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In the early morning hours of June 23, 1899, seventy-four passengers and one ship’s officer from the Mary Dexter drown, while fifty-eight passengers and seven marine officers are brought across in the 70
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breeches buoy. Another man, a lifesaving officer from Ely, is lost in the rescue effort. The lifesaving boat itself, with nearly a dozen volunteers, pulls away from the unfortunate barque just before the vessel pitchpoles into the sea and splinters into wooden lathes against the rocks.
Despite the gravity of the wreck, the citizens of Fortune’s Rocks cannot help but be somewhat prideful about the success of the breeches buoy, which has not ever been tried before at the Ely station.
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Because the house is an unusual one in that it was once a convent, there are still a great many cell-like rooms with beds and dressers on the second floor, several of which are occupied by help, but many of which are vacant. With the Haskells in residence, a kind of field hospital is established, and they become, her small family and their guests and servants, its officers: her father the retired general recommissioned for the event; John Haskell the medical officer with all the responsibilities and intimacies that such a position demands; Catherine Haskell the nursing sister in her simple gray dressing gown with the white apron she found in the kitchen; Josiah the veteran sergeant, excellent in a crisis, his organizational skills beyond compare; Philbrick the quartermaster, who takes upon himself the task of securing foodstuffs for the bursting household; Zachariah Cote a kind of AWOL soldier, who feigns sleep during the entire lifesaving effort and who seems to think his only contribution lies in sitting with Olympia’s distraught mother in her rooms; and Olympia the fledgling private initiated into the ranks of adulthood by default, there being few other able women present. Olympia does not get any more sleep that night, since she and the others are employed in numerous tasks. Because no one amongst the 71
Norwegian immigrants speaks even the most rudimentary English, nor any of the Americans Norwegian, Olympia is called upon to decipher requests and pleas by facial expressions alone and is often reduced to hand gestures for replies. As a large number of the Norwegian menfolk have been lost to the sea, many of the women are deranged by grief. One such woman, with chestnut hair and light gray eyes, has with her five children under the age of eleven. Her face, when she enters the house, is wild, as if she were still in mortal terror for her life, and she is at first unable to care for her children, who are bathed and dressed by Olympia and Catherine. It is frustrating to Olympia not to be able to speak even the crudest expressions of sympathy to the Norwegian woman, although she hopes that her gestures and the tone of her voice are reassuring enough. Olympia notes that she, like most of the refugees who have come into the house, is in a physically deplorable state, even considering her ordeal; and this causes Olympia to wonder at the conditions aboard the immigrant vessel even before it foundered.
All along the hallways of the cottage is a cacophony of sound —
children crying, women speaking excitedly in a foreign tongue, Josiah and the other servants moving briskly from room to room. A copper tub is set up in the kitchen, a cloth hastily erected. Olympia’s job is to bathe the children, female and male alike; and thus she observes that even the most stringent of mores, kept highly polished in normal times, may be quickly abandoned in times of crisis. By mid-morning, some order has been established. Olympia is bathing a small girl with silver curls whose name may or may not be Anna. Though Olympia has little verbal communication with the child, they manage to convey a great deal by way of an inventive soap sculpture of a sailing vessel that floats for a time and then disappears into the cloudy water. As small children will, the girl seems recovered from her near fatal mishap, and she appears to be, for the 72
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moment, simply enjoying her bath. As Olympia kneels before the tub, enduring the child’s brief annoyance when she washes her hair, she hears a sound behind her. When she turns, she sees that John Haskell has entered the room.
“Do not let me disturb you,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He leans against a pine table and crosses his arms. He seems tired, which she knows he must be. He has hours ago changed into dry clothes, although his hair is somewhat unkempt.
Shielding the child’s face with her hand, Olympia pours another pitcher of water over the silvery head. The girl squeals and fidgets, encouraging her to finish the task with dispatch. Through an open window, Olympia notes the ribs of the unfortunate barque, a sight that calls to mind the skeleton of a beached and stripped whale. And how strange it is to see the lifesaving station, which was the locus of such frenetic activity just hours earlier, rendered tame and even charming in the sunlight. The building is a handsome structure with many wide windows and a large tower with a widow’s walk. Intricate carvings decorate the eaves of the red roof, which rises to a sharp peak. How tidy and neat the scene appears, she thinks. And how unapologetic Nature seems to be in her calm indifference.
“It was a brave effort,” Haskell says.
“Yes.”
“Sixty-five souls saved, and only one lifesaving officer lost. That is” — he calculates a moment — “slightly less than fifty percent of the ship’s passengers and crew saved and only eight percent of the lifesavers lost.”
She ponders his calculations.
“Were I the wife of the man who was lost,” she says, “I might consider that poor return for the risk, for to me and my children the loss would be one hundred percent.”
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He studies her for a moment. “I think you quite beyond your years in understanding,” he says. She flushes with pleasure, though later she will wonder if the remark did not contain more hope than accuracy.
“What of the others?” she asks quickly.
“We have several with broken bones, one with a serious injury to the neck that may leave the man paralyzed. Philbrick is even now trying to arrange to have the injured and sick transferred to the hospital at Rye, but Mason has declared the house quarantined and has said that no one may leave.”
Haskell refers to the health inspector from Ely Falls, who arrived in the early hours. He comes to the tub and lifts the Norwegian girl from the water, the suds falling on his shirt. Olympia hands him a flannel, and he swaddles the girl in the cloth. He lays her on the kitchen table and examines her in a way Olympia finds thoughtful and gentle, despite the demands on his time and the sense of urgency all around them. She stands to one side, not certain whether to stay or to go, and in the end, indecision keeps her still. She watches as Haskell retrieves a dry cloth from a basket Josiah has brought. He wraps the child again. He holds the girl in the crook of his arm — such a tiny thing in his confident grasp — and speaks to her constantly of this small thing and that, his words incomprehensible to her but their soothing quality apparent in the drowsy look in her eyes.
“Did Mr. Mason say how long he expects the quarantine to last?”
Olympia asks, thinking of the mild unpleasantness of being unable to leave the house.
“No, he is like all petty officials in the arbitrary wielding of very little power. No, he will not say, and this is of some annoyance to me, as Catherine and the children are to leave for York later today.”
Olympia busies herself with the wet cloths on the floor of the kitchen.
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“Where will Mrs. Haskell and your children stay in York?” she asks.
“Catherine’s mother has a cottage. My wife will return here on weekends, of course, and then will come to stay for good in August if the new cottage is finished, which I hope it shall be.”
Olympia drops the cloths into another basket in the corner of the room and walks toward John Haskell.
“Let me,” she says, lifting the girl out of his arms. And it seems a most elemental gesture — to take a child from a man.
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O n the third dayafter the wreck of the Mary Dexter, the visitors to the house are released from quarantine. Olympia wonders what will happen to the refugees. Since they now have no assets with which to negotiate their way in America, many of them are incorporated into the mills at Ely Falls, and what happens to the very young children, such as Anna, she never learns. Catherine and the children travel on to York. Haskell again takes up residence at the Highland Hotel. For some time, Olympia does not see him, since he works at the clinic in Ely Falls most of the hours of the day, and there is no natural opportunity for them to meet. Outwardly, Olympia passes her time in the usual manner. She reads books from a list her father has made up for her. Later she will remember The Valley of Decision, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Scarlet Letter in particular, since they are all works written in one century about another, the purpose of which is an issue her father and she debate at some length (her father taking the position that the social mores of a previous era might better highlight certain moral dilemmas of one’s own time, and Olympia holding to the notion that Edith Wharton or Charles Dickens or Nathaniel Hawthorne might simply 76
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have been drawn to the baroque language and richer color of an earlier era). As Olympia’s drawing skills have been seen to be inferior, she is given instruction by the French painter Claude Legny, who is residing at the Isles of Shoals for the season and who consents to ferry over to the mainland on Friday mornings to give her lessons. Though Olympia has a few talents, illustration is not among them, and she knows that she disappoints the man. She can see a thing well enough, can even describe it quite passably in words, but she cannot translate the subsequent vision to the fingers of her right hand. It is not unlike an adult giving instructions to a child, and the child rendering a result that, unfortunately, does not possess even a childlike charm. She has more success, however, with riding and tennis. As for the riding, which she takes up at the Hull farm in Ely, it is a skill she has already mastered and therefore cannot lay claim to as an accomplishment this summer. The tennis, however, is new to her and is one of the few organized activities that require all of her concentration and provide brief respites from her thoughts and daydreams. For more than anything else, the days that pass are ones that hold her in a state of suspension, somewhat in the way of an elongated pause in a beautiful piece of music — an interrupted prelude. Sometimes, it is all she can do to focus on any activity or task at all. She frequently feels dazed and preoccupied, unable to shake herself free of troubling thoughts. Indeed, she wonders from time to time if she is not possessed: Every moment that has passed between Haskell and her is examined and reexamined; every word that they have exchanged is heard and reheard; every look, gesture, and nuance interpreted and reinterpreted. While she sits at the dining table, or writes letters on the porch, or reads to her mother in her room, Olympia invents dialogue and debate with Haskell and weaves amusing anecdotes for him around the most seemingly banal events 77
of her daily life. In truth, her normal routines appear now to exist solely for the purpose of self-revelation, of revealing herself to a man she hardly knows. But though she repeats the same conversations and scenes over and over in her mind, she cannot exhaust them. It is as if she drinks from a glass that continuously refills itself, the last long, cool swallow as necessary as the first, her thirst unquenchable. Occasionally, her relentless scrutiny of the brief time she has spent in Haskell’s presence is an agony to her, for she can see no satisfactory conclusion to what has begun, nor any possible way at all to go forward. She is only fifteen, and Haskell is nearly her father’s age. He is married and has children. She is still in her father’s care. She is but a child herself, perhaps even a deranged and obstinate child, fixed upon a fantasy that has for its roots only a few brief episodes that, for all she knows, she may have misinterpreted. Even so, she tortures herself with her endless imaginings, and there is no hour in which Haskell does not dominate her thoughts. Which causes her to wonder if there is not, existing simultaneously with the torment, an intensely pleasurable element to her self-created distress. Despite the fact that she seems barely present in the universe her physical body inhabits, the days seem more alive and arresting than any she has ever experienced before. Colors enhance themselves; music, which has before been only pleasant or difficult, now has the ability to transfix; the sea, to which she has always been drawn, takes on an epic grandeur and seems endlessly seductive — so much so that she is often sharply impatient of any demand upon her time that takes her away from simply gazing at the water and letting her thoughts float upon its surface.
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The beach at Fortune’s Rocks has always been a democratic one, and at no time more so than on the Fourth of July, when all of the population of the summer community, as well as that of Ely and Ely 78
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Falls, gathers for the traditional clambake. The stretch of sand from the seawall to the water’s edge is crowded with summerfolk, tradesmen and their families, and many Franco-Americans and Irish from the mills. An enormous fire is built and covered with wet seaweed, so that the steam that arises appears to be rising from the sand itself. And all around this fire stand men of every class and economic means, some in formal dress, others in more casual and festive attire, nearly all of them enjoying the potent liquid refreshment in the stoneware jugs that have been dug into the sand. Periodically, large slatted baskets of clams are carried down to the fire and heaped, along with potatoes, upon the seaweed. When a particular batch is considered properly steamed, tin dishes are brought out and filled with the food. The women, some with parasols, rest on wooden stools, while the children sit cross-legged on the rugs. Since there is a kind of lawlessness associated with this event, both men and women have on bathing costumes and are frolicking in the breakers. Occasionally a bather is carried to the surf by a servant and lowered into the water to lessen the shock of the cold. The water seldom rises above sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that is announced each noon hour by blasts from the Highland Hotel (six long blasts, five short). Near the bathers, Olympia can see that the Ely Club is conducting footraces along the low-tide flats on sand so hard, one could play tennis on it. Parked along one portion of the seawall are carriages and horses and one or two motorcars as well, novelties that quite intrigue the children, who crowd about the vehicles, not daring to touch them for fear of making them start up and run away. (An odd foreshadowing of calamity, as the following summer one of the motorcars is inadvertently turned on by a young boy; and the automobile does overshoot the seawall, burying itself but fortunately not the child in the soft sand at the high end of the beach, where it remains for a year, until a team of horses is able to drag it out.)
