I hesitate to trample here upon the most private of memories, but as it is part of my narrative, and part of my attempt to understand Etna, I set it down in writing. Etna kissed my eyes and cheeks. She found her way again to my mouth. She touched me gently on my neck. She tucked her fingers behind the knot of my tie and unfastened it with a surprisingly deft movement. With both hands slipped beneath the lapel of my jacket, she slid it over my shoulders and along my arms. I began to help her, scarcely able to believe my luck.
Etna touched me in a way she had not ever done before (me, Nicholas Van Tassel), and I experienced in that half hour such bliss (I do not think that William would mind having his name used in such a manner; he always struck me as a man who had known happiness in sexual matters) that it now seems like a dream. I kicked the door shut and let my wife undress me. For the first time in our marriage, Etna made love to me.
I needed no skill to please her. Indeed, it was effortless, sublime. And I recall thinking, as we lay in a state of considerable disarray afterward, that this was how it was meant to be: husband and wife, intertwined and sated, no barrier between them.
If only such a state could have continued indefinitely.
I heard voices just outside the door and nudged Etna, who had drifted off to sleep. She flinched and sat up and, to my dismay, immediately began to rearrange her clothes and hair. I wanted to tell her to stop, but I knew that she would be shamed were she to be caught in such disarray by one of the other mourners. As for me, a great lassitude had overtaken my body, so that I was barely able to fasten the buttons of my shirtfront, buttons that had, but a half hour earlier, been so deliciously undone by my wife.
“Forgive me, Nicholas,” Etna said with her back to me. She was pinning up the strands of hair that had fallen to her shoulders. I adjusted my position on the bed so that I could see her face.
“There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “Far from it. Etna, I am celebrating.”
“I am not myself.”
“You are delightfully yourself.”
“Nicholas.”
“It is how a man and his wife should be,” I said, protesting. “You as much as said so yourself.”
Etna pressed her fingers to her temples and then drew them back through her hair. She folded her arms over her head as if to hide herself.
“Etna,” I said.
She let her arms fall. She assessed herself in the mirror and saw that she had mussed the patient pinning of her hair and would have to begin again.
“My dear,” I said. “I hope you are not feeling ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Then what is it?” I asked, hating the distance she was already putting between us. I could feel my wife retreating. Or perhaps the retreat was already complete, for she turned to me and gave me the half smile I had seen so often — the one directed to me in kindness or to the children always, or even to Mary when praising her. A smile that was half of nothing. Nothing! I would rather have seen despair in that moment or even deep chagrin than this indecently rapid return to the wife I had known for more than a decade. I felt shut out, and I hope I do not blaspheme here, but it was akin to that experience described by religious mystics of being shut away from the light of heaven. I did not want my former wife back; I desired the one who had just revealed herself to me in all her sensual glory.
Etna turned, touched me on my ankle (I had not even removed my shoes), and then she was gone.
That abruptly. That fast.
I lay as a man will when he is spent, desiring only sleep (desiring it all the more when it is not possible). Gradually, I found the wherewithal to finish buttoning my shirtfront and fastening my trousers. If circumstances had brought forth such passion in Etna, I reasoned, perhaps they would again, the path having been forged, the way easier. I might have to draw her out, or I might have to be alert to moments of vulnerability, but what had happened once could happen again, could it not?
In such a manner, I reached a kind of equilibrium, one that was entirely necessary in order to return to the other mourners downstairs.
I do not recall much of the luncheon that followed the funeral, with the exception of a strange encounter with Josip Keep, whom I had been trying to avoid. Toward the end of the affair, however, when I was watching Etna say farewell to Arthur Hallock across the room, Keep surprised me at my elbow. Perhaps my brother-in-law was still feeling outmaneuvered by that long-ago Sunday morning at his house in Exeter. Whatever his motive, he chose that moment to ask a question that startled me.
“Did she sell the painting?” Keep asked in a baritone that had grown only deeper through the years.
“What painting?” I asked, turning to him. Keep’s silky black hairline had receded to a vanishing point. His massive frame had softened some, and his handsome face — that face so used to entitlement — had blurred a bit with age.
“Oh, I am mistaken, then,” Keep said. “I was under the impression that Etna had sold a painting she inherited.”
“A painting of what?” I asked.
Keep sipped from a glass of sherry. “My dear man, if you don’t know, how should I?”
“Etna has sold no such painting,” I said. “If she had, I surely would have known about it.”
“Of course,” Keep said.
“I can’t imagine what made you think she had inherited a painting,” I said. “We own many paintings, but none that she inherited.”
“Quite so,” Keep said, taking another sip from his glass of sherry (an amontillado I myself had purchased for the occasion).
“Do you know the artist?” I asked.
“There can hardly have been an artist if there was no painting,” Keep said with evident impatience.
“There is none.”
“I believe you said as much.”
I sniffed. “Really, Keep, whatever gave you that strange idea?”
“Perhaps a Claude Legny?”
“A Legny, indeed,” I said with mild amusement.
