by James Salter
“They what?”
“Anyway it smells that way.”
He was making it up, he did that when he drank and to protect himself. She was so plainly not interested in what he was saying, too young to know what anything was about. He had imagined some kind of sophisticated, dissolute wedding, with a bridesmaid drunkenly going off with him, but there were no bridesmaids, there was only the maid of honor to whom he was not attracted. He wandered over to the groom.
“So, this will be your country estate, I take it.”
“I don’t think so,” Bowman said.
“I met your father-in-law. Big landowner. Rich as a goat. Anyway you’re a lucky man. Very lucky,” he said, his eye on Vivian. “Still, I have this flower …” He took hold of his lapel. “I’m going to keep it in remembrance, press it in a book,” he said looking down at it. “Would have to be a big book. I talked to your mother-in-law. Well turned out.”
Caroline had been moving among the guests, a little heavier than she had been when last seen and her cheeks a little rounder. She was in an expensive black dress and managing to avoid being near her former husband.
Beatrice had said little. She had wept at the church. She had embraced Vivian and in return felt a dutiful response. It had all been like that, dutiful, restrained, with only smiles and polite talk.
She was bidding good-bye to her son. She had a chance to embrace him and to say with all her heart,
“Be good to one another. Love one another,” she said.
Though she felt it was love cast into darkness. She had doubts that she would ever know her daughter-in-law. It seemed, on this bright day, that the greatest misfortune had come to pass. She had lost her son, not completely, but part of him was beyond her power to reclaim and now belonged to another, someone who hardly knew him. She thought of all that had gone before, the hopes and ambition, the years that had been filled, not just in retrospect, with such joy. She tried to be pleasant, to have them all like her and favor her son.
George Amussen she felt she knew, the self-possession and manners, the life that the house seemed to represent. He reminded her of her husband, whom she had long tried to banish from her thoughts but who remained in her life, distant and unassailable.
Vivian was happy. She was wearing a white wedding gown, she had yet to change, and though she was not yet used to the idea, she was a married woman. She’d married at home, with her father’s blessing, more or less. It had happened, she had done it. Like Beverly she was married.
Bowman was happy or felt he was, she was his, a beautiful woman or girl. He saw life ahead in regular terms, with someone who would be beside him. In the presence of her family and friends he realized that he knew only one side of her, a side that attracted him but that was not her entire or essential self. Behind her as he looked was her unyielding father and not far away from him her sister and brother-in-law. They were all complete strangers. Across the room, smiling and alcoholic, was her mother, Caroline. Vivian caught his eye and perhaps his thoughts and smiled at him, it seemed understandingly. The unsettled feeling disappeared. Her smile was loving, sincere. We’ll leave soon, it said. That night though, having driven to the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, wearied by the events of the day and unaccustomed to being a wedded couple, they simply went to sleep.
5
ON TENTH
There was a front room and glass doors to a bedroom with a bed by the window. The kitchen was narrow but long and the dishes often unwashed; Vivian was indifferent to housekeeping and her clothes and cosmetics could be found all over. Still, a glorious being emerged from her preparations, even when abbreviated. She had the gift of allure, even when her lips were bare and her hair uncombed, sometimes especially then.
The apartment was on Tenth Street, where old New York families had long lived and which was still quiet but close to everything, together with the neighboring streets a kind of residential island, ordinary and discreet. There were the photographs Vivian had brought, framed and two of them on the dresser, photographs of her jumping, leaning forward close to the horse’s neck as they cleared, in a black rider’s helmet, her face pure and fearless. She knew how to ride, that was in her face, to have the great beast moving easily beneath her, ears pricked back to hear and obey, the leather giving and cracking, the mastery of it. She and Beverly and Chrissy Wendt, the three of them coming from the horse show, getting out of the truck, a little dusty, in their riding pants, Vivian with her striking face, blond and yawning grandly as if she were alone and getting out of bed. Twelve and carelessly natural, mischievous even.
At the age of eight, her small feet wobbling in her mother’s high heels and an imaginary cigarette in one hand, she appeared in the bedroom doorway. Her mother was at the dressing table and saw her in the mirror.
“Oh, darling,” Caroline said noticing also the pearls, “you look beautiful. Come and give me a puff.”
The joy of it. Vivian clattering in and holding her hand out near her mother’s mouth. Caroline took a drag and exhaled an invisible plume.
“You’re all dressed up. Are you getting ready to go to a party somewhere?”
“No,” she said.
“You’re not going out?”
“No, I think I’ll just invite some boys over,” Vivian said knowingly.
“Some boys? How many?”
“Oh, three or four.”
“You’re not going to favor just one?” Caroline said.
“Older boys. It depends.”
The age of imitation when there are no dangers although it depended. In the past, girls might be married at twelve, queens-to-be knelt to be wed even younger, Poe’s wife was a child of thirteen, Samuel Pepys’ only fifteen, Machado the great poet of Spain fell madly in love with Leonor Izquierdo when she was thirteen, Lolita was twelve, and Dante’s goddess Beatrice even younger. Vivian knew as little as any of them, she was a tomboy until she was almost fourteen. She loved make-believe with her mother. She loved and feared her father and with her sister quarreled constantly from the time they both could talk, so much so that Amussen had many times asked his wife to do something about it.