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Olympia has worn this day a costume she particularly likes: a thin, light-gray chemise, belted at the waist, over a simple navy linen skirt. For some reason she cannot articulate, possibly having to do with the general air of license that infects the day, she has not worn a hat. She also has on a navy shawl in anticipation of sea breezes that do not come; indeed, so warm is it this day that she soon abandons the shawl altogether and unbuttons the cuffs of her blouse and rolls the cloth along her forearms. And she supposes the reason she likes these clothes so well is that they are easy and free and do not call attention to themselves. For what she most covets is the freedom to observe the people around her while remaining if not invisible, then not obvious in her scrutiny. As to the infection of liberty, she has heard that there are more love affairs begun, proposals offered, and dormant marriages rekindled on this day than on any other of the year, a supposition borne out annually by the abnormally large number of births during the first week in April. Her tolerance for public occasions being unnaturally thin, Rosamund Biddeford sits with Olympia for a short time, eats precisely one clam that somehow the communal cooking seems to have tainted for her, complains mildly of a headache from the sun, and summons Josiah to see her back to the house. As none of this is unexpected, Olympia is quite content to sit upon her canvas chair by herself, sated with a dish of steamed clams and oyster crackers, and observe the comings and goings of all the celebrants in their various attire. And as she does so, she keeps a weather eye on her father, who hovers near to the fire with several other men and who appears to be drinking an immoderate amount of whiskey. Occasionally neighbors speak to Olympia, and some invite her to join them; but she declines, saying untruthfully that she is awaiting her mother’s return. After a time, however, Olympia finds herself restless, unwilling to sit still for so long on such a fine day. And so she begins to stroll along the beach, weaving in and out of families and social groupings, 80
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some of them rather elaborate with canvas gazebos, ice chests, and fine linen and silver. Others are more humble with only the tin plates and the cups of lemonade that have been provided for the occasion. She sees one family, even the children, dressed as if for church, sitting as formally as their posture will allow. And near to them is a Franco-American family from the mills, likewise dressed in their best finery, but not as stiff, for clearly they have put the several bottles of wine they have brought with them to excellent use. Their gathering seems joyous, if not actually raucous.
All along the beach, on the cottage porches, informal parties are being held, as is traditional on the Fourth. Olympia and her family have been invited to some of these parties. Because this is the first year Olympia is allowed to call upon someone of her own acquaintance alone, without the assistance or protection of her parents, she earlier thought of making a point of stopping by the Farragut cottage; Victoria Farragut is a young woman whose company she has sometimes enjoyed. But Olympia finds that she is reluctant, as she digs the toes of her boots into the sand, to enter into conversation with others, and so she passes by the Farragut cottage, noting the conviviality of all the people on the porch, but keeping her face averted. She does not want to be seen and called to. After a time, she sheds her boots and begins to walk barefoot, which she has been encouraged to do by not a few good-natured strangers she has passed. Since she fully intends to slip her boots back on when she returns to the clambake fire, she is not concerned about being seen by her father, who would, of course, disapprove. For some time, she feels bold and flirts with the sea, lifting her skirts just enough for her feet to skim the spills of water upon the shallow sand and jumping quickly out of the way when a more substantial wave threatens.
As she draws nearer to the Highland Hotel, however, her progress grows more tentative. The hotel is grand in the way of many of the 81
hotels scattered along that part of the coast; but none of them, she thinks, is as appealing as the Highland, with its excessively deep porches, its pristine white railings, and its black wicker rockers lined up against the railings like sentries on their watch. Men and women, on their way to and from the hotel, pass by her, carrying with them a distinct air of festivity. She watches as a cluster of employees poses on the steps of the hotel porch for a photograph; they seem unable to contain their merriment at the enterprise, much to the consternation of the hapless photographer. Behind them, plates of oysters are being passed among the many hotel guests, some of whom are splendidly dressed, the women with hats so large and ornate that they seem like lush peonies that might bend the slender stems beneath them. Other men and women, with racquets in hand, lounge less formally at the far end of the porch and appear to be waiting for a game of tennis to begin.
Her eye scans the porch and pauses at a figure seated in a rocker. Collarless and hatless, he is reading a pamphlet. She stops abruptly in the sand. Her sudden stillness must stand out in the scene, for he glances in her direction.
She turns around and begins to walk briskly along the beach, her boots in her hand. She can hear nothing but the surf of foolishness in her head: Whatever was she thinking to be so bold as to present herself at the hotel? Knowing that she might encounter Haskell?
Knowing how inappropriate such a presentation would be? With her body bent forward, she is determined to retreat to the other end of the beach as soon as possible. And so it is that she does not at first hear her name called, and it is only when she feels a restraining hand upon her arm that she stops and turns.
“Olympia,” Haskell says, breathless from trying to overtake her.
“I spotted you from the porch.”
She drops her skirts.
He bends to catch his breath. “I have regretted not having had the 82
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chance to visit with you and your father,” he says, “as I very much enjoyed my stay with your family.”
“And we as well,” she says politely.
He rights himself and puts his hands on his hips. “And how are your father and mother?” he asks. “Well, I trust?”
“Oh, yes, very well,” she answers. “And Mrs. Haskell and the children? Are they with you on this holiday?”
“No,” he says. “I must be at the clinic in an hour, and I have given most of the others the afternoon off. It seemed pointless to send for Catherine when I could not join her in the festivities. In any event, I shall be with her in York tomorrow.”
Olympia crooks an arm over her forehead to shade her eyes from the light. She is forced to look up at Haskell in order to speak to him.
“And how is your work at the clinic?” she asks.
“Difficult,” he says without hesitation. “There has not been sufficient time for me to reorganize the staff in the way it must be done, and I am still awaiting supplies and medicines from Boston, which have been unpardonably late in arriving.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” she says.
“Oh, I think we shall manage all right. Although I shall be dreadfully short-staffed this afternoon,” he adds, putting his hands into his trouser pockets. He seems to have recovered his breath. “May I accompany you back to wherever you are going?” he asks. “I should welcome an opportunity to greet your father if he is here with you.”
His eyes scan her face.
She turns, and they begin to walk toward the bonfire. The beach slopes precipitously, and she is nearly as tall as he is. She imagines that her gait is self-conscious, her movements stiff and unnatural, for she feels unnerved in his presence. Haskell, however, seems considerably more relaxed and occasionally bends to pick up a shell or to send a flat stone skipping across the waves. After a time, he asks if he 83
can stop for a moment since his boots are filling with sand. He puts the boots down where they stand, out of reach of the incoming tide, and says he will collect them later, which she thinks reflects rather more trust in human nature than perhaps is prudent. They walk together again, and though there are a thousand questions she wants to ask the man, she finds she is rendered silent. Voluble in her imaginings, she is inarticulate in his presence. The sea that day is a brilliant aquamarine, a color seldom observed off the coast of New Hampshire, where the ocean most often presents either a deep navy or a gunmetal gray appearance. Indeed, so rich and lovely are the water and sky and light together that Olympia thinks that Nature, in her generosity, must be in a celebratory mood herself on this, the one hundred and twenty-third anniversary of the country’s independence.
“Have you eaten?” she asks.
“The food at the Highland, I am sorry to say, is remarkably poor, despite the high standard of the service. I think they need another cook.”
“You are in luck today, then, for the clambake is providing a savory meal for everyone. Do you know about this tradition?”
“I heard about it at breakfast and have watched the staff slink away in their finery all morning. I’m quite glad to be offered a meal, as I’m sure the dining room is like a ship deserted. Your face is growing pink,” he says. “I think you should have worn your hat.”
They walk side by side, the walking irregular and slow-going in the sand. Occasionally one or the other of them stumbles, and a sleeve brushes a sleeve or a shoulder a shoulder. The heat causes a prism of air above the sandy beach that distorts the view. Waves surprise them, and Haskell yelps once from the cold, which is always a shock upon the tender skin of the ankles, no matter how often one visits this part of the coast of New England.
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In the distance, Olympia can see that the festivities have gathered some momentum in her absence. Men and boys are playing with balls and nets and racquets. Nearer to the water, where the sand is harder, several couples have set up wickets and are engaged in croquet, although it seems a fruitless enterprise since all the balls naturally roll toward the sea. Beyond the seawall and the fish shanties, hucksters hawk their wares from carts: ice-cold tonics, Indian baskets, ice-cream cones, and confections of all sorts. She stops suddenly, unwilling to reenter the crowd so soon. Haskell strolls on for a few paces before realizing that she is behind him. He walks back to where she is standing.
“What is it?” he asks her. “What is wrong?”
Her eyes skim the tops of his shoulders, his braces making indentations in his shirt. She is perspiring all about her collar and wishes she could unbutton it. She sees a blue-and-orange-striped balloon rise above his right shoulder.
The balloon ascends slowly into the thickish air — a massive thing, both gaudy and majestic. The balloon gains height and floats in their direction. Two men are standing on the parallel bars suspended from the balloon. They wave to the throng below. Olympia wonders at the view of Fortune’s Rocks the men must be having, and for a moment, she feels envious and wishes to be aloft with them.
“Olympia, are you not well?” Haskell asks again.
He stands so close to her that she can see the pores of his skin, smell the scent of him mixed with the starch of his shirt. There are perspiration rings under his arms. She wants to lie down. She watches as the balloon begins to ascend more rapidly and to pass overhead. And then she is startled by the sight of the aeronauts cutting loose from the balloon and falling to earth with parachutes. They scarcely seem to drift. In the distance, she can hear the muffled elation of the crowd.
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Slowly and without preamble, Olympia takes hold of Haskell’s hand and lifts it to her throat. She opens his fingers and presses them against her skin.
There is a long moment of silence between them.
“Olympia,” Haskell says quietly, withdrawing his hand. “I must say something to you now. In a moment, we shall be at the fire and with your father, and there will be no more opportunity.”
Her breath catches in her chest.
“I have reproached myself a thousand times since that day at your house when I took liberties with you,” he says. “When I was photographing you. I felt then that I could not help myself, though it is pure cowardice to hide behind the excuse of helplessness now.”
She shakes her head slightly.
“It is unpardonable, unpardonable,” he says heatedly. “And I do sincerely ask your forgiveness, and you must give it, as I cannot work properly for thinking of it and of the harm I have done to you.”
All about them, children squeal and run, oblivious to the drama that is taking place so near to them. Gulls, ever hopeful of a discarded morsel, swoop dangerously low to their heads. Haskell opens his mouth and closes it. He shakes his head. He turns once quickly toward the sea and then back again.
The aeronauts land on the sand. The balloon continues to fly overhead.
“I am going now,” Haskell says. “If your father has seen us together already, please tell him that I have been urgently called away. And it is true. I am going now to the clinic. I will not visit you again. You understand that. I will not call on your family, however awkward that may prove.”
And because she thinks he truly means to leave her then, she reaches for his arm; and though she catches only a small bit of his shirt cuff, it is enough.
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“I shall go with you,” she says calmly. She does not feel reckless. She is sure of her words and clear about their implications. “You yourself have said you would be dreadfully shorthanded this afternoon.”
“The clinic is no place for . . . ,” he begins, but then he stops. They have already had this conversation.
“I trust I can fetch and carry as well as the next person. Did I not prove myself the night of the shipwreck?”
“Olympia, you will regret this,” he says gravely.
She looks out toward the horizon, where the balloon is only a speck. She wonders where it will finally land.
“Then allow me at least to have it before I regret it,” she says calmly.
He opens his mouth as if to speak, but then hesitates. “No, I cannot allow this,” he says finally, and leaves her.
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She watches him walk away until he is only a blurry dot on the sand. When he is almost out of sight, she begins to follow him. For a time, she walks at a normal pace, and then she breaks into a run. 87
S he waits, as they have agreed, at the back of the Highland while he fetches a carriage from the stables. She stands, with sand in her boots, praying that she will not encounter anyone known to her or to her father, for she will not easily be able to explain her presence by the road nor, if Haskell were then to appear, her intention to accompany him in the carriage. She hopes her father has had enough to drink that he will take his customary Fourth of July nap on the sand by the seaweed fire, as do many of the men on this day, a democratic falling-out if ever there was one. Haskell comes around the corner in a small buggy with a canopy that bobbles wildly on the rutted dirt road. The coach is painted bottle green and has yellow wheels. On its side is written, in chaste script, The Highland Hotel. He has gathered from his room his physician’s satchel and his jacket and hat, and he presents such a pleasing aspect to her eye that despite her nerves, despite the fact that she has begun to tremble at the audaciousness of her actions, she cannot help but feel a gladness in her heart at the anticipation of riding beside him. He steps down from the carriage to help her up. They drive the length of the winding road between the bay and 88
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the ocean, passing many cottages and stone walls and carriages that jostle along the hard-packed dirt surface, much as they are doing. Men on bicycles ring their bells at them and tip their hats, and a family of Gypsies with begging tins tries to stop the buggy. This part of the world is flat, demarcated only by stone walls, clapboard cottages, a few trees, and low scrub pine. They pass a large party of revelers in a hay wagon, and as they make the turn at the end of the coast road, she sees again the lifesaving station. She wonders if the crew inside are allowed to partake of the festivities, and then thinks not, since Nature in her whims and frenzies knows not a holiday. At the very least, she imagines that the officers will have to be on the lookout for errant bathers who might be swallowed up by the breakers.
Behind the lifesaving station, the sun glints off the ocean with such ferocity that she cannot see her father’s house on the rocks at the end of the beach — which is fine with her since she does not much want to be reminded of it just now. She turns her head toward the bay, which presents a calmer prospect with its flotilla of sloops and yawls at anchor. She can see the brown and ochre Congregational church tower, the weathered fish cooperative, and the long pier that attracts commercial and pleasure vessels alike. Farther inside the bay are many skiffs and tenders with gentlemen at the oars and ladies sitting stiff-backed in the stern, enjoying their gentle outings under frilled parasols. In a short time, they leave Fortune’s Rocks and enter the marshes, a watery labyrinth of long reeds, rare birds, and pink and white lilies. She likes best to travel through the marshes in a skiff at sunset, or rather in that half hour before sunset when the rusty light of the lowering sun sets the grasses ablaze and turns the water a metallic pink. Sometimes, on these solitary excursions, she will deliberately lose herself amongst all the shallow passageways, finding a kind of quiet 89
thrill in the ginger-colored reeds. The challenge is then to make her way back through the watery maze, and she remembers only one time when she discovered herself at an unproductive dead end and had to summon help from a boy who was fishing along the harder ground of the shore.
