by Anita Shreve
She stood and shook the water from her fingers. “I have happy family memories, certainly,” she said carefully.
She moved around the tiled edge of the pool and sat in a wicker chair near its edge. The act of sitting caused her skirt to rise. Drawn by the sight of her copper ankles, I joined her in an adjacent chair. Along the opposite wall, there were many plants, which seemed to thrive in the room’s humidity. Etna’s hair had begun to curl at her temples. I reached over and took her hand in mine.
“Is it so very important to you?” she asked.
“Your happiness?”
“No, I meant the post. Of Dean.”
“Yes, I think it is,” I answered. “I am ambitious.”
“Not overly so.”
“It is something I have wanted for some years now.”
“Your workload will increase.”
“I regard it as a challenge.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, smiling at me.
“What is so amusing?” I asked.
“I was remembering that first time we had tea in town on Kimball Street. You said you were willing to wait years to gain Noah Fitch’s position. I was struck by your patience.”
“That seems so long ago,” I said, thinking of that pleasant outing. “I remember you spoke of Newman.”
“You were surprised I had ever heard of the man,” Etna said.
“Well, yes, I was. I know I shouldn’t have been, I can see that now. You spoke of freedom.”
“Did I?”
She withdrew her hand. “Perhaps we should go back. We shall be missed.”
“Linger a bit,” I said, unwilling just yet to relinquish her to the party.
There was something I wanted to say to my wife. Now, after all these years. The ripples on the water combined with an element of risk were making me bold. And though I was aware of a sterner, more sensible voice screaming no within my head, I was sorely tempted toward adventure.
“I wish …” I said.
Etna turned to face me. She waited. “What do you wish for, Nicholas?” she asked after a time.
I tried to form the question I so very much wanted my wife to answer. I opened my mouth and then closed it. How should I put this, exactly? What would be the most delicate way of phrasing it? Should I begin with an apology? Should I start by saying that I knew such a question might be offensive, but that I had waited so long for an answer? I had shown patience, had I not? Was this not an answer to which a man, a husband, was entitled?
I opened my mouth again. I may have leaned forward. Etna may have leaned forward as well. It seemed there was a long silence between us.
“I wish I could erase the memory of our wedding trip!” I blurted in frustration.
Etna recoiled slightly — stunned, I think, by the ferocity of my statement. She sat in an attitude of stillness, as I had so often seen her do in moments of fear or confusion. This was the closest we had ever come to discussing the events of our wedding night, and I was now quite horrified that I had lost control of my tongue.
“It is just that …” I said, seeking to soften and explain. “It seems to have …” I realized that of course I could not utter aloud my anxieties about that night. I could not ask her if she had had other lovers before me. Sense had won out over boldness. “I really cannot say,” I said helplessly.
Etna shook her head. “Whatever is the matter, Nicholas?” she asked. “You are behaving very strangely tonight.”
“There is nothing the matter,” I said. “It is just that …” But I was unable to continue. She understood, I am sure of it. For she laid her hand over mine with a tender gesture and a kindness that nearly takes my breath away when I recall it now.
“Nicholas, sometimes you make me laugh. You are so earnest and you try so hard,” she said.
“We all try hard in our own small ways,” I replied.
“I’m told there is a conservatory,” she said, standing.
“A conservatory,” I repeated, rising with her. “Another English affectation. If Ferald is so enamored of England, perhaps he should simply move there.”
“And would that make you happy?” Etna asked.
I shrugged down my vest, which had risen over my considerable stomach. “I already am happy,” I insisted.
We left the natatorium. Moving from room to room, I could hear the murmur of voices from the public rooms of the house. In time, we found the glass conservatory, through which one could view the stars. We also discovered a remarkably modern kitchen, fitted out with all the latest conveniences: a toaster, a refrigerator, an electric hot plate. Etna and I made a breathless run through a butler’s pantry that seemed nearly as long as the southern border of our own decently sized house. We returned to the gathering like children who imagine they have gotten away with something grand.
