All He Ever Wanted (21 page)

“Do you know the artist?” I asked.

“There can hardly have been an artist if there was no painting,” Keep said with evident impatience.

“There is none.”

“I believe you said as much.”

I sniffed. “Really, Keep, whatever gave you that strange idea?”

“Perhaps a Claude Legny?”

“A Legny, indeed,” I said with mild amusement.

I might have pursued my denial further in this somewhat deranged manner had not the word
Legny
suddenly triggered a memory: a memory of a conversation with William Bliss I had had late in the summer, when he had first
become ill and was resorting to morphine for the pain. (He was later to abandon the drug, as it addled his mind, he said.)
He had just taken the tonic, and perhaps he had misjudged the dose, for he was rambling on a bit. He was asking questions
and making pronouncements, none of which made any sense at all. Occasionally I would say
yes, yes
or
there, there,
but in truth I was paying very little attention to his disjointed statements. But I suddenly remembered, there in William
Bliss’s dining room, on the day of his funeral, as Josip Keep stood at my elbow, that Bliss had said the word
Legny
in the same breath as the word
Etna
. It was a conjunction of names such as normally nestles innocently in the mind and might remain there until it decomposes
in the grave, unless summoned by a similar confluence of words at a later date.

Legny. Etna
.

“There was never a painting,” I said.

“No, of course not,” Keep said. “I can’t think of where I should have gotten the idea.”

“I must go to my wife,” I said.

“By all means,” Keep said.

The man beside me in the dining car is poking at his baked ham with his fork, even as he is debating the matter of the new
German chancellor with the gentleman seated across from him. I gather they are strangers. Farther along in the dining car,
an elderly fellow is reading his newspaper, an awkward task at the best of times, nearly impossible on a moving train with
one’s lunch spread before one. promoter who ate own salve dead at 96, the headline says. (I believe the article refers to
the inventor of Vaseline.) And even farther along, I see a man whose face is familiar to me. I cannot place it exactly; it
is a face I associate with sport. To judge from his imperfect table manners, I may be right in this. (He emptied the contents
of his nose into his white dinner napkin, a boorish gesture I cannot abide in a man.) With him is a man of the cloth, reading
a volume of Thoreau. I am lingering at my table as I write this, hoping once again to encounter a Mrs. Hazzard, a widow from
Holyoke, Massachusetts, who appears to have inherited a half dozen sizable mills from her husband, one of which is in South
Carolina, the point of her journey. We were seated together at breakfast this morning. Two very large families — each with
at least seven children — took up most of the other seats and made an immoderate amount of noise, so that the widow and I
had to huddle over our omelettes (with guava jelly) to hear each other, a circumstance that produced, in me at least, the
beginnings of something like affection, enough so that I am desirous of seeing her again. I have not been entirely bereft
of female companionship these many years, but I have seldom
liked
the women I have been with, and so it pleases me to converse with such a spirited and clever female. She is determined, she
told me, not to be a mere figurehead for her husband’s businesses but rather to learn everything she must know in order to
take them over. Indeed, she seemed reasonably knowledgeable about looms and balance sheets and commercial loans, none of which
I know a thing about myself. I did not hold it against her that she had never heard of Thrupp. She has a lovely laugh and,
though I guessed her to be in her late forties, an estimable figure as well. But even as one who can see the future in an
instant, and is capable of imagining a lifetime in a face, I did not entertain thoughts of marrying.

I will never marry again. It is a penance to which I shall ever be faithful.

M
rs. Hazzard and I had dinner together this evening, and I was glad of her company. Over our braised beef tips, we chatted
amiably of her husband, and I learned, among other things, that he was not only a devotee of moving pictures but also a collector
of automobiles. There was some suggestion that he was a philanderer as well, though the widow Hazzard did not seem particularly
bitter about this fact. After a moment’s pause, during which it might have been polite to offer some commentary about my own
life, Mrs. Hazzard (
Betty,
she insists I call her) did ask a question about how long I had been a widower. I answered politely but then steered the
conversation to the safer topic of my son, for I could not bear to discuss Etna Bliss Van Tassel with a stranger, even one
as delightful as Betty Hazzard. And, as will sometimes happen, Mrs. Hazzard spoke at some length (though not tediously) about
her own children, for whom she clearly has great fondness. Thus the tricky precipice of truth was avoided.

