All He Ever Wanted(14)

“Where exactly should you go?”

She looked up at me in keen appraisal. “That is precisely the question, Professor Van Tassel. Where should I go indeed?”

She disengaged her arm from mine and was quiet for a time, and I had, once again, to accustom myself to her silence. But not before I had detected, beneath the blue-and-gold silk of her dress, an underskirt of desperation. Or perhaps I only hoped it so.

“Might I ask you to call me Nicholas?” I asked, emboldened by her frankness.

I was at once furious with myself for reaching forward too greedily, for she stepped away from me and studied the dismal ruin of the hotel. It was a dispiriting sight, the blackened maw now soaked through and rotting. A terrible smell I had not noticed before was in the air, and I shuddered to imagine its origin.

“To think we might have died that night,” she said with some awe.

I withdrew a handkerchief from my pocket, shook it out, and reached across the space that separated me from Etna Bliss. Boldly, I put that square of Belgian linen up against her nose and mouth, covering her, smothering her, so to speak, so that the stench from the fire might not enter her nose and soil her senses. I was actually trembling with the audacity of the gesture.

She was startled but did not flinch. After a moment, her hand replaced my own. And after another moment, she removed the cloth.

“Of course I shall call you Nicholas,” she said, turning toward me. And I could hardly speak for the proffered boon of this hoped-for intimacy.

“Miss Bliss,” I said, “would you like a cup of cocoa?”

“If I’m to call you Nicholas, it is only fitting that you should call me Etna,” she said easily. “And yes, I should like something hot to drink. This walk has done me good.”

“Well then,” I said, unable to speak further.


We entered a small tearoom on Kimball Street, assaulted at once by its overheated bustle, the smell of wet boots, and the steam that clouded the etched glass. There was a fire in the stove, and on the muddy boards of the floor were various mufflers and mittens and gloves and knitted hats and even children’s cloaks that had been abandoned under tables and chairs and occasionally lost mid-aisle, as if the entire population of the café had shed their outer garments en masse. We were shown to a table by a serving girl in black taffeta and white lace, a matching cap on her head, her hair frizzing in the heat. Etna and I sat down. She ordered tea and apple cake, and I ordered hot cocoa. There were patches of red upon her cheeks that spoke of outdoor exercise and of considerable vivacity. She looked a woman now bursting with health and even a sort of lust for life, as if a restless spirit that had lain dormant all these weeks in Bliss’s fetid parlor could now breathe and move.

“Are all of these people from the college?” she asked.

“Most will be,” I said, turning to examine the crowd. There were the usual pockets of students by the window and some ladies who had been shopping in anticipation of the coming holiday, wives or daughters of faculty, I guessed. Then, as I strained to see into the corner, I spotted Moxon, sitting alone with a book. And, bad luck, he glanced up at the very moment my head swiveled in his direction. Our eyes met, and he waved a smart hello, which meant that he was bound to get up and introduce himself to my companion, and, if I could not somehow signal in the negative, accept Etna’s almost certain invitation to join us.

Moxon was a lanky man of biscuit hair and pale complexion who, though our tastes were, as I have said, nearly opposite (Moxon being the fellow with the ornate marble clocks and the fire screens), was my closest colleague at the college. We often joined each other in the dining hall and spoke easily together of thorny lines of verse or of the unyielding prose of certain essayists (and occasionally of wayward students one hoped to rein in). Moxon liked the horses and was continually fetching down to his bookmaker to place a bet, and he was a keen follower of college athletics, which I was not, but apart from these dissimilarities, we got on well enough that we had dined together on more occasions than I could number.

“Your name is interesting,” Etna said. “Is it…?”

“Dutch,” I said stiffly. “The Van Tassel, that is. Nicholas, of course, is old English.”

(It occurs to me now that there may have been an entirely other meaning to my old nickname. Could the student responsible for its coinage have meant wild Boer?)

“How many students are at the college?” she asked.

“Nearly four hundred,” I said.

“And do you like it there?”

“Well enough. I hope one day…Well, I shouldn’t say. And I shouldn’t like this repeated, of course.”