All That Is (32 page)

She revered her father, whose name was Jacob Lindner. She liked his hair, his smell, his solid legs. The vision of him in the morning in her parents’ small bedroom in his undershirt as he finished getting dressed was one of the prime images of her childhood. She loved his kindness and strength. In the end, with a longtime friend, he invested far more than he should have in some property in Jersey City and they could not keep up the mortgage. The bank foreclosed, and they were wiped out. He said nothing except to his wife, but they all knew. We’ll be all right, he told them, somehow.

Years after, on the subway, a disturbing thing happened to her. She was sitting across from a bag lady, a poor old woman with all her possessions in a plastic bag.

“Hello, Diana,” the woman said quietly.

“What?”

She looked at the woman.

“How is Robert?” the woman asked. “Are you still writing?”

She hadn’t written since college. She must have misheard, but suddenly she recognized who it was, a classmate, a girl she had known named Jean Brand who had been in college with her and had gotten married just afterwards. She had been good-looking. Now there were gaps where her perfect teeth had been. Diana opened her bag and took all her money out of her purse. She pressed it into her friend’s hand.

“Here. Take this,” she managed to say.

The woman reluctantly took the money.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. Then, “I’m all right.”

Diana thought of her father. No one had helped him. He never recovered from the loss. We’ll be all right, he would say.

She told Robert the story, but no one else. Merely telling it upset her. She had met Robert when she was eighteen. He was attracted to her but she was too young—he took her to be fifteen at the most. He was already a man. He had been in the war. When they got married, Diana had almost no sexual experience. She’d never known another man. I doubt that my mother ever knew another man, she said, and what did she miss? I don’t think anything.

She was completely satisfied by marriage, by the intimacies that really could not be found elsewhere. She knew that views on that had changed, that young women were now much freer, especially before marriage and that second and even third marriages were common and often happier, but all of that was outside her own life. She and her husband were inseparable. It was deeper even than marriage, but, oh, she had loved her father. She had been formed by his standards and ideals.

There was an idea that Baum had perhaps been involved with a woman in the office, and that Diana had known of it—she certainly would have known—but whatever she and her husband said concerning it, no one knew. The woman, who had gone on to another job as a publicist, was a tall, unmarried Catholic woman named Ann Hennessy, long-limbed, with a somewhat reserved personality. She was unmarried at thirty-eight and had some sort of past. Baum liked her sense of humor. He had often gone on long lunches with her. They might be seen together but never appeared to be hiding anything. She had gone to Frankfurt twice.

Bowman liked Diana very much although he was always a bit cautious with her. He liked her, he was certain, more than she liked him or more than she showed, but that night at the restaurant she was unusually open, as if they were often together.

“I’d like to live in Italy,” she mused aloud.

“Who wouldn’t, darling,” Baum said.

“One thing I always think of, in Italy they didn’t round up the Jews. Mussolini wouldn’t allow it, say what you like about him.” The Germans did that.

“No, that came later,” Baum said. “Mussolini was happy to let Ezra Pound broadcast though. He thought that was OK.”

“Oh, Ezra Pound,” Diana said. “Ezra Pound was crazy. Who listened to Ezra Pound?”

“Probably not a lot of people. I think it was shortwave, anyway, but it was the idea of it.”

“I don’t think they should have given him that prize, the Bollingen. They did it as soon as they could. It was too soon for that. You don’t honor someone who’s thrown sewage on top of you and stirred up ignorance and hatred.”

Baum had fought in the war, but he knew and had even published
men who’d avoided it, who’d managed to get deferments or some way fail the physical, but that was only craven. It was different than aiding the enemy, different than finally going back to Italy, landing in Naples and giving the Fascist salute.

“I was against it,” he said.

“Yes, but you didn’t say anything. Don’t you agree with me?” she said to Bowman.

“I think I was against it at the time.”

“At the time? That was when it was crucial.”

They were interrupted by a well-dressed man in a dark suit who had come to the table and said,

Hello, Bobby.” And to Diana, “Hi, ya, Toots.”

