Professor Van Tassel has sent round a note to all concerned saying that he relinquished any thought of the post of Dean in order to better attend to his duties as department chair. I find this difficult to credit, not only because that was a position your husband seemed to handle with ease, but also because I know how keenly he wanted the post of Dean.
Your devoted and concerned friend,
Phillip Asher
The Hotel Thrupp
December 11, 1914
Dear Mrs. Van Tassel,
I write to tell you that in the absence of any word from you, I have accepted the post of Dean of the Faculty of Thrupp College. I officially take up my duties at the start of the new term. I will shortly move out of the hotel into a rented house at 14 Gill Street, but if you should write to me between now and January 10, you may send it to the hotel, and they will forward any mail to me. I hope that you and your children are well.
Very respectfully yours,
Phillip Asher
14 Gill Street
January 6, 1915
Dear Mrs. Van Tassel,
I write to tell you that I have shifted residences from the Hotel Thrupp to 14 Gill Street, and should you wish to answer this or any of my previous letters, you may do so there. I am renting a small house in anticipation of beginning my new job at Thrupp.
I hope you and your children were able to pass a happy Christmas with your sister and her family.
Yours,
Phillip Asher
Exeter
January 15, 1915
Dear Mr. Asher,
Forgive my silence.
Etna Van Tassel
14 Gill Street
January 18, 1915
Dear Mrs. Van Tassel,
You do not need my forgiveness for your silence. It is perfectly understandable. I wish you a swift and happy conclusion to your difficult circumstances.
Phillip Asher
Exeter
January 22, 1915
Dear Mr. Asher,
I put these questions to you as an ethicist. Is a woman, married and with children, entitled to reserve a portion of her life for her own and exclusive use? May such a woman, if she decides that by doing so, no harm will come to either her children or her husband, be permitted to retire to an inviolable place, a place to which only she has access, in which only she resides, for the benign and innocent purposes of gentle education and recreation, which might encompass activities such as reading and sewing and possibly the writing of letters or of poetry? Is not a man, of a certain education, accorded, without difficulty from any party, an inviolable retreat of his own, one in which neither wife nor child is welcome, one in which he may read or smoke or write or engage in contemplation, or even entertain certain friends and colleagues, a room that is commonly called a study or an office or a library? And if so, why then is a woman — married and with children — not entitled to a similar retreat? And if this woman should discover that no retreat may be had within her own home, owing to the traffic of children and servants and even her own husband, who sees no violation in entering such a retreat, and because of the lack of respect for such a place of solitude, is she not then allowed to seek retreat elsewhere, such as at a resident hotel or boarding house or at a cottage in a rural area, outside of town, some miles away from the family abode, the whereabouts of which is unknown to any family relative?
I await your reply to these questions, as they are ones I am struggling with moment to moment and which are at the very heart of what you have accurately heard is considerable marital discord.
With respect for your judgment,
Etna Bliss Van Tassel
14 Gill Street
January 27, 1915
Dear Mrs. Van Tassel,
You do me a great honor by confiding in me the details of your marital discord and by assuming that I might be able to help you answer these difficult questions. But I must tell you that I am an academic only and not a superior judge of either human or marital behavior. I am not married, nor have I ever been. Marriage is a special province, the residents of which have access to a knowledge and a language all their own, one that cannot be had by any other means than to be married. (It is for this reason that I have always thought unmarried clergy and magistrates particularly poor counselors for those who seek redress for marital grievances.) But as I am a scholar, I will, if you will permit me, put to you questions that in answering may give you increased insight into your own difficulties.
Is not the personal retreat of this putative husband you speak of — the inviolable retreat within the house that we commonly call the study or the library — agreed upon, in essence, by both parties of a marriage when they take up residence at that specific abode and a room is so designated for that purpose? Or, put another way, can a retreat not agreed upon by both parties of a marriage, or not even known about by one party of a marriage, be accorded the same respect? Might not a wife have reason to distrust a husband were she to discover that he had rented a room in secret, even if the husband planned only to read and write and think in such a place? Might not the discovery of such a room put too great a burden on the fragile thread of marital trust between a man and his wife?
Mrs. Van Tassel, I can only guess at your circumstances, having no knowledge of them. More important, I have no knowledge of your health or well-being. These are serious questions that you ask me, disturbing in their nature, more disturbing since I am in a position to see your husband daily; and I must tell you, as a reporter only, that he is hardly in a fit state to teach a class of young men. I have given him leave so that he may travel back and forth to Exeter, and have suggested a sabbatical, as he is certainly deserving of it. Your husband would seem to be a proud man, however, as he has refused this offer. By all accounts, he is in a seriously overstressed state, one that concerns many of his colleagues and friends.
I do not know how your unhappy story shall end, but I implore you to consider returning to Thrupp with your children and repairing, with time and sacrifice, the marriage to which you have committed yourself.
