by Anita Shreve
“You could spend the night here,” I ventured. “There are rooms for college guests. And then I could take you back in the morning. We could send a messenger to your uncle and aunt so that they won’t worry. A boy will have an easier time of it in the snow than we.”
“I would not send a boy out in this blizzard on my account,” she said. “No, I must go. I don’t have my things.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, reluctantly standing with her.
Our cloaks and mufflers had been dried next to the fire by a college servant. I tipped the fellow and inquired about a sleigh, and one was fetched for us. During the journey to her uncle’s house, Etna and I held a blanket above our heads, wrapping ourselves in a kind of tent. I could feel warm breath all about my face. At her door, she invited me in, but I had sympathy for the boy and the horses with the sleigh, and could now see what I had not been able to before: there were large drifts in which even a sleigh might be lost.
“I’ll call on Tuesday, then,” I said at her door.
She nodded, but she seemed distracted. I could not let her stand in the snow a moment longer.
“Go inside,” I said.
She nodded again, and she stepped into the house. She glanced once at me before she shut the door. I walked back to the sleigh, suddenly painfully aware of the snow, which was now considerably higher than my boots.
As it happened, Etna became ill with fever the next day, a development for which I chastised myself unmercifully. Had I warned her sufficiently of the perils of the storm — as any decent man would have done — she would not have taken sick. (Although it did occur to me that the preternatural flush I had seen upon her cheeks in the Bliss vestibule might have been due to incipient fever, but never mind.) I did not discover this until Tuesday, when I called at the accustomed hour and was told so by Mrs. Bliss, after which it was necessary to endure an interminable cup of tea and an intolerable conversation in the parlor (in which I must say Mrs. Bliss seemed to thrive like a rare tropical flower, or was she, too, coming down with the fever?). I could think of little but the fact that Etna might be lying in her bed not ten feet from my head. She was sick for a week, after which she was able to come down into the parlor for brief intervals, the evidence of the contagion in her cough and reddened nose. On my visits, I brought sweets from the baker and hothouse flowers and, on one occasion, a rare orchid from the college greenhouse that the Biology Professor, Everett Tucker, had given me. And, of course, I brought books for Etna to read. Despite these gifts, our conversations in that parlor (Etna settled in a chaise, myself sweating profusely beneath my suit jacket and waistcoat) were always desultory and unconvincing — and whether this was a result of our confinement in that dreadful room or of the unfortunate contrast to the brisk animation we had known together in the college dining room, I could not tell. Needless to say, it was with a feeling of tremendous relief that Etna determined she was well enough to again venture forth.
During our courtship, I was generous with my gifts, most of which I purchased at Johnston & Herrick’s in Hanover. I remember a pair of topaz earrings Etna particularly liked. (Have I said how much Etna attended to her dress and accessories? In a modest way, of course, but with an arresting mix of artfulness and taste.) I also gave her a moonstone necklace, and even now I cannot forget the pleasure of fastening the clasp at the back of her neck. Was I wrong to imagine that if I offered these gifts (a jet brooch, a tourmaline comb), and she accepted them, she was accepting me and my attentions, each present given and received an entry to my credit in the ledger of our courtship? And so I had hope, even some confidence, and began to think about a proper occasion on which to ask her to marry me.
It happened on a mild afternoon in March. It was unseasonably warm, the first good day we had had in weeks. The college had paths for walking that prior to that afternoon had been covered with snow and shortly after would be too muddy to negotiate, but on that day, betwixt the winter and the spring, the ground was hard enough for travel.
