The Suicide Run by William Styron

Author:William Styron [Styron, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-58836-906-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-11-10T23:00:00+00:00

MY FATHER’S

HOUSE

ONE MORNING IN THE YEAR AFTER the end of the war (the Good War, that is, the second War to End All Wars) when I had returned to my father’s house in Virginia, and had slept long merciful hours, I woke up after completing a weird megalomaniacal dream. Not that I was unaccustomed to dreams touched with megalomania. A few years before, for example, when I was a writing student at college, I had a dream about James Joyce. In this particular reverie I was sitting at a café table somewhere in Europe, probably Paris, having a cup of coffee with the Master. There was no hesitancy in the way he turned his purblind gaze upon me, no embarrassment in the sudden light touch of his hand on the back of my own, nor was there anything but nearly mawkish admiration in his Hibernian brogue as he uttered these words: “Paul Whitehurst, your writing has been such an inspiration to me! Without your work I could not have finished Dubliners!”

I never thought I’d recapture the mad glee that seized me upon waking from such a cockeyed fantasy. And during the war I had no similar visitations. But the end of that exhausting conflict brought me such relief that I suppose it was inevitable that another such dream should return, rescuing my near-drowned ego. In this sequence I was seated next to Harry Truman as we cruised in a limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue. “Paul Whitehurst”—once again the full name, precisely enunciated—“the best advice you ever gave me was to drop the atom bomb.” Amid pennants snapping in the wind and the blare of military music, I nodded left and right to the adoring throng. “Thank you, Mr. President,” I replied. “I gave it much thought.”

And waking, I lay there for a while, helplessly disgorging cackles of laughter. At last the dream faded away, as dreams do. Then I made my mind a blank. Finally, the sound of breakfast being made was borne upstairs and I inhaled the good smell and prepared for the new day.

Except for a central drawback, which I’ll soon deal with, I was fairly contented in my father’s house. The house itself inspired a kind of contentment. My father had never been a rich man, but the war with its naval contracts had brought prosperity to the sprawling shipyard where he toiled nearly all of his life; his share in the prosperity had allowed him to move from the cramped little bungalow of my childhood to an unpretentious, comfortable, locust-shaded house whose screened porch and generous bay windows faced out on a grand harbor panorama. The enormous waterway, several miles across, was always afloat with an armada of naval ships or seabound tankers and freighters—all distant enough to be dramatic-looking rather than unsightly—and the harbor was forever being touted by the local boosters as the rival or the superior of San Francisco or Rio or Hong Kong, though to my mind they were exaggerating badly since the

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