All He Ever Wanted: A Novel

by Anita Shreve

  “My dear,” I said, standing and bending to kiss the top of Etna’s head, “I must leave you. I am late.”

  “Are you?” she asked, looking up.

  “A meeting,” I said. “I’d nearly forgotten.”

  “Shall I give you a ride?”

  “No, no, it’s not necessary. I’ll walk. I must have the exercise.”

  I did not want Etna to drive me to the college, because I was not, in fact, going to the college, but rather to the Hotel Thrupp. I didn’t know precisely what I should do when I arrived; I simply felt that I could not be elsewhere.

  The hotel had been rebuilt following the fire of 1899 and had been furnished in the manner of a New England colonial inn, which pleased me; as I may have mentioned, I did not care much for nineteenth-century decoration. Wood floors with good Persian rugs, pale wallpaper with white wainscoting, and simple mahogany and cherry pieces made up the lobby of the hotel, where I hovered, hoping that Asher would pass through. I could then pretend to have run into him and start up a conversation. For I was now intensely interested in speaking with the man away from the prying eyes of Ferald and his cronies. More to the point, I did not want to be seen visiting Asher at the college. An encounter in town, however, a word or two: nothing amiss in that.

  I sat in a chair in the corner and read the Thrupp Gazette and for the second time that day failed to absorb the news therein. I waited for as long as it might take a man to peruse a local journal and was about to leave the hotel and go to my college office (the office of Noah Fitch was now mine; I had, the reader will be happy to learn, installed electric lights) when I had the idea that Asher might be breakfasting in the hotel. I made my way to the dining room, and there, in the corner, was my prey.

  A waiter inquired as to whether I should be dining in the hotel that morning, and I, seizing an opportunity I had not anticipated, answered in the affirmative. As I was led toward a table, I passed by that of Phillip Asher.

  “Professor Asher,” I said, sounding (I hoped) suitably surprised. “Good morning.”

  “Van Tassel,” Asher said, holding a white linen napkin to his lap as he stood. He seemed momentarily flustered to be caught so off guard.

  “I trust you are enjoying your stay in Thrupp,” I said.

  “Very much so.”

  “That was quite a pleasant gathering last night.”

  “Yes, it was,” he said, using the napkin to wipe a stray bit of egg from his mustache.

  “Please, don’t let me disturb you,” I said, gesturing to his plate.

  Asher was silent a moment, as if considering various replies, and I was happy to see that the man was perhaps not as quick on his feet as I had at first imagined.

  “Are you breakfasting here as well?” he asked finally.

  “I often do — one or two times a week,” I said, inventing a schedule for myself as I spoke. I leaned in conspiratorially. “Our cook, upon occasion, makes an appalling porridge, which I only pretend to eat.” I glanced at the second chair at the table, a glance that cannot have been misinterpreted.

  “Will you join me?” Asher asked.

  And before Phillip Asher could inform me that he had nearly finished his own meal, I accepted his not entirely sincere offer (how could it be? I had forced myself upon him).

  “Excellent,” I said, dismissing the man who had been waiting to lead me to my table. “I should welcome an opportunity to discuss your lecture series, which I am looking forward to. They begin on Thursday?”

  I settled myself at the table. As I seldom ate at the hotel, I did not know the breakfast menu well. I ordered eggs, meat, toast, and orange marmalade when the waiter reappeared.

  “They do,” Asher said. He seemed to have lost his appetite, or perhaps he was simply sated, for he sat forward in his chair, wrists poised upon the table, and looked from me to the window and then back at me before he spoke. His face, already pale by nature, seemed excessively fair that morning. “I hope they will not be too much of a bore.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “Though you must miss New Haven.”

  “I am content to see the New England autumn in New Hampshire. The colors are so much richer the farther north one goes.”

  “To a point,” I said. “They are weak in Canada, I am told.”

  “Well, yes,” Asher said. “I meant New England.”

  “But Thrupp can have little appeal to one used to the scholarship of Yale,” I said. “I envy you.”

  “Do you?”

  “I envy anyone who has an opportunity to converse in a spirited manner with like-minded men on the work of Bertrand Russell or Hilaire Belloc or Ben Jonson, for that matter.”

  “I’m afraid I’m at a loss when it comes to Jonson,” Asher said. “Quite out of my field.” He paused for a moment, as if he could not remember his field, and I noted that he was studying my face intently — a face surely not worth such a perusal.

  “A minor poet,” I said, engaging in a little scrutiny of my own. Asher’s was a strong visage, the cheekbones prominent, the eyes truly gray. The man was undeniably handsome, which was a disconcerting realization, since I knew only too well that beauty in a man could well dispose others to favor him. I also knew the reverse of this truism: lack of beauty in myself had occasionally been a hindrance to advancement. (Though, in a slight disturbance of chronology, I will just say here that Asher and I met quite by chance more than a decade later on Newbury Street in Boston, and I was shocked by how unkind the years had been to him. He had quite simply faded in the interim. His hair was white, and his eyebrows were so pale as to be nearly invisible. “It wasn’t true,” I said to him as we stood on that charming Boston street. Asher nodded, speechless in the moment.)

