Sophie's Choice (4 page)

pastimes had been to drop a sheet of paper from the window and to watch its ecstatic tumbling flight as it sped across the rooftops, often disappearing far off into the canyons around Times Square, still tumbling and soaring. That noon, along with my Daily Worker, I had been inspired to buy a tube of plastic bubble material--the kind commonly used by children now, although then a novelty on the market--and once back in my office, I had blown up half a dozen of these fragile, lovely, iridescent globes, all the while anticipating their adventure upon the wind with the greedy suspense of one at the brink of some long-denied sexual blessing. Released one by one into the smoggy abyss, they were more than I had hoped for, fulfilling every buried, infantile desire to float balloons to the uttermost boundaries of the earth. They glowed in the afternoon sunlight like the satellites of Jupiter, and were as big as basketballs. A quirky updraft sent them hurling high over Eighth Avenue; there they remained suspended for what seemed interminable moments, and I sighed with delight. Then I heard squeals and girlish laughter and saw that a gaggle of McGraw-Hill secretaries, attracted by the show, were hanging out the windows of adjoining offices. It must have been their commotion which called the Weasel's attention to my aerial display, for I heard his voice behind me just as the girls gave a final cheer and the balloons fled frantically eastward down the garish arroyo of Forty-second Street. I thought the Weasel controlled his rage very well. "You're dismissed as of this day," he said in a strained voice. "You may pick up your final paycheck at five o'clock." "Up yours, Weasel, you're firing a man who's going to be as famous as Thomas Wolfe." I did not say this, but the words trembled so palpably on my tongue that to this day I've retained the impression that they were spoken. I think I merely said nothing, only watched the small man wheel about on his small feet and saunter off out of my existence. Then there was an odd sense of release that flooded through me, a physical sensation almost like comfort, as if I had removed warm stifling layers of clothes. Or to be more exact, as if I had remained immersed too long in murky depths and had struggled to surface gulping blissful drafts of fresh air. "A narrow escape," said Farrell later, reinforcing my metaphor with unconscious precision. "People have been known to drown in this place. And they never even find their bodies." It was long past five o'clock. I had remained late that afternoon to pack my effects, such as they were, to say goodby to one or two of the editors with whom I had struck up a mildly amiable acquaintance, to collect my last $36.50 and, finally, to bid what turned out to be a surprisingly painful and sad farewell to Farrell, who, among other things, revealed what I might have suspected all along had I really cared or had I been more observant--that he was a solitary and despondent drinker. He came into my office, wobbling a little, just as I was stuffing into my briefcase carbon copies of some of my more thoughtful manuscript reports. I had removed them from the files, feeling a rather wistful affection for my piece on Gundar Firkin, and coveting especially my musings on Kon-Tiki, about which I had the odd suspicion that they might comprise someday an interesting sheaf of literary marginalia. "They never even find their bodies," Farrell repeated. "Have a little snort." He extended toward me a glass and a pint bottle of Old Overholt rye, half full. The rye was heavily aromatic on Farrell's breath, indeed he smelled a bit like a loaf of pumpernickel. I declined the snort, not out of any real reticence but because in those days I imbibed only cheap American beer. "Well, you weren't cut out for this place anyway," he said, tossing down a gulp of the Overholt. "This wasn't the place for you." "I had begun to realize that," I agreed. "In five years you'd have been a company man. In ten years you'd have been a fossil. A fossilized old fart in his thirties. That's what McGraw-Hill would have turned you into." "Yeah, I'm kind of glad to be going," I said. "I'm going to miss the money, though. Even though it was hardly what you might call a bonanza." Farrell chuckled and made a modest little burp. His face was such a long upper-lipped Irish prototype that it verged on a joke, and he exuded sadness--something intangibly rumpled, exhausted and resigned that caused me to reflect with a twinge of pain on these lonesome office drinking bouts, the twilight sessions with Yeats and Hopkins, the bleak subway commute to Ozone Park. I suddenly knew I would never see him again. "So you're going to write," he said, "so you're going to be a writer. A fine ambition, one that I once shared myself. I hope and pray that you become one, and that you send me a copy of your first book. Where are you going when you start writing?" "I don't know," I