I don’t know what became of my students that day, for I didn’t drive to the college but rather to my home, which was empty of everyone I loved. Mrs. Van Tassel was gone, a flustered Abigail reported. To Exeter. She had taken the children with her. I nodded, surprised by nothing now. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been forced to resign my candidacy for a post I had dearly wanted, I had discovered that my wife owned a separate residence to which she had been retreating in secret for nearly a year, and I had declared that I would be divorced — none of which I would have said was remotely within the realm of possibility just the week before.
“There is a letter on the breakfast table,” Abigail announced.
I opened the letter as if it were a bill I had no intention of paying. Dear Nicholas, it read.
I have taken the children to Exeter. Please do not follow me. Let us think about the things we have said to each other.
Your loving, Etna
My loving Etna.
I left the dining room, dropping the letter on the hallway floor. I went up to my bed. I don’t believe I had yet had a coherent thought. Nor did I the next day or the next. I recall a telephone call from the college asking if I was unwell. Yes, I said, and I would be away from my classes for a week. I remember Moxon coming to visit me and a bizarre conversation in the sitting room, desultory on my part, frantic on his. Etna had left me, I said to Moxon’s horror. He was all arms and legs, flapping in companionate misery. Keep the car, he said, keep the car, as if an automobile might help to mitigate the heartache of a foolhardy declaration.
In the days that followed, I grew whiskers and had to be told by the housemaid to shave them. I ate cheese and eggs repeatedly, as if I had returned to the nursery. On Friday, Phillip Asher was elected to the post of Dean.
On Saturday, I drove to Exeter, remembering that earlier trip of fifteen years previous, when all my life had been contained within a single petition. On the way, I practiced the words of my second plea to Etna Bliss Van Tassel.
Do not think about a divorce, I would say. It was the utterance of an angry man and was to be accorded no more respect than the ravings of a lunatic. Listen instead to the husband of fifteen years who desires to have his wife and children at home. Their absence from the house is unnecessary. Foolish words are often said in the heat of the moment, are they not? Surely a marriage is elastic enough to accommodate them without destroying the union? As to the other matter, as to the separate abode, we would discuss it upon her return to Thrupp. I might leave the college, I would say. I might write a book.
But Etna had another idea, which she communicated to me immediately upon my arrival.
“I agree to a divorce,” she said in that parlor in which she had once announced that she would marry me. She had entered the room as if she had long been expecting me, as if she had already armed herself, had built around her both a moat and a fortress.
We stood across a Persian carpet. I was vaguely aware of damask and crystal and rosewood and silk, the end result of all those ladders and drop cloths of so long ago. Etna’s face was drawn, and I saw that she was thinner; perhaps it was that severe aspect to her expression and posture that gave her the glamour of a regent.
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head, certain that sister Miriam was listening from behind the paneled door. “I didn’t mean it. I was too rash. I was angry. Etna, listen to me.”
She stood her ground and went as still as the ancestral Keep in the oil portrait behind her. Her gaze was steady and unyielding. I studied her and thought again, as I had so often before, that there must have been a foreign element in her blood, perhaps that of a superior race, one that had produced the almond eyes and the high cheekbones, the utter poise that seemed to require no breath. Then I had an astonishing thought, one so remarkable that I was, for some moments, unable to continue the conversation. Why had Phillip Asher blurted out to me — of all people — the fact of his Jewishness? Had he simply assumed I would know this because Etna had once known the family? Or, more to the point, was my wife herself Jewish?
I examined her anew.
“Are you Jewish?” I asked.
Etna was startled by the question. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“My mother didn’t know her father.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My mother’s mother was a servant girl who was impregnated by a man she later would not, or could not, identify.”
This was news to me. I had simply assumed for my wife an Anglo-Saxon ancestry on her mother’s side. “Then why do you think you are Jewish?” I asked.
“I could be anything,” she said.
“My son may be Jewish?” I asked, incredulous.
“Does that matter?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully.
