All He Ever Wanted

by Anita Shreve

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A man receives a bill for a white chandelier that he never ordered and has never seen. This mysterious document turns out to be the hinge of his world and his attempts to make sense of it lead him to facts about himself, his marriage and his orderly life that had previously been hidden from him.

Set in New England and Florida during the 1920s, All He Ever Wanted gives us a marriage, betrayal and the search for redemption from the vantage points of both a husband and a wife.

Release date: April 1, 2003

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

The fire began in the kitchen and spread to the hotel dining room. Without warning, or perhaps just the one muffled cry of
alarm, a ball of fire (yes, actually a ball) rolled through the arched and shuttered doorway from the kitchen, a sphere of
moving color so remarkable, it was as though it had life and menace, when, of course, it did not—when, of course, it was
simply a fact of science or of nature and not of God. For a moment, I felt paralyzed, and I remember in the greatest detail
the way the flame climbed the long vermilion drapes with a squirrel’s speed and agility and how the fire actually leapt from
valance to valance, disintegrating the fabric and causing it to fall as pieces of ash onto the diners below. It was nearly
impossible to witness such an event and not think a cataclysm had been visited upon the diners for their sins, past or future.


If the fact of the fire did not immediately penetrate my consciousness, the heat of the blast did and soon propelled me from
my seat. All around me, there was a confusion of upended tables, overturned chairs, bodies pitched toward the door of the
dining room, and the sounds of broken glass and crockery. Fortunately, the windows toward the street, large windows through
which a body might pass, had been thrown open by an enterprising diner. I remember that I rolled sideways through one of these
window frames and fell onto the snow and was immediately aware that I should move aside to allow others to land as I had— and it was in that moment that my altruism was finally triggered. I rose to my feet and began to assist those who had sustained
cuts and bruises and broken bones, or who had been mildly crushed in the chaos. The blaze lit up the escaped diners with a
light greater than any other that could be produced in the night, so that I was able to see clearly the dazed expressions
of those near to me. Many people were coughing, and some were crying, and all looked as though they had been struck by a blow
to the head. A few men attempted heroics and tried to go back into the hotel to save those who remained behind, and I think
one student did actually rescue an elderly woman who had succumbed to paralysis beside the buffet table; but generally there
was no thought of reentering the burning building once one had escaped. Indeed, so great was the heat that we in the crowd
had to move farther and farther across the street until we all stood in the college quadrangle, surrounded by bare oaks and
elms and stately sycamores.


Later we would learn that the fire had begun with a few drops of oil spilled onto a kitchen fire, and that the undercook,
who stood near to the stove, had felt compelled to extinguish the fire by throwing upon it a pitcher of water and then, in
her excitement, fanning the flames with a cloth she was holding. Some twenty persons in the upper stories of the hotel were
trapped in their rooms and burned to death—one of these Myles Chapin from the Chemistry faculty, and what he was doing in
a hotel room when his wife and child were safely at home on Wheelock Street I should not like to speculate (perhaps it was
his compromised circumstances that made the man hesitate just a second when he should not have). Surprisingly, only one of
the kitchen staff perished, owing to the fact that the back door had been left open, and the fire, moving with the particular
drafts between door and windows, sped toward the dining room, allowing most of the staff to escape unharmed, including the
hapless undercook who had started it all with her fluster.


The hotel was situated directly across from Thrupp College, where I was then engaged as the Cornish Professor of English Literature
and Rhetoric. Thrupp was, and is (even now, as I set down my story), a men’s school of, shall we say, modest reputation. Its
buildings are a motley collection, some of them truly hideous, erected at the beginning of the last century by men who envisioned
a seminary but later contented themselves with a small enclave of intellectual inquiry and classical education. There was
one impressive Georgian building that housed the administration, but it was surrounded by altogether too many dark brick structures
with small windows and oddly placed turrets that were emblematic of perhaps the most dismal period of American architecture,
which is to say early Victorian Gothic. Some of these edifices surrounded the quadrangle; the rest spilled along the streets
of a town that was all but dominated by the college. Because the school had elected to retain the flavor of a small New England
village, however, the colonial clapboard houses that lined Wheelock Street had been left intact and served as residences for
the more eminent figures in the various faculties. At the outskirts of town, before the granite hills began, lay the farms:
struggling enterprises that had been witness to generations of men trying to eke out a living from the rocky soil, soil that
always put me in mind of thin, elderly women.


