James Salter: All That Is

“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.