Silently, they travel through the village of Ely with its stolid wooden houses built a century earlier by men who shunned adornment. In the center of the village is a butcher’s shop with a meat wagon parked to the side, a blacksmith’s shop, an apothecary, the town pump. Because of the holiday, there are no people about. Indeed, the stillness is almost eerie, as if a contagion has decimated the population, although Olympia knows it to be a fever of high spirits that has infected the people here and has caused them to flee their village.
They follow the trolley route into Ely Falls, where the buildings are darkened by soot from the mills. They do not speak much, some pleasantries, which sound strange on her tongue. She tries to attend to the world around her, but her mind remains preoccupied. Both the beauty of the marshes and the bustle of the city seem, as they ride to the clinic, mere scenery or chorus to the real drama at hand: the silent, unspoken one played out by Haskell and her. The main street of the city is thronged with shops, all decorated with yards and yards of festive bunting: druggists, confectioners, saloons, milliners, watchmakers. They pass a chowder house, a shoe factory: Coté and Reny. Over the shops are more French names and some Irish: Lettre, Dudley, Croteau, Harrigan, LaBrecque. Turning a corner, they come abreast of a parade in honor of the holiday. Olympia notes the men in Napoleonic costumes and the marching bands, the fire brigades on safety bicycles . The parade ends, they discover when they are forced to make a detour, at a two-pole big top that seems to have attracted at least half the city. The mill buildings themselves are massive and dominate the town. 90
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Most are brick structures with large windows, stretching all along the banks of the Ely River. Beyond these factories is the worker housing, row upon row of boardinghouses with a drab, utilitarian appearance. Perhaps the blocks of houses once looked fresh and appealing, but it is clear that the buildings, which have neither shutters nor paint, have been left to ruin with few attempts at repair.
They stop before an unprepossessing brick edifice, one of many in a row. Haskell helps her down, and he swings his satchel from the floorboards. She walks behind him to the front door, where he puts his hand upon the latch. He hesitates and looks about to speak. She shakes her head quickly to forestall his words. “Do not trouble yourself about me,” she says. “It is all right what we have done.”
Although they both know — as how could they not? — that it is not all right. It is not all right at all.
•
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•
It is the noise Olympia notices first. In a large room, which she takes to be a waiting room, she can hear a group of small children squealing and shouting as they chase one another through the aisles. Near to them, a woman who seems to huddle into herself is alternately crying and cursing. Men in varying states of dress and undress roughly cough up phlegm, and a mother, in a harsh voice, scolds a group of boys who are trying to crowd all together onto a scale. Olympia hears as well the irritated mutterings of patients who have been kept waiting on the holiday, and the moans of other patients who are clearly in pain: an old woman weeping, and a younger woman, in labor, grunting in a terrible manner. These people sit or lie upon a series of wooden benches that resemble church pews in their arrangement; and the entire gathering seems to her like nothing so much as a bizarre and noisy congregation waiting rudely for its minister. As Haskell strides purposefully through the room, a kind of order begins to descend, as though the patients can already 91
perceive their relief. Haskell speaks immediately with a nurse who has on a starched white muslin cap and a blue serge dress with sleeves Olympia assumes once were white but now are dotted or smeared with blood and other substances she does not want to think about. The nurse holds a sheaf of papers in one hand and a watch chained to her belt in the other. It is an unfortunate posture, as the implication seems to be that she is scolding Haskell for being tardy.
“The holiday is worse than a Saturday night for the drunkenness and injuries resulting from inebriation,” the nurse says to Haskell in an accent of broad vowels that Olympia recognizes as native. “There are seven patients who have come in with food poisoning from a tin of tainted meat, and there are three boys who fell into the runoff from the Falls, and what they were doing trying to cross the river there, I cannot tell you, but they are, as you might say, all battered to pieces. And as we are short-staffed today — well, there is no wonder we are in such a state. Oh, and there is a child, the Verdennes boy, who came into the clinic not an hour ago with the diphtheria croup, and I am sorry to say that he has passed on, sir.”
(The half hour she detained Haskell on the beach, Olympia thinks, with the first of many small shocks of that afternoon.) Haskell looks disturbed, but not overly so. Perhaps he knows that the child would have died even had he been there.
“This is Miss Olympia Biddeford,” he says, turning to her.
“Olympia, this is Nurse Graham,” he adds by way of introduction. Nurse Graham, who looks to be in her mid-twenties, narrows her eyes at Olympia, but her scrutiny is fleeting. She has other, more pressing matters on her mind.
“I promised my family, sir, that I would be finished at two o’clock,” she says.
“Yes, of course,” Haskell answers. “Is there anyone in the back?”
“Yvonne Paquet is here, sir. And Malcolm.”
“Enjoy yourself then,” he says, turning then to survey his flock, 92
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who now have fallen mostly silent and are watching him with great interest. Haskell takes in air and holds it, and then lets his breath out in a long, slow sigh.
“Let us begin,” he says to Olympia.
•
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•
The clinic occupies the ground floor of what was recently a textile warehouse. It has several rooms, one of which Olympia has ample opportunity to examine, since it is the chamber in which Haskell has set up his temporary office. In it are a desk and a cot and many cabinets filled with medicines, which Haskell frequently asks her, as the afternoon progresses, to fetch for him: quinine, aconite, alcohol, mercury, strychnine, colonel, and arsenic. There is an eye chart and a scale with many weights, an atomizer, a graduated medicine glass, and long metal trays of instruments — knives and needles and scissors. She notes a large glass bell jar, a microscope, and several flannelcovered bags, the purpose of which she never discerns. On a stove nearby are pots of water boiling continuously.
Nurse Paquet, a sallow and sullen girl not much older than Olympia, interviews the patients while Olympia functions as a nurse attendant, fetching bandages and medicines and tonics, cleaning instruments and returning them to the boiling water, and, once or twice, holding a limb or a child’s hand while Haskell goes about his business. The first patient he sees that day is a man who has lost his arm to a spinner, which mangled it up to the elbow some weeks before. Haskell begins to unwind the man’s dressing with the most careful of motions. He speaks in a soothing voice, trying to distract the mechanician with queries and jokes, and Olympia deduces that securing a patient’s trust and cooperation is the first order of business in any treatment. Haskell is, she observes that afternoon, a gentle, not to say tender, physician.
“Olympia, fetch me some clean dressings,” he instructs. “There, in that metal cabinet.”
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She finds the gauze and torn strips of cloth where he has said she would and hands them to Haskell.
“Contrary to established medical opinion, there is no intrinsic value to pus,” he says, unwinding the filthy bandages and gesturing to the exudation of a purple stump that emits such a powerfully noxious odor that she involuntarily puts the back of her hand to her nose and steps away. “It does but tell us that the patient is suffering and that the wound is infected,” he continues. “I have given orders that any person who walks into the clinic with a malodorous dressing should be seen to at once, but it is sometimes difficult to convince a provincial nursing staff who have been taught otherwise.”
Olympia looks over at Nurse Paquet, whose sullen expression does not change. Olympia watches as Haskell removes instruments from the pots of boiling water. After he has thoroughly cleaned the wound with carbolic acid, he begins to scrape away at the infection. The patient, despite Haskell’s soothing words and deft curettage, cannot keep himself from crying out at the pain. Olympia does observe, however, that Haskell is quick and precise in his gestures and that when the pain seems to be intolerable, he stops and administers laudanum by a teaspoon to ease his patient’s distress — which, miraculously, it does. The man, who ceases his shouting and trembling, lies still as Haskell finishes the job and bandages up the wound again.
That afternoon Haskell sets a broken leg, gives numerous injections, uses a pulmotor on a young man in the last stages of white lung, and treats another man who complains of a parched tongue, fevers in the night, and pain near his nipples. He diagnoses a case of scarlet fever on the basis of a telltale, ash gray patch on the palate, he cleans an abcess, he thumps a child’s back for pleurisy, and he dispenses tonics. One of the boys who fell into the river dies that afternoon as a result of his injuries, and the woman who was grunting 94
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in the waiting room is delivered of a healthy girl (though not by Haskell himself ).
Through all of this, Olympia is watchful, as though she were being introduced to a second language and must pay close attention. Several times she feels her stomach rise toward her throat, but she is determined to betray no weakness. Occasionally Haskell bids her don a mask in the presence of highly infectious disease, and he constantly reminds her to wash her hands, which she makes nearly raw by the time the afternoon is over. And though she seeks to keep her composure, it is impossible to remain unmoved by the persons who are treated by Haskell, and sometimes she finds herself close to tears. Toward the end of her visit to the clinic, a boy and a woman come in with itching between their fingers, which have begun to bleed rather badly. Haskell diagnoses scabies. But the true malady, Olympia can see at once, is poverty, the likes of which she has never come across before. The woman is inebriated, and Olympia thinks the boy may be, too, although he cannot be more than ten. The woman has on a blouse of faded green silk with a narrow scarf of black wool tied round her neck. Her hair hangs down from a soiled boater in hacked clumps. The boy’s clothes — an old cotton shirt, trousers, and a waistcoat — are so big for him, they have to be rolled and braced. The mother’s black boots are broken, and the boy is barefoot.
When Olympia looks at those narrow feet, encrusted not with sand but with filth, she feels a rush of shame. To have reveled in being barefoot just hours earlier now seems almost unnecessarily insensitive. How can she disdain what so few have? Haskell looks over at her then, and she thinks she must be pale.
And he does look at her this day. He does. Many times. A dozen times, perhaps. He catches her eye, and though no words pass between them — and he does not change his expression nor interrupt 95
his conversation with a patient — each glance to Olympia seems laden with content. These glances are, in an odd sort of way, both disturbing and comforting to her. Several times, under his acute gaze, she is afraid she will simply break apart or disintegrate. But then she collects herself, for all around her there are the sick and the injured who require, at the very least, another’s rapt attention. Curiously, none of the patients questions her presence. Perhaps it is her gray chemise and navy skirt, or an absence of adornment that causes them to take her for a nurse-in-training or a novice; and it seem to be acceptable to them that she remain in the room during their treatment. What they cannot know, and indeed she can barely bring to consciousness herself, is that though she observes the workings of the clinic, she studies the physican as well. She is a novitiate, but not, as the patients believe, in the nursing arts. For when she finally leaves the clinic that early evening, she will not be the same person she was when she entered. In the space of five hours, she will see more of human pain and suffering and relief than she has in the whole of her life. Yes, her father can tell her about the world, or she can read about it in books, or discuss it in polite conversation at the dinner table, but always at a safe remove. During the course of the afternoon, Haskell shows her something of the real and the visceral. He opens up the seams and makes her look. And in a strange manner, he is preparing her, but not in the way either of them has imagined: It is a rapid and brutal initiation into the ways of the body, a glimpse of what is possible, a taste of future intimacy. Later, she will come to understand that it was as much his nature to initiate her in this manner as it was hers to invite this instruction.
•
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Toward evening, the clinic begins to grow quiet, as one by one the patients are sent home or are admitted to makeshift wards. After Haskell has seen a small child with measles, he says to Malcolm, who 96
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seems to be a general handyman, though the man has evident fluency with the names of the medical instruments and tonics, “I am just going to run Miss Biddeford home, and then I shall return after I have had a meal. Nurse Paquet will be in charge until I get back.”
“Yes, sir,” Malcolm answers, “but before you go, Mrs. Bonneau is asking if you can attend to a young woman who is powerful overwrought with the birthing pains. She says to bring the laudanum, as it is a breech and likely to cause the mother some galling troubles.”
Haskell looks at Olympia.
“There is no need to hurry to take me home,” she says quickly.
“My father will not miss me, as he thinks that I am with the Farraguts. And they have almost certainly given up expecting me and doubtless think me at home with my father. So I am, for the moment, in a sort of limbo of freedom as regards my whereabouts.”
This is not entirely true, as she well knows; her father, having woken from his Fourth of July nap, could indeed be looking for her at this very moment. But she also knows that the day itself permits a certain latitude not normally available to her and that if she is clever, and her father has drunk enough, she will be able to excuse her absence to her father’s satisfaction. Haskell finishes washing his hands and dries them on a cloth Malcolm is holding. Olympia watches him unroll the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and fasten the links, which he has kept in his trouser pocket. He removes his apron, wads it into a ball, and tosses it into a laundry basket in the corner. There is a smear of blood near his shoulder, and his face has lost some of its color with fatigue. Later, she will understand that he is biding his time, thinking hard about the consequences of taking her with him to the room in which Mrs. Bonneau and her charge wait; for he understands, as she does not, that she is about to see something for which no preparation will be adequate and which, once witnessed, can never be erased from the memory. He lifts his coat from the hook on the back of the door. “There 97
is a satchel of boiled cloths in the cabinet in the next room, Olympia,”
he says. “It is not heavy. If you would bring that, we could go now.”
