All He Ever Wanted (29 page)

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?

I have pictured the event in detail. (Are not imagined events sometimes more real than events at which one is present?) It
is the summer of 1896. Etna, just twenty-three, is engaged to a Mr. Bass of Brockton, Massachusetts, a Mr.
Josiah
Bass, shall we say, an older man, perhaps thirty-six or thirty-eight. He is a man whom Etna does not love, but whose shoe-manufacturing
fortune promises her some independence, which, as we now know, is of paramount importance to Etna Bliss, even if she herself
does not understand this yet. In the meantime, a Mr. Samuel Asher, tall like his brother, twenty-seven, an academic with —
I am just guessing here — a high forehead (perhaps a slightly receding hairline?), a blond beard, and sloping shoulders, has
recently had occasion to visit Etna’s father, William’s brother, Thomas Bliss, an educated and tolerant man who would not
shrink from inviting a Jew to his house — particularly an English Jew. (Or does Bliss simply not know about Samuel Asher,
who for years may well have been passing for an Episcopalian?) Was this a jointly taught course on the mathematics of navigation?
A research project? A steering committee of two? We cannot know. Etna and Samuel have two or three times found themselves
alone in the Bliss sitting room while Thomas has been attending to other matters, and they have discovered in each other like-minded
souls. (Do they discuss astronomy? No, probably not.) They have, at least once, played tennis with Samuel’s father and his
younger brother Phillip. Samuel and Etna look forward to their encounters and contrive to make them happen. Samuel Asher,
attracted beyond reason to this striking daughter of Thomas Bliss, even as he is engaged to Ardith Silver of Toronto, Ontario,
a woman he met when her family lived in Exeter prior to moving to that Canadian city, manages to come round to the Bliss house
even when he knows (though he pretends to forget) that Thomas Bliss is engaged elsewhere. (We will not imagine for Samuel
the baser motive of needing female company while his intended is elsewhere.) A summer acquaintance turns to autumnal friendship
and then swiftly molts into something very like passion before Christmas.

Indeed, Samuel Asher calls upon the Bliss family on Christmas Eve to bid them a happy holiday. Thomas, who does not yet have
any inkling about his betrothed friend’s secret affection for his betrothed daughter, welcomes Samuel into the house. Etna
is in the parlor with her mother and Miriam (Pippa already being married and living in Massachusetts), making last-minute
adjustments to an impressive Christmas tree that will be lit within the hour. On the sideboard is a cut-crystal bowl of punch,
liberally laced with rum. Etna is wearing a plum velvet dress with perhaps a slightly revealing neckline, and she looks almost
beautiful on this occasion. Samuel, cheeks reddened by the weather and his anticipation, greets Etna’s mother, then Miriam,
and finally, when all other formalities have been observed, Etna, whose cheeks are as red as his. (Might not Thomas, were
he alert to romantic oscillations, have detected something amiss in the greeting of Miriam before Etna? Perhaps not.) Thomas
mentions how much Samuel must miss his fiancée on the holiday. Samuel agrees politely even as he notes the tiny flinch in
Etna’s lovely white shoulders.

(And where is Josiah Bass, Etna’s intended? Away. He is simply away.)

How will Samuel negotiate this tricky evening? For he has a gift he wishes to bestow upon Etna. He cannot give it to her in
front of the mother and the sister, because he has not brought them gifts as well. Nor can he give it under Thomas’s scrutiny,
for Thomas, though a scientist, would surely detect an unnatural favoritism in the singling out of Etna. A walk is therefore
contrived — casually, politely. Samuel invites Mrs. Bliss first, praying that she won’t accept. She does not; it is too cold
for her. Etna accepts readily, speaking of the pleasure of seeing smoke emanating from other houses, of encountering carolers
along the way. Miriam is tired, she says, and miraculously she declines.