“I did not remember anything about Phillip Asher until I recovered my memory, nearly ten months later.”
“But you do now remember what happened to you during that memory loss.”
“Yes, I do. I woke in a hospital tent in Marne. I will never know, I suspect, what happened between the time I ran into the field in Camiers and woke up on the canvas cot in Marne. I was very confused. I remember trying to guess at a name and coming up with Stella Bain. I called myself Stella and was known as Stella Bain all the time I was in Marne. I believe now that the name came to me because it is more or less an anagram of Etna Bliss.”
“At some point, you left France with the intention of going to London.”
“Yes. I had heard a soldier mention the word Admiralty when I was working in Marne. Immediately I began to obsess about the word. I thought if I could find out what Admiralty meant, the mystery of my memory loss would be explained.”
“And was it solved in that place?”
“Yes, but not until many months later.”
“Mrs. Van Tassel, during the time of your memory loss, did you know that you had children?”
“No, I did not.”
“You were abroad from September of 1915 until early March of 1916, a time of six months, during which you could not leave France to get back to see your children.”
“That is correct.”
“And from early March of 1916 to January of 1917, you did not know you had children.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“And what happened when you finally realized who you were and that you were a mother to Clara and Nicky?”
“I was stunned. Shamed. Worried. Before the week was out, I was able, through the generosity of Captain Samuel Asher, to obtain passage on a merchant ship leaving London for Cuba. I took another ship to Jacksonville, Florida, and a train to Gainesville, where I was shortly reunited with my daughter, Clara.”
Mr. Hastings turns away from Etna and addresses the judge. “Your Honor, may I request a recess? I do not want to exhaust my client, and I see that we have gone beyond the lunch hour.”
The judge contemplates Etna. “Yes,” he says. “We shall adjourn until ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Mr. Bates, I think this would be an opportune time for you to convey to your client the earnestness of the court’s request that he appear in this hearing room tomorrow.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Van Tassel,” the judge says. “You may step down now.”
“Court dismissed,” the bailiff calls out.
The next morning, when Etna sees Van Tassel moving toward her from the end of the corridor, she stands as still as an animal wishing to remain invisible. He is deep in conversation with Mr. Bates, who seems to be trying to persuade his client about something—a conversation Etna cannot hear. Van Tassel has aged, but so has she. More so than he, she suspects, because of her time in France. Her husband (she can barely think the word) has grown older in a way one might have expected: his body is rounder, his hair has begun to thin. He has a triple chin, which she does not remember from before. He seems, as he moves closer to her, to be a self-satisfied member of the gentry rather than a scholar: a man who eats well and entertains a great deal, a man who owns horses and land.
When he catches sight of Etna, Van Tassel stops while his hapless lawyer keeps on walking. Van Tassel’s blue eyes widen and his face is suffused with the blush that is more than a blush; he looks apoplectic. She waits for the color to slowly leach from his face. As he grows colder and his eyes narrow, he walks toward her.
“Etna,” he says with feeling, and for an awful moment, Etna thinks he will embrace her. “How dare you do this to me?”
Etna cannot pretend that he does not terrify her. The last time she saw this man was on a bed after he had raped her. But now she is at least capable of standing her ground. “I am not doing this to you, as you put it,” she says in a quiet voice. “I simply want to be a mother to my children.”
“You forfeited that right years ago.”
Etna can see a yellow stain on her husband’s shirt. He has perspired all the way through to his suit coat.
“The court will decide that,” she says.
“You are no mother,” Van Tassel declares, lifting his chin. “You are a whore and a harlot.”
“I believe the latter two are one and the same. In any case, I am neither.”
“I have evidence that you went straight to Samuel Asher’s home in London when you arrived there. That you lived with him in sin.”
Mr. Bates has a hand on Van Tassel’s elbow. “Dean Van Tassel, you are above this. You are wanted in court.”
“Who gave you that evidence?” Etna asks her husband.
“A detective I hired.”
Etna smiles. “You were misinformed.”
Van Tassel points a finger at Etna even as Mr. Bates is trying to drag his client away from the encounter. “You will be sorry for this.”
Etna holds her hands tightly in front of her. “I sincerely hope not,” she says.
Counsel for the Respondent calls Dr. George Church to the stand.
“Good morning, Doctor.”
“Good morning.”
“Can you tell us where you work and what your specialty is?”
“I work at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, and my specialty is psychiatric illness.”
“Have you ever had occasion to witness memory loss in a patient?”
“The condition is extremely rare. I have seen it only in cases of serious blows to the head. The memory loss is almost always short-lived, perhaps two or three days in duration. I have seen a similar condition in patients who appear to have sustained memory loss, yet when subjected to scrutiny confess that they only wish they had.”
“Is it your opinion that a woman who may or may not have sustained an injurious blow to the head could have lost her memory for ten months?”
“I do not believe that is possible. I would be more inclined to diagnose that woman as suffering from hysteria that appeared to present as memory loss.”
“Would the patient know that the memory loss was false?”