•
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The light has softened some, and there are shadows on the streets. A cool, damp breeze from the east slips through the narrow alleys and washes over them at regular intervals. The sky is a vivid azurine, unblemished by clouds. It will be a lovely evening, Olympia knows, and even now, on this ugliest of streets, the light plays wondrously upon the bricks, catching a pane of glass and making it shimmer silver, turning the tops of the leaves of the trees a trembling pink. They walk side by side, saying little, trying to ignore the filth in their path, not only the detritus of the city’s daily life but also the leavings of a holiday’s many revelers: broken bottles, some human waste, articles of clothing shed and not retrieved, puddles of dishwater slung from second-story windows, wrappings of half-eaten food, crockery that reeks of beer. More than once, Olympia fears for her head and wishes fervently that she had a hat. But they reach the designated row house without incident and climb the stairs to the place where the unfortunate woman lives. Haskell opens the door and walks in without knocking.
The room is no bigger than the one Olympia sleeps in at Fortune’s Rocks, a cramped chamber with only one window that looks out upon a wall not ten feet away. Though it is still day, there is little light, and it takes a moment for Olympia to adjust her eyesight to the gloom. On the bed, a woman lies in apparent agony, for she writhes and clenches her teeth and then lets her breath out in sharp gusts, calling out words in a French so accented and tortured, Olympia cannot understand her. Her skirts have been rucked up to the tops of her thighs, and even from the doorway Olympia can see the blood on her skin and on the grimy pillow ticking beneath her. Her naked legs, moving and twisting on the bed, are a shock to the 98
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senses, and Olympia feels as if she had upturned a rock and come unexpectedly upon a mass of transparent worms, colorless from never having been exposed to the sun.
Olympia breathes shallowly. She fights the impulse to gag and to back out of the door.
In a moment, Haskell has shed his jacket. A quick perusal of the room indicates an absence of a water pump, and she can see him deciding to forgo washing his hands in the interests of time. As he sits upon the bed, his fingers disappear beneath the slim modesty of the thin band of cloth that hides the most private self of the woman, whose name, Olympia learns, is Marie Rivard. Haskell occupies himself thus for a moment and seems to confirm what he has been told. He speaks in French to Mrs. Bonneau, an older woman with a nervous bearing who tells him that she was summoned by one of the woman’s children, who was fearful for her mother’s life. And that this was largely the scene when she arrived. She adds, with much expression and many imprecations, that the young woman on the bed is a recent immigrant. There was a husband, but he abandoned his wife and children some months earlier. Marie Rivard, who must be in her late twenties, Olympia thinks — although it is impossible to give an age to the writhing apparition on the bed — has been unable to find work because she has been with child.
Olympia notices then the other occupants of the room: three children, none of whom can be more than nine years old, sitting on the floor against a wall. All are barefoot and wear soiled dresses of the most distressing cloth, dark and colorless and long wrenched out of shape. It is apparent that the children have not bathed in quite some time. The stench in the small airless cubicle is considerable. The walls of the room are unpapered and have turned dark and greasy from years of cooking. There is no wardrobe, nor any trunk in the room, merely a shallow pantry; and when its door is opened, Olympia is surprised to discover that it is not crammed full of the 99
occupants’ belongings, but is nearly bare. Although a man’s jacket hangs upon a hook, there are no other signs of a man in residence. A corner of the room, where the floor meets the joining, is burned as though there was once a fire there. Above the encrusted stove are rude kitchen implements: a colander, a knife, a pot. A few garments hang from nails hammered into moldings. She notes that there is no sign of a toy or of a plaything for any of the children. In the recesses of the sill of the window, however, is a tall stack of folded clothing partially wrapped in brown paper. Beside that package is a silver filigree frame of a man and a woman on their wedding day. The bride has on a long white satin dress with a delicate mantilla that falls forward onto her brow. The man, in a heavy woolen suit, stands as though at attention. Olympia looks from the woman in the photograph to the woman on the bed. Can it be that they are the same person? And if so, how is it that this astonishing photograph and frame have escaped being sold for food, as nearly everything else in the room appears to have been?
Haskell loses no time in spooning laudanum into the laboring woman’s mouth. He uses his own utensil and takes care that no drops are spilled. The writhing on the bed lessens, and the unspeakable cries subside into low moans.
“Olympia, give me the satchel.”
She hands over the bag of boiled cloths and watches with curiosity and admiration as Haskell takes a sheet from the bag, makes the bed on one side, rolls the sheet taut, and, with a trick she cannot not quite catch the mechanics of, slips the sheet under the woman and quickly fastens the bedclothes on the other side. Covering the woman’s lower extremities with a white cloth, he and Mrs. Bonneau manage to remove Marie Rivard’s soiled clothing.
“Olympia, would you see if you can find the pump?” he asks quietly and evenly, as though he were merely asking her for a pencil in the midst of contemplating a correction to a half-written paragraph. 100
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“Get that pot there, and bring it back full of water. I need to wash the woman.”
Olympia removes the cooking pot from its hook over the stove and walks into the hallway in search of a pump. She knows it must be out in the back of the brick house, but she cannot at first determine how to get to the rear of the building without having to go round the entire block and into the alley. She does finally discover, however, a small door in the basement that leads up and out into a parched garden. The pump in its center is rusty and jerky in its motions; but after several barren tries, Olympia finally gets the water to flow. The stench from the nearby privy is nearly overpowering, and she thinks it cannot have been emptied in some time. Breathing shallowly, she fills the pot, retraces her steps, and climbs the two flights of stairs back to the room she just left. When she arrives, she finds the door shut and the three children waiting out in the hallway. They sit on the floor, their pale legs extended before them, snipping buttons from garments of clothing they lift from the paper parcel Olympia saw on the sill, taking care not to let the cloth touch the floor. With expert motions, they flick their small knives, pop the buttons into the air, catch them easily and toss them into a can they have set in front of them. If the scene were not so haunting in its implications, the skill with which the children accomplish their task, their hands flying almost faster than the eye can see, would be astonishing and perhaps even amusing. But as their dexterity speaks only to the hundreds of hours the children must have spent honing such a skill, any astonishment or amusement Olympia might feel quickly turns to dismay.
From behind the door to the room, she hears a deep guttural cry. The children do not stir. Only the smallest child, who cannot be more than three years old, stops for a moment and sucks her thumb, which the oldest girl almost immediately bats out of her mouth with her hand.
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Olympia stands helplessly with the pot in her arms, not knowing what to do for the children. She knocks once on the door, and the old woman opens it. She takes the pot from Olympia and puts it on the stove. When Olympia looks at the laboring woman on the bed, she is confronted with a most extraordinary sight. Haskell has maneuvered Marie Rivard so that she is on her elbows and knees. Haskell kneels with his arms between her thighs, his hands plunged deeply inside her. Olympia’s abdomen contracts with a sympathetic sensation. But she finds that she cannot turn away. Of the reality of childbirth, Olympia has only the haziest of notions, her knowledge of anatomy inexpert at best. Childbirth is more than just a mystery to her; it is a subject about which no polite person has ever spoken — not even Lisette, who has educated her as to some of the facts of life but who has confined herself to those bits of information absolutely necessary for Olympia to enter the first stages of womanhood. Thus she is both fearful and exhilarated by the sight of a woman’s open legs, her most private place stretched sore and purple, violated not only by her physician’s hands but also by the rude life that pushes relentlessly against her and makes her moan in drugged stupor. If Olympia has any conscious thoughts at all those few astonishing moments, it is to wonder at the cruelty of a God who can only with violence and pain and suffering bestow his great gift of children upon mankind.
As she watches, transfixed, Haskell appears to tussle with the infant, as if pulling a stubborn turnip from hard-packed ground. The woman screams, even with the laudanum. Copious amounts of blood spill onto the white bed sheet. But Haskell seems satisfied with the event, even as he withdraws one hand and pushes hard against the woman’s belly, massaging and kneading the living mass that lies beneath. In no time at all, it seems, Haskell abruptly shifts position and gently turns the woman onto her back. He cups his 102
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palms like a priest expecting holy water. The slippery purple and blue creature slides out entirely into its new world. Haskell takes a cloth from the satchel and wipes fluids from the baby’s eyes and nose and mouth. He holds the infant at an odd angle. Olympia sees that it is a girl. Immediately they hear the first cry; and within several breaths, the skin sheds its bluish cast and pinkens. Olympia begins to weep — from relief or from exhilaration or from the shock of the birth, she cannot tell.
Haskell examines the infant’s extremities and orifices and uses the warmed water to wash the child clean. He attends to the mother and extracts further matter from her womb. Exhausted by her labors, the mother falls into a deep sleep that feigns death. He gives instructions to Mrs. Bonneau, who places the clean infant at the breast of the inert mother. Haskell listens to Marie Rivard’s breathing and gives further instructions. It is the first time this day Olympia hears irritation in his voice, and she thinks it must be a result of his own exhaustion or perhaps his dismay and frustration at the appalling circumstances of the impoverished family.
He washes his hands and wrists in what little water remains, using a charcoal-gray soap and producing a lather of blood and gray suds that makes Olympia have to turn away. Haskell tells the old woman to massage the uterus and that he will send Malcolm around with fresh linen and gauze to stanch the bleeding. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and withdraws some paper dollars and hands them to Mrs. Bonneau. He tells her to buy oranges and milk and wheat bread for the children, not to give the money to any relative who is a man and not to spend it on drink. Undoubtedly grateful to Dr. Haskell for saving the life of the infant and possibly that of the newly arrived French Canadian mother as well, Mrs. Bonneau promises she will do exactly as he has asked. But when Olympia looks up at Haskell’s face, she notices that he has a wry, not 103
to say sardonic, expression on his features; and she thinks that he perhaps has little faith that his instructions will be followed to the letter.
After Haskell has cleaned himself and dressed, he gestures to Olympia, and they leave the room. Arrayed along the floor, still expertly popping buttons, are the three children of the woman who has just given birth. If they know they now have another sister, they give no sign. Haskell crouches down in front of the smallest of the three, holds her head in his hands and draws back the lid of the child’s right eye. He examines her thoughtfully and then says, in French, “Why are you not outside playing on this holiday?” The child shrugs. Haskell reaches into his shirt pocket and produces a handful of saltwater taffy pieces, wrapped in waxed paper, which he distributes to the three children. Then he stands and, without knocking, opens the door to the room. He gives the old woman a further set of instructions.
“Oui, oui, oui,” Olympia hears from beyond the door.
•
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They walk to the horse and buggy. Haskell helps her in, and then he climbs up and takes the reins. The sun has nearly set in their absence, and the sky has the appearance of indigo dust. They retrace their route along the trolley line and head out toward Ely and Fortune’s Rocks, a distance of perhaps eight miles. From time to time, Olympia begins to tremble with the memory of the extraordinary events of the afternoon and evening. She wonders how it is that Haskell does not collapse from the sheer weight of his encounters with mortal injury and illness. But then she surmises that a physician, familiar with, if not actually inured to, the physical vicissitudes of birth and death, might take the occurrences of the afternoon as merely commonplace; though she cannot imagine how seeing the human body in extremis, as they have just done, can ever be routinely 104
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absorbed. The sleeves of his shirt are spotted with blood and other matter, and he gives off a distinctly masculine odor — not unpleasant, but testament to his own labors. After some time, he speaks.
“You must not be frightened of childbirth,” he says. “What you saw just now is not unnatural or uncommon. Difficult perhaps, but not desperately so. Nature sometimes makes a thunderous entrance and a whimpering exit, though I assure you it can be otherwise. I fear I have gravely injured your sensibilities.”
“Not injured,” she says. “Stunned them, perhaps. And my sensibilities are not as tender as you might imagine. Indeed, I am grateful to you for allowing me to witness the birth, which was an astonishing miracle. And is it not better always to know the truth of a thing?”
“I have mixed opinions on that subject,” he says thoughtfully.
“But what good does a woman do herself if she hides from the physical realities of her person? So that she might be terrified in the event itself? I wonder how I should ever have learned of such matters, for I have been overly sheltered.”
“And wisely so,” Haskell says. “Your father’s protection has allowed you to grow and develop and blossom in an entirely healthy and appropriate manner. And if the alternative to sheltering is snipping buttons in conditions of filth and degradation, then I am in favor of such protection, even if that be suffocating.” He shakes the reins, and the carriage begins to move slightly faster. “The children should be given over to the orphanage,” he says heatedly.
“Taken away from their mother?” she asks.
“Why not? How can a woman who is so impoverished be an adequate mother? At least in an orphanage, under the care of the sisters, the children will have baths and regular meals and clean clothing and fresh air and some schooling. As far as I am concerned, what we just witnessed wasn’t a birth, but rather a kind of infanticide.”
“But, surely, we cannot blame the mother for her poverty,”
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Olympia argues. “Surely, there is a man involved, who now seems to be absent.”
“I would be more inclined to agree with you had I not seen some of these young immigrant women — Irish and Franco alike —
drunk on more occasions than I care to think about. And there are other unfortunate women, desperate women, who at least have the good sense to ask for help, who beg to give over their children to orphanages if only spaces can be found for them.”
