This state of affairs went on for upwards of eight weeks.
By August, a poisonous pall had settled over our house and even over the entire village of Thrupp, which always seemed, without its students, eerily if pleasantly empty in the summer months. Day after day, we woke to dishwater skies that delivered no rain. Our garden at the side of the house was withering from lack of water and of tender cultivation, our gardener unwilling or unable to recreate its whimsical beauty without his mistress’s instructions. Only Nicky seemed oblivious to the mood of recrimination and resignation within that household. As a puppy will look for affection even from a listless master, poking its nose against a shin or licking a recalcitrant hand until, almost absentmindedly, its owner scratches the animal under its chin, Nicky prodded us from time to time into something very like love. Only Clara, pretending to read, lashed out when Nicky got too close. She was severely reprimanded for these objectionable outbursts, after which she retreated from the family even further. I worked in my study for hours at a time, occasionally distracted by my new duties. In September, I would formally address the faculty, a speech I wrote and rewrote a dozen times.
And Etna. Where was Etna then? Where had my wife of fifteen years gone? In early August, I suggested a trip to the Highland Hotel, a seaside vacation for the sake of the family. Etna would have none of it. (Have I mentioned that we scarcely spoke?) She was growing alarmingly thin, a result of both a diminished appetite and a kind of unattractive and frenzied domesticity. It was as though she had to keep moving in order to ward off the images that her daughter had planted in her mind — Etna, a woman whose stillness had once defined her being.
Did she dream about her cottage? Did she wonder where Phillip Asher had gone? Did she blame herself for having invited the man into her home? I do not know. I took to drinking more and more, beginning earlier in the day, in an effort to anesthetize myself against the pain of Etna’s frigid silence, a project at which I was becoming increasingly unsuccessful.
One afternoon in late August, after I had finished nearly half a bottle of sweet wine and had a headache I could not assuage with tonics (the air so still and stifling within that unhappy house that I could not get a decent breath), I came upon Etna sitting in a wicker chair on a side porch. She had no sewing with her, which I took to be a sign of health. Before I went to her (uninvited), I watched her for a moment in repose. Her body and face in profile, she seemed to be staring at something beyond the screen. She had on a sleeveless overblouse and a linen skirt, and her shoulders and long arms were white and bare, a sight I seldom saw those days. She scratched the knob of her collarbone as if she’d been bitten by an insect. Her arms were terribly thin, and without her robust figure, she seemed to have aged considerably since the spring. This was a sight that moved me. I walked out onto the porch and sat on the glider and rocked back and forth, hoping to simulate a breeze. Etna glanced over at me without a greeting. I was aching for the cooler days of autumn, which I was certain would bring a swift conclusion to the fever that had infected all of us.
“Perhaps,” I said to Etna, “we might think of taking the children to the mountains. It would be cooler there. I am sure I could find us rooms in a hotel.”
“What mountains?” she asked plainly. In the weeks since she had returned to the house, she had either lost or forfeited the gift of graceful conversation.
“Well, the White Mountains,” I said, unable to think of any other mountains. The moment I had named them, however, I regretted the reference to the locus of our wedding trip.
“It is not something I should look forward to,” she said.
“Is there anything you would look forward to?” I asked.
“You go,” she said, “and take the children.”
“I should not like to leave you all alone,” I said, more than slightly irritated with her recalcitrance on every subject. For the sake of the children, shouldn’t we get on with life?
Etna stared through the screen at the brown filigree of the seeding Queen Anne’s lace that had infiltrated the untended garden. And as will sometimes happen when under the influence of both alcohol and headache at too early an hour in the day, I was seized with a fit of pique.
“Asher is in the Argonne,” I said, naming the most deadly geography on the planet.
Etna turned her head slowly in my direction. Finally something had claimed my wife’s attention.
“Phillip in France?” she asked.
Phillip.
“I am reliably informed that Professor Asher has signed on with the British Red Cross,” I announced.
“It’s not possible,” she said.