All That Is

25


IL CANTINORI



Bowman was a friend of the Baums’ though he and Robert Baum were never strong personal friends. Aside from occasional parties they rarely saw one another in the evening, but they were having dinner one night at a restaurant that was one of Baum’s favorites, Il Cantinori, in the large room that was like someone’s own dining room but filled with white tablecloths and flowers and on a quiet street. The service was good—Baum was well known there, of course—and the food excellent. He and Diana had just been to Italy. It was always difficult, she said, to come home. She adored Italy. Apart from everything else, it was one of the few places where one’s hopes for the future could be restored. Beautiful, unspoiled fields and hills. Great houses that families had lived in for five hundred years. It was deeply consoling. Also the general sweetness of the people. She had wanted to go to the post office and asked for directions from a man standing outside a shop. He was explaining it to her when a passerby stopped to say that was not the best way and described another. The men began arguing back and forth until finally the passerby said, Signora, per piacere, viene, and began leading her down a series of small streets and across a square to an imposing building, like a national bank, where she could buy some stamps.

“Where else in the world would they do that?” she said.

Over the years, Diana had become an influential figure and a woman of principled opinion, often feared. She was a serious person. Fashionable and chic were for her words of criticism, even contempt. What she wanted was your politics and your opinions, if any, about books. She went to movies because she enjoyed them, but she did not take them seriously. The theater was a different matter. She was not beautiful—she never had been and it was no longer of importance—but she had an enviable face, even to the slight darkness beneath her eyes, and a well-defined position.

She was fiercely loyal and expected loyalty in return. A journalist she knew who was a friend had written a long piece on Robert Baum, interviewed in his office and over several lunches. Baum could be jaunty. His house, on its own and together with one or two others, represented at least half of American literature. There was really no one above him. He had changed little over the years although he was wearing more expensive clothes and sometimes a felt hat. He could be charming and casually say, oh, f*ck them or him as readily as any agent. He took care of his writers but was not, in private, always reverent about them. The article had quoted him referring to “major writers” and “major frauds.” Also “major, major writers.” Diana had found it embarrassing. At a reception she bumped into the journalist, who asked, “You’re not angry with me?”

“No, just indifferent,” Diana said.

She was never evasive. She had a slight New York accent, but she was not New York as only people from elsewhere can be, she was the genuine article. When she liked or championed a writer it was a crown for them although not one without weight. But she respected and defended them. To a young woman who had been telling stories of a brief affair with Saul Bellow to editors all over town, she had said coldly,

“Look, that simply isn’t done. You have to earn the right to betray an important writer.”

Diana had grown up, in the years before the war, on a diet of politics and current events in an apartment at the outer limit of respectability, far up on Central Park West. Her father had a small textile importing business and like everyone else had to struggle during the Depression, but the family sat down together every evening for supper and talked about what was happening in the city and the world as well as what was happening at school. From the time she was eight years old she read the Times every day, the four of them did, including the editorial page. No other newspaper was allowed in the house. In high school she read the Daily News on the subway with a feeling of sin.

She revered her father, whose name was Jacob Lindner. She liked his hair, his smell, his solid legs. The vision of him in the morning in her parents’ small bedroom in his undershirt as he finished getting dressed was one of the prime images of her childhood. She loved his kindness and strength. In the end, with a longtime friend, he invested far more than he should have in some property in Jersey City and they could not keep up the mortgage. The bank foreclosed, and they were wiped out. He said nothing except to his wife, but they all knew. We’ll be all right, he told them, somehow.

Years after, on the subway, a disturbing thing happened to her. She was sitting across from a bag lady, a poor old woman with all her possessions in a plastic bag.

“Hello, Diana,” the woman said quietly.

“What?”

She looked at the woman.

“How is Robert?” the woman asked. “Are you still writing?”

She hadn’t written since college. She must have misheard, but suddenly she recognized who it was, a classmate, a girl she had known named Jean Brand who had been in college with her and had gotten married just afterwards. She had been good-looking. Now there were gaps where her perfect teeth had been. Diana opened her bag and took all her money out of her purse. She pressed it into her friend’s hand.

“Here. Take this,” she managed to say.

The woman reluctantly took the money.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. Then, “I’m all right.”

Diana thought of her father. No one had helped him. He never recovered from the loss. We’ll be all right, he would say.

She told Robert the story, but no one else. Merely telling it upset her. She had met Robert when she was eighteen. He was attracted to her but she was too young—he took her to be fifteen at the most. He was already a man. He had been in the war. When they got married, Diana had almost no sexual experience. She’d never known another man. I doubt that my mother ever knew another man, she said, and what did she miss? I don’t think anything.

She was completely satisfied by marriage, by the intimacies that really could not be found elsewhere. She knew that views on that had changed, that young women were now much freer, especially before marriage and that second and even third marriages were common and often happier, but all of that was outside her own life. She and her husband were inseparable. It was deeper even than marriage, but, oh, she had loved her father. She had been formed by his standards and ideals.

There was an idea that Baum had perhaps been involved with a woman in the office, and that Diana had known of it—she certainly would have known—but whatever she and her husband said concerning it, no one knew. The woman, who had gone on to another job as a publicist, was a tall, unmarried Catholic woman named Ann Hennessy, long-limbed, with a somewhat reserved personality. She was unmarried at thirty-eight and had some sort of past. Baum liked her sense of humor. He had often gone on long lunches with her. They might be seen together but never appeared to be hiding anything. She had gone to Frankfurt twice.

Bowman liked Diana very much although he was always a bit cautious with her. He liked her, he was certain, more than she liked him or more than she showed, but that night at the restaurant she was unusually open, as if they were often together.

“I’d like to live in Italy,” she mused aloud.