He looked prosperous and athletic. His well-shaved cheeks almost gleamed. He was a friend and an early backer named Donald Beckerman.

“I don’t want to interrupt your dinner,” he said. “I wanted Monique to meet you. Sweetheart,” he said to the woman with him, “this is Bob and Diana Baum. He’s a big-shot publisher. This is my wife, Monique.”

She was dark-haired with a wide mouth and the look of someone smart and unmanageable.

“Sit down for a minute, won’t you?” Baum said to them.

“So, how are things going?” Beckerman said when they sat. “Any new best-sellers?”

He was one of three brothers who had gone into business together, investments, and made a lot of money. The middle brother had died.

“I’m Don,” he said to Bowman reaching out his hand.

The waiter had come to the table.

“Will you be having dinner, sir?” he asked.

“No, we’re at a table back there. We’re just sitting here for a few minutes.

“Bobby and I were in prep school together,” Beckerman said. “We were the only two Jews in the class. In the whole school, I think.”

He had a winning smile.

“Ever go to one of the reunions?” he asked Baum. “I went about seven or eight years ago. You want to know something? Nothing has changed. It was terrible to see them all again. I only stayed the one evening.”

“You didn’t see DeCamp?”

It was a classmate who was a rebel that Baum liked.

“No, I didn’t see him. He wasn’t there. I don’t know what ever happened to him. Did you ever hear?”

While they were talking, his wife said to Bowman,

“Have you known Donnal a long time?”

“No, not long.”

“Ah, I see.”

She was Beckerman’s second wife. They’d been married for a little more than two years. They lived in his large, corner apartment in an expensive building near the armory. Monique had made it very comfortable. She had put a lot of his former wife’s furniture out on the street and gotten rid of all the dishes.

“I threw them away,” she said.

“It was a lot of dishes,” Beckerman commented. “We kept a kosher house.”

“I’m not kosher,” Monique said.

She was from Algeria. Her family were French colonists,
pieds-noirs
, and when the trouble started they left and came back to France. She became a journalist. It was for a right-wing Catholic paper, but she had nothing to do with the politics, she only wrote book and theater reviews and sometimes interviewed writers. She met Beckerman through some friends.

As he sat there, Bowman was more and more conscious of not being one of them, of being an outsider. They were a people, they somehow recognized and understood one another, even as strangers. They carried it in their blood, a thing you could not know. They had written the Bible with all that had sprung from it, Christianity, the first saints, yet there was something about them that drew hatred and made them reviled, their ancient rituals perhaps, their knowledge of money, their respect for justice—they were always in need of it. The unimaginable killing in Europe had gone through them like a scythe—God abandoned them—but in America they were never harmed. He envied them. It was not their looks that marked them anymore. They were confident, clean-featured.

Baum was not religious and did not believe in a God who killed or let live according to an unknowable design unconnected to whether you were decent, devout, or useless to the world. Goodness had no meaning
to God, although there had to be good. The world was chaos without it. He lived as he lived because of that and seldom thought of it. In his deepest feelings, however, he accepted that he was one of his people and the God they believed in would always be his as well.

“Do you go to France?” Monique asked.

“Not very often,” Bowman said.

She had a rather coarse complexion, he observed, and was not beautiful, but she was the one you would pick out. She might be an ex-girlfriend of Sartre’s, he thought idly, though he had no idea what any of them were like. Sartre was short and ugly and made very frank arrangements that he could imagine her understanding.

He decided to say,

“Do you miss living in France?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What things do you miss?”

“Life here is easier,” she said, “but in the summer we go to France.”

“Where do you go?”

“We go to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.”

“That sounds very nice. Do you have a house there?”

“Near there,” she said. “You should come.”

