All He Ever Wanted (24 page)

The day was a miserable and rainy one, but I was able to congratulate myself on being able to sit back in my seat most of
the way and not having to clutch the steering wheel as if it were a life ring. I was on Norfolk Street before one o’clock
and was approaching the settlement house when I saw, from a distance, Etna emerging from one of the front doors. Really, I
thought, my timing was impeccable!

I watched as Etna held up her umbrella and let it unfurl. She spread her arms out a bit and skipped down the steps to the
coupe in the driveway. I stopped my own vehicle and got out of the car and called to her, but with the rain beating down and
the sound of her own engine, she did not hear me. With the economic gestures of one used to such a machine, Etna reversed
out of the driveway and made a turn.

She did not turn in my direction, however, but rather the opposite way. She hadn’t even noticed the presence of Moxon’s touring
car.

Did Etna have an errand? I mused. Was she taking a shortcut home?

After an initial moment of surprise, I climbed back into the Stevens-Duryea and attempted to follow my wife. The road was
wet and slippery, and the rain made a blur of shapes on the windshield. I pressed a bit harder on the pedal in hopes of catching
up to Etna, but as I was a less skilled driver than she, I couldn’t seem to gather enough speed without skidding. I didn’t
even know whether I was following Etna’s car or someone else’s, for a carriage had overtaken me soon after I had set out,
and I had to hope that it had passed Etna as well. At some point, I was vaguely aware of having driven into another town,
Drury, perhaps. I stepped even more firmly on the gas pedal, frightening myself with the sound of the straining motor (I was
traveling at thirty miles per hour, which seemed rattling in those days). After fifteen minutes of this insanity, I was rewarded
with a glint of green through the rain. I would pass Etna, I thought, and wave to her, and then she would stop her car.

But as I was formulating this plan, Etna veered left off the road into a driveway. She made the turn too quickly for me to
do so as well, and so I bypassed that turning and stopped the car at a clearing farther on. I was shaken at having traveled
so fast, though relieved not to have perished doing so. I sat for some minutes until the beating of my heart slowed. I got
out of Moxon’s motorcar and walked back to the place where Etna had turned. I thought that I might have to lecture my wife
about her driving. Really, I thought, she could have killed herself at such a speed and in such a downpour!

I stopped at the entrance to what clearly looked to be a large estate. Just beyond the main house — a white manse of several
stories with massive pillars reaching to the roof — was a small carriage house. It was in front of that smaller building that
Etna had parked the Cadillac.

Perhaps my wife was collecting a parcel from another benefactor, I thought. Not many women drove motorcars in those days,
and Etna may have offered her services to an acquaintance. As I drew nearer to the main house, however, I saw that it was
closed, as a summer cottage will be in winter. The shutters on the first floor were locked, and the curtains at the upper
stories were drawn. If no one was in residence, I wondered, then what was Etna doing there?

Hiking my collar over my neck, I walked past the main house and directed myself toward the coupe. The estate had lovely grounds,
undulating and benign, even in November. The property, as far as I could make out, was bordered with a handsome stone wall.
There were fruit orchards and dormant rose beds and a grape arbor in the back. What I had thought was a carriage house, however,
was in fact a simple, unadorned dwelling with a front door that would admit no automobile or carriage. The structure reminded
me of a schoolhouse, and for a moment I had the idea that Etna had taken on the job of tutor to a family and I had simply
failed to attend to this bit of information. The house was white clapboarded with shutterless windows, and it had a pitched
roof with a cupola at its crown. The grounds immediately surrounding the cottage had the look of having been cultivated and
then tidied for the winter. There was no sign of activity and there were no other motorcars or carriages nearby. I walked
to a window and peered inside.

I looked into a single chamber, neither sitting room nor dining room nor kitchen, but rather one that combined all three in
the same way that the most impoverished shacks will do. The walls were painted white, the plaster chipped in places. At the
windows, pale linen curtains were knotted just below the sills, and on the wall directly over a davenport hung the frame of
a Gothic window, like that from a small chapel. Faded French floral studies were stuck onto the walls with hat pins, and in
one corner of the room was a tall apothecary cabinet the color of cream. Atop the cabinet was a tin cake box with a green
design embossed in its latched front door. There was a white pitcher of dried flowers on the single table. The light in the
room was diffuse, as if it had been sifted.