We left the Bliss household, and I led Etna to the head of the college paths, a walk already longer than any we had taken together. I was in a state of considerable anxiety, as any suitor about to make a petition will be, but I took heart from the fact that Etna did not demur at the entrance to the meadows. Indeed, I think she hardly noted it, so great was her restlessness, as if her limbs were suffused with the very fluid that was rising in the maples all around us. The path we embarked upon kept to the water’s edge, the river boisterous that day with early freshets. Not only was the air mild, but so also were the colors — the sky muted to a milky blue, the sharp outlines of the trees blurred by the soft air. Etna held her skirts as she walked, but even so, her hem was soon soaked. She seemed not to mind at all. In fact, she walked at some speed, as though she had a destination. She wore that day a blue and gray and brown plaid skirt that had a short matching cape with a gray rabbit’s-fur collar. When she lifted her skirt, I would sometimes catch a glimpse of layers of heavy cream-colored petticoats.
“I don’t much care for Upham’s stories,” she was saying. “I thought I would, but I do not. They are fussily written and weighted with the sort of writerly flourishes I find so distasteful.”
“Just so,” I said, for she had expressed this distaste before to me.
“What a lovely scent. What is that, do you know?”
I sniffed. I could smell only the river.
“And what was he thinking, to create a character so fundamentally blind that he does not even understand the true import of his utterances?” she asked.
“It is a device, I believe,” I said.
“To what end?”
“To show us a character who deceives himself.”
“Well, I for one cannot believe in such a device. It makes the reader distrust the narrator. How are we to know what truly happened? And besides, no one can be so self-deceived.”
“You don’t think so?” I asked.
“I think the promise of spring has addled your thoughts this afternoon, Nicholas. You’re unusually distracted.”
“Perhaps I am,” I said.
Within the half hour, we had come to a sheltered spot, a rocky outcropping that produced a hollow under which we could stand and rest a moment and survey the scene before us — a pleasant vista of rust-colored grasses bowed from the weight of the snow and ice that had so recently left them. Etna had been willing to follow me to the shelter; perhaps she had to catch her breath. Her legs cannot have been used to such exercise. I moved a step closer to her, my hands in the pockets of my coat, my own body soaked with perspiration beneath my waistcoat (I had overdressed). She did not move away, but allowed me this proximity as we gazed for a moment at a flock of starlings that were swooping in a complicated pattern at the edge of the river. She smiled and seemed content.
“My dear Etna,” I began, and there must have been an inadvertently reverential tone to my voice, for she turned to me at once with a look of puzzlement. She tucked her hands beneath her cloak. In the matted leaves, I could hear the rustle of some wood animal — a chipmunk? a squirrel?
“I have a matter of the utmost importance to discuss with you,” I said, and then paused, for already this was not going as planned; already my words had the ring of a business transaction. “That is to say, I wish to confess to you …” I took a quick breath. “…I love you,” I said.
This pronouncement cannot have been entirely unexpected (after all, what had she imagined the topaz earrings and jet brooch signified?), and yet she seemed taken aback, astonished in the moment. I suspect the idea of marriage had been very far from her thoughts just then; certainly her flushed face had been the result of exertion, not of expectation.
But as was so often true for Etna in situations of fright or surprise, she became utterly still. Even her eyelids seemed to blink more slowly as she regarded me steadily.
“I adore you,” I said with a fervor that must have seemed bizarre in contrast to her quiet. “I cannot sleep at night for
thinking of you. I wish you to be my wife.”
(When I recall this event, I cannot help but see a scene from a play in which one of the principles is overacting as a consequence of nerves while the other appears entirely to have forgotten her lines.)
Perhaps Etna was truly alarmed at this bold declaration, which I immediately sought to soften. “That is to say,” I continued, “I should like you for a wife if the prospect pleases you. Indeed, I am asking you to marry me. I know this can be neither sudden nor entirely unexpected, and, of course, you must take your time deciding; but I tell you now that you would make me the happiest man on earth if you would say yes.”
For a long time, Etna remained silent. I cannot ever be certain of her thoughts then, but I believe that though the possibility of marriage had occurred to her, and though she knew that she must in the end say yes if she was to escape the quiet tyranny of a life lived in exile, she had refused actually to imagine it. She had warded it off, so to speak, and thus was at a loss for reply.
