Extraordinary acclaim for Anita Shreve’s
F O R T U N E ’ S R O C K S
“Beguiling and richly rewarding. . . . This story of passion and scandal at the end of the last century is a breathtaking, highly entertaining novel. . . . Olympia may well be the most alluring female since Nabokov’s Lolita. . . . No praise is too high for Fortune’s Rocks. The book will take hold of you and not let go until the last word.”
— Robert Allen Papinchak, USA Today
“Shreve is a wildly entertaining novelist. . . . Fortune’s Rocks is a classic fin de siècle novel wrapped in millennial optimism . . . a morality tale that reads like something Edith Wharton would have written if she’d been a friend of Gloria Steinem instead of Henry James. . . . Indeed, what makes Fortune’s Rocks so compelling is Shreve’s attention to detail and her remarkable restraint.”
— Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor
“Anita Shreve, consummate historical novelist, has her own capacity for enthralling the reader and Fortune’s Rocks engages totally. . . . Shreve’s ability to build dramatic tension is remarkable.”
— Victoria Brownworth, Baltimore Sun
“Wonderful. . . . Fortune’s Rocks is intelligently told and beautifully written. . . . Shreve makes the reader care not just about Olympia and John, but about the supporting characters as well. She skillfully spins out several subplots, meanwhile tantalizing the reader with hints of what surely must happen next.”
— Michele Ross, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Anita Shreve has seduced this reader. . . . She is a skilled storyteller with an uncanny eye for detail: She excels in descriptions of fin de siècle clothing, styles of architecture, the manners and mores of New England families. . . . I found Fortune’s Rocks more satisfying than her previous books.”
— Kunio Francis Tanabe, Washington Post Book World
“Refined in style, powerful in feeling, Fortune’s Rocks creates a heroine who risks all for love. . . . The novel works on several levels: as love story, as social criticism, and as a depiction of the manners and mores of a stratified society in . . . . Novelists Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and Edith Wharton all challenged the rosewater-and-lavender tradition of women as creatures of invincible innocence. . . . Anita Shreve writes in this line of literary succession.”
— Peggy Nash, Dallas Morning News
“This book is not to be missed. . . . Shreve’s writing is just complex and meaty enough to portray the time period perfectly, and it’s a beautifully told story [with] a tense, page-turning trial at the end.”
— Beth Gibbs, Library Journal
“Shreve unravels her story painstakingly, allowing readers to experience the full measure of Olympia’s struggle as well as Haskell’s alternating periods of romantic passion and aching remorse. . . . Through it all, Shreve carefully contrasts the intellectual with the emotional and draws a compelling portrait of highly moral, ethical people who commit the one unforgivable crime of their time.”
— Diane Carman, Denver Post
“Fortune’s Rocks projects an inevitability and authorial confidence that bristles with the word now. Shreve’s heroine is similarly self-assured. . . . This novel of a forbidden love a century ago is a satisfying read.”
— Sunil Iyengar, San Francisco Chronicle
“Lolita meets Hester Prynne in this sexy, hard-to-put-down novel. . . . Fortune’s Rocks has all the ingredients for success.”
— Gabriella Stern, Wall Street Journal
“Desire takes center stage in Fortune’s Rocks. . . . Shreve’s luminous prose is splendid. She plumbs such emotional depths and can describe anything — light, the weather, suffering, remorse, passion, sexuality, despair, clothes. She beautifully documents, explores, and charts the course of this seemingly doomed affair from initial sexual bliss to exposure, expulsion, and exile. All of it is written in a present tense that keeps you on the edge of your seat.”
— Sam Coale, Providence Sunday Journal
A N I TA S H R E V E
Fortune’s Rocks
A N O V E L
Little, Brown and Company
b o s t o n | n e w y o r k | l o n d o n a l s o by a n i ta s h reve
The Pilot’s Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. FORTUNE’S ROCKS. Copyright © 1999 by Anita Shreve. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY
10020.
W A Time Warner Company
ISBN 0-7595-6289-X
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1999 by Little, Brown and Company. First eBook edition: April 2001
Visit our Web site at www.iPublish.com
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J o h n O s b o r n
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Contents
Fortune’s Rocks
In Exile
Fortune’s Rocks Revisited
The Writ
Excerpt from The Last Time They Met
• I •
Fortune’s Rocks
I n the timeit takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. Desire that slows the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence, that focuses the gaze absolutely on the progress of naked feet walking toward the water. This first brief awareness of desire — and of being the object of desire, a state of which she has had no previous hint — comes to her as a kind of slow seizure, as of air compressing itself all around her, and causes what seems to be the first faint shudder of her adult life. She touches the linen brim of her hat, as she would not have done a summer earlier, nor even a day earlier. Perhaps she fingers the hat’s long tulle sash as well. Around her and behind her, there are men in bathing costumes or in white shirts and waistcoats; and if she lifts her eyes, she can see their faces: pale, wintry visages that seem to breathe in the ocean air as if it were smelling salts, relieving the pinched torpor of long months shut indoors. The men are older or younger, some quite tall, a few boys, and though they speak to one another, they watch her.
3
Her gait along the shallow shell of a beach alters. Her feet, as she makes slow progress, create slight and scandalous indentations in the sand. Her dress, which is a peach silk, turns, when she steps into the water, a translucent sepia. The air is hot, but the water on her skin is frigid; and the contrast makes her shiver.
She takes off her hat and kicks up small splashes amongst the waves. She inhales long breaths of the sea air, which clear her head. Possibly the men observing her speculate then about the manner in which delight seems suddenly to overtake her and to fill her with the joy of anticipation. And are as surprised as she is by her acceptance of her fate. For in the space of time it has taken to walk from the seawall to the sea, perhaps a distance of a hundred yards, she has passed from being a girl, with a child’s pent-up and nearly frenzied need to sweep away the rooms and cobwebs of her winter, to being a woman. It is the twentieth day of June in the last year of the century, and she is fifteen years old.
•
•
•
Olympia’s father, in his white suit, his hair a fading ginger and blowing upward from his brow, is calling to her from the rocks at the northern end of the beach. The rocks upon which it has been the fate of many sailors to founder, thus lending the beach and the adjacent land the name of Fortune. He cups his mouth with his hands, but she is deaf from the surf. A white shape amidst the gray, her father is a gentle and loving man, unblemished in his actions toward her, although he believes himself in possession of both her body and her soul, as if they were his and not hers to squander or bestow. Earlier this day, Olympia and her father and her mother journeyed north from Boston by train to a cottage that, when they entered, was white with sheets and oddly without dust. Olympia wished when she saw the sheets that her mother would not ask 4
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Josiah, who is her father’s manservant, to take them off the furniture, because they made fantastical abstract shapes against the six pairs of floor-to-ceiling windows of the long front room. Beyond the glass and the thin glaze of salt spray lay the Atlantic with its cap of brilliant haze. In the distance there were small islands that seemed to hover above the horizon.
The cottage is a modest one by some standards, although Olympia’s father is a wealthy man. But it is unique in its proportions, and she thinks it lovely beyond words. White with dark blue shutters, the house stands two stories high and is surrounded by several graceful porches. It is constructed in the style of the grand hotels along Fortune’s Rocks, and in Rye and Hampton to the south: that is to say, its roof curves shallowly and is inset with evenly spaced dormer windows. The house has never been a hotel, but rather was once a convent, the home of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty sisters who took vows of poverty and married themselves to Jesus. Indeed, an oddity of the structure is its many cell-like bedrooms, two of which Olympia and her father occupy and three of which have been connected for her mother’s use. Attached to the ground floor of the house is a small chapel; and although it has been deconsecrated, Olympia’s family still cannot bring themselves to place their own secular belongings within its wooden walls. Except for a dozen neat wooden benches and a wide marble stone that once served as an altar, the chapel remains empty. Outside the house and below the porches are massive tangles of hydrangea bushes. A front lawn spills down to the seawall, which is little more than a rocky barricade against the ocean and which is covered at this time of year with masses of beach roses. Thus, the view from the porch is one of emerald leaves with blots of pink against a blue so sparkling that it is not so much a color as the experience of light. To the west of the lawn are orchards of Sheepnose 5
and Black Gilliflower apples, and to the north is the beach, which stretches two miles along the coast. Fortune’s Rocks is the name not only for the crescent of land that cradles this beach but also for the gathering of summer houses, of which the Biddefords’ is but one, on its dunes and rocks.
From the rocks, her father waves to her yet again. “Olympia, I called to you,” he says when she, with her wet hem, climbs up to the rock on which he is standing. She expects him to be cross with her. In her impatience to feel the sea on her feet, she inadvertently went to the beach during the men’s bathing hours, an activity that might be acceptable in a girl but is not in a young woman. Olympia explains as best she can that she is sorry; she simply forgot about the men’s bathing hours, and she was not able to hear him call to her because of the wind. But as she draws nearer to her father and looks up at his face and observes the manner in which he glances quickly away from her — this is not like him — she realizes that he must have witnessed her bare-legged walk from the seawall to the ocean’s edge. His eyes are watering some in the wind, and he seems momentarily puzzled, even bewildered, by her physical presence.
“Josiah has prepared a tray of bread and pastes,” her father says, turning back to her and recovering from the slight loss of his composure. “He has taken it to your mother’s room so that you both might have something to eat after the long journey.” He blinks once and bends to his watch. “My God, Olympia, what a shambles,” he adds. He means, of course, the house.
“Josiah seems to be handling the crisis well enough,” she offers.
“Everything should have been prepared for our arrival. We should have had the cook by now.”
Her father wears his frock coat still. His boots are heavy and black and covered with dust, and she thinks he must be extraordinarily hot and uncomfortable. Clearly, he dressed this day with some 6
’
indecision — trailing Boston behind him even as he was anticipating the sea. In the bright sunlight, Olympia can see her father’s face more clearly than she has all winter. It is a strong face, full of character, a face he inherited from his father before him and then later, through his own behavior, has come to deserve. His most striking feature is the navy of his eyes, a blue so vivid that his eyes alone, even with the flecks of rust in the irises, suggest moral rectitude. A fan of wrinkles, however, as well as folds of skin at the lids, soften the suggested righteousness. His hair is graying at the sides and thinning at the front, but he has high color and has not yet begun to grow pale, as is so often the fate of ginger-haired men in their middle age. Olympia is not sure if she has ever thought about her father’s height, nor can she accurately say how tall he is — only that he is taller than her mother and her, which seems in keeping with the proper order of the universe. His face is elongated, as Olympia’s will one day be, although neither of them is precisely thin.
“When you have finished your tea, I should like to see you in my study,” her father says in the ordinary manner in which he is accustomed to speak to her, though even she can see that something between them has changed. The sun etches imperfections in his skin, and there are, in that unforgiving light, tiny glints of silver and ginger spread along his jawline. He squints in the glare.
“I have some matters I need to discuss with you. Matters relating to your summer study and so forth,” he adds.
Her heart falls at the mention of summer study, since she is eager to have a respite from her singular, yet intense, schooling. Her father, having lost faith in the academies, has taken her education upon himself. Thus she is his sole pupil and he her sole teacher. He remains convinced that this education is progressing at a pace not dreamt of in the academies and seminaries, and that its breadth is 7
unsurpassed anywhere in New England, which is to say, the United States. Possibly this is true, Olympia thinks, but she cannot say: It has been four years since she last attended classes with other girls.
“Of course,” she answers.
He looks at her once and then lets his eyes drift over her right shoulder and out to sea. He turns and begins to walk back to the cottage. As she gazes at his slightly hunched posture, a physical characteristic she has not ever noticed before, she feels suddenly sad for her father, for the thing that he is losing, which is the guardianship of her childhood.
•
•
•
She floats through the house, appreciating the sculptures made by the white sheets strewn over the furnishings. A coatrack becomes a maiden ghost; a long dining room table, an operating theater; a set of chairs piled one on top of the other and shrouded in white becomes a throne. She climbs the stairs in the front hall to her mother’s rooms. Her mother is resting unperturbed on a peacock chaise that has been uncovered and looks directly out to sea. She seems not to notice the man perched on a ladder just outside her window. He has in one hand a bottle of vinegar and in the other a crumpled wad of newsprint. Josiah wears an overall for this task, although he also has on a waistcoat and a formal collar underneath. Later, when the windows have been cleaned, he will take off the overall, put his suit coat back on, adjust his cuffs under the sleeves, and walk into the study, where he will ask Olympia’s father if he wishes his customary glass of London porter. And then Josiah, a man who has been with her father for seventeen years, before her father’s marriage and her birth, and who has without complaint taken upon himself the washing of the windows in her mother’s rooms because he does not want her view of the ocean to be obscured on this, the first day of her summer visit (even though such a task is thoroughly beneath him), will walk 8
’
down the long pebbled drive and onto Hampton Street to lay into the new man who was to have had the house prepared before Olympia’s family arrived.