Your humble friend,
Phillip Asher
Exeter
February 3, 1915
Dear Mr. Asher,
You write to me as a man and not as a friend. I do not need to be told to return to Thrupp to repair a broken marriage. That judgment I am more than capable of placing on myself. I was hoping that you might, as a friend only, give me guidance as to the ethical issues involved.
Sincerely, Etna Bliss Van Tassel
14 Gill Street
February 7, 1915
Dear Mrs. Van Tassel,
I think there is a strong argument to be made that all marriages might be improved if both husband and wife had a private place to which to retreat for the contemplation — in solitude — of issues that the daily noise of life does not permit. But questions of right or wrong can exist only within a framework of convention, the circumstances agreed to by any society. In our society, at this moment, neither a man nor a woman who is married may rent or own a private and separate abode about which the spouse knows nothing. I do not speak about the legal ramifications of such an action (I suspect it is not illegal to own or rent such a room), but rather of the moral. Without trust, there can be no marriage, and a secret as large as a rented house or room puts too great a burden on that trust.
Mrs. Van Tassel, I am in a difficult position. I wish to be your friend and to give you what guidance I have in my power to bestow. But I know so little of your particular situation beyond the observable effects upon your husband. It is my understanding that your son has returned to Thrupp, but that your daughter and you have not. The presence of your son seems to have had a beneficial and salutary effect on Professor Van Tassel. He appears, at least for the moment, to have largely recovered his equanimity.
Yours,
Phillip Asher
Exeter
February 11, 1915
Dear Mr. Asher,
I am grateful to
you for conveying to me the improved condition of my husband. It has been achieved, however, at great cost to me. I find myself now embroiled in a battle for the protection and custody of my son, Nicodemus, who is hardly of an age to understand why he has been separated from his mother. Theoretical issues of privacy and solitude within a marriage have vanished in the face of the very real issue of child custody, to which I am now employing all of my wits and about which I pray constantly.
Forgive me for not having apprised you of the details of our marital discord, and forgive me further for not having the necessary strength to do so now. I am grateful for your understanding, and am sorry you are in the difficult position of being privy to the thoughts of the wife even as you are the supervisor of the husband. It is an awkward position I have placed you in, and one from which I now release you. I have realized that it is inappropriate in the extreme to be writing to you in the manner in which I have, and so I shall, with immense gratitude for your patience and solicitude, stop.
With perfect consideration,Etna Bliss Van Tassel
14 Gill Street
February 15, 1915
Dear Mrs. Van Tassel,
My constitution and wits are, I trust, sufficiently strong to be able to read your letters and to “supervise” your husband, who, in any event, needs no supervision of any sort that I can offer him. I should be distressed to think I had given you any indication that our correspondence should cease because of a burden upon me. If I can offer any assistance, if only to be a sounding board of sorts, then please allow me to be. Though I know it must pain you to remember that earlier matter regarding my family, I cannot forget it, and it assuages my familial conscience, if you will, to be of help to you.
Believe me always your friend,
Phillip Asher
Exeter
February 20, 1915
Dear Mr. Asher,
Thank you for your letter of February 15 th. I have realized that in all these weeks we have written only of me, and that I have not asked a single question about your new life. Forgive me. I have been, I am afraid, too self-involved to think of others, and reluctant to ask how you are settling into a position I still believe my husband should have had. Though his recent behavior toward me has been most objectionable, and I have been the recipient of his explicit and unreserved anger, I have great sympathy for his lost possibilities. Please do tell me of yourself. Are you settling in on Gill Street?
Since the veil of polite comportment was dropped so many years ago, don’t you think it would be more appropriate to address me as Etna? It is, after all, as Etna that you knew me when we played tennis with your brother and your father.
Most sincerely,Etna
14 Gill Street
March 3, 1915
Dear Etna,
There you go again, reminding me of that horrid tennis date.
I am pleased to be invited to call you Etna and shall do so. Thank you as well for inquiring about my life, which though academically satisfying is largely uneventful on a personal level. This is just as well, I think, since I find I must devote nearly all of my energies to my new post. In that regard, Gill Street is a good address. It is comfortably furnished and well run and the cook is remarkably competent for a college town (my cook in New Haven was appalling), so I have no complaints.
It is, however, difficult to write of my new life when yours is in so much turmoil. The dinners to which I go and the meager social life Thrupp has on offer (your husband did warn me about this) pale into insignificance when compared with the struggle in which you are involved.
I did, on the advice of Gerard Moxon, take up snow skiing this winter, which was, at best, a highly comical endeavor.
