All He Ever Wanted(92)

Clara, a mirror to a mirror, covered her eyes with her hands. It was one thing to invent dialogue and a playlet, quite another to see the sudden parental incredulity it produced.

But Etna, stern parent, pulled Clara’s hands away. “Look at me,” she demanded of her daughter. “Look at me. When else?”

“Once when you were late from Baker House,” Clara said in a tremulous voice, speaking her fourth and final line, “and once when you were in the garden.”

As she so often did when confronted with a disturbing fact, Etna went completely still. Clara and I, witnesses to this maternal immobility, could only wait. Etna was torn between going to the child who had been wronged and withholding judgment — her mother’s instinct detecting a covert note (actually, the truth).

Etna placed a hand against the flat of her stomach and turned around, putting her back to us. Clara began to weep, the desperate ploy of an unschooled actress who must resort to tears to convince her audience. Etna, misreading this (as she was meant to do), turned back and folded her daughter into her chest. She put a hand behind Clara’s head and pressed her to her own bosom. “Shhh,” she said. “There now.”

I watched with a kind of giddy horror.

“Clara, I must ask you,” Etna said. “Are you very, very sure about this? This is a serious accusation.”

Clara pulled her head away and nodded, and I silently applauded my daughter’s lack of hesitation.

“My God,” Etna said.

My wife swayed and briefly closed her eyes. I thought that she might faint and take the child with her. I took a step forward.

“It was so terrible,” Clara wailed. “Please let us be a family again,” she managed between her sobs, clinging to her mother’s delicate body.

(Careful, Clara, I thought.)

But no mother could have resisted that petition. “Yes,” Etna said, comforting her daughter. “Shhh. There now.”

My relief was so visceral, I feared it would be visible.

“You must never tell anyone about this,” Etna said to Clara.

I cleared my throat and offered my one and only (and clearly devastating) line. “The college and the police have already been informed,” I intoned.

Etna looked as though she had been slapped. “You’ve told the school?” she whispered, her voice deserting her.

“Of course,” I said. “The man cannot be allowed to continue in a position of responsibility. Criminal charges will have to be brought.”

“Oh, dear God,” Etna said.

I didn’t dare to look at Clara, my accomplice, for fear I would see success upon her face, an expression that would risk the entire venture. I turned away, shaken but elated. I had it all, had I not? My wife and Clara would return home. The family would be intact. Phillip Asher would be removed from his post, his reputation in tatters.

Nicky, who had been waiting in the wings, broke free of Abigail’s arms and bolted into the sitting room, where he crushed himself against his mother’s skirts. He began to beg.

“Don’t go, don’t go,” he sang, to which chorus I added my own silent verses.


Etna was not to return to the cottage, I said, taking command of a scene that begged for a leading man. Abigail would go by taxi to fetch anything Etna needed. I would see to it that the building was put up for sale. Etna, too stunned to reply or even to think, did not demur. I guessed that she had no desire now to see that cottage, nor even to show her face in Thrupp. I told myself that with time this shame would go away, that in time we would once again be a normal family.

As for Phillip Asher, he was confronted with the accusation later that afternoon in his office by both Chief Gates and President Goodspeed, an unlikely and awkward pairing. I am told that Asher laughed when he first heard of the informal indictment, thinking it was pure fabrication on the part of a defeated and bitter rival, easily refuted. But when he was informed that it was not me but rather Clara who had made the charge, the color drained from his face, convincing Goodspeed, at least, of Asher’s guilt.

Asher wrote to Etna at once, insisting that the imputation wasn’t true, that perhaps Clara had misunderstood an entirely innocent gesture, though he could think of no time that he had been in such proximity to her. He would never, he would never. Could he come to see Etna? Could he please speak with her? I intercepted the letter as, of course, any loving husband would have done; though, generously, I allowed Etna to read the missive. She set it aside. Who was a mother to believe: her own child or a would-be lover?

(For I have no doubt now that Asher and Etna would shortly have become lovers. There was no other way to read the look of pure delight on Etna’s face beneath the white chandelier. And, in later years, when assaulted with the visions that sometimes plague a guilty man, I would take heart in the fact that I had at least prevented that consummation.)