Free All That Is by James Salter Page A

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