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begun with the idea of studying biology, but in his second semester he happened upon, as if rising up before him from nowhere, the great Elizabethan Age—London, Shakespeare’s own city still with trees, the legendary Globe, the eloquence of people of rank, sumptuous language and dress, the Thames and its dissolute south bank with land belonging to the Bishop of Winchester and the young women who made themselves available there known as Winchester geese, the end of one tumultuous century and beginning of another—all of it seized his interest.
    In the class on Jacobean drama the famed professor, an actor really who had polished his performance over decades, began gorgeously in a rich voice, “Kyd was the El Greco of the English stage.”
    Bowman remembered it word for word.
    “Against a background of clouded landscapes and fitful lightnings, we may descry these curiously angular figures clothed in garments of unexpected richness, and animated by convulsions of somber passion.”
    Fitful lightnings, garments of richness. The aristocrats who were writers—the Earl of Oxford, the Countess of Pembroke—the courtiers, Raleigh and Sidney. The many playwrights of whom no likenesses existed, Kyd, arrested and tortured for irregular beliefs, Webster, Dekker, the incomparable Ben Jonson, Marlowe whose
Tamburlaine
was performed when he was twenty-three, and the unknown actor whose father was a glovemaker and mother illiterate, Shakespeare himself. It was an age of fluency and towering prose. The queen, Elizabeth, knew Latin, loved music, and played the lyre. Great monarch, great city.
    Bowman, too, had been born in a great city, in the French Hospital in Manhattan, in the burning heat of August and very early in the morning when all geniuses are born, as Pearson once told him. There had been an unbreathing stillness, and near dawn faint, distant thunder. It grew slowly louder, then gusts of cooler air before a tremendous storm broke with lightning and sheets of rain, and when it was over, just rising, a gigantic summer sun. Clinging to the blanket at the foot of the bed was a one-legged grasshopper that had somehow found shelter in the room. The nurse reached to pull it off but his mother, still dazed from the birth, said don’t, it was an omen. The year was 1925.
    His father left them two years later. He was a lawyer at Vernon, Wells and had been sent by the firm to work with a client in Baltimore, where he met a woman, a society woman named Alicia Scott and fell in love with her and left his wife and young son. Later they married and had a daughter. He married twice more, each time to successively richer women he met at country clubs. These were Bowman’s stepmothers although he never met any of them or his half sister, for that matter.
    He never saw his father again, but he was fortunate in having a loving uncle, Frank, who was understanding, humorous, given to writing songs and studying nudist magazines. The Fiori did well enough, and Bowman and his mother had many dinners there when he was a boy, sometimes playing casino with his uncle, who was a good player and could do card tricks, making four kings come up in the deck after the four queens and things like that.
    Over the years, Beatrice Bowman acted as if her husband were merely away, as if he might come back to them, even after the divorce and his marriage to the Baltimore woman, which somehow seemedinsubstantial though she had been eager to know what the woman who had taken him away from her looked like and finally saw a photograph that was in a Baltimore newspaper. She had less curiosity about the two wives that followed, they represented only something pitiable. It was as if he were drifting further and further downward and away, and she had determined not to watch. She herself had several men who courted her, but nothing had come of it, perhaps they sensed what was equivocal in her. The two important men in her life, her father and her husband, had both abandoned