All That Is (6 page)

“Look, I didn’t get up at six o’clock to listen to a lecture.”

“Dismount!” Stump cried. “Dismount at once and return to the stables!”

Later he apologized.

Judge Stump was a friend of Vivian’s father, George Amussen, who had manners and was always polite but also particular regarding those he might call a friend. The judge was his lawyer and Anna Wayne, the judge’s first wife, who was narrow-chested but a very fine rider, had for a time before her marriage gone with Amussen, and it was generally believed that she accepted the judge when she was convinced that Amussen would not marry her.

Judge Stump pursued women, but George Amussen did not—they pursued him. He was elegant and reserved and also much admired for having done well buying and selling property in Washington and in the country. Even-tempered and patient, he had seen, earlier than others, how Washington was changing and over the years had bought, sometimes in partnerships, apartment buildings in the northwest part of the city and an office building on Wisconsin Avenue. He was discreet about what he owned and refrained from talking about it. He drove an ordinary car and dressed casually, without ostentation, usually in a sport jacket and well-made pants, and a suit when it was called for.

He had fair hair into which the gray blended and an easy walk that seemed to embody strength and even a kind of principle, to stand for things as they should be. A gentleman and a figure of country clubs, he knew all the black waiters by name and they knew him. At Christmas every year he gave them a double tip.

Washington was a southern city, lethargic and not really that big. It had atrocious weather, damp and cold in the winter and in the summers fiercely hot, the heat of the Delta. It had its institutions apart from the government, the old, favored hotels including the Wardman, familiarly called the riding academy because of the many mistresses who were kept there; the Riggs Bank, which was the bank of choice; the established downtown department stores. Howard Breen, who was the owner of the insurance agency where George Amussen in principle worked, one day would inherit the many properties his father had amassed, including the finest apartment building in town, where the old man, in a fedora and
with a spittoon near his foot, often sat in the lobby watching things with lizard eyes. Only the right sort of people were allowed as tenants and even they were treated with indifference. If, as was not often the case, he nodded slightly to one of them as they came or went, that was considered cordial. The apartments, however, were large with handsome fireplaces and high ceilings, and the employees, taking their cue from the owner, were mute to the point of insolence.

The war changed it all. The hordes of military and naval personnel, government employees, young women who were drawn to the city by the demand for secretaries—in two or three years the sleepy, provincial town was gone. In some respects it clung to its ways, but the old days were vanishing. Vivian had come of age during that time. Though she appeared at the club in shorts that were in her father’s opinion a little too brief and wore high heels too soon, her notions were really all from the world she had been a girl in.

Bowman wrote to her and almost to his disbelief she wrote back. Her letters were friendly and open. She came to New York several times that spring and early summer, staying with Louise and even sharing the bed with her, laughing, in pajamas. She had not yet told her father about her boyfriend. The ones she had in Washington worked at State or in the trust department at Riggs and were in many ways replicas of their parents. She did not think of herself as a replica. She was daring, in fact, taking the train up to see a man she had met in a bar, whose background she did not know but who seemed to have depth and originality. They went to Luchow’s, where the waiter said
guten Abend
and Bowman talked to him for a moment in German.

“I didn’t know you spoke German.”

“Well, until recently it wasn’t a great thing to do,” Bowman said.

He had taken German at Harvard, he explained, because it was the language of science.

“At the time I thought I wanted to be a scientist. I went back and forth between a number of things. I thought for a while I might teach. I still have a certain yearning for teaching. Then I decided to be a journalist, but I wasn’t able to get a job as one. I heard about a job as a reader then. It was pure luck or maybe destiny. What do you think of the idea of destiny?”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” she said casually.

He liked talking to her and the occasional smile that made her forehead shine. She was wearing a sleeveless dress and the roundness of her small shoulders gleamed. Her little finger was curled and held apart as she ate a bite of bread. Gestures, facial expressions, way of dressing—these were the revealing things. He was imagining places where they might go together, where no one knew them and he would have her to himself for days on end, though he was uncertain of how it might happen.

“New York’s a wonderful place, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes. I like coming here.”

“How do you know Louise?”

“We were in boarding school, in the same class. The first thing she ever said to me was a dirty joke, well, not exactly dirty but, you know.”

He told her about the time that the letters
ES
on the big sign above the Essex House had gone out and there it was, forty stories up, shining in the night. He went no further. He didn’t want to seem coarse.

At the end of the evening at the front door he was prepared to say good night but she acted as if he were not there, unlocking the door and saying nothing. Louise was gone for the weekend to visit her parents. Vivian was nervous though she did not want to show it. He went upstairs with her.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, that would be … No,” he said, “not really.”

They sat for a few moments in silence and then she simply leaned forward and kissed him. The kiss was light but ardent.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

She did not take everything off—shoes, stockings, and skirt, that was all. She was not prepared for more. They kissed and whispered. As she slid from her white panties, a white that seemed sacred, he barely breathed. The fineness of her, the blondish fleece. He could not believe they were doing this.

“I don’t … have anything,” he whispered.

There was no answer.

He was inexperienced but it was natural and overwhelming. Also too quick, he couldn’t help it. He felt embarrassed. Her face was close to his.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t stop it.”

She said nothing, she had almost no way to judge it.

She went into the bathroom and Bowman lay back in awe at what had happened and feeling intoxicated by a world that had suddenly opened wide to the greatest pleasure, pleasure beyond knowing. He knew of the joy that might lie ahead.

Vivian was thinking along less heady lines. There was the chance of her becoming pg though she had, in truth, only an inexact idea of how likely that was. At school there had been a lot of talk, but it was only talk and vague. Still, there were stories of girls who got that way the first time. It would be just her luck, she thought. Of course, it hadn’t been entirely the first time.

