Stella Bain (17 page)

“Yes, I was.”

“Can you tell the assembled why you went to France?”

Etna takes a long breath. Of all the questions Hastings is likely to ask her, this is by far the most difficult. It is also the most crucial. “This will be a long answer, Mr. Hastings.”

“Proceed.”

“In the early summer of 1915, my husband and I had grown apart. I was living with our daughter, Clara, then fourteen, in a cottage I had purchased in Drury, New Hampshire. Nicky, then six, was living with his father. In order to bring Clara and me back to the house, my husband convinced our daughter, Clara, to tell an outrageous lie. She said that my husband’s rival for the post of dean of Thrupp College, a Mr. Phillip Asher, a man I had known when he was a boy and more recently as an acquaintance, had touched her inappropriately.”

“Did you believe your daughter?”

“At first, no. I could not believe that Phillip Asher, who seemed to have an unblemished character, would do such a thing. But then my daughter made a gesture that was so appalling, so personal, that I thought her incapable of making this up. I was horrified, but I was compelled to accept my daughter’s accusation. She was a child. I didn’t even know she knew such things were possible. That she should demonstrate the gesture seemed damning in itself.”

“So you returned to your husband’s home.”

“Yes, I did. I felt that Clara needed both parents to support her.”

“And then what happened?”

“My husband sent a letter to the chief of police in Thrupp and to the board of corporators at Thrupp College with the charge. Phillip Asher, who had won the post of dean, was immediately fired by the college and interrogated by the police. He left Thrupp in disgrace, his academic reputation destroyed. Later in the summer, my husband told me that Phillip Asher had gone to France as a pacifist and was serving as an ambulance driver with the British Red Cross.”

“How did you feel when your husband told you this?”

“I was deeply shaken. I felt that we had sent a man to his likely death. I was afraid my daughter would not forgive herself for having spoken up about this matter, and yet I believed she had done the right thing in bringing the matter to our attention. Mostly, I felt ill in both body and soul.”

“Then what happened?”

“Shortly after her father said that Phillip Asher was in France, Clara called out to her father and asked if she
could tell now.
My husband tried to hush her, but I was instantly alert to something amiss. I pressed my daughter as to what she meant and learned that what she had said about Phillip Asher was a lie. She had been coached by her father to tell this lie so that I, her mother, would return to the family home, which I had done, and also so that Mr. Phillip Asher’s reputation would be ruined.”

“This was on August seventeenth, 1915.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I was enraged. I went up to the guest room. I needed time to think. I tried to write to Phillip Asher, but I could find no words to convey my deep apology for what my family had done to him. I hated my husband then and would not admit him to the guest room, where I was staying.”

“And what about your daughter, Clara?”

“I knew that Abigail, our housekeeper, would keep an eye on both Clara and Nicky, who was too young to understand what was going on. It was my intention to go to Clara in the morning and talk about the incident with her. But I knew I needed to calm down first.”

“And then what happened?”

“It was a stifling night. It had been humid and hot for weeks, and I had the window open and the door ajar to get any kind of a breeze that might be blowing. I had fallen asleep without thinking to lock the door. At some point, I do not know precisely when, my husband entered the room. He had been drinking.”

Etna is silent. She cannot tell this next part. Not to the men assembled in the room. It feels prurient and disgusting. She tries to gather herself together.

“Mrs. Van Tassel, I know this is difficult for you,” her lawyer says encouragingly.

“Watching a man die is difficult for me, Mr. Hastings. I can answer your question. My husband assaulted me. He tore my clothes and hurt me.”

“Would it be fair to say that he raped you?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Objection.” Mr. Bates rises, nearly spitting. Perhaps he has been wanting to spit during Etna’s entire testimony. “Your Honor, no husband can be prosecuted for rape in this state.”

“Your Honor,” Mr. Hastings counters. “We have no intention of trying to prosecute Nicholas Van Tassel at this time. This testimony is intended to reveal why my client felt she needed to flee the house.”

