All He Ever Wanted (2 page)

“Yes,” she said simply, thus placing the utmost trust, and perhaps even the well-being of her aunt, in my person.

I discovered that night that a man is never so capable and alert as when in the service of a woman he hopes to please. Almost
at once, I was in the street with paper dollars in my hand, which caught the eye of a cabdriver who already had a fare, but
who doubtless saw an opportunity to squeeze more bodies onto his frayed upholstered seats. I completed his calculation by
leaping onto the carriage and giving immediate instructions.

“Sir, this is irregular,” he said, looking for the extra tip.

But I, and rightly so, dressed him down. “A disaster has occurred of the most serious proportions, and people all about are
in dire need. You should be lending your aid for no pennies at all,” I said.

Astonishingly, for I had in the interim begun to doubt the reality of my encounter with the arresting woman, the two women
with the child were where I had left them. I helped the older woman, who was by now shivering badly, into the carriage first,
and then gave my hand to the woman with the child — the hand surprisingly warm in my frozen one. The other passengers could
barely suppress their annoyance at being delayed to their hot baths, but they nevertheless moved so that my party could fit.

“Madam, I shall need an address,” I said.

The ride cannot have lasted half an hour, even though the driver took the other fare home first. I sat across from the aunt,
who was still coughing, and from the couple, who might have been thinking of their lost possessions in the cloakroom (a dyed
fox coat? an alligator case?), but I was aware only of a slight pressure against my elbow, a pressure that increased or decreased
as the woman beside me attended to the child or leaned forward to put a hand upon her elderly aunt’s arm. And just that slight
pressure, of which the woman beside me was doubtless completely unaware, was, I believe, the most intensely physical moment
of my life to date — so much so that I can re-create its delicate promise and, yes, its eroticism merely by closing my eyes
here in my moving compartment, even with all that came after, all that might reasonably have blotted out such a tender memory.

We traveled the length of Wheelock Street until we came to an antique house of beeswax-colored clapboards. It was an unadorned
residence, like so many of the houses of that street. These I much preferred to the frippery that passed for architecture
on adjacent Gill Street: large, rambling structures with gables and porches and seemingly no symmetry, although these newer
houses did have better accommodations for indoor plumbing, for which one might have been willing to trade aesthetics. The
Bliss house had seven bedrooms, not counting attic rooms for servants, and two parlors, a dining room, and a study. It also
had, as of a year previous, steam heat, which hissed and bubbled up in silver radiators. I sometimes used to think the appliances
might explode and scald us to death as we played backgammon or took tea or dined of an evening in those overly furnished and
fussily papered rooms.

“But, madam, I know this house,” I said. “It is the home of William Bliss.”

“My uncle.”

I then realized that the woman sitting across from me was not elderly at all, but rather was the middle-aged wife of the Physics
Professor, a woman I had met on at least three occasions at the college.

“Mrs. Bliss,” I said, addressing her, “forgive me. I did not realize…”

But she, unable to speak, waved my apology away with a flutter of her hand.

I walked the two women to the front door, which was almost immediately opened by William Bliss himself.

“Van Tassel, what is this?” he asked.

“A fire at the hotel,” I explained quickly. “We are all lucky to have escaped with our lives.”

“Dear God, he said, embracing his wife and leading her farther into the house. “We wondered what all the bells and horns were
for.”

A housemaid took the child from the woman with the golden brown eyes, who then turned in my direction, simultaneously slipping
the rug from her shoulders and giving it to me to wear.

“Please take this for your journey home,” she said. “My aunt and I are very much in your debt.”

“Nicholas Van Tassel,” I said.

“Etna Bliss.”

Once again, she put her warm hand in mine. “How cold you are!” she said, looking down and withdrawing her hand almost immediately.
“Will you come in?”

Though I dearly wanted to enter that house, with its promise of warmth and its possibility of love (the mind leaps forward
with hope in an instant, does it not?), one knew that such was not appropriate under the circumstances.

“Thank you very much, but no,” I said. “You must go inside now.”

“Thank you, Mr. Van Tassel,” she said. And I think already her mind was on her aunt and the child and the hot bath that would
be waiting, for with that, she closed the door.