Mrs. Hazzard chided me gently about my pomposity (which I fear has grown only more pronounced as the years have passed), once
stopping me when I used the word
heretofore.
“
Heretofore,
Mr. Van Tassel?” she asked. And while
heretofore
may not be a particularly defensible word, I did argue that as a professor of English Literature, one had to decry the more
simple (and, to my ear, bereft) speech of today’s discourse, since it constricted one’s vocabulary and did not allow one to
parse the moment — dissect the moment, as it were — with clause upon clause upon clause (boxes within boxes within boxes,
I so often think). She mulled this over a bit and then said she enjoyed speaking with me nevertheless, and that she found
me
charmingly amusing
. Since it has been some time since any woman has called me either charming or amusing, I daresay I blushed (the blood of
my Dutch ancestors no less likely to betray me in advanced age than it was in my youth), which seemed to please her even more,
for she tilted her head and smiled, a smile I wish I could retain and take out when I am dispirited. We lingered over coffee,
and I found I was anxious about her imminent departure, for I knew that she would be detraining at Charleston. She invited
me to call upon her should I have occasion to visit that city on my return. I know that one extends such invitations as a
matter of courtesy, not really expecting the invited ever to appear, but for some time after we had left the dining car and
returned to our separate compartments, I allowed myself to envision a visit to that southern town, a pleasant stay with Mrs.
Hazzard, and possibly even a friendship of some duration.

The days immediately following the Bliss funeral were distressing ones for Etna, who kept to her room, ignoring not only her
social work but her family as well. Nicky and Clara and I tried to draw her out, but it quickly became apparent that Etna
had retreated to a private place from which she could not be summoned. This went on for some weeks, into early November, and
I was on the point of calling for the doctor, since Etna’s grief was beginning to feel out of proportion to the event. Perhaps
she understood that I was becoming frightened, for I found her one morning at the breakfast table looking almost normal, the
pink having left her eyes. She attempted a smile, and I had the sense that this effort was distinctly Herculean (Minervian?)
on her part.

“Etna,” I said. “I am so happy to see you up and about.”

“I am up, but not entirely about,” she said.

“Still, though,” I said.

“It has not been good for the children.”

“No,” I said.

“I have had a difficult …” She took a quick breath, but not before I saw a slight quivering of her lower lip. “… time,” she
said.

It was clear to me that I should have to tread lightly and try to keep the conversation on an even keel, away from subjects
of death or sadness.

“You look very pretty this morning,” I said, which was true. She had on a high-necked indigo silk blouse and a long string
of jet beads that matched both the decorative buttons of the blouse and her delicate pendant earrings.

“Thank you,” she said.

“May I get you a cup of coffee?”

“No, I’ve had mine already. I’ve been down here for some time.”

“You are making your list,” I said, unfolding my napkin in my lap. I studied my breakfast. There appeared to be meat of some
sort. Kidneys, possibly. Or liver. It looked dark and overcooked.

“Yes,” she said. “I plan to do the marketing today in town. Is there something you need?”

“I need a new shaving brush,” I said to Etna. “And shoe polish. And ink for my desk. But I can buy these things when I am
myself in town.”

“Let me,” she said. “It’s better if I am busy.”

“Well, in that case, I should love some of that blackberry jam we had last month. I should love it right now, as a matter
of fact. What is this meat?”

Etna glanced in the direction of my plate. She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll have a word with Mary,” she said just under her breath,
for it was clear that in the absence of her mistress’s attention, our cook had relaxed her standards considerably.

Etna made a notation on the tablet of paper that lay beside a stack of correspondence — most of it, I guessed, sympathy letters.
“I’m not sure that the jam will be available this time of year,” she said.

And I, who was pleased to hear my wife speak of trivial matters, could only smile. I put my hand over hers. “I am so happy
to have you back,” I said.

