Philbrick is silent. He adjusts his tie and looks down at his large stomach, as if assessing its comfort. Then he leans forward, emphasizing the seriousness of what he is about to say.
“I have always regarded you, Olympia Biddeford, as a responsible and gifted young woman. I confess I was shocked and saddened at the events which occurred four summers ago. It seemed so unlike you, I hardly knew what to think. I was distressed for your father, of course, who was my friend, and I was very concerned about Mrs. Haskell and the children. I am sorry to bring this up again, but these things must be said.”
“Yes.”
“Actually, I was not as shocked to hear of a child as I might have been. It is, sad to say, a not uncommon occurrence. Hence, the existence of the orphanage.”
“Yes.”
“But let me ask you this, Olympia. Are you prepared to take a young child, barely more than a baby, from his home? From the only mother he has ever known?”
She has thought about this question and has rehearsed her response. “She is not the mother,” Olympia says quickly. Philbrick shakes his head. “You have wronged one family already. I am sorry to say this harshly to you, but there it is. Are you quite certain that you wish to do this again? Surely you do not expect a foster mother to give up her child so easily?”
“He is not her child,” Olympia repeats.
“I doubt very much the woman in question will see it that way.”
“But what if the woman is not caring for the boy properly?” she asks. “What if she has many other children and thus little to go around? What if she is Franco? Indeed, she almost certainly is Franco to judge from the name of the boy. Do I want a child of mine to be raised in a culture he was not born to?”
“But what if the mother is a loving, caring woman?” Philbrick 284
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asks. “Does station or income or culture matter in such a case? Do you not think of what is best for the child?”
“I do,” Olympia cries. “I do. And I think I shall be best for the child. I have some means. I have no other responsibilities. I know that I can take good care of the boy. That I will be a good mother. I sincerely believe this.”
Olympia hears the note of near hysteria in her voice and tries to compose herself. “Mr. Philbrick, I cannot argue my case, for it is an argument written in the blood of my body. It is a debate more heartfelt than reasoned.”
Philbrick stands up then and walks to a window.
“Am I to be eternally punished by not even being allowed to know the whereabouts of my own child?” Olympia asks. “Shall you not at the very least tell me whether he is well cared for and what his situation is? Am I to be denied that simple knowledge for the rest of my life?”
Philbrick turns. “Let me think about these matters, Olympia. They are difficult.”
“I know.”
“I believe I can answer at least one question for you,” Philbrick says. “I cannot say for sure what name the child has now, but I do know he once had the name of Haskell.”
“My father gave the name Haskell to the boy?” Olympia asks.
“It was John who brought the child,” he says quietly. Olympia turns her head away and stares through the screen at an old lilac bush, now divested of its blooms. Philbrick leans toward her, but she waves him off.
“No, I did not know,” she says