The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by William Styron Read Free Book Online Page B

succumbed to the fatal invitation to rejoin the reserves. Shortly after this he received news of the death of his father, the patriarch of an old Westchester WASP family and the publisher of a small but prosperous list of scientific textbooks, and Lacy returned to New York with his French bride in order to take over the firm and to live a civilized life made up of “good wine, good books and music, orderly children, and two months in France every summer.” But this fantasy had been blown to pieces. As for his present plight, he had faced it neither with sulky rebelliousness, as a few had, nor with supine acceptance, as had some others, but with a kind of controlled and cynical desperation permeated by grisly good humor. About the only truly solemn fear I ever heard him give voice to was that he might get killed without making, with his wife Annie, another summer visit to the small farmhouse he had bought in the hills near Grasse.
    “Of course, you understand there are degrees of misery,” he went on, “and if you are attentive to this fact it will allow you a certain consolation, if only in a relative way. For instance, take your own situation. On an ascending scale of misery, from one to ten, I’d place you around one, or a little less. Why? Well look, in the first place you’re not married,you have no responsibilities or financial obligations, no one to support, so basically your misery index is insignificant. It’s true you’re not getting a regular piece of ass but, tant pis , which of us is? At least you’ve gotten your book written and can hope for some small immortality, also a bit of money, if you live that long. Then too, remember that you’re an officer and, compared to these enlisted reserves, you get to live with some of the amenities. So I’d place you almost as far down on the misery scale as it’s possible to get.”
    “Where would you put yourself, smart guy?” I said. The twenty-five-cent bourbon had filled me with a soothing melancholy, and Lacy’s game caused me to float between distant annoyance and straightforward fascination. “Nine? Or ten?”
    “Oh God, no. Misery-wise, I don’t claim any points. I do have the responsibility of a wife, which puts me ahead of you a bit. And because the housing situation here makes her have to stay in New York, that gives me another small notch. But we have no children—blind chance, but fortunate under the circumstances—and in addition I have a good solid professional who’s running the family business, and it continues to make money nicely in my absence. It would be swinishly presumptuous of me to put my misery any higher than two or three, miserable though I am.”
    The bar had begun to fill up with officers—young fellows between twenty-five and thirty-five mostly, lieutenants and captains in sport shirts and slacks, save for a sprinkling of grimy types in green dungarees just in from some field problem, sweatily gulping cans of beer. In twos or threes, in clusters of a half dozen or more, they lolled around the perfunctory Formica tables or stood restlessly at the bar itself astheir voices, not loud but very urgent, filled the air with a passionate monotone of discontent. Sometimes I heard laughter but it sounded bitter, and it was more often than not cut off short, as if whoever had laughed had sensed an impropriety. I was struck by the ease with which I was soon able to distinguish the newcomers like myself from those who had shared with Lacy the routine of several months. The veterans, besides being trimmer and tanner, seemed to bear themselves with a certain casual, glum assurance, as if they had become acclimated to the stress of this new existence, had through slow reacquaintance become finally adjusted to once familiar duties and tensions; their faces wore looks of bemused resignation, and they appeared older than their years. The recent arrivals, most of whom were sallow of hue and who were puffed out in places with telltale sedentary