All That Is by James Salter Read Free Book Online

you doing here?”
    “I wanted to say good-bye,” he said and added, “I brought you a book I thought you might like.”
    Vivian had had books as a child, she and her sister, children’s books, they had even fought over them. She had read Nancy Drew and some others, but to be honest, she said, she didn’t read that much.
Forever Amber
. Her skin was luminous.
    “Well, thank you.”
    “It’s one of ours,” he said.
    She read the title. It was very sweet of him. It was not something she would ever expect or that boys she knew would do or even grown-ups. She was twenty years old but not yet ready to think of herself as a woman, probably because she was still largely supported by her father and because of her devotion to him. She had gone to junior college and gotten a job. The women she knew were known for their style, their riding ability, and their husbands. Also their nerve. She had an aunt who had been robbed in her home at gunpoint by two black men and had said to them cooly, “We’ve been too good to you people.”
    The Virginia of Vivian Amussen was Anglo, privileged, and inbred. It was made up of rolling, wooded country, beautiful country, rich at heart, with low stone walls and narrow roads that had preserved it. The old houses were stone and often one room deep so the windows on both sides could be opened and allow a breeze to come through in the very hot summers. Originally the land had been given in royal grants, huge tracts, before the Revolution and put to farming, tobacco first and then dairy. In the 1920s or ’30s, Paul Mellon, who liked to hunt, came and bought great amounts of land and friends joined him and bought places for themselves.It became a country for horses and hunts, the hounds baying in disorder as they ran, while after them, from around the trees, came the galloping horses and their riders jumping stone walls and ditches, uphill and down, slowing a little in places, galloping again.
    It was a place of order and style, the Kingdom, from Middleburg to Upperville, a place and life apart, much of it intensely beautiful, the broad fields soft in the rain or gentle and bright in the sun. In the spring were the races, the Gold Cup in May, over the steeplechase hills, the crowd distractedly watching from the rows of parked cars with food and drink laid out. In the fall were the hunts that went on into the winter until February when the ground was hard and the streams frozen. Everyone had dogs. If you had named a hound, he or she was yours when no longer needed for the hunt, in fact the dog would be dumped at your door.
    The fine houses belonged to the rich and to doctors, and the estates—farms, as they were called—retained their old names. People knew one another, those they did not know they regarded with suspicion. They were white, Protestant, with an unstated tolerance for a few Catholics. In the houses the furniture was English and often antique, passed down through the family. It was horses and golf: you made your best friends in sport.
    By the straight, two-lane blacktop road it was less than an hour’s drive to Washington and the downtown section where Vivian worked. Her job was more or less a formality, she was a receptionist in a title office, and on weekends she went home, to the races or thoroughbred sales or hunts through the countryside. The hunts were like clubs, to belong to the best one, the one she and her father were members of, you had to own at least fifty acres. The master of that hunt was a judge, John Stump, a figure out of Dickens, stout and choleric, with an incurable fondness for women that had once led him to attempt suicide upon being rejected by a woman he loved. He threw himself from a window in passion but landed in some bushes. He had been married three times, each time, it was observed, to a woman with bigger breasts. The divorces were because of his drinking, which befitted his image as a squire, but as master of the hunt he was resolute and demanded