All That Is (8 page)

Life in the country was pleasant for Caroline. She smoked and drank. Her laugh became hoarse and a small seductive roll of flesh slowly appeared above her girdle. She lay in bed with her daughters and sometimes read to them on rainy days. Amussen drove into Washington to work, occasionally coming back late or even spending the night, and his attention to Caroline, in a way that was important to her, dwindled. She brooded on this.

“George,” she said one evening over a drink, “are you happy with me?”

She was not yet thirty but her face was a bit puffy beneath the eyes.

“What do you mean, darling?”

“Are you happy?”

“I’m happy enough.”

“Do you still love me?” she persisted.

“Why are you asking that?”

“I just want to know.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes, you love me? Is that what you mean?”

“If you keep asking it, I don’t know what I’ll say.”

“That means you don’t.”

“Is that what it means?”

There was a silence.

“Is it that there’s someone else?” she finally said.

“If there was, it wouldn’t amount to anything,” he said.

“So, there is.”

“I said, if there was. There isn’t.”

“You’re sure of that? No, you’re not, are you?”

“Why don’t you listen to what I say?”

With that, she suddenly threw her drink in his face. He stood and brushed himself off, taking out a handkerchief to do it.

She threw a drink in his face at a party in Middleburg that fall and wept in the car on the way home from several others. She became known as a drinker, that was not so bad—drinking, even too much, was an aspect of character, like courage, in their society—but Amussen became tired of it and of her. Her angry moods were like a disease that couldn’t be treated, much less cured. She had taken her pillow and was sleeping in the guest room. By the tenth year of their marriage they had separated and soon after, divorced. Caroline went to Reno for the divorce and left her two daughters, eight and ten years old, with her husband so as not to disrupt their schooling and routine. Although she retained custody of them, she did not exercise it strictly, and Amussen was content to let things continue this way, as they were.

Bowman met Caroline Amussen—she kept the name, which was worth something—in her apartment in Washington. She was wearing bedroom slippers but she had a somehow gallant air and was warm towards him. She liked him, she said, and later said it privately to her daughter. Bowman forgot the fact that girls, in time, became like their mothers. He felt that Vivian took after her father and would become her own woman.

The waiter came to take their order.

“How is the shad roe, Edward?” Amussen asked.

“Jus’ fine, Mistuh Amussen.”

“Do you have two orders of it?” he asked. “If you’d like to have it,” he said to his guest.

Bowman assumed it was a southern dish.

“Do you do any fishing?” Amussen said. “Shad is bony, generally too bony to bother with. The roe is the best part.”

“Yes, I’ll have it. How do they make it?”

“In a pan with some bacon. They brown it. That’s right, isn’t it, Edward?”

It was at the end of lunch, when they were being served coffee, that Bowman said,

“You know, I’m in love with Vivian.”

Amussen continued stirring his coffee as if he had not heard.

“And I think she’s in love with me,” Bowman went on. “We would like to get married.”

Still Amussen showed no emotion. He was as calm as if he were alone.

“I’ve come to ask for your permission, sir,” Bowman said.

The “sir” seemed a little courtly but he felt it was appropriate. Amussen was still occupied with stirring.

“Vivian’s a nice girl,” Amussen finally said. “She was raised in the country. I don’t know how she’d take to city life. She’s not one of those people.”

He then looked up.

“How do you plan on providing for her?” he said.

“Well, as you know, I have a good job. I like my work, I have a career. I earn enough to support us at this point, and whatever I have is hers. I’ll make sure she’s comfortable.”

“She’s not a city girl,” Amussen said again. “You know, from the time she was just a little thing, she’s had her own horse.”

“We haven’t talked about that. I suppose we could always make room for a horse,” Bowman said lightly.

Amussen seemed not to hear him.

“We love one another,” Bowman said. “I’ll do everything in my power to make her happy.”

Amussen nodded slightly.

“I promise you that. We’re hoping for your permission, then. Your blessing, sir.”

There was a pause.

“I don’t think I can give you that,” Amussen said. “Not and be honest with you.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think it would work. I think it would be a mistake.”

“I see.”

“But I won’t stand in Vivian’s way,” her father said.

Bowman left feeling disappointed but defiant. It would be a kind of morganatic marriage then, politely tolerated. He was not sure what attitude to take about it, but when he told Vivian what her father had said, she was not disturbed.

“That’s just Daddy,” she said.

The minister was a tall man in his seventies with silvery hair who couldn’t hear very well, having fallen from a horse. Age had taken the edge from his voice, which was silken but thin. At the prenuptial meeting he said he would ask them three questions, the ones he always asked couples. He wanted to know if they were in love. Next, did they want to be married in the church? And lastly, would the marriage last?

“We can definitely answer yes to the first two,” Bowman replied.

“Ah,” the minister said, “yes.” He was absentminded and had forgotten the order of the questions. “I don’t suppose it’s so important to be in love,” he admitted.

