All That Is

3


VIVIAN



St. Patrick’s Day was sunny and unusually mild, men were in shirtsleeves and from the appearance of things work was ending at noon. The bars were full. Coming into one of them from out of the sunlight, Bowman, his eyes blinded, could barely make out the faces along the bar but found a place to stand near the back where they were all shouting and calling to one another. The bartender brought his drink and he took it and looked around. There were men and women drinking, young women mostly, two of them—he never forgot this moment—standing near him to his right, one dark-haired with dark brows and, when he could see her better, a faint down along her jawbone. The other was blond with a bare, shining forehead and wide-set eyes, instantly compelling, even in some way coarse. He was so struck by her face that it was difficult to look at her, she stood out so—on the other hand he could not keep himself from doing it. He was almost fearful of looking.

He raised his glass towards them.

“Happy St. Patrick’s,” he managed to say.

“Can’t hear you,” one of them cried.

He tried to introduce himself. The place was too noisy. It was like a raging party they were in the middle of.

“What’s your name?” he called.

“Vivian,” the blond girl said.

He stepped closer. Louise was the dark-haired one. She already had a secondary role, but Bowman, trying not to be too direct, included her.

“Do you live around here?” he said.

Louise answered. She lived on Fifty-Third Street. Vivian lived in Virginia.

“Virginia?” Bowman said, stupidly he felt, as if it were China.

“I live in Washington,” Vivian said.

He could not keep his eyes from her. Her face was as if, somehow, it was not completely finished, with smouldering features, a mouth not eager to smile, a riveting face that God had stamped with the simple answer to life. In profile she was even more beautiful.

When they asked what he did—the noise had quieted a little—he replied he was an editor.

“An editor?”

“Yes.”

“Of what? Magazines?”

“Books,” he said. “I work at Braden and Baum.”

They had never heard of it.

“I was thinking of going to Clarke’s,” he said, “but there was all this noise in here, and I just came in to see what was going on. I’ll have to go back to work. What … what are you doing later?”

They were going to a movie.

“Want to come?” Louise said.

He suddenly liked, even loved her.

“I can’t. Can I meet you later? I’ll meet you back here.”

“What time?”

“After work. Any time.”

They agreed to meet at six.

All afternoon he was almost giddy and found it hard to keep his mind on things. Time moved with a terrible slowness, but at a quarter to six, walking quickly, almost running, he went back. He was a few minutes early, they were not there. He waited impatiently until six-fifteen, then six-thirty. They never appeared. With a sickening feeling he realized what he had done—he had let them go without asking for a telephone number or address, Fifty-Third Street was all he knew and he would never see them, her, again. Hating his ineptness, he stayed for nearly an hour, towards the end striking up a conversation with the man next to him so that if by chance they did finally come, he would not seem foolish and doglike standing there.

What was it, he wondered, that had betrayed him and made them decide not to come back? Had they been approached by someone else after he left? He was miserable. He felt the terrible emptiness of men who are ruined, who see everything collapse in a single day.

He went to work in the morning still feeling anguish. He could not talk about it to Eddins. It was in him like a deep splinter together with a sense of failure. Gretchen was at her desk. Eddins smelled of talcum or cologne, something suspicious. Bowman sat silently reading when Baum came in.

“How are you this morning?” Baum said easily, the usual overture when he had nothing particular in mind.

They talked for a bit and had just finished when Gretchen came over.

“There’s someone on the phone for you.”

Bowman picked up his phone and said, somewhat curtly,

“Hello.”

It was her. He felt a moment of insane happiness. She was apologizing. They had come back at six the night before but hadn’t been able to find the bar, they couldn’t remember the street.

“Yes, of course,” Bowman said. “I’m so sorry, but that’s all right.”

“We even went to Clarke’s,” she said. “I remembered you said that.”

“I’m so glad you called.”

“I just wanted you to know. That we tried to come back and meet you.”

“No, no, that’s all right, that’s fine. Look, give me your address, will you?”

