All He Ever Wanted
Copyright © 2003 by Anita Shreve
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Contents
A
LSO BY
A
NITA
S
HREVE
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
Fortune’s Rocks
The Pilot’s Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
for Katherine
T
he fire began in the kitchen and spread to the hotel dining room. Without warning, or perhaps just the one muffled cry of
alarm, a ball of fire (yes, actually a ball) rolled through the arched and shuttered doorway from the kitchen, a sphere of
moving color so remarkable, it was as though it had life and menace, when, of course, it did not — when, of course, it was
simply a fact of science or of nature and not of God. For a moment, I felt paralyzed, and I remember in the greatest detail
the way the flame climbed the long vermilion drapes with a squirrel’s speed and agility and how the fire actually leapt from
valance to valance, disintegrating the fabric and causing it to fall as pieces of ash onto the diners below. It was nearly
impossible to witness such an event and not think a cataclysm had been visited upon the diners for their sins, past or future.
If the fact of the fire did not immediately penetrate my consciousness, the heat of the blast did and soon propelled me from
my seat. All around me, there was a confusion of upended tables, overturned chairs, bodies pitched toward the door of the
dining room, and the sounds of broken glass and crockery. Fortunately, the windows toward the street, large windows through
which a body might pass, had been thrown open by an enterprising diner. I remember that I rolled sideways through one of these
window frames and fell onto the snow and was immediately aware that I should move aside to allow others to land as I had —
and it was in that moment that my altruism was finally triggered. I rose to my feet and began to assist those who had sustained
cuts and bruises and broken bones, or who had been mildly crushed in the chaos. The blaze lit up the escaped diners with a
light greater than any other that could be produced in the night, so that I was able to see clearly the dazed expressions
of those near to me. Many people were coughing, and some were crying, and all looked as though they had been struck by a blow
to the head. A few men attempted heroics and tried to go back into the hotel to save those who remained behind, and I think
one student did actually rescue an elderly woman who had succumbed to paralysis beside the buffet table; but generally there
was no thought of reentering the burning building once one had escaped. Indeed, so great was the heat that we in the crowd
had to move farther and farther across the street until we all stood in the college quadrangle, surrounded by bare oaks and
elms and stately sycamores.
Later we would learn that the fire had begun with a few drops of oil spilled onto a kitchen fire, and that the undercook,
who stood near to the stove, had felt compelled to extinguish the fire by throwing upon it a pitcher of water and then, in
her excitement, fanning the flames with a cloth she was holding. Some twenty persons in the upper stories of the hotel were
trapped in their rooms and burned to death — one of these Myles Chapin from the Chemistry faculty, and what he was doing in
a hotel room when his wife and child were safely at home on Wheelock Street I should not like to speculate (perhaps it was
his compromised circumstances that made the man hesitate just a second when he should not have). Surprisingly, only one of
the kitchen staff perished, owing to the fact that the back door had been left open, and the fire, moving with the particular
drafts between door and windows, sped toward the dining room, allowing most of the staff to escape unharmed, including the
hapless undercook who had started it all with her fluster.
The hotel was situated directly across from Thrupp College, where I was then engaged as the Cornish Professor of English Literature
and Rhetoric. Thrupp was, and is (even now, as I set down my story), a men’s school of, shall we say, modest reputation. Its
buildings are a motley collection, some of them truly hideous, erected at the beginning of the last century by men who envisioned
a seminary but later contented themselves with a small enclave of intellectual inquiry and classical education. There was
one impressive Georgian building that housed the administration, but it was surrounded by altogether too many dark brick structures
with small windows and oddly placed turrets that were emblematic of perhaps the most dismal period of American architecture,
which is to say early Victorian Gothic. Some of these edifices surrounded the quadrangle; the rest spilled along the streets
of a town that was all but dominated by the college. Because the school had elected to retain the flavor of a small New England
village, however, the colonial clapboard houses that lined Wheelock Street had been left intact and served as residences for
the more eminent figures in the various faculties. At the outskirts of town, before the granite hills began, lay the farms:
struggling enterprises that had been witness to generations of men trying to eke out a living from the rocky soil, soil that
always put me in mind of thin, elderly women.
We ousted, and therefore fortunate, diners stood at the center of this universe, too stunned yet to begin to shiver in earnest
from the cold and the snow that soaked our boots. Many people were squinting at the blaze or had thrown their arms over their
eyes and were staggering backward from the heat. Somewhat bewildered myself, I moved aimlessly through the throng, not having
the wits to walk across the quadrangle to Woram Hall, where I might have attained my bed. And so it was that my eyes were
caught, in the midst of this chaos, by the sight of a woman who was standing near a lamppost.