We ousted, and therefore fortunate, diners stood at the center of this universe, too stunned yet to begin to shiver in earnest
from the cold and the snow that soaked our boots. Many people were squinting at the blaze or had thrown their arms over their
eyes and were staggering backward from the heat. Somewhat bewildered myself, I moved aimlessly through the throng, not having
the wits to walk across the quadrangle to Woram Hall, where I might have attained my bed. And so it was that my eyes were
caught, in the midst of this chaos, by the sight of a woman who was standing near a lamppost.


I have always been a man who, when glancing at a woman, looks first at the face, and then at the waist (those shallow curves
that so signal youth and vitality), and then thirdly at the hair, assessing in an instant its gloss and length. I know that
there are men for whom the reverse is true and men whose eyes fix inevitably upon the bodice of a dress and then hope for
a glimpse of calf, but on that night, I was incapable of parsing the woman in question in such a calculated manner simply
because I was too riveted by the whole.


I will not say plain, for who of us is entirely plain in youth? But neither will I say beautiful, for there was about her face and person a strength of color and of feature that rendered her neither delicate nor pliant,
attributes I had previously thought necessary for any consideration of true feminine beauty. She had immoderate height as
well, which is often off-putting in a woman. But there was about her a quality of stillness that was undeniably arresting.
If I close my eyes now, here in this racketing compartment, I can travel back in time more than three decades and see her
unmoving form amidst the nearly hysterical crowd. And even the golden brown of her eyes, a color in perfect complement to
the topaz of her dress, an inspired choice of fabric.


(As it happened, this was a skill at which Etna had no peer—that of matching her clothing and jewels to her own idiosyncratic
charms.)


The woman had almond-shaped eyes and an abundance of dark brown lashes. Her nostrils and her cheekbones were prominent, as
if there were a foreign element to her blood. Her acorn-colored hair, I guessed, would unwind to her waist. She was holding
a child in her arms, which I took to be her own. My desire for this unknown woman was so immediate and keen and inappropriate
that it quite startled me; and I have often wondered if that punishing desire, that sense of fire within the body, that craven
need to touch the skin, was not simply the result of the heightened circumstances of the fire itself. Would I have been so
ravished had I seen Etna Bliss across the dining room, or turned and noted her standing behind me on a street corner? I answer
myself, as I inevitably do, with the knowledge that it would not have mattered in what place or on what date I first saw the
woman—my reaction would have been just as swift and as terrifying.


(In a further aside, I should just like to add here that I have observed in my sixty-four years that passion both erodes and
enhances character in equal measure, and not slowly but instantly, and in such a manner that what is left is not in balance
but is thrown desperately out of kilter in both directions. The erosion the result of the willingness to do whatever is necessary
to obtain the object of one’s desire, even if it means engaging in lies or deception or debasing what was once treasured.
The enhancement a result of the knowledge that one is capable of loving greatly, an understanding that leaves one, paradoxically,
with a feeling of gratitude and pride in spite of all the carnage.)


(But, of course, I knew none of this at the time.)

When I had attended with some impatience and distraction to a man who had attached himself to my arm, an elderly gentleman
with rheumy eyes looking for his wife, I turned back to the place where the woman and child had stood and saw that they were
gone. With a sense of panic I can only describe as wholly uncharacteristic and quite possibly deranged—fortunately such
agitation was hardly noticeable in that crowd—I searched the quadrangle as a father will for a lost child. Many people were
already dispersing to their homes and to cabs (a fact that did little to ease my anxiety), while others had emerged from the
surrounding houses with blankets and coats and water and cocoa and even spirits for the victims of the blaze. Some of those
who had been in the dining room were now huddled in garments that were either too big or too small for them; they looked like
refugees who had beached themselves upon the quadrangle. By now the fire brigade had arrived and was turning its hoses on
the hotel. I am not aware that they saved a single soul that night, though they did drench the charred building with water
that turned to icicles before morning.


I wiped at my cheeks and forehead with my handkerchief. Strangely, I do not remember feeling cold. I walked amongst the thinning
crowd, my thoughts undisciplined. How was it that this woman had escaped my notice all the time I had been at Thrupp? After
all, the village was not so large as to produce general anonymity. And why had she been dining at the hotel? Had she been
sitting behind me as I had eaten my poached sole in solitude? Had the child been with her then?