Since Olympia’s mother is partial to hues of blue, even in the summer months, she has on this day a wisteria crepe blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons and long deep cuffs that hide her wristbones and flatter her hands. At her waist is a sash of Persian silk. This preference for blue is to be seen as well in the fabrics of her room —
the pale beryl sateen puff on the bed, the peacock silk brocade of the chaise, the powder velvet drapes at the windows. Her mother’s rooms, Olympia thinks, suggest excessive femininity: They form a boudoir, separate, cut off from the rest of the house, the excess not to be condoned, not to be seen by others, not echoed anywhere else in the austere furnishings of the cottage.
Her mother lifts a cup to her lips.
“Your skin is pink,” she says to Olympia lightly, but not without a suggestion of parental admonition. Olympia has been told often to wear a hat to protect her face from the sun. But she was unable to forgo for those few happy moments at the water’s edge the sensation of heat at the top of her head. She knows that her mother does not seriously begrudge her this small pleasure, despite her inordinate regard for beauty. Beauty, Olympia has come to understand, has incapacitated her mother and ruined her life, for it has made her dependent upon people who are desirous of seeing her and of serving her: her own father, her husband, her physician, and her servants. Indeed, the preservation of beauty seems to be all that remains of her mother’s life, as though the other limbs of the spirit — industriousness, curiosity, and philanthropy — have atrophied, and only this one appendage has survived. Her mother’s hair, which has been hennaed so that it has taken on the color of a roan, is caught with combs at the sides and rolled into a complex series of knots that Olympia herself 9
has yet to master. Her mother has pale, pearl-gray eyes. Her face, which is both handsome and strong, belies her spirit, which is uniquely fragile — so fragile that Olympia herself has often seen it splinter into glittering bits.
“Josiah has prepared a tray,” her mother says, gesturing to the display of paste sandwiches. Olympia sits at the edge of the chaise. Her mother’s knees make small hillocks in the indigo landscape of her skirt. “I am not hungry,” Olympia says, which is true.
“You must eat something. Dinner will not be for hours yet.”
To please her mother, Olympia takes a sandwich from the tray. For the moment, she avoids her mother’s acute gaze and studies her room. They do not have their best furnishings at Fortune’s Rocks, because the sea air and the damp are ruinous to their shape and surface. But Olympia does like particularly her mother’s skirted dressing table with its many glass and silver boxes, which contain her combs and her perfumes and the fine white powder she uses in the evenings. Also on the dresser are her mother’s many medicines and tonics. Olympia can see, from where she sits, the pigeon milk, the pennyroyal pills, and the ginger tonic.
For as long as Olympia can remember, her mother has been referred to, within her hearing and without, as an invalid — an appellation that does not seem to distress her mother and indeed appears to be one she herself cultivates. Her ailments are vague and unspecific, and Olympia is not certain she has ever been properly diagnosed. She is said to have sustained an injury to her hip as a girl, and Olympia has heard the phrase heart ailment tossed about from time to time. There is, in Boston, a physician who visits her frequently, and perhaps he is not the charlatan Olympia’s father thinks him. Although even as a girl, Olympia was certain that Dr. Ulysses Branch visited her mother for her company rather than for her rehabilitation. Her mother never seems actually to be unwell, and Olympia 10
’
sometimes thinks about the term invalid as it is applied to her mother: invalid, in valid, not valid, as though, in addition to physical strength, her mother lacked a certain authenticity. As a result of these vague disabilities, Olympia’s mother is not the caretaker in the family, but rather the one cared for. Olympia has decided that this must suit both of her parents well enough, for neither of them has ever taken great pains to amend the situation. And as time has gone on, perhaps as a result of actual atrophy, her mother has become something of a valid invalid. She seldom leaves the house, except to have her husband walk her at dusk to the seawall, where she will sit and sing to him. For years, her mother has maintained that the sea air has a salubrious effect on both her spirits and her vocal cords. Despite the humidity, she keeps a piano at Fortune’s Rocks as well and will occasionally leave her rooms and play with some accomplishment. Olympia’s mother has wonderful bones, but Olympia will not inherit her face or the shape of her body or, thankfully, the brittleness of her spirit. Olympia’s mother, who met her father in Boston at a dinner arranged by her own father when she was twenty-three, did not marry until she was twenty-eight. Although she was considered a handsome woman, it was said that her nerves, which were selfeffacing to a degree of near annihilation, rendered her too delicate for marriage. Olympia’s father, ever one for a challenge and captivated by those very characteristics that frightened other men away — that is to say, her mother’s alternating fuguelike states of intense quiet and imaginative flights of fancy — pursued her with an ardor that he himself seldom admits to. Olympia does not know what to make of her parents’ married life, for her mother appears to be, though sensitive to a fault, the least physical of all women and oftentimes, if surprised, can be seen to flinch at her husband’s touch. Olympia’s thoughts balk, however, at crossing the veil to that forbidden place where she might be able to imagine in detail her parents’ marriage. 11
For it is a marriage that has seemed to thin as it has endured, until it appears to Olympia, by the summer of her fifteenth year, that there is only the one child and the vaguest and most formal of connections between them.
“You are quiet, Olympia,” her mother says, eyeing her carefully. Though fragile, her mother can be astute, and it is always difficult to hide from her one’s true thoughts. Olympia has been, indeed, thinking about her walk along the beach, viewing it as if from beside herself, seeing the somewhat blurry and vague figure of a young woman in peach silk conveying herself to the water’s edge under the scrutiny of several dozen men and boys. And in her mother’s room she blushes suddenly, as if she has been caught out.
Her mother shifts slightly on the chaise. “I fear I may already be too . . . too tardy in this discussion,” she begins diffidently, “but I cannot help but notice — indeed, I think I am quite struck by this —
that is to say, I am very mindful today of certain physical characteristics of your person, and I think we must soon have a talk about possible future occurrences, about necessary and delicate dilemmas all women have to bear.”
Though the sentence cannot be parsed, her meaning can be; and Olympia shakes her head quickly or waves her hand, as though to tell her she need not go on. For she has relied heavily upon Lisette, her mother’s maid, for information on matters of the body. Her mother looks startled for a moment, in the manner of someone who has hastily prepared a lengthy speech and has been stopped midsentence. But then, as she sits there, Olympia observes that relief overtakes her mother and flatters her features.
“Someone has discussed this with you?” her mother asks.
“Lisette,” Olympia says, wishing the conversation over.
“When was this?”
“Some time ago.”
“Oh. I have wondered.”
12
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And Olympia wonders, too, at the silence of Lisette regarding the daughter of her mistress. She hopes the woman will not receive a scolding for this confidence.
“You are settled?” her mother asks quickly, eager now as well to change the subject. “You are happy here?”
“Quite happy,” Olympia answers, which is true and is what her mother wants to hear. It is essential that her mother’s placidity not be disturbed.
At the window, Josiah moves on the ladder, causing both of them to look up in his direction.
“I wonder . . . ,” her mother says, musing to herself. “Do you think Josiah a handsome man?”
Olympia looks at the figure framed seemingly in midair. He has light-brown hair that waves back from a high forehead and a narrow face that seems in keeping with the length of his slim build. Mildly astonished as Olympia always is by any sudden and surprising crack in her mother’s long-practiced poise, she cannot think of how to answer her.
“Do you imagine that he keeps a mistress in Ely Falls?” her mother asks, pretending to wickedness. But then, after a brief heartbeat of silence, during which Olympia imagines she hears her mother’s longing for (and immediate dismissal of ) another life, she answers herself: “No, I suppose not,” she says.
Altogether, it is a day on which everyone around Olympia seems to be behaving oddly. She does not know whether this is a consequence of truly altered behavior on their part, or of her perception of herself, which she thinks she must be giving off like a scent. How else to explain the uncharacteristic inarticulateness of her father, or the forays of her mother into subjects she normally avoids?
“I should like you to take the tray with you when you go. To help Josiah, who is quite overwhelmed, I fear.”
Olympia is not as surprised by this non sequitur as she might be, 13
since her mother has a gift for abandoning subjects she has suddenly decided she does not wish to discuss further. Olympia stands up from the chaise and bends to lift the silver tray, happy to help Josiah, whom she likes. She is relieved to be dismissed.
“You must be more protective of yourself,” her mother says as Olympia leaves the room.
•
•
•
After Olympia has returned the tray to the kitchen, she walks into her father’s study, where he sits, in an oversize mahogany captain’s chair, reading, she can see, The Shores of Saco Bay by John Staples Locke, the first of the many volumes he will devour during the summer. Her father is, both by profession and by inclination, a disciplined and learned man, discipline being, in his belief, a necessary hedge against dissolution; therefore, he does not like to change his routine even on this first day of vacation, despite the lack of preparation for their arrival and the resulting chaos. During this summer, as in past summers, her father will invite to their cottage a succession of guests whom he has met largely through his position as president of the Atlantic Literary Club or as editor of The Bay Quarterly, a periodical of no small literary reputation. He will hold lengthy discussions with these people, who are most often poets or essayists or artists, in a kind of continuous salon. During the day, he will oversee the recreation of the visitors, which will be bathing at the beach or tennis at the Ely Tennis Club or boating through the pink-tinged marshes of the bay at sunset. Evening meals will be long and will last well into the night, even though his wife will excuse herself early. The women who will come to these dinners will wear white linen dresses and shawls of woven silk. Olympia has always been fascinated by the clothing and accessories of their female guests.
14
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Her father glances down at the hem of her dress, which is still damp. She asks him what he recommends that she read first this summer. He removes his spectacles and sets them on the green marble table beside his chair, which is a replica of the table he has in his library in Boston. Around them, the windows are thrown open, and the room is flooded with the peculiar salt musk of the outgoing tide.
“I should like you to read the essays of John Warren Haskell,” he says, reaching for a volume and handing it to her. “And then you and I will discuss its contents, for the author is here at Fortune’s Rocks and is coming to stay with us for the weekend.”
And this is the first time she hears John Haskell’s name.
“Haskell is bringing his wife and children with him,” her father adds, “and I hope you will help to entertain them.”
“Of course,” she says, smoothing her palm across the book’s brown silk cover and fingering its gilt-embossed title, “but as to these essays, I do not know the author.”
“Haskell is a man of medicine, and lectures occasionally at the college, which is where I originally met him; but his true calling, in my estimation, is as an essayist, and I have published several of his best. Haskell’s interests lie with labor, and he seems most particularly keen on improving living and working conditions for mill girls. Hence his further interest in Ely Falls.”
“I see,” she says to her father as she riffles through the pages of the modest book. And though she is already slightly bored with this topic, later she will sift and resift through the memory of this conversation for any tiny morsel she might have missed and thus might savor.
“Haskell keeps a clinic in east Cambridge,” her father says. “He is offering his services at Ely Falls for the season, as he is replacing one of the staff physicians who is taking a leave.” Her father clears his throat. “Haskell regards this as the most fortunate of circumstances, 15
for not only will it allow him to remain close by while his own cottage is being constructed farther down the beach, but he should be able to study firsthand the conditions that interest him so. And as for me, I also regard his visit as a fortunate circumstance, for I do enjoy the man’s wit and company. I think you will be charmed by Catherine, who is Haskell’s wife, as well as by the children.”
“Am I to be a governess then?” Olympia asks, mostly in jest, but her father takes the question seriously and looks appalled.
“My dear, certainly not,” he says. “The Haskells are our guests for the weekend only, after which Haskell shall stay on, as he has been doing, at the Highland Hotel until their cottage is finished, which should be by the end of July. Catherine and the children will stay in York with her family until then. Heavens, Olympia, how could you have imagined I would exploit you in such a manner?”
Her father’s study is dark, though the windows are open; and his books, which have been partially unpacked by Josiah, are already beginning to warp in the damp air. Each Monday throughout the summer, Josiah will place the books in tall stacks and weight these stacks with heavy irons to help return them, for a few hours, to their original shape and thickness. Olympia moves about the room, touching various familiar objects that her father has collected through the years and keeps at Fortune’s Rocks: a malachite paperweight from East Africa; a bejeweled cross her father purchased in Prague when he was nineteen; a stained ivory letter opener from Madagascar; the silver box that contains all of her mother’s letters written when her father was in London for a year before they were married; and a stained-glass desk lamp fringed with amber crystals at the edges that once belonged to Olympia’s grandmother. Her father also collects shells, as a small boy might, and when they walk together at the beach, he is never without a container in which to put them. On his shelves are delicately edged scallop shells, the darkly iridescent casings of lowly mussels, and 16
’
encrusted white oyster shells. When her father smokes, he uses the shells for ashtrays.
He watches her move about his study.
“You enjoyed your first visit to the beach?” he asks her carefully. She picks up the malachite paperweight. She is not certain she could describe her walk along the beach even if she wanted to.
