Etna was not to return to the cottage, I said, taking command of a scene that begged for a leading man. Abigail would go by taxi to fetch anything Etna needed. I would see to it that the building was put up for sale. Etna, too stunned to reply or even to think, did not demur. I guessed that she had no desire now to see that cottage, nor even to show her face in Thrupp. I told myself that with time this shame would go away, that in time we would once again be a normal family.
As for Phillip Asher, he was confronted with the accusation later that afternoon in his office by both Chief Gates and President Goodspeed, an unlikely and awkward pairing. I am told that Asher laughed when he first heard of the informal indictment, thinking it was pure fabrication on the part of a defeated and bitter rival, easily refuted. But when he was informed that it was not me but rather Clara who had made the charge, the color drained from his face, convincing Goodspeed, at least, of Asher’s guilt.
Asher wrote to Etna at once, insisting that the imputation wasn’t true, that perhaps Clara had misunderstood an entirely innocent gesture, though he could think of no time that he had been in such proximity to her. He would never, he would never. Could he come to see Etna? Could he please speak with her? I intercepted the letter as, of course, any loving husband would have done; though, generously, I allowed Etna to read the missive. She set it aside. Who was a mother to believe: her own child or a would-be lover?
(For I have no doubt now that Asher and Etna would shortly have become lovers. There was no other way to read the look of pure delight on Etna’s face beneath the white chandelier. And, in later years, when assaulted with the visions that sometimes plague a guilty man, I would take heart in the fact that I had at least prevented that consummation.)
Asher was told that if he wished, a written accusation would be required of Clara. He could, in fact, take the matter to court. But I had gambled on Asher’s being an honorable man who would not put a child on the witness stand nor cause a woman for whom he had tremendous respect — and perhaps even love — to suffer such a second humiliation at the hands of his family. Within the week, after having repeatedly failed to communicate with Etna by telephone and post and even in person (I had Abigail frostily send him away), Asher resigned his position at the college and left the house on Gill Street. Without a trial, there could be no future for the man from Yale in Thrupp, for he would never be able to refute the charge against him.
By the end of June, much to my astonishment and delight, Asher’s presence had been so miraculously expunged from the college town — his name never mentioned in public discourse — that it was as though he had never existed. Any hint of scandal is always disastrous for a college badly in need of contributions from alumni.
The matter of a divorce was, of course, dropped. (“I wish to have an amicable and quiet conclusion to the legal deliberations,” I wrote.) I had the cottage in Drury put up for sale. I set a high price on it, thinking to get a little something in return for the near ruination of my family. A week after Asher left for destinations unknown, I was summoned to the college, not by Ferald, whose horse had been disqualified, but by Frank Goodspeed, the very president who had delivered the dismal bulletin to a white-faced Asher. Would I accept the post of Dean of Thrupp? he asked. Left unsaid was the obvious truth that I was second choice, an also-ran, a dean appointed by default. Understood as well was the fact that no one had the heart to initiate another search.
Yes, I said with as much dignity as I thought the scene required. Yes, I would be only too happy to help the college out in this matter.
“Thank you,” Goodspeed said with evident relief. “I shall make a quiet announcement.”
No fanfare for Nicholas Van Tassel.
“How is your wife?” Goodspeed inquired, almost as an after-thought.
“She’s as well as can be expected,” I said.
“We have tried to suppress the incident,” Goodspeed added, “but I am sure this has been a trial for you.”
“It has,” I said.
“And the young girl? Your daughter?”
“She is trying to put the matter behind her,” I said.
“The young are so resilient,” Goodspeed said.
But, in fact, Clara was not as resilient as I had hoped. In the days that followed Etna’s return, my daughter was alternately falsely cheerful and sullen, as if, having been on the brink of finding out who she was, she had discovered, to her dismay, that she was not that person at all. We never spoke, she and I, of the drama we had written and enacted; she seemed as eager to forget the incident as was her father. But I noticed that Clara fretted more than usual and resisted any attempts to jolly her. Whereas before she had lobbied constantly to be allowed to visit one or two close friends, now she never left the house except to finish her classes. She ended the year with a bad report, her grades having plummeted in the last month of the term. I knew this to be a casualty of all the Sturm und Drang of May and hoped for a return to better study habits in the fall.