* * *

Perhaps a brief word here about my own circumstances at that time, which was December of 1899, for I believe it is important
to pass on to subsequent generations the facts of one’s heritage, information that is often neglected in the need to attend
to the day-to-day and, as a consequence, drifts off into the ether of time past. My father, Thomas Van Tassel, fought in the
War Between the States with the Sixty-fourth Regiment of New York and sacrificed a leg to that conflict at Antietam, a calamity
that in no way hindered his manhood, as I was but one of eleven children he subsequently sired off a succession of three wives.
My mother, his first wife, perished in childbirth — my own — so that I never knew her, but only the other two. My father,
clearly a productive man, was enterprising as well, and built three sizable businesses in his lifetime: a print shop, to which
I was apprenticed at a young age; a carriage shop; and then, as horses quite thoroughly gave way to motors, an automobile
showroom. My memories of my father exist primarily in the print shop, for I hardly knew him otherwise. I often sought refuge
in those rooms of paper and ink and type from my overly populated house in Tarrytown, New York, with its second and third
wives: one cold, the other melancholy, and in neither case well disposed to me, who had issued from the first wife, the only
woman my father had ever loved, a fact he did not shrink from announcing at frequent intervals, despite the impolitic nature
of the sentiment and the subsequent frigidity and sadness that resulted. I was not altogether bereft of feminine warmth during
my childhood, however, for I was close to one sibling, my sister Meritable, the very same sister whose funeral I am even now
journeying toward.

Perhaps because I was so engaged in the world of ink and broadsides, I developed an early and passionate appetite for learning
and was sent off to Dartmouth College at the age of sixteen. I can still remember the exquisite joy of discovering that I
should have a room to myself, for I had always had to share a room with at least three of my siblings. The college has an
estimable reputation and is widely known, so I shall not linger upon it here, except to say that it was there that I briefly
entertained the ministry, later abandoning it for want of piety.

After obtaining my degree, by which time I was twenty, I traveled abroad for two years and then was offered and accepted the
post of Associate Professor of English Literature and Rhetoric at Thrupp College, which is located some thirty-five miles
southeast of my alma mater. I took this post with the idea that in a smaller and less well known institution I might rise
more quickly and perhaps one day secure for myself the post of a Senior Professor or even of Dean of the Faculty, positions
that might not have been open to me had I remained at Dartmouth. I had not thought of taking a post outside of New England,
though there were opportunities to do so, the reason being that I had adopted the manners and customs of a New Englander so
thoroughly that I no longer considered myself a New Yorker. Indeed, I had occasionally taken great pains to present myself
as a New Englander, once even, I am a bit chagrined to admit, falsifying my history during my early months at Dartmouth, a
pretense that was difficult in the extreme to maintain and hence was abandoned before I had completed my first year. (It was
at Dartmouth that I dropped the second
a
from Nicholaas.)

Because my father was, by the time I had returned from Europe, modestly well off, I could easily have afforded to have my
own house in the village of Thrupp. I chose instead, however, to take rooms in Woram Hall, a Greek Revival structure affectionately
known as Worms, for the reason that I did not particularly wish to live entirely alone. I had as well a somewhat misguided
idea that boarding nearer to the students would allow me to come to know them intimately, and that this would, in turn, make
me a better teacher. In fact, I rather think the reverse was true: more often than not, I discovered, close proximity gave
birth to a thinly veiled antagonism that sometimes baffled me. My rooms consisted of a library, a bedroom, and a sitting room
in which to receive guests and preside over tutorials. In adopting New England ways, born two centuries earlier in Calvinistic
discipline, I had furnished these rooms with sturdy yet unadorned pieces — five ladder-back chairs, a four-poster bed, a dresser,
a cedar chest, a tall stool, and a writing desk in which I kept my papers — eschewing the more ornate and oversized furnishings
of the era that were so fashionable and so much in abundance elsewhere. (I think now of Moxon’s rooms: one could hardly move
for the settees and hassocks and English desks and velvet drapes and ornate marble clocks and fire screens and mahogany side
tables.) And as form may dictate content, I fit my daily habits to suit my austere surroundings, rising early, taking exercise,
arriving promptly to class, disciplining when necessary with a firm hand, and requiring much of my students in the way of
intellectual progress. Though I should not like to think I was regarded as severe by my students and colleagues, I am quite
certain I was considered stern. I think now, with the forgiveness that comes with reflection in later years, that I often
tried too hard to show myself the spiritual if not the physical progeny of my adopted forebears, even though what I imagined
to be the license of my New York heritage, as evidenced in my father’s excessive procreativity, would occasionally cause me
to stray from this narrow and spartan path, albeit seldom in public and never at Thrupp. For my parenthetical pleasure, I
traveled down to Springfield, Massachusetts, as did many of my unmarried, and not a few married, colleagues. I remember well
those furtive weekends, boarding the train at White River Junction and hoping one would not encounter a colleague in the dining
car, either coming or going, but always ready with a fabricated excuse should an encounter present itself. Over time, as a
result of such encounters, perhaps five or seven or ten, I had to develop a “sister” in Springfield whom I had twice monthly
to visit, even though said “sister” actually resided in Virginia, prior to moving to Florida, and wrote to me upon occasion,
the envelopes with the return address a source of some anxiety to me. I shall not here set forth in detail my activities while
in Springfield, though I can say that even in that city I proved to be, during my visits to its less savory neighborhoods,
as much a man of loyalty and habit as within the brick and granite halls of Thrupp.

