All He Ever Wanted(87)

Confinement didn’t suit her, I was thinking. It never had. “How are the children?” I asked.

“They are well,” she said.

“I wish some news of them. I wish to see them.”

“They are away,” she said.

“Away where?”

“Away with Miriam. Visiting Pippa in Massachusetts.”

“You cannot keep my children from me,” I insisted.

“Nicholas,” she said with a flicker of marital concern, “you are not in a fit state to be with children, your own or anyone else’s.”

“And are you?” I countered.

“I have a good deal of help,” she said.

“Why, Etna?” I asked, sitting forward. “Why are you doing this?”

“I have given you fifteen years,” she said.

“I would have given you my whole life!” I said.

“You say that,” she said calmly, “but you will not give me one hour of true freedom.”

At last, I begged. “Etna. Please. Come back for the sake of the children, who desire only that we be together.”

I watched as she struggled with that old emotion — pity. And I am ashamed to write here that for a moment I gladly would have accepted it.

“I will have a divorce,” she said.

“On what grounds?” I said, angry now.

“I have never loved you,” she said, as if that were enough.

And it may have been. It was certainly enough to silence me. With difficulty, I stood, my legs those of a wizened man. “We will correspond through lawyers,” I said hoarsely from the hollowed-out place to which my wife had sent me.

“Yes,” was all she said.

I found the strength to walk to the door. I let myself out. My wife made no move to stop me.

The divorce proceeded at the pleasure of the court, which is to say it scarcely proceeded at all. I was awash in legal sentence structure and grievous grammar:


It may be averred that the relator’s marriage was a sacrifice, the result of an unwillingness, on her part, to recede from an ill-conceived engagement, into which she had improvidently allowed herself to be drawn, and with which she afterwards complied, under the influence of a mistaken sense of duty. That she would not thus have complied or been married to the respondent at all if she had not been assured that her wishes would not be opposed, upon points which she deemed vital to her happiness and welfare, and upon which he did not then consider her wishes as unreasonable.

I sent a lawyer to retrieve Nicodemus. His name was Tucker, and he had strict instructions.

“He will let you have the girl,” Tucker announced to Etna, who stood in Josip Keep’s hallway. “But he wants the boy back. If you don’t comply, he will have both children. Under the circumstances, he would almost certainly get them.”

“What circumstances?” Etna asked.

“A mother who has committed an immoral act is seen by the court to be corrupting the morals of a son.”

“Not a daughter?”

“The court does not like to remove a daughter from a mother’s protection.”

“This is absurd,” Etna said.

“Nevertheless.”

“What immoral act?” Etna asked.

“A secret residence for possible immoral purposes,” Tucker said, handing Etna the latest of the legalese.

Tucker stood and waited. He would not leave without the boy.

Etna, after consultation with her lawyer, reluctantly complied.

Etna had to return to Thrupp, which, all along, I had known she would do. If I had our son, Etna would have to be near him. She took up residence in the cottage.

I had the boy, and she had Clara, who slept with Etna in the narrow bed in the gabled attic bedroom. Clara resumed her studies at Thrupp Girls’ Academy, and Nicky continued his at the local grammar school. On weekends, Abigail, the maid, became a courier, fetching Clara to bring her home even as she was delivering Nicky for a Sunday meal.


I took to watching Etna and Clara through the windows of the cottage — that endless motion picture of humble domesticity. I went at night, when the moon of my face could not be seen at the window. I cultivated stealth and became more proficient at this calling than I had ever been at Rhetoric.

I would leave Nicky in his bed, Nicky whose face I searched daily for clues as to his ancestral identity, Nicky who asked nightly for his mother. I would drive to Drury, where I had found a clearing in which to park the black Ford. I would walk the quarter mile to the cottage and stand in such a way that I could not be seen in the light of the white chandelier, an extravagance so out of keeping with the rude cottage that it was as if a dowager had entered a fishing hut. In its splintery light, I would examine Clara’s luminous skin, her pale eyebrows, and the light blue eyes that reminded me of my sisters’. In contrast to her mother, who was taking on a look of transparency, even with her dark features, Clara was a lush bloom of Dutch beauty.