American Romantic Read Online Free

Churchill had sat at it, drinking everything in sight and reminiscing about the Boer War, rum show. A Marsden Hartley landscape on one wall, an Alfred Munnings stallion on the wall opposite, a wee Homer next to that. Kilim rugs on the floor, not so out of place as you might think. A martini or two before the meal and a walk in the fields after it, a stroll accompanied by the Labrador retrievers, Pat and Dick. There were firearms, too, in case anyone wanted to shoot a pheasant. More Washington, more horseracing and real estate, and an agreement to get together again soon, in Connecticut or the city. Harry was attracted to this life, its iron routine and American naturalness. He could have done with more conversation concerning the world, foreign affairs, but the world was far away on Sunday afternoons. He wondered then if the girl he had been seeing would take to Sunday lunch in Connecticut. She was German, her name Sieglinde Hechler, a technician from the hospital ship docked these past months in the harbor on the river. He had no idea; the life of the squires was an acquired taste. It took some getting used to. Sieglinde was game but it took more than gameness. Gameness took you only so far around the Regency table and its revolving decanters.
    Connecticut. He remembered how in late-afternoon darkness gathered in the corners of the high ceiling and over the yellow hills curling west toward the Hudson and, beyond the Hudson, all of the American interior. The dying sun gave the landscape a golden glow, even the lichen-topped tumbledown stone wall with the dogs’ graves behind it, four generations of Labrador retrievers. Prime time was mid-October, the air so crisp you could break it in your fingers. Everyone turned to look out the big windows at the autumn light show. Conversation softened and became intimate, as if a stranger might be nearby and listening in. Soon enough the westering sun was forgotten, an object on the edge of their vision. They were indoor people, most comfortable at a crowded table; indoor air, indoor vistas. The Candlesses, old Mr. Wilson who did something in the energy sector, the widow Born who looked after diamonds at one of the Fifth Avenue shops, the brothers Green who ran a private concern on Wall Street, Congresswoman Finch and her doctor—all content. Harry’s father once remarked that he preferred Marsden Hartley’s landscape to the one in front of his eyes out the window, a thought his mother found baffling. Look at the way it catches the light, his father said. As it happened, the old man preferred his own horse to Alfred Munnings’s horse, but that seemed to matter less.
    That afternoon two years past: Someone asked Harry about the war, the true situation, where things were and how they might develop. Harry was silent a moment, wondering where to begin and, once begun, where to go. Wasn’t it all a matter of stamina? the doctor asked. Yes, Harry said, that was true enough and should give us pause. He commenced with what diplomats called an appreciation of the situation, meaning the long view, the macro-estimate of the state of security upcountry and down, which provinces were secure and which were not; well, most of them were not. The degrees of difference were important. Harry talked about the war until the expressions around the table grew slack and then impatient. Old Jimmy Candless at the end of the table poured a glass of wine and stared into it as if it were a fortuneteller’s crystal ball. He had been an airborne brigadier general in the war in Europe, a war of easily described measurements. The boats landed at Omaha and Utah and Sword, and the troops drove east to Berlin. That was essentially it, although his old army comrades—now very senior generals—said that was not essentially it in this war. It was hard to grasp. It was a damned enigma.
It
—well,
it
was a kind of riddle.
    Harry explained that the war could be grasped only in its many