All He Ever Wanted (33 page)

“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?

T
here 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 forward.

“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.

Etna was not to return to the cottage, I said, taking command of a scene that begged for a leading man. Abigail would go by
taxi to fetch anything Etna needed. I would see to it that the building was put up for sale. Etna, too stunned to reply or
even to think, did not demur. I guessed that she had no desire now to see that cottage, nor even to show her face in Thrupp.
I told myself that with time this shame would go away, that in time we would once again be a normal family.

As for Phillip Asher, he was confronted with the accusation later that afternoon in his office by both Chief Gates and President
Goodspeed, an unlikely and awkward pairing. I am told that Asher laughed when he first heard of the informal indictment, thinking
it was pure fabrication on the part of a defeated and bitter rival, easily refuted. But when he was informed that it was not
me but rather Clara who had made the charge, the color drained from his face, convincing Goodspeed, at least, of Asher’s guilt.

Asher wrote to Etna at once, insisting that the imputation wasn’t true, that perhaps Clara had misunderstood an entirely innocent
gesture, though he could think of no time that he had been in such proximity to her. He would never, he would never. Could
he come to see Etna? Could he please speak with her? I intercepted the letter as, of course, any loving husband would have
done; though, generously, I allowed Etna to read the missive. She set it aside. Who was a mother to believe: her own child
or a would-be lover?

(For I have no doubt now that Asher and Etna would shortly have become lovers. There was no other way to read the look of
pure delight on Etna’s face beneath the white chandelier. And, in later years, when assaulted with the visions that sometimes
plague a guilty man, I would take heart in the fact that I had at least prevented that consummation.)

Asher was told that if he wished, a written accusation would be required of Clara. He could, in fact, take the matter to court.
But I had gambled on Asher’s being an honorable man who would not put a child on the witness stand nor cause a woman for whom
he had tremendous respect — and perhaps even love — to suffer such a second humiliation at the hands of his family. Within
the week, after having repeatedly failed to communicate with Etna by telephone and post and even in person (I had Abigail
frostily send him away), Asher resigned his position at the college and left the house on Gill Street. Without a trial, there
could be no future for the man from Yale in Thrupp, for he would never be able to refute the charge against him.

By the end of June, much to my astonishment and delight, Asher’s presence had been so miraculously expunged from the college
town — his name never mentioned in public discourse — that it was as though he had never existed. Any hint of scandal is always
disastrous for a college badly in need of contributions from alumni.

The matter of a divorce was, of course, dropped. (“I wish to have an amicable and quiet conclusion to the legal deliberations,”
I wrote.) I had the cottage in Drury put up for sale. I set a high price on it, thinking to get a little something in return
for the near ruination of my family. A week after Asher left for destinations unknown, I was summoned to the college, not
by Ferald, whose horse had been disqualified, but by Frank Goodspeed, the very president who had delivered the dismal bulletin
to a white-faced Asher. Would I accept the post of Dean of Thrupp? he asked. Left unsaid was the obvious truth that I was
second choice, an also-ran, a dean appointed by default. Understood as well was the fact that no one had the heart to initiate
another search.

Yes, I said with as much dignity as I thought the scene required. Yes, I would be only too happy to help the college out in
this matter.

“Thank you,” Goodspeed said with evident relief. “I shall make a quiet announcement.”

No fanfare for Nicholas Van Tassel.

“How is your wife?” Goodspeed inquired, almost as an after-thought.

“She’s as well as can be expected,” I said.

“We have tried to suppress the incident,” Goodspeed added, “but I am sure this has been a trial for you.”

“It has,” I said.

“And the young girl? Your daughter?”

“She is trying to put the matter behind her,” I said.

“The young are so resilient,” Goodspeed said.

But, in fact, Clara was not as resilient as I had hoped. In the days that followed Etna’s return, my daughter was alternately
falsely cheerful and sullen, as if, having been on the brink of finding out who she was, she had discovered, to her dismay,
that she was not that person at all. We never spoke, she and I, of the drama we had written and enacted; she seemed as eager
to forget the incident as was her father. But I noticed that Clara fretted more than usual and resisted any attempts to jolly
her. Whereas before she had lobbied constantly to be allowed to visit one or two close friends, now she never left the house
except to finish her classes. She ended the year with a bad report, her grades having plummeted in the last month of the term.
I knew this to be a casualty of all the Sturm und Drang of May and hoped for a return to better study habits in the fall.