“It was excellent, after so long a winter, to feel the sea and the sea air,” she answers. But when she looks up at him, she sees that he has put on his spectacles in a mild gesture of dismissal.
•
•
•
From her father’s study, she walks out onto the porch. She has the book her father gave her, but she is too distracted to open it. During the winter, she attained her full height, so that when she sits on a chair on the porch, she can now see over the railing and down the lawn, which needs cutting. A blossom she cannot identify is sending a luscious scent into the air, and that scent, combined with the sea, is creating an intoxicating and soporific cloud all about her. She unfastens the top two buttons of her dress and fans her neck with the cloth. She takes off her hat and lays it down, whereupon it immediately skitters along the porch floor until it wedges itself on the bottom rung of the railing. She slips her hands under her dress and removes her stockings from her garters as she did earlier at the bathhouse before walking down to the sea. She rolls the stockings into a ball and sits on them, and then lifts the hem of her dress, which has now grown stiff from the seawater, to her knees. She stretches out her legs, startled by the whiteness of her skin, which she has hardly ever in her life given any thought to. The coolish moist breeze tickles the back of her knees and the calves of her legs. She imagines the shocked face of Josiah or her father or her mother were any of them to come around the corner and catch her in her dishabille; but she decides the exquisite pleasure of the air against 17
her limbs worth the later mortgage of the consequences. Her eyes relax at the horizon, the place where the sea meets the sky, where it appears that all movement has been suspended. And indeed, it seems this day that she herself hovers in a state of suspension — that she is waiting for something she can hardly imagine and is only beginning to be prepared for.
18
O lympia likes to thinkabout the original inhabitants of the house, the sisters of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty French Canadian girls and women from the province of Quebec. Though the sisters had taken vows of poverty and were attached to the parish of Saint Andre in Ely Falls, they lived in the cottage at Fortune’s Rocks with all the beauty that such a prospect had to offer. Sometimes Olympia imagines the nuns sitting contemplatively on the porch, looking out to sea; or lying on their narrow horsehair beds in cells adorned with only a single cross above a rustic table; or praying together in the small wooden chapel with French thoughts and Latin words; and then traveling across the large expanse of salt marsh between Fortune’s Rocks and Saint Andre’s so that they could attend services with the French Canadian priests and immigrants. Olympia is sometimes puzzled by the contrast between the lush grounds of the cottage and the austere habits of the women who dwelt in it; but since she is not a Catholic, she cannot think too long about the theology behind this paradox. In fact, she does not, early in the summer of 1899, when she is lost in speculation about the women who must have glided in slippers along the polished floors of the house, know a single person of the 19
Catholic faith — a deficit that troubles her, since it seems to be yet another manifestation of her overly sheltered existence. She has been to Ely Falls only once, and that was the previous summer, when her father took her into the city to see that natural phenomenon that empties into the Ely River and makes the location such a desirable one on which to build a textile mill. They journeyed by carriage from Fortune’s Rocks into the heart of the city, with its massive dark-brick mills and its narrow tiers of worker housing, and it was, as they made their way, she thought, as though they moved through layers of names: from the Whittiers and Howells of Fortune’s Rocks, a class of wealth and some leisure who come north from Boston each year for the summer months; to the Hulls and Butlers of Ely proper, old Yankee families who live in sturdy clapboard houses and who own and run the mills and the surrounding shops; to the Cadorettes and Beaudoins of Ely Falls, firstand second-generation French Canadians from Quebec who emigrated to southern Maine and to the coast of New Hampshire looking for work. Residents of Fortune’s Rocks, which is largely uninhabitable in the winter because of the severity of the storms out of the northeast, are continually trying to secede from the government of Ely; but that government, which encompasses Fortune’s Rocks and Ely Falls, remains loath to let the wealthy inhabitants of Fortune’s Rocks escape, because the tax revenues from the summer cottages are considerable. Her father, who is moderately progressive in his views, is not supportive of secession. He has told his daughter repeatedly that he believes it is his moral duty to contribute to the welfare of the inhabitants of the mill town, even though that town government is inexpressibly corrupt.
Though that day with her father Olympia was indeed rapt by the majestic sight of five million gallons of water a minute falling a height of sixty feet into a diamond-strewn spray that fueled the spinners and the looms of the mills at Ely Falls, it was the nearby utili20
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tarian, and indeed often shabby, town houses, where the mill girls boarded, that intrigued her more. As they rode through the city in their carriage, her father delivering, since he was a man of letters and two generations removed from the shoe manufacturing in Brockton, Massachusetts, that had produced his own family’s wealth, a lucid commentary on the exploitative economics of textile manufacturing — a commentary that was understood to be as integral to her education as the works of Ovid and Homer she had been reading in the spring — it was all Olympia could do not to cry out to her father to stop the horse. For she wanted so to gaze upon the facades of those buildings, with the odd book or feathered hat or milk glass pitcher in a window, and imagine, with only the angle of the hat or the simplicity of the pitcher to guide her, the lives of the women behind those enigmatic windows. In those rooms, Olympia believed, were girls not much older than she, living lives she desperately wanted a glimpse of, if not actually to try on. Lives so much more independent and adventurous than her own, however appreciative she was of her comfort. And she still does not know if her own restlessness, which has always seemed to be part of her spirit, is a result of her orderly and comfortable upbringing, or whether she is simply destined, by the same biological inheritance that causes her mother to be intolerant of even modest episodes of reality, to have a less complacent, and perhaps more curious, temperament than her peers. But she did not cry out to her father that day; for if she had, he would have regarded her with astonishment and dismay and would have assumed it necessary to readjust his assessment of her maturity and judgment.
In 1892 Bishop Pierre Bellefeuille of Saint Andre’s Church, having decided that the parish would be better served if the sisters moved into the city so that they could take over the management of the hospice and the orphanage, sold the convent to Olympia’s father, who happened to be in the smoking room of the Highland Hotel on 21
the evening that Father Pierre came for a drink and mentioned the upcoming sale. Her father graciously (and rather prudently, as it happened) offered to buy the convent sight unseen and gave Father Pierre a check for the entire amount right there in the smoking room. The conversion took a month — primarily the turning of twenty tiny bedrooms into eight modest ones and one larger set of rooms for her mother, as well as the installation of indoor plumbing, a luxury the sisters had not permitted themselves. Olympia is sitting, as she idly contemplates the nuns and their convent and the town of Ely Falls, on a wooden bench inside the deconsecrated chapel, which is attached to the northern side of the house. It is a small building with a peaked roof and clear-glass windows through which one can gaze at the many charms of nature, if not actually of God, although Olympia is sure the sisters would have had it otherwise. Apart from the shape of the chapel and its pews, the only religious artifact is its altar — a squat, heavy slab of delicately veined white marble that looks naked without its cross and candelabra and other accessories to the Catholic Mass. It is the late morning of the day of the summer solstice, and through an open window Olympia is trying to capture on her sketch pad the look of a wooden boat, unpainted, its sails old, a dirty ivory. But she is not, she knows, terribly gifted as an artist, and her attempts to render this boat are more impressionistic than accurate, the main purpose of her sketching being not so much to improve her drawing skills as to provide herself with an opportunity for idle thought. For at this time in her life, Olympia is much occupied with the process of thinking: not constructive thinking necessarily, and nothing that will produce brilliant solutions to problems, but rather drift thinking, like dreaming, the thoughts moving randomly from one place to another, picking something up, looking at it, putting it down again, the way people move through shops. As she takes her daily walks along the seawall (or through the Public Garden at 22
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home), or sits on the porch gazing out to sea, or joins her father’s guests at the dinner table, observing the way the flattering yellow candlelight plays amongst the faces of the visitors, her thoughts wander and the scenery shifts. Although at the dinner table she will sometimes play a game with herself in which she tries to reconcile what an individual might be saying at any given moment with the unrelated and truer thoughts she imagines the person to be having, a game that has caused her to be unusually attentive to character. So her sketching is a ruse for a larger scheme. But though it is, and she is more than a little content simply to be left alone on a bench in the chapel, she is mildly disturbed by her inability to capture, even approximately, the relative size of the boat when compared with the islands behind it. Thus she is slightly distracted by her task when she hears, faintly at first and then with more clarity, the urgent and excited voices of children. When she stands up to peer through the window at the house, she sees that there are indeed children on the front porch; and although it seems as though an entire schoolroom has descended upon them, she can count only four slender bodies. Of course, she knows at once that this means that John Warren Haskell and his family have arrived and that she should go in to greet them.
Olympia sees immediately, as she walks across the lawn, that the children are all related: There are three dark-haired girls, ranging in age from about twelve years to three, and one boy, slightly older than the youngest girl, whose hair is thick and smooth and so yellow as to startle the eye. As Olympia reaches the porch steps, her sketchbook under her arm, and the children, curious, peer over the edge of the railing at the stranger in the white linen dress drawing nearer to them, she sees that they all have dark eyebrows (even the boy) and the same strong, wide mouth. The two older girls have shed their baby fat and are quite slender; the eldest girl, Olympia notes, will one day have considerable height since her shoulders are already 23
broad and her legs long. The girl stands with her feet spread slightly apart and with her hands on her hips. Her pale blue dress, with its white collar and delicate embroidery, seems at odds with her athletic stance; and she is, as Olympia watches her, slightly challenging in her posture.
The other girl is shy and has a hand to her mouth. The youngest girl and the boy are continuously in motion, unable to stop at any one place upon the porch for fear of missing another vista that might prove to be almost unbearably exciting. As the children take in the lawn and the rocks and the sea and then the young woman who is approaching them, they have about them an expression Olympia recognizes from herself the previous day: a nearly frenzied inhaling of the first stingingly heady breaths of summer.
Once on the porch, she stops first to say hello to the two smaller children, who bend their heads in embarrassment, and then to the middle girl, who shyly takes Olympia’s hand but does not utter a word, and then to the oldest girl, who tells Olympia her name is Martha.
“I am Olympia Biddeford,” she says. The girl takes her hand but looks over her right shoulder.
“And I am John Haskell,” she hears a voice announce behind her. Olympia makes a half turn. She sees walnut hair, hazel eyes. The man nods almost imperceptibly. His shirt is wilted in the humidity, and the hems of his trousers are frosted with a fine layer of wet sand. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his braces making indentations in his shoulders. The cuffs of his shirt are undone, though he has not gone so far as to roll them. She guesses, in the brief period of time it takes him to cross the porch and extend his hand, that he is about the age of her father, perhaps a year or two younger, which would put him at about forty. He is not stocky exactly, because he has height, but he is broad-shouldered. She has the sense that his clothes confine him.
24
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As he takes her hand, he steps from the shade of the porch into a rectangle of sunlight. Perhaps there is the barest trembling of her fingers in his palm, for he quickly tilts his head so that the sun is not in his eyes. He glances down at their clasped hands and then again at her face. He does not speak for some seconds after that, nor does she. Not a word, not a greeting, not a pleasantry. And Olympia thinks that her mother, who is just coming out onto the porch at this time, must see this silence between them.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Olympia says finally.
“And I yours,” he says, releasing her hand. “You have met Martha.”
Olympia nods.
“And this is Clementine,” he says, gesturing to the shy middle girl. He turns around to find the smaller children. “And those in motion are Randall and May.”
Olympia feels, through the body, a sensation that is a combination of both shame and confusion.
“Do you swim?” Martha asks beside her, her voice breaking through the warm bath of John Haskell’s greeting like a spill of ice water upon the skin.
“Yes, I do,” Olympia says.
“Are there shells upon the beach?”
“Many,” she answers.
Olympia wants suddenly to leave the porch and the watchfulness of her mother, who has not moved over the threshold of the doorway nor spoken a word.
“What kind?”
“What kind of what?” Olympia asks distractedly.
“Shells,” Martha says with some impatience.
“Well, there are oysters and mussels, of course. And clams.”
“Do you have a basket?”
“I think one can be found,” she says.
25
John Haskell walks away from them. He leans against the railing of the porch and studies the view.
“Where?” Martha asks.
“There are several in the kitchen,” she says.
“What are you working on?”
Olympia does not at first understand the question. Martha points to the sketchbook under her arm.
“A picture,” she says. “It is not very good.”
“Let me see it.”
Although she does not want to, Olympia can find no reason to refuse Martha this request.
“No, it is not,” Martha says in a disarmingly forthright manner when she has looked at the drawing.
“Martha,” John Haskell says in mild admonition. “We should not detain Miss Biddeford any longer. Walk with me, please.”
Olympia watches as John Haskell and his daughter descend the wide front steps of the porch and make their way across the lawn, Martha not reaching his shoulders. Olympia turns and looks at her mother, who regards her thoughtfully. Olympia moves toward her and makes as if to brush past her, and asks (and she can hear the new false note in her voice) if she should take the smaller children out for a walk along the seawall. And then immediately, before her mother has a chance to speak, Olympia answers herself: “Let me just change my boots and fetch a shawl,” she says, slipping past her mother. And if her mother speaks a word to her, Olympia does not hear it.
