All He Ever Wanted (36 page)
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.
(And if I was an interregnum, what was Phillip Asher? An interregnum within the interregnum? A mere echo of a previous love?
Did Phillip and Samuel ever speak again? I do not know.)
In June, I will retire from Thrupp College, which is, unfortunately, more recognizable than it ought to be as the school it
was in 1899 and 1915. During my tenure as Dean, I hired some thirty faculty members, increased the enrollment of the college
from four hundred to six hundred students, changed the three terms to two, and instituted the teaching of the contemporary
American novel, a radical move that surprised everyone.
Three years ago, I was informed, by way of legal telegram, that Etna had died as a result of influenza. She was fifty-six
when she perished. Oddly, her sister Miriam went to great pains to bring Etna’s body back from England for burial in the family
plot in Exeter; perhaps Miriam felt remorse for her condescending treatment of her sister those many years ago. More oddly
still, I was invited to the funeral. I went with timid step, fearful that I might encounter either Phillip or Samuel Asher.
I needn’t have worried, as neither was present, Samuel apparently having decided, for reasons known only to him, not to make
the crossing with the body. The funeral itself was a wretched affair, poorly attended, as might have been expected: Etna had,
after all, been out of the country for fifteen years. The preacher, who hadn’t known her, kept referring to the deceased as
Edna,
a distraction that tended to disrupt the strangely comforting wallow of grief.
For yes, I did grieve then. And I do so still.
I have mostly given up trying to imagine what Etna’s life with Samuel in England was like. Though they lived together until
her death, they never married. Was this Etna’s choice? Or Samuel’s? Did she suffer from having lost her children? I believe
that she must have. I believe my wife would have lived a life composed in equal parts of shared happiness and private misery.
To date, Nicodemus has been reluctant to investigate the matter of why his mother went away to live in London, abandoning
him when he was only six, and why he was raised without his sister; but now that he is about to become a father himself, I
suspect that these are questions he will shortly ask. On rereading this memoir, however, I see that I have revealed more than
I intended, both to the reader and to myself, and that perhaps it is not a suitable thing to pass on to a child. It seems
to me a melodramatic tale as well, the story of a faintly ridiculous man, of little interest to anyone; but then again, so
much of life (the joy, the anguish, the words of recrimination, our strange fits of passion) is, sadly, melodramatic in nature,
hardly artful.
We are nearing the station, for I can feel the slowing heartbeat of this overheated train, a tired beast wanting to end its
day and rest. Soon I shall step onto the platform and search the crowd in vain for my daughter, whom I have not seen in almost
two decades. It may be that there will be tears in my eyes as I alight, or perhaps it will be only that I am dazzled from
the glare, befuddled by the heat, an old man in the early throes of Florida sunstroke.
But I shall go on. And will, when my head has cleared, summon a taxi to take me to the address of my sister, where I will
greet my sisters and brothers and cousins, and hope for a word with my daughter. When the funeral is over, I will make the
return journey, with perhaps a short stop in Charleston to visit Betty Hazzard. In Thrupp, I shall sit out my remaining days
in a study in which I constantly arrange and rearrange my books, as if in ordering a library one could order a life. As to
what I shall do with this untidy journal, I think I might slip it next to Dryden’s
Palamon and Arcite,
since neither is a volume I am apt to want any time soon.
What was my crime? I taught a child to lie, but my sins were graver far.
I have written quite enough for now, and, as a result, I am feeling rather hollowed out and in need of a cold drink. In this
document, its prose chipped and flaking, I have evidence of a life once lived, proof that I once passed this way and thought
to have love and understanding, passion and forgiveness, if not finally for my soul then for the condition of all things natural
in the body and in the heart, which is always large and hungry and wanting.
Nicholaas Van Tassel
West Palm Beach, Florida
September 23, 1933
Thank you Michael, Ginger, Alan, Katherine, and John. (Thanks also to Betsy Uhrig.)
Anita Shreve is the author of the acclaimed novels
Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilot’s Wife, Fortune’s Rocks, The
Last Time They Met,
and
Sea Glass.
She lives in Massachusetts.