Time passed in the way that it will. Throughout those weeks of mid-November, I rose, I breakfasted, I danced lightly around
any topic that might cause Etna distress. I went to my classes, I taught my students, I read endless copybooks of dull treatises.
But I was in a state of anxiety nearly all the time: cautious around Etna, worried about the impending vote, and sleepless
with thoughts of Phillip Asher, whose lectures were as brilliant as advertised. I began to disparage Asher to my colleagues.
“The man does not know his Jonson,” I said, and sometimes I saw an expression of wariness or pity on my colleagues’ faces.
Was I so transparent? They had picked up the scent of rivalry, and perhaps there was some sport in it, for they also seemed
amused.

One afternoon, I had occasion to be in Chandler Hall, as I had a book I needed to return to Moxon. I made my way along the
corridor, passing by the closed door of Phillip Asher’s office. I knew the man was in the Recitation Hall at that hour, delivering
a lecture on the nature of good and evil in
Paradise Lost
(hardly a challenging topic). I meandered past the closed door, then pretended to have forgotten something. I turned and
walked past it again, this time unable to resist the urge to slip inside. I had no clear idea what I was looking for; it was
simply that I felt I needed to be nearer to the man’s
things
— as if in so doing, I might learn more about my rival. I entered the room and shut the door.

Asher kept an untidy desk and an open file cabinet (why, indeed, should any man lock up his brilliance?), and one’s first
impression was of disarray — of books, of academic journals, and of a plethora of personal items on the desk, which I took
to be souvenirs of his tours: pressed butterflies within a glass case, a small sculpture made out of soapstone, an intricate
Indian mosaic, a copper printer’s block with a cow engraving, an odd monocle that allowed one to see to the side rather than
straight ahead. Near the typewriter, I discovered a silver frame with a picture of a young woman inside it. She was fair haired
and Scandinavian in her looks, actually quite pretty. I immediately began to imagine a fiancée in a distant city — Oslo, possibly.
Encouraged by this discovery, I dared to take a closer look at the various papers Asher had scattered about the office. I
recall a treatise submitted to the Academy of Arts and Letters about the role of photography in the recording of history.
There was also some correspondence with a professor at the University of Virginia about a prebiblical story of the Flood,
and a letter to the Royal Geographic Society asking to be allowed to accompany an expedition to the Arctic in search of the
lost explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. I found a detailed scientific paper delivered to the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin
the previous spring about Dr. Gaston Odin’s discovery of the cancer microbe and how that might promise a vaccine, as well
as an essay in the
Atlantic Monthly
magazine in defense of pacificism. I sat back in Asher’s oak roll-away chair and contemplated a series of woodcuts, framed
in wide white mats, along one of the walls. How had so young a man published so much? The range of the man’s talents and interests
was astonishing!

Perhaps it was time to come to terms with the very real possibility that I would not be elected to the post, I thought as
I swiveled in Asher’s chair. Would that be so terrible? Well, yes, it would. Nevertheless, one had to be realistic. One had
to prepare.

I sighed and stood and was about to leave the office when I caught sight of a brown accordion folder with a cloth string tied
around it on the floor just beyond the reach of the desk. I bent and picked it up and, as delicately as I could, I undid the
string. Inside were letters from a professor at Jesus College, Oxford, inviting Asher to come to that college as a visiting
lecturer. I read, from copies of Asher’s own letters, that he had at least considered such a move. I held the illicitly viewed
correspondence and began to think in earnest: if I had been disheartened to discover that Phillip Asher, lately of Yale, was
indeed that rare thing, a man of greatness, could I not take courage from the fact that such a man might not agree to a post
at Thrupp if he had a better offer elsewhere? I contemplated a new line of attack in my politicking. I could suggest to my
colleagues that Asher was too
good
for Thrupp, that such a man would almost certainly grow tired of a provincial college and might therefore allow himself to
be hired away by a better-known institution after the board had gone to all the trouble to elect him. Whereas I, Nicholas
Van Tassel, was in it for the long haul. I was a man of loyalty. I had dedicated my life to Thrupp, had I not?