I went on in this manner for some time until I began to slow my pace. It was not that desire had ebbed but rather that fatigue
was overwhelming me. I became aware that I had suffered a terrific shock: my knees grew shaky, and my hands began to tremble.
I finally noticed the cold as well; it cannot have been more than twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit on that night. I decided
to seek refuge and was recrossing the quadrangle for perhaps the fifth time when I heard a child’s cry. I turned in the direction
of the sound and saw two women standing in the darkness. The taller of the two was half hidden beneath a rug thrown over her
shoulders and in which she had wrapped the child. Next to her, and clinging to her arm, was an older woman who seemed in some
distress. She was coughing roughly.


When I drew closer to the threesome, I saw that the stillness I had observed in the woman with the golden brown eyes had now
been replaced by concern.


“Madam,” I said, approaching swiftly (as swiftly as the fire itself?), “are you in need of assistance?”

Whether Etna Bliss actually saw me then, or not until the following day, I cannot say, for she was understandably distracted.

“Please, I must get my aunt home,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you could find us transportation, for she has inhaled a great
deal of smoke and cannot walk the necessary distance to her house even under the best of circumstances.”


“Yes, of course,” I said. “Will you stay put?”

“Yes,” she said simply, thus placing the utmost trust, and perhaps even the well-being of her aunt, in my person.

I discovered that night that a man is never so capable and alert as when in the service of a woman he hopes to please. Almost
at once, I was in the street with paper dollars in my hand, which caught the eye of a cabdriver who already had a fare, but
who doubtless saw an opportunity to squeeze more bodies onto his frayed upholstered seats. I completed his calculation by
leaping onto the carriage and giving immediate instructions.


“Sir, this is irregular,” he said, looking for the extra tip.

But I, and rightly so, dressed him down. “A disaster has occurred of the most serious proportions, and people all about are
in dire need. You should be lending your aid for no pennies at all,” I said.


Astonishingly, for I had in the interim begun to doubt the reality of my encounter with the arresting woman, the two women
with the child were where I had left them. I helped the older woman, who was by now shivering badly, into the carriage first,
and then gave my hand to the woman with the child—the hand surprisingly warm in my frozen one. The other passengers could
barely suppress their annoyance at being delayed to their hot baths, but they nevertheless moved so that my party could fit.


“Madam, I shall need an address,” I said.

The ride cannot have lasted half an hour, even though the driver took the other fare home first. I sat across from the aunt,
who was still coughing, and from the couple, who might have been thinking of their lost possessions in the cloakroom (a dyed
fox coat? an alligator case?), but I was aware only of a slight pressure against my elbow, a pressure that increased or decreased
as the woman beside me attended to the child or leaned forward to put a hand upon her elderly aunt’s arm. And just that slight
pressure, of which the woman beside me was doubtless completely unaware, was, I believe, the most intensely physical moment
of my life to date—so much so that I can re-create its delicate promise and, yes, its eroticism merely by closing my eyes
here in my moving compartment, even with all that came after, all that might reasonably have blotted out such a tender memory.


We traveled the length of Wheelock Street until we came to an antique house of beeswax-colored clapboards. It was an unadorned
residence, like so many of the houses of that street. These I much preferred to the frippery that passed for architecture
on adjacent Gill Street: large, rambling structures with gables and porches and seemingly no symmetry, although these newer
houses did have better accommodations for indoor plumbing, for which one might have been willing to trade aesthetics. The
Bliss house had seven bedrooms, not counting attic rooms for servants, and two parlors, a dining room, and a study. It also
had, as of a year previous, steam heat, which hissed and bubbled up in silver radiators. I sometimes used to think the appliances
might explode and scald us to death as we played backgammon or took tea or dined of an evening in those overly furnished and
fussily papered rooms.


“But, madam, I know this house,” I said. “It is the home of William Bliss.”

“My uncle.”

I then realized that the woman sitting across from me was not elderly at all, but rather was the middle-aged wife of the Physics
Professor, a woman I had met on at least three occasions at the college.


“Mrs. Bliss,” I said, addressing her, “forgive me. I did not realize…”

But she, unable to speak, waved my apology away with a flutter of her hand.

I walked the two women to the front door, which was almost immediately opened by William Bliss himself.

“Van Tassel, what is this?” he asked.

“A fire at the hotel,” I explained quickly. “We are all lucky to have escaped with our lives.”

“Dear God, he said, embracing his wife and leading her farther into the house. “We wondered what all the bells and horns were
for.”


