For the first time in weeks, I became painfully alert and was aware of the workings of my heart, a hard thumping that made me put my hand to my chest. I moved silently to my favorite hiding place (a window behind the Chinese grass chair that was often shrouded in darkness) and peered in. I pressed hard on my chest with my fist.
Phillip Asher sat sideways to the small table, one arm thrown back over the ladder-back chair, the other reaching for a teacup. His legs were casually crossed, and he seemed relaxed, as if he had been in this house before, as if he had often been welcomed here. Indeed, Clara remained unconcerned in a corner with her music stand and her flute; between the muted bits of conversation (I seldom ever heard a specific word, so it was mostly a silent movie I watched those many nights), I could hear the notes of the practice lesson. Etna was sewing on the davenport, and it was as if Phillip Asher were a brother or a cousin who had interrupted a domestic scene simply to say hello. I looked over to the sink and saw the remnants of a meal that had not yet been cleaned up. I strained to count the plates and the silverware, for I wished to know if Asher had had his supper with my daughter and my wife.
Had Etna lied to me? Had she and Phillip Asher all along been lovers? (I could hardly be expected to monitor the cottage by day.) Had he been there all afternoon, while Clara was in school, and simply lingered longer than was usual, enjoying the easy company of an arresting woman and her child? But then I had a truly terrible thought: Had I caused Etna and Asher, with my foolish decrees, to come together after my wife and I had separated? Yes, I thought, I had. Asher, under the guise of concern for my well-being and in his position as Dean of the Faculty, would have driven to the cottage to discuss the matter, would he not?
I exercised that night the utmost self-control, for I wanted nothing more than to enter that room and haul the man out and send him sprawling across the driveway. How dare he sit in such close proximity to my daughter! How dare he insinuate himself into my family!
Asher took another sip of tea, which had to have grown cold in the time it had sat on the table; I had been watching this cozy domestic scene for nearly a half hour. Clara put down her flute and asked her mother a question. I could see from the considerate but firm shake of the head that Etna was denying Clara’s request to quit her practicing early. Clara, with pained expression, went on, and I could again hear the labored notes of a flute badly played. I watched my daughter stretch her legs in an indecorous manner, a gesture that immediately caught her mother’s watchful eye. Asher leaned forward in his chair, as if making a point in his ongoing conversation with my wife. (My wife). He leaned his elbows on his knees and seemed insidiously relaxed. I was afraid that my furious and steamy breaths of air in the frigid night might be noticeable through the window.
To calm myself, I looked away. I shot my gaze up through the tall pines to the stars, wondering why the gods were treating me so badly. I had never before felt such violation. The man had taken my position, and now he was taking my wife?
I turned back to the window, and as I did, Asher and Etna rose simultaneously.
I have played and replayed this scene a thousand times in my head, and I think the paired rising was purely coincidental in its initial moments. Perhaps Etna had been about to go to Clara; possibly Asher was merely stretching. As if in slow motion and with faint smiles playing upon their lips, they were carried forward by the momentum that had made them stand, first two and then three steps, causing them to meet directly beneath the white chandelier, that extravagant monstrosity. Their hands rose — her right, his left — and quickly, lightly, clasped, as if by the same impulse that makes people who speak the same phrase simultaneously smile at each other in amusement.
That I might have borne. The clasped hands I might have endured and forgotten. After all, the entire incident lasted only a second, perhaps two. But in those moments, I glimpsed something else, something that has stayed with me all these years, that is more vivid to me sometimes than the remembered visages of my children. It was the expression on Etna’s face, an expression that was — how can I describe this? Radiant is the word I must use. Giddy with delight. An ecstatic expression of happiness that seemingly required the participation of the entire body, as if the body were moving forward at great speed. It was a look I had seen on Etna’s face only once before, on the sleigh on that late-winter afternoon so many years ago when the horses, nearly out of control, had sped toward the barn. She had reached for my hand, and I had gone rigid with joy.
Asher and Etna swayed a bit. The moment dissolved in laughter. From the corner, Clara watched, her eyes wary and humorless. My own eyes were dry with anger. I longed to snatch my daughter from that tableau.
The next morning, I sent a note to Etna. I would call that night for Clara, and we would have a meal. She would stay the night with Nicodemus and me, and I would deliver her to school the next morning. Etna was to pack Clara a suitcase with a clean uniform and her nightclothes. I would call for my daughter at five o’clock. I would come up the driveway in the Ford, but I would not enter the cottage. If she would be so kind as to send Clara out to me, I should be very grateful. Yours sincerely, et cetera, et cetera.
Clara was, as she settled herself in the Ford, both timid and angry in equal measure — timid in the face of this rupture of routine, angry because she wanted to blame someone for the dissolution of the family. I did not try to defend myself. She was still a child, too young to know of bargains or of unrequited passion.