“I cannot imagine giving over a child,” Olympia says with some confusion. She has seen for herself that the Rivard children are woefully neglected, though she finds it harder than Haskell does to blame the mother. Surely a woman of her mother’s station would not be expected to give up her child even if she found herself in difficult straits following abandonment by her husband, even if she drank to excess on occasion. Was a woman, mired in poverty and grieving for her lost husband, to be denied, by decree of society, all possible pleasures, all possible relief ? And yet Olympia can also understand the particular treachery of taking money meant for children’s food to spend on drink. And altogether, the issue seems to present a more complicated problem than can be sorted out in casual discussion. The evening suddenly darkens, bringing with it an awareness that Olympia is on the verge of being unpardonably late. She can possibly excuse a daylight absence, but at night her father will almost certainly become worried.
“Regarding your earlier point,” Haskell says, “in truth, I do not believe in shielding a young woman on the threshold of marriage and childbirth from the physical particulars of what surely awaits her. In some situations — and childbirth is one of them — ignorance can be lethal. I have come upon not a few young women in my practice who have begun birthing without ever having known they were with child.”
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Olympia wonders how that might be possible, since it seems to her that such naïveté would require almost willful ignorance. They pass through Ely, noting signs of life in the small village: lanterns lit in windows and shadowy figures moving along the streets, having recently been disgorged, she knows, from the trolley. They hear singing and a few drunken shouts, but for the most part the revelers have grown weary and quiet. She thinks suddenly, in the way of perfectly obvious realizations, that all of the people on the street at that moment have entered the world in a manner similar to the one she witnessed that afternoon. And she further thinks that the wonder isn’t that she was present for the birth, but rather that she has reached the age of fifteen without having observed it sooner and more often.
“Did you attend the births of your own children?” she asks Haskell.
Her query seems to surprise him. As they enter the marshes, the half-moon rises and, with its pearly ripples of light on the surface of the water, illuminates all of the twisting and turning paths of the brackish labyrinth, so that the landscape becomes one of near magical beauty, the underground lair of a god, perhaps, or a passageway to the realm of a cool queen.
“I was absent for the births of my first two children,” Haskell says,
“and present for the last three.”
“I was under the impression you had four children,” Olympia says without thinking.
“The last of them was stillborn,” he says. “This past March.”
“Oh, I am sorry —”
“This, too, is Nature’s way,” he says, interrupting her. “The child would have been grotesquely deformed.”
Olympia is assaulted then with disturbing images. That of Haskell kneeling between the legs of his wife, an intimate picture in stark contrast to the couple’s chaste demeanor together at the dining 107
table; and that of an infant, not at all like the one she saw that afternoon, but rather one misshapen in its limbs, pushing ferociously to get out into the world, only to perish at the moment of birth. Olympia wraps her arms around herself.
And then, in the way of random thoughts, she remembers the photograph on the sill of the Rivard room, the small picture within the silver filigree frame, the beauty and youth of the two persons who posed on their wedding day, the fine satin of the dress and the mantilla with its crown of pearls. And she wonders at the disparity between that pose of civility on the wedding day and the animal-like posture of birth within the hideous surroundings of that boardinghouse room. And she further imagines that if the bride and groom in the picture had been able to foresee the circumstances in which that framed portrait would one day find itself, each of the innocents would have fled the altar in terrified disbelief.
Haskell stops the carriage.
“This has been too much,” he says, turning to her.
“No,” she says, “I . . .”
She inhales the salt air, as if it were her own laudanum. She tilts her head back. She can sense, but not quite see, the bats that fly near to them and then away.
“Olympia, I wish to say something to you, but not without your permission.”
She rights her head and looks at him. “You do not need to ask, nor do I need to grant, permission,” she says quietly.
“Our circumstances are not normal, though they feel as natural to me as it is to breathe.” He says this last with quiet assurance.
“If we speak of the unnaturalness of our circumstances,” she says evenly, “it will seem to us that is all we have.”
With his fingers, he turns her head so that she faces him. She gives herself freely to his direction.
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“Olympia, I have thought of nothing but you since the day I left your house,” he says.
She briefly closes her eyes.
“I do you the greatest injury a man in my position can a young woman,” he says, “which is to speak of unspeakable feelings.”
In the moonlight, she can see pinpoints of moving lights in his pupils.
“This week has been unendurably long,” he adds so close to her that she can feel his breath. She wants to lean into him, to rest her head on his chest.
“Mr. Haskell,” she says. “I . . .”
“Have I not, in your thoughts at least, become John?” he asks quietly.
“In my thoughts of you, which are constant, you are always Haskell,” she answers without any hesitation.
And there is, in the confessing of this truth, a moment of the greatest joy and release of spirit Olympia has ever felt.
“This cannot be,” he says. “I cannot have created this.”
“You did not.”
“We can say no more about this.”
“No.”
“This is all,” he says. “This is all we can ever have. You understand that?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I forfeit all right to speak to you in this manner, and I have already trespassed upon your good nature beyond any hope of forgiveness. Indeed, by stopping here, I take advantage of your gentle spirit and of your youth, which is the worst sort of opportunism a man of my age and position can engage in. I can do you nothing but harm.”
“I do not for one minute believe you guilty of opportunism,” she says truthfully.
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The scent of sea salt is pungent in the air, and there is as well the dank but not unpleasant aroma of mudflats and sea muck. The tide is low, but not out altogether.
“Then you are not afraid?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
He puts his hands on her wristbones and slides his fingers slowly up her arms to the elbows under her loose cuffs. He says her name and presses his palms against her, as though he means to deliver the full force of himself through her skin. He removes his hands from her arms and tucks one finger inside the collar of her blouse, opening the top button with the gesture. He leans in close to her to fit his mouth to the shallow place at the bottom of her throat where she earlier directed his hand.
Olympia feels her body, for the first time, transform itself, become liquid, open itself up, wanting nothing more than more. An absolute stillness follows. It is a long kiss, if such a touch may be called a kiss, although Olympia experiences it as something different: The memory of the Franco woman with her legs open, the unruly living mass pushing against her, overtakes Olympia and seems now not an event to be feared, but rather a sensation to be savored; and it is as though she understands a thing about what will come to her in good time. She touches the back of Haskell’s neck and feels the fine hairs that twirl in a comma there. He removes his mouth from her throat and presses his forehead to hers, sighing once as if only this particular embrace could give him ease.
They remain in that posture as the half-moon rises higher in its arc and the crickets scratch their repetitive tune. In the distance, they hear another carriage approaching.
“It is late, and I must go,” she says. “Take me to the seawall near my house, and I will walk from there.”
The other carriage comes into view, and they part reluctantly. The 110
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driver passes them with a greeting. Haskell takes up the reins, and he and Olympia journey on. When they arrive at the seawall, which is crowded with evening revelers, he helps her down from the carriage, takes her hand, and bids her good night in a manner so necessarily formal as to belie any intimacy they shared just minutes earlier.
•
•
•
Her father is sitting on the porch when she returns. He is smoking — a dark figure in a chair, with only the ember of his cigar clearly visible.
“Is that you, Olympia?” he calls.
“Yes, Father,” she says, climbing the steps. She moves into his line of sight. He lights a candle and holds it out to her. He studies her face, her clothing.
“We have been worried about you,” he says. “It is after ten o’clock.”
“I went for a long walk on the beach and met Julia Fields, with whom I had a meal,” she says, discerning at once that to tell the obvious lie, that she has been at the Farragut party, will lead to discovery.
“I am not certain I ever met Julia Fields,” he says, somewhat puzzled. “When you did not appear at dusk, I went to fetch you at Victoria Farragut’s,” he adds, thus justifying at once her pragmatic deceit.
“I stopped there briefly on the porch,” she says, “but I saw that to gain entrance I would have to engage in a lengthy discussion with Zachariah Cote, and so I fled, preferring my own company for a time.”
It is a clever lie, for her father will easily be able to empathize with the unpleasantness of being trapped in conversation with a man who proved sycophantic and boring at table. Her father partially smiles; but then, as Olympia takes the candle from him, she sees him look111
ing at her collar, which she has not thought to refasten. His incipient smile vanishes, and his expression turns to one of faint alarm.
“I am exhausted, Father,” she says quickly, stepping past him.
“Let me say good night.”
But she does not bend to kiss him, as is her custom, for all about her is the distinct smell of John Haskell, as though the pores of her skin had absorbed the essence of the man, a foreign essence she luxuriates in even as she fears its consequences. 112
D ays passinto days, and it seems the entire coast lies under a gray pall that, for nearly a week, neither breaks nor gathers enough momentum to become an actual storm. But there is rain, a steady drizzle that renders nearly all outdoor pursuits unmanageable. Her sense of isolation, of being set apart from those around her, only intensifies with the poor weather; and it is as though she inhabits a warm and impenetrable cocoon in a damp and irrelevant world.
Though she paces alone on the porch, or soaks herself as she walks the beach, or eats at her dining table, or converses, albeit distractedly, with her father, or tries to read John Greenleaf Whittier or to play backgammon with her mother, every moment is devoted to — no, claimed by — John Haskell, so that she has no conscious thought or unconscious dream that does not include him. Her distraction does not go unnoticed, even though those around her do not know its cause. As the days pass, she grows less able (or less willing) to dissemble and to hide her feelings; and several times she comes perilously close to revealing the true reason for her agitation. Once or twice she dangerously mentions Haskell in conversation with her father, referring more often than is prudent to the 113
volume Haskell has written or to the work that he is doing in Ely Falls. And at a party at which Rufus Philbrick and Zachariah Cote are both present, she contrives to steer the conversation to a discussion of the mills and of progressive reforms; for simply to speak the word mills or progressive aloud in their company is rewarding and even thrilling in a secretive way. She imagines, after she does so, however, that Mr. Cote regards her with an odd and thoughtful gaze and then with the faintest of smiles, all of which causes her to wonder if she is so transparent that her true thoughts can be read upon her face.
All around her, she can see that others study her, their puzzlement turning to a smile or to a frown, depending upon what they deduce from her behavior. Her father is careful with her: He can hardly accuse her of something for which he has no evidence. And she believes that though there was between them on the porch that night the barest recognition of waywardness, he has chosen willfully to dismiss it from his thoughts. Olympia thinks her mother may be more watchful than before, but since she seldom ventures farther than her own room, there is not a great deal for her to observe. If her parents think about her distraction at all consciously, she is certain they attribute it to that temperamental state that claims many young women of her age. Or else they imagine for her an innocent romance with a boy she has recently met. Or they think she is participating in a harmless flirtation in which she, in her naïveté, has doubtless invested too much significance. Curiously, during this period of time, whenever they have visitors to the house or she happens to observe Josiah going about his chores or her father reading, she begins to notice certain masculine characteristics that she has not ever observed before — or never knew she observed: the inch or two of skin that sometimes will show itself between a man’s cuff and his wristbone when he reaches for a door, for example; or the graceful languor of men standing casually with 114
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their hands in their trouser pockets; or the way the power, the heart of the body, seems to reside just below the midpoint between the shoulders. And she is certain that though she has actually seen such masculine attributes before — that is to say, physically absorbed them with the eye — they have not previously produced conscious thoughts as they do in abundance during this spate of rainy days. On the afternoon of the sixth day, Olympia is knitting in her room, an activity that is producing in her only a benumbed stupor. To rouse herself, she decides to make herself a cup of tea. As she descends the carpeted steps, she hears masculine voices from her father’s study. She halts in her progress, her heel poised against the riser, listening intently to discern the speakers. One voice, of course, is that of her father, and there is no mistaking the other. They are talking about a book of photographs.
Taking deliberate breaths, Olympia continues down the stairs and walks, with deceptively casual posture, into her father’s study, as if merely looking in to see who the company is. Her father glances over at her. He stops his speech mid-sentence. Haskell, whose back has been to her, turns. After a brief heartbeat of hesitation, he advances with the perfect manners of a gentleman and takes her hand.
“Miss Biddeford,” he says, “what a pleasure to see you again.”
“I trust you know my daughter well enough to call her Olympia,”
her father says cheerfully enough (and with what agonizing irony for both Haskell and Olympia he cannot know).
“Olympia, then,” Haskell says pleasantly.
He has a bowler in his hand. She can see tiny droplets of water on his overcoat. His boots are stained black from the wet in a semicircle around the toes. His hair has been somewhat flattened by the hat, and his face is flushed, as though he had been running. In the crook of his arm is a book, perhaps the excuse for his visit. How cunning, how capable of deceit, they show themselves to be in these few minutes as they speak the sentences of a ritual long prac115
ticed, drop their hands at precisely the right moment, and turn ever so slightly in the direction of Olympia’s father so as to include him in their greetings. Her father, who seems particularly pleased to see Haskell, whose company he genuinely enjoys and whose work he honestly admires, immediately insists that Haskell stay to tea.
“I was just going into the kitchen to make a pot myself,” Olympia says.
“Excellent,” her father says. “Your timing, Haskell, is rather good. Olympia, bring it into the parlor. It is too cramped in here, and too cold for me, I am afraid, on the porch.”
