by Anita Shreve
I cursed myself for having kept silent on our wedding night. Later, the right moment for such a confrontation having passed, I could not find a suitable context in which to broach the delicate subject. Then, as the weeks slipped by us, as we entered into the daily routines of our married life, the notion of raising such an appalling topic grew more and more difficult, until it became impossible even to imagine querying her on this point. (A moment lost is a moment lost forever, is it not?)
One evening several months after we had returned from our wedding trip, I stood impulsively and crossed the room and knelt before my wife. Etna had been poking at a knot for some minutes with her needle in an effort to release the threads, and perhaps it caused me to think about the tightening knot of our marriage, for I seized her hand and cried out that I loved her dearly and wished only for her happiness. She looked at me with an astonished, perhaps even alarmed, expression on her face. “Nicholas,” she said. (For years, my wife retained a slight reluctance to use my Christian name. It was as though she had been about to utter Professor Van Tassel, but had stopped herself in time.) She still held her sewing needle with one hand; the embroidery hoop had fallen into her lap. Her eyes, normally so lovely, were pink tinged from eyestrain (I would have to find her a better lamp, I thought). Before I could stop the words, I exclaimed, “How cold you are!” Her hand was unexpectedly chilly in my own, and I could not help but recall the evening after the hotel fire when I had conveyed Etna to William Bliss’s house, and she had put her hand in mine and had exclaimed, with like astonishment, How cold you are! It was as though, in the months since our wedding, I had leached the warmth from my wife’s body.
Only one other time did I speak of love to Etna. One late afternoon, we stood at a second-story window looking down together at our children playing in a side yard. It was a moment such as only parents can share — pride commingled with the purest sort of joy — and it seemed that day that Etna smiled not only upon Clara and Nicodemus, but upon me as well; indeed, so encouraged was I by that entirely spontaneous smile that I blurted out, startling her, “Love me, Etna. Please love me.” It was, I know now, the purest sort of howl in the desert, and I could see at once that I had frightened her. She turned slowly and left the window, not unkindly or harshly, but almost reluctantly, as though, if it had been in her power to do so, she would willingly have summoned love.
(And what to say of our physical relations? I was knowledgeable, if not necessarily accomplished, in the more exotic practices of the sexual arts, an interest that has proven to be lifelong. Though I would not for all the world have introduced these arcane acts to the marriage bed, nor would I have sullied Etna with my considerable knowledge, I did, unlike so many new husbands, know something about the female body and how it may receive pleasure. Etna did not rebuff me, but neither did she respond; and though failure to pleasure a woman will not extinguish the sexual flame in a man — endlessly reignited — it curbed extraordinary effort, so that our relations became more habitual than inventive.
But enough of this. Dear God, enough.)
So it was that Etna and I sat among the twinkling dust motes that October morning in the breakfast room, a habit I would not ever have willingly forgone. Though we were strangers in the night, we were, in the light of morning, once again husband and wife, involved amiably in the quotidian. As we ate our breakfast of toast and eggs and meat and so forth, we would — without tension of any sort — parse the hours to come. She kept beside her plate a pen and ink pot and notebook, and as we chatted she would fill its pages with notations, tasks to be completed or food to be purchased. I loved to watch her at this activity, since she had grown only lovelier with age and was, at forty, more beautiful than when I had met her at twenty-five. Every woman has, I am convinced, a specific age at which her beauty peaks. For most, this occurs at fifteen or sixteen years of age, when they are still girls. But though these perfect creatures are lovely and have great promise (yet how many later disappoint!), one cannot touch, as it were, these treasures, and thus their beauty cannot be fully appreciated. Of course, I cannot ever know what Etna looked like at fifteen years of age (sadly, no photographs of her then exist), but I feel confident in saying that Etna was, at forty, at her best.
“Will you join me at the reception tonight?” I asked my wife as she buttered her toast.
I referred to a gathering that would be held that evening to introduce to the faculty the men who had survived thus far what was proving to be a rigorous search for a candidate to replace Noah Fitch. Fitch had ascended to and held for four years until his death several months earlier the position of Dean of Faculty. I had made no secret of my ambitions and still remained as one of the final candidates. (Against all likelihood, the hapless Moxon had nearly made it too; he was well liked and had had considerable success with his popular biography of Lord Byron.) My two remaining rivals were Arthur Hallock, the man who had brought physical culture to Thrupp, and Fisher Talcott Ames, an historian from Bates College. All fall, the Board of Corporators of the college had brought in other candidates — Atwater Hall, from Princeton, and William Merriam Hatch, from Dartmouth, are two that I recall — and though it had been disconcerting to see what could only have been rivals walking the halls of Thrupp, I was fairly confident of a happy outcome.
The reception would be at the home of Edward Ferald, who had swiftly ascended to the Board of Corporators by dint of his considerable fortune. Thrupp was only too glad to have him: an “old boy” as well as a patron was well nigh an unbeatable combination (Ferald was rumored to have in excess of two million). Though Ferald had a vote in the upcoming election (a vote I did not expect to garner; the memory of that failing grade in his Scott tutorial doubtless lingered in his mind), his would be but one of seven, and I felt fairly certain of at least three of their number.