I withdrew from my pocket a box that contained a ring I had recently purchased at Johnston & Herrick’s (at considerable expense, I might inform the reader; I cannot see the harm in mentioning it now). “I wish to give you this,” I said, “as a token of… to commit myself …” But I was unable to go on. The voluble, at times pedantic, Van Tassel was rendered as silent as a stone — as silent as Etna Bliss, for that matter. I held the ring, an emerald and white gold confection, in my palm.
She did not reach for it, but did bring her hands out from under her cloak, perhaps to use them in gesture, and I, nearly desperate lest she refuse me (a possibility that was growing more and more likely with each passing moment), seized one of those gloved hands and wrapped it over my own, so that the ring lay between us. I wrapped my free arm around her long back. I felt her stiffen, her limbs unyielding. But then, when it became clear I would not willingly release her, she relaxed enough to permit the embrace, though I cannot say she responded in any way. She remained motionless, in a state of neither giving nor receiving. Perhaps she was testing herself, watching herself for a reaction. (I believe an entire story, an entire marriage, was written in that embrace, though I could not have foreseen it then. And based on that experience, I would advise young lovers to be as attentive to the first embrace with the beloved as one would be to a soothsayer.)
Yet even Etna’s passivity was bliss (I apologize to the reader, but no other word will do): to feel her breath on my neck, to feel the rise and fall of her breast next to my hand. Slowly, so as to give her a chance to pull away (but she did not!) I allowed my face to slide along hers so that I might kiss her on the mouth, a highlight of my hourly imaginings. I had nearly achieved my goal when a great bird came fluttering along the path, that bird being Moxon in his coat — his hair and arms and tails flapping vigorously. Etna and I instinctively twisted apart. Moxon stopped abruptly.
“Van Tassel, what a surprise!” he said.
“Moxon,” I said.
“Miss Bliss. How nice to see you again.”
Etna turned slightly in his direction but kept her eyes averted.
Moxon seemed oblivious to the scene he had stumbled upon.
I was trembling, as much from rage as from the dashing of expectation.
“I am taking exercise,” Moxon said, stating the perfectly obvious, wiping his damp forehead with a handkerchief pulled from his coat. “My doctor tells me it’s the only antidote to college food. To keep the bowels moving and so forth.”
I was speechless, appalled that the man would discuss so boorish a subject in Etna’s presence.
(Wild boor?)
“Oh, by the way, good luck I ran into you,” Moxon said, replacing the damp handkerchief in his pocket. “Fitch has been searching for you all afternoon. He seems most exercised and has left messages everywhere for you to appear at his office at your earliest convenience.”
“Fitch,” I said distractedly. “Looking for me? Today?”
“Most assuredly.”
“Whatever for?”
“I have no idea.”
Etna was as still as a deer that has heard the snap of a twig. I rather loved that quality in her — of not dissembling, of not pretending something was acceptable when clearly it was not.
“I should be off,” Moxon said. “My doctor tells me I mustn’t allow the blood to slow on these outings.”
“By all means,” I said, waving him away.
I still held the emerald ring and was anxious to deliver it to its future owner. But when I turned to Etna, I could see that Moxon had ruined the mood of passivity.
“Etna, I am sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m chilled now, and I think I’d better return home. I don’t want to risk another fever.”
“No, of course not,” I said.
“We’ve come rather a distance.”
“It seemed no distance at all to me,” I said.
In desultory conversation and (for me) dismal silence, we walked back to the Bliss house, my frustration and my fury given vent only in my silent imprecations. When we arrived at Etna’s door, she turned and put out her hand in the ordinary way. I was in turmoil, for I was anxious to give her the ring, but I was loath to do so in so public a setting, since I feared that an inopportune moment would almost certainly facilitate a refusal. Thus, I couldn’t speak. But she did, somewhat easing my rattling heart.