•
•
•
Olympia’s room is soothing to the eye, and she is not unlike her mother in that within its four walls she often seeks refuge. It has been papered in a pale azure that echoes the sky; against this background are tiny bouquets of miniature cream roses. The room is large enough for only her single bed, a small bedside table, a dresser, 26
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a ladies’ writing desk, and a chair. Olympia has put the writing desk up against the window so that she might see out across the lawn and to the ocean, a view she never tires of, not even on the worst of days the New Hampshire coast has to offer. Framing the window are white muslin curtains with their panels tied back so that the soft cloth provides a diamond opening to the sea. She thinks it may be the diffused light through the white gauze that almost always causes a sensation of tranquillity to descend upon her whenever she shuts the door and realizes that at last she is alone.
But this day, there is no peace to be had in that room or in any other. She walks to the window and away again. She lies on the bed and then is immediately up and pacing. She walks to the glass over the dresser and peers at her face, turning her face from side to side to observe it, trying to imagine how it might be seen in the first few seconds of a greeting, what judgments might be made about her physical beauty or lack thereof. She turns sideways and studies the length of her figure and the manner in which her dress falls from her bosom. She leans forward almost into the glass itself to peer at the skin above the scalloped collar of her dress, and in doing so, she sees that her face is mottled at the cheekbones. She is suddenly certain her mother must have noticed this staining as well. She wonders then about her mother, who surely is waiting to see if Olympia will descend soon with shawl and boots to take the children for a walk on the beach, as she has promised. And at that moment, as if in answer, there is a knock.
Composing herself as best she can, Olympia moves to the door and opens it. Her mother stands across the threshold, her arms folded, her mouth open in a question that does not entirely emerge. It is purely serendipitous, and more fortunate than Olympia deserves, that she looks as ill as she professes to be. She lies to her mother, shamelessly and extravagantly, and tells her she is uneasy in her bowels, possibly from something she has eaten. She does not feel 27
feverish, she adds, but she has been resting for a moment. And then before her mother can speak, Olympia asks if her mother has told the children yet about the walk, for she doubts she will be able to take them to the beach as she planned.
“I see,” her mother says, though Olympia notes the doubt in the cast of her mother’s mouth. Olympia has lied before, white lies to protect her mother from discovering some small truth that might worry her needlessly, but Olympia is not aware of ever having lied to protect or excuse herself. And she thinks then that though her mother often chooses to dwell in a world in which few decisions need to be made, she is making one then. And that her mother is, in her way, nearly as discomfited by Olympia’s obviously agitated state as she is.
“You will not come down then for supper,” her mother says, and Olympia hears in her voice that this is not a question, but a statement. When she is gone, Olympia lies on her bed. She stares at nothing at all and tries to calm herself with the sound of the waves breaking against the sand. And after a time, this effort begins to bring the reward of regular breath. So much so, in fact, that she sits up, searching the room for occupation. Her knitting is in a carpetbag by the dresser, her sketchbook abandoned on her desk. On her bedside table, she sees the book her father gave her the day before. She picks it up and fingers the slightly raised lettering of the gilt title. She takes the book with her to the room’s single chair and begins to read. That afternoon, Olympia reads John Haskell’s entire book, not to educate herself or to understand its contents, which only yesterday seemed a tedious challenge, but to search for clues as to another’s mind in the specific combination of words, as if the structure of the sentences and the words therein were formulas that once deciphered might reveal small secrets. But she is, as she reads, despite her true 28
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intentions, absorbed in the matter of the book itself. The premise is deceptively simple and unusual, at least in Olympia’s limited experience. In On the Banks of the Rivers, John Warren Haskell presents to the reader seven stories, or rather, Olympia thinks, portraits —
portraits that are extraordinarily detailed and drawn with seeming objectivity — of seven persons associated with the mills at Lowell, Holyoke, and Manchester: four female workers and three male. In the rendering of these portraits, there is little rhetoric and no observable attempt on the part of the author to praise or to injure any of the men or women. Instead, the reader is given a depiction of a way of life that speaks, through the images of the daily struggles alone, more eloquently, Olympia decides, than rhetoric ever could of the nearly intolerable lot of the millworker. The portraits are raw and have passages that are to her both illuminating and difficult to read — not in their language but in the pictures they call forth; for the knowledge of the author in domestic and medical matters is exceedingly detailed. She wonders briefly about her father’s motivation in exposing her to this material, although this is not the first time he has given her difficult or questionable subject matter that other teachers might suppress. He has always encouraged Olympia, in their dialogues, not to turn away from the painful or the ugly, at least not in print. That afternoon, in her room, without moving from her chair, she lingers over words: male-spinner and scabs and colomel. She flinches at the description of a surgical intervention for an early cancer. She is fascinated by the plumbing of the boardinghouse. And she wonders, more than a little idly, how John Haskell can know of machine knitting as well as the pain of childbirth. As she reads and wonders these things, she is admitted, page by page, into the breadth of the man’s knowledge of the human body and of human nature, so that she feels as though she has spoken with John Haskell at length, when, of course, she has not.
29
When she looks up, she sees that the light has reached that excellent period in the day when all objects are given more clarity than they have had before. And she is able to convince herself that she has somehow deftly managed to trade an unacceptable set of feelings for an acceptable set, namely, to have spun respect from confusion, admiration from agitation, and that this alchemy permits her to contemplate descending for the evening meal in an almost normal state. 30
I n timeOlympia will learn of the obsession with the “other,”
that person from whom the theft is made — the wife, the former mistress, the fiancée. Of the relentless prurience that causes another woman to become an object of nearly intolerable curiosity. Of tormenting fascination that doesn’t abate. She will discover that summer that she wants to know the most intimate of details about Catherine Haskell’s life: if she sleeps alone in her bed or entwined with her husband; what words of tenderness she whispers and thus receives; if she hears, as Olympia does, the momentary pause and then the low, hushed cry, secretive and thrilling, that only a lover should be privy to. Do they share, she will wonder, Catherine Haskell and she, certain memories, events replayed at different points in the continuum of time, so that her memories are not her own at all, but merely repetitions of Catherine’s? So that, in the continuum of time, each woman is similarly betrayed?
And in years to come, Olympia will ask herself if she did not, in fact, enter into a kind of love affair with Catherine Haskell, if her curiosity about the woman and about the years she had with John Haskell that Olympia did not, years in which marriage vows were 31
made and celebrated, children were born and treasured, a marriage bed was entered and left a thousand times, did not constitute a twisted form of love itself, a love that could never, by its very nature, be returned or sated.
•
•
•
Olympia makes the decision to go down to supper and confronts the reality of her unkempt appearance in the mirror over the dresser. Although they have a laundress at Fortune’s Rocks, Olympia does not have a personal maid (nor does she in Boston), since her father believes self-sufficiency in matters of dress and personal hygiene to be an essential part of the education of a young woman. Nor does he approve of vanity in a girl, and to that end he has urged Olympia to keep her toilet and her wardrobe as uncomplicated as possible, without straying into the realm of the eccentric. It would appear that this schooling in simple taste applies only to his daughter, however, and not to his wife: Her father seems pleased with her mother’s lavenderblue silks and navy voiles and also with the elaborate and timeconsuming coils and combs of her hair. Olympia’s mother, of course, does have a personal maid, who is Lisette.
Olympia has never minded her father’s admonitions to her on the subject of dress and appearance, for she has grown accustomed to caring for herself. Indeed, she thinks she would find it distasteful to share, for the purposes of maintenance only, the intimacies of her body. That being true, however, she does have an unpleasant half hour in her room, discarding one dress for another, bewildered by a modest assortment of jewelry, and unsure of whether to let her hair down or keep it pinned up, both choices seemingly fraught with underlying resonance: Is she a girl or is she a woman? Is this supper a casual event or is it more formal? Would her father like to see her with her hair down but her mother with it up? Olympia settles for 32
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loose hair with a ribbon and a navy blue and white linen dress that has about the bodice rows of white piping that suggest a sailor’s collar. But just as she is about to leave the room, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and she is somewhat horrified to see that she resembles more an overgrown schoolgirl than a young woman about to attend a supper party on the evening of the summer solstice. Frantically unfastening the buttons of the bodice and pulling the offending dress over her head, she selects from the clothes on the bed a white handkerchief linen blouse and a long black wool challis skirt with a high-fitted waist. She tears the equally offensive ribbon from her head and begins to pin her hair into a high knot. Her hair at this time of year, before it has collected its summer highlights, is oakcolored and heavy and requires an extraordinary number of hairpins to secure it in place. Even so, she finds she has to allow loose strands to wander to her shoulders, or she will miss supper altogether. Prudently, she decides not to glance at her appearance in the mirror as she leaves the room.
•
•
•
She hears muffled voices in the direction of the porch and so takes a detour to the dining room, unwilling yet to enter into conversation. Since it is the first supper party of the season, the table has been more elaborately set than usual, with cloisonné china, her mother’s cut-crystal goblets, and masses of miniature cream roses strewn seemingly haphazardly, but with her mother’s artful eye, upon the white damask of the tablecloth. Dozens of candles, in sconces and in candelabra, have been lit and are reflected in double mirrors over two opposing mahogany buffets, so that everywhere there seems to be an infinite number of yellow-warm flickering lights. As it is still only dusk, she can see, through the large screens at the windows, hedges of beach roses that border the south side of the lawn, and be33
yond them the orchards. The air through the screens is soft and swims over the body like a spirit making its way through the room. Olympia follows this spirit’s trail by watching the flickering flames of the candles. Beyond the door to the butler’s pantry, she can hear raised voices and the sound of metal clanging upon metal. And then she hears another sound, the sibilant rustling of skirts in the doorway.
“You must be Olympia.”
Olympia notices first, as doubtless everyone must, the wide green eyes, a green as transparent as sea glass. Catherine Haskell advances, and Olympia is surprised to discover that the woman is not as tall as she and that she has an almost imperceptible limp.
“What a lovely room,” Catherine says, removing her hat and taking in the table in a glance. Her hair, Olympia sees, is a most unusual color: a dark blond woven with a fair percentage of silver threads, so that it has taken on the appearance of gossamer.
“You must be Mrs. Haskell,” Olympia responds, finding her tongue.
“I can never get used to the gloriousness of Fortune’s Rocks, no matter how often we come here,” Catherine says, trying to twist a stray strand of hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Olympia is struck by her smile, which is not exactly a smile of self-satisfaction, but seems rather to be one of genuine contentment.
“I have been walking,” Mrs. Haskell says, explaining the hat and lifting it in her hand. She has on a green taffeta dress with many underskirts — an odd choice, Olympia thinks, for a walk. Perhaps Catherine Haskell was simply too impatient to change her clothes, as Olympia was the day before. Olympia notices that her boots and the hems of her skirts have dust on them.
“I was afraid I would delay supper,” she says.
Olympia shakes her head.
34
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“I hope the children have not been pestering you,” Catherine says. “Have you met them? I know that Martha will have been charmed by you and will want to question you about all manner of things, and you must send her away whenever you want.”
“Oh, not at all,” Olympia says, thinking that Martha was not in the slightest charmed by her. “I have hardly seen them, except to meet them, as I have been in my room all afternoon.”
“Really? On such a fine day? Whatever for?”
Instantly Olympia regrets having confessed confinement in her room, and she sees as well that she cannot tell this woman that she has spent the entire afternoon reading her husband’s essays. Although Olympia cannot articulate precisely why at that moment, the idea feels ill-mannered and intrusive, as if she had been studying an album of private photographs.
“I have been resting,” she says.
“Oh, I hope you are not unwell.”
“No, I am very well,” Olympia answers in confusion, looking at her feet.
“Catherine,” the woman says slowly, pronouncing her name in three syllables. “Please call me Catherine. Otherwise, you will make me feel too old.”
Olympia looks up and tries to smile, but she can see that Mrs. Haskell is examining her, the eyes straying to her waist, to her hair. And then returning to her face, which she holds for a moment before glancing away toward the porch.
“Do you suppose,” Mrs. Haskell asks, “that I might have time to slip up to my room and change into another dress, one that has not been dragged along the sand and the sea moss?”
It is not really a question, for surely Olympia is not the arbiter of the supper hour. Mrs. Haskell leaves the room with the same sibilant swishing of her skirts with which she entered.
35
Olympia leans for a moment against the frame of the door, and as she does, she happens to see, through the screen of a window, a small seal beach itself upon a rock.
