All He Ever Wanted (7 page)

I had a new thought, a dispiriting one. “Are you ill?” I asked. If I was concerned for her health, I confess I was also worried
that I should have to return to the college without her.

“No,” she said, removing her fingers from her face. “It is just… Sometimes I find it hard….” She shook herself slightly. “Is
it so very bad outside?”

“It’s not impossible,” I said carefully. “Unpleasant, perhaps, but there will be a good fire in the dining hall, and the meal
today is goose.”

She raised her chin. I noticed that her hands were trembling. Though I very dearly wanted to believe that she trembled for
me, I knew otherwise. She was gasping for oxygen.

I took a step toward her, but she put a hand out as if to stop me. Had it been at all within the realm of possibility, I would
have crossed the distance between us and forced her face to mine. I would have dug my hand into the small of her back so that
she was pressed hard against me. I would have lifted her skirts and run my hand along her thigh and tucked my fingers into
her stocking. I would have done all those things, and perhaps she saw this, for she drew herself together in an instant, as
if she had plunged her wrists into icy water. Of course, I did nothing, but I cannot help wondering what might have happened
between us had I been bold enough to touch her then.

I looked at my outstretched hands. To give them occupation, I reached over toward the hat rack and took her cloak from it.
I held it to her, and she stepped inside, wrapping herself in the wool. Perhaps I let my arms linger around her a moment longer
than was proper. Her hair had been freshly washed and smelled of castile. She pulled away and put her hood over her hair.

“We should go,” she said quickly, “before my aunt detains us.”

There was no need to say anything more, since I was as eager as she to quit that house.

(What bargains — what bargains — did I force Etna Bliss to make?)

The storm had increased in its ferocity. Etna held her hood low over her face, and I had to lead her in what I hoped was the
right direction. It was madness to be outside on such a day, and my thoughts were split between embarrassment for having allowed
this foolish outing at all, and a kind of exultation that comes with adventure and risk.

By the time we had arrived at the college and stepped into the hallway of Worms, the fronts of our cloaks were sheeted with
ice. My mouth had frozen into a grimace, and it was hard to speak properly for those first few seconds. A college servant
helped us off with our outer garments and even encouraged us to remove our wet boots, which Etna would not do. We went immediately
into the dining room and stood by the fire, warming ourselves. Etna’s cheeks and nose were crimson from the stinging snow
— but, my God, how lovely her face was! She could not suppress a smile: we had survived an ordeal. As the warmth rushed back
into her face and her limbs, so also did the words pour from her lips. I had hardly ever seen her so animated.

“Once I went ice-skating with my sisters,” she said. “I was very young, no more than six or seven, I think, and while we were
there, a sudden storm came on, very like this one, actually, and I don’t remember exactly why now, but whoever had been sent
to watch us was not there; perhaps it was thought that my sister Pippa could look after us. The storm came on so suddenly,
we could not find our way back, and we were forced to take shelter in a kind of cave, and oh, the thrill of that, of being
on our own! I remember that Pippa had brought a jug of cocoa wrapped in flannels in a sack. Miriam was too anxious and couldn’t
drink much, but I did, all at once, and, my dear, I was so sick later! But it remains, it remains…It is a wonderful memory.”

She was rubbing her hands by the fire. She had large hands, nearly as large as mine.

“And how were you found?” I asked.

“There was a search party. It was feared we had slipped through the ice. I don’t know how long we were lost; it can’t have
been more than an hour or two, which can be a lifetime in a child’s imagination, no? I suppose also in a mother’s. I remember
that I was so disappointed to be found.”

She laughed. The hair at the top and the sides of her face was damp and curled against her forehead and cheeks. I glanced
around the dining room, which was only partially full. There were no other women. Some men who had been watching Etna turned
reluctantly away when I looked at them; others nodded and smiled knowingly.

“Oh, it is so wonderful to be warm,” she said. “One hardly appreciates these comforts when they are too easily come by.”

“We should sit down,” I said, “and have our meal. You must be hungry.”

“I am,” she said, looking around for the first time. “I’m starved, actually.” (That was another thing about Etna; she had
a marvelous appetite for a woman.)