“In Washington?”

“Yes, anywhere.”

She gave it and Louise’s as well. She was going back to Washington that afternoon, she said.

“Do you … what time is the train? Do you have time for lunch?”

Not really. The train was at one.

“That’s too bad. Maybe another time,” he said foolishly.

“Well, bye,” she said after a pause.

“Good-bye,” he somehow agreed.

But he had her address, he looked at it after hanging up. It was precious beyond words. He didn’t know her last name.

In the great vault of Penn Station with the light in wide blocks coming down through the glass and onto the crowd that was always waiting, Bowman made his way. He was nervous but then caught sight of her standing unaware.

“Vivian!”

She looked around and then saw him.

“Oh. It’s you. What a surprise. What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to say good-bye,” he said and added, “I brought you a book I thought you might like.”

Vivian had had books as a child, she and her sister, children’s books, they had even fought over them. She had read Nancy Drew and some others, but to be honest, she said, she didn’t read that much. Forever Amber. Her skin was luminous.

“Well, thank you.”

“It’s one of ours,” he said.

She read the title. It was very sweet of him. It was not something she would ever expect or that boys she knew would do or even grown-ups. She was twenty years old but not yet ready to think of herself as a woman, probably because she was still largely supported by her father and because of her devotion to him. She had gone to junior college and gotten a job. The women she knew were known for their style, their riding ability, and their husbands. Also their nerve. She had an aunt who had been robbed in her home at gunpoint by two black men and had said to them cooly, “We’ve been too good to you people.”

The Virginia of Vivian Amussen was Anglo, privileged, and inbred. It was made up of rolling, wooded country, beautiful country, rich at heart, with low stone walls and narrow roads that had preserved it. The old houses were stone and often one room deep so the windows on both sides could be opened and allow a breeze to come through in the very hot summers. Originally the land had been given in royal grants, huge tracts, before the Revolution and put to farming, tobacco first and then dairy. In the 1920s or ’30s, Paul Mellon, who liked to hunt, came and bought great amounts of land and friends joined him and bought places for themselves. It became a country for horses and hunts, the hounds baying in disorder as they ran, while after them, from around the trees, came the galloping horses and their riders jumping stone walls and ditches, uphill and down, slowing a little in places, galloping again.

It was a place of order and style, the Kingdom, from Middleburg to Upperville, a place and life apart, much of it intensely beautiful, the broad fields soft in the rain or gentle and bright in the sun. In the spring were the races, the Gold Cup in May, over the steeplechase hills, the crowd distractedly watching from the rows of parked cars with food and drink laid out. In the fall were the hunts that went on into the winter until February when the ground was hard and the streams frozen. Everyone had dogs. If you had named a hound, he or she was yours when no longer needed for the hunt, in fact the dog would be dumped at your door.

The fine houses belonged to the rich and to doctors, and the estates—farms, as they were called—retained their old names. People knew one another, those they did not know they regarded with suspicion. They were white, Protestant, with an unstated tolerance for a few Catholics. In the houses the furniture was English and often antique, passed down through the family. It was horses and golf: you made your best friends in sport.

By the straight, two-lane blacktop road it was less than an hour’s drive to Washington and the downtown section where Vivian worked. Her job was more or less a formality, she was a receptionist in a title office, and on weekends she went home, to the races or thoroughbred sales or hunts through the countryside. The hunts were like clubs, to belong to the best one, the one she and her father were members of, you had to own at least fifty acres. The master of that hunt was a judge, John Stump, a figure out of Dickens, stout and choleric, with an incurable fondness for women that had once led him to attempt suicide upon being rejected by a woman he loved. He threw himself from a window in passion but landed in some bushes. He had been married three times, each time, it was observed, to a woman with bigger breasts. The divorces were because of his drinking, which befitted his image as a squire, but as master of the hunt he was resolute and demanded perfect etiquette, one time halting the field when they’d done something wrong and giving them a ferocious dressing down until someone spoke out,

“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.