•
•
•
That night they are seven at dinner, with the addition of Rufus Philbrick from Rye, who owns hotels and boardinghouses in that town, as well as Zachariah Cote, a poet from Quincy who is having a holiday at the Highland Hotel. (A seventh place is hastily set for Olympia, who was not expected.) The children, having eaten earlier, have been removed temporarily from the house by the Haskells’ governess, who has obligingly taken them for an evening walk along the beach. Mr. Philbrick, a large man with pure white whiskers and beard, has on a striped jacket with cream trousers. Olympia takes him for a dandy as well as a man of property. Cote, whose poetry she has sampled and set aside, his saccharine and sorrowful images not to her liking, is a remarkably handsome man with dark blond hair and astonishingly white teeth, an asset he must be vain about, Olympia thinks, for he seems to smile a great deal. (And are those really lavender eyes?) Her mother, in hyacinth chiffon, with pearl combs in her hair, seems to be in an animated mood, which sets off but the faintest of alarms in Olympia’s mind, and she imagines in the mind of her father as well; for they have both known such episodes of brilliance and gaiety before and have reason to fear the collapse that sometimes follows. But such is the flickering beauty of the room with its seven diners, and with the candles reflected again and again in the double mirrors over the buffets, and with the moist air moving through the screen, air that hints of such a wealth of nights to follow that Olympia feels rich with their luxury, that she cannot be anything but exhilarated.
Olympia is greeted and spoken to and queried early in the meal, a mild flurry of attention that she has learned to expect and respond 36
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to. When the guests have asked all the obligatory questions, and the fish chowder has been exchanged for escalloped oysters, she will be left to listen to the others, which is the part of the meal she enjoys best.
She forms quick judgments about the guests. She sees that Zachariah Cote, in his conversation and in his gestures, is too eager to please her father, who has not yet decided whether to publish the poet’s verse. And she finds that this particular display of eagerness, as it inevitably will be under such circumstances, is more pathetic than charming. She prefers the rather gruff demeanor of Rufus Philbrick, in his odd striped suit, with his sharp-tongued replies to her father’s queries. For these in turn produce joviality in her father, since he knows his evening will contain at least a modicum of wit. Olympia’s mother seems to drink a great deal of champagne and not to touch her meal, and periodically Olympia’s father glances over at his wife or lays his fingers briefly on her hand. Olympia knows that he hopes his wife will excuse herself early in the evening before she begins to disintegrate. Catherine Haskell, in a dress of heliotrope crepe de chine, which dramatically sets off her blond and silver hair, responds politely to queries from the men and gravitates protectively toward Olympia’s mother, complimenting her with apparent sincerity on the masses of miniature roses on the table and asking her opinion about the advisability of the girls’ boating in the marshes in the morning.
John Haskell is seated at the far end of the table, and from time to time Olympia can hear his voice. It seems that the men, including Haskell, are relating to Cote, who is not familiar with the area, a story involving the poetess Celia Thaxter, whom her father has published often and admires. Thaxter, Olympia knows, had a peripheral, though critical, role in a local murder some twenty-five years earlier. But since this is an oft-told tale for Olympia, and a rather gruesome one at that, she lets her thoughts drift for a period of min37
utes until such time as the lamb medallions and the rice croquettes will be served and good manners will once again compel the guests to include her. She is informed enough this summer on some subjects to enter into conversation if invited to do so, a fact that her father knows; and it is possible that at any moment he might demonstrate the education of his daughter by drawing her into a debate about American liberalism or Christian social reform. But that night she observes that her father, too, seems to be more than usually animated, almost flushed, and she thinks this must somehow be attributable to the double beauty of Mrs. Haskell and her mother, and the further doubling — no, quadrupling — of their handsomeness in the double mirrors over the buffets. Indeed, Olympia discovers, as she looks around the table, that all of the men are well positioned in regard to the double mirrors and thus are recipients of an infinite multiplication of the charms inherent in a certain tilt of a head, a long throat leading to a cloud of silver and gold gossamer, a smile quickly bestowed, a slight furrowing of the brow, the drape of pearls upon a white bosom, the fall of a strand of hair that has come loose from a jet and diamond-studded comb. And she, too, is deeply attentive to these charms, as an apprentice will be to a carpenter or a smith. But when, in the course of her drifting thoughts, she glances over at the opposite end of the table, she sees that John Haskell is gazing not at the charms of his wife or of Rosamund Biddeford, either in the flesh or in the double mirrors, but at her. There is no mistaking this gaze. It is not a look that turns itself into a polite moment of recognition or a nod of encouragement to speak. Nor is it the result of an absentminded concentration of thought. It is rather an entirely penetrating gaze with no barriers or boundaries. It is scrutiny such as Olympia has never encountered in her young life. And she thinks that the entire table must be stopped in that moment, as she is, feeling its nearly intolerable intensity. 38
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She bends her head, but perceives nothing, not the fork in her hand, the lace at the sleeve of her blouse, nor the lamb medallions on her plate. When she raises her eyes, she sees that his gaze is still unbroken. She cannot, finally, keep the bewilderment from her face. Perhaps because of her confusion, which must suddenly be apparent, he turns his head away quickly toward her father, as if he would speak to him. And it is then that her father, doubtless startled by Haskell’s abrupt attention (or possibly unconsciously aware of the man’s gaze in his daughter’s direction), says to the assembled group,
“I have given Olympia John’s new book to read.”
The silence that follows is more dreadful than any untutored comment she might have uttered in its place, a silence in which her father and his guests wait for her to speak, a silence during which she risks turning her father’s pleasure into disappointment. So that after a time, he is compelled to say, with the faint echo of the schoolmaster in his voice, “Is not that so, Olympia? Or perhaps you have not yet had time to glance at Haskell’s essays.”
She raises her chin with a bravado she does not feel and says to John Haskell rather than to her father, “I have read nearly all of the essays, Mr. Haskell, and I like them very much.”
She breathes so shallowly that she cannot get air into her lungs. Another silence ensues, one that, as it unfolds, begins to annoy her father.
“Surely, Olympia, you can be more specific,” he says finally. She takes a breath and lays down her fork.
“The form of your essays is deceptively simple, Mr. Haskell,” she says. “You appear to have written seven stories without judgment or commentary, yet the portraits, in the accretion of detail, are more persuasive, I believe, than any rhetoric could possibly be.”
“Persuasive of what?” asks Philbrick, who has not read the essays.
“Persuasive of the need to improve the living conditions of millworkers,” she answers. 39
John Haskell looks quickly at Philbrick, who does, after all, own a number of boardinghouses in Rye, as if to ascertain whether the man will be offended by further discussion of the topic. But Haskell doubtless also sees, as she does, the small smile on her father’s face, a smile that indicates to her that perhaps his insistence that she speak about the book is, in fact, part of his plan to engage in lively debate. Haskell then turns from Philbrick to Olympia. She prays that he will not say that she is too kind in her comments, for she knows that to do so will be to dismiss her entirely.
“Your portraits are raw and have passages that are to me both illuminating and difficult to read,” she continues before he can speak,
“not in their language but in the images they create, particularly as regards accidents and medical matters.”
“This is quite true, Olympia,” her father says, beginning slightly to recover his pride in his daughter.
“I think it would be the rare reader indeed who could come away from those portraits unmoved,” she adds.
“Your perceptions would seem to belie your age,” Rufus Philbrick interjects suddenly, appraising her with keen eyes. She finds she does not mind the frankness of his gaze.
“Not at all,” her father says. “My daughter is exceptionally well schooled.”
“And what school might that be?” Zachariah Cote asks, addressing her politely. Olympia does not like the man’s sudden smile, nor the exceptional length of his side-whiskers, nor, more important, the way in which the conversation has turned to her rather than to the work of John Haskell.
“The school of my father,” she says.
“Is that so?” asks Rufus Philbrick with some surprise. “You do not attend classes?”
Her father answers for her. “My daughter went to the Common40
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wealth Seminary for Females in Boston for six years, at which time it became painfully apparent that Olympia’s learning was far superior to that of her instructors. I removed her and have been schooling her at home instead; although a year from now, I hope to enroll her at Wellesley College.”
“Have you minded?” Catherine Haskell asks quietly, turning in her direction. “Being separated from other girls your age?”
“My father is a gifted and kind teacher,” Olympia says diplomatically.
“So you know a great deal about the mills?” Rufus Philbrick asks John Haskell.
“Not as much as I would like,” he answers. “One of the disadvantages of creating portraits to tell one’s story is that they seldom allow the writer to reveal a full historical perspective, and I fear this is a major flaw of the book. I think that understanding the history of any given situation is critical to comprehending it in the present. Do you not agree?”
“Oh, I think so,” Olympia’s father says.
“In the early days of the mills,” Haskell continues, “when the workers were mostly girls from Yankee farms, the mill owners took a benevolent attitude toward their employees and felt obliged to provide decent housing and clean infirmaries. The girls were housed two to a room and were fed communally three times a day in the dining room. In many ways, the boardinghouse was a home away from home, something like a college dormitory. There were libraries and literary societies for the girls, for example, and concerts and plays and so on. A young woman could be said to have had her horizons broadened if she went into the mills.”
“Even so, I have heard,” says Rufus Philbrick, “that the girls worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week, and to ruin one’s eyesight or to become diseased was not uncommon.”
41
“This is absolutely true, Philbrick. But my point is that when the Yankee girls began to go home and were replaced by the Irish and French Canadians, conditions deteriorated rapidly. These immigrants have come in families, large families that are forced to crowd into rooms previously meant only for two. The original housing cannot sustain such a large population, and the sanitary and health conditions have broken down. It is only in the past several years that progressive groups have begun to take on the cause of better housing and clinics and care for children.”
“I have heard something of these progressive groups,” Zachariah Cote says, looking around at the assembled group.
“Last April,” says Haskell, “I and several other physicians from Cambridge journeyed up to Ely Falls and conducted a survey of as many men, women, and children as we could cajole into participating. The inducement, seven dollars per family, was sufficiently appealing that we were able to examine five hundred and thirty-five persons. Of these, only sixty could be considered to be entirely healthy.”
“That is an astoundingly poor ratio,” Olympia’s mother says.
“Yes, it is. The boardinghouses, we discovered, were riddled with disease — tuberculosis, measles, white lung, cholera, consumption, scarlet fever, pleurisy — I could go on and on. I have already gone on and on.”
“One of the difficulties, John, as I understand it,” says Olympia’s father, “is that some of the immigrants do not have strong cultural opposition to child labor. The Francos, for example, see whole families as working families, and thus they try to evade the child-labor laws by having the children do piecework at home, sometimes, depending upon how desperate the family is, for fourteen hours a day in a room with little or no ventilation.”
“What sort of piecework?” Catherine Haskell asks.
“The children sew or baste or rip out stitches,” her husband ex42
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plains. “Simple, repetitive tasks.” He shakes his head. “You would not believe these children if you saw them, Philbrick. Many are diseased. Some are stunted in their growth and have ruined their eyesight. And these children are not twelve years old.”
The conversation pauses for the contemplation of this startling fact that must be properly digested before the talk can continue. Olympia pokes at her rice croquettes. With the fleeting bravery that comes of being encouraged in conversation, she once again addresses John Haskell.
“And something else, Mr. Haskell,” she says. “There is a fondness in your portraits. I think you must bear these workers no small amount of affection.”
John Haskell responds with a small but distinct smile in her direction. “I had quite hoped that such affection would be apparent to the reader,” he says, “but it seems to have escaped the notice of my reviewers entirely.”
“I believe the critic Benjamin Harrow is better known for his gravity than for his good humor,” says her father, smiling.
“I wonder if these are not, strictly speaking, something other than essays, John,” says Zachariah Cote, still trying to find a way into the conversation, which has been moving along well enough without him.
“They are not essays in the strictest sense, to be sure,” says John Haskell. “They are profiles only. But I like to think the details of a life form a mosaic that in turn informs the reader about something larger than the life. I have drawings as well of these workers, which I commissioned and which I should have liked to have included in my book, but my publisher persuaded me that pictures would detract from the seriousness of my work, and so I did not — a decision I regret, by the way.”
“I regret it as well,” Olympia says. “I, for one, would very much like to see drawings of the people you have written of.”
43
“Then I shall oblige you, Miss Biddeford,” he says. And Olympia can see, in the quick turn of her mother’s head, that she has perhaps been too bold with her request.
“But does that not destroy the very purpose of the written portrait?” Philbrick asks. “How can one’s words ever equal the accuracy of a picture?”
“Surely there remains a great deal that cannot be caught in a likeness,” John Haskell says. “Historical facts, for example, or the joy of a marriage. The anguish resulting from the death of a child. Or simply a broken spirit.”
“But I for one have always thought that a life can be read on a face,” says Philbrick. “It is how I do my business, by what I see in a face. Loyalty. Honesty. Cunning. Weakness.”
“Well, then, we are in luck,” says Catherine Haskell brightly. “For my husband has brought his camera with him. Perhaps we may persuade him to make photographs of each of us tomorrow. After which we can decide for ourselves whether character may be read in the face.”
“Oh, surely not!” exclaims Olympia’s mother, mistaking the gentle teasing of her guest for a summons. “I shall never have a photograph made of myself. Never!”