“I can no longer be your wife,” Etna said so quietly that I was not certain I had heard correctly. Or perhaps it was only that I didn’t want to have heard correctly. Outside, there was a commotion, as if there had been an accident with motorcars. It cannot have been any more serious, I was thinking, than the collision in the parlor.
“That is no grounds,” I said, adding pomposity to foolishness, as if I knew the law. Spending a precious sentence when simple words of love would have been better currency.
“It will have to be enough,” she said with the tentative authority of the recently coronated.
Etna quit the room, left her husband sputtering, the husband who was prevented from following her up the stairs. I shook Miriam’s surprisingly tenacious hand off my arm, but men were brought to the hallway. I was forced to go away, Josip Keep smugly clucking that marriage was a trial.
I drove to Salisbury, a seaside town of poor repute. I found a brothel, my first lapse of a sexual nature in fifteen years of wedlock. After an encounter I do not now remember, I went on to a bar near the ocean and drank a bottle of bourbon. I was left to mutter in a leather booth. In the morning, I returned to Thrupp.
I appeared for some classes and ignored others. My wife had been called away, I said to anyone who seemed poised on the brink of inquiry. Her sister was gravely ill, I added, happily giving Miriam a fatal disease. My colleagues nodded, and if they doubted me, I didn’t care. I removed myself before expressions of pity or distaste could form. I was a man of little conversation and even less patience. It was understood that I was reeling.
In January, I was summoned by Phillip Asher, who had moved into the office of the Dean. (Everyone, it would appear, including Asher himself, had been willing to look the other way regarding his Jewishness.) I went reluctantly and left without a word before the offer of a sabbatical had been completely tendered. It was a sop to a defeated rival, I thought with disgust, unaware at the time of his correspondence with my wife. I knew only that he had once known of Etna years ago. Still, I thought, Asher would have heard the rumors of a dissolving marriage. In his eyes, I would be a twice-defeated man, an academic and marital emeritus.
A week later, I returned to Exeter, nearly losing myself and my newly purchased black Ford in a dun-colored storm. Etna, paler still, was summoned to the parlor. The room was bathed in the flat dull light of midseason snow. She wore a pale blue daytime dress that showed the new angles of her body, and already I was imagining how I would care for her, how I would instruct Mary to fatten her up with a rich diet. My wife was disappearing in Exeter.
I strove to be composed. I did not beg or wheedle, but I presented my case.
I had made a rash pronouncement, I said. It was a wife’s duty to forgive the ranting of a temporarily deranged husband. Any man might have said the same, I said. As to the matter of the cottage, I was prepared to consider the issue in a calmer manner, and I was sure that some arrangement could be made.
“What arrangement?” she asked, settling herself in a yellow-silk-covered chair. She moved as if her bones had become fragile, and I was suddenly worried for my children. Was Keep not feeding
my family in exile?
“An arrangement,” I said, though in truth I had not thought much about any such arrangement. Indeed, I could not think about the cottage at all. The very sight of it in my mind’s eye — or the sight of it in reality (for I had several times gone there to look at it, the door locked, the thief unwilling to break a window, since he still believed a reconciliation imminent) — caused a tide to flood my brain, like the assault of a rising blush.
Etna folded her hands in her lap. “You would decree when I could go there,” she said.
“Not necessarily,” I said, treading carefully.
“But you would want to know when and for how long and precisely what I would be doing there,” she said. “Who I might see there.”
Confinement didn’t suit her, I was thinking. It never had. “How are the children?” I asked.
“They are well,” she said.
“I wish some news of them. I wish to see them.”
“They are away,” she said.
“Away where?”
“Away with Miriam. Visiting Pippa in Massachusetts.”
“You cannot keep my children from me,” I insisted.
“Nicholas,” she said with a flicker of marital concern, “you are not in a fit state to be with children, your own or anyone else’s.”
“And are you?” I countered.
“I have a good deal of help,” she said.