Olympia leaves their company and walks with strained poise through the dining room and pantry and into the kitchen. But once she has let the swinging door shut itself, she leans heavily with her hands upon the lip of the broad worktable and bends her head. She has shocked even herself with her deceit, with the ease of her deception. After a time, she rights herself, fetches the kettle from the top of the stove, fills it, and returns it to the stovetop, which is still warm from lunch. Mrs. Lock, who is recently from Halifax and who will not return to the house until it is time to prepare the supper meal, has left a plate of blueberry scones on the counter. In the larder, Olympia finds butter and jam to go with the scones and sets everything on a marquetry tray from the pantry. Then she sits down on a kitchen chair to wait for the water to boil and the trembling in her hands to subside.
The kitchen is a large room that has been painted pale green with white trim. Along one wall is a series of windows looking out on a trellis and the back garden. Set into the wall opposite is a brick hearth so tall that Martha could stand upright inside it. The floors are wide pine boards, and Olympia notes that Mrs. Lock is such a fastidious cook that there is not a particle of pastry or flour or even dust in the cracks between the boards. Behind glass-fronted cabinets 116
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are the foodstuffs and the dishes, and in a corner is a polished oak ice chest.
She glances down at her lap and is suddenly stricken to discover that she has on her fawn calico, a dull dress not fit to be seen by anyone but family. She wore it today because she had nowhere to be and no visitors expected. She holds the dingy material in her fists and wonders frantically how she might swap the drab frock for another. But she knows at once that she cannot change her dress; for though she could easily sneak up the back stairway to her room, it will be worse to be seen to have altered her clothing than to remain as she is. Her hair, she realizes with further dismay, patting the hastily made knots at the back of her head, is so artlessly done on this day as to be not merely plain but unkempt.
She hears the brush of the swinging door. She turns in her chair.
“Olympia,” Haskell says, and she stands.
His face is at first unreadable. In the better light of the kitchen, she can see dark circles around his eyes.
“I could not stay away,” he says.
She puts a hand on the chair back. Haskell crosses the space between them.
“Your father is looking for a book in his study,” he says with the careful pragmatism of the secret lover. “I said I would help you with the tray. We have only a minute, two minutes at best.”
She touches the cloth of his coat at his chest. It is damp from the rain.
Haskell hooks his arm around her shoulders and draws her to him with a powerful grip. She has a distinct sense of vigor. Not accustomed to feeling small, she is nearly lost in his embrace. Releasing an arm, she reaches a hand up behind his head and pulls him toward her, her actions as instinctive to her as it is to bat a fly away from one’s face. He opens his mouth, shocking her, for she has never had such a kiss. She tastes his tongue, the inner lining of his lips. Her 117
head is tilted at an angle, and her neck is drawn long and exposed. Haskell slowly slides his mouth all along the skin there, and she shivers against him. And then that is all. That is all the time they have. He backs away, his empty hands forming a shape, his mouth seemingly wishing to speak a word. His tie has come undone, and unable to speak herself, she points to her own collar to tell him. She can feel the weight of her disheveled hair pulling itself loose. She tries to repin it as they stand there. Haskell’s face has turned an unnatural red, and her mouth feels raw. Her father comes through the swinging door.
“So you have found her,” her father says amiably, looking at them but not really looking at them. “This is the volume I wanted to show you, Haskell. The photographs are astonishing.”
He glances from Haskell to Olympia and seems puzzled by his daughter’s immobility.
“Can I help?” he asks.
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A fter her encounterwith Haskell in the kitchen, they sit on the porch, surrounded by the gray brocade of an unrelenting cloud cover. Haskell converses politely with her father, and how he manages to do that, Olympia cannot imagine. It seems incongruous — beyond incongruous — to be eating blueberry scones and speaking of photography and the new century, when only moments before, she and Haskell came together in the way they did in the kitchen. And as will happen often to her this summer, she is accosted by a moment of pure astonishment that such events can possibly be occurring in her life. If she but thinks about the kiss in the kitchen, she feels a fluttering sensation in her abdomen, and her face becomes suffused with color. She experiences the reality again and again and again, a series of brief shocks upon both her soul and her body. How can Haskell and she have done that? she wonders. They who have no right to have transgressed in that manner? And yet, in the way one may hold within the mind two separate and contradictory thoughts or theories, she believes in the next moment that they have no choice but to respond as they do, that what draws her to Haskell and him to her is as natural as it is to breathe.
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She awakens the next morning to an oily green sea, the surface flat and reflecting no light at all, a pond covered with scum. She has spent a restless night and is not certain she slept at all; and she wonders if her perception of the color of the ocean isn’t a result at least as much of her sleep-deprived state as of Nature’s inclinations. Since it is a Sunday, and her father does not consider it proper to interrupt one’s service to God with summer pleasures, Olympia knows they will all be going to church. She dresses in a benumbed state, so preoccupied that it takes her nearly twice as long as usual to complete a perfectly ordinary toilet. She descends the stairs in a distracted flurry and takes her cloak and bonnet from Josiah. He tells her that perhaps the sun will break through the cloud cover before the day is over. He is dressed for church himself and adds that he will be accompanying them.
“Your mother and father are in the carriage already,” he says, looking at her oddly. “You are not unwell, I hope?”
“No, Josiah, I am well enough,” she says, burying her hair within her bonnet and grateful that the hat’s wide brim will hide the confusion on her face. At the doorway, he extends his arm, and she is relieved to have someone at this moment to lean upon. It is a modest brown-shingled church with its trim painted in yellow ochre. It has a tall, wooden spire above its single gable, and atop that is an unadorned cross that is visible from all of Fortune’s Rocks. At fifteen, Olympia has not yet suffered any crises of faith, but neither is she devout. God and his commandments, as interpreted by man, are for her primarily social and familial obligations. When at church, she does sometimes enjoy the sense of calm that will occasionally spread across the congregation, and the music is appealing to her. But more often than not, she finds herself restless in that darkened sanctuary, wishing she were out-of-doors. The roads are muddy, and the journey is slow going. The cold seeps in at the sides, and the four of them sit huddled, heads bent, 120
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against the unseasonable elements. They enter the church and move to their customary pew. All about them is the smell of wet wool, the sound of cloaks being snapped to shake off the damp. The windows are arched and leaded and stained a dark red and a brownish gold. The gloom they create is dispelled only by the candles in the sconces on the walls. It is as if it were already night in the church, the faces and forms of the parishioners at first hard to discern. The pulpit, of carved cherry, is suspended from a chain in the vaulted ceiling. More than once, as a child, Olympia imagined the links of the chain giving way and crashing the pulpit and its minister to the floor, these unkind fantasies more a result of childish restlessness than a comment upon the quality of the sermons. They sit quietly, none of them speaking, each engaged in separate reveries. Olympia thinks neither of her parents particularly devout as well, but who can ever truly know the extent of faith in another, she thinks, faith being among the most intimate and well guarded of possessions? Thus, it is not until the choir begins the processional that Olympia happens to glance to her right, past the straightbacked and uncurious form of her father, and sees who is sitting in the pew opposite theirs. Perhaps a small sound escapes her then and penetrates her father’s composure, for he glances quickly at her. But she is saved from a question by the need to rise for the hymn. It has been only a glance: a hat with a brim that all but hides a mass of silvery blond hair; a kid glove with a pearl button; a child’s small boot swinging back and forth; the strain in the fabric of a blue cotton smock as a shoulder is turned to the side; the cuff of a trouser leg, wet at its hem; and above that a perfect masculine profile with no beard or mustache. He must have seen her, she thinks at once. He must know that she is there. It must have been Catherine, then, who quite innocently allowed herself to be led by the usher to the seat opposite Olympia’s father, whom she doubtless plans to greet when the service is over.
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Olympia sits as still as wood, determined to give nothing away. The excessive stiffness of her posture must in some small measure betray her, however, for her father glances at her again and again. But he does not speak, church etiquette requiring his silence. If ever Olympia is conscious of another person in a room, aware only of another’s physical presence — though there are at least a hundred other people in the congregation — it is that morning, during that hour and a half when she might pray, might ask for guidance, might vow to banish Haskell from her thoughts. But though she makes an attempt to speak to God, she cannot, not for the white noise inside her head, nor for the unwillingness of her soul to relinquish what it has so recently gained. And though she yearns for a glimpse of the man, it is enough just to see, from the corner of her eye, the cloth that drapes his leg, the movement of his foot. Later, Olympia will believe that it was during that hour and a half, in that brown and ochre church, with all their families around them, with a congregation of witnesses, that she came to understand that she and Haskell would one day have a future. And that she would not put up any impediment to its unfolding.
•
•
•
Catherine invites them to lunch at the Highland, an invitation so genially proffered that even Olympia’s mother cannot hide her pleasure at the prospect of a diversion from the claustrophobic imprisonment of the weather. In fact, Mrs. Haskell exclaims, having almost certainly planned the wording of the invitation during the pastoral prayers, they needn’t return home at all; they can simply follow the Haskells to the hotel. This is all said and done in the center aisle of the church, while Olympia stands gazing fixedly at an uncharacteristically lurid depiction of the Last Supper. It would not be proper of Haskell to speak to her then; and he does not, nor she to him. But once, as they are moving to the nave, she catches his eye in 122
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the turn, and the gaze is so intimate, so knowing, that she colors immediately, a fact he cannot fail to notice. Olympia takes it as an omen that the sky has brightened during the hour and a half they have been inside, that the west wind, now palpable, has blown out nearly all of the clouds, which form a line one can watch as they make their way out to sea. The week of constant rain has left the world shimmering with droplets on every leaf, every blade of sea grass, every beach rose. On the way to the hotel, the sheen on the rocks is so ferocious, Olympia can hardly bear to look.
At the Highland, they pass through the glass-paned front doors to a cavernous lobby with a thirty-foot-long mahogany desk; and from there to the dining room that is so large, it might accommodate a thousand diners. Set as it is for Sunday lunch, with its starched linen, polished silver plate, and clean white crockery, the dining room seems, upon entering it, an ocean itself of welcome, so far removed from the gloomy interior of the church they left just minutes earlier. And she wonders why it is that the men who design places of worship do not consider more often the appeal of light and beauty in their architecture.
Catherine, in her role as hostess, seats Olympia with her mother to one side and Martha to the other, as though Olympia were neither woman nor girl, but rather inhabited some world in between. Their posture and gestures are formal, as befits a Sunday dinner, but the meal is infused with warmth and even gaiety; and it may be that the current which Olympia knows passes between her and Haskell, who sits at the head of the table, is drawn off in part by the others. Catherine invites Josiah to dine with them, but he excuses himself immediately on the grounds that he deeply desires a walk along the beach and with it the rare opportunity to take the fine air after so long a confinement. Were it not for Haskell’s presence, Olympia would have ached to join him.
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Olympia listens to the light banter that accompanies the settling in to a meal.
Catherine, you are looking well.
I am well now that the sun is out.
Has Josiah gone?
Mother, must I sit next to Randall?
And so you say you have not received your supplies yet?
Those are lovely pearls.
I thought it was rather a brilliant sermon.
And who was the soloist?
I understand they do a marvelous lamb here.
Do they?
Glancing at her from his end of the table, Haskell seems more an attractive stranger than someone with whom she has been intimate. And it strikes Olympia then as astonishing how willing we are to give our hearts — and indeed our souls — to someone we hardly know. Olympia notes that more than one person entering the dining room turns to look at Catherine and Haskell together, the dark and the fair, Catherine no longer hiding with her hat the loveliness of her face or the silvery gossamer of her hair. Idly, as Olympia watches them, Catherine reaches over to her husband and smooths a tendril of hair behind his ear, a wifely gesture that causes Olympia to have to look away. And she thinks that Haskell himself cannot be unaware of the irony of suffering such a caress in her presence. Around them is an agreeable clinking of silver against china, of ice rattling in goblets, of the low murmur of gentle and even animated discourse. Through the windows, which are sparkling with a vinegar wash, is the ever present surf — a steady rumble occasionally punctuated with the calling and cawing of seagulls. Her father monopolizes Haskell’s attention, which is, Olympia 124
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thinks, a relief to both Haskell and her. Catherine, buoyed by her own good spirits or perhaps simply the joy of the sunshine after so many days of gloom, keeps her mother in continuous conversation — no easy task, although even she seems infected with conviviality. Beside Olympia, there is Martha, and it is an effort to pull away from the adult debate and banter to pay attention to the girl’s odd and disjointed comments, each designed, it would appear, to elicit Olympia’s undivided attention. But from time to time, Martha does penetrate Olympia’s reveries, reminding her of how rudely she is ignoring her. So that after the pudding, when Martha asks her if she would like to go up with her to see her room, Olympia cannot refuse without drawing undue attention to herself. As they stand and excuse themselves, Martha pulls at her sleeve, eager to be gone from the table.
“The pudding was wretched,” Martha says as they move through the dining room and into the lobby. “I hate raspberries, don’t you?
They stick to your teeth and hurt when you bite down.”
“Yes, they do,” Olympia says distractedly.
“I went out this morning early, before Mother was awake, and collected all manner of pearlish seashells, which seem to have washed up on the beach with the bad weather. You must tell me what they are.”
“I may not know,” Olympia says.