Throughout the early weeks of that unnaturally hot summer, Etna remained at home, a ghostly presence who performed her duties as if from a great distance. Some days she would not come out of her room at all, and trays of food, largely uneaten, would be sent back to the kitchen. When she did come down, she sewed maniacally, as if having been given a deadline by an overseer at a mill. She would sit in the parlor, in her old chair, her fingers flying, her teeth angrily biting off thread, her hands snapping out the silk or linen on her lap. She sewed bureau scarves and pillow slips and children’s dresses and corset covers. She made luncheon sets and then draperies for a nonexistent room. She embroidered monogrammed initials and wreaths with tiny yellow knots. She made a cape coat for Clara and a long-waisted tunic dress, presumably for herself, though she never wore it. I know this inventory by heart, because it has remained in a cedar chest at the foot of Etna’s bed all these years, the master of the house not having the heart or the will to send it on to charity, which is where the odd trousseau should go.
No doubt the reader’s interest will have been piqued by the phrase Etna’s bed. In silence and with no fuss, Etna took up residence in the guest room, quickly removing anything of a personal nature from our bedroom. She slept on a high, white, narrow bed, monastic in its spareness, immediately exchanging its colorful quilt for a white chenille bedspread. Sometimes, on the hot nights of that sultry summer, she would leave her door open a crack to catch a breeze. I would pass by on my way to the bathroom and see her sleeping, her hair tangled upon the pillow, her arms thrown up above her head in an uncharacteristically unfeminine manner. I would stare, mesmerized by this sight, for it was understood that I was as barred from this room as I was from my wife’s bed. This was the closest I would get to seeing Etna Bliss Van Tassel at peace. As in the days when I had watched my wife through a glass pane, I would observe the rising and falling of her chest under the thin sheet, the curve of her faintly lined neck as it arched over the pillow, the fluttering of her eyelids as she dreamt. (Of what? Of whom? Of Phillip Asher? Of Samuel?) A knot of desire would sometimes tug at me, and it was all I could do not to step through that cracked door and lower myself onto the bed beside my sleeping wife. But I did not. Such an action was unthinkable under the present circumstances. Even husbandly lust was a subject that could not be admitted into that household. I prayed, insofar as I was capable of praying (our sins are screens between ourselves and God, are they not?), that with time this disgust would pass and we would once again be husband and wife.
This state of affairs went on for upwards of eight weeks.
By August, a poisonous pall had settled over our house and even over the entire village of Thrupp, which always seemed, without its students, eerily if pleasantly empty in the summer months. Day after day, we woke to dishwater skies that delivered no rain. Our garden at the side of the house was withering from lack of water and of tender cultivation, our gardener unwilling or unable to recreate its whimsical beauty without his mistress’s instructions. Only Nic
ky seemed oblivious to the mood of recrimination and resignation within that household. As a puppy will look for affection even from a listless master, poking its nose against a shin or licking a recalcitrant hand until, almost absentmindedly, its owner scratches the animal under its chin, Nicky prodded us from time to time into something very like love. Only Clara, pretending to read, lashed out when Nicky got too close. She was severely reprimanded for these objectionable outbursts, after which she retreated from the family even further. I worked in my study for hours at a time, occasionally distracted by my new duties. In September, I would formally address the faculty, a speech I wrote and rewrote a dozen times.
And Etna. Where was Etna then? Where had my wife of fifteen years gone? In early August, I suggested a trip to the Highland Hotel, a seaside vacation for the sake of the family. Etna would have none of it. (Have I mentioned that we scarcely spoke?) She was growing alarmingly thin, a result of both a diminished appetite and a kind of unattractive and frenzied domesticity. It was as though she had to keep moving in order to ward off the images that her daughter had planted in her mind — Etna, a woman whose stillness had once defined her being.