We spoke, we spoke of… what? I cannot remember now. How I wish I could recall every word of that afternoon, that afternoon
of childlike conspiracy and warmth and good food and wine. Perhaps we talked of books, but I don’t think so. That day felt
different from all of the others.

We lingered long after one might reasonably have left the table. I was light-headed with possibilities. I, who could invent
a lifetime in an instant, had visions of Etna having to spend the night in college rooms, of an embrace she would allow me
before she entered those rooms, perhaps even a kiss snatched in a dark corridor. I imagined sleeping in the same building
as she and fetching her for breakfast, a meal we had never taken together. (Delicious intimacies, erotic in their content,
and how strange, for we were to take nearly five thousand breakfasts together, none of which ever produced comparable sensations.)

As the meal drew to a close and the staff was compelled to remove the linens and silver from the other tables and I saw the
lovely afternoon slipping away (and perhaps because of my bold fantasies, which I later had to remind myself Etna could not
have known about and certainly did not share), I reached across the table and seized her hand. She stopped her sentence before
she had finished it. I could see that she was holding her breath. I laced my fingers into hers.

“Etna,” I said. “You are so very beautiful.” It was a joy simply to say the words aloud. I had not done so yet.

“Professor,” she said.

“You have promised to call me Nicholas.”

“There are others in the room.”

“Who envy me,” I said.

Her fingers were frozen in my own. I don’t know if she tried to withdraw them; perhaps she saw that for the moment she could
not. The stillness I had observed before in her crept over her body and her features like an incoming tide saturating the
sand beneath it. She began to breathe slowly, and her face lost its flush. I had the distinct impression (God forgive me)
of an animal in a woods standing absolutely still to make itself invisible. She would not look at me.

But on that day, I chose, in my besotted state, to take her demeanor to be only feminine modesty and physical shyness, both
of which were, I thought then, endearing and charming qualities in a woman. I wondered as well if this fear in physical matters
was testament that she had not had other lovers before me, a question that had vexed me no end since the day I had first visited
her uncle’s house.

I released her hand, which she immediately tucked into her lap. “This has been the most wonderful afternoon of my life,” I
said truthfully.

She raised her eyes to mine. “Thank you for the dinner.”

“It will be a dreadful walk back,” I said. “The storm does not appear to have abated much.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, looking out the massive windows of the college dining hall.

“You could spend the night here,” I ventured. “There are rooms for college guests. And then I could take you back in the morning.
We could send a messenger to your uncle and aunt so that they won’t worry. A boy will have an easier time of it in the snow
than we.”

“I would not send a boy out in this blizzard on my account,” she said. “No, I must go. I don’t have my things.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, reluctantly standing with her.

Our cloaks and mufflers had been dried next to the fire by a college servant. I tipped the fellow and inquired about a sleigh,
and one was fetched for us. During the journey to her uncle’s house, Etna and I held a blanket above our heads, wrapping ourselves
in a kind of tent. I could feel warm breath all about my face. At her door, she invited me in, but I had sympathy for the
boy and the horses with the sleigh, and could now see what I had not been able to before: there were large drifts in which
even a sleigh might be lost.

“I’ll call on Tuesday, then,” I said at her door.

She nodded, but she seemed distracted. I could not let her stand in the snow a moment longer.

“Go inside,” I said.

She nodded again, and she stepped into the house. She glanced once at me before she shut the door. I walked back to the sleigh,
suddenly painfully aware of the snow, which was now considerably higher than my boots.

