All He Ever Wanted(86)

I examined her anew.

“Are you Jewish?” I asked.

Etna was startled by the question. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“My mother didn’t know her father.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My mother’s mother was a servant girl who was impregnated by a man she later would not, or could not, identify.”

This was news to me. I had simply assumed for my wife an Anglo-Saxon ancestry on her mother’s side. “Then why do you think you are Jewish?” I asked.

“I could be anything,” she said.

“My son may be Jewish?” I asked, incredulous.

“Does that matter?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully.

“I can no longer be your wife,” Etna said so quietly that I was not certain I had heard correctly. Or perhaps it was only that I didn’t want to have heard correctly. Outside, there was a commotion, as if there had been an accident with motorcars. It cannot have been any more serious, I was thinking, than the collision in the parlor.

“That is no grounds,” I said, adding pomposity to foolishness, as if I knew the law. Spending a precious sentence when simple words of love would have been better currency.

“It will have to be enough,” she said with the tentative authority of the recently coronated.

Etna quit the room, left her husband sputtering, the husband who was prevented from following her up the stairs. I shook Miriam’s surprisingly tenacious hand off my arm, but men were brought to the hallway. I was forced to go away, Josip Keep smugly clucking that marriage was a trial.

I drove to Salisbury, a seaside town of poor repute. I found a brothel, my first lapse of a sexual nature in fifteen years of wedlock. After an encounter I do not now remember, I went on to a bar near the ocean and drank a bottle of bourbon. I was left to mutter in a leather booth. In the morning, I returned to Thrupp.

I appeared for some classes and ignored others. My wife had been called away, I said to anyone who seemed poised on the brink of inquiry. Her sister was gravely ill, I added, happily giving Miriam a fatal disease. My colleagues nodded, and if they doubted me, I didn’t care. I removed myself before expressions of pity or distaste could form. I was a man of little conversation and even less patience. It was understood that I was reeling.

In January, I was summoned by Phillip Asher, who had moved into the office of the Dean. (Everyone, it would appear, including Asher himself, had been willing to look the other way regarding his Jewishness.) I went reluctantly and left without a word before the offer of a sabbatical had been completely tendered. It was a sop to a defeated rival, I thought with disgust, unaware at the time of his correspondence with my wife. I knew only that he had once known of Etna years ago. Still, I thought, Asher would have heard the rumors of a dissolving marriage. In his eyes, I would be a twice-defeated man, an academic and marital emeritus.

A week later, I returned to Exeter, nearly losing myself and my newly purchased black Ford in a dun-colored storm. Etna, paler still, was summoned to the parlor. The room was bathed in the flat dull light of midseason snow. She wore a pale blue daytime dress that showed the new angles of her body, and already I was imagining how I would care for her, how I would instruct Mary to fatten her up with a rich diet. My wife was disappearing in Exeter.

I strove to be composed. I did not beg or wheedle, but I presented my case.

I had made a rash pronouncement, I said. It was a wife’s duty to forgive the ranting of a temporarily deranged husband. Any man might have said the same, I said. As to the matter of the cottage, I was prepared to consider the issue in a calmer manner, and I was sure that some arrangement could be made.

“What arrangement?” she asked, settling herself in a yellow-silk-covered chair. She moved as if her bones had become fragile, and I was suddenly worried for my children. Was Keep not feeding my family in exile?

“An arrangement,” I said, though in truth I had not thought much about any such arrangement. Indeed, I could not think about the cottage at all. The very sight of it in my mind’s eye — or the sight of it in reality (for I had several times gone there to look at it, the door locked, the thief unwilling to break a window, since he still believed a reconciliation imminent) — caused a tide to flood my brain, like the assault of a rising blush.

Etna folded her hands in her lap. “You would decree when I could go there,” she said.

“Not necessarily,” I said, treading carefully.

“But you would want to know when and for how long and precisely what I would be doing there,” she said. “Who I might see there.”