Did she dream about her cottage? Did she wonder where Phillip Asher had gone? Did she blame herself for having invited the man into her home? I do not know. I took to drinking more and more, beginning earlier in the day, in an effort to anesthetize myself against the pain of Etna’s frigid silence, a project at which I was becoming increasingly unsuccessful.
One afternoon in late August, after I had finished nearly half a bottle of sweet wine and had a headache I could not assuage with tonics (the air so still and stifling within that unhappy house that I could not get a decent breath), I came upon Etna sitting in a wicker chair on a side porch. She had no sewing with her, which I took to be a sign of health. Before I went to her (uninvited), I watched her for a moment in repose. Her body and face in profile, she seemed to be staring at something beyond the screen. She had on a sleeveless overblouse and a linen skirt, and her shoulders and long arms were white and bare, a sight I seldom saw those days. She scratched the knob of her collarbone as if she’d been bitten by an insect. Her arms were terribly thin, and without her robust figure, she seemed to have aged considerably since the spring. This was a sight that moved me. I walked out onto the porch and sat on the glider and rocked back and forth, hoping to simulate a breeze. Etna glanced over at me without a greeting. I was aching for the cooler days of autumn, which I was certain would bring a swift conclusion to the fever that had infected all of us.
“Perhaps,” I said to Etna, “we might think of taking the children to the mountains. It would be cooler there. I am sure I could find us rooms in a hotel.”
“What mountains?” she asked plainly. In the weeks since she had returned to the house, she had either lost or forfeited the gift of graceful conversation.
“Well, the White Mountains,” I said, unable to think of any other mountains. The moment I had named them, however, I regretted the reference to the locus of our wedding trip.
“It is not something I should look forward to,” she said.
“Is there anything you would look forward to?” I asked.
“You go,” she said, “and take the children.”
“I should not like to leave you all alone,” I said, more than slightly irritated with her recalcitrance on every subject. For the sake of the children, shouldn’t we get on with life?
Etna stared through the screen at the brown filigree of the seeding Queen Anne’s lace that had infiltrated the untended garden. And as will sometimes happen when under the influence of both alcohol and headache at too early an hour in the day, I was seized with a fit of pique.
“Asher is in the Argonne,” I said, naming the most deadly geography on the planet.
Etna turned her head slowly in my direction. Finally something had claimed my wife’s attention.
“Phillip in France?” she asked.
Phillip.
“I am reliably informed that Professor Asher has signed on with the British Red Cross,” I announced.
“It’s not possible,” she said.
“They’ll take men of practically any age,” I said. “Of course, this is a very brave gesture on his part. I rather think he means to make amends, in some odd way, for his crime. The death rate for medics is near seventy percent. Did you know Asher’s a pacificist?”
Etna’s eyes were pink-rimmed. Not from crying, I guessed (she seemed too dry for tears), but from malnutrition. She was growing skeletal inside her homemade dresses.
“Phillip in France,” Etna repeated.
“The Argonne.”
“You mean he is gone altogether?”
I flinched and turned to see the speaker. Clara stood in the doorway behind me.
“You mean he is gone altogether?” my daughter asked again.
She crossed the threshold, a silver hairbrush in her hand. Her hair needed a wash, and her white stockings were dirty. She looked from me to her mother and back to me again. “Professor Asher is gone?” Clara asked again.
I stood, sensing a dangerous turn to the conversation. “Clara, your mother and I are talking privately,” I said. “You should learn not to speak unless asked to do so.”
“Very far away?” Clara asked, as if she had not heard my admonition.
“Yes, very far away,” I said. “We should go and find your brother,” I added, moving toward her.
“Then can I tell now?” Clara asked.
I took in a breath and held it, waiting for the moment to pass without incident. Clara’s light blue eyes looked straight into mine. Her question was not an innocent one, I realized then. Was this a malicious act, born of long hours of idleness? A way to draw attention to herself once again? Did she mean to assuage a guilty conscience? Or, worse, was this treachery aimed at me?