As it happened, Etna became ill with fever the next day, a development for which I chastised myself unmercifully. Had I warned
her sufficiently of the perils of the storm — as any decent man would have done — she would not have taken sick. (Although
it did occur to me that the preternatural flush I had seen upon her cheeks in the Bliss vestibule might have been due to incipient
fever, but never mind.) I did not discover this until Tuesday, when I called at the accustomed hour and was told so by Mrs.
Bliss, after which it was necessary to endure an interminable cup of tea and an intolerable conversation in the parlor (in
which I must say Mrs. Bliss seemed to thrive like a rare tropical flower, or was she, too, coming down with the fever?). I
could think of little but the fact that Etna might be lying in her bed not ten feet from my head. She was sick for a week,
after which she was able to come down into the parlor for brief intervals, the evidence of the contagion in her cough and
reddened nose. On my visits, I brought sweets from the baker and hothouse flowers and, on one occasion, a rare orchid from
the college greenhouse that the Biology Professor, Everett Tucker, had given me. And, of course, I brought books for Etna
to read. Despite these gifts, our conversations in that parlor (Etna settled in a chaise, myself sweating profusely beneath
my suit jacket and waistcoat) were always desultory and unconvincing — and whether this was a result of our confinement in
that dreadful room or of the unfortunate contrast to the brisk animation we had known together in the college dining room,
I could not tell. Needless to say, it was with a feeling of tremendous relief that Etna determined she was well enough to
again venture forth.

During our courtship, I was generous with my gifts, most of which I purchased at Johnston & Herrick’s in Hanover. I remember
a pair of topaz earrings Etna particularly liked. (Have I said how much Etna attended to her dress and accessories? In a modest
way, of course, but with an arresting mix of artfulness and taste.) I also gave her a moonstone necklace, and even now I cannot
forget the pleasure of fastening the clasp at the back of her neck. Was I wrong to imagine that if I offered these gifts (a
jet brooch, a tourmaline comb), and she accepted them, she was accepting me and my attentions, each present given and received
an entry to my credit in the ledger of our courtship? And so I had hope, even some confidence, and began to think about a
proper occasion on which to ask her to marry me.

It happened on a mild afternoon in March. It was unseasonably warm, the first good day we had had in weeks. The college had
paths for walking that prior to that afternoon had been covered with snow and shortly after would be too muddy to negotiate,
but on that day, betwixt the winter and the spring, the ground was hard enough for travel.

We left the Bliss household, and I led Etna to the head of the college paths, a walk already longer than any we had taken
together. I was in a state of considerable anxiety, as any suitor about to make a petition will be, but I took heart from
the fact that Etna did not demur at the entrance to the meadows. Indeed, I think she hardly noted it, so great was her restlessness,
as if her limbs were suffused with the very fluid that was rising in the maples all around us. The path we embarked upon kept
to the water’s edge, the river boisterous that day with early freshets. Not only was the air mild, but so also were the colors
— the sky muted to a milky blue, the sharp outlines of the trees blurred by the soft air. Etna held her skirts as she walked,
but even so, her hem was soon soaked. She seemed not to mind at all. In fact, she walked at some speed, as though she had
a destination. She wore that day a blue and gray and brown plaid skirt that had a short matching cape with a gray rabbit’s-fur
collar. When she lifted her skirt, I would sometimes catch a glimpse of layers of heavy cream-colored petticoats.

“I don’t much care for Upham’s stories,” she was saying. “I thought I would, but I do not. They are fussily written and weighted
with the sort of writerly flourishes I find so distasteful.”

“Just so,” I said, for she had expressed this distaste before to me.

“What a lovely scent. What is that, do you know?”

I sniffed. I could smell only the river.

“And what was he thinking, to create a character so fundamentally blind that he does not even understand the true import of
his utterances?” she asked.

“It is a device, I believe,” I said.

“To what end?”

“To show us a character who deceives himself.”

“Well, I for one cannot believe in such a device. It makes the reader distrust the narrator. How are we to know what truly
happened? And besides, no one can be so self-deceived.”

“You don’t think so?” I asked.

“I think the promise of spring has addled your thoughts this afternoon, Nicholas. You’re unusually distracted.”

“Perhaps I am,” I said.

Within the half hour, we had come to a sheltered spot, a rocky outcropping that produced a hollow under which we could stand
and rest a moment and survey the scene before us — a pleasant vista of rust-colored grasses bowed from the weight of the snow
and ice that had so recently left them. Etna had been willing to follow me to the shelter; perhaps she had to catch her breath.
Her legs cannot have been used to such exercise. I moved a step closer to her, my hands in the pockets of my coat, my own
body soaked with perspiration beneath my waistcoat (I had overdressed). She did not move away, but allowed me this proximity
as we gazed for a moment at a flock of starlings that were swooping in a complicated pattern at the edge of the river. She
smiled and seemed content.