“From time to time, yes, but such would be her hysteria that she would be able to convince herself that her memory loss was real.”
“Thank you, Dr. Church.”
Counsel for the Relator wishes to cross-examine Dr. Church.
“Good morning, Dr. Church. I have just two questions.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever met, let alone examined, Mrs. Van Tassel?”
“No, I have not.”
“Have you ever treated patients coming directly from the front in Europe?”
“I have not had an opportunity to do so. No.”
“Thank you, Dr. Church. That is all.”
Counsel for the Respondent recalls Mrs. Van Tassel to the stand.
Mr. Bates stands eagerly, carrying a sheaf of notes toward Etna. How many questions can be in those papers? she wonders.
“Mrs. Van Tassel, how are you this fine morning?”
“I am well.”
“I am glad to hear that. You have told the court that you were married for fifteen years.”
“Yes.”
“During that time, did you purchase a house in Drury, New Hampshire? Specifically, on February ninth, 1914?”
Etna dares not glance at Mr. Hastings. He knows about the cottage, but he has chosen not to bring up this potentially damaging fact. Etna thought her lawyer wrong in this and said so. She has lost her advantage now. She has lost the ability to tell the undistorted truth.
“I did.”
“Can you tell the court why you purchased this house?”
“It was not a house. It was a one-room cottage. I purchased it so that I could have a place to read and draw and sew and write.”
“Simple pursuits, you would say.”
“Yes.”
“And you could not do those things at home?”
“I could do them,” Etna says, trying to explain the impossible. “But it wouldn’t have been the same.”
“And why is that?” Mr. Bates queries.
“I felt I needed to have a place of my own. A place where I could breathe.”
Mr. Hastings, at his desk, drops his head. Wrong answer.
“You did not feel you could breathe in your own home?”
“Of course I could,” Etna says, trying to stay for a moment longer above the fray. “It’s an expression. It means I needed a place where I might find solace.”
“Again, I would ask,” says Mr. Bates, somewhat more dramatically, “why you could not find solace within the bosom of your family? With your children?”
“I believe every man or woman is entitled to a space where he or she can think without the demands of one’s relationships.”
“But you were a mother, Mrs. Van Tassel. Indeed, that is why you are in a courtroom today. Do you think it proper for a woman to have a life apart from her duties as a mother?”
Etna hesitates. This will go hard on her. “Not a whole life, but a small portion of that life, particularly if it will not harm anyone else.”
“Indeed,” says Mr. Bates, making no secret of his disapproval. “Did you tell your husband about this house?”
Mr. Bates uses the word house deliberately.
“I did not.”
“And why was that?”
“It would no longer have been mine.”
“Objection,” says Mr. Hastings, rising. “I should like to remind the court at this time of the Married Women’s Property Act, which has made it legal for women to hold property of their own.”
The judge scrutinizes the lawyer. “I do not think that was an objection to Mr. Bates’s question. Objection overruled.”
Mr. Hastings sits, but he has made his point and reminded the court of Etna’s legal right to own a cottage.
“Mrs. Van Tassel, if you discovered that your husband had bought a house for his own purposes and did not tell you about it, how would you feel?”
“Objection!” says Mr. Hastings, again on his feet. “Mrs. Van Tassel cannot be required to answer a hypothetical question.”
“Objection sustained.”
“Very well. Mrs. Van Tassel, did your husband discover that you had this house?”
“Yes, he did. He followed me there one day.”
“And how did he respond?”
“He was very angry.”
“I can imagine. Most men would be. He must have thought you had been having an affair.”
“Objection!” This from Mr. Hastings.
“Sustained. Mr. Bates, please do not speculate.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Etna replies nonetheless. “I most assuredly was not having an affair. As for my husband, I cannot say for certain what he thought. He was not himself. He destroyed things in the room. He said he would divorce me.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I did not know what to believe. It seemed inconsistent with what I knew about him.”
“In any case, you took the children and went to live with your sister, Miriam, in Exeter.”
“Yes.”
“Why is that?”
“Our marriage was broken. I was afraid of my husband. In addition to discovering the cottage, he did not receive the post of dean. It was a time of many disappointments, and he was reacting in a volatile way.”
“Were you visited in Exeter by a Mr. Tucker, Esquire?”
“Yes, I was.”
“And why did this man drive all the way to Exeter?”
“He came to take Nicky back to his father.”
“And did he explain why?”
“Yes, he did. He said that a woman who had purchased a cottage for immoral purposes was seen to be immoral. Any woman seen to be immoral was considered by the state to be a bad influence on her son, and thus the son could be removed from her care. Mr. Tucker did not seem to want to hear that there had been no immoral purposes in the first place. I might add that Mr. Tucker was not concerned about Clara, who was also with me. The state, apparently, does not care about daughters.”
“Mrs. Van Tassel, let us not get carried away,” says Mr. Bates.
“I do not believe I am carried away,” says Etna. “The purpose of Mr. Tucker’s visit was nefarious. He had been encouraged to visit Exeter and take Nicky away from me by my husband, whose goal was to have his wife return to Thrupp. He knew that I would not let Nicky live too far from me.”