“I look forward to it,” Etna said, rolling back the cuffs of her serviceable white blouse. I could always tell by what my wife wore at breakfast what she would be doing that day; and as she had on a gabardine skirt and a pair of boots not her best, I deduced that she would be spending a portion of her day at the settlement house. She functioned there as an administrator and was much appreciated for her secretarial skills. The settlement house took in indigent women and girls and children only, which was reassuring to me, as I should not have liked my wife exposed to the sort of men who would have been forced to resort to such charity. It was bad enough that Etna had to know of the horrors that befell girls of poor moral character, but I comforted myself by imagining the great pains my wife would take to insure that our daughter, Clara, fell to no such harm. “Is it for dinner?” she asked.
The telephone rang in the kitchen, and I hoped it was not for me. I did not like my early-morning interludes with Etna interrupted for any reason. “I believe so,” I said.
“Then I should dismiss Mary after she has prepared the children’s dinners. We won’t be dining at home this evening, and neither of us will be home for lunch.”
“No, you’re quite right,” I said, distracted by the day’s headline: wilson appeals to nation to pray for peace.
“Although she could do the marketing,” Etna said more to herself than to me.
“The reception is to introduce to the faculty the remaining candidates for the post of Dean,” I said.
My wife looked up from her list. “It is a post you should have,” she said.
“I think I am a strong candidate,” I said. “If it weren’t for these bylaws that so shackle the board, I might have the post already.” I spoke with equanimity, but beneath my calm exterior, I was annoyed by the necessity of the college to consider candidates from outside the school.
“When is the vote?”
“December fourth.”
“Why so long a wait?”
“The date is stipulated in the bylaws. It must be precisely four months after the search has begun.”
“Perhaps this would be a good day to have the painter in to finish the hallway,” Etna said, pu
tting the top of her pen to her chin. “He could work undisturbed through the late afternoon and evening.”
“Yes,” I said, “that might be wise.”
And then she said, in a quieter voice, “I shall be needing some more money, Nicholas.”
I looked up at her. “For…?”
“Fuel for the motorcar,” she said. “And there are other expenses I have. Of a more personal nature.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, not wishing to inquire further what these expenses of a “more personal” nature might be.
“And Clara has a cough,” she added.
“Clara does not have a cough,” I said, glancing at the letters Mary had just put by my plate.
“You heard her this morning,” Etna said.
“It is my opinion,” I said, opening the first envelope on the stack, “that our daughter is a remarkably gifted actress when it suits her.”
“Our daughter does not lie.”
“I love her dearly, Etna, but I happen to know that Clara has a particularly odious examination on plane geometry this afternoon and that she would resort to any ruse to get out of it. Tell me you didn’t say she could stay home from school.”
“I’m afraid I might have,” my wife said.
“You are altogether too soft,” I said, not unkindly. I stood and walked to the hallway and called up the stairs. “Clara, come down here, please,” I said, reading what was not a letter after all but rather an invoice. “This can’t possibly be right,” I said.
“What is it?” Etna asked.
“It’s a bill for a chandelier,” I said, turning to her. “White iron, six sconces. From March’s in Hanover. Did we order a chandelier?”
“Let me see that,” Etna said. After a moment, she added, in what I took to be an annoyed tone, “I sent it back. I don’t understand why we should have received a bill.”
“Then we did order a chandelier.”
“I did,” she said. “I thought it might look pretty in the side entrance. But it was far too big. I sent it back.”
“I’ll just telephone the man and remind him.”
“Let me,” Etna said. “You have enough to do. This is a household item. I will see to it.”
I cannot say whether or not we discussed the matter further, for Clara, whose presence was always vivid (even when she was feigning illness), came down the stairs and into the room. She had been born a year and two days after our wedding and was growing into a comely girl. For some time, I had thought that she would be a frail and slender child, since she could hardly keep any weight on her bones, but lately she had become sturdier. Clara had inherited Etna’s height and the blond, blue-eyed coloring of my Dutch ancestors (though I myself had brown hair), and she had exquisitely textured skin. I had to suppress a smile when she entered the room, for she had misbuttoned the sweater she wore over her uniform.
“Clara, are you ill?” I asked. “I warn you that you must tell me the truth.”
Our daughter opened her mouth to reply, but something in my voice, or perhaps in my face, gave her pause. She had entered the room with a wan demeanor imperfectly masking the bloom of good health. Now she seemed more confused than sickening from a cough.
“My dear,” I said, softening my tone, “do you think that you might try extra hard to make it to school today because of the importance of the geometry examination?”
She pondered this request and glanced at her mother.
“Clara, I agree with your father,” Etna said. “Perhaps you are feeling better now.”
Clara coughed once feebly, but even she could see that the game was lost. And it being lost, there was now no reason to pretend to no appetite. She gazed longingly at the spread on the buffet. “Is there jam today with bread?” she asked.