“The testimony will be allowed,” the judge says.

“Mrs. Van Tassel, can you tell us what happened after the assault?”

“I felt that if I did not run from the house, my husband would kill me. The situation he had created was intolerable. I waited until he had fallen asleep, and then I ran. Well, not literally. I took my motorcar and drove away.”

“And where did you go?”

“I drove to White River Junction, where I caught the first train to Boston. I was afraid my husband would follow me. At the same time, I believed it was urgently necessary to find Mr. Asher in France and make amends to him for what our family had done to him. I know this doesn’t sound logical now, but I was not in my right mind. I believe no woman is after she has been raped.”

“Objection,” says Mr. Bates, rising. “Mrs. Van Tassel is in no position to know how all women feel after they have been assaulted, if that is indeed what happened. I further object to such crude language being used in this court.”

“Mr. Bates, this is a hearing room, and a fact is a fact, crude or not. Please sit down.”

“Mrs. Van Tassel,” asks Mr. Hastings, “can you continue with your answer?”

“When I arrived in Boston, I saw a poster at the train station advertising the need for young women to sign up for passage on a Red Cross hospital ship. Under the auspices of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, it was scheduled to cross the Atlantic to tend to the wounded in France. Training for nurse’s aides would take place aboard ship, at Southampton, and in France. As it happened, the training stopped the very second we set foot on French soil. The true nursing began then.”

“Mrs. Van Tassel, at what point would you say that you regained your wits?”

“That is a hard question to answer, since it was difficult to keep whatever wits one had to begin with under those terrible conditions. But I believe it must have been around October of 1915, as Captain Richardson suggested in his letter.”

“To reiterate, you asked to have your contract broken so that you could return to your children.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Objection,” shouts Mr. Bates. “Your Honor, is it necessary to have this testimony repeated? I believe we all understood it when it was read out.”

“Objection sustained. Mr. Hastings, would you please move on to your next question?”

Mr. Bates sits with a satisfied expression on his face. A point to him.

“What happened to you in regard to your desire to return to your children after that?”

“Common sense told me I could not just slip away from the camp and go AWOL. I might make it as far as a hospital ship going to the coast of England or even to London, but then what would I do? I did not have the means to travel back to America and would not have until I had fulfilled at least a year of my contract.”

“And that was it?”

“Yes, until I spoke with Phillip Asher. He suggested I look up his brother, Samuel Asher, whom I had once known in Exeter, at the Admiralty in London. Phillip thought his brother could help me.”

“And how did you find Phillip Asher?”

“He found me. He had heard I was looking for him.” Etna squeezes the fingers of her right hand. “A few months later, after a bombardment, he was terribly wounded in the face. He was brought into our hospital camp,” she says in a quiet voice. “His face was shattered.”

“What happened when you saw Mr. Asher’s face?”

“There are no words, Mr. Hastings, to express how I felt.”

“I am sure there are not.”

“I tried to comfort him and to follow him into surgery. I was certain that he would die. I was prevented from remaining near the surgical tent. I ran out of the tent and fell to my knees. Then I ran into a field. That is all I remember.”

Hastings moves to the other side of Etna. “You remember nothing about what happened to you after you ran into the field?”

“I did not remember anything about Phillip Asher until I recovered my memory, nearly ten months later.”

“But you do now remember what happened to you during that memory loss.”

“Yes, I do. I woke in a hospital tent in Marne. I will never know, I suspect, what happened between the time I ran into the field in Camiers and woke up on the canvas cot in Marne. I was very confused. I remember trying to guess at a name and coming up with Stella Bain. I called myself Stella and was known as Stella Bain all the time I was in Marne. I believe now that the name came to me because it is more or less an anagram of Etna Bliss.”

“At some point, you left France with the intention of going to London.”

“Yes. I had heard a soldier mention the word
Admiralty
when I was working in Marne. Immediately I began to obsess about the word. I thought if I could find out what
Admiralty
meant, the mystery of my memory loss would be explained.”