“Did Dean Van Tassel ever confide that to you?”
“No, he did not.”
“Then you cannot know what was in his mind. Perhaps he simply wanted to follow the law in this matter.”
“I can tell you this, Mr. Bates,” Etna says, even as she glances at her husband. “The last thing Mr. Van Tassel would have wanted was to have me leave his home. He was, and I hope the court will forgive me for saying such a bold thing, obsessed with me. Did he love me? Yes, I suppose he did. In his way. It is difficult to tell where love ends and obsession begins. In his case, I think it was the other way around.”
“Your Honor,” says Mr. Bates. “Would you please instruct the witness to answer the questions I put to her simply and plainly, without embellishment?”
The judge knits his eyebrows together. It is some time before he delivers his opinion on the matter. “Mr. Bates, I have always been of two minds on this issue. On the one hand, I like proceedings to move along swiftly in this courtroom. But not at the expense of the truth. In my experience, I have often found that the second statement from the witness often contains more truth than does the first. I shall not at this moment rein in Mrs. Van Tassel’s answers, but I will not hesitate to do so if they are not immediately pertinent to the question at hand.”
Mr. Bates seems to take unfavorable judgments quite hard. When he asks his next question, he has already transferred his anger to Etna.
“Mrs. Van Tassel, is it true that Nicky went to live with his father, and that you went to live with Clara at the cottage?”
“Yes.”
“Did Mr. Phillip Asher, your husband’s rival for the post of dean of Thrupp College, ever visit you there?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ever visit you when Clara was present?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did you not think his visits in questionable taste, if not outright immoral?”
“No, I did not. He came to the cottage as a friend only.”
“But it was possible for someone to imagine that Mr. Asher had made advances toward you and possibly toward your daughter?”
“One can imagine anything, Mr. Bates. But the truth is the truth, wouldn’t you say?”
“I am not required to say anything, Mrs. Van Tassel. In early August of 1915, what caused you to return to your husband’s household?”
“He said that Clara had something of importance to tell me.”
“How could your husband know that Clara had something to tell you if she was living with you exclusively?”
“She and her father sometimes had dinner out together.”
“I see. And the important thing was?”
“Objection!” shouts Mr. Hastings. “The witness has already spoken of this matter quite fully. The court does not need her to do it again.”
“Objection sustained. Move on, Mr. Bates.”
“Mrs. Van Tassel, during your fourteen years of motherhood, did you ever take your children to church?”
Etna is taken aback by the abrupt transition. “I did.”
“Every Sunday?”
“No, not every Sunday.”
“How many times a month would you say you took your children to church or Sunday school?”
She has had time to prepare her answer. Why then is it so hard to respond? “I took the children to church and Sunday school at least once a month.”
Mr. Bates looks astonished, aghast. Etna hopes he is not as good a lawyer as he is an actor. ??
?Were they given religious instruction at home?”
“No, they were not. My faith was not strong at that time.”
“I see. And now?”
“My faith is nonexistent as a result of having seen so much death and destruction during the time I spent in France.”
“And speaking of that, Mrs. Van Tassel, can you explain to the court why you did not tell your children or your husband where you were from the moment you left the house in August of 1915 and your return to this country in February of 1917? It is my understanding that they had no letter from you, no telegram, no transatlantic call, no message from you through a relative, no form of communication at all.”
How clever of Mr. Bates to make it seem as if Etna has brought the question upon herself. The query has been asked casually, but its intent is anything but casual. It is at the heart of Mr. Bates’s case: how can a mother abandon her children and then expect them to be returned to her when she wants them? But Etna’s answer is at the heart of Mr. Hastings’s case. She must not only respond to the question but also do so in such a way that it does not damn her forever.
Etna raises her head and forces her hands to remain still in her lap. “When I left the house, I was afraid for my life. I was not afraid for my children’s lives. I knew that Abigail would protect them, and I did not believe Mr. Van Tassel would harm them. He was obsessed with me, not them. The desire to flee from him merged with the desire to make amends to Mr. Phillip Asher so powerfully that I was temporarily deprived of rational thought. I also hoped that Mr. Asher would forgive Clara, for she was in a terrible state at the time. Once I boarded the hospital ship in Boston, I could not return, and the court already knows why I could not. As for writing to them, I believed that Mr. Van Tassel would not pass along the letters to my children but rather would read them himself. He might even be tempted to distort what I had written to persuade my children that I was never coming back.”
Van Tassel makes a sound and squints at her.
“I had a second reason, not as important as the first,” Etna continues. “Though I doubt Mr. Van Tassel would have had the means or the wherewithal to snatch me back from France, I did not want him to know where I was. Once I had made the decision to go AWOL from the Royal Army Medical Corps and seek advice from Samuel Asher in London, I felt I could better explain everything to my children in person and without their father’s intervention. But as we know, I did not make it to London until eight months later, and when I did, I did not know I had children.”