I set off for the college on foot, as I did every weekday morning that the weather was hospitable, though even in inclemency I tried to make the journey. The walk was my only form of exercise. As I may have mentioned, I did not, as did so many of my colleagues, exercise for sport. I did not ride, for example, or bowl or play base-ball. But my step was brisk, nevertheless, abetted by the nearly translucent color of the autumn leaves — golden ochre and tulip red, interspersed with grass green. The New England soil and air and water produced this rampant color, and no matter how much one anticipated it, it was always a surprise (and that surprise a further surprise, since I had been a New Englander for well over twenty years). The mind forgot, through the white winter and the humid summer, just how brilliant nature could be. Indeed, one could scarcely credit the color, nor the blue above it, and I thought how seldom it was that nature was accurately described in literature. (Wordsworth, possibly, though then again it was more the idea of nature than nature itself that had so engaged that poet.) It was enough to put one in mind of one’s maker (autumn in New England being one of God’s better creations), despite my tepid acquaintance with God — though I thanked him often enough for the miracle of my children and the more unlikely miracle of my fourteen years of marriage to Etna Bliss.
My journey that morning took me past two dairy farms, neither picturesque, and then along the outskirts of the village where the modest houses were not pleasing to the eye (the houses of college staff and village shopkeepers and so forth), and then finally to the foot of Wheelock, ablaze with a canopy overhead that produced a fiery tunnel through which one yearned to walk. I recalled then my autumn walks with Clara not so many years previous and the manner in which she would clap her hands, and her mouth would form an astonished O. She would sprint ahead, gathering up the loveliest blots of color — scarlet and tangerine and butter yellow — so that when we returned home, our pockets would crinkle with dried leaves. (How I adored those walks and adore the memory of them now!)
I strode up Wheelock Street with somewhat more decorum than Clara would have done. Though the world had changed considerably since 1899, the houses on that street had not. I paused in front of the home of William Bliss, who until recently had been a frequent visitor to our house; our children called him Papa, as one would a beloved grandfather. But now, sadly, the man had been diagnosed with the cancer and was, I knew, resting in an upstairs bedroom. Etna and William had grown closer over the years, and she visited him several times a week. I believe she looked upon him as a father, a role he was only too happy to play. I often visited myself, and thought of doing so that day, but after a few seconds’ consideration, decided to move on, reluctant, on such a sparkling morning, to enter the darkened rooms of death. And as with nearly all such selfish decisions, I found, as I made my way to the college, that I could think of little else but the thing I had hoped to avoid, which was death, Bliss’s and my own one day. That line of thought led almost immediately to a seizure of thought such as might produce a sudden intake of breath: Were I to die before the end of the semester (which was Bliss’s sentence), what would be my legacy? Where would Nicholas Van Tassel have left his mark?
I stood in an attitude of contemplation and thought about the ambitious Van Tassel who had arrived at Thrupp so many years ago. Other men of the college had written better than I, had published more, had garnered more awards and prizes. The trajectories of their careers had been swifter, the ascent steeper. Mine had not been an altogether insignificant career — I had taught hundreds of students and perhaps even inspired one or two; and I had proved myself an able administrator (indeed, it was the successful supervision of what was now a full-fledged English Department that spoke most eloquently in favor of my ascending to the post of Dean of Faculty) — but still, these small successes did not add up to greatness. No, I thought as I stood in the quadrangle, if I had come close to greatness in my life, it was in loving the woman who was my wife. I knew that few men of my acquaintance would have said that greatness could be had simply in loving another: it was too easy, too common, too uxorious, they would doubtless have argued. Indeed, I had seldom heard a man speak of love; it was understood to be a discourse reserved exclusively for women and poets. Yet I knew, as
I stood there, that I had, in loving Etna, touched something extraordinary in myself. It was the one occupation that had engaged all of me: my senses, my intellect, and my emotions.
I took a step forward and walked on for a bit and then stopped abruptly, assaulted by a new and troubling thought. Would it not be necessary to have that extraordinary love returned in order to have achieved true greatness? Etna had never spoken the words of love to me, and I had been disinclined, after those two previous (and distressing) encounters, to press her on this point. She was more fond of me than she had been at the beginning of our marriage — of this I was quite certain — but did she love me? It is with some heartache — even now, after all these years, even after all that was to follow — that I must write here that she did not. Not as I loved her. This was the bargain we had made, was it not? She had agreed to be my wife in exchange for the freedom to be a mother and mistress of her own home, and, more recently, to come and go in an automobile to a place where she was able to find some satisfaction in her charitable work. For a long moment, as I watched the students bisect the quadrangle’s green — that brisk autumnal geometry — I felt sad, quite out of keeping with the glorious day. But then I reminded myself that I did, in fact, actually have Etna Bliss for a wife. Were not such questions irrelevant in the face of so great a truth? I shook off my fleeting melancholy and set off for my classroom.
I heard the voices even before I had turned the corner. There was no mistaking Ferald’s self-satisfied drawl or Moxon’s high-pitched queries (the very voice of sincerity), though there was a third voice I could not identify, a voice with an English accent that had perhaps blurred over the years. I thought of slipping unseen into a classroom, since I did not welcome an encounter with Edward Ferald under any circumstances, but it was already too late. Indeed, had I not pressed myself against the wall, there might have been a collision.
