Sophie's Choice - William Styron [282]
I adored Jack Brown. There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in afteryears, no matter how genuine; Jack was one of these friends. He was bright, compassionate, well-read, with a remarkably inventive comic gift and a wonderful nose for frauds and four-flushers. His wit, which was often scathing and which relied on a subtle use of Southern courthouse rhetoric (doubtless derived in part from his father, a distinguished judge), had kept me laughing during the enervating wartime months at Duke, where the Marine Corps, in its resolve to transform us from green cannon fodder into prime cannon fodder, tried to stuff us with two years’ education in less than a year, thereby creating a generation of truly half-baked college graduates. Jack was a bit older than I—a critical nine months or so—and thus became chronologically scheduled to see combat, whereas I was lucky and escaped with my hide intact. The letters he wrote to me from the Pacific—after military exigencies had separated us and he was preparing for the assault on Iwo Jima while I was still studying platoon tactics in the swamps of North Carolina—were wondrous long documents, drolly obscene and touched with a raging yet resigned hilarity which I assumed was Jack’s exclusive property until I saw it miraculously resurrected years later in Catch-22. Even when he was horribly wounded—he lost most of one of his legs on Iwo Jima—he maintained a cheerfulness I could only describe as exalted, writing me letters from his hospital bed that bubbled with a mixture of joie de vivre and Swiftian corrosiveness and energy. I am sure it was only his mad and sovereign stoicism that prevented him from falling into suicidal despair. He was completely unperturbed by his artificial limb, which, he said, gave him a kind of seductive limp, like Herbert Marshall.
I remark upon all this only to give an idea of Jack’s exceptional allure as a person, and to explain why I jumped at his invitation at the cost of neglecting my obligations in regard to Nathan and Sophie. At Duke, Jack had wanted to become a sculptor, and now after postwar study at the Art Students’ League, he had removed himself to the serene little hills behind Nyack to fashion huge objects in cast iron and sheet metal—aided (he allowed to me without reticence) by what might be construed as a fine dowry, since his bride was the daughter of one of the biggest cotton-mill owners in South Carolina. When at first I made some faint-hearted objections, saying that my novel which was rolling along so well might suffer from the abrupt interruption, he put an end to my worries by insisting that his house had a small wing where I could work all by myself. “Also, Dolores,” he added, referring to his wife, “has her sister up here visiting. Her name is Mary Alice. She’s a very filled-out twenty-one and, son, believe me, she’s pretty as a picture. By Renoir, that is. She’s also very eager.” I happily pondered that word eager. It may be easily assumed, given my perennially renewed, pathetic hope