A waiter produced a tray of champagne in flutes. Etna and I each took one and clinked glasses. The sharp rap of a silver knife upon a wineglass cut short our sense of conspiracy. Heads turned in search of the source of the summons.
Edward Ferald, when he had everyone’s attention, put aside the glass and the knife. “Welcome, colleagues and lovely wives,” he began, the compliment causing a polite titter to ripple through the crowd. One could not help but note, however, that Ferald himself was not standing with his own lovely wife, but rather with Phillip Asher, lately of Yale.
“Thank you for coming to my home on this beautiful October evening,” Ferald continued. “I will let you get to your suppers in just a moment, but I wanted to introduce to those of you who have not met him my very special guest, Phillip Asher, Professor of Philosophy at Yale. Professor Asher has graciously agreed to deliver the Kitchner Lectures at our college.”
There were some murmurs, even a bit of applause here.
“Professor Asher, who has a degree from Harvard College, was born in London, immigrated to this country when he was six, and was raised in our own New Hampshire. In addition to being an ethicist and a poet, Professor Asher is something of an explorer, having recently returned from an expedition to New Guinea,” Ferald went on. “He is currently on sabbatical for the term. Unless of course …” (and here Ferald winked, a particularly smarmy sight, and snaked his arm possessively around Asher’s shoulder) “…we can persuade the man to stay on a bit longer.”
Asher, looking for a place to cast his embarrassed gaze, caught my eye, and it was in that moment that the obvious occurred to me.
Asher was a candidate. It was only too clear.
Appalled by this new and certain knowledge, I studied the man. He was everything I was not. An authentic New Englander next to my stolid Dutch-American. (No, better than that, an authentic Englishman–turned–New Englander.) An apparently brilliant scholar next to my dull schoolmaster. A poet to my pedant. I thought of the college corporators who might find Asher appealing — the Reverend Mr. Frederick Stimson, currently the college pastor (a man who would almost certainly be intrigued by the thought of an ethicist as Dean); Howard Yates, a banker from an old New England family; Clark Price, a confessed Anglophile; not to mention the ever-present Ferald, who I knew despised me. Could dutiful administration and dogged scholarship compete with a wide-ranging intellect and an artistic temperament from Yale?
Asher’s eyes did not leave mine, and I knew only too well what he was seeing: a man grown stouter through the years, formed by his sedentary profession; a hairline receding with the same velocity as the stomach advanced. Would he know I was a candidate as well? Had Ferald apprised him of this fact, or could he sense ambition in another?
In the moment I had first seen Etna Bliss on the night of the fire, I had felt the keenest desire. It was a moment that had altered my life forever. Indeed, I had long grown accustomed to dividing my life into halves: before Etna and after Etna. So it was as I watched Ferald take Asher under his wing. Jealousy uncoiled itself and stretched its serpentine length, and I realized I had not yet known the depths of its passion, not even in my imaginings as I lay beside Etna
in our marriage bed. That had been, in comparison, a cerebral sort of envy that dissipated easily enough in the sunlight of the breakfast room. But this… this was something else: the under-belly of admiration, the darker side of love.
(It occurs to me now, some twenty years after the events I describe, that great passion or jealousy may be reduced to an understanding of chemicals in the brain, chemicals that are triggered and retriggered each time the memory of the initial event is retrieved. If so, what a riot of chemicals must be in my brain as I have been writing this memoir — a kind of chemical soup!)
(Are there chemicals in the brain? I shall have to query the Chemistry Professor on this matter when I return to Thrupp.)