This note of alarm, as inappropriate to the evening as any note sounded, yet as significant to the summer as if a pianist had inadvertently fingered the wrong keys and had produced a measure of heartbreakingly beautiful music, vibrates through the room and then slowly dies away.
“My dear,” says her husband, reaching across to touch, and then to still, his wife’s trembling hand in a gesture Olympia will always think of as one of infinite grace, “I should never permit anyone to photograph your beauty, for I should be insanely jealous both of the photographer and of anyone who dared to look at the finished product.”
44
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And whether it is the faint reminder of danger or the humbling recognition of the generosity of married love, each of the guests is rendered silent as Lisette brings to the table the Sunderland pudding, which she begins to spoon and serve.
•
•
•
The notes of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu” float through the tiny squares of the wire screens and onto the porch, where the men sit with cigars and large delicate bubbles of brandy. Olympia’s mother has, as expected, excused herself, and her father has returned from seeing her to her bedroom. Catherine Haskell plays with an accomplished, even plaintive, touch that is, Olympia thinks, to be much admired. Moths flutter about the lanterns, and she sits away from their light as well as from the men. Since there are no women on the porch, she cannot join the men, but neither can she bear to be kept inside on such a fine evening.
The moon makes long cones upon the sea, which has settled with the darkness and resembles, as it approaches high tide, a magnificent lake. The continuous susurrus of the surf is soothing in and about the conversation and the piano’s notes. Olympia cannot hear what the men are saying, but the sound of their voices is instantly recognizable: the assured and gracious, if sometimes pedantic, pronouncements of her father; the short staccato bursts of enthusiasm and advice from Rufus Philbrick; the somewhat breathy and all too deferential note of Zachariah Cote; and, finally, the low, steady sentences of John Haskell, his voice seldom rising or falling. She strains to pick out words from the talk: merchandise . . . Manchester . . . carriage-maker . . . travesty . . . benefits . . . Masculine words drenched in smoke and slightly slurred on the tongue. From time to time, the men lower their voices conspiratorially, with heads bent toward one another, and then suddenly, with harsh bursts of laughter, they move apart. At these moments, Olympia thinks perhaps she should leave 45
the porch. But so deep are her lassitude and physical contentment that she cannot rouse herself to action. It strikes her as possible that she might simply fall asleep in the chair and remain in it the entire night, this entire short night of the summer solstice. That she might watch the sun rise over the sea at dawn. And so it is that she does not notice that Catherine Haskell has stopped her playing until she hears the woman’s voice behind her.
“Did you know that nearly all civilizations have regarded the night of the summer solstice as possessing mystical powers?” she asks. Olympia sits up straighter, but Catherine puts a restraining hand on her shoulder. She takes a seat near to Olympia and looks out over the railing.
“Your playing is very beautiful,” Olympia says.
Catherine Haskell smiles vaguely and waves her hand, as if to dismiss such an unearned compliment.
“Not as beautiful as your mother’s, or so I have heard,” she says. The heliotrope crepe de chine of her dress has the effect, in the darkness, of disappearing altogether, so that she seems, in the dim light of the lanterns, to be merely two slender arms, a throat, a face, and all that hair.
“And that the earliest setting of the blue stones at Stonehenge is aligned with the moment of sunrise on the summer solstice? On that day, sacrifices were made. Some think human sacrifices.”
“On this night I could believe anything possible,” Olympia says.
“Yes. Quite.”
Olympia can hear the creak of wicker as Mrs. Haskell leans back and begins to rock in the chair. Her white slippers glow faintly in the moonlight.
“Your mother is not unwell, I hope,” Catherine says.
“She tires easily,” Olympia explains.
“Yes, of course.”
46
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Olympia hesitates. “She is delicate in her constitution,” she says.
“I see,” Catherine Haskell says quickly, as though this is something she has already divined. She turns her head toward Olympia, but Olympia can see only a quarter moon of face.
“I think you must be like your father,” Catherine says.
“How is that?” Olympia asks.
“Protective. Strong, I think.”
Beyond them there is another short burst of laughter, causing them both to glance in the direction of the men. The two women examine the tableau in the lantern light.
“Of course, you have your mother’s beauty,” Catherine adds. She smooths out an invisible skirt with her alabaster arms. “I have always thought there is a moment in the life of a girl,” she begins, and then pauses. They hear John Haskell’s voice rise briefly above the others with a fragment of a sentence: have deteriorated with the coming of the . . . “By ‘moment,’” Catherine continues, “I mean a period of time, a week, or months perhaps. But finite. A moment for which the bones have been forming themselves. . . .” She stops, as if searching for the appropriate words with which to continue. “And in that moment, a girl becomes a woman. The bud of a woman perhaps. And she is never so beautiful as in this period of time, however brief.”
Olympia is glad that it is dark and that her face cannot be seen, for she can feel it becoming suffused with color.
“What I mean to say, my dear,” Catherine adds, “is that I believe you are just on the cusp of your moment.”
Olympia looks down at her lap.
“Your beauty is in your mouth,” Catherine says further, and Olympia is jolted by this frank pronouncement.
“Of course, it is in your face,” the older woman adds hastily, “but primarily your mouth, in its unconventional shape, its fullness. Your mouth is worthy of its own portrait.”
47
Olympia hears the deliberate repetition of the word portrait. In the darkness, the kitchen’s screen door squeaks as it is opened and then slapped to. The cook must be on her way home. Olympia is too unsettled to form a reply that is not fatuous, and she is as well a bit alarmed by the intimacy in Catherine Haskell’s comment, for she hardly knows the woman at all. Although later, from the perspective of years, Olympia will think that Catherine’s pronouncement was delivered more to herself than to Olympia, as if by defining a thing, one could successfully defuse its power.
“Well, you are lovely altogether,” Catherine Haskell says, employing a different tone, the casual voice of a favorite aunt or a cousin, as if she has sensed Olympia’s misgivings. “And I have no doubt that this will be your summer.”
“You flatter me too much, Mrs. Haskell.”
“Catherine.”
“Catherine.”
“And I do not flatter you half enough. As you shall see. If I may ask a favor?”
Olympia nods.
“I wonder if you would take the older girls boating while we are here. I know that Martha would adore it.”
“I would be happy to,” Olympia says.
“Martha and Clementine only, I think. The others are too young.”
“We have the lifesaving dresses,” Olympia says.
“Even so, I would rather you take them, if you would. I do not trust Millicent’s judgment. You have met the children’s governess?
On other matters, yes. But not boating. She has little experience with the water.”
A masculine voice, wheedling and insistent, rises a note above the others. Instinctively, Catherine Haskell and Olympia glance together toward the men by the porch door, at the flurry of moths over their heads.
48
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“Cote seems such an ass,” Catherine whispers. And Olympia laughs, at least as much in relief as in recognition of her own thoughts.
But as she laughs, and perhaps this is only a trick in the moonlight, the white skin of Catherine Haskell’s face seems fleetingly to become thin and drawn.
“Do not be up late,” the older woman says, putting a hand on Olympia’s wrist for support as she stands, and Olympia is again reminded of her limp. Catherine’s fingers are shockingly cold.
“How warm you are,” she says, looking down.
Her face hovers only inches from Olympia’s, so close that she can smell Catherine’s breath, which is sweet with the mint from the lamb. For a moment, Olympia thinks that Catherine will kiss her.
•
•
•
Olympia knows other facts about the solstice. That it rests in Gemini, and that on this day at Aswan, which lies five hundred miles southeast of Alexandria, the sun’s rays fall precisely vertically at noon. That visionary cults paint their bodies in symbols on the solstice and salute the sun with lamentations until they either fall unconscious or have their expected visions. That the solstice produces the highest tides of the year, particularly so if it happens in concert with a full moon. The moon is not entirely full this night, but nearly so, and will be a source of worry, Olympia knows, for those few who inhabit houses too near to the beach at Fortune’s Rocks. She slips off the porch and walks along the edge of the lawn in shadow, so as not to attract the attention of the men. She makes her way to the seawall and finds a dry rock on which to sit. She perches herself on a natural ledge over a glistening calligraphy of seaweed that is remoistened each time the waves enter the rock crevice nearest to her and send up a spray. The tide is indeed high and teases even the uppermost of the stones. As one draws closer to the water, 49
the temperature drops accordingly, and she is somewhat chilled as she sits with her legs bent under her. The porch of the house, some hundred feet away, is bathed in pools of yellow light that flicker in the light breeze. Though she can see the cluster of men by the door, she cannot hear their voices for the surf.
She removes her slippers and stockings and sets them near to her. She presses the soles of her feet into the slippery sea moss of the rock below. The sensation is a queasy one, immediately giving rise to thoughts of the thousands of forms of sea life just beneath the deceptively calm surface of the water. The summer previous to this one, her father insisted that Olympia have bathing lessons, since he does not allow anyone who cannot swim to use the boat alone. They went to the bay for these lessons, and she was at first so frightened by the feel of the muck between her naked toes, and by possible contact with any number of slippery sea creatures, that she learned to swim in near record time. At least well enough to permit her to have some chance of saving herself should she fall overboard reasonably close to shore. And all this despite the extraordinary, if not altogether comical, appearance her father made in his bathing costume, and his extreme embarrassment to be so unarmored. (And it occurs to her now that the speed with which she learned to swim may, in addition to her fear of touching the slimy unknown, have been a result of his haste to change into more suitable attire.) She does not know how long she sits upon the rocks, watching the tide rise to its highest point. She is having thoughts of returning to the house when an errant wave washes up over the rock on which she is sitting and steals a slipper like a thief vanishing instantly into the night. She stands up at once, physically shocked by the icy water, which has soaked the back of her skirt. She bends to snatch the slipper, which she sees bobbing just out of reach, and in doing so receives another frigid soaking as a result of a wave that claims not 50
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only the other slipper but also her stockings. She scuttles backward and then stands up again. It is clear that she will never retrieve the slippers and stockings. She watches them make slow progress outward from the rocks, one of the shoes disappearing altogether. Shivering slightly, and wet all along the back of her petticoat, she turns to make her way to the house. She crosses the lawn, which is glistening with dew and blackened in the dark. She is fervently hoping that no one will hear the screen door open and close when she enters the house.
She is halfway across the lawn when she begins to discern, in the shadows of the porch, a lone figure. Her heart plummets to a cold place within her chest. Her father, vexed, has been waiting for her, and he will be furious to have been kept up for so long. But when she takes a few steps farther, she can tell, by the posture and size of the person, that it is not her father. Anxiety is replaced by relief, but that relief quickly gives way to apprehension.
She stops mid-stride and pauses for a moment. She has been seen and now cannot turn around without seeming either rude or frightened, neither of which she wishes to appear to be. With forced ease, she continues on her walk. John Haskell stands and walks over to the steps. He gives her his hand, which she briefly takes.
“You have forgotten your shoes,” he says.
“I have lost them to the sea,” she answers.
“And the sea will not give them back, I fear.”
She allows him to lead her onto the porch.
“I told your father I thought you had gone to bed,” he says, “but I can see that I was mistaken. It is very late. You should go up.”
“Yes,” she says.
“You look pale,” he says. “Let me fetch you some hot tea.”
“No,” she says, waving him off. “I will just sit a second and catch my breath.”
51
She feels a hand at her elbow, guiding her to a chair.
“You are soaked,” he says.
She knows he has seen the back of her skirt.
He hands her a cup. “This is mine,” he says. “Please, humor me and take a sip.”
She takes the cup in her palms and brings it to her lips. The hot tea burns its way through her body and causes a warming tingle to spread to her limbs. She takes another sip and gives the cup back to him. Since dinner, Haskell has loosened his collar. His jacket lies over the back of the wicker rocker on which he is sitting. She is painfully aware of her bare ankles and feet, which she tries to hide by sitting up straighter and tucking the offending appendages out of sight. Setting the cup aside, John Haskell leans back in his chair, which is so close to hers that if she extended her hand, she could touch his knee. The shivering begins in earnest in her upper arms.
“You lingered at the seawall too long a time,” he says.
“It is the night of the summer solstice,” she answers, as if that were explanation enough.
“So it is. You were too kind to me in your earlier comments on my book.”
And there it is, she thinks, the dismissal. But she is mistaken.
“You would seem to be my perfect reader,” he adds.
“Of course not,” she says quickly. “Your intent will be apparent to any reader.”
“If I can but reach them,” he says. “I fear I have erred in producing a book that will have only a handful of readers. I should have published a pamphlet, as my instincts originally urged me to. But pride, I fear, got the better of me.”
“You feel some urgency to reach a wide audience?” she asks.
“I must,” he says. “The conditions are appalling. Enlightenment, I fear, has been replaced by successive layers of contempt and neglect.”