It was no longer women of an Eastern European swarm, the toiling mothers and wives. It was now women who were glamorous and smart as in nineteenth-century Vienna, a breed of women, New York was known for them. No one called them Jewesses anymore. The word evoked rabbinates and pious, backward villages along the Pale. They were stylish, ambitious, at the center of things. Their allure. He had never gone with one. Their lives had warmth and no scorn of pleasure or material things. He might have married one and become part of that world, slowly being accepted into it like a convert. He might have lived among them in that particular family density that had been formed by the ages, been a familiar presence at seder tables, birthday gatherings, funerals, wearing a hat and throwing a handful of earth into the grave. He felt some regret at not having done it, of not having had the chance. On the other hand, he could not really imagine it. He would never have belonged.

A train had just left and in the crowd slowly making its way up the stairs he was almost certain he saw her, not looking his way. His heart jumped.

“Anet!” he called.

She saw him and stopped, people passing around her.

“Hi,” she said. “Hello.”

They moved to one side.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“I’ve been fine.”

“Let’s go to the top of the stairs.”

He had been going down to catch the train. If he had been a minute earlier he would have been standing on the platform and getting on as she got off, almost certainly at another door, and he would never have seen her.

“How have you been?” he said again. “Are you in school? It’s been a while.”

“No, I’m still in school, but I’m taking a break. I’m taking a year off.”

She was wearing no lipstick. There was the piercing squeal of another train coming in and the groan of the cars.

“So, what are you going to be doing?”

“This is so unbelievable. Actually, I’m looking for a job.”

“Really. What kind of job?”

She laughed a little in saying it,

“In fact, I was looking for a job in publishing.”

“Publishing? That’s a surprise. How did that come about?”

“I’m a Lit major,” she said, making a little face of disbelief.

She was so unaffected that the pleasure from seeing her welled up.

“Well, it’s lucky we bumped into each other, isn’t it? Look, I’m having a little thing tomorrow for a friend in British publishing, Edina Dell, but some other people will be there. It’s just drinks. Why don’t you come?”

“Tomorrow?” she said.

“Yes, at about five-thirty. At the apartment. Do you remember where I live? I’ll write it down. Here.” He wrote it on a card.

They went up to the street together to say good-bye. They stood for a few moments on the corner. He was unaware of the buildings around them, the traffic, the tawdry signs of the shops. She was going east. He watched her walk away, younger and somehow better than others in the crowd. He had always liked her.

He doubted she would come. She must have known about the trial and its consequences and thought of him as the enemy. As it happened, he was wrong.

She arrived a little late. She came into the room almost unnoticed to find people drinking and talking and also at least one person her own age, Edina’s daughter, Siri, slender and half-black with great bushy hair. Edina was wearing a long, gauzy dress of violet and rose. She took Anet’s hand and said, “Who is this stunning girl?”

“This is Anet Vassilaros,” Bowman said.

“You’re Greek.”

“No. My father is,” Anet said.

“The great love of my life was a Greek man,” Edina said. “I used to fly to Athens to see him. He had a fabulous family apartment there. I could never get him to come back with me. Do you work in publishing? No, you’re still in school.”

“No, I’m actually looking for a publishing job.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d have to look long.”

Bowman introduced her to several others. This is Anet Vassilaros, he said. There were two other women about Edina’s age, women who worked
and whose names she didn’t get. There was a tall English agent, Tony something. Bowman had bought flowers and arranged them around.

She talked to Siri, who had a soft voice and was in school in London somewhere.

“Is she an adopted daughter?” Anet asked Bowman when she had a chance.

“No, she’s her real daughter. She has a Sudanese father.”

“She’s really beautiful.”

Tony had left, saying good-bye to her. By seven-thirty, most of the others were going. Anet got ready to leave.

“No, don’t go yet,” Bowman said to her. “We haven’t had a moment to really talk. Sit down. I’m just going to turn the TV on. There’s a piece about a writer of mine at the end of the news.”

It would be a few minutes. He turned off the sound and as they sat there, inevitably thought of her mother. He remembered the images shifting silently on the screen like jumps in reality, the face of the actress as she pleaded and then threw open her coat, defiant and submitting.