  “I am afraid you will find Thrupp a very dull place,” I said in the dining room.

  “I have not so far.”

  “But one that you will soon tire of, I can assure you. I will admit there are some fine minds in the various disciplines, but there is simply so little to do in Thrupp,” I said. “No theater or music of any consequence.”

  “Really not?” he asked. “I was led to believe that the Cushing concerts were worth attending.”

  “But they are in the spring,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And you will be back in New Haven by then,” I said.

  “I am on sabbatical for the year,” he said.

  “So you are, so you are,” I said. “Do you have family?” I asked.

  “I am not married, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You studied at Harvard.”

  “I did.”

  “And did you not like Cambridge?” I asked.

  “It was not that I disliked Cambridge,” Asher said carefully. “It was simply that New Haven seemed the best place for me at the time.”

  “You have gone from London to Cambridge to New Haven to Thrupp, Professor Asher. You are a nomad. Wandering in the wrong direction, I might add.”

  “Or the right direction, depending upon one’s point of view,” he said quietly.

  “Quite,” I said, and busied myself with my breakfast. “Forgive my asking, but how old are you?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “So young!”

  Asher said nothing.

  “But time to think of a family, nevertheless,” I said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Though one would not want to limit oneself to the eligible young women of Thrupp.”

  “No?” he asked.

  “There simply aren’t any!” I exclaimed.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Asher said.

  “Well, there is Sarah Griggs, who has an unfortunately high-pitched voice that one cannot abide for more than a few minutes at a time. She is the daughter of the Provost. And there is Julia Phipps, daughter of the Sanskrit Professor. She must be nearing thirty, I should think. She seems to have been eligible for years. And then, of course, one might try the stately Frederica Hesse, whose German blood is as evident in her postu
re as it is in her chilly mien, not to mention her overbite.”

  Asher glanced out the window. (I wince now to recall this patently transparent conversation.)

  “I trust they have given you an office in which to prepare your lectures,” I said. “Or have they consigned you to the library?”

  “The corporators have been generous. I do have an office.”

  “Very good,” I said. “Once again, forgive me for intruding into your private life, but if I am not mistaken, you are being considered for the post of Dean of Faculty?”

  Asher leaned back in his chair. “As are you, I am told,” he said.

  And so, at last, our cards were on the breakfast table.

  “You applied to the post?” I asked.

  “I was invited to apply.”

  How had that been accomplished? I wondered. Had Edward Ferald himself written to Asher? Yet how would Ferald have learned of such an intellect? Or were others responsible for the arrival of the Yale professor at Thrupp?

  “We are such a backwater institution,” I said. “The train journey to Boston alone takes most of a day.”

  Asher made a show of looking at his watch. “I’m afraid I must go,” he said, rising. “An appointment.”

  I rose as well, as good manners required. “Well, I cannot say that I wish you luck,” I said.

  “No,” he said, extending his hand. “But I hope we shall remain amiable colleagues.”

  “The most amiable,” I said. Asher had a strong, entirely masculine grip, which took me by surprise, as there was something distinctly refined about his features.

  “Professor Asher,” I said.

  “Please call me Phillip,” he said.

  “Well, yes, Phillip, then. I wonder if you would care to come to dinner at my home. My wife, Etna, and I should love to have you. Hotel and college food cannot be much to your liking.”

  For just a moment, Asher’s eyes widened in alarm, or what I took to be alarm — perhaps it was only surprise: would one rival have another to his home? (Yes, I might have answered him, I would do so, if only to better assess the competition.) I didn’t think Etna would mind, though she might decide it was strange I had invited a colleague home at all, since I so seldom did this. Yet, she, too, had been at Ferald’s reception and could not have failed to grasp the import of Ferald’s public embrace of Asher.

  “Thank you, Van Tassel,” Asher said.

  “Nicholas.”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Friday evening?”

  He appeared to think a moment. “I’m afraid I…”

  “Sunday dinner, then.”

  Asher nodded slowly.

  “There,” I said, once again seizing the moment. “That’s settled. Let me just write down the address. Shall we say one o’clock? To give you time to get home from church and so forth?”

  Asher said nothing.

  “Do you have need of transportation?”

  “No, I have an automobile.”

  “Do you?” I asked. “What kind?”

  “A Ford.”

  “You drove up from New Haven?”

  “I did.” He looked around and seemed anxious to be gone.

  “And were the roads tolerable?” I asked.

  “There’s a direct route,” he said distractedly.

  “I keep you too long,” I said. “These are matters we may discuss on Sunday at my home.”

  And before I could detain him a minute longer, he moved away from the table. “I look forward to it,” he said.

  I sat to my cold breakfast and watched his retreating figure. I felt better than I had after our two previous encounters. I had seen a momentary weakness in Phillip Asher, a sign that the man might fear my own candidacy. Perhaps all was not lost after all.