A housemaid took the child from the woman with the golden brown eyes, who then turned in my direction, simultaneously slipping
the rug from her shoulders and giving it to me to wear.


“Please take this for your journey home,” she said. “My aunt and I are very much in your debt.”

“Nicholas Van Tassel,” I said.

“Etna Bliss.”

Once again, she put her warm hand in mine. “How cold you are!” she said, looking down and withdrawing her hand almost immediately.
“Will you come in?”


Though I dearly wanted to enter that house, with its promise of warmth and its possibility of love (the mind leaps forward
with hope in an instant, does it not?), one knew that such was not appropriate under the circumstances.


“Thank you very much, but no,” I said. “You must go inside now.”

“Thank you, Mr. Van Tassel,” she said. And I think already her mind was on her aunt and the child and the hot bath that would
be waiting, for with that, she closed the door.


Perhaps a brief word here about my own circumstances at that time, which was December of 1899, for I believe it is important
to pass on to subsequent generations the facts of one’s heritage, information that is often neglected in the need to attend
to the day-to-day and, as a consequence, drifts off into the ether of time past. My father, Thomas Van Tassel, fought in the
War Between the States with the Sixty-fourth Regiment of New York and sacrificed a leg to that conflict at Antietam, a calamity
that in no way hindered his manhood, as I was but one of eleven children he subsequently sired off a succession of three wives.
My mother, his first wife, perished in childbirth—my own—so that I never knew her, but only the other two. My father,
clearly a productive man, was enterprising as well, and built three sizable businesses in his lifetime: a print shop, to which
I was apprenticed at a young age; a carriage shop; and then, as horses quite thoroughly gave way to motors, an automobile
showroom. My memories of my father exist primarily in the print shop, for I hardly knew him otherwise. I often sought refuge
in those rooms of paper and ink and type from my overly populated house in Tarrytown, New York, with its second and third
wives: one cold, the other melancholy, and in neither case well disposed to me, who had issued from the first wife, the only
woman my father had ever loved, a fact he did not shrink from announcing at frequent intervals, despite the impolitic nature
of the sentiment and the subsequent frigidity and sadness that resulted. I was not altogether bereft of feminine warmth during
my childhood, however, for I was close to one sibling, my sister Meritable, the very same sister whose funeral I am even now
journeying toward.


Perhaps because I was so engaged in the world of ink and broadsides, I developed an early and passionate appetite for learning
and was sent off to Dartmouth College at the age of sixteen. I can still remember the exquisite joy of discovering that I
should have a room to myself, for I had always had to share a room with at least three of my siblings. The college has an
estimable reputation and is widely known, so I shall not linger upon it here, except to say that it was there that I briefly
entertained the ministry, later abandoning it for want of piety.


After obtaining my degree, by which time I was twenty, I traveled abroad for two years and then was offered and accepted the
post of Associate Professor of English Literature and Rhetoric at Thrupp College, which is located some thirty-five miles
southeast of my alma mater. I took this post with the idea that in a smaller and less well known institution I might rise
more quickly and perhaps one day secure for myself the post of a Senior Professor or even of Dean of the Faculty, positions
that might not have been open to me had I remained at Dartmouth. I had not thought of taking a post outside of New England,
though there were opportunities to do so, the reason being that I had adopted the manners and customs of a New Englander so
thoroughly that I no longer considered myself a New Yorker. Indeed, I had occasionally taken great pains to present myself
as a New Englander, once even, I am a bit chagrined to admit, falsifying my history during my early months at Dartmouth, a
pretense that was difficult in the extreme to maintain and hence was abandoned before I had completed my first year. (It was
at Dartmouth that I dropped the second a from Nicholaas.)