They climb the stairs to the fourth floor, where the Haskells have rooms facing the ocean. Along the way, Olympia is struck by the pale blue walls of the hallways and their high white ceilings. Through open doors, she can see other rooms, and beyond them the ocean, which seems to lie suspended just outside the panes of glass. The effect of the blue and white is of the sky and fair-weather clouds, and she thinks the interior an inspired design. Martha takes her through a door and into a room that leads to others at either 125
side — bedrooms, Olympia imagines, for the room they have entered is clearly a sitting room. Wisely, the beautiful windows here have not been shrouded in heavy drapes, but rather are framed with muslin. The room is suffused with a delicate light through the gauze that might have a sedating influence upon the spirit, but Olympia’s senses are preternaturally alert; she is both curious and fearful of what she might find, in the way of a lover confronted with his beloved’s private mail. Even as Martha chats away and lays her prized seashells upon a table for inspection, Olympia’s eye travels to every surface of table and chair for some sign of Haskell and how he has lived in this space.
On a desk in a corner are several volumes and what appears to be an opened ledger filled with slanted cursive in indigo ink. A pair of spectacles lies next to the ledger, and these surprise her, since she has never seen Haskell with eyeglasses. On the pale mauve settee is a white crocheted throw curled into a soft mound, as though it recently sheltered someone’s feet. On the floor beside the settee is a book, Gleanings from the Sea by Joseph W. Smith, a silk ribbon defining its pages.
Martha queries her incessantly. Olympia does her best to identify the girl’s treasures, though there are several oddities she does not recognize — one shell a delicate opalescent, so fine it seems it might shatter to the touch.
“My best one is not here,” Martha complains. “Randall must have taken it. I know he did. Wait here. I know just where he will have hidden it.”
Martha strides out of the sitting room in the direction of one of the bedrooms. Olympia stands for a few moments, looking at the water. Many people are strolling along the beach and flirting with the surf, doubtless because of the good weather after such a dreary week. Waiting for Martha, Olympia finds herself drifting slowly to the opposite doorway. She does not know precisely what she is doing or 126
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why; it is only that she wants somehow to be closer to Haskell, to understand how he lives. Silently, she steps over the threshold into the second bedroom.
It is a masculine room — there is no mistaking that — and though Catherine Haskell has obviously set her trunk upon a stand, it seems she is more a visitor than an occupant. Olympia notes a tortoiseshell brush and comb upon the bureau, above which is a spotted mirror. The bed, though made, is slightly rumpled, as though a man recently sat on it to pull on his socks. On a marbletopped table by the windows is a porcelain chamber set and a man’s shaving things, a brush and mug and razor. Beside the table is a valet with a frock coat hung upon its wooden shoulders.
Emboldened by Martha’s continued absence, Olympia moves farther into the room until she can see the whole of it — specifically, a wide oak bureau, the surface of which is covered with photographs. From a distance, she can make out images only: a profile, a portion of a hat, a railing such as might be on a porch. Gliding closer still, she sees that these are the photographs that were taken on the front steps of her house on the day that Haskell had his camera. The pictures make a fan shape. At one of the edges, tucked behind the others, she notes a trouser leg. She slips the photograph away and recognizes the picture she took of Haskell on the day they had a picnic on the beach: a face, in repose; clothing loosened upon the limbs; rolled cuffs revealing legs covered with darkened hair and sand; a Franco family in the background. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she sees the white border of a further photograph, tucked in behind that of Haskell. With her index finger, she slides it free. It is, she discovers, her own photograph. But it is not the picture itself that is so arresting; rather, it is the blurry impression of fingerprints that have stripped away the emulsion that compels her attention. Martha steps into the room, her hand outstretched with her treasure. On her face is a look of confusion. Olympia drops the photo127
graph on top of the bureau. She assumes an attitude of slight boredom and indifference. “I was looking for a lavatory so that I might wash my hands,” she says.
“It is not in here,” Martha says, frowning.
“You have found your shell,” Olympia adds, moving toward her.
“It is not a shell,” the girl replies. She retracts her palm and studies Olympia intently. “It is sea glass.”
“May I look at it?” Olympia asks, returning Martha’s gaze as steadily as she bestows it.
“We should not be in here.”
“No, of course not. Let me take this to the windows in the sitting room so that I can see its color better.”
As they leave John Haskell’s bedroom and walk to the windows, and Martha reluctantly offers Olympia her small treasure — a shard of pale blue, the surface of the glass brushed cloudy by months or years of battering on the rocks and sand — Olympia realizes, too late, that the fact that she has disturbed the order of the photographs on the bureau will be immediately apparent to their owner.
•
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Olympia’s parents are standing with the Haskells in the lobby when they return. She does not look at Haskell, nor does she meet Catherine’s gaze. She is apprehensive lest Martha, for whatever private reasons of her own, blurt out her knowledge of Olympia’s having wandered into the Haskells’ bedroom. But Martha hangs back, still puzzled, Olympia thinks, by something she can sense but not quite understand.
Olympia’s father, who has drunk more wine with his meal than is perhaps prudent, invites Catherine and John Haskell to dine with them on Tuesday. Catherine thanks him warmly but says that she is returning with the children to York later that afternoon. She makes a remark about abandoning her husband, after which she takes her 128
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husband’s hand. Olympia happens to glance up at the moment of that touch; and then, because she cannot not help herself, looks further at Haskell’s face. And perhaps only Olympia can read the complex mix of anguish and remorse that resides there: anguish for his wife and for themselves, and remorse for deeds not yet committed but for which she already understands that they will one day have to answer.
•
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Olympia waits through the long afternoon and through the night until daybreak — that time of day when there is light but the sun has not yet risen, when all the world is still for a moment, seemingly gathering itself in silence. She washes and dresses quietly in her room and listens for any restless stirring from either her mother or her father, or from Josiah or Lisette, who might be up earlier than usual. Hoping to disturb no one, she slips from her room, moves through the house, and steps outside.
The tide is dead low, the shoreline a vast flat of sand and sea muck. Long strands of sea moss droop from the exposed rocks like walrus mustaches. There are clam diggers already on the beach, and farther out, a lone boat with sails of dirty ivory moves parallel to the shoreline. At first, Olympia merely walks purposefully, holding her boots in one hand, her skirt in the other. But then caution abandons her altogether, and she breaks into a run. All the hard decisions have been made the day before. The debate, what little there has been of it, is already quashed and settled.
In the most brazen act of her short life, she sits upon the hotel steps, puts her boots and stockings back on, and enters the lobby, where she is immediately confronted with the stark reality of the night clerk. He is reading the racing form and smoking a pipe. He looks up and is clearly startled to see a young woman in the lobby at this hour.
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“I have been sent to fetch Dr. Haskell,” Olympia says at once, inventing an emergency as she speaks. “He is needed at the clinic. Mrs. Rivard is having a difficult birth. . . .”
The clerk snaps to attention. “Oh, yes, miss,” he says at once, not eager for her to explain further. “I will go up myself. Just you wait right here.”
Olympia nods. Somewhat nervous now, she moves about the lobby, inspecting the horsehair sofas, the oil portraits on the walls, the carved pillars around which velvet banquettes have been placed for the guests. It seems she waits a long time for the clerk to return with Haskell. And as she does so, she begins to doubt the wisdom of her actions. What if Catherine and the children did not go yesterday afternoon as she said they would? What if Haskell is angry with Olympia for this ruse? In fact, he will be angry, will he not? Olympia hardly knows the man. He will undoubtedly think her foolish, if not altogether mad.
Suddenly panicked, she glances all about her. She did not give her name to the desk clerk. Haskell will guess who it is, but she does not actually have to be standing there, does she? She walks quickly to the front door. But as she nears its threshold, she hears the breathless announcement of the desk clerk.
“There she is, sir. Very good.”
Haskell, with his coat in one hand and his satchel in the other, sees her across the long expanse of the lobby. Olympia can move neither forward nor backward. With slow steps Haskell approaches her.
“It is Mrs. Rivard, then,” Haskell says quietly.
It is all Olympia can do to nod.
“Very well, let us speak further about this on the porch.”
Obediently, she passes through the door, onto the porch, and, following his lead, down the steps. Silently, they walk together to the 130
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back of the hotel. As they turn the corner, she stumbles on an exposed pipe, and in the sudden motion, he reaches for her arm.
“Olympia, look at me, please.”
She turns and raises her eyes to his.
“I wish with all my heart,” he says, “that it was I who could come to you. You understand that?”
She nods, for she believes him.
•
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•
He will go up first, he says, to unlock the room. After a suitable interval, she is to follow. The sun has risen, and through the windows in the hallways, the light is overbright, causing a continual blindness as Olympia passes from shadow to light to shadow. Not many are stirring in the hotel, although she does hear water running and, once, footsteps behind her briefly. Through the windows to the side, she can see wash on a line and a group of chambermaids sitting with mugs of tea on the back steps.
When she enters the room, Haskell is standing by the windows, his arms folded across his chest, his body a dark silhouette against the luminous gauze. She removes her hat and places it on a side table.
He tilts his head and considers her for a long moment, as though he might be going to paint her portrait, as though he were seeing planes and lines and curves rather than a face.
But there is expectation in his features, too. Definitely expectation.
“Olympia,” he says.
He unfolds his arms and walks toward her. He puts his hands to the back of her neck. He bends her head toward his chest, where she rests it gratefully, flooded with an enormous sense of relief. 131
“If I truly loved you,” he says, “I would not let you do this.”
“You do truly love me,” she says.
He trails his fingers up and down her spine. Tentatively, she circles him with her arms. She has never held a man before, never felt a man’s broad back or made her way along its muscles. She no longer has fear, but neither does she have the intense hunger she will know later. The sensation is, rather, a sort of sliding against and sinking into another, so that she seems more liquid than corporeal. She brings her hands to the front of his shirt and lays her palms against him.
He seems to shudder slightly. His body is thicker than she has imagined it, or perhaps it is only that his tangible physical presence, under her palms, is more substantial than she has remembered. And it seems to her then that everything around her is heightened, emboldened, made larger than in her dreams.
“Olympia, we cannot do this.”
She is taken aback, unprepared for discussion.
“It is already done,” she says.
“No, it is not. We can stop this. I can stop this.”
“You do not want this to stop,” she says, and she believes this is true. She hopes this is true.
“I am a married man. You are only fifteen.”
“And do these facts matter?” she asks.
“They must,” he says.
He takes a step back from her. Her hands drop from his body. She shakes her head. She feels a sudden panic that she will lose him to his doubts.
“It is not what we are doing,” she says. “It is what we are.”
He briefly closes his eyes.
“I thought you understood that,” she says quietly.
“We will not be forgiven.”
“By whom?” she asks sharply. “By God?”
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“By your father,” he says. “By Catherine.”
“No,” she says. “We will not be forgiven.”
An expression of surrender — or is it actually joy? — seems to wash over his features. She sees the strain of resistance leave his body.
“This will be very strange for you,” he says, trying to warn her.
“Then let it be strange,” she says. “I want it to be strange.”
He tries to unbutton the collar of her blouse but fumbles with the mother-of-pearl disks, which are difficult to undo. She stands away from him for a moment and unfastens the collar herself, impatient to reenter that liquid world that is only itself, not a prelude, nor an aftermath, nor a distraction, but rather an all-absorbing and enveloping universe. There is a change in tempo then, a quickening of his breath and perhaps of hers, too. They embrace awkwardly. She hits a corner of the settee with the small of her back and stiffens. Her clothing seems clumsy and excessively detailed. He sheds his jacket in one sinuous motion. Her blouse is undone, open to the collarbone.
“Let me lie down,” she says.
If nothing is ever taught, how is it that the body knows how to move and where to place itself ? It must be a kind of instinct — of course it is — a sense of physical practicality. Olympia has never had the act of love described, nor seen drawings, nor read any descriptions. Even the most ignorant of farmers’ children would have more knowledge than she.
She goes into the bedroom alone, into the room where Haskell and his wife have so recently lain together. The bed is unmade and rumpled, its occupant having left it in haste. There are no traces of Catherine now, nor of the photographs that were on the bureau. Olympia takes off her dress and her hose, her corset and petticoat. Wearing only her steps-ins and her vest, she lies down and covers herself.
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Haskell comes into the room and stands at the foot of the bed. “If you only knew how you looked to me,” he says.
She watches as he takes off his collar and unbuttons his shirt. For the first time in her life, Olympia sees a man undress. She is struck by the way Haskell tussles with his cuff links, the way he removes the collar of his shirt as if freeing himself from a yoke. She feels odd and cold beneath the sateen puff and frightened at the thought of a man’s nudity, which, in fact, she does not entirely see this day. Haskell stops short of removing his undergarments before he slides into the bed with her.
She rolls into the crook of his arm and rests her head there. She puts the palm of one hand against his vest. Uneasy and expectant, they are silent for a time. There is nothing impetuous in their actions, nothing at all. Though impetuosity will come soon enough, it is as though each movement toward the other must be taken with some forethought, some understanding of what it is they do. He shifts his position and dislodges her from his arm, so that she is now lying beneath him. “I saw you at the beach that day. You do not remember me.”
“I am not sure.”
“I think I loved you then. Yes, I am certain of this.”
“How is that possible?”
“I do not know,” he says. “But I am sure of it. And then when I saw you on the porch the night of the solstice, I experienced . . .”
He searches for the words. “As though I had known you. Will know you.”
“Yes,” she says, for she has felt it, too.