said. "I know I can't stay in the dump I live in any longer. I've got to get out of there." "Ah, how I wanted to write," he mused. "I mean, to write poetry. Essays. A fine novel. Not a great novel, mind you--I knew I lacked the genius and the ambition for that--but a fine novel, one with a certain real elegance and style. A novel as good as, say, The Bridge of San Luis Rey or Death Comes for the Archbishop--something unpretentious but with a certain quality of near-perfection." He paused, then said, "Oh, but somehow I got sidetracked. I think it was the long years of editorial work, especially of a rather technical nature. I got sidetracked into dealing with other people's ideas and words rather than my own, and that's hardly conducive to creative effort. In the long run." Again he paused, regarding the amber dregs in his glass. "Or maybe it was this that sidetracked me," he said ruefully. "The sauce. This one-hundred-proof goblet of dreams. Anyway, I did not become a writer. I did not become a novelist or a poet, and as for essays, I wrote only one essay in my entire life. Know what it was?" "No, what was it?" "It was for The Saturday Evening Post. A little anecdote I sent in regarding a vacation that my wife and I took in Quebec. Not worth describing. But I got two hundred dollars for it, and for several days I was the happiest writer in America. Ah, well..." A great melancholy appeared to overtake him, and his voice trailed off. "I got sidetracked," he murmured. I did not know quite how to respond to his mood, which seemed perilously near grief, and could only say, as I continued to stuff things into my briefcase, "Well, I hope we can somehow keep in touch." I knew, however, that we would not keep in touch. "I do too," Farrell said. "I wish we had gotten to know each other better." Gazing down into his glass, he fell into a silence which became so prolonged that he began to make me nervous. "I wish we had gotten to know each other better," he repeated slowly at last. "I had often thought to ask you to come to my home out in Queens for dinner, but I always put it off. Sidetracked again. You remind me very much of my son, you know." "I didn't know you had a son," I said with some surprise. I had heard Farrell once allude casually and wryly to his "childless state" and had simply assumed that he had not, as the phrase goes, been blessed with issue. But my curiosity had ceased there. In the McGraw-Hill atmosphere of gelid impersonality it was considered an effrontery, if not downright dirty, to express even mild interest in the private lives of others. "I thought you--" I began. "Oh, I had a son all right!" His voice was suddenly a cry, startling me with its mingled tone of rage and lament. The Overholt had unloosed in him all the Celtic furies with which he had consorted daily in the desolate time after five in the afternoon. He rose to his feet and wandered to the window, gazing through the twilight at the incomprehensible mirage of Manhattan, set afire by the descending sun. "Oh, I had a son!" he said again. "Edward Christian Farrell. He was just your age, he was just twenty-two, and he wanted to be a writer. He was... he was a prince with the language, my son was. He had a gift that would have charmed the devil himself, and some of the letters he wrote--some of those long, knowing, funny, intelligent letters--were the loveliest that ever were written. Oh, he was a prince with the language, that boy!" Tears came to his eyes. For me it was a paralyzingly awkward moment, one that appears now and then throughout life, though with merciful infrequency. In grieving tones a near-stranger speaks of some beloved person in the past tense, throwing his listener into a quandary. Certainly he means the departed is dead. But hold! Mightn't he simply have run off, victim of amnesia, or become a fleeing culprit? Or was now pathetically languishing in a lunatic asylum, so that the use of the past tense is merely sorrowfully euphemistic? When Farrell resumed talking, still offering me no clue to his son's fate, I turned away in embarrassment and continued to sort out my belongings. "Maybe I could have taken it better if he hadn't been my only kid. But Mary and I could have no more children after Eddie was born." He stopped suddenly. "Ah, you don't want to hear..." I turned back to him. "No, go ahead," I said, "please." He seemed to be suffering from an urgent need to talk, and since he was a kindly man whom I liked and, furthermore, one who in some fashion had indeed identified me with his son, I felt it would have been indecent for me not to encourage him to unburden himself. "Please go ahead," I said again. Farrell poured himself another huge shot of rye. He had become quite drunk and his speech was a little slurred, the freckled indoor face sad and haggard in the waning light. "Oh, it's true that a man can live out his own aspirations through the life of his child. Eddie went to Columbia, and one of the