All That Is Read Free Page A

high rose, a biblical pillar, and the sky was filled with red-hot pieces of steel coming down like rain. As if in echo there came, from the deep, a second climactic explosion, and thick smoke came pouring up.
    Some of the crew that had not been pulled down by the suction were still swimming. They were black with oil and choking in the waves. A few were singing songs.
    They were the only survivors. Neither the captain nor the admiral were among them. The rest of the three thousand men were in the lifeless body of the ship that had settled to the bottom far below.
    The news of the sinking of the
Yamato
spread quickly. It was the end of the war at sea.
    Bowman’s ship was among the many anchored in Tokyo Bay when the war ended. Afterwards it sailed down to Okinawa to pick up troops going home, but Bowman had the chance to go ashore at Yokohama and walk through part of what remained of the city. He walked through block upon empty block of nothing but foundations. The smell of scorched debris, acrid and death-filled, hung in the air. Among the only things that were not destroyed were the massive bank vaults of solid steel, although the buildings that had contained them were gone. In the gutters were bits of burnt paper, banknotes, all that remained of the Imperial dream.

2
THE GREAT CITY
    “The hero!” his uncle Frank cried, stretching out his arms to hug him.
    It was a welcome-home dinner.
    “Not exactly a hero,” Bowman said.
    “Sure you are. We read all about you.”
    “Read about me? Where?”
    “In your letters!” his uncle said.
    “Frank, let me!” his aunt cried.
    They had come from the Fiori, their restaurant near Fort Lee that was decorated in thin red plush and where music from
Rigoletto
and
Il Trovatore
was always playing until the last, softly talking couples left, the last melancholy couples and the few men still at the bar. Frank was the uncle of his childhood. He was dark with a rounded nose and thinning hair. Stocky and good-natured, he had gone to law school in Jersey City but dropped out with the idea of becoming a chef, and at the restaurant, when he was in the mood, sometimes went back into the kitchen to cook himself, though his real joy was music. He had taught himself to play the piano and would sit in happiness, drawn up close to the keyboard with his thick fingers, their backs richly haired, nimble on the keys.
    The evening was all warmth and talk. His mother, Beatrice, his aunt and uncle listened to the stories of where Bowman had been—wherewas San Pedro? had he eaten any Japanese food?—and drank champagne Frank had kept from before the war.
    “You don’t know how worried we were all the time you were out there,” his aunt Dorothy—Dot they called her—told him. “We thought of you every day.”
    “Did you really?”
    “We prayed for you,” she said.
    She and Frank had no children of their own, he was really like their son. Now their fears were over and the world was as it should be and also, it seemed to Bowman, very much as it had been, familiar and ordinary, the same houses, shops, streets, everything he remembered and had known since childhood, unremarkable, yet his alone. In some windows there were gold stars for sons or husbands who had been killed, but that and the many flags were almost the only evidence of all that had taken place. The very air, untroubled and unchanged, was familiar and the high school and grammar school with their sober facades. He felt in a way superior to it all and at the same time beholden.
    His uniform hung in the closet and his cap was on the shelf above. He had worn them when he was Mr. Bowman, a junior officer but respected and even admired. Long after the uniform had lost its authenticity and glamour, the cap, strangely, would still have its power.
    In dreams that were frequent for a long time, he was there again. They were at sea and under attack. The ship had been hit, it was listing, going to its knees like a dying horse. The passageways were