“Why, Etna?” I asked, sitting forward. “Why are you doing this?”
“I have given you fifteen years,” she said.
“I would have given you my whole life!” I said.
“You say that,” she said calmly, “but you will not give me one hour of true freedom.”
At last, I begged. “Etna. Please. Come back for the sake of the children, who desire only that we be together.”
I watched as she struggled with that old emotion — pity. And I am ashamed to write here that for a moment I gladly would have accepted it.
“I will have a divorce,” she said.
“On what grounds?” I said, angry now.
“I have never loved you,” she said, as if that were enough.
And it may have been. It was certainly enough to silence me. With difficulty, I stood, my legs those of a wizened man. “We will correspond through lawyers,” I said hoarsely from the hollowed-out place to which my wife had sent me.
“Yes,” was all she said.
I found the strength to walk to the door. I let myself out. My wife made no move to stop me.
The divorce proceeded at the pleasure of the court, which is to say it scarcely proceeded at all. I was awash in legal sentence structure and grievous grammar:
It may be averred that the relator’s marriage was a sacrifice, the result of an unwillingness, on her part, to recede from an ill-conceived engagement, into which she had improvidently allowed herself to be drawn, and with which she afterwards complied, under the influence of a mistaken sense of duty. That she would not thus have complied or been married to the respondent at all if she had not been assured that her wishes would not be opposed, upon points which she deemed vital to her happiness and welfare, and upon which he did not then consider her wishes as unreasonable.
I sent a lawyer to retrieve Nicodemus. His name was Tucker, and he had strict instructions.
“He will let you have the girl,” Tucker announced to Etna, who stood in Josip Keep’s hallway. “But he wants the boy back. If you don’t comply, he will have both children. Under the circumstances, he would almost certainly get them.”
“What circumstances?” Etna asked.
“A mother who has committed an immoral act is seen by the court to be corrupting the morals of a son.”
“Not a daughter?”
“The court does not like to remove a daughter from a mother’s protection.”
“This is absurd,” Etna said.
“Nevertheless.”
“What immoral act?” Etna asked.
“A secret residence for possible immoral purposes,” Tucker said, handing Etna the latest of the legalese.
Tucker stood and waited. He would not leave without the boy.
Etna, after consultation with her lawyer, reluctantly complied.
Etna had to return to Thrupp, which, all along, I had known she would do. If I had our son, Etna would have to be near him. She took up residence in the cottage.
I had the boy, and she had Clara, who slept with Etna in the narrow bed in the gabled attic bedroom. Clara resumed her studies at Thrupp Girls’ Academy, and Nicky continued his at the local grammar school. On weekends, Abigail, the maid, became a courier, fetching Clara to bring her home even as she was delivering Nicky for a Sunday meal.
I took to watching Etna and Clara through the windows of the cottage — that endless motion picture of humble domesticity. I went at night, when the moon of my face could not be seen at the window. I cultivated stealth and became more proficient at this calling than I had ever been at Rhetoric.
I would leave Nicky in his bed, Nicky whose face I searched daily for clues as to his ancestral identity, Nicky who asked nightly for his mother. I would drive to Drury, where I had found a clearing in which to park the black Ford. I would walk the quarter mile to the cottage and stand in such a way that I could not be seen in the light of the white chandelier, an extravagance so out of keeping with the rude cottage that it was as if a dowager had entered a fishing hut. In its splintery light, I would examine Clara’s luminous skin, her pale eyebrows, and the light blue eyes that reminded me of my sisters’. In contrast to her mother, who was taking on a look of transparency, even with her dark features, Clara was a lush bloom of Dutch beauty.
Etna, loving mother, brushed her daughter’s hair, unaware of the audience beyond the glass. My wife’s face was composed but white, and I could see the strain of skin over the high cheekbones, the nervousness in the topaz eyes, the worry lines at the sides of her mouth.