  * * *

  As it happened, Asher did not come to dinner that Sunday, or on the Sunday after that, owing to the fact that William Bliss died the Friday following our breakfast at the Hotel Thrupp, and Etna and I had perforce to enter a period of mourning. Etna was understandably distraught, and I was required to remain close to home for the better part of a week to comfort her. She found some solace in her sister Miriam, who came up from Exeter to attend the service. (Pippa, Etna’s other sister, was visiting her husband’s family in Chicago and did not attend.) Keep, Miriam’s husband, came with his wife, and, of course, the couple stayed with us. I did not care for Josip Keep, but in such a situation, one is more generous of spirit than one might be otherwise. Besides, I was not at all unhappy to dispel the image of my boorish and unconfident intrusion into their household on that long-ago Sunday morning. Though Miriam had visited yearly for a weeklong stay each time, Josip Keep had not accompanied her to Thrupp; and while I had no illusions regarding his impression of the village (“Dreadful,” he pronounced it upon arriving), I thought he might at least be impressed with our house. (In fact, he was not: “I wonder, Van Tassel, that you did not situate the house so that it avoided the dismal prospect of those granite mountains,” he said.

  “It was already situated,” I answered, seething.)

  The funeral was impressive, with the Reverend Mr. Frederick Stimson delivering a personal and moving homily on the benevolent brilliance of our Physics Professor. Etna wept copiously (her sister Miriam did not; indeed, she appeared hardly to have known the man), and I, too, felt the masculine lump in the throat that will lodge when tears are not seemly. I was moved by Etna’s obvious grief, by my affection for William Bliss (quite genuine; it had, after all, been in his house that I had come to know Etna), and by the memory of our wedding, fourteen years earlier, in that very same chapel, a memory further enhanced by the recollection of that first fluttering kiss with my wife. The chapel was filled to overflowing with mourners. I had not known that Bliss had been held in such affection, though I might have guessed; he was a gentle man with a keen mind in a difficult field. Following the ceremony, there was a buffet luncheon at the home of Evelyn Bliss, who appeared visibly exhausted from the effort of tending to her husband during his illness and then having to watch him die.

  Etna and I stood in the hallway of the Bliss residence, greeting the mourners who had come to have a meal (a bizarre custom, I often think: who wants to partake of food following a death, which inevitably leads to an unhappy contemplation of one’s own?). Occasionally, Etna would leave my side when freshets of grief threatened to embarrass her, and it was after an exceptionally long absence that I went to find her. I searched through the crowd, and when I couldn’t locate her, I climbed the stairs. I could hear a sound in one of the rooms. Approaching it, I hesitated just the one second outside the doorway as the memory of coming upon Etna on our wedding day pushed itself forward through fourteen years of marriage. I refer to the sight of my wife as she stood gazing into the mirror but an hour after our wedding, and the hollow and rav-aged reflection from said mirror, a look such as I had hardly ever seen on another human’s face. I shook the vision from my thoughts and allowed forward momentum to propel me across the threshold, where I beheld no more harrowing a sight than that of my wife sitting on the bed, her eyes red rimmed and swollen. She took a breath of air and raised her head.

  “My dear,” I said, “I have been worried about you.”

  “I should have come to visit Uncle William more often,” she said.

  “You came whenever you could.”

  “Not enough. The man suffered. I have been so selfish.”

  “Nonsense, Etna. No one could have been more dutiful.”

  “I have thought only of myself!”

  If I was surprised by my wife’s outburst, I was tolerant nevertheless; she was, in essence, losing a father for the second time. “Etna, I do not understand you,” I said. “You think of everyone but yourself. You take excellent care of the children and me.”

  “I deceive you, Nicholas. You think me virtuous when really I care so little about virtue. You think me selfless when really I save everything for myself.” She studied me a moment. “I have not taken care of
you, Nicholas. Not at all. I have been cold in wifely matters, and I am sorry. I am so very, very sorry.”

  I touched her shoulder. “You have not been cold,” I said.

  “But I have not loved you!” she said.

  My fingers froze upon her dress. I felt a paralysis such as that which may attend one in moments of extreme shock (I think of the woman who succumbed to paralysis by the buffet table during the hotel fire and had to be carried bodily from the room). I had known — of course I had known — that my wife did not love me. But to hear it said. To hear it said!

  “Nicholas,” she said, “forgive me. That is not what I meant.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I have hurt you.”

  “It is no matter.”

  “Look at me, Nicholas,” she commanded.

  I did so.

  “Please sit down.”

  Again, I did as she asked.

  “You have loved me with all your heart,” she said.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “It is a treasure. To be able to love someone in that way. So thoroughly. So freely. Do you understand? Do you know how much that is worth?”

  I must have looked startled. I shook my head no.

  “Yes, yes, Nicholas. I envy you!” my wife said.

  I was stunned by the ferocity of her statement. This was so unlike Etna. For a long moment, neither of us moved.

  And what am I to say of what came after? That out of death comes life? That in the darkest hours, grief gives the body license? I have known such grief and the gradual emergence of desire that follows, a desire that may swiftly develop into a keen appetite for life (a hedge, I often think, against annihilation). Thus it was, that day on the bed, when Etna turned to me and took my face in her hands and searched my features for… for what was she so desperately looking? I do not know, but I do remember clearly the kiss that followed, a kiss that both moved and aroused me. It was the first taste of true passion I had ever had from my wife, and, as such, it produced a joy made all the sweeter for the wait.