Authors: James Salter
“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.
In the end Bowman decided on journalism. There was the romance of reporters like Murrow and Quentin Reynolds, at the typewriter late at night finishing their stories, the lights of the city all around, theaters emptying out, the bar at Costello’s crowded and noisy. Sexual inexperience would be over with. He had not been shy at Harvard but it had simply not happened, the thing that would complete his life. He knew what the
ignudi
were but not the simply nude. He remained innocent and teeming with desire. There was Susan Hallet, the Boston girl he had gone with, slender, clear-faced, with low breasts that he associated with privilege. He had wanted her to go away for a weekend with him, to Gloucester, where there would be foghorns and the smell of the sea.
“Gloucester?”
“Any place,” he said.
How could she do it, she protested, how could she explain it?
“You could say you were staying at a friend’s.”
“That wouldn’t be true.”
“Of course not. That’s the whole idea.”
She was looking at the ground, her arms crossed in front of her as if somehow embracing herself. She would have to say no, though she enjoyed having him persist. For him it was almost unbearable, her presence and unfeeling refusal. She might have said yes, she thought, if there were some way of doing it, going off and … she was able only vaguely to imagine the rest. She had felt his hardness several times when dancing. She more or less knew what all that was.
“I wouldn’t know how to keep it a secret,” she said.
“I’d keep it a secret,” he promised. “Of course, you would know.”
She smiled a little.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You know how I feel about you.”
He couldn’t help thinking of Kimmel and the ease with which others did this.
“I’m serious, too,” she said. “There’s a lot more at stake for me.”
“Everything is at stake.”
“Not for the man.”
He understood but that meant nothing. His father, who had always had success with women, might have taught him something priceless here, but nothing was ever passed between father and son.
“I wish we could do it,” she said simply. “All of it, I mean. You know how much I like you.”
“Yes. Sure.”
“You men are all alike.”
“That’s a boring thing to say.”
In the mood of euphoria that was everywhere after the war it was still necessary to find a place for oneself. He applied at the
Times
but there was nothing, and it was the same at the other papers. Fortunately he had a contact, a classmate’s father who was in public relations and who had virtually invented the business. He could arrange anything in newspapers and magazines—for ten thousand dollars, it was said, he could put someone on the cover of
Time
. He could pick up the phone and call anyone, the secretaries immediately put him through.
Bowman was to go and see him at his house, in the morning. He always ate breakfast at nine.
“Will he expect me?”
“Yes, yes. He knows you’re coming.”
Having hardly slept the night before, Bowman stood on the street in front of the house at eight-thirty. It was a mild autumn morning. The house was in the Sixties, just off Central Park West. It was broad and imposing, with tall windows and the facade almost completely covered with a deep gown of ivy. At a quarter to nine he rang at the door, which was glass with heavy iron grillwork.
He was shown into a sun-filled room on the garden. Along one wall
was a long, English-style buffet with two silver trays, a crystal pitcher of orange juice, and a large silver coffee pot covered with a cloth, also butter, rolls, and jam. The butler asked how he would like his eggs. Bowman declined the eggs. He had a cup of coffee and nervously waited. He knew what Mr. Kindrigen would look like, a well-tailored man with a somewhat sinewy face and gray hair.
It was silent. There were occasional soft voices in the kitchen. He drank the coffee and went to get another cup. The garden windows were vanishing in the light.
At nine-fifteen, Kindrigen came into the room. Bowman said good morning. Kindrigen did not reply or even appear to notice him. He was in shirtsleeves, an expensive shirt with wide French cuffs. The butler brought coffee and a plate with some toast. Kindrigen stirred the coffee, opened the newspaper, and began reading it, sitting sideways to the table. Bowman had seen villains in Westerns sit this way. He said nothing and waited. Finally Kindrigen said,
“You are …?”
“Philip Bowman,” Bowman said. “Kevin may have mentioned me …”
“Are you a friend of Kevin’s?”
“Yes. From school.”
Kindrigen still had not looked up.
“You’re from …?”
“New Jersey, I live in Summit.”
“What is it you want?” Kindrigen said.
“I’d like to work for the
New York Times
,” Bowman said, matching the directness.
Kindrigen glanced at him for a brief moment.
“Go home,” he said.
He found a job with a small company that published a theater magazine and began by selling advertising. It was not difficult, but it was dull. The world of the theater was thriving. There were scores of theaters in the West Forties, one after another, and crowds strolled along deciding which to buy tickets to. Would you like to see a musical or this thing by Noël Coward?
Before long he heard of another job, reading manuscripts at a publishing house. The salary, it turned out, was less than he’d been making, but publishing was a different kind of business, it was a gentleman’s occupation, the origin of the silence and elegance of bookstores and the freshness of new pages although this was not evident from the offices, which were off Fifth Avenue in the rear of an upper floor. It was an old building with an elevator that ascended slowly past open grillwork and hallways of worn white tile uneven from the years. In the publisher’s office they were drinking champagne—one of the editors had just had a son. Robert Baum, the publisher, who owned the company together with a financing partner, was in shirtsleeves, a man of about thirty, of medium height with a friendly face, a face that was alert and somewhat homely with the beginnings of pouches beneath the eyes. He talked amiably with Bowman for a couple of minutes and, having learned enough, hired him on the spot.
“The salary is modest,” he explained. “You’re not married?”
“No. What is the salary?”
“One sixty,” Baum said. “A hundred and sixty dollars a month. What do you think?”
“Well, less than needed, more than expected,” Bowman replied.
“More than expected? I made a mistake.”
Baum had confidence and charm, neither of them false. Publishing salaries were traditionally low and the salary he offered was only slightly below that. It was necessary to keep overhead low in a business that was uncertain in itself as well as being in competition with larger well-established houses. They were a literary house, Baum liked to say, but only through necessity. They were not going to turn down a best-seller as a matter of principle. The idea, he said, was to pay little and sell a truckful. On the wall of his office was a framed letter from a colleague and friend, an older editor who’d been asked to read a manuscript. The letter was on a sheet of paper that had two fold marks and was very to the point.
This is a very obvious book with shallow characters described in a style that grates on one’s nerves. The love affair is tawdry and of little interest, and in fact one is repelled by it. Nothing but the completely obscene is left to the imagination. It is utterly worthless
.