James Salter - All That Is

In dreams that were frequent for a long time, he was there again. They were at sea and under attack. The ship had been hit, it was listing, going to its knees like a dying horse. The passageways were flooded, he was trying to struggle through them to get on deck where there were crowds of men. The ship was nearly on its side and he was near the boilers that might explode at any minute, he had to find a safer place. He was at the railing, he would have to jump and get back on board further astern. In the dream he jumped, but the ship was traveling too fast. It passed as he swam, the stern rumbling by, leaving him in the wake, far behind.

“Douglas,” his mother said, naming a boy slightly older that Bowman had gone to school with, “asked about you.”

“How is Douglas?”

“He’s going to law school.”

“His father was a lawyer.”

“So is yours,” his mother said.

“You’re not worried about my future are you? I’m going back to school. I’m applying to Harvard.”

“Ah, wonderful!” his uncle cried.

“Why so far away?” said his mother.

“Mother, I was off in the Pacific. You didn’t complain about that being so far away.”

“Oh, didn’t I?”

“Well, I’m glad to be home.”

His uncle put an arm around him.

“Boy, are we glad,” he said.

Harvard did not accept him. It was his first choice, but his application was turned down, they did not accept transfer students, their letter informed him. In response he sat down and wrote a carefully composed reply mentioning by name the famed professors he hoped to study under, whose knowledge and authority had no equal, and at the same time portraying himself as a young man who should not be penalized for having gone off to war. Shameless as it was, the letter succeeded.

In the fall of 1946 at Harvard he was an outsider, a year or two older than his classmates but seen as having a kind of strength of character—he’d been in the war, his life was more real because of it. He was respected and also lucky in several ways, chief among them his roommate with whom he struck it off immediately. Malcolm Pearson was from a well-to-do family. He was tall, intelligent, and mumbling, only occasionally was Bowman able to make out what he was saying, but gradually he became accustomed and could hear. Pearson treated his expensive clothing with a lordly disdain and seemed rarely to go to meals. He was majoring in history with the vague idea of becoming a professor, anything to displease his father and distance himself from the building supplies business.

As it happened, after graduation he taught for a while at a boys’ school in Connecticut, then went on to get a master’s degree and marry a girl named Anthea Epick, although no one at the wedding at the bride’s home near New London, including the minister and Bowman, who was best man, understood him to say “I do.” Anthea was also tall with dark brows and slightly knock-kneed, a thing not perceptible in her white wedding gown, but they had all been swimming in the pool the day before. She had an odd way of walking, a sort of lurch, but she shared Malcolm’s tastes and they got along well.

After marriage, Malcolm did very little. Dressed like a bohemian of the 1920s in a loose overcoat, scarf, exercise pants, and an old fedora and carrying a thorn stick, he walked his collie on his place near Rhinebeck and pursued his own interests, largely confined to the history of the Middle Ages. He and Anthea had a daughter, Alix, to whom Bowman was godfather. She, too, was eccentric. She was silent as a child and later spoke with a kind of English accent. She lived at home with her parents, which they accepted as if it had always been intended, and never married. She wasn’t even promiscuous, her father complained.

The years at Harvard had as lasting an effect on Bowman as the time he had spent at sea. He stood on the steps of Widener, eyes level with the trees, looking out at the great redbrick buildings and oaks of the Yard. Late in the day the deep, resounding bells began, solemn and grand, ringing on and on almost without reason and finally fading in calm, endless strokes, soft as caresses.

He had begun with the idea of studying biology, but in his second semester he happened upon, as if rising up before him from nowhere, the great Elizabethan Age—London, Shakespeare’s own city still with trees, the legendary Globe, the eloquence of people of rank, sumptuous language and dress, the Thames and its dissolute south bank with land belonging to the Bishop of Winchester and the young women who made themselves available there known as Winchester geese, the end of one tumultuous century and beginning of another—all of it seized his interest.

In the class on Jacobean drama the famed professor, an actor really who had polished his performance over decades, began gorgeously in a rich voice, “Kyd was the El Greco of the English stage.”

Bowman remembered it word for word.

“Against a background of clouded landscapes and fitful lightnings, we may descry these curiously angular figures clothed in garments of unexpected richness, and animated by convulsions of somber passion.”

Fitful lightnings, garments of richness. The aristocrats who were writers—the Earl of Oxford, the Countess of Pembroke—the courtiers, Raleigh and Sidney. The many playwrights of whom no likenesses existed, Kyd, arrested and tortured for irregular beliefs, Webster, Dekker, the incomparable Ben Jonson, Marlowe whose Tamburlaine was performed when he was twenty-three, and the unknown actor whose father was a glovemaker and mother illiterate, Shakespeare himself. It was an age of fluency and towering prose. The queen, Elizabeth, knew Latin, loved music, and played the lyre. Great monarch, great city.

Bowman, too, had been born in a great city, in the French Hospital in Manhattan, in the burning heat of August and very early in the morning when all geniuses are born, as Pearson once told him. There had been an unbreathing stillness, and near dawn faint, distant thunder. It grew slowly louder, then gusts of cooler air before a tremendous storm broke with lightning and sheets of rain, and when it was over, just rising, a gigantic summer sun. Clinging to the blanket at the foot of the bed was a one-legged grasshopper that had somehow found shelter in the room. The nurse reached to pull it off but his mother, still dazed from the birth, said don’t, it was an omen. The year was 1925.

His father left them two years later. He was a lawyer at Vernon, Wells and had been sent by the firm to work with a client in Baltimore, where he met a woman, a society woman named Alicia Scott and fell in love with her and left his wife and young son. Later they married and had a daughter. He married twice more, each time to successively richer women he met at country clubs. These were Bowman’s stepmothers although he never met any of them or his half sister, for that matter.

He never saw his father again, but he was fortunate in having a loving uncle, Frank, who was understanding, humorous, given to writing songs and studying nudist magazines. The Fiori did well enough, and Bowman and his mother had many dinners there when he was a boy, sometimes playing casino with his uncle, who was a good player and could do card tricks, making four kings come up in the deck after the four queens and things like that.

Over the years, Beatrice Bowman acted as if her husband were merely away, as if he might come back to them, even after the divorce and his marriage to the Baltimore woman, which somehow seemed insubstantial though she had been eager to know what the woman who had taken him away from her looked like and finally saw a photograph that was in a Baltimore newspaper. She had less curiosity about the two wives that followed, they represented only something pitiable. It was as if he were drifting further and further downward and away, and she had determined not to watch. She herself had several men who courted her, but nothing had come of it, perhaps they sensed what was equivocal in her. The two important men in her life, her father and her husband, had both abandoned her. She had her son and her job in the schools. They had little money but their own house. They were happy.