I might have pursued my denial further in this somewhat deranged manner had not the word Legny suddenly triggered a memory: a memory of a conversation with William Bliss I had had late in the summer, when he had first become ill and was resorting to morphine for the pain. (He was later to abandon the drug, as it addled his mind, he said.) He had just taken the tonic, and perhaps he had misjudged the dose, for he was rambling on a bit. He was asking questions and making pronouncements, none of which made any sense at all. Occasionally I would say yes, yes or there, there, but in truth I was paying very little attention to his disjointed statements. But I suddenly remembered, there in William Bliss’s dining room, on the day of his funeral, as Josip Keep stood at my elbow, that Bliss had said the word Legny in the same breath as the word Etna. It was a conjunction of names such as normally nestles innocently in the mind and might remain there until it decomposes in the grave, unless summoned by a similar confluence of words at a later date.
Legny. Etna.
“There was never a painting,” I said.
“No, of course not,” Keep said. “I can’t think of where I should have gotten the idea.”
“I must go to my wife,” I said.
“By all means,” Keep said.
The man beside me in the dining car is poking at his baked ham with his fork, even as he is debating the matter of the new German chancellor with the gentleman seated across from him. I gather they are strangers. Farther along in the dining car, an elderly fellow is reading his newspaper, an awkward task at the best of times, nearly impossible on a moving train with one’s lunch spread before one. promoter who ate own salve dead at 96, the headline says. (I believe the article refers to the inventor of Vaseline.) And even farther along, I see a man whose face is familiar to me. I cannot place it exactly; it is a face I associate with sport. To judge from his imperfect table manners, I may be right in this. (He emptied the contents of his nose into his white dinner napkin, a boorish gesture I cannot abide in a man.) With him is a man of the cloth, r
eading a volume of Thoreau. I am lingering at my table as I write this, hoping once again to encounter a Mrs. Hazzard, a widow from Holyoke, Massachusetts, who appears to have inherited a half dozen sizable mills from her husband, one of which is in South Carolina, the point of her journey. We were seated together at breakfast this morning. Two very large families — each with at least seven children — took up most of the other seats and made an immoderate amount of noise, so that the widow and I had to huddle over our omelettes (with guava jelly) to hear each other, a circumstance that produced, in me at least, the beginnings of something like affection, enough so that I am desirous of seeing her again. I have not been entirely bereft of female companionship these many years, but I have seldom liked the women I have been with, and so it pleases me to converse with such a spirited and clever female. She is determined, she told me, not to be a mere figurehead for her husband’s businesses but rather to learn everything she must know in order to take them over. Indeed, she seemed reasonably knowledgeable about looms and balance sheets and commercial loans, none of which I know a thing about myself. I did not hold it against her that she had never heard of Thrupp. She has a lovely laugh and, though I guessed her to be in her late forties, an estimable figure as well. But even as one who can see the future in an instant, and is capable of imagining a lifetime in a face, I did not entertain thoughts of marrying.
I will never marry again. It is a penance to which I shall ever be faithful.
Mrs. Hazzard and I had dinner together this evening, and I was glad of her company. Over our braised beef tips, we chatted amiably of her husband, and I learned, among other things, that he was not only a devotee of moving pictures but also a collector of automobiles. There was some suggestion that he was a philanderer as well, though the widow Hazzard did not seem particularly bitter about this fact. After a moment’s pause, during which it might have been polite to offer some commentary about my own life, Mrs. Hazzard (Betty, she insists I call her) did ask a question about how long I had been a widower. I answered politely but then steered the conversation to the safer topic of my son, for I could not bear to discuss Etna Bliss Van Tassel with a stranger, even one as delightful as Betty Hazzard. And, as will sometimes happen, Mrs. Hazzard spoke at some length (though not tediously) about her own children, for whom she clearly has great fondness. Thus the tricky precipice of truth was avoided.
Mrs. Hazzard chided me gently about my pomposity (which I fear has grown only more pronounced as the years have passed), once stopping me when I used the word heretofore. “Heretofore, Mr. Van Tassel?” she asked. And while heretofore may not be a particularly defensible word, I did argue that as a professor of English Literature, one had to decry the more simple (and, to my ear, bereft) speech of today’s discourse, since it constricted one’s vocabulary and did not allow one to parse the moment — dissect the moment, as it were — with clause upon clause upon clause (boxes within boxes within boxes, I so often think). She mulled this over a bit and then said she enjoyed speaking with me nevertheless, and that she found me charmingly amusing. Since it has been some time since any woman has called me either charming or amusing, I daresay I blushed (the blood of my Dutch ancestors no less likely to betray me in advanced age than it was in my youth), which seemed to please her even more, for she tilted her head and smiled, a smile I wish I could retain and take out when I am dispirited. We lingered over coffee, and I found I was anxious about her imminent departure, for I knew that she would be detraining at Charleston. She invited me to call upon her should I have occasion to visit that city on my return. I know that one extends such invitations as a matter of courtesy, not really expecting the invited ever to appear, but for some time after we had left the dining car and returned to our separate compartments, I allowed myself to envision a visit to that southern town, a pleasant stay with Mrs. Hazzard, and possibly even a friendship of some duration.