In the center of the room, a white chandelier hung from the ceiling. The conceit of the chandelier, which was oversized for
the room, was of a bouquet of white iron flowers, the rust poking through in patches lending the blossoms a tinge of ruin.
Through this thicket of flowers — some daisies, some roses with sharpedged petals — the six sconces of the fixture spread
out with open arms. All about the chandelier, hanging from the stems and leaves and vines of the sconces, were dozens of crystals.

Near a window and with her back to me, Etna sat in an upright wooden chair. She was bent over what looked to be needlework.

I turned away from the window and pressed myself against the clapboards, the rain striking my face. I cannot say why I reacted
in such a way, why I did not simply rap at the window to catch my wife’s attention, why I did not, more properly, knock at
the door. It was, I believe, the shock of seeing my wife bent so serenely over her work in the bleached quiet of the foreign
room that confused me.

I was besieged with questions. What was Etna doing there? To whom did the cottage belong? Was this a dressmaker’s cottage?
Had Etna taken on a bit of sewing to make extra money?

I turned back to the window, aware now of a certain stealth on my part. I watched her at her sewing. I saw her put a pin between
her lips. She lifted up the material she was working on, rearranged it, and laid it back down in her lap. Her driving hat
and her foxtrimmed coat were on the davenport, as if tossed in a rush. The furled umbrella was making a puddle in a corner.

I studied my wife in this manner for perhaps half an hour, occasionally glancing at the road lest someone passing by wonder
why a man was peering into the window of a cottage. As I stood there, I took in more of the details of the room — a tiny porcelain
sink, a cookstove, a hassock on which rested a plate of golden pears — but my eyes were constantly drawn back to the white
chandelier, its image melting and re-forming in the rain-washed windowpanes. I remembered the bill for a white chandelier
that I had inadvertently opened and which Etna had explained away by insisting that she had sent the fixture back.
White iron with six sconces.
Etna stood and turned in my direction, as if she had caught me. But she only shook out a piece of silk from an untied parcel
on a shelf. She sat back down in her chair.

With each passing moment, the idea of knocking on a window or at the door became more and more difficult to imagine. And if
I am to be truthful here, there was some excitement in watching my wife through a glass pane. It was as though I were a disinterested
spectator viewing a play, the meaning of which was crucial to my existence. My wife seemed not my wife, but rather a thing
apart from me. I could not reach her or touch her or call out to her. She existed in a separate universe from the one which
I inhabited.

Etna knelt on the wooden floor and spread the cloth out in front of her, the edges of the silk running in the windowpane.
She pinned a paper pattern to the silk and began to cut around the edges. She stood then and took the garment she had already
been sewing to the davenport and smoothed it out. She gazed at it for a few moments (I think it was a nightgown), her fingers
folded beneath her chin. She tilted her head and frowned a bit and then put her hands on her hips and looked around her. She
collected the bits of silk from the floor and put them in a sewing basket.

I watched as she walked to the stove, put a kettle on, and took a teapot, cup, and saucer from a cabinet. She stood for a
time, staring out a small window over the sink (fortunately not in my direction), until even I could hear the kettle’s whistle.
She spooned tea into a pot and walked to another cupboard. She removed a writing case and set it on a table. She waited for
the tea to steep. When it had, she poured herself a cup and put it on the table next to the writing case. I had the distinct
impression that the table had a wobble. She removed a pen and bottle of ink and a sheet of paper from the case. She began
to write, occasionally taking a sip of tea as she did this.

These were perfectly ordinary actions that I should have paid no attention to had I seen Etna performing them in our home.
But watching her through the window was altogether different. There was a sort of fascination in it as well as the insistent
hammering of the central riddle: What was my wife doing in that cottage?