Fondly,
Phillip
Exeter
March 9, 1915
Dear Phillip,
I cannot express to you how distressed and troubled I am at the removal of my son from my protection. It is not just the personal sadness that sweeps over me so many times during the day — a kind of emptying out of any joy in the moment and then a filling up, as of a well, with sorrow — it is the knowledge that my Nicodemus is in the custody of his father, who has shown himself to be so violent in his temper and so disturbed by our marital circumstances that I fear he will be, at best, a preoccupied parent, and at worst a frightening one. Is this retribution for my wanting the solace of occasional solitude? Swift and devastating retribution, if it is, and, I cannot help but think, so much greater than the crime.
So it is with some trepidation, born out of parental love and necessity, that I shall be returning to Thrupp so that I may be nearer to my son. It is my hope that I shall be allowed to see him on a frequent, not to say regular, basis until such time as I am able to regain custody of him. I cannot tell you my future address at this moment, but as I shall be leaving Exeter before the week is out, I do not think it wise to write to me again until you hear from me.
With respect,Etna
April 20, 1915
My dearest Phillip,
Would you be kind enough to meet me at the Payne Street Market in Worthington at ten o’clock next Thursday morning? There is something I should like to show you.
E. VT.
A marriage is always two intersecting stories. I can tell only mine. As for her story (as for their story), I was not privy to it apart from the letters I was to find in Etna’s tin cake box, letters I append here with a clip, somewhat reluctantly, not only because of their revealing (and, to me, dismaying) content, but also because I rather liked the slim, neat package my leather journal made, as if a life could be contained within its elaborately tooled covers.
Etna was by nature a reticent individual, not given to verbal displays of emotion, and therefore hardly likely to have apprised me of her relationship with Phillip Asher. Had it not been for my accidental discovery of Etna’s and Asher’s correspondence (my hand nervously strumming the front of the tin cake box, thus tripping the latch of the door), I might never have been aware of, for it almost certainly would have been destroyed in the fire. I cannot say that the enigma that was my wife is entirely revealed to me here, but some questions are answered.
I learned in Etna’s letter of October 22 that she had once been engaged to a Mr. Bass from Brockton, but that the betrothal had been broken off. It is a wonder such a fact was kept from me, that William Bliss, in all innocence, did not reveal it, or that Keep, not so innocently, did not seek to wound (or rather nick) me with this bit of information. A betrothal in those days was a serious matter and nearly as difficult to undo as a marriage. I can conclude only that William Bliss, after having seen me disintegrate so completely upon the news that Etna had left for Exeter to become a governess for Keep’s children, thought it best not to trouble me with facts that were, after all, not his to tell. Indeed, both Bliss and Keep might well have imagined that Etna had already discussed the matter with me. Most women would have done so, but, as we have seen, Etna was not like most women. Etna was a woman of secrets.
Indeed, what was I to think of what is clearly revealed in the correspondence to have been a passionate love affair between Etna and Samuel Asher? Truth to tell, this revelation was not as agonizing as I might have expected — I who have shown myself to be quite capable of agony on any number of occasions. In fact, this knowledge was almost a relief, for somehow I had always known. I remember speculating even on the first day I met Etna as to whether she had had one or many lovers before me. A woman who has known love has about her an aura of having been — how shall I put this? I do not wish to be indelicate here —plundered is the only word I can think of, and I do not think it an inaccurate one in this circumstance. Etna had been plundered, soul and body, however willingly, by Samuel Asher. I will not now dwell upon the images that this avenue of thought produces; suffice it to say that the senses have an intellect that may be denied the conscious mind, and that my senses accurately detected, on my unpleasant wedding night, more than just a previous deflowering of my bride. Etna had been well and
truly loved.
I cannot ever know the nature and duration of that love affair. It is not a question I can ask anyone — not Phillip Asher, who, in any event, might not have known a great deal about it (he was only a boy of seventeen at the time); and certainly not Samuel Asher, who may or may not even be alive at this writing. All I have are phrases from the correspondence, more revealing on Phillip Asher’s part than on Etna’s.
Though Etna asserts that her love was genuine, it is Asher who speaks of passion. “The ferocity of love that lies behind the veil of polite comportment,” he writes. And this: “The sight of your face on that morning so many years ago has remained for me a standard by which I judge my own affection for any woman with whom I am close, and the affection of any woman for me. I count you among the most fortunate of persons to have felt so strongly for another human being, however unhappy the outcome. Is this not the point of our existence?” (Italics mine.)
We can only imagine what happened “that snowy morning” in Exeter. Had Etna gone to the house to confront Samuel? To tell him that she had broken off her engagement to the man from Brockton? And why was it necessary to seek Samuel out at his house? Had he already withdrawn from the relationship? Was he about to leave for Canada? Was he engaged to another? And what precisely was the nature of the “unhappy incident” in the “overcrowded” house in Exeter? Were there declarations of love? Were there tears? And why, years later, does Phillip Asher find it necessary to apologize for the behavior of his family? Or does he mean by family only his brother?