All He Ever Wanted(95)

“They’ll take men of practically any age,” I said. “Of course, this is a very brave gesture on his part. I rather think he means to make amends, in some odd way, for his crime. The death rate for medics is near seventy percent. Did you know Asher’s a pacificist?”

Etna’s eyes were pink-rimmed. Not from crying, I guessed (she seemed too dry for tears), but from malnutrition. She was growing skeletal inside her homemade dresses.

“Phillip in France,” Etna repeated.

“The Argonne.”

“You mean he is gone altogether?”

I flinched and turned to see the speaker. Clara stood in the doorway behind me.

“You mean he is gone altogether?” my daughter asked again.

She crossed the threshold, a silver hairbrush in her hand. Her hair needed a wash, and her white stockings were dirty. She looked from me to her mother and back to me again. “Professor Asher is gone?” Clara asked again.

I stood, sensing a dangerous turn to the conversation. “Clara, your mother and I are talking privately,” I said. “You should learn not to speak unless asked to do so.”

“Very far away?” Clara asked, as if she had not heard my admonition.

“Yes, very far away,” I said. “We should go and find your brother,” I added, moving toward her.

“Then can I tell now?” Clara asked.

I took in a breath and held it, waiting for the moment to pass without incident. Clara’s light blue eyes looked straight into mine. Her question was not an innocent one, I realized then. Was this a malicious act, born of long hours of idleness? A way to draw attention to herself once again? Did she mean to assuage a guilty conscience? Or, worse, was this treachery aimed at me?

“Tell what?” Etna asked.

“Be quiet,” I said under my breath to Clara, putting all the warning I could muster into my barely audible command.

“Tell what?” Etna asked, rising from the green wicker chair. “Nicholas, what is this all about?”

“It’s nothing,” I said, waving dismissively. “Nothing. Clara, come with me.”

I reached for my daughter’s arm and would have dragged her bodily from the porch, but she twisted away from me and went to her mother.

At first Etna’s eyes were curious, seeing neither her husband nor her daughter, but rather a scene she had witnessed four months earlier in the sitting room, when Clara had touched her fingers to her breast.

Etna gave a quick shake of her head in disbelief.

Clara embraced her mother, whose long white arms were yet unwilling to curl around her daughter’s back. Indeed, my wife seemed struck with paralysis.

“I didn’t mean it,” Clara said, her nervous voice thinning as it rose to a wail. “Mother, I thought it would bring you back.”

I watched as Etna replayed that earlier scene in her mind, her eyes alighting on mine. I saw in them the vacant expression of the dazed, and then the sharp focus of the knowing.

“How could you?” she said to me over Clara’s head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You know,” Etna said. “I can see that you know.”

“I haven’t the faintest,” I said.

“Clara, tell me the truth,” Etna said, holding her daughter at arm’s length. “The absolute truth.”

I turned away before the truth could be confessed. I left the porch and walked through the house to my study.

What did it matter now? I thought as I shut the door behind me. The mother would never leave the family. She would sacrifice herself to the happiness of her children.

I had won, had I not? I had Etna. I had the children. I was Dean of the Faculty of Thrupp College.

Then why was I so frightened?


Etna went to the guest room and slammed the door so hard the walls shook. From time to time, as afternoon wore into evening, we could all hear erratic gusts of disbelief — sharp and breathless, as if she were repeatedly hearing the truth anew. Clara cowered in her room, and Nicky would not leave Abigail’s side. Once I saw him walking with his ears covered in case he should inadvertently hear the bursts of weather behind the guest room door. As for me, I stayed in my study, where I had sherry for nourishment and brandy for sustenance. I sat and paced and drank, occasionally as fearful as Nicky of the intermittent cries from overhead.

It was a storm that would blow through, I told myself. No woman, no human being, could physically sustain the intensity of such outbursts. Abigail came to the door, but I turned her away with a peremptory dismissal. I don’t know whether her solicitude was for me, by now quite drunk, or for her mistress, whose anguish I could only imagine. Would Etna be thinking about how her family had wronged Phillip Asher (an odd redressing of familial crime, it would appear), of how she had refused even to listen to the man? Of how he had gone away in shame and was now in harm’s way in Europe? Might the machinations of her husband and her daughter cause the death of this gentle academic who, at the very least, was her friend? A man she might one day have loved? And on whom did Etna place the burden of guilt? On me, for having devised the plan? On her untrustworthy daughter, who might never recover from having so seriously wronged another at such a tender age (cost a man his job, if nothing else)? Or upon herself, for having goaded me into unnatural behavior with her unnatural bid for freedom?