I could stand for hours in the dark and cold, observing Clara at her studies and Etna at her sewing. I watched Etna at the sink, washing dishes like a common undercook. She seemed not to mind these chores, some of which were truly odious — the tossing out of slops, the washing and ironing of laundry that froze on the clothes-line at the back of the house, the cleaning of the outhouse. Clara, called upon to help, protested like a spoiled girl, and I sometimes longed to step in and upbraid her. At other times, it was all I could do to keep from storming through the door and embracing my child, who was growing tall without me.
Standing in the dark, I considered the matter of Etna’s maternal ancestors, of the unknown parentage. The man who had impregnated the servant girl and then abandoned her could have been anything, I reasoned. Jewish, possibly. More likely a common Yankee with striking features. But then again, he might have been Turkish or Indian or Russian. Each night I would study the cheekbones and eyes of my wife and wonder: Was she Greek? Italian? A Gypsy?
I pondered also the nature of fate and circumstance. Had it not been for the fire, I doubt I should ever have met Etna Bliss. Did I now wish that those few drops of oil in the hotel kitchen had not fallen onto the cooking fire? Might I have eaten my poached sole in solitude and never noticed the young woman in the topaz silk sitting behind me and thus escaped both the joy and anguish of the next fifteen years, only to have met, two months later, say, the daughter of a rare-book dealer from Thrupp whom I then married? Might I never have encountered Etna Bliss at all, but rather have seen a woman emerging from a trolley three days later to whom I gave pursuit and was ultimately betrothed? Or have been introduced at a faculty party at the college to the wife of a colleague (no, never; the sentence does not bear completion, for I should never have stooped so low)…or chanced upon, in twenty years’ time, after having remained for decades a bachelor, a widow to whom my academic credentials, not to mention my modest fortune, might have been attractive? Or, then again, might I actually have met a worse fate than was dealt to me? Might I have wed the daughter of a phy
sician who bore me a child who then died as a result of my wife’s carelessness? There are stories more terrible than mine. I do understand this. But the influence of circumstance upon a man’s destiny is considerable, is it not?
My nightly visits to that cottage became more and more frequent and then routine. After I had stood at the window for an hour or so, I would walk into the woods and eat a bit of cheese and bread and drink the whiskey that I had brought. Truth to tell, I was drinking rather a lot in those months, and sometimes I had difficulty returning the Ford to its garage in the early hours of the morning. I slept late and was often tardy for or absent altogether from my classes, to which I scarcely paid any attention. My colleagues, concerned and then alarmed and then annoyed, avoided me when an encounter threatened, which was fine with me, who wanted only silence and anonymity, both difficult to come by in that college of mediocre and unruly boys. I would tender my resignation in the summer, I told myself with sweet relief.
Only once in all the times I went to the cottage to spy on my wife did I come near to getting caught. I had gone into the woods to relieve myself, and I must have made an inadvertent sound, because when I was finished and had turned back to the house, I saw that Etna was standing at the window staring straight at me. She tilted her head from side to side, so I didn’t think she had actually spotted me. I watched as she left the window and then I heard the door open. She came out, shivering and hugging a shawl around her arms, making delicate footprints in the snow-covered lawn of late March.
“Who’s there?” she called out, squinting in the night.
I stood behind a tree and watched her face, longing to reveal myself and wondering how it had come to pass that I, Nicholas Van Tassel, was hiding behind a tree in the woods, the steam from my urine still rising behind me, concealing myself from the only woman I had ever loved.
Routine became obsession. (What, precisely, is an obsession? My much-used dictionary tells me it is a state of compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or unwanted feeling or emotion. The word, of course, stems from the Latin obsidere [past participle obsessus], which means “to sit down before”; ob, against, combined with sedere, to sit. Well, I wasn’t sitting, but I was certainly standing.) Sometimes, exhausted beyond sense, I would doze off and wake only to find that I had been asleep as I leaned against the white clapboards. This went on for some time and might have continued indefinitely had I not seen, one night in early May when I approached the cottage, a Ford not my own parked in the driveway beside the Landaulet.