“I see,” she says. She knows that she should go up and change into 52
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dry clothes, but she is unwilling to leave the porch just at that moment. “And you wish to regain some of that lost ground?” she asks. He shakes his head. “Nothing so grand,” he says. “It is the health of the millworkers with which I must first concern myself. Their personal health, their sanitary conditions, their medical care, all of which are quite wretched, I can assure you.”
“And so you will work at the clinic.”
“Yes, I have already begun.”
A small silence fills the space between them.
“It is more than kind of you to ask to see the pictures,” he says.
“I should like to see them,” she repeats.
“Well, then I shall send for them.”
“I would not want you to go to any trouble,” she says.
“No, none at all.”
“I must go,” she says, standing abruptly. And in doing so, her hair, which has been jostled in her walk across the lawn (or perhaps in the startled movement of her head when the sea soaked her skirt), lists slightly to one side and releases a comb, which clatters to the porch floor. John Haskell, who has stood with her, bends to retrieve it.
“Thank you,” she says, holding the comb in her palm.
“How poised you are,” he says suddenly. He tilts his head, as if to examine her from another angle. “How self-possessed. Quite extraordinary in a young woman of your age. I think it must be a result of your singular education.”
She opens her mouth, but she cannot think how to reply.
“I was there yesterday,” he says. “On the beach. I saw you at the beach.”
She shakes her head wordlessly, then turns on her heel, belying in an instant the truth of Haskell’s compliment.
53
A fter her encounterwith John Haskell on the porch, Olympia climbs up to her bedroom in an agitated state. She opens the window, puts her hands on the sill, and bends her head. A fine dampness covers her face and hair and throat. She dresses in a white linen nightdress, a garment she has not worn since the previous summer. The thinness of the fabric is a pleasure to her, although she notes that she has grown so much during the winter months that the sleeves are at least an inch too short. At the cuffs is a delicate tatting her mother has knotted, tatting being a skill that suits her invalid status and one she has tried to pass on to her daughter without success. Olympia sits on her bed and, as usual, plaits her hair, her feet bare against the slightly damp wooden floorboards. She has long grown accustomed to the ever present humidity; indeed, it is not uncommon to slip between slightly dampened sheets at night or to retrieve from the armoire dresses that have quite lost their stiffness in the sea air.
Sometime after she has finished tying up her hair, she crawls into her bed and falls into a troubled sleep. Her dreams are different from any she has ever had before, different in their texture and in their 54
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substance. They are somewhat shocking, but not terrifying, since they contain the most private and pleasurable of physical sensations she has ever experienced in her short life. She wakes in a state of much confusion, lying in a tangle of twisted linen, believing she has spoken to John Haskell just moments before, when, of course, she has not. And she wonders fleetingly if there might be something wrong with her, if she has been, in fact, hallucinating, if she is in danger of becoming her mother’s daughter after all. But then she dismisses this speculation, for the dreams that she has had, and the sensations that have been visited upon her, feel, in spite of their extraordinary novelty, welcoming, as is a warm bath. And if these sensations do not seem entirely good, they feel deep and authentic. And she is, in truth, loath to watch them thin and dissipate with the morning sun.
•
•
•
That morning, with Philbrick and Cote and, of course, the Haskells still in residence, they are all occupied with photography, an undertaking Olympia finds as intriguing to observe as to participate in. The sittings begin shortly after breakfast, Haskell wisely deciding to start with the children so that they might be released to other pursuits early in the day. The camera is an English one and quite a handsome instrument with its mahogany case and brass fittings. Inside the camera, Haskell explains, is a metal cone lined with black velvet into which one puts the film. Once exposed, it is withdrawn from the other side. The camera holds film for forty exposures, he adds, so there will be enough for several photographs of each of them. Olympia is relieved to see that the camera is one that can be held in the hands and that the enterprise will not be the agonizing one she has heard about — an enterprise in which the unfortunate subject is made to remain still on a chair while the camera, anchored upon a 55
stand, records in a painstakingly long process the rigid expression of the participant, any smile or movement on the part of the subject ruinous to the result.
To capture the best light, which there is in abundance this day, Haskell uses the front steps for his venue. While one of them is being photographed, the others come and go upon the porch and busy themselves with reading or with conversation or simply with gazing out to sea, a seductive activity that can consume many hours in a day. Olympia takes a chair near to the proceedings and watches Haskell work. And as she watches, she discovers that a dream creates a nonexistent intimacy, that one feels, all the next day after the dream, as though certain words have been said or actions taken which have not. So that the object of the dream feels familiar, when, in fact, no familiarity exists at all.
Haskell, in a white linen suit and cravat, with a straw hat which he removes when he begins to work in earnest, suggests from time to time a tilt of the head, a placement of an arm. Occasionally he reaches across the photographic space and moves the shoulder just so. As might be expected, the children are impatient, and it is an effort for them just to sit still. Olympia is impressed, however, by Haskell’s lack of sentiment in posing his youngest children, Randall and May, waiting for a moment when both have spotted a fishing boat not far off shore and are gazing with rapt but keen attention, their eyes wide and their mouths slightly parted, at the novel sight. Later Olympia will see the photographs after they and the camera have been sent back to Haskell from Rochester, and she will be impressed with their clarity, a sharp precision of line and facial feature one tends not to observe in reality, since the face may be in shadow or the glance, of polite necessity, too short.
On the porch steps, Martha looks like a young girl aching to be taken seriously; Clementine, someone for whom it is an effort to lift her eyes to the camera. Both wear white dotted Swiss pinafores with 56
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pale blue underdresses, and each has a ribbon in her hair. Haskell poses his wife sitting sideways, the slightest suggestion of a pearlbuttoned opera boot peeking out below her skirts, her body and her face in profile. Catherine, Olympia notes, has a lovely profile, not flat or sharp-chinned, but rather one with high cheekbones and a long neck. Mrs. Haskell’s bearing, though seemingly relaxed, is flawless. She has on this day a straw hat with a wide ribbon and many flowers on its brim. It sits atop her head with her abundant hair caught in rolls beneath. Most striking, however, is her costume, a white suit of the finest linen, nipped tightly at the waist, the peplum of the jacket draping itself becomingly over her hips, a suit that suggests both casual elegance and a disdain for frills. As Haskell photographs his wife, he communicates with her in a language of easy gestures and single syllables, a code that signals comfort, if not actually a fair degree of intimacy.
Philbrick, who is much interested in the make and mechanics of the camera, which, Haskell tells him, is called a Luzo, has on his striped jacket of the night before. He refuses to sit still, continually getting up to peer into the viewfinder and to ask why the image is upside down and to marvel how it is that Haskell can accurately make out facial features. Cote has worn a navy frock coat that accentuates the planes of his face, and with it a silky white shirt. Her father, not surprisingly, has Haskell photograph him standing, complete with hat and waistcoat and pocket watch, since he is of the mind that one ought not to promote too much informality at the beach. Even Olympia’s mother, in the end, relents and allows herself to be photographed, albeit behind a veil with her eyes lowered, flinching each time she hears the shutter click, as though she might be shot. Toward the end of these proceedings, Haskell glances over at Olympia.
“You have been so observant,” he says to her, “I think you could do this yourself.”
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“It is fascinating, surely,” she answers, deciding not to add that she thinks one can learn at least as much from watching the subject pose himself as from the finished photograph.
“Well, then, let us see what we can do with you,” he says, and she notes that he, like his wife on the previous night, speaks with the fond tone of a relative. “Please. Sit here on the steps,” he says, gesturing with his hand. She does as he has asked, smoothing her skirts under her and tilting her knees to the side when the folds of the material rise above her lap. She is determined not to be a difficult subject, but something about her pose feels ungainly. It must strike Haskell as awkward as well, for she is aware of the keenest interest on his part. For a few moments, she feels that every flaw of her face or of her figure must now be apparent to the man; and she thinks that in this it is perhaps not so unusual for Haskell to have been drawn to both photography and medicine. For do not both require severe attention to the body?
She has dressed this day in a white handkerchief linen chemise that billows out over a broad navy sash she has tightened to within an inch of her life. She has a navy shawl about her shoulders, and on her head a white broad-brimmed hat that she thinks would have benefited from a sprig of beach rose or even a single hydrangea blossom had she thought of it earlier. Somewhat restlessly, Haskell moves toward her and then away, to her left and to her right, occasionally looking up from the viewfinder and studying her face.
“Olympia, lift your shoulder . . . ,” he says. “There. Now turn your head toward me. Slowly. Yes. Now stop. Good. Hold that.”
She does as she is told.
He squeezes the shutter, simultaneously looking up and moving the film through the camera.
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“No,” he says in a disappointed tone, as much to himself as to anyone else.
“She looks fine to me,” says Philbrick, who, having already had his sitting and having examined every aspect of the camera, is now impatient to reach the beach during the family bathing hours of noon to one and, perhaps more important, to eat the picnic that will be brought there.
“Lovely pose,” says Catherine, who is knitting.
“I think she should sit up straighter,” her mother says. “Olympia often slouches.”
“Relax your arm,” Haskell says, “and tilt your head like this.”
He demonstrates.
Slightly annoyed at all the instruction, Olympia lifts her arms and removes the pin that secures her hat to her hair. She pulls the hat off quickly and tosses it to the steps. She folds her hands in her lap. She thinks her mother, sitting near the railing, actually says, “Oh no,”
for no female has been photographed this morning without a hat, not even the girls.
Haskell stands unmoving for a moment. And then he steps forward. She thinks he might speak to her. Instead, he lifts her chin with his fingertips. He raises her chin high and then higher, so that she is forced to look into his eyes. He holds this pose at its apex, studying her face, and then he allows his hand, which she is quite certain is hidden from the others’ view, to trail under her chin, to her throat. The touch is so brief and soft, it might be a hair floating across the skin.
This fleeting brush of his fingers, the first intimate touch she has ever had from a man, triggers a sudden image from the previous night’s dreams. Her gaze loosens and swims, and color comes into her face. There must be on her cheeks the hectic flush of confusion, she thinks. And she is afraid that she will, in the several seconds she 59
is required to remain still, betray the content of the scenes and pictures that float before her eyes. She waits for some confirmation that the others have observed Haskell’s touch. But she realizes, from the impatient and bored tones of the onlookers, that no one has noticed the moment at all. And she wonders then: Did it really happen, or did she imagine it?
Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks — how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture, her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she will wonder if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observer even as it conceals depths and currents below.
“Very good,” says Philbrick, standing. “I, at least, am off to the beach.”
•
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As promised, they make their expedition at noon, all of them, that is, except for her mother, and then Catherine, who remains behind to keep her mother company. Josiah has packed an elaborate picnic in a wicker basket, so large it requires two boys to haul it. The day continues to be bright and breezy, and although the surf is decidedly energetic, everyone except Olympia and Haskell ventures into the water. Olympia has deliberately chosen not to wear a bathing costume, being uncomfortable in that company to be in such a state of undress. Haskell has not had time to change, since he has been working with the camera until the last minute. Indeed, he still has it with him in its mahogany box.
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The day and the hour seem to have brought out nearly all of the population of Fortune’s Rocks. Olympia observes many children under the watchful eye of governesses. One woman, taking care of eight babies, has placed her charges in laundry baskets. From where Haskell and Olympia sit, they can see only tiny heads and faces bobbing and peering out over the baskets’ rims, altogether a most comical sight. In other groupings, there are women overdressed in black taffeta dresses with elaborate hats and gloves and boots and ruffled parasols, as though desperate not to let a single grain of sand or ray of sunshine touch their bodies. Olympia wonders how it is they do not melt from being swathed as they are in so many garments. In other gatherings, men stand in bathing costumes that quite cost them their dignity: The apparel has the impoverished look of union suits, and the cloth sags in an unfortunate manner when wet. But at the beach, she thinks, is there not a certain license in dress, a latitude in custom?
After they have set up their picnic on the rug, Philbrick and Cote and (reluctantly) her father accompany Martha and the other children, in sailors’ costumes and dark stockings, to the water’s edge, some fifty feet away. Haskell and Olympia are left behind. This is not contrivance on their part, Olympia knows, although she is certain they are both aware of the somewhat awkward circumstances as the others leave them. Haskell sheds his jacket and his shoes, removes his tie and his socks, and rolls the white flannel of his trousers to just below the knees. He leans back on the rug, propped up on one elbow, and watches the bathing party proceed to the ocean.
To busy herself, Olympia prepares a plate of boiled eggs and rolled tongue and bread and butter, and hands it to Haskell, who takes it from her. She makes a plate of food for herself. They eat side by side, Olympia on a small stool that has been brought for the occasion. They do not speak for some time. Occasionally, a gust of 61
wind makes one or the other of them reach forward to anchor a corner of the rug or to lay a hand on a hat that threatens to stray. She pours lemonade into glasses and gives him one.
“What do you do when you are at the clinic?” she asks, her voice sounding strained, at least to her.