I have always been a man who, when glancing at a woman, looks first at the face, and then at the waist (those shallow curves
that so signal youth and vitality), and then thirdly at the hair, assessing in an instant its gloss and length. I know that
there are men for whom the reverse is true and men whose eyes fix inevitably upon the bodice of a dress and then hope for
a glimpse of calf, but on that night, I was incapable of parsing the woman in question in such a calculated manner simply
because I was too riveted by the whole.
I will not say
plain,
for who of us is entirely plain in youth? But neither will I say
beautiful,
for there was about her face and person a strength of color and of feature that rendered her neither delicate nor pliant,
attributes I had previously thought necessary for any consideration of true feminine beauty. She had immoderate height as
well, which is often off-putting in a woman. But there was about her a quality of stillness that was undeniably arresting.
If I close my eyes now, here in this racketing compartment, I can travel back in time more than three decades and see her
unmoving form amidst the nearly hysterical crowd. And even the golden brown of her eyes, a color in perfect complement to
the topaz of her dress, an inspired choice of fabric.
(As it happened, this was a skill at which Etna had no peer — that of matching her clothing and jewels to her own idiosyncratic
charms.)
The woman had almond-shaped eyes and an abundance of dark brown lashes. Her nostrils and her cheekbones were prominent, as
if there were a foreign element to her blood. Her acorn-colored hair, I guessed, would unwind to her waist. She was holding
a child in her arms, which I took to be her own. My desire for this unknown woman was so immediate and keen and inappropriate
that it quite startled me; and I have often wondered if that punishing desire, that sense of fire within the body, that craven
need to touch the skin, was not simply the result of the heightened circumstances of the fire itself. Would I have been so
ravished had I seen Etna Bliss across the dining room, or turned and noted her standing behind me on a street corner? I answer
myself, as I inevitably do, with the knowledge that it would not have mattered in what place or on what date I first saw the
woman — my reaction would have been just as swift and as terrifying.
(In a further aside, I should just like to add here that I have observed in my sixty-four years that passion both erodes and
enhances character in equal measure, and not slowly but instantly, and in such a manner that what is left is not in balance
but is thrown desperately out of kilter in both directions. The erosion the result of the willingness to do whatever is necessary
to obtain the object of one’s desire, even if it means engaging in lies or deception or debasing what was once treasured.
The enhancement a result of the knowledge that one is capable of loving greatly, an understanding that leaves one, paradoxically,
with a feeling of gratitude and pride in spite of all the carnage.)
(But, of course, I knew none of this at the time.)
When I had attended with some impatience and distraction to a man who had attached himself to my arm, an elderly gentleman
with rheumy eyes looking for his wife, I turned back to the place where the woman and child had stood and saw that they were
gone. With a sense of panic I can only describe as wholly uncharacteristic and quite possibly deranged — fortunately such
agitation was hardly noticeable in that crowd — I searched the quadrangle as a father will for a lost child. Many people were
already dispersing to their homes and to cabs (a fact that did little to ease my anxiety), while others had emerged from the
surrounding houses with blankets and coats and water and cocoa and even spirits for the victims of the blaze. Some of those
who had been in the dining room were now huddled in garments that were either too big or too small for them; they looked like
refugees who had beached themselves upon the quadrangle. By now the fire brigade had arrived and was turning its hoses on
the hotel. I am not aware that they saved a single soul that night, though they did drench the charred building with water
that turned to icicles before morning.
I wiped at my cheeks and forehead with my handkerchief. Strangely, I do not remember feeling cold. I walked amongst the thinning
crowd, my thoughts undisciplined. How was it that this woman had escaped my notice all the time I had been at Thrupp? After
all, the village was not so large as to produce general anonymity. And why had she been dining at the hotel? Had she been
sitting behind me as I had eaten my poached sole in solitude? Had the child been with her then?
I went on in this manner for some time until I began to slow my pace. It was not that desire had ebbed but rather that fatigue
was overwhelming me. I became aware that I had suffered a terrific shock: my knees grew shaky, and my hands began to tremble.
I finally noticed the cold as well; it cannot have been more than twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit on that night. I decided
to seek refuge and was recrossing the quadrangle for perhaps the fifth time when I heard a child’s cry. I turned in the direction
of the sound and saw two women standing in the darkness. The taller of the two was half hidden beneath a rug thrown over her
shoulders and in which she had wrapped the child. Next to her, and clinging to her arm, was an older woman who seemed in some
distress. She was coughing roughly.
When I drew closer to the threesome, I saw that the stillness I had observed in the woman with the golden brown eyes had now
been replaced by concern.
“Madam,” I said, approaching swiftly (as swiftly as the fire itself?), “are you in need of assistance?”
Whether Etna Bliss actually saw me then, or not until the following day, I cannot say, for she was understandably distracted.
“Please, I must get my aunt home,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you could find us transportation, for she has inhaled a great
deal of smoke and cannot walk the necessary distance to her house even under the best of circumstances.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Will you stay put?”