(“The cottage belonged to your wife,” said a policeman who came to my house later that day.
“Yes,” I said.
“Lucky she wa’n’t in it,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
“Can I speak to the wife?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“I see.”
“She’s quite distraught.”
“Of course she is. What’d she have it for anyways?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The cottage. What’d she do there?”
“Sew,” I said with confidence.
“Sew?”
“She gave classes to the indigent,” I said.
“Did she?”
“She did.
“Unfair, then, i’n’t it?”
“Unfair?”
“To lose the cottage that way.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Most unfair.”)
If I had had any intimations of freedom in the moments when I watched the cottage burn, I needed to set them aside when I returned home. For there were my children, Clara and Nicodemus, to whom I had to explain that their mother had gone away for a rest. Nicky cried, and Clara did not believe me. “You sent her away,” she accused, and, truthfully, it was a charge that was difficult to refute.
In early November, I had to send for Meritable, for I was at a loss as to how to raise a daughter who did not shrink from announcing, at frequent intervals, that she hated me.
“Father killed our mother,” I overheard Clara say to a horrified Nicky as I passed by my son’s bedroom not a week after the fire had destroyed the cottage.
“He did not!” Nicky protested, defending the only parent he had left. “Mother is having a rest.”
“Resting in her grave, more like,” Clara muttered. “Father is a murderer,” she said, drawing out the word with obvious relish.
“Clara, go to your room!” I bellowed from the doorway.
Meritable, whom I’d before thought incapable of being ruffled by the behavior of a young girl, was impressed with Clara’s intransigence. Perhaps it would be better, my sister suggested gently, if Clara came to stay with her for a bit, “just to get her back on her feet.” And so it was that by Christmas, it was just Nicky and myself in that cavernous house, a state of affairs that would remain until he went to Bowdoin College at the age of seventeen. I believe I was a good father to Nicodemus, more attentive than most, and I do not think he suffered from excessive affection. I was trying to be, as the reader may imagine, two parents and a sibling, and though I could not be all things to my son, we had some good times together, my boy and I.
In the fall, I hired a detective, who informed me (during a perfectly awful interview in my study) that Etna had made her way to London.
“Well, sir,” the short, empurpled man from Boston began, “I am afraid the news is not good.”
“Of course it’s not good,” I said impatiently. “Get on with it.”
“Etna Van Tassel, your wife, is living in London.”
“London?”
“She has taken up residence at this address.” He handed a piece of paper across the desk. There was only a street name and a number. “It is the address, sir, of a gentleman,” he added.
“What gentleman?” I asked, bracing for the name of Phillip Asher.
“A gentleman by the name of Samuel Asher,” the detective said.
I started with surprise, which the man from Boston seemed to be expecting. (Detectives are like policemen, are they not, delivering terrible news? Do they steel themselves? Or are they merely prurient witnesses to extremes of human behavior?)
“She is living there?” I asked.
“Most unhappily, she is,” he said.
“My wife is unhappy?” I asked.
“No, I am unhappy to tell you this.”
“Well, you should be,” I said.
(How did the meeting between Samuel and Etna come about? Did Etna go directly to Samuel’s town house, her shame abandoned in New Hampshire? Did Samuel, seeing Etna’s face, realize the full force of a love he had once known and then given up? Did they revel in this second chance? Did he tell her of his less-than-happy marriage? Did they immediately resume their fully satisfying and somewhat astonishing physical relationship? Did they ever think about the six children they had wronged?)
I actually know nothing of this resumption of their love affair, and the reader will forgive me if I do not linger here in order to try to imagine it. Though I do often wonder if I wasn’t a sort of interregnum for Etna Bliss. The father of her children, certainly. Her husband, legally. A man whom she never loved, sadly. But mostly, I think, I was a man with whom she lived in between the first and second episodes of Samuel Asher. And when I am torturing myself, as I occasionally do, I think of Etna’s words in the Bliss bedroom, just before that wondrous revelation of the passion of which she was capable, when she insisted it was a treasure to be able to love so thoroughly, so freely.