All He Ever Wanted (32 page)

Etna, loving mother, brushed her daughter’s hair, unaware of the audience beyond the glass. My wife’s face was composed but
white, and I could see the strain of skin over the high cheekbones, the nervousness in the topaz eyes, the worry lines at
the sides of her mouth.

I could stand for hours in the dark and cold, observing Clara at her studies and Etna at her sewing. I watched Etna at the
sink, washing dishes like a common undercook. She seemed not to mind these chores, some of which were truly odious — the tossing
out of slops, the washing and ironing of laundry that froze on the clothes-line at the back of the house, the cleaning of
the outhouse. Clara, called upon to help, protested like a spoiled girl, and I sometimes longed to step in and upbraid her.
At other times, it was all I could do to keep from storming through the door and embracing my child, who was growing tall
without me.

Standing in the dark, I considered the matter of Etna’s maternal ancestors, of the unknown parentage. The man who had impregnated
the servant girl and then abandoned her could have been anything, I reasoned. Jewish, possibly. More likely a common Yankee
with striking features. But then again, he might have been Turkish or Indian or Russian. Each night I would study the cheekbones
and eyes of my wife and wonder: Was she Greek? Italian? A Gypsy?

I pondered also the nature of fate and circumstance. Had it not been for the fire, I doubt I should ever have met Etna Bliss.
Did I now wish that those few drops of oil in the hotel kitchen had not fallen onto the cooking fire? Might I have eaten my
poached sole in solitude and never noticed the young woman in the topaz silk sitting behind me and thus escaped both the joy
and anguish of the next fifteen years, only to have met, two months later, say, the daughter of a rare-book dealer from Thrupp
whom I then married? Might I never have encountered Etna Bliss at all, but rather have seen a woman emerging from a trolley
three days later to whom I gave pursuit and was ultimately betrothed? Or have been introduced at a faculty party at the college
to the wife of a colleague (no, never; the sentence does not bear completion, for I should never have stooped so low)…or chanced
upon, in twenty years’ time, after having remained for decades a bachelor, a widow to whom my academic credentials, not to
mention my modest fortune, might have been attractive? Or, then again, might I actually have met a
worse
fate than was dealt to me? Might I have wed the daughter of a physician who bore me a child who then died as a result of
my wife’s carelessness? There are stories more terrible than mine. I do understand this. But the influence of circumstance
upon a man’s destiny is considerable, is it not?

My nightly visits to that cottage became more and more frequent and then routine. After I had stood at the window for an hour
or so, I would walk into the woods and eat a bit of cheese and bread and drink the whiskey that I had brought. Truth to tell,
I was drinking rather a lot in those months, and sometimes I had difficulty returning the Ford to its garage in the early
hours of the morning. I slept late and was often tardy for or absent altogether from my classes, to which I scarcely paid
any attention. My colleagues, concerned and then alarmed and then annoyed, avoided me when an encounter threatened, which
was fine with me, who wanted only silence and anonymity, both difficult to come by in that college of mediocre and unruly
boys. I would tender my resignation in the summer, I told myself with sweet relief.

Only once in all the times I went to the cottage to spy on my wife did I come near to getting caught. I had gone into the
woods to relieve myself, and I must have made an inadvertent sound, because when I was finished and had turned back to the
house, I saw that Etna was standing at the window staring straight at me. She tilted her head from side to side, so I didn’t
think she had actually spotted me. I watched as she left the window and then I heard the door open. She came out, shivering
and hugging a shawl around her arms, making delicate footprints in the snow-covered lawn of late March.

“Who’s there?” she called out, squinting in the night.

I stood behind a tree and watched her face, longing to reveal myself and wondering how it had come to pass that I, Nicholas
Van Tassel, was hiding behind a tree in the woods, the steam from my urine still rising behind me, concealing myself from
the only woman I had ever loved.