“You cannot know how precious this is,” he says. “You will think that this is how it always is. But it is not.”
He supports his weight on his forearms. He kisses her slowly on her neck. As if they have all the time in the world, which, in fact, they do not.
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“I envy you,” he says. “I envy your not having known anything else.”
She can feel him pressing into her, a weight lowering itself, even as his hands draw up her vest and push away the rest of her underclothing. For a moment, he fumbles with something he must have had in his hand when he entered the bed, something she cannot now identify, though later he will explain his caution to her. Does she feel pain? Not exactly. Not terrible pain. It is more a sense of greater weight, of a thrusting against her, though she does not resist. She wants to take him in.
“Am I hurting you?” he asks once.
“No,” she says, struggling for breath. “No.”
She is thrilled, tremulous with the event. The sun moves and makes a hot oblong of light on the topaz sateen puff, so oddly unmasculine, a spread similar to her mother’s. All around them is the soft cotton of overwashed sheets — almost silky, almost white —
and beyond these the austere mahogany of the carved furnishings: the wardrobe, the bed, the side tables. There are a man’s garments strewn upon a chair and on the floorcloth, which has been painted to resemble a rug. She looks up at the pattern on the sage tin ceiling. Only near the end, just at the end, does she feel a quickening within herself, the barest suggestion of pleasure, a foretaste of what she will one day have. Oddly, she understands this prophecy, even as she hears for the first time the low hush, the quick exhalation of breath, and knows that the event is over.
His weight, which has been great upon her, becomes even heavier. She thinks he does not understand that he will crush her. She shifts slightly beneath him, and he slides away. But as he does so, he pulls her with him, nestling her within the comma that his body makes, as one might cradle a child, as, indeed, he may have nestled his own children. She arranges herself to fit within his larger embrace. For a time, Olympia listens to his breathing as Haskell dozes in 135
and out of consciousness, a particular form of sleeping that she will come to treasure over time, to feel privileged to witness. He wakes with a start.
“Olympia.”
“I am here.”
“My God. How extraordinary.”
“Yes,” she says.
“I will not say that I am sorry.”
“No, we must not say that.”
She moves so that she can see his face.
“I feel different now,” she says.
“Do you? It is not just . . . ?”
“No.” As though she can never return to the girl she used to be. “I did not even know enough to wonder about this,” she says. “I did not have any idea. Not the slightest.”
“Are you disturbed . . . ?”
“No. I am not. It seems a wondrous thing. To become one. In this way.”
“It is a wonder with you,” he says. “It is with you.”
“I should go,” she says. “Before the maids come.”
And he seems sad that she has so quickly learned the art of deception. “Not yet,” he says. They lie together until they hear footsteps in the corridor. Reluctantly, Haskell stands up from the bed, trailing his hand along the length of her arm, as though he cannot physically bear to remove himself from her. He dresses more slowly than he might, all the while watching her on the bed. Only when they hear voices in the hallway — native accents, chambermaids — does he collect himself and finish dressing more quickly. He leaves the room for a time and returns with a cloth, which he gives to Olympia. She feels the sudden incongruity of Haskell with his clothes on while she lies naked. 136
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“You will need this,” he says, bending to kiss her. Discreetly, he walks into the sitting room and closes the door so that she can dress. When she climbs out of the bed, she sees, on her legs and on the sheets, what the cloth is for. It shocks her, all the blood. She did not know. But he did. Of course he did. He knows everything there is to know about these matters, does he not?
He reenters the room as she is fastening her boots. She stands and turns to him across the bed, and as she does so, she realizes that she has not covered the stain. He opens his mouth to speak, but she waves her hand to silence him. There is a decorum to the moment, an action called for, though she is not certain what it should be. She is not embarrassed, exactly, but she does not want to discuss it. No, surely, she does not want to discuss it. Reaching down, and without haste, she brings the topaz puff up to the pillows and covers the discoloration. And she is certain that they are both at that moment remembering the childbirth they once witnessed together. They walk together to the door. There is shame, she thinks, in his having to remain behind while she goes out. It is difficult to speak. She is glad that he does not feel it necessary to make plans to see each other again. She understands that it will happen of its own accord because now they cannot be apart.
He kisses her at the door. She leaves the room and steps into the corridor. All around her are the sounds of conversations, as though the rest of the world has come awake: the high-pitched voice of a woman, insistent, making points; the low snide chuckle of a man. The air has changed and has brought with it the smell of oranges. Behind her, she hears Haskell shut the door.
Her legs feel weak as she descends the stairs. She wonders what Haskell will do with the bloody flannel and the sheet. She catches sight of herself in a mirror in the hallway and is startled to see that her mouth is blurred and indistinct. Unwilling to go out the back 137
door like a thief, she decides to brave the lobby, but when she walks across it, she knows that a dozen pair of eyes inspect her. She guesses that the desk clerk wonders what she is doing there, when she was to have taken Dr. Haskell to see the Rivard woman. Hotel guests, who have come down for breakfast and are waiting for their companions by the door of the dining room, glance at her as she walks by. Servants eye her as they cross the lobby to and fro with folded linens in their arms. She makes her way out to the porch, where she stands for a moment by a wicker chair, recovering her strength, unwilling yet to test her legs on the steep set of stairs. The sun is well up, but the light is muted. In the distance, she can see fishermen in their lobster boats checking their buoys.
“Miss Biddeford?”
Startled, Olympia turns. There must be an expression of fright on her face, for Zachariah Cote puts out a hand to steady her.
“I did not mean to scare you,” he says.
The sight of the poet, in a gray silk waistcoat, the furtiveness of the man emphasized in the way his sudden smile appears to have nothing to do with his eyes, is like an apparition from a universe she has left behind and does not want to reenter.
“I see you in the strangest of places,” he says amiably.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asks, moving a step backward. He takes a step closer to her. “I am sure it was you, on the night of the Fourth, in a carriage by the side of the road? In the marshes?”
He cups an elbow in the palm of his hand and rests his chin on his knuckles. He studies her in an altogether impertinent manner, and she suddenly feels more naked than she did in the bedroom moments earlier. Indeed, his gaze is so frank and his smile so calculating that she wants to slap his face.
“No, it cannot possibly have been,” she says.
“Then I am mistaken,” he says, though he does not seem repentant. “But whyever are you here?” He makes a show of looking at his 138
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pocket watch. “It is so awfully early still. I am just about to go in to breakfast. I have had a walk. Will you join me?”
“No, I cannot,” she says.
He raises an eyebrow. She leaves him standing there. She discovers the stairs and heads in the direction of the sea, which is turning a dove gray as a result of a thickening cloud cover. 139
O lympia’s fathernormally takes his breakfast in solitude or, if there are others present, immersed in a book he holds beside his plate. But on the morning after Olympia’s visit to Haskell, her father looks up at her as she enters the breakfast room, and he continues to observe her as she takes her place and spreads her napkin over her lap. Though she wants to, Olympia cannot ask him to discontinue his stare, for that would be not only to acknowledge the unusual but also to speak to him in a manner that is not acceptable. Instead, she says good morning and pours herself a cup of tea. When she dares to glance up at him, she understands that his is not an angry stare, but rather one of some bewilderment, as though he needed to reassure himself that the girl before him is not, as it would appear, an imposter.
“Olympia, you look peaked,” her father says, halting a forkful of shirred egg in its progress to his mouth. “You are well? You worry me sometimes. I was particularly concerned when you did not come down for supper last night.”
“I am fine,” she says, eyeing the food before her. She is now ravenous, and the raspberry cake looks particularly appetizing. “You 140
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distress yourself too much. Really, Father, I am fine. If I were ill, I would say so.”
He takes a sip of tea.
“Well, you always have been a sensible girl,” he says. “That is a pretty dress.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“By the way, I am thinking of having a gala partially in honor of your sixteenth birthday.”
“A gala? Here?”
“Your mother and I are very proud of you, Olympia, and I have high hopes for your future.”
Though the word future strikes an uneasy and discordant note within her, she nods in her father’s direction. “Thank you,” she says.
“And also I have had a letter from the Reverend Edward Everett Hale. He says he may come to visit at that time. We shall have a dinner and dancing. I have in mind the tenth of August. About a hundred and twenty? Many of the summer people from Boston, of course, and Philbrick and Legny. Yes, that would be a treat. Which means I shall require you to finish Hale’s sermons before the event. You have, of course, read ‘Man Without a Country.’ ”
“Yes, Father.”
“And I shall invite the Haskells as well, since I know that John is most eager to meet Hale. Haskell’s cottage is to be finished by that date, or so I am to understand. John cannot much appreciate hotel food each meal, regardless of how well prepared it is.”
“The tenth is less than four weeks away,” Olympia says.
“Yes, not much time at all. Invitations will have to go out the day after tomorrow at the latest. You and I will have to put together a guest list later this afternoon. Your mother will help us with writing out the invitations, I am sure.”
“Yes, of course,” Olympia says.
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Silently, she regards her father’s plans for a gala with both dread and excitement. Dread, because it will be painful and awkward to be in public with Haskell and not be able to be with him. Excitement, because any opportunity to be with each other, even if in public, seems desirable.
“If there is someone of your own you would like to invite . . . ,”
her father offers. Once again, he examines her face, which she hopes gives nothing away.
“No, there is no one,” she says.
He nods. “I must write a note and send it. Yes, Josiah must take a note to Haskell, for I need to know whether the date is suitable for him and Catherine. I doubt John would ever forgive me if I had Hale here on an evening when he could not make it. John and the reverend share, I believe, an abnormally keen interest in motorcars.”
“Let me take it,” Olympia says impulsively. “I should welcome the walk.”
They both simultaneously turn to look through the windows at the weather, which is not particularly fine. But she knows her father will assent to her suggestion, since he is nearly as keen a believer in her physical education as he is in her intellectual one.
“Yes,” he says. “A walk is just the thing after a hearty breakfast. But leave the note at the desk. I should not like Haskell to think I am reduced to relying upon my daughter for my errands.”
“Of course,” she says, overbuttering her second piece of raspberry cake. Her appetite will not be appeased.
“A remarkable man, do you not think?” her father asks.
“I like him very much,” she answers.
“I meant Hale,” he says.
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A shallow cloud cover prevents shadows and causes the landscape to take on a flat aspect that is unrelieved by color. Perhaps no palette in 142
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nature, Olympia thinks as she walks along the beach, is as capable of transformation as the seashore. Just two days earlier, the water was a vivid navy, the beach roses lovely blots of pink. But today, that very same geography is bleached of color, the sea now gray and the roses dulled.
She walks with her father’s note in her pocket and her boots in her hand. She is imagining how pleased Haskell will be if she takes the note to his room. But then she has another thought: Might he not be offended, or engaged elsewhere? She does not know his schedule, nor yet know his routine.
There are few people on the hotel porch, one a woman knitting, who smiles at Olympia when she climbs the steps, and another a governess with a small child. Olympia pushes through the door to the lobby, takes the note out of her pocket, and hands it to the clerk behind the desk, who is, fortunately, a different clerk than was there the day before.
“Oh, Dr. Haskell is it then?” the clerk asks, reading the envelope.
“He is just breakfasting in the dining room, miss. . . . I will have it sent in straightaway.” He signals for the porter and gives the man the note.
“Thank you,” she says.
She walks out onto the porch and lingers by the railing. She fastens her eyes on the ocean, though she sees nothing. She hears Haskell’s footsteps behind her before he speaks.
“This is more than I could have hoped for,” he says quietly. He is dressed in a blue shirt with a gray linen waistcoat. His hair is wet and still bears its brush marks.
Olympia turns. Haskell takes an involuntary step toward her and puts a hand out, as if he would touch her, but then stops himself just in time. Although he does, Olympia thinks, give himself away in the very next moment by glancing over at the woman who is knitting.
“Olympia,” he says.
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She cannot call him by the name that she has heard his wife use so endearingly.
“You were about to leave,” she says, noting his coat and satchel.
“I have to be at the clinic.” He walks closer to her. “I have thought of nothing but you,” he says in a low voice only she can hear. “It is an agony to be so distracted. Yet it is an agony I wished for. That I cannot deny.”
There is much she wants to say to him, but she cannot think how to form the words.
He misunderstands her long silence.
“You are sick at heart,” he says. “It is why you have come.”
“No,” she says, feeling a flush of confusion upon her face. She finds it difficult to meet his eye, and suddenly she is acutely aware of her youth, her naïveté. But she also knows that if she allows herself to think of the damage done, she and he will both be lost, that what they have so recently begun will be tainted. “No,” she repeats. “I am not sick at heart. I have joy in my heart, and there is no room for anything more.”
He glances again in the direction of the knitting woman, who is now unraveling her progress. He takes Olympia’s elbow and guides her down the steps. She willingly follows his lead. They walk around to the back of the hotel and stop at a small enclosure. There is a bench, a bicycle leaning against it. They are alone, though still visible from the hotel. They sit on the bench. He trails his fingers along her skirt from her knee to her hip and lets them linger at the top of her thigh. She puts her hand over his. A chambermaid walks by the opening of the enclosure.
“This is madness,” he says, reluctantly removing his fingers. For a time they sit in silence. After a few moments, he remembers the note from her father.