“Who wouldn’t, darling,” Baum said.

“One thing I always think of, in Italy they didn’t round up the Jews. Mussolini wouldn’t allow it, say what you like about him.” The Germans did that.

“No, that came later,” Baum said. “Mussolini was happy to let Ezra Pound broadcast though. He thought that was OK.”

“Oh, Ezra Pound,” Diana said. “Ezra Pound was crazy. Who listened to Ezra Pound?”

“Probably not a lot of people. I think it was shortwave, anyway, but it was the idea of it.”

“I don’t think they should have given him that prize, the Bollingen. They did it as soon as they could. It was too soon for that. You don’t honor someone who’s thrown sewage on top of you and stirred up ignorance and hatred.”

Baum had fought in the war, but he knew and had even published men who’d avoided it, who’d managed to get deferments or some way fail the physical, but that was only craven. It was different than aiding the enemy, different than finally going back to Italy, landing in Naples and giving the Fascist salute.

“I was against it,” he said.

“Yes, but you didn’t say anything. Don’t you agree with me?” she said to Bowman.

“I think I was against it at the time.”

“At the time? That was when it was crucial.”

They were interrupted by a well-dressed man in a dark suit who had come to the table and said,

Hello, Bobby.” And to Diana, “Hi, ya, Toots.”

He looked prosperous and athletic. His well-shaved cheeks almost gleamed. He was a friend and an early backer named Donald Beckerman.

“I don’t want to interrupt your dinner,” he said. “I wanted Monique to meet you. Sweetheart,” he said to the woman with him, “this is Bob and Diana Baum. He’s a big-shot publisher. This is my wife, Monique.”

She was dark-haired with a wide mouth and the look of someone smart and unmanageable.

“Sit down for a minute, won’t you?” Baum said to them.

“So, how are things going?” Beckerman said when they sat. “Any new best-sellers?”

He was one of three brothers who had gone into business together, investments, and made a lot of money. The middle brother had died.

“I’m Don,” he said to Bowman reaching out his hand.

The waiter had come to the table.

“Will you be having dinner, sir?” he asked.

“No, we’re at a table back there. We’re just sitting here for a few minutes.

“Bobby and I were in prep school together,” Beckerman said. “We were the only two Jews in the class. In the whole school, I think.”

He had a winning smile.

“Ever go to one of the reunions?” he asked Baum. “I went about seven or eight years ago. You want to know something? Nothing has changed. It was terrible to see them all again. I only stayed the one evening.”

“You didn’t see DeCamp?”

It was a classmate who was a rebel that Baum liked.

“No, I didn’t see him. He wasn’t there. I don’t know what ever happened to him. Did you ever hear?”

While they were talking, his wife said to Bowman,

“Have you known Donnal a long time?”

“No, not long.”

“Ah, I see.”

She was Beckerman’s second wife. They’d been married for a little more than two years. They lived in his large, corner apartment in an expensive building near the armory. Monique had made it very comfortable. She had put a lot of his former wife’s furniture out on the street and gotten rid of all the dishes.

“I threw them away,” she said.

“It was a lot of dishes,” Beckerman commented. “We kept a kosher house.”

“I’m not kosher,” Monique said.

She was from Algeria. Her family were French colonists, pieds-noirs, and when the trouble started they left and came back to France. She became a journalist. It was for a right-wing Catholic paper, but she had nothing to do with the politics, she only wrote book and theater reviews and sometimes interviewed writers. She met Beckerman through some friends.

As he sat there, Bowman was more and more conscious of not being one of them, of being an outsider. They were a people, they somehow recognized and understood one another, even as strangers. They carried it in their blood, a thing you could not know. They had written the Bible with all that had sprung from it, Christianity, the first saints, yet there was something about them that drew hatred and made them reviled, their ancient rituals perhaps, their knowledge of money, their respect for justice—they were always in need of it. The unimaginable killing in Europe had gone through them like a scythe—God abandoned them—but in America they were never harmed. He envied them. It was not their looks that marked them anymore. They were confident, clean-featured.

Baum was not religious and did not believe in a God who killed or let live according to an unknowable design unconnected to whether you were decent, devout, or useless to the world. Goodness had no meaning to God, although there had to be good. The world was chaos without it. He lived as he lived because of that and seldom thought of it. In his deepest feelings, however, he accepted that he was one of his people and the God they believed in would always be his as well.

“Do you go to France?” Monique asked.

“Not very often,” Bowman said.

She had a rather coarse complexion, he observed, and was not beautiful, but she was the one you would pick out. She might be an ex-girlfriend of Sartre’s, he thought idly, though he had no idea what any of them were like. Sartre was short and ugly and made very frank arrangements that he could imagine her understanding.

He decided to say,

“Do you miss living in France?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What things do you miss?”

“Life here is easier,” she said, “but in the summer we go to France.”

“Where do you go?”

“We go to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.”

“That sounds very nice. Do you have a house there?”

“Near there,” she said. “You should come.”

It was no longer women of an Eastern European swarm, the toiling mothers and wives. It was now women who were glamorous and smart as in nineteenth-century Vienna, a breed of women, New York was known for them. No one called them Jewesses anymore. The word evoked rabbinates and pious, backward villages along the Pale. They were stylish, ambitious, at the center of things. Their allure. He had never gone with one. Their lives had warmth and no scorn of pleasure or material things. He might have married one and become part of that world, slowly being accepted into it like a convert. He might have lived among them in that particular family density that had been formed by the ages, been a familiar presence at seder tables, birthday gatherings, funerals, wearing a hat and throwing a handful of earth into the grave. He felt some regret at not having done it, of not having had the chance. On the other hand, he could not really imagine it. He would never have belonged.