“You make me think of a pony,” he said lovingly.

“A pony? Why?”

“You’re just beautiful. And free.”

“I don’t see how that’s like a pony,” she said. “Besides, ponies bite. Mine did.”

She nestled against him and he tried to think along her lines. Whatever might happen, they had done it. He felt only exaltation.

They spent the night together when he came to Washington that month and drove to the country the next day to have lunch with her father. He had a four-hundred-acre farm called Gallops, mostly given over to grazing. The main house was fieldstone and sat on top of a rise. Vivian showed him around, the grounds and first floor, as if introducing him to it and, in a way, to her. The house was lightly furnished in a manner that was indifferent to style. Behind a couch in the living room Bowman noticed, as in seventeenth-century palaces, were some dried dog turds.

Lunch was served by a black maid towards whom Amussen behaved with complete familiarity. Her name was Mattie and the main course came in on a silver tray.

“Vivian says you work in publishing,” Amussen said.

“Yes, sir. I’m an editor.”

“I see.”

“It’s a small house,” Bowman went on, “but with quite a good literary reputation.”

Amussen, picking at something near his incisor with his little finger, said,

“What do you mean by literary?”

“Well, books of quality, essentially. Books that might have a long life. Of course, that’s the top end. We publish other books, to make money or try to.”

“Can we have some coffee, Mattie?” Amussen said to the maid. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Bowman?”

“Thank you.”

“Viv, you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

The brief conversation about publishing had been without resonance. It was of no more interest than if they had been talking about the weather. Bowman had noticed only popular titles in the bookcase in the living room, Books of the Month with jackets that looked pristine. There were a few others, dark and leather-bound, the kind that are handed down though no one reads them, in a mahogany secretary, behind glass.

As they drank coffee, Bowman made a last attempt to cast himself favorably as an editor, but Amussen turned the subject to the navy, Bowman had been in the navy, was that right? There was a neighbor down the road, Royce Cromwell, who had gone to Annapolis and been in the same class as Charlie McVay, the captain of the
Indianapolis
. Bowman hadn’t run into him in the navy, by any chance?

“No, I don’t think so. I was only a junior officer. Was he in the Pacific?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there was a big Atlantic fleet, too, for the convoys, the invasion, and all that. Hundreds of ships.”

“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

Almost without effort he had made Bowman feel as if he were prying. The lunch had been one of those meals when the sound of a knife or fork on a plate or a glass being set down only marks the silence.

Outside, as they walked to the car, Bowman saw something moving slowly with undulant curves into the ivy bed along the driveway.

“There’s a snake, I think.”

“Where?”

“There. Just going into the ivy.”

“Damn it,” Vivian said, “that’s just where the dogs like to sleep. Was it big?”

It had not been a small snake, it was thick as a hose.

“Pretty good-sized,” Bowman said.

Vivian, looking around, found a rake and began furiously running the handle of it back and forth through the ivy. The snake was gone, however.

“What was it? Was it a rattler?”

“I don’t know. It was big. Do they have rattlesnakes around here?”

“They sure do.”

“You’d better come out of there.”

She was not afraid. She ran the handle through the dark, shiny leaves a final time.

“Damned thing,” she said.

She went to tell her father. Bowman stood looking at the thick ivy, watching for any movement. She had stepped right into it.

Driving back that day, Bowman felt they were leaving a place where not even his language was understood. He was about to say it, but Vivian commented,

“Don’t mind Daddy,” she said. “He’s like that sometimes. It wasn’t you.”

“I don’t think I made a very good impression.”

“Oh, you should see him with Bryan, my sister’s husband. Daddy calls him Whyan, why in hell did she pick him? Can’t even ride, he says.”

“You aren’t making me feel much better. I can sail,” he added. “Can your father sail?”

“He’s sailed to the Bahamas.”

She seemed ready to defend him, and Bowman felt he should not go further. She sat looking out of the window on her side, somewhat removed, but in her leather skirt, hair pulled back, face wide, with a thin gold chain looped around her neck, she was the image of desirability. She turned back towards him.

“It’s like that,” she commented. “You sort of have to go through the mud room first.”

“Is your mother anything like that?”

“My mother? No.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s a drunk,” Vivian said. “That’s the reason they got divorced.”

“Where does she live? In Middleburg?”

“No, she has an apartment in Washington near Dupont Circle. You’ll meet her.”

Her mother had been beautiful but you couldn’t tell it now, Vivian added. She started in the morning with vodka and rarely got dressed until afternoon.

“Daddy really raised us. We’re his two girls. He had to protect us.”

They drove for a while in silence and near Centerville somewhere he glanced over and saw that she was asleep. Her head had fallen softly to the side and her lips were slightly parted. Sensual thoughts came to him. Her smooth-stockinged legs, for some reason he thought of them separately—their length and shape. He realized how deeply in love he was. She had it in her power to bestow immense happiness.

When they said good-bye at the station he felt that something definitive had passed between them. He possessed, despite the uncertainty, assurance, an assurance that would never fall away.

Freely, as they sat or ate or walked he shared with her his thoughts and ideas about life, history, and art. He told her everything. He knew she didn’t think about these things, but she understood and could learn. He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams.

In Summit, where he wanted his mother to meet Vivian, to see and approve of her, he took her first to a diner across from City Hall that had been there for years. It had actually been a railroad car with windows all along the side facing the avenue. Inside, the floor was tile and the ceiling pale wood that curved down into the wall. A counter where customers sat—there were always one or two—ran the length of the place. It was more crowded in the morning; the railroad station, the Morris and Essex line that went to the city, was just down the street. The tracks were low and out of sight. At night the lights of the diner were the only lights along the street. You entered by a door opposite the counter and there was another door at one end.