“Mommy!” Beverly cried out. “Do you know what she just called me?”
“What did she call you?”
Vivian was lingering and listening partway down the hall.
“She called me a horse’s ass.”
“Vivian, did you say that?” Caroline called to her. “Come here, did you say that?”
Vivian was resolute.
“No,” she said.
“Liar!” Beverly cried.
“Did you or didn’t you, Vivian?”
“I never said horse’s.”
It was not always fighting, but it might always come to that. When in time it became apparent that Vivian would be the one who was beautiful, their positions hardened and Beverly adopted her own raw-boned, caustic style. Vivian, in turn, became noticably more feminine. Nevertheless they grew up doing everything together. They had ridden in the hunt from the time they were seven or eight. Vivian, though, was the favorite of the field master. Judge Stump, well-versed in such things, admired her form. In her well-fitted riding clothes he imagined her as a few years older with certain unfatherly thoughts though he was not her father, only a good friend. That might properly exclude one thing but not another. To George Amussen, the judge habitually and easily said “your beautiful daughter” in a way, he felt, that was fond and respectful, that could almost be a title. His fantasy of himself and Vivian, well, then, was not entirely far-fetched, his experience and her freshness unexpectedly but appropriately combined. This idea—it would be wrong to call it a plan—made him behave somewhat more stiffly towards her than he might have and seem even older and more inflexible than he was. He could feel it, but the more he tried the less he was able to do about it.
In Virginia that first fall, the weather for the races was rainy and cold. There was mud underfoot in the fields and the grass was matted flat where people had driven and w
alked. Spectators in bulky clothes lined the fences with children running about and dogs. Along the row of cars where people stood drinking in small groups came a stocky figure in an Australian army hat with one side pinned up, the brim dotted with water and a braided cord beneath his chin. It was the judge, who shook hands with Amussen, greeted Vivian courteously, and nodded and muttered something to Bowman. They stood in the rain talking, the judge talking only to Amussen while horses and riders, very small in the distance, galloped steadily across vast green slopes. The judge had not come to terms with Vivian’s marriage. When lovely woman stoops to folly, he thought, but he stood where he could see her in the normal course of things and at one point caught her eye with what he felt was a fond look, water dripping from his brown hat.
By the time they got back to New York, Vivian had a fever and ached in every limb. It was the flu. Bowman filled a hot tub for her and carried her in a white robe to bed afterwards, watching her as she lay asleep with a damp, untroubled face. He slept on the couch that night so as not to disturb her and went to work but came home two or three times during the day to look after her. Her illness seemed to draw them closer, strangely affectionate hours as she lay, too weak to do anything, and he read to her and brought her tea. The two middle-aged men, neighbors, who lived together on the floor below stopped him on the stairs to ask about her. That night they brought her some soup, minestrone, they had made.
“How is she doing?” they asked solicitously at the door.
They could hear her coughing in the bedroom, Larry and Arthur, they were veterans of the musical theater, alcoholic and living under rent control. Vivian liked them, Noël and Cole, she called them, they had met in the chorus. The walls of their apartment were covered with framed theater programs and signed photographs of old performers. One of them was Gertrude Neisen. Gertrude, she was so fabulous! they cried. They had a piano they sometimes played and occasionally they could be heard singing. When Vivian began to recover they brought her a fluted glass vase with an arrangement of lilies and yellow roses from the flower shop on Eighteenth Street owned by an elegant man Arthur had once been involved with, Christos, who was friends with both of them. He, too, loved the theater and everything about it. Later he opened a restaurant.
The flowers lasted for almost two weeks. They were still there the evening of dinner at the Baums’. Bowman had never been to their house and Vivian hadn’t met them. She was preparing for it, fastening her earrings with her face reflected in the hall mirror above the glamour of the flowers.
Baum’s private life Bowman knew only by conjecture, it was European, he guessed, and secure. A doorman had been instructed to send them right up and as they walked down the short hallway a dog behind someone’s door began barking. Baum himself showed them in. The first impression was of density. There was comfortable furniture and layered oriental rugs with books and pictures everywhere. It did not seem the house of a couple with a child but rather of people who had ample time for things. Diana rose from the couch where she had been sitting with another guest. She greeted Vivian first. She had very much wanted to meet her, she said. Baum made drinks from a tray filled with bottles on top of a low secretary. The other guest seemed very at home. Bowman at first took him to be a relative, but it turned out that he taught philosophy and was a friend of Diana’s.
At dinner they talked about books and a manuscript by a Polish refugee named Aronsky who had somehow managed to survive the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto and then of the city itself. In New York he had found his way into literary circles. He was said to be charming though unpredictable. How, the question was, had he gotten through? To this he answered he didn’t know, it was luck. Nothing could be predicted, a thing as small as a fly could kill a mother of four. How was that? If she moved to brush it away, he said.
They’d been joined by another couple, a wine writer and his girlfriend, who was small with long fingers and hair that was thick and absolutely black. She was lively and wanted to talk, like a wind-up doll, a little doll that also did sex. Kitty was her name. But they were talking about Aronsky. His book, as yet unpublished, was called The Savior.