“A bit of everything,” he says. “Set broken bones, amputate mangled fingers, treat diphtheria and pneumonia and typhoid and dysentery and influenza and syphilis . . .” He pauses. “But this is not a fit discussion for a young woman,” he says, wiping his mouth with his napkin. His eyes are shaded by the brim of his straw hat.
“Why not?”
“Have you ever been to Ely Falls?”
“Only once,” she confesses. “With my father last summer. But I did not see much. My father made me remain in the carriage while he went about his business.”
“My point exactly. It is a fearful place, Olympia. Overcrowded and filthy and disease-ridden.”
The wind lifts her skirts, which she smooths over her knees. So bright is the glare of the sun on the water that even with her broadbrimmed hat she finds it necessary to squint.
“Do you think,” she asks, “that one day I could accompany you to the clinic? You speak of appalling conditions, and I should like to see them for myself. Perhaps I could help in some way. . . .”
“Poverty is raw, Olympia. And ugly. The people are good enough — I do not mean to suggest that they are not — it is simply that the clinic is not a suitable place for a young woman.”
“Tell me this then,” she says, feeling slightly challenged and unwilling to forfeit the debate so quickly. “Are there fifteen-year-old female workers in the mills?”
She knows perfectly well that there are.
“Yes,” he says reluctantly. “But that does not mean they should be there.”
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“And are fifteen-year-old females permitted into the clinic?”
He hesitates. “Sometimes,” he says. “As patients certainly. Or to tend to their mothers.”
“Well, then . . .”
“It is not a good idea,” he insists. “In any event, I should have to ask your father for permission, and I sincerely doubt he would give it.”
“Perhaps not,” she says. “But he may surprise you. He holds unusual views as regards my education.”
Haskell lifts up a handful of sand and watches it fall through his fingers. He takes off his hat, lies back on the rug, and closes his eyes.
Does he know she watches him then? He seems peaceful, as if he were dozing or sleeping. The lines of his face and his body are elongated, so that there is a hollow at his throat that echoes a hollow at the base of his shirt. Below his knees, his legs are bare; and she is struck by how smooth his skin is, how silky with dark hairs. She looks quickly to the water and back at Haskell. She knows it will be only moments before the others return, wet and chilled and wrapped in rugs, their feet encrusted with fine wet sand, wanting food and drink and feeling both virtuous and vigorous for their exercise in the sea. She saw Haskell with the camera often enough earlier this morning to know how it is done. Quietly, so as not to disturb him, she lifts the camera from its case and peers through the viewfinder.
Beyond Haskell, in the background, is a fish house and a large family of bathers, some of whom, Olympia realizes, are watching her with the camera. They must be a family from Ely Falls, she decides, for they do not have much in the way of a picnic. They are crowded, all eleven or twelve of them, onto only one rug, so that those at the periphery are half sitting on the sand and have to lean into the center of the group. They have all been swimming, she determines, even 63
the women, for their hair is unkempt and slicked back against their heads. They stare in a curiously impolite manner. She thinks that at least one or two of the children must be undernourished, as they have a sunken appearance about the cheeks.
She squeezes the shutter.
Startled, Haskell opens his eyes. She sets the camera back into its case.
“Olympia,” he says, sitting up.
She closes the top and fastens the latch.
Simultaneously, they see Olympia’s father emerging from the sea and draping himself in a robe he has left by the water’s edge so as not to have to appear too long in public in his wet bathing costume. She watches her father walk from the sea to where they sit, wondering if he has seen her take Haskell’s picture. When he reaches them, she thinks he cannot fail to note the strain which lies between Haskell and her and which they both immediately seek to defuse with overattention to her father’s needs, Haskell standing with a wrap, Olympia preparing a plate of food. But her father does not ask her about the time she has spent with Haskell, either then or later. The others soon follow her father, Zachariah Cote a somewhat comical spectacle in his union suit, which reveals rather large hips and suggests that the man is better suited to a frock coat. (But which man is not? Olympia wonders.) Philbrick, with little modesty or self-consciousness, walks briskly to the rug, sits down to lunch, and begins to consume his meal with enthusiasm. Unable to remain calm in their company, Olympia stands and walks to the water’s edge with wraps for the girls, who twirl themselves into the dry cloths as if forming cocoons. Even Martha seems happy to see her, although somehow the girl has gotten sand into her stockings and they bag with the weight and make odd lumps against her legs. They walk back to the rug as if Olympia were a governess and 64
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they her waterlogged charges. Along the way, when she chances to look up, she sees that Haskell has gone.
•
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•
He does not reappear for dinner in the evening. When Olympia inquires as to his whereabouts, Catherine says that he has been called away to the clinic. Olympia struggles through the meal with little appetite. She minds Haskell’s absence more than she ever could have anticipated. It is the first of many nights she will now spend when her life, which seemed complete enough only the night before, appears to be missing an essential piece. Wishing to be alone, she pushes her chair back. Thunder shakes the house, and Olympia can feel the vibrations through the floorboards. A streak of lightning needles the sky outside the windows of the dining room.
“A storm,” Catherine says.
“The man who brings the lobsters said there would be,” her mother answers.
“I must go upstairs to close my window,” Olympia says, relieved to have an excuse to leave the table.
“Did you know,” her father asks the gathering, “that such a heavy clap of thunder will cause many of the lobsters in the waters hereabouts to lose at least one of their claws?”
“Fascinating,” Catherine says.
The rain starts then, a heavy rain that slants under the eaves and beats against the panes of glass in the windows, as if it would be let in.
Olympia walks upstairs to her room and lies down on the bed in a state for which she has had no preparation and of which she cannot speak — not even to Lisette, who might have some practical advice. For how can Olympia admit to any person that she harbors 65
such extraordinary and inappropriate feelings for a man she hardly knows? A man nearly three times her age? A man who seems to be happily married to a woman Olympia much admires?
After a time, she sits up in the bed and reaches for the volume that is still on her night table. She begins to read Haskell’s book anew. She reads until her eyes blur and her senses dull and she can contemplate with equanimity her preparations for bed. Later she will learn that Haskell did not go to the clinic that night, but rather walked with troubled thoughts along the beach until he was surprised by the sudden storm, which almost immediately drenched him and caused him to have to run back to the house for shelter.
•
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Just before daybreak, Olympia is awakened by a hoarse cry. For a few moments, she thinks it part of another dream she cannot quite escape, until she realizes that the shouting comes from below her bedroom window. As she climbs out of bed, the hollering grows louder, and she can hear now that it involves several men. Because the air has become chillier, she reaches for the shawl on the chair. When she looks out her window, she sees that all along the beach of Fortune’s Rocks, bonfires have been lit and are now blazing. She does not at first understand the meaning of these fires until she notices the men in lifesaving dress and cork belts standing by the fire nearest to the cottage. Other men, among them Rufus Philbrick and her father and John Haskell, hover in their dressing gowns at the perimeter of this group. Since everyone is gesturing toward the sea, Olympia looks out to discover what it is that so excites them; and she is startled to see a large dismasted barque foundering in the white foam of the breakers not three hundred feet from shore. The bow of the vessel has shattered and has a ragged and 66
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splintered appearance. As she watches, the rudderless ship rises and rolls and hits the rocks that have been the site of not a few shipwrecks. The doors of the Ely station, built only the year before, are flung open. A half dozen men in oilskins and crotch-high waders begin to maneuver to the water’s boisterous edge the long, slim lifesaving boat that is kept always ready for such occasions. By now, the operation has drawn a crowd, and Olympia is compelled to throw her shawl over her shoulders and make her own way down to the beach.
She stands in the cold and darkness, just beyond the revealing light of the bonfires, the gale already unraveling her patient plaiting of the night before. The wind blows sparks from the fires and threatens to extinguish the signal lights from the red-globed lanterns. In the foaming currents, Olympia can see that the disabled vessel has pitched to an unnatural angle and that men and also women are abandoning her decks for the rigging.
She feels a hand on her arm and, startled, turns. “Olympia,”
Catherine Haskell says, unfolding a cloak and laying it across Olympia’s shoulders. “I saw you from the porch. You should not be out here.”
Olympia accepts the gift of the cloak by drawing it more tightly around her. “What has happened?” she asks Catherine.
“Oh my dear, it is so dreadful. Such a horror. I only hope the lifesavers can get to them.”
“Who are they?” Olympia asks.
“According to Rufus, it is an English ship out of Liverpool. They were meant to put in at Gloucester, but the storm has blown them off course.”
The gale makes conversation difficult. Catherine’s hair blows all about her face, and the skirts of Olympia’s nightdress snap at her 67
shins. Together they watch as a gun is brought out of the station on a wagon and aimed at the ship.
“What are they doing?” Olympia asks.
“It is for the breeches buoy,” Catherine answers.
A signal flare lights up the wounded vessel. A woman falls soundlessly from the rigging, and someone on the beach screams. Catherine turns to Olympia and pulls her toward her, as if to shield her face. But Olympia is taller than Catherine, and the embrace is cumbersome and mildly awkward; so they separate and watch as a man is swamped by a cresting wave.
“My God,” Catherine says.
So sheltered has Olympia’s life been up to this point that she has never seen death, nor anything resembling it. She flinches at the sudden boom of the gun. She watches as a ball with a rope attached spools out across the waves and lands behind the ship. A taut line is immediately established from the shipwreck to the shore. One of the men in lifesaving dress steps into the breeches buoy, a device that resembles nothing so much, Olympia thinks, as a large pair of men’s pants attached to a wash line. As the men on shore haul the line through a pulley, the officer makes slow progress toward the vessel, his legs dangling unceremoniously just inches above the surf.
At the water’s edge, John Haskell and Olympia’s father take hold of the stern of the lifesaving boat and run it into the water. Her father’s face is grave, his features wholly concentrated. The sash of his dressing gown has come undone, and Olympia is surprised to see, as she seldom does, his thin white legs. Although Olympia is embarrassed for his body, she is nevertheless proud of her father’s strength in this matter: Haskell and her father seem oblivious to any possible discomfort from the wind or the sea or their endeavors as they both join in the effort to pull the line. Later Olympia and Catherine will learn that the ship, which was called the Mary Dexter and carried 68
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Norwegian immigrants, sustained damage at the docks in Quebec; but the captain, too eager to finish the journey, unwisely left before repairs could be made.
Catherine and Olympia watch as the breeches buoy returns along the line, not with the man who only moments ago traversed it, but rather with the slumped form of a woman who is in turn carrying a child.
“She will drop the child,” Catherine exclaims.
Those at the shoreline must have the same fear, for Haskell sheds his dressing gown and wades into the surf in his nightshirt to snatch the feet of the cargo. When he has the woman in his grasp, he brings her onto dry ground and, with the aid of Rufus Philbrick, disentangles her from the contraption. Another officer steps into the buoy and sets off for the wounded ship.
“I must go to him,” Catherine says. “Will you be all right here?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Olympia says. “I am fine.”
Olympia watches as Catherine Haskell runs against the wind toward her husband. While Olympia’s father attends to the female passenger, wrapping her in a blanket Josiah has brought to the scene, John Haskell lays the child immediately upon a rug and begins to administer lifesaving breaths. Olympia watches as Catherine puts a hand to her husband’s back, and he looks up at her. He tells her something, perhaps gives her instructions, for she immediately takes charge of the woman Olympia’s father has been attending to. Haskell, apparently having restored the child’s breathing, scoops the girl into his arms and begins to walk briskly with her toward the house. Olympia inhales sharply. For she can see that in order to get to the house, he will have to pass by the place where she is standing at the perimeter of the rescue effort.
Her hair blows all about her face, and she has to hold it back to see him. He carries the child close to him, but flat, level with the ground, his arms cradling her underneath. He does not pause, he 69
cannot stop now, but he nevertheless looks directly at Olympia as he passes her. It is only a moment, because he is moving fast. Perhaps she speaks his name, not John but rather Haskell, which is how she has come to think of him. And in an instant, he is gone. She stands as if she had been hollowed out.
She hears her father calling to her. She waves to him. She wants to help; of course she does. She tries to run, but there is something wrong with her legs, as if her body were momentarily paralyzed. Her father beckons her impatiently on, and she can see his need is urgent. The sand is a drag against her feet, and her movements are sluggish, as they sometimes are in dreams. She tries to run, but she steps on her nightdress or her legs buckle, and she stumbles. When she looks up, she can see that her father is walking toward her and saying her name. She shakes her head; she does not want him to see her like this. He bends over and puts his hand on her shoulder. His touch is foreign and strange, for they do not ever embrace, but the unfamiliar touch brings her to her senses. She rubs her eyes with the sleeve of her nightdress.
“Olympia?” he asks tentatively.
Awkwardly, she stands. It is almost daybreak now, and she can see the sinking vessel and the drama unfolding there more clearly than before.
“I am fine, Father,” she says. “I tripped on my nightdress.”
She slips her arms into the sleeves of the cloak Catherine has brought her.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” she says. “I want to help.”