He hadn’t shaved, Bowman noticed, there was a white stubble on his face, but he was more presentable at the wedding. Vivian’s family was there, her mother, sister, brother-in-law, and some others Bowman had never met and also friends. There were fewer on the groom’s side, but his Harvard roommate, Malcolm, and his wife, Anthea, were there, and Eddins with a white carnation in his buttonhole. It was a bright, cool morning, then afternoon, passing in an excitement that made it hard to remember. He was with his mother beforehand and could see her during the ceremony. He watched with a sense of victory as Amussen brought Vivian down the aisle. He put any misgivings aside, it was like a scene from a play. During the vows he saw only his bride, her face clear and shining, and in back of her Louise smiling, too, as he heard himself say, With this ring, I thee wed. I thee wed.

Eddins proved to be very popular or anyhow well-remembered at the reception, which was held at Vivian’s house—her father had wanted it to
be at the Red Fox, the old inn in Middleburg, but had been persuaded otherwise.

The bar was on a table covered with a white tablecloth and tended by two bartenders, reserved but polite, burnished somehow by inequality. In a bow tie and with the round face of good fellowship, Bowman’s new brother-in-law, Bryan, came up to him.

“Welcome to the family,” he said.

He had small, even teeth that made him seem friendly and worked in the government.

“Very nice wedding,” he said. “We didn’t have one. The pater offered us three thousand dollars—actually he offered it to Beverly—if we’d just go off and get married. He was probably hoping I’d run away with the money. He as much as told me so. Anyway, we eloped. Where are you from?”

“New Jersey,” Bowman said. “Summit.”

He was from the east, too, Bryan said.

“We lived in Mount Kisco. Guard Hill Road—they used to call it Banker’s Row, every house belonged to a Morgan partner.”

They had a four-car garage. Actually there were three cars and a chauffeur.

“Redell was his name. He was also the cook, very spooky kind of guy,” Bryan said amiably. “He used to drive us to school. We had a Buick and a Hispano-Suiza, huge monster with a separate chauffeur’s section and a speaking tube. Every day at breakfast, Redell would ask which car we wanted to take, the Buick or … The Hissy, the Hissy! we’d say. And then when we got away from the house, we would drive.”

“You would drive?”

“My brother and I.”

“How old were you?”

“I was twelve and Roddy was ten. We took turns. We made Redell do it. We threatened him. We said we’d claim he tried to molest us. Death rides, we called them.”

“Where’s Roddy now?”

“He’s not here. He’s out west. He works in construction in the West. He just likes it, the life.”

Beverly joined them.

“We were talking about Roddy,” Bryan explained.

“Poor Roddy. Bryan loves Roddy. Do you have brothers or sisters?” she asked Bowman.

“No, I’m the only one.”

“Lucky you,” she said.

She did not resemble Vivian. She was bigger and somewhat ungainly with a receding chin and a reputation for being outspoken.

“So, what do we make of Mr. Bowman?” she asked her husband afterwards. She was eating some of the wedding cake with her hand cupped beneath to catch any pieces.

“He seems like a nice-enough guy.”

“He’s from Hah-vud.”

“So?”

“I think Vivian made a mistake.”

“What have you got against him?”

“I don’t know. It’s my intuition. I like his friend, though.”

“Which one?”

“The one with the flower. He’s nervous, look at him.”

“What’s he nervous about?”

“Us, probably.”

Eddins was on his second drink but in Virginia he felt more or less at home. He had talked to an ex-colonel and to a not unattractive woman who had come with a judge. Also to Bryan, who mentioned the cars they used to have before the family lost their money and had to move to Bronxville, which was a real shame. Eddins had been watching a good-looking girl who was standing behind the judge and he finally walked her way.

“Do you come here often?” he asked as a try at wit.

“I’m sorry?”

Her name was Darrin, she was the daughter of a doctor. It turned out that she exercised horses.

“Horses need exercise? Don’t they do that themselves?”

She regarded him somewhat scornfully.

Eddins tried to cover it up by talking.

“They said there might be thunderstorms today, but it looks like they’re wrong. I like thunderstorms. There’s a wonderful one in Thomas Hardy. Do you know Thomas Hardy?”

“No,” she said briefly.

“He’s English. An English writer. You can’t top the English. Lord Byron, the poet. Incredible. The most famous man in Europe when he was still in his twenties. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, I’m trying to model myself after him.”

She failed to smile.

“Died of a fever at Missolonghi. They put his heart in an urn and his lungs in something else, I forget … supposed to end up in a church but they got lost. His body was sent back to England in a coffin filled with rum. Women came to the funeral, former mistresses …”

She was listening without expression.

“I have some English blood,” he confessed, “but mostly Scottish.”

“Is that right?”

“Wild, unbridled people. Wash their clothes in urine,” he said.

“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.