“I found it very disturbing,” Diana said.
“There’s something wrong with it,” Baum agreed. “Most novels, even the great ones, don’t pretend to be true. You believe them, they even become part of your life, but not as literal truth. This book seems to violate that.”
It was an account, almost official in its tone and lack of metaphor, of the life of Reinhard Heydrich, the long-headed, bony-nosed SS commander who had been second only to Himmler and one of the black-uniformed planners of the so-called Final Solution. As head of the police he was as powerful and feared as any man in the Third Reich. He was tall and blond with a violent temper and an inhuman capacity for work. His icy but handsome appearance was well-known, along with his sensual tastes. There was an episode when, coming home late at night after drinking, he had suddenly seen someone in wait in the darkened apartment, pulled his pistol and fired four shots that shattered the hall mirror in which it was he who had been reflected.
The truth of his past had been carefully hidden. In the town where he was born, the gravestones of his parents had mysteriously disappeared. His schoolmates were afraid to remember him, and his early records as a naval cadet had vanished, there was only the story that he’d been dismissed over trouble with a young girl. What was concealed, incredibly, was that Heydrich was a Jew, his identity known only to a small circle of influential Jews who relied upon him to both inform and protect them.
In the end, he betrays them. He betrays them both because he is perhaps not Jewish and because he ends up as they do, in death, all engulfing. He has been made governor of occupied Czechoslovakia and is ambushed in his touring car near Prague, an act ironically encouraged by unknowing Jews in England, where the assassination was planned and organized.
The book was compelling in its authority and in details that were hard to believe had been invented. The floor of the hospital he had been taken to and the naked torso of Heydrich on the operating table as they tried to save him. Hitler had sent his own doctor. There was chilling authenticity. The Czech assassins who had been parachuted in escape but do not survive. They are trapped in the basement of a church and, surrounded by overwhelming German forces, take their own lives. The village of Lidice is selected for reprisal and all of its inhabitants, who had nothing to do with it, men, women, and children, are executed. There was no sound on earth, wrote Aronsky, like a German pistol being cocked.
Baum did not believe it, or if he did it was with reluctance. It was not that he had heard guns being cocked himself, which he had, but that he suspected the motive. He hadn’t met Aronsky, but he was troubled in a deep way by the book.
“Its neatness,” was all he managed to come up with.
“Heydrich was assassinated.”
“I simply don’t believe that he was Jewish. The book never makes it clear.”
“One of Hitler’s field marshals was partly Jewish.”
“Which one?” Baum said. “Von Manstein.”
“Is that really a fact?”
“So it’s been said. He’s supposed to have admitted it in private.”
“Perhaps. The thing is, I believe the book can confuse a lot of readers. And to what end? It can have a long existence even if it’s eventually exposed as fiction. My feeling is that, especially on this subject, you have to respect the truth. Someone is doubtlessly going to publish it, but we’re not going to,” Baum said.
They went home in a taxi. Bowman was exhilarated.
“Did you like Diana?” he asked.
“She was nice.”
“I thought very nice.”
“Yes,” Vivian said. “But the wine guy …”
“What about him?”
“I don’t know if he understood we were married. He was making a pass at me.”
“Are you sure?” Bowman said.
He had a feeling of satisfaction. His wife
had been desired.
“He thought I had fabulous cheekbones. I looked like a Smith girl,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“Bryn Mawr, I told him.”
Bowman laughed.
“Why’d you say that?”
“It sounded better.”
Dinner at the Baums’. It was admittance into their life, to some degree, into a world he admired.
He was thinking of many things but not really. He was listening to the small sounds in the bathroom and waiting. Finally, in familiar fashion, his wife came out, switching off the light as she did. She was in her nightgown, the one he liked with crossed straps in back. Almost as if unaware of him, she got into bed. He was filled with desire, as if they had met at a dance. He lay still for a moment in anticipation and then whispered to her. He put his hand on the swell of her hip. She was silent. He moved her nightgown up a little.
“Don’t,” she said.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” he whispered.
It was impossible that she did not feel as he did. The warmth, the satisfaction, and now to complete it.
“What’s wrong?” he said again.
“Nothing.”
“Do you feel sick?”
She didn’t reply. He waited, for too long it seemed, his blood trembling, everything going bitter. She turned and kissed him briefly, as if dismissing him. She was suddenly like a stranger. He knew he should try to understand it but felt only anger. It was unloving of him, but he could not help it. He lay there unwillingly and sleepless, the city itself, dark and glittering, seemed empty. The same couple, the same bed, yet now not the same.
6
CHRISTMAS IN VIRGINIA
It had snowed before Christmas but then turned cold. The sky was pale. The country lay silent, the fields dusted white with the hard furrows showing where they had been plowed. All was still. The foxes were in their dens, the deer bedded down. Route 50 from Washington, the road that had been originally laid out in almost a straight line by George Washington when he was a surveyor, was empty of traffic. On the back roads an early car with its headlights came along. First the trees, half-frosted, were lit, then the road itself, and finally the soft sound as the car passed.