“Professor Van Tassel,” she said, employing my surname, which I took to be a bad omen, “I know that an offer of marriage is not easily tendered.” (Oh, but it was, I so wanted to say; and perhaps she sensed this, for she held up her hand to stay my speech.) “But neither can such an offer, if it is sincere, be easily accepted,” she continued. “And so you must allow me time to think about this so that I can make an honest and clear decision.”
“I’ll call in two days,” I said, eager to mark the boundaries of this decision-making.
“No, let it be a week before we see each other again. I need time to contemplate my future.”
“You wish leisure to think,” I said.
“Not leisure, Professor Van Tassel. But time for meditation. I cannot make such a momentous decision in a hurry.”
“Shall I speak to your uncle?”
“Not at this time.”
“Please,” I said, unable to keep the desperation from my voice, “don’t take too much time. I doubt I’ll have a restful night until I hear from you.”
And I think that naked confession moved her somewhat, for she nodded — not in amusement or with pity, but with true sympathy, an emotion to which, I would shortly discover, Etna Bliss had ready and ample access.
The office of Noah Fitch was located at the end of a long stone corridor, so that to reach it, one had to walk that corridor’s distance, each boot step echoing between the polished mahogany panels of the walls and announcing the visitor well in advance of arrival. The journey’s reward was but a lone white bust of Franklin Pierce on a plinth before a massive window that overlooked the college quadrangle. Familiar with Fitch’s office (and somewhat out of breath from both exertion and anxiety), I knocked confidently to dispel an aura of timidity. Hearing a tentative knock upon one’s door, I knew only too well from having often been on the other side, put one in an unnecessarily superior frame of mind; and though Fitch was, as Hitchcock Professor, my natural superior, I did not like him to think me cowed by the summons.
Fitch was an impressive man, with tin-colored hair in the muttonchops mode and, improbably, a mouth of perfect teeth — an attribute of heredity or diet, I cannot say. He was a renowned vegetarian and had not taken meat in twenty years. He dressed formally on all occasions and held himself erect — even at fifty-five — and I often suspected it was his imposing and appealing physical presence as much as his scholarship that had garnered for him his post.
“Yes. Van Tassel. Come in.”
He led me into his office, and perhaps it was the drawn drapes at the windows that lent that offic
e such a somber air, even in the day-light. Needless to say, the walls were lined with books, though here and there a cherished objet interrupted the monotony: a birdcage, a lead rooster, an orange studded with cloves. There was also a rather good portrait of his wife, which was later to find its way into the Elliot Collection.
We sat across from each other, a large expanse of cherry wood between us. There was a folder in front of him.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” I asked.
“Yes, Van Tassel, I did.”
He glanced away for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. The urgency of which Moxon had spoken earlier was nowhere in evidence. I had then, as I had had sometimes in the past, the faint impression that Fitch did not actually like me very much — a feeling, I must say, he took great pains to hide — and I had long ago decided that the cause of this mild dislike was that I was not born and bred to my adopted New England heritage and thus lacked a certain authenticity.
“This is a delicate matter,” Fitch began.
The heat came instantly into my face. What might such a “delicate” matter be? Had a student complained about excessively harsh treatment? Had I, in my current state of distraction, been missing tutorials? Had I been unfair in my grading?
He pushed himself away from his desk. I became aware that I was leaning forward in my own chair in the attitude of a supplicant and so made an attempt to readjust my posture.
“As you know,” he began, “we share an interest in the writings of Sir Walter Scott.”
“Just so,” I said.
“And we are, as we should be, acquainted with the scholarship regarding this author.”
I nodded, resisting the urge to sniff, as I fancied myself better read in this field than Fitch, whose interests were necessarily broader, allowing him less opportunity for depth in any one area.
“And so it is that I have come across your monograph on the early novels of Sir Walter Scott.”
( Was there then the briefest jolt of alarm within my breast? I think not. Not yet.)
