A manservant answered my frenzied knock.
“Professor Van Tassel,” Jackson (first or second name, I never knew) said, “Professor Moxon is not here. He will not be back until Thursday.”
“I’ll wait for him,” I said.
I walked into a sitting room and laid myself on the sofa. Jackson was kind to me that night, for which I will always be grateful. He let me sleep and brought me soup and let me sleep again and had the wisdom not to ask me any questions. When I stood up finally, late the next morning, he led me to a bathroom, where I bathed and shaved. I ate a breakfast of eggs and toast and sat for some time at the table. I did not think as I sat there; no coherent thoughts were formed in Moxon’s house. After a time, I stood up again and went out to the motorcar and drove away.
I don’t know what became of my students that day, for I didn’t drive to the college but rather to my home, which was empty of everyone I loved. Mrs. Van Tassel was gone, a flustered Abigail reported. To Exeter. She had taken the children with her. I nodded, surprised by nothing now. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been forced to resign my candidacy for a post I had dearly wanted, I had discovered that my wife owned a separate residence to which she had been retreating in secret for nearly a year, and I had declared that I would be divorced — none of which I would have said was remotely within the realm of possibility just the week before.
“There is a letter on the breakfast table,” Abigail announced.
I opened the letter as if it were a bill I had no intention of paying. Dear Nicholas, it read.
I have taken the children to Exeter. Please do not follow me. Let us think about the things we have said to each other.
Your loving, Etna
My loving Etna.
I left the dining room, dropping the letter on the hallway floor. I went up to my bed. I don’t believe I had yet had a coherent thought. Nor did I the next day or the next. I recall a telephone call from the college asking if I was unwell. Yes, I said, and I would be away from my classes for a week. I remember Moxon coming to visit me and a bizarre conversation in the sitting room, desultory on my part, frantic on his. Etna had left me, I said to Moxon’s horror. He was all arms and legs, flapping in companionate misery. Keep the car, he said, keep the car, as if an automobile might help to mitigate the heartache of a foolhardy declaration.
In the days that followed, I grew whiskers and had to be told by the housemaid to shave them. I ate cheese and eggs repeatedly, as if I had returned to the nursery. On Friday, Phillip Asher was elected to the post of Dean.
On Saturday, I drove to Exeter, remembering that earlier trip of fifteen years previous, when all my life had been contained within a single petition. On the way, I practiced the words of my second plea to Etna Bliss Van Tassel.
Do not think about a divorce, I would say. It was the utterance of an angry man and was to be accorded no more respect than the ravings of a lunatic. Listen instead to the husband of fifteen years who desires to have his wife and children at home. Their absence from the house is unnecessary. Foolish words are often said in the heat of the moment, are they not? Surely a marriage is elastic enough to accommodate them without destroying the union ? As to the other matter, as to the separate abode, we would discuss it upon her return to Thrupp. I might leave the college, I would say. I might write a book.
But Etna had another idea, which she communicated to me immediately upon my arrival.
“I agree to a divorce,” she said in that parlor in which she had once announced that she would marry me. She had entered the room as if she had long been expecting me, as if she had already armed herself, had built around her both a moat and a fortress.
We stood across a Persian carpet. I was vaguely aware of damask and crystal and rosewood and silk, the end result of all those ladders and drop cloths of so long ago. Etna’s face was drawn, and I saw that she was thinner; perhaps it was that severe aspect to her expression and posture that gave her the glamour of a regent.
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head, certain that sister Miriam was listening from behind the paneled door. “I didn’t mean it. I was too rash. I was angry. Etna, listen to me.”
She stood her ground and went as still as the ancestral Keep in the oil portrait behind her. Her gaze was steady and unyielding. I studied her and thought again, as I had so often before, that there must have been a foreign element in her blood, perhaps that of a superior race, one that had produced the almond eyes and the high cheekbones, the utter poise that seemed to require no breath. Then I had an astonishing thought, one so remarkable that I was, for some moments, unable to continue the conversation. Why had Phillip Asher blurted out to me — of all people — the fact of his Jewishness? Had he simply assumed I would know this because Etna had once known the family? Or, more to the point, was my wife herself Jewish?