“And was it solved in that place?”

“Yes, but not until many months later.”

“Mrs. Van Tassel, during the time of your memory loss, did you know that you had children?”

“No, I did not.”

“You were abroad from September of 1915 until early March of 1916, a time of six months, during which you could not leave France to get back to see your children.”

“That is correct.”

“And from early March of 1916 to January of 1917, you did not know you had children.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“And what happened when you finally realized who you were and that you were a mother to Clara and Nicky?”

“I was stunned. Shamed. Worried. Before the week was out, I was able, through the generosity of Captain Samuel Asher, to obtain passage on a merchant ship leaving London for Cuba. I took another ship to Jacksonville, Florida, and a train to Gainesville, where I was shortly reunited with my daughter, Clara.”

Mr. Hastings turns away from Etna and addresses the judge. “Your Honor, may I request a recess? I do not want to exhaust my client, and I see that we have gone beyond the lunch hour.”

The judge contemplates Etna. “Yes,” he says. “We shall adjourn until ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Mr. Bates, I think this would be an opportune time for you to convey to your client the earnestness of the court’s request that he appear in this hearing room tomorrow.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Van Tassel,” the judge says. “You may step down now.”

“Court dismissed,” the bailiff calls out.

T
he next morning, when Etna sees Van Tassel moving toward her from the end of the corridor, she stands as still as an animal wishing to remain invisible. He is deep in conversation with Mr. Bates, who seems to be trying to persuade his client about something—a conversation Etna cannot hear. Van Tassel has aged, but so has she. More so than he, she suspects, because of her time in France. Her husband (she can barely think the word) has grown older in a way one might have expected: his body is rounder, his hair has begun to thin. He has a triple chin, which she does not remember from before. He seems, as he moves closer to her, to be a self-satisfied member of the gentry rather than a scholar: a man who eats well and entertains a great deal, a man who owns horses and land.

When he catches sight of Etna, Van Tassel stops while his hapless lawyer keeps on walking. Van Tassel’s blue eyes widen and his face is suffused with the blush that is more than a blush; he looks apoplectic. She waits for the color to slowly leach from his face. As he grows colder and his eyes narrow, he walks toward her.

“Etna,” he says with feeling, and for an awful moment, Etna thinks he will embrace her. “How
dare
you do this to me?”

Etna cannot pretend that he does not terrify her. The last time she saw this man was on a bed after he had raped her. But now she is at least capable of standing her ground. “I am not doing this
to you,
as you put it,” she says in a quiet voice. “I simply want to be a mother to my children.”

“You forfeited that right years ago.”

Etna can see a yellow stain on her husband’s shirt. He has perspired all the way through to his suit coat.

“The court will decide that,” she says.

“You are no mother,” Van Tassel declares, lifting his chin. “You are a whore and a harlot.”

“I believe the latter two are one and the same. In any case, I am neither.”

“I have evidence that you went straight to Samuel Asher’s home in London when you arrived there. That you lived with him in sin.”

Mr. Bates has a hand on Van Tassel’s elbow. “Dean Van Tassel, you are above this. You are wanted in court.”

“Who gave you that evidence?” Etna asks her husband.

“A detective I hired.”

Etna smiles. “You were misinformed.”

Van Tassel points a finger at Etna even as Mr. Bates is trying to drag his client away from the encounter. “You will be sorry for this.”

Etna holds her hands tightly in front of her. “I sincerely hope not,” she says.

Counsel for the Respondent calls Dr. George Church to the stand.

“Good morning, Doctor.”

“Good morning.”

“Can you tell us where you work and what your specialty is?”

“I work at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, and my specialty is psychiatric illness.”

“Have you ever had occasion to witness memory loss in a patient?”

“The condition is extremely rare. I have seen it only in cases of serious blows to the head. The memory loss is almost always short-lived, perhaps two or three days in duration. I have seen a similar condition in patients who appear to have sustained memory loss, yet when subjected to scrutiny confess that they only wish they had.”