“Tell what?” Etna asked.
“Be quiet,” I said under my breath to Clara, putting all the warning I could muster into my barely audible command.
“Tell what?” Etna asked, rising from the green wicker chair. “Nicholas, what is this all about?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, waving dismissively. “Nothing. Clara, come with me.”
I reached for my daughter’s arm and would have dragged her bodily from the porch, but she twisted away from me and went to her mother.
At first Etna’s eyes were curious, seeing neither her husband nor her daughter, but rather a scene she had witnessed four months earlier in the sitting room, when Clara had touched her fingers to her breast.
Etna gave a quick shake of her head in disbelief.
Clara embraced her mother, whose long white arms were yet unwilling to curl around her daughter’s back. Indeed, my wife seemed struck with paralysis.
“I didn’t mean it,” Clara said, her nervous voice thinning as it rose to a wail. “Mother, I thought it would bring you back.”
I watched as Etna replayed that earlier scene in her mind, her eyes alighting on mine. I saw in them the vacant expression of the dazed, and then the sharp focus of the knowing.
“How could you?” she said to me over Clara’s head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You know,” Etna said. “I can see that you know.”
“I haven’t the faintest,” I said.
“Clara, tell me the truth,” Etna said, holding her daughter at arm’s length. “The absolute truth.”
I turned away before the truth could be confessed. I left the porch and walked through the house to my study.
What did it matter now? I thought as I shut the door behind me. The mother would never leave the family. She would sacrifice herself to the happiness of her children.
I had won, had I not? I had Etna. I had the children. I was Dean of the Faculty of Thrupp College.
Then why was I so frightened?
Etna went to the guest room and slammed the door so hard the walls shook. From time to time, as afternoon wo
re into evening, we could all hear erratic gusts of disbelief — sharp and breathless, as if she were repeatedly hearing the truth anew. Clara cowered in her room, and Nicky would not leave Abigail’s side. Once I saw him walking with his ears covered in case he should inadvertently hear the bursts of weather behind the guest room door. As for me, I stayed in my study, where I had sherry for nourishment and brandy for sustenance. I sat and paced and drank, occasionally as fearful as Nicky of the intermittent cries from overhead.
It was a storm that would blow through, I told myself. No woman, no human being, could physically sustain the intensity of such outbursts. Abigail came to the door, but I turned her away with a peremptory dismissal. I don’t know whether her solicitude was for me, by now quite drunk, or for her mistress, whose anguish I could only imagine. Would Etna be thinking about how her family had wronged Phillip Asher (an odd redressing of familial crime, it would appear), of how she had refused even to listen to the man? Of how he had gone away in shame and was now in harm’s way in Europe? Might the machinations of her husband and her daughter cause the death of this gentle academic who, at the very least, was her friend? A man she might one day have loved? And on whom did Etna place the burden of guilt? On me, for having devised the plan? On her untrustworthy daughter, who might never recover from having so seriously wronged another at such a tender age (cost a man his job, if nothing else)? Or upon herself, for having goaded me into unnatural behavior with her unnatural bid for freedom?
Or would Etna’s guilt go even further back than that, to the day when she stood in an unpainted room in Exeter, New Hampshire, and allowed pity to sway her judgment? Or would my wife, as I had done from time to time, think upon the mysterious conjunction between circumstance and fate? What if she had not accepted the offer of assistance on the night of the fire? What if she and her aunt had stayed home that night and not chosen to dine in the hotel? One could unravel a life in this manner back to the beginning of conscious thought.
Sullen afternoon gave way to stifling evening. The gusts of grief subsided, and Nicky uncovered his ears. Clara came out of her room to find a meal. I discovered my children eating pie at the white enameled table in the kitchen. Clara rose without a word, her mouth stuffed with peaches and crust, and left the room before I had a chance to speak, which, in any event, I had no intention of doing. Abigail, whom I summoned, picked Nicky up and carried the sleepy boy to bed. I lingered in the kitchen, looking for brandy, and when I could find none, I walked out onto the back lawn.