All He Ever Wanted(88)

Etna, loving mother, brushed her daughter’s hair, unaware of the audience beyond the glass. My wife’s face was composed but white, and I could see the strain of skin over the high cheekbones, the nervousness in the topaz eyes, the worry lines at the sides of her mouth.

I could stand for hours in the dark and cold, observing Clara at her studies and Etna at her sewing. I watched Etna at the sink, washing dishes like a common undercook. She seemed not to mind these chores, some of which were truly odious — the tossing out of slops, the washing and ironing of laundry that froze on the clothes-line at the back of the house, the cleaning of the outhouse. Clara, called upon to help, protested like a spoiled girl, and I sometimes longed to step in and upbraid her. At other times, it was all I could do to keep from storming through the door and embracing my child, who was growing tall without me.

Standing in the dark, I considered the matter of Etna’s maternal ancestors, of the unknown parentage. The man who had impregnated the servant girl and then abandoned her could have been anything, I reasoned. Jewish, possibly. More likely a common Yankee with striking features. But then again, he might have been Turkish or Indian or Russian. Each night I would study the cheekbones and eyes of my wife and wonder: Was she Greek? Italian? A Gypsy?

I pondered also the nature of fate and circumstance. Had it not been for the fire, I doubt I should ever have met Etna Bliss. Did I now wish that those few drops of oil in the hotel kitchen had not fallen onto the cooking fire? Might I have eaten my poached sole in solitude and never noticed the young woman in the topaz silk sitting behind me and thus escaped both the joy and anguish of the next fifteen years, only to have met, two months later, say, the daughter of a rare-book dealer from Thrupp whom I then married? Might I never have encountered Etna Bliss at all, but rather have seen a woman emerging from a trolley three days later to whom I gave pursuit and was ultimately betrothed? Or have been introduced at a faculty party at the college to the wife of a colleague (no, never; the sentence does not bear completion, for I should never have stooped so low)…or chanced upon, in twenty years’ time, after having remained for decades a bachelor, a widow to whom my academic credentials, not to mention my modest fortune, might have been attractive? Or, then again, might I actually have met a worse fate than was dealt to me? Might I have wed the daughter of a physician who bore me a child who then died as a result of my wife’s carelessness? There are stories more terrible than mine. I do understand this. But the influence of circumstance upon a man’s destiny is considerable, is it not?

My nightly visits to that cottage became more and more frequent and then routine. After I had stood at the window for an hour or so, I would walk into the woods and eat a bit of cheese and bread and drink the whiskey that I had brought. Truth to tell, I was drinking rather a lot in those months, and sometimes I had difficulty returning the Ford to its garage in the early hours of the morning. I slept late and was often tardy for or absent altogether from my classes, to which I scarcely paid any attention. My colleagues, concerned and then alarmed and then annoyed, avoided me when an encounter threatened, which was fine with me, who wanted only silence and anonymity, both difficult to come by in that college of mediocre and unruly boys. I would tender my resignation in the summer, I told myself with sweet relief.

Only once in all the times I went to the cottage to spy on my wife did I come near to getting caught. I had gone into the woods to relieve myself, and I must have made an inadvertent sound, because when I was finished and had turned back to the house, I saw that Etna was standing at the window staring straight at me. She tilted her head from side to side, so I didn’t think she had actually spotted me. I watched as she left the window and then I heard the door open. She came out, shivering and hugging a shawl around her arms, making delicate footprints in the snow-covered lawn of late March.

“Who’s there?” she called out, squinting in the night.

I stood behind a tree and watched her face, longing to reveal myself and wondering how it had come to pass that I, Nicholas Van Tassel, was hiding behind a tree in the woods, the steam from my urine still rising behind me, concealing myself from the only woman I had ever loved.


Routine became obsession. (What, precisely, is an obsession? My much-used dictionary tells me it is a state of compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or unwanted feeling or emotion. The word, of course, stems from the Latin obsidere [past participle obsessus], which means “to sit down before”; ob, against, combined with sedere, to sit. Well, I wasn’t sitting, but I was certainly standing.) Sometimes, exhausted beyond sense, I would doze off and wake only to find that I had been asleep as I leaned against the white clapboards. This went on for some time and might have continued indefinitely had I not seen, one night in early May when I approached the cottage, a Ford not my own parked in the driveway beside the Landaulet.