Routine became obsession. (What, precisely, is an obsession? My much-used dictionary tells me it is a state of compulsive
preoccupation with a fixed idea or unwanted feeling or emotion. The word, of course, stems from the Latin
obsidere
[past participle
obsessus
], which means “to sit down before”;
ob,
against, combined with
sedere,
to sit. Well, I wasn’t sitting, but I was certainly standing.) Sometimes, exhausted beyond sense, I would doze off and wake
only to find that I had been asleep as I leaned against the white clapboards. This went on for some time and might have continued
indefinitely had I not seen, one night in early May when I approached the cottage, a Ford not my own parked in the driveway
beside the Landaulet.

For the first time in weeks, I became painfully alert and was aware of the workings of my heart, a hard thumping that made
me put my hand to my chest. I moved silently to my favorite hiding place (a window behind the Chinese grass chair that was
often shrouded in darkness) and peered in. I pressed hard on my chest with my fist.

Phillip Asher sat sideways to the small table, one arm thrown back over the ladder-back chair, the other reaching for a teacup.
His legs were casually crossed, and he seemed relaxed, as if he had been in this house before, as if he had often been welcomed
here. Indeed, Clara remained unconcerned in a corner with her music stand and her flute; between the muted bits of conversation
(I seldom ever heard a specific word, so it was mostly a silent movie I watched those many nights), I could hear the notes
of the practice lesson. Etna was sewing on the davenport, and it was as if Phillip Asher were a brother or a cousin who had
interrupted a domestic scene simply to say hello. I looked over to the sink and saw the remnants of a meal that had not yet
been cleaned up. I strained to count the plates and the silverware, for I wished to know if Asher had had his supper with
my daughter and my wife.

Had Etna lied to me? Had she and Phillip Asher all along been lovers? (I could hardly be expected to monitor the cottage by
day.) Had he been there all afternoon, while Clara was in school, and simply lingered longer than was usual, enjoying the
easy company of an arresting woman and her child? But then I had a truly terrible thought: Had I caused Etna and Asher, with
my foolish decrees, to come together after my wife and I had separated? Yes, I thought, I had. Asher, under the guise of concern
for my well-being and in his position as Dean of the Faculty, would have driven to the cottage to discuss the matter, would
he not?

I exercised that night the utmost self-control, for I wanted nothing more than to enter that room and haul the man out and
send him sprawling across the driveway. How dare he sit in such close proximity to my daughter! How dare he insinuate himself
into my family!

Asher took another sip of tea, which had to have grown cold in the time it had sat on the table; I had been watching this
cozy domestic scene for nearly a half hour. Clara put down her flute and asked her mother a question. I could see from the
considerate but firm shake of the head that Etna was denying Clara’s request to quit her practicing early. Clara, with pained
expression, went on, and I could again hear the labored notes of a flute badly played. I watched my daughter stretch her legs
in an indecorous manner, a gesture that immediately caught her mother’s watchful eye. Asher leaned forward in his chair, as
if making a point in his ongoing conversation with my wife. (
My
wife). He leaned his elbows on his knees and seemed insidiously relaxed. I was afraid that my furious and steamy breaths
of air in the frigid night might be noticeable through the window.

To calm myself, I looked away. I shot my gaze up through the tall pines to the stars, wondering why the gods were treating
me so badly. I had never before felt such violation. The man had taken my position, and now he was taking my wife?

I turned back to the window, and as I did, Asher and Etna rose simultaneously.

I have played and replayed this scene a thousand times in my head, and I think the paired rising was purely coincidental in
its initial moments. Perhaps Etna had been about to go to Clara; possibly Asher was merely stretching. As if in slow motion
and with faint smiles playing upon their lips, they were carried forward by the momentum that had made them stand, first two
and then three steps, causing them to meet directly beneath the white chandelier, that extravagant monstrosity. Their hands
rose — her right, his left — and quickly, lightly, clasped, as if by the same impulse that makes people who speak the same
phrase simultaneously smile at each other in amusement.

