All That Is (4 page)

“It sold two hundred thousand copies,” Baum said, “and they’re making a movie of it. The biggest book we’ve ever had. I keep it there as a reminder.”

He did not add that he himself had disliked the book and had only been persuaded to publish it by his wife, who said it would touch something in people. Diana Baum was an important influence on her husband though she very seldom appeared at the offices. She devoted herself to their child, a son named Julian, and to literary criticism, writing a column for a small, liberal magazine, influential beyond its numbers, and she was a figure as a result.

Baum had money, how much was uncertain. His father, a banker who had immigrated to America, had done very well. The family was Jewish and German and felt a kind of superiority. The city was filled with Jews, many of them poor on the Lower East Side and in the boroughs, but everywhere they were in their own world somewhat excluded from the greater one. Baum had known the experience of being an outsider and more at boarding school, where, despite his open nature, he made few friends. When the war came, rather than seeking a commission, he had served in the ranks, in intelligence, as it happened, but in combat. He had one near-death experience. They were in the flatlands of Holland at night. They were sleeping in a building where the roof had been blown away. Someone came in with a flashlight and began moving among the sleeping men. He tapped one man on the arm.

“You a sergeant?” Baum heard him ask.

The man cleared his throat.

“That’s right,” he said.

“Get up. We’re going.”

“I’m a supply sergeant. I’m a replacement.”

“I know. You’ve got to take twenty-three men up to the front.”

“What twenty-three men?”

“Come on. There’s no time.”

He led them along a road in the dark. There was the sickening sound of firing up ahead and the heavy thump of artillery. In a slight decline a captain was giving orders.

“Who are you?” the captain asked.

“I’ve got twenty-three men,” the sergeant replied.

In fact there were only twenty-one, two had slipped away or become lost in the darkness. There was firing going on not far away.

“Been in combat yet, sarge?”

“No, sir.”

“You will tonight.”

They were supposed to cross the river in rubber boats. Almost on hands and knees they dragged the boats down to the bank. Everyone was whispering but Baum felt they were making a great amount of noise.

He went in the first boat. He was not filled with fear, he was almost paralyzed by it. He held his rifle, which he had never fired, in front of him as if it were a shield. They were making a fatal transgression. He knew he was going to be killed. He could hear the low splashing of the paddles that was going to be drowned in a sudden outbreak of machine-gun fire, the whispers he knew they could hear. Paddle with your hand, someone said. The Germans were waiting to open fire until they got halfway across, but for some reason nothing happened. It was the next wave that was caught midway. Baum was on shore by then and the entire bank above his head and further back exploded into firing. Men were shouting and falling into the water. None of those boats made it.

They were pinned down for three days. He later saw the captain who had given them orders in the ravine lying dead, a half-naked body with a bare chest and dark, swollen woman’s nipples. Baum made a vow to himself, not then but when the war ended. He vowed never to be afraid of anything again.

Baum did not seem the sort of man who had been through and seen that. He was domestic and urbane, worked on Saturday and in deference to his parents appeared in synagogue on the holiest days, in deference also to those more distant in obliterated villages or mass burial pits, but at the same time he did not represent the Jewishness of black hats and suffering, the ancient ways. The war, he imagined, from which he had emerged whole and unharmed, had given him his credentials. He was almost indistinguishable from other citizens except in inner knowing. He ran his business in an English way. In his sparsely furnished office there was only a desk, an old couch, a table, and some chairs. He read everything himself and after some agreement from his wife made all the decisions. He went to lunch with agents who for a long time regarded him lightly, had dinners, and in the office made it a practice to go around and talk to everyone every day. He would sit on the corner of their desk and chat casually, what did they think about this or that, what had they read or heard? His manner was open and talking to him was easy. He sometimes seemed more like the mail clerk than the publisher, and often
had tidbits himself, stories he had heard, gossip, news, feigned horror at the size of advances—how could you hope to publish good books if you went broke in the process? He seemed never to be in a hurry, though the visits were rarely lengthy. He repeated jokes he had heard and called everyone by their first name, even the elevator man, Raymont.

Bowman was not a reader long. The editor who’d had a son left to take a job at Scribner’s and Bowman, taking the trouble to find out what his salary had been, took his place. He liked it. The office was a world of its own. It did not run by the clock, he was sometimes there until nine or ten at night and other times having a drink at six. He liked reading the manuscripts and talking to the writers, being responsible for bringing a book into existence, the discussions, editing, galleys, page proofs, jacket. He’d had no clear idea of it before he started but found it fulfilling.

Going home on weekends was a pleasure, sitting down to dinner with his mother—shall we have a cocktail first? she always said—telling her what he was doing. She was fifty-two that year and showing no age but somehow past the thought of remarrying. Her love and all her attention went to her family. During the week Bowman was living in a single room without a bath off Central Park West, and the comparative luxury of his old house stood in contrast.

His mother so liked talking to him, she could have talked to him every day. It was only with difficulty she resisted the impulse to hug and kiss him. She had brought him up from the day he was born and now, when he was the most beautiful, she could only smooth his hair. Even that could be awkward. The love she had given he would pass on to someone else. At the same time he was somehow still the wonderful child he had been in the years when there were just the two of them, when they went to visit Dot and Frank and have dinner at the restaurant. She would never forget the well-dressed woman who, seeing the little boy holding the fork too big for his hand and trying to pick up spaghetti, had said admiringly,

“That is the most beautiful child I have ever seen.”