More dazed than sensible, I took the cab back to the hotel, which was by now beginning to form its fantastical icicles as
a result of the sprays of water from the fire hoses. I lingered only briefly, however, due to the combination of penetrating
cold and shock, which had begun to make me shiver in earnest. I went back to my rooms at Worms, where I directed the head
boy to make a good fire and to draw a hot bath.

Worms did not then, nor does it now, have private bathrooms within its suites, and so I locked the door to the common bath
as I customarily did. The steam had made a cloud upon the cheval mirror, and I wiped away a circle of condensation so that
I could just make out my bewildered face. There was a bloody scratch on my cheek I had not known about. I was not accustomed
to spending any time in front of the glass, for I did not like to think myself vain, even in private, but that night I tried
to imagine how I, as a man, might appear to a woman who had just met me. At that time — I was thirty — I had a considerable
thicket of light brown hair, undistinguished in its color (this will surprise my son, for he has known me for a decade now
as only bald), and what is commonly called a barrel chest. That is, I had strength in my body, a body quite out of keeping
with my sedentary and intellectual occupations, a strength I could not refine but instead had learned to live with. I do not
know that I had ever been called handsome, my excursions to Springfield notwithstanding, for my lips were thickish in the
way of my Dutch forebears, and the bone structure of my face was all but lost within the stolid flesh bequeathed to me by
generations of burghers. To dispel that somewhat unpleasant image, and to appear more academic, I had cultivated spectacles
I did not actually need.

After my inspection, which taught me nothing I did not already know, except perhaps that one cannot hide one’s naked emotions
as well as one might wish, I lowered myself into water so hot that my submerged skin immediately turned bright pink, as though
I had been scalded. The boy, who I knew was angling for an A in “Logic and Rhetoric,” had set out a cup of hot cocoa, and
I indulged in these innocent pleasures, all the while seeing in my mind’s eye the form and face of Etna Bliss and feeling
anew the exquisite pressure of her arm against my own. Happily, the bath, as a hot soak will often do, produced a drowsiness
sufficient to send me off to my bed.

In the morning, I woke in a state of agitation and was forced to complete my toilet in haste and miss breakfast altogether
in order not to be late for my first class of the day, “The Romantic Lyric Poets” (Landon and Moore and Clare and so forth).
When I arrived at the classroom, I saw that the fire in the stove had gone out for want of tending and that the students sat
with their coats still on, their mufflers wrapped round their necks. Though cold, my classroom was not an unpleasant one.
The wainscoting had recently been painted white, an inspired touch that lent an illusion of light and air previously denied
by the dark walnut paneling so ubiquitous in those rooms. Above the wainscoting were large windows that looked out over the
quadrangle’s elms and sycamores. As one could take in this view only while standing, I often laid my arm upon the deep sills
and gazed out as the students wrote their exercises and examinations. That day, of course, the view was severely compromised
by the black maw of the hotel and the soot-dirty snow; in any event, I was too distraught to appreciate a view of any kind
— beautiful or not.