I parked on Wheelock Street, and we walked, as in the old days, Clara’s arm in mine, toward the college quadrangle. We spoke of her classes and of her music lessons and occasionally, now that she was growing older, of topics outside the immediate circumference of her life, such as a desire to see Yosemite, for example, of which she had heard a great deal from her new friend Rosemary. We made our way to the hotel, where I had told her we would have a meal, ending with a cup of hot chocolate for each. Gradually she thawed and remembered her love for her father, and at times we were simply a man and his daughter having a meal in the Hotel Thrupp. Who was to say that we might not return to our home on Holyoke Street only to find Etna bathing Nicky, and that life would go on as before?
Lovely thought, but below that happy agenda, I had another.
Three times in conversation, I said Phillip Asher’s name. (Dean Asher, I actually said, in case that was how he had been introduced to Clara.) After the third mention, when I could no longer bear her silence or her reticence on this subject, I asked, as casually as I was capable of, “Have you ever met the man?” And Clara, after an initial hesitation, said yes, she had. I, aware now of a sudden heat that had risen to my face, let some seconds pass, and then I asked, as if I had nearly forgotten the topic, “And where did you meet him?”
Clara answered that Professor Asher was a friend of her mother’s and sometimes came to the cottage. The dialogue proved too much for her tender sensibilities, however — this was not a subject she thought she ought to be discussing (she, too, had seen the clasped hands under the chandelier) — and she began to cry.
“Clara dear,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Why are you and Mother doing this to me?” she asked, weeping like a child now, which is to say messily.
“We are not doing this to you,” I said. “It is simply that for the moment we have chosen to live apart.”
“That’s not true!” she said with the wisdom of the keen observer. “It is Mother who is doing this. You want us back; I know you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”
“Then why did you send for Nicky and not for me?” she cried.
This, I knew, was at the heart of Clara’s resentment. “Nicky is the younger,” I said, groping for an answer.
“You love him more than me!” she accused.
“No, Clara, I do not,” I said truthfully. “I love you both the same.”
I reached across the table and took her hand in mine, unable, in that public place, easily to
embrace her. The touch of my hand consoled her somewhat, so that I was reluctant to let her go. At that moment, a man who was entering the dining room — a man I had never seen before, perhaps a man simply needing a meal — passed by our table and looked at Clara.
It was a subtle glance, in the main inoffensive in its brevity. But as I turned back to Clara, I saw what he had seen. The full lips. The hint of bosom beneath the bodice of her uniform. The slender waist and delicate ankles. It was the first time I saw my daughter as men would for years see her.
“Father,” she said, having blown her nose into my handkerchief, “why are you staring at me?”
I forced myself to look away. I studied the stranger, who had sat down, oblivious of the plot he had set in motion.
A plan was unfolding. A narrative was spooling itself across the dining room.
“Clara,” I said. “I think I have a way to bring your mother back.” My daughter looked up at me, the tears still shiny saucers in her eyes.
In the morning, I delivered three letters. One to my wife. One to the president of the college. And one to the chief of police of Thrupp.
“My daughter, Clara, has brought something very disturbing to my attention,” I wrote.
The train is lulling me into a kind of stupor. It is the heat. I am told that we have crossed the border into Florida, and I can well believe this true, for it is stifling in my compartment, even with the top half of the window open (which is all that is allowed; to prevent people from jumping out, I should think). We stopped this morning in Yemassee, where we were all witness to the strange sight of Negro men carrying large bunches of bananas on their shoulders to a freight train parked next to us. They looked both exhausted and resigned in the poisonous heat.
All along the train, men are shedding clothes like boys headed for a swimming hole. First a jacket is laid upon a chair. Then a tie is tugged down, after which the cuffs of the shirt are unbuttoned and rolled. I saw a man with his braces undone. Manners are being cast away with the clothing, it would seem, for tempers are noticeably shorter today than they have been the entire journey. One man snarled at a porter for delivering a drink with no ice (the ice, it would seem, melted in Georgia). I tried to nap but awoke too quickly, my silk sleeping mask wet with both sweat and tears.
Will my daughter come to the funeral if I am there? This is a question that vexes me no end. And if she does come, will she speak to me? I would say ordinarily not, for she has lived with her aunt now for eighteen years and has not spoken or written to me in all that time. But the human heart is a mysterious organ, is it not, and it may be that Clara has forgiven me.
How is it that life goes forward when so many people have been wronged?
There is just one more piece of my story to tell, which is just as well, for soon we shall be approaching West Palm Beach, the end point of my journey. My trip has taken somewhat longer than I thought it would (more than three days due to the derailment near New Haven and the bout of food poisoning in Richmond; it was supposed to have taken thirty hours), and I have realized I will be lucky to make the funeral on time; it has already been delayed, as per my sister’s wishes, so that I can be there. Meritable’s pronouncement on this matter moved me when I first got the telegram from Berthe, one of our sisters, and indeed motivated me to take the journey, which I might not otherwise have done. It was gratifying to see that Meritable still bore me some affection, despite what can only have been a strong allegiance all these years to Clara. Perhaps Meritable had some design to thrust Clara and me together after her death so that we may repair the rift between us.