Making little word and picture books from folded paper that was sewn together, writing out his first words with him, the many nights that now seemed a single night, putting him to bed and hearing him say, pleading, “Leave the door open.”

All of the days, all of it.

She remembered when the down had appeared on his cheeks, a faint, soft down that she pretended not to see, and then he began to shave, his hair gradually darkened and his features seemed to more resemble his father’s. Looking back she could remember every bit of it, most of it with happiness, in fact with nothing but happiness. They were always close, mother and son, without end.

Beatrice had been born, the younger of two girls, in Rochester in the last year and month of the century, 1899. Their father was a teacher who died of the flu, the so-called Spanish flu that had first appeared in Spain and then broke out in America in the fall of 1918, just at the end of the war. More than half a million people died in scenes reminiscent of the plague. Her father had been stricken while walking on Clifford Avenue on a balmy afternoon, and two days later, face discolored, burning with fever and unable to breathe, he died. Afterwards they went to live with her grandparents, who ran a small hotel on Irondequoit Bay, a wooden hotel with a bar and a large, white kitchen and, during the winter, empty rooms. When she was twenty, she came down to New York City. She had distant relatives there, the Gradows, cousins of her mother, who were rich, and she was a number of times in their home.

One of the lost images of Bowman’s boyhood was of the mansion—he’d been taken to see it when he was five or six—a great, ornate, gray granite building with, as he remembered it, a moat and latticed windows near the park somewhere but not to be found, like streets in that familiar city that repeatedly appears in dreams. He never bothered to ask his mother about it and if it had been torn down, but there were places along Fifth where it seemed it might have been.

Beatrice, perhaps because of her father’s death, which she remembered clearly, had a certain lingering dread of the fall. There was a time, usually late in August, when summer struck the trees with dazzling power and they were rich with leaves but then became, suddenly one day, strangely still, as if in expectation and at that moment aware. They knew. Everything knew, the beetles, the frogs, the crows solemnly walking across the lawn. The sun was at its zenith and embraced the world, but it was ending, all that one loved was at risk.

Neil Eddins, the other editor, was a southerner, smooth faced and mannerly, who wore striped shirts and made friends easily.

“You were in the navy,” he said.

“Yes, were you?”

“They wouldn’t have me. I couldn’t get into the program. I was in the merchant marine.”

“Where was that?”

“In the East River, mostly. The crew was Italian. They could never get them to sail.”

“Not much danger of being sunk.”

“Not by the enemy,” Eddins said. “Were you ever sunk?”

“Some people thought we were.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s too long a story.”

Gretchen, who was the secretary, walked by as they talked. She had a good figure and an attractive face marred by three or four large inflamed blemishes, some unnameable skin trouble, on her cheeks and forehead that made her miserable though she never betrayed it. Eddins gave a slight moan when she had passed.

“Gretchen, you mean?”

It was known she had a boyfriend.

“Oh, my God,” Eddins said. “Forget the acne or whatever that is, we can clear that up. Actually I like women who look a little like boxers, high cheekbones, lips a bit thick. What a dream I had the other night! I had three cute girls, one after the other. It was in a little room, almost a stall, and I was starting in with the fourth and someone was trying to come in. No, no, damn it, not now! I was shouting. The fourth one’s ass was right up against me as she bent over to take off her shoes. Am I being too disgusting?”

“No, not really.”

“Do you have dreams like that?”

“I usually only dream about one at a time,” Bowman said.

“Anyone in particular?” Eddins said. “What I really like is a voice, a low voice. When I get married, that’s the first thing I’m going to tell her, speak in a low voice.”

Gretchen passed on her way back. She gave a slight smile.

“Jaysus,” Eddins said, “they know what they’re doing, don’t they? They love it.”

After work they sometimes went up to Clarke’s for a drink. Third Avenue was a street of drinkers and many local bars, always in the shadow of the elevated and the sound of it passing overhead, rocking by tenements and daylight dropping through the tracks after it had gone by.

They talked about books and writing. Eddins had had only a year of college but had read everything, he was a member of the Joyce Society and Joyce was his hero.

“But I don’t normally like a writer to give me too much of a character’s thoughts and feelings,” he said. “I like to see them, hear what they say, and decide for myself. The appearance of things. I like dialogue. They talk and you understand everything. Do you like John O’Hara?”

“Somewhat,” Bowman said. “I like some O’Hara.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He can be too nasty.”

“He writes about that kind of people.
Appointment in Samarra
is a great book. It just swept me away. He was twenty-eight when he wrote it.”

“Tolstoy was younger. Tolstoy was twenty-three.”

“When he wrote what?”

“
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
.”

Eddins hadn’t read it. In fact he’d never heard of it, he admitted.

“It made him famous overnight,” Bowman said. “They all became famous overnight, that’s the interesting thing. Fitzgerald, Maupassant, Faulkner, when he wrote
Sanctuary
, that is. You should read
Childhood
. There’s a wonderful short chapter where Tolstoy describes his father, tall and bald and with just two great passions in his life, you think it’s going to be his family and his lands, but it’s cards and women. An amazing chapter.”

“You know what she told me today?”

“Who?”

“Gretchen. She told me the Bolshoi was in town.”

“I didn’t know she was interested in ballet.”

“She also told me what Bolshoi means. It means big, great.”

“So?”

Eddins made a cupping gesture with each hand.

“Why is she doing this to me?” he said. “I wrote a little poem to her, like the one Byron wrote to Caroline Lamb, one of the many women including countesses he put it to, if I may use the term.”