That night, I slept fitfully, scarcely at all, and from time to time I sensed in Etna next to me an alertness of which I was normally not aware. I ascribed her restlessness to having caused a bit of unwanted attention at the party. Etna had been apologetic to her host, attributing a dropped champagne glass — which, unfortunately, had fallen during the momentary lull after Ferald’s introduction of Asher and was thus all the more noticeable in that crowded room of academics and their spouses — to wet fingers due to the condensation on the flute. As for my own agitation, each time I opened my eyes, I could see only too clearly the patrician features of Phillip Asher, lately of Yale. Thus Etna and I, we two small boats, bobbed along the tempestuous waves of insomnia, one visible and then lost, the other rising from a trough and then sinking again, until such time as we were roused from our bed by our maid, Abigail. My wife, as if she had been anticipating the summons for hours, rose from the sheets so quickly that I did not have a moment to speak to her.
We met, as always after our respective toilets, in the breakfast room. I noted that the relief I normally felt, the relief from the nightly marital tension between us, was not present that morning. We greeted each other not as warm friends will do (no kiss that morning, as I recall), but rather as exhausted or preoccupied colleagues, each engaged in silent dialogues with other persons. Since I cannot know Etna’s thoughts (at the time I imagined she was composing a further apology to Millicent Ferald), I can only record mine, which were both exceedingly anxious and highly political.
I sifted through all that had been said the day before — in the hallway of Chandler as well as at Ferald’s reception — and, as most of us will do after the fact, I composed replies that were sensible or sharp or even witty, replies that taunted me with their cleverness as they could never be uttered in reality. How I wished I could retrieve time so that I might appear the confident and generous professor who, instead of collapsing at the thought of a serious challenge to his candidacy, rather welcomed, even encouraged, the rival, as men of sport will do. But as I have never been a sporting man, and as I had been blindsided by Ferald’s remarks, I felt my mind to be a jumble of confused thoughts, none of which I should have liked to utter in Etna’s presence.
Appetite, as well as peace of mind, seemed to have been stolen from me, and I poked the viscous and vile-looking yolk of my egg much as a child will do. I should have to seek Asher out, I determined. I should have to speak to him to ascertain just how much of a threat the man really was. I knew that Eliphalet Stone (the man who detested bottom-feeders) would not be well-disposed to an outsider for the post. He believed, and rightly so, that only a man drawn from within the ranks of the college could understand the particular provincial needs of Thrupp. More to the point, Stone was not in favor of expansion. If Latin and Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation had been adequate for their own educations, their argument went, such a curriculum was good enough for successive generations as well. I was not as conservative as they, though I favored the direction of funds to the library rather than to further schools of science — with apologies to the ailing William Bliss, who was, in fact, no more interested in this debate than was Mary, who cleared away my nearly untouched plate with a disapproving look.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Etna reaching for the sugar bowl. I was reminded of my boorishness and sought immediately to make amends.
“That was a pleasant reception last night,” I said, puncturing the silence that lay between us.
“It was,” she said.
“You are perhaps too worried this morning about the broken champagne glass,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The one you dropped.”
“Yes,” she said, taking two spoonfuls of sugar (she normally took only the one).
“You were suitably apologetic,” I said. “I think you should not give it another thought.”
I glanced at her face, which was decidedly pale, causing me to inquire after her health. “Are you unwell?” I asked. “I noticed that you took two sugars.”
“Did I?”
She made an effort then to eat a bite of toast, which must have been what was needed, for she smiled at me.
“I’ll be at Baker House this afternoon and may not be back until five,” she said.
“Is that so?” I asked. “You’re not dressed for it.”
Indeed, Etna had on a pink silk blouse, not at all suited, I thought, to physical encounters with the poor.
“I hadn’t planned to go today, but I feel I need to this morning,” she said, which made me further curious. It was the expression of need, as well as the speed with which she had uttered it, that piqued my interest. It was not often that I saw desire of any sort in my wife, and I began to reflect that charity, though generous, was not entirely selfless, serving as it did the donor as well as the indigent.
“You will be here for dinner?” I asked.
“Yes, surely,” she said, making a notation on the pad of paper beside her cutlery.