How long I stood at that window with the rain running down my neck and soaking the backs of my trousers I cannot now recall.
I did not move or make a sound. After a time, Etna laid down her pen and put the writing case away. She washed her cup and
saucer and teapot in the sink. She shook the water off the cup and then dried it with a cloth and set it back in the cupboard.
She shook her hands as well and then wiped them off with the damp cloth. She surveyed the room and walked to the davenport.
When she began to slip her arms into her coat, I moved around the corner to the wooded side of the house so that she would
not see me. I heard her leave the cottage by the front door, pulling it shut twice, as if it had not properly closed the first
time. A few minutes later, I heard the start of a motor.

I slid down the clapboards to the ground, having for the moment lost the strength of my legs. I was as perplexed as I had
ever been. Why would my wife, Etna Bliss Van Tassel, drive to Drury, New Hampshire, to sit in a foreign cottage to sew, when
she could sew perfectly well — and had done so nearly every night of our married life — at home?

I drove erratically and made several wrong turnings. Worse, I ran out of fuel and had to wait for a passing motorist to lend
me a cupful to get home. When I arrived at the house, I saw that Etna’s coupe was parked in our driveway. Disheveled and soaked
through to the skin, I went inside the house and walked directly upstairs to Etna’s dressing room, where she stood in her
corset covering, holding a dress she planned to put on for dinner.

“Nicholas,” she said, clutching the dress to her breast.

“Where were you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where were you?” I shouted. I had not even taken off my wet coat and hat, which were creating a sort of rain on the rug.
I knew that I was frightening my wife, but I didn’t care.

“I was at the settlement house,” she said. “I have just got home.”

“I went to the settlement house,” I said. “You were not there.”

“I must already have left,” she said. “Nicholas, what is this all about?” She pretended to be both surprised and annoyed by
my queries, but her manner was not quite as self-assured and innocent as she might have wished.

“I was there at half past one o’clock,” I said.

“Were you?” She pretended to think. “Well, I don’t know what time I left, but I had some errands to do.”

“Where? What errands?”

“I had fabric I had to buy in Drury,” she said. “Really, Nicholas, stop shouting at me. This inquisition is offensive. I must
ask you to leave my dressing room.”

I stood, poised on the brink of accusation, one that would have been reflected four times in the mirrors that lined the dressing
room. Perhaps I opened my mouth. For a long moment, we were husband and wife, across a gulf of silence. Was she about to confess
her visit to the cottage? Was I about to tell her I had watched her for nearly an hour through a window but had not announced
my presence? Was I afraid to introduce a topic that once mentioned could never be retrieved? I do not know. I know only that
the silence between us was so profound that neither of us at first understood the meaning of Mary’s shouts from below.

“Mary is shouting,” Etna said.

“What?”

“Mary is shouting.”

I went to the head of the stairs. “What is it, Mary?” I called, annoyed.

“The machine, sir, the machine!” Mary cried, flapping her hands about her face. “It is reversing itself down the driveway!”

I moved to the window, through which I could see that, indeed, the Stevens-Duryea was gathering speed as it rolled down the
pebbled drive. Worse, I now saw the reason for Mary’s hysteria: Clara sat in the driver’s seat, clutching the wooden steering
wheel in a kind of paralysis.

I ran down the stairs and out of the house, shouting my daughter’s name. In my haste to confront Etna, I realized, I had left
the motor running. My wet clothes hampered my speed, and though I am, as the reader will doubtless have realized, among the
least athletic of persons, I think it is true to say that when his child is in danger, a father may perform miracles of physical
prowess. I pursued the errant motorcar the length of the driveway, screaming at Clara to press the brake pedal — Clara, who
did not know a brake pedal from a gearshift. When I reached the vehicle, I leapt onto the running board. I clutched the door
frame, my sudden momentum causing the motorcar to lurch. I now feared the wheels would catch in the trench at the side of
the drive and turn the motorcar over. I shouted at Clara to move to one side. In her fear, she lay down on the floor. With
a contortionist’s skill, I opened the driver’s-side door and threw myself inside. After several stabbings at the floor with
my foot, I finally stopped the Stevens-Duryea just inches from a stone wall that bordered the property opposite us.