All That Is Read Free Page B

flooded, he was trying to struggle through them to get on deck where there were crowds of men. The ship was nearly on its side and he was near the boilers that might explode at any minute, he had to find a safer place. He was at the railing, he would have to jump and get back on board further astern. In the dream he jumped, but the ship was traveling too fast. It passed as he swam, the stern rumbling by, leaving him in the wake, far behind.
    “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 wasbest 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