I studied my wife in profile as she bent to her task. (She was, in my estimation, nearsighted, though she would not admit to it — a gentle vanity I could well understand and tolerate in a woman; odd circumstance, though, since I had long cultivated spectacles, though I did not, even at forty-five, need them.) The light from a transom window defined the planes of her face — those prominent cheekbones, her dark brown eyelashes framing her almond-shaped eyes, the sloping hairline at the temple, the long throat, only faintly lined. She wrote with a formidable and upright hand, and I strained to see her list, but apart from the words lamb and carbolic, I could make out nothing.
My attention was drawn away at that moment by the happy arrival of our children. Clara, her examination in plane geometry having been successfully negotiated, was in considerably better spirits than she’d been the day before, and, as a result, she tucked straight into her porridge (I so appreciated her good appetite), while Nicodemus, ever a finicky eater, looked at his bowl with suspicion.
“It is only porridge, Nicky,” Etna said.
“I must have brown sugar and raisins,” he said, and Etna, who often indulged him, nodded to Mary, who was standing by the door. We had only the three servants — Mary; our housemaid, Abigail; and Warren, the gardener. Not so many for that era, I think. Nothing, for example, as compared to Ferald’s thirteen or to Moxon’s seven. (What did they do all day? I often wondered. Moxon was not even married. Have I mentioned that Moxon had had an unexpected success with his life of Byron, a popular volume that had made him a small fortune? Yes, perhaps I have. Did I envy Moxon his success? Well, perhaps I did.)
“You look well today,” I said to Clara. I had been noticing for the past few months that the previously scrawny Clara was filling out admirably, growing taller and developing something of a womanly body. I was glad to see that she was discarding some of her more tomboyish mannerisms (her knees askew when she sat, a propensity to run when she ought to have walked, an entirely unnecessary fidgeting when she was required to be still, such as in church) and was demonstrably more graceful and fluid of limb. Nonetheless, she was still a child, and never more so than in the presence of her brother, who brought out the worst in her.
“Nicky wrote his name on the back of his bedroom door,” Clara announced with unconcealed satisfact
ion, much to the horror of Nicodemus.
“I did not!” he said, though incipient tears told us otherwise. At six, Nicky was incapable of a successful untruth (and still is today, I am happy to report).
“You did so,” Clara insisted. “N-I-C-O-D-E-M-A-S. He didn’t even spell it right.”
“Is this so?” Etna asked Nicky.
The tears that had threatened to spill fell in earnest down Nicky’s cheeks, making him all the more upset with himself.
“With what did you write your name?” Etna asked gently.
“He wrote it with charcoal from my drawing set,” Clara said at once. “And he ruined the crayon!”
By now one had sympathy for the young Nicodemus, who, after all, had committed no crime greater than the claiming of his door (I had no doubt the charcoal would easily wash off ), whereas Clara had committed the graver sin of informing. Thus are the joys of parenthood presented daily: sorting out the innocent from the not entirely innocent of misdemeanors.
“Nicky,” Etna said quietly, “after you have eaten your breakfast, you will wash your name off the back of your door, and you must pay Clara for the charcoal pencil.”
“But how shall I pay her?” Nicodemus asked.
“With money from your glass jar,” his mother said.
“But what is a charcoal crayon worth?”
“Ten cents,” Clara said at once.
I could see that this debate, if left to Clara and Nicky, would have no satisfactory conclusion, and so I said, quite arbitrarily, that Nicodemus would pay Clara one penny, an outcome that vexed Clara, who thought the charcoal crayon more dear than that, but one that pleased Nicky simply because it ended the discussion.
The children returned their attention to their meals, and, in the brief silence that followed, my preoccupation with Asher reasserted itself. I neither heard the rest of the breakfast conversation, if there was any, nor absorbed a word of my newspaper. I could see only the cool and confident visage of the man from Yale. Would not Asher’s excellent credentials as well as Ferald’s scheming ways sway the board in Asher’s favor? For a moment I began to contemplate the notion that I might not, after all, be elected to the post. I must do something, I thought, but what?
