All He Ever Wanted (15 page)

Occasionally, this restlessness became something more: Etna needed to be away. As a consequence, she was a great one for wanting
to go on holidays. In the summers, she and I took Clara and Nicodemus to a small seashore community on the coast of New Hampshire.
We rented a cottage there for a month or so, or took rooms at a hotel called the Highland. In my memories of those holidays,
we always have sand in our boots and the children are slightly sunburnt. Etna is in her linen duster, the black ribbon of
her straw hat snapping behind her in the east wind. She stands looking out to sea, or she is simply walking along the shoreline.
Or she is wading in the water in her mohair bathing suit, her hair captured in her turban, her long legs and arms deliciously
white and bare.

As often as I could, I joined her on the beach or went walking with her, for I, too, was equally happy to be “away.” Thrupp,
I had long since learned, could be only too confining. I had continued on at the college and had risen to the post of Hitchcock
Professor of English Literature when Noah Fitch had moved on to the position of Dean of Faculty four years earlier. (The word
Rhetoric,
much to my sorrow and before my time as the senior professor, had been dropped. Students didn’t like it, it was thought.
I, of course, found such pandering thoroughly detestable, but Fitch had argued, and successfully, that one could certainly
continue to teach the subject, albeit in a surreptitious manner, and that there wouldn’t be much teaching of anything if enrollment
didn’t go up. Every discipline had been told to “improve” its curriculum so as to be more appealing. Slippery standards all
around, I said.) It was a post that suited me well, as I was an able administrator and had implemented some few ideas in the
department, such as stricter requirements for a degree in English Literature and the awarding of the Kellogg Prizes for superior
essays.

When we returned from the shore each September, Etna would again take up the overseeing of the education of our children,
at first tutoring them herself in rudimentary mathematics and in the principles of reading in preparation for grammar school.
More recently, however, Etna had also taken on charity work at a settlement house in an adjacent town. The Baker House on
Norfolk Street in Worthington was an establishment that took in the poor and the sick. We had Mary, our cook, and Abigail,
the maid, and because the house had long been seen to (Etna unleashing in me a decorating streak I had not known I possessed),
Etna was able to volunteer her services at the charity house several hours a week. Indeed, she had, just the year previous,
learned to drive a motorcar in order to accomplish this. I had purchased for her a Cadillac Landaulet coupe, one of the first
cars to have an electric starter, thus enabling a woman to manage it. It was quite a lovely little thing, a green boxy affair
with a gold stripe. Etna was one of only four women in Thrupp who could drive an automobile, and I must say she made a most
spirited picture in her hat as she sat behind the wheel. I would sometimes catch sight of her speeding by the quadrangle as
I crossed it for my classes. The tails of her scarf would be fluttering, a dust cloud would have risen up behind her, and
I would think, with considerable satisfaction,
That is my wife. That is Nicholas Van Tassel’s wife.

So these are the facts of daily married life. But beneath this pleasant narrative there is another story — that of a nightly
struggle I could not win.

I try now to understand. Was there something I might have done differently? Was I being punished for having grasped for more
than I was due? I cannot say. Never have I experienced such a fraught and complex entanglement as is a marriage. The most
vexing student or the most abstruse essay are as nothing compared to the challenge of negotiating the delicate marital truces
we forge and live by.

To wit: though Etna proved to be an excellent mother and we were happy in our children, our relations, cordial enough by day,
grew strained as evening approached, so that silence replaced conversation, glances became more guarded, distractions were
sought and welcomed. As was our custom, we passed our evenings together in the parlor, a sentence neither one of us was willing,
or able, to commute. Thus I would read in preparation for a lecture and Etna would bend over her needlework, and it would
be so still, so quiet, that I could actually hear my wife swallowing across an expanse of Persian carpet. If she felt imprisoned,
then so did I — doubly so — not only by my desire for her, which seemed never to abate, but also by the tension that thrummed
between us as I read Dreiser and Etna embroidered dresser scarves.

It will come as no surprise to the reader that the cause of this considerable unease between Etna and me was the existence
of the marriage bed, a mahogany monstrosity we had purchased in near silence on our wedding trip. Though Etna seldom refused
me outright, she took no pleasure in the event. Night after night, I would slip between the sheets and embrace a woman whom
I had seen only that morning lift our son from his carriage or plait our daughter’s hair, the woman who only hours before
had handed me a shirt she had just mended or who had looked up from her book, pleasantly distracted, to answer a question
from our cook, to discover that I was, in essence, as barred from her body as I was from her soul. Though she was dutiful
in that bed of trefoils and flower medallions, Etna could not love me. Time, which I had imagined to be my ally (would not
a woman come to discover the joys of physical love with patience? might not the alchemy of time transform respect into love,
duty into passion?), proved only to pass too slowly during those agonizing hours before we met in our bedroom. As a consequence,
I had learned to hold myself back, and an unnecessary coldness had set in, made chillier still by the fact that each night
I was reminded of the first, of my hideous certainty that Etna was not a maid when she married me. Thus was jealousy refreshed,
renewed, doomed to repeat itself. It was my constant companion in the night, more trustworthy than love, more faithful than
my vows.

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.