That I might have borne. The clasped hands I might have endured and forgotten. After all, the entire incident lasted only
a second, perhaps two. But in those moments, I glimpsed something else, something that has stayed with me all these years,
that is more vivid to me sometimes than the remembered visages of my children. It was the expression on Etna’s face, an expression
that was — how can I describe this?
Radiant
is the word I must use. Giddy with delight. An ecstatic expression of happiness that seemingly required the participation
of the entire body, as if the body were moving forward at great speed. It was a look I had seen on Etna’s face only once before,
on the sleigh on that late-winter afternoon so many years ago when the horses, nearly out of control, had sped toward the
barn. She had reached for my hand, and I had gone rigid with joy.

Asher and Etna swayed a bit. The moment dissolved in laughter. From the corner, Clara watched, her eyes wary and humorless.
My own eyes were dry with anger. I longed to snatch my daughter from that tableau.

The next morning, I sent a note to Etna. I would call that night for Clara, and we would have a meal. She would stay the night
with Nicodemus and me, and I would deliver her to school the next morning. Etna was to pack Clara a suitcase with a clean
uniform and her nightclothes. I would call for my daughter at five o’clock. I would come up the driveway in the Ford, but
I would not enter the cottage. If she would be so kind as to send Clara out to me, I should be very grateful. Yours sincerely,
et cetera, et cetera.

Clara was, as she settled herself in the Ford, both timid and angry in equal measure — timid in the face of this rupture of
routine, angry because she wanted to blame someone for the dissolution of the family. I did not try to defend myself. She
was still a child, too young to know of bargains or of unrequited passion.

I parked on Wheelock Street, and we walked, as in the old days, Clara’s arm in mine, toward the college quadrangle. We spoke
of her classes and of her music lessons and occasionally, now that she was growing older, of topics outside the immediate
circumference of her life, such as a desire to see Yosemite, for example, of which she had heard a great deal from her new
friend Rosemary. We made our way to the hotel, where I had told her we would have a meal, ending with a cup of hot chocolate
for each. Gradually she thawed and remembered her love for her father, and at times we were simply a man and his daughter
having a meal in the Hotel Thrupp. Who was to say that we might not return to our home on Holyoke Street only to find Etna
bathing Nicky, and that life would go on as before?

Lovely thought, but below that happy agenda, I had another.

Three times in conversation, I said Phillip Asher’s name. (
Dean Asher,
I actually said, in case that was how he had been introduced to Clara.) After the third mention, when I could no longer bear
her silence or her reticence on this subject, I asked, as casually as I was capable of, “Have you ever met the man?” And Clara,
after an initial hesitation, said yes, she had. I, aware now of a sudden heat that had risen to my face, let some seconds
pass, and then I asked, as if I had nearly forgotten the topic, “And where did you meet him?”

Clara answered that Professor Asher was a friend of her mother’s and sometimes came to the cottage. The dialogue proved too
much for her tender sensibilities, however — this was not a subject she thought she ought to be discussing (she, too, had
seen the clasped hands under the chandelier) — and she began to cry.

“Clara dear,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Why are you and Mother doing this to me?” she asked, weeping like a child now, which is to say messily.

“We are not doing this to
you,
” I said. “It is simply that for the moment we have chosen to live apart.”

“That’s not true!” she said with the wisdom of the keen observer. “It is Mother who is doing this. You want us back; I know
you do.”

“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

“Then why did you send for Nicky and not for me?” she cried.

This, I knew, was at the heart of Clara’s resentment. “Nicky is the younger,” I said, groping for an answer.

“You love him more than me!” she accused.

“No, Clara, I do not,” I said truthfully. “I love you both the same.”

I reached across the table and took her hand in mine, unable, in that public place, easily to embrace her. The touch of my
hand consoled her somewhat, so that I was reluctant to let her go. At that moment, a man who was entering the dining room
— a man I had never seen before, perhaps a man simply needing a meal — passed by our table and looked at Clara.

It was a subtle glance, in the main inoffensive in its brevity. But as I turned back to Clara, I saw what he had seen. The
full lips. The hint of bosom beneath the bodice of her uniform. The slender waist and delicate ankles. It was the first time
I saw my daughter as men would for years see her.