I should like to have gone to the library car after breakfast this morning, particularly to the periodicals room, as I feel, in my moving metal cocoon, as though I have been estranged from the world. I have been writing almost without interruption since I boarded the train at White River Junction three days ago, though I have traveled through sixty-four years of personal history.
What a fraught venture this has been, more perilous than I ever imagined.
As soon as Etna received her letter — the same letter I had written and delivered to Frank Goodspeed, the President of the college, and Merrill Gates, the chief of police — she drove to the house.
Etna and Clara and I gathered in the sitting room. Etna would not sit, however, despite repeated entreaties on my part to do so. She held the letter in her hand as if she had been clutching it all the way from Drury. My heart had lifted when I had seen the green-and-gold Landaulet pull into the driveway, as I had known it would. (I had predicted the time of her arrival to within the quarter hour.)
“Is this true?” she asked of a trembling Clara, who had, as my daughter and I had planned, returned to Holyoke Street after school.
Clara, who wished only that the family be reunited, said yes, it was true, Mr. Asher had touched her.
“Touched you how?” Etna asked, her voice and face as sharp as the point of a thorn.
I watched my daughter carefully. This would be Clara’s truest test, her most difficult examination. For a long moment, we all stood in an unhappy triangle, breathing slowly in unison, Nicky safely closeted with Abigail. Clara touched her bosom, a three-fingered brush at the side of her breast that was nearly obscene against the white blouse of her school uniform. It was a breathtaking gesture, not only for its implications, but also for the sight itself — that of a young girl who may never have touched herself in that way before, doing so in such a public manner. It froze Etna’s expression. My wife, in unconscious mimicry, brushed her fingers against her own breast, as if wishing (or needing) to feel what Clara had felt.
Clara blushed. She must have longed, as in a child’s game, to shout, “Make-believe!” To call to all the players, “All-ee, all-ee, in free!” But she was committed to her actor’s role, her lines rehearsed, the unthinkable gesture completed. To quit now would be to lose everything.
“Touched you when?” Etna asked in a voice so quiet as to be barely audible. She took off her driving hat and let it fall to the floor.
“After school,” she said, “when you went to the market.”
“Once?”
“Three times,” Clara said, sealing Asher’s fate with a number. A number picked by me both for its damning quality and for its unlikely plausibility.
“Three times,” Etna repeated, struggling, I could see, for comprehension. “When were the other times?”
Clara, a mirror to a mirror, covered her eyes with her hands. It was one thing to invent dialogue and a playlet, quite another to see the sudden parental incredulity it produced.
But Etna, stern parent, pulled Clara’s hands away. “Look at me,” she demanded of her daughter. “Look at me. When else?”
“Once when you were late from Baker House,” Clara said in a tremulous voice, speaking her fourth and final line, “and once when you were in the garden.”
As she so often did when confronted with a disturbing fact, Etna went completely still. Clara and I, witnesses to this maternal immobility, could only wait. Etna was torn between going to the child who had been wronged and withholding judgment — her mother’s instinct detecting a covert note (actually, the truth).
Etna placed a hand against the flat of her stomach and turned around, putting her back to us. Clara began to weep, the desperate ploy of an unschooled actress who must resort to tears to convince her audience. Etna, misreading this (as she was meant to do), turned back and folded her daughter into her chest. She put a hand behind Clara’s head and pressed her to her own bosom. “Shhh,” she said. “There now.”
I watched with a kind of giddy horror.
“Clara, I must ask you,” Etna said. “Are you very, very sure about this? This is a serious accusation.”
Clara pulled her head away and nodded, and I silently applauded my daughter’s lack of hesitation.
“My God,” Etna said.
My wife swayed and briefly closed her eyes. I thought that she might faint and take the child with her. I took a step forwar
d.
“It was so terrible,” Clara wailed. “Please let us be a family again,” she managed between her sobs, clinging to her mother’s delicate body.
(Careful, Clara, I thought.)
But no mother could have resisted that petition. “Yes,” Etna said, comforting her daughter. “Shhh. There now.”
My relief was so visceral, I feared it would be visible.
“You must never tell anyone about this,” Etna said to Clara.
I cleared my throat and offered my one and only (and clearly devastating) line. “The college and the police have already been informed,” I intoned.
Etna looked as though she had been slapped. “You’ve told the school?” she whispered, her voice deserting her.
“Of course,” I said. “The man cannot be allowed to continue in a position of responsibility. Criminal charges will have to be brought.”
“Oh, dear God,” Etna said.
I didn’t dare to look at Clara, my accomplice, for fear I would see success upon her face, an expression that would risk the entire venture. I turned away, shaken but elated. I had it all, had I not? My wife and Clara would return home. The family would be intact. Phillip Asher would be removed from his post, his reputation in tatters.
Nicky, who had been waiting in the wings, broke free of Abigail’s arms and bolted into the sitting room, where he crushed himself against his mother’s skirts. He began to beg.
“Don’t go, don’t go,” he sang, to which chorus I added my own silent verses.