Because my father was, by the time I had returned from Europe, modestly well off, I could easily have afforded to have my
own house in the village of Thrupp. I chose instead, however, to take rooms in Woram Hall, a Greek Revival structure affectionately
known as Worms, for the reason that I did not particularly wish to live entirely alone. I had as well a somewhat misguided
idea that boarding nearer to the students would allow me to come to know them intimately, and that this would, in turn, make
me a better teacher. In fact, I rather think the reverse was true: more often than not, I discovered, close proximity gave
birth to a thinly veiled antagonism that sometimes baffled me. My rooms consisted of a library, a bedroom, and a sitting room
in which to receive guests and preside over tutorials. In adopting New England ways, born two centuries earlier in Calvinistic
discipline, I had furnished these rooms with sturdy yet unadorned pieces—five ladder-back chairs, a four-poster bed, a dresser,
a cedar chest, a tall stool, and a writing desk in which I kept my papers—eschewing the more ornate and oversized furnishings
of the era that were so fashionable and so much in abundance elsewhere. (I think now of Moxon’s rooms: one could hardly move
for the settees and hassocks and English desks and velvet drapes and ornate marble clocks and fire screens and mahogany side
tables.) And as form may dictate content, I fit my daily habits to suit my austere surroundings, rising early, taking exercise,
arriving promptly to class, disciplining when necessary with a firm hand, and requiring much of my students in the way of
intellectual progress. Though I should not like to think I was regarded as severe by my students and colleagues, I am quite
certain I was considered stern. I think now, with the forgiveness that comes with reflection in later years, that I often
tried too hard to show myself the spiritual if not the physical progeny of my adopted forebears, even though what I imagined
to be the license of my New York heritage, as evidenced in my father’s excessive procreativity, would occasionally cause me
to stray from this narrow and spartan path, albeit seldom in public and never at Thrupp. For my parenthetical pleasure, I
traveled down to Springfield, Massachusetts, as did many of my unmarried, and not a few married, colleagues. I remember well
those furtive weekends, boarding the train at White River Junction and hoping one would not encounter a colleague in the dining
car, either coming or going, but always ready with a fabricated excuse should an encounter present itself. Over time, as a
result of such encounters, perhaps five or seven or ten, I had to develop a “sister” in Springfield whom I had twice monthly
to visit, even though said “sister” actually resided in Virginia, prior to moving to Florida, and wrote to me upon occasion,
the envelopes with the return address a source of some anxiety to me. I shall not here set forth in detail my activities while
in Springfield, though I can say that even in that city I proved to be, during my visits to its less savory neighborhoods,
as much a man of loyalty and habit as within the brick and granite halls of Thrupp.


More dazed than sensible, I took the cab back to the hotel, which was by now beginning to form its fantastical icicles as
a result of the sprays of water from the fire hoses. I lingered only briefly, however, due to the combination of penetrating
cold and shock, which had begun to make me shiver in earnest. I went back to my rooms at Worms, where I directed the head
boy to make a good fire and to draw a hot bath.


Worms did not then, nor does it now, have private bathrooms within its suites, and so I locked the door to the common bath
as I customarily did. The steam had made a cloud upon the cheval mirror, and I wiped away a circle of condensation so that
I could just make out my bewildered face. There was a bloody scratch on my cheek I had not known about. I was not accustomed
to spending any time in front of the glass, for I did not like to think myself vain, even in private, but that night I tried
to imagine how I, as a man, might appear to a woman who had just met me. At that time—I was thirty—I had a considerable
thicket of light brown hair, undistinguished in its color (this will surprise my son, for he has known me for a decade now
as only bald), and what is commonly called a barrel chest. That is, I had strength in my body, a body quite out of keeping
with my sedentary and intellectual occupations, a strength I could not refine but instead had learned to live with. I do not
know that I had ever been called handsome, my excursions to Springfield notwithstanding, for my lips were thickish in the
way of my Dutch forebears, and the bone structure of my face was all but lost within the stolid flesh bequeathed to me by
generations of burghers. To dispel that somewhat unpleasant image, and to appear more academic, I had cultivated spectacles
I did not actually need.


After my inspection, which taught me nothing I did not already know, except perhaps that one cannot hide one’s naked emotions
as well as one might wish, I lowered myself into water so hot that my submerged skin immediately turned bright pink, as though
I had been scalded. The boy, who I knew was angling for an A in “Logic and Rhetoric,” had set out a cup of hot cocoa, and
I indulged in these innocent pleasures, all the while seeing in my mind’s eye the form and face of Etna Bliss and feeling
anew the exquisite pressure of her arm against my own. Happily, the bath, as a hot soak will often do, produced a drowsiness
sufficient to send me off to my bed.


In the morning, I woke in a state of agitation and was forced to complete my toilet in haste and miss breakfast altogether
in order not to be late for my first class of the day, “The Romantic Lyric Poets” (Landon and Moore and Clare and so forth).
When I arrived at the classroom, I saw that the fire in the stove had gone out for want of tending and that the students sat
with their coats still on, th. . .