No, no, I said to myself, shaking my head violently. This was too melodramatic. This was not how it would be.
I made the left turn into the driveway and brought the motorcar to a stop outside the cottage. The Landaulet was nowhere in sight, but the door to the cottage was open.
I climbed out of the Ford and walked to the threshold, peering tentatively inside. I called out Etna’s name and was answered with silence. My eyes scanned the floor, which needed a sweep but otherwise was bare. I glanced up at the chandelier, that white iron monstrosity, all its bulbs intact. I stepped inside the cottage. Apart from the stale air, which even the open door had not been able to dissipate, and a gloom brought on by the curtained windows, the cottage was much as it had been when I had locked it up late in the spring. (That Etna might have kept a second key hadn’t occurred to me.) I opened the curtains and the windows and the shutters, letting light and air into the musty room. I looked all around me to make sure that Etna was not there, unwilling to show herself. I climbed the narrow stairs to check the attic bedroom, but I had to climb straight back down again: one could scarcely breathe in the spinous garret.
“Etna,” I called again.
I took inventory of the contents of the cottage, but apart from Etna’s writing case, I noted nothing missing. My headache reasserting itself, I leaned against the apothecary cabinet. My hand brushed against the front of the white tin cake box. The door banged open, revealing a fan of blue and white and lavender envelopes that spilled across the floor. I picked them up and studied the addresses.
Mrs. Etna Van Tassel, Holyoke Street, Thrupp, New HampshireMr. Phillip Asher, The Hotel ThruppMrs. Etna Van Tassel, Exeter, New HampshireMr. Phillip Asher, 14 Gill Street
I sat hard on the ladder-back chair. After a time, I laid the letters upon the table and put them in order. (Of course, Nicholas Van Tassel must read any series of letters in their proper order.) I read them through once, and then once again. I set them in a neat stack.
Etna and Phillip Asher, my wife and the man from Yale, had married their letters — a marriage, it would appear, more durable than my own.
I threw my head back and howled, a ghostly and guttural cry that might have frightened any sane man or woman.
My wife had come and gone. I understood then that she would not be back. She had tripped the latch of her cage and set herself free.
She had set herself free of me.
What began in fire would end in fire, I decided. Was this an attempt at catharsis on my part or merely the result of a lifelong attention to metaphor? I do not know. What I do know is that it is considerably harder to start a fire than one might imagine. Lacking invention, I stood with a dish towel over the cooking fire, trying to coax a flame into life, only to watch it catch and die, catch and die, disappearing in the humidity-sodden cloth. Finally, after much fluttering of the towel, I had the beginnings of a decent flame. I set it down beneath a curtain.
I took the tin cake box with its contents and, impulsively, the dress form, for which I had no use but which was, after all, the wire ghost of my Etna, having her height and her dimensions. I packed them in the Ford. Hurrying now, I climbed into the motorcar, put the vehicle in reverse, and moved backward down the driveway, hardly daring to watch as first a curtain and then a bit of wall turned orange. At the end of the driveway, just as I was about to make the turn toward Thrupp, I saw a lick of fire poke itself through the open door, and then there was a whoosh of dramatic proportions as the entire cottage went aflame. It was a mesmerizing sight. Fire is truly a beautiful thing.
The blaze raged, its heat impressive even from the end of the drive. It was then, as I was watching the fire, that I had an entirely new thought that intrigued me deeply: If Etna Bliss had set herself free, did it not follow that I was free as well?
The idea was a stunning one. I began to explore it, feeling the tentative relief of someone who discovers that a tragedy has an unexpected bonus. Could it be that I was relieved of the obsession that had been Etna Bliss Van Tassel? The obsession that had dogged me for almost sixteen years?
It could. It could.
I tested my heart and mind as a man will who has been knocked unconscious upon the battleground and wakes and feels for his arms and legs to see if they are still intact — my sense of relief no less exhilarating than that of the soldier who discovers himself to be still alive.
I might have sat at the end of the driveway all morning, trying to absorb this notion, but I began to worry then, for the fire was spreading. I had not intended to burn down the nearby manse as well. I quickly drove away and stopped at the first house I came to. I told the much-surprised man who answered the door that there was a fire just down the road and that he should call the brigade. As it was reported to me later, Etna’s cottage was almost entirely destroyed by the time the fire truck arrived, but the larger house, despite the heat and the drought, suffered little damage.