The days immediately following the Bliss funeral were distressing ones for Etna, who kept to her room, ignoring not only her social work but her family as well. Nicky and Clara and I tried to draw her out, but it quickly became apparent that Etna had retreated to a private place from which she could not be summoned. This went on for some weeks, into early November, and I was on the point of calling for the doctor, since Etna’s grief was beginning to feel out of proportion to the event. Perhaps she understood that I was becoming frightened, for I found her one morning at the breakfast table looking almost normal, the pink having left her eyes. She attempted a smile, and I had the sense that this effort was distinctly Herculean (Minervian?) on her part.
“Etna,” I said. “I am so happy to see you up and about.”
“I am up, but not entirely about,” she said.
“Still, though,” I said.
“It has not been good for the children.”
“No,” I said.
“I have had a difficult …” She took a quick breath, but not before I saw a slight quivering of her lower lip. “… time,” she said.
It was clear to me that I should have to tread lightly and try to keep the conversation on an even keel, away from subjects of death or sadness.
“You look very pretty this morning,” I said, which was true. She had on a high-necked indigo silk blouse and a long string of jet beads that matched both the decorative buttons of the blouse and her delicate pendant earrings.
“Thank you,” she said.
“May I get you a cup of coffee?”
“No, I’ve had mine already. I’ve been down here for some time.”
“You are making your list,” I said, unfolding my napkin in my lap. I studied my breakfast. There appeared to be meat of some sort. Kidneys, possibly. Or liver. It looked dark and overcooked.
“Yes,” she said. “I plan to do the marketing today in town. Is there something you need?”
“I need a new shaving brush,” I said to Etna. “And shoe polish. And ink for my desk. But I can buy these things when I am myself in town.”
“Let me,” she said. “It’s better if I am busy.”
“Well, in that case, I should love some of that blackberry jam we had last month. I should love it right now, as a matter of fact. What is this meat?”
Etna glanced in the direction of my plate. She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll have a word with Mary,” she said just under her breath, for it was clear that in the absence of her mistress’s attention, our cook had relaxed her standards considerably.
Etna made a notation on the tablet of paper that lay beside a stack of correspondence — most of it, I guessed, sympathy letters. “I’m not sure that the jam will be available this time of year,” she said.
And I, who was pleased to hear my wife speak of trivial matters, could only smile. I put my hand over hers. “I am so happy to have you back,” I said.
Time passed in the way that it will. Throughout those weeks of mid-November, I rose, I breakfasted, I danced lightly around any topic that might cause Etna distress. I went to my classes, I taught my students, I read endless copybooks of dull treatises. But I was in a state of anxiety nearly all the time: cautious around Etna, worried about the impending vote, and sleepless with thoughts of Phillip Asher, whose lectures were as brilliant as advertised. I began to disparage Asher to my colleagues. “The man does not know his Jonson,” I said, and sometimes I saw an expression of wariness or pity on my colleagues’ faces. Was I so transparent? They had picked up the scent of rivalry, and perhaps there was some sport in it, for they also seemed amused.
One afternoon, I had occasion to be in Chandler Hall, as I had a book I needed to return to Moxon. I made my way along the corridor, passing by the closed door of Phillip Asher’s office. I knew the man was in the Recitation Hall at that hour, delivering a lecture on the nature of good and evil in Paradise Lost (hardly a challenging topic). I meandered past the closed door, then pretended to have forgotten something. I turned and walked past it again, this time unable to resist the urge to slip inside. I had no clear idea what I was looking for; it wa
s simply that I felt I needed to be nearer to the man’s things — as if in so doing, I might learn more about my rival. I entered the room and shut the door.
Asher kept an untidy desk and an open file cabinet (why, indeed, should any man lock up his brilliance?), and one’s first impression was of disarray — of books, of academic journals, and of a plethora of personal items on the desk, which I took to be souvenirs of his tours: pressed butterflies within a glass case, a small sculpture made out of soapstone, an intricate Indian mosaic, a copper printer’s block with a cow engraving, an odd monocle that allowed one to see to the side rather than straight ahead. Near the typewriter, I discovered a silver frame with a picture of a young woman inside it. She was fair haired and Scandinavian in her looks, actually quite pretty. I immediately began to imagine a fiancée in a distant city — Oslo, possibly. Encouraged by this discovery, I dared to take a closer look at the various papers Asher had scattered about the office. I recall a treatise submitted to the Academy of Arts and Letters about the role of photography in the recording of history. There was also some correspondence with a professor at the University of Virginia about a prebiblical story of the Flood, and a letter to the Royal Geographic Society asking to be allowed to accompany an expedition to the Arctic in search of the lost explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. I found a detailed scientific paper delivered to the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin the previous spring about Dr. Gaston Odin’s discovery of the cancer microbe and how that might promise a vaccine, as well as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in defense of pacificism. I sat back in Asher’s oak roll-away chair and contemplated a series of woodcuts, framed in wide white mats, along one of the walls. How had so young a man published so much? The range of the man’s talents and interests was astonishing!
Perhaps it was time to come to terms with the very real possibility that I would not be elected to the post, I thought as I swiveled in Asher’s chair. Would that be so terrible? Well, yes, it would. Nevertheless, one had to be realistic. One had to prepare.