things that thrilled me was the way he took to books, his gift for words. At nineteen--nineteen, mind you--he had had a sketch published in The New Yorker, and Whit Burnett had taken a story for Story. One of the youngest contributors, I believe, in the history of the magazine. It was his eye, you see, his eye." Farrell jabbed his forefinger at his eye. "He saw things, you understand, saw things that the rest of us don't see and made them fresh and alive. Mark Van Doren wrote me a lovely note--the loveliest note, really--saying that Eddie had one of the greatest natural writing gifts of any student he'd ever had. Mark Van Doren, imagine! Quite a tribute, wouldn't you say?" He eyed me as if in search of some corroboration. "Quite a tribute," I agreed. "And then--and then in 1943 he joined the Marine Corps. Said he'd rather join up than be drafted. He honestly loved the glamour of the marines, although basically he was too sensitive to have any illusions about war. War!" He spoke the word with revulsion, like a seldom-used obscenity, and paused for an instant to shut his eyes and to nod in pain. Then he looked at me and said, "The war took him to the Pacific and he was in some of the worst of the fighting. You should read his letters, marvelous, jolly, eloquent letters, without a trace of self-pity. He never once doubted that he'd come home and go back to Columbia and finish up and then become the writer he was meant to be. And then two years ago he was on Okinawa and got hit by a sniper. In the head. It was July and they were mopping up. I think he must have been one of the last marines to die in the war. He'd made corporal. He won the Bronze Star. I don't know why it happened. God, I don't know why it happened! God, why?" Farrell was weeping, not obtrusively but with the sparkling, honest tears welling up at the edge of his eyelids, and I turned away with such a feeling of shame and humiliation that years later I am able to recapture the slightly fevered, faintly nauseous sensation that swept over me. This may now be difficult to explain, for the passage of thirty years and the fatigue and cynicism engendered by several barbaric American wars might make my reaction appear to be hopelessly old-fashioned and romantic. But the fact remains that I, too, had been a marine like Eddie Farrell, had, like Eddie, burned to be a writer and had sent letters home from the Pacific that were inscribed in my heart's blood, written with the same weird amalgam of passion, humor, despair and exquisite hope that can only be set down by very young men haunted by the imminent appearance of death. Even more wrenching to recount, I, too, had come to Okinawa only days after Eddie had perished (who knows, I have often wondered, perhaps scant hours after he took his mortal wound), to encounter no enemy, no fear, no danger at all, but, through the grace of history, a wrecked yet peaceful Oriental landscape across which I would wander unscathed and unthreatened during the last few weeks before Hiroshima. I had, in bitter truth, heard not a shot fired in anger, and although in terms of my hide, at least, I was fortune's darling if there ever was one, I could never get over the feeling that I had been deprived of something terrible and magnificent. Certainly in regard to this experience--or my lack of it--nothing ever pierced me so deeply as Farrell's brief, desolating story of his son Eddie, who seemed to me immolated on the earth of Okinawa that I might live--and write. As Farrell sat weeping in the twilight, I felt foreshortened, shriveled, and could say nothing. Farrell rose, dabbing at his eyes, and stood by the window gazing out at the sun-encrimsoned Hudson, where the dingy outlines of two great ships moved sluggishly seaward toward the Narrows. The spring wind whistled with the noise of demons around McGraw-Hill's green indifferent eaves. When he spoke, Farrell's voice came from a distance, breathing a despair past telling: "Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day... The herald's cry, the soldier's tread Exhaust his glory and his might: Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed." Then he turned to me and said, "Son, write your guts out." And, weaving down the hallway, he was gone out of my life forever. I lingered there for a long time, pondering the future, which now seemed as misty and as obscure as those smog-bound horizons that stretched beyond the meadows of New Jersey. I was too young to be really afraid of much but not so young that I remained unshaken by certain apprehensions. Those ludicrous manuscripts I had read were somehow cautionary, showing me how sad was all ambition-especially when it came to literature. I wanted beyond hope or dreaming to be a writer, but for some reason Farrell's story had struck so deeply at my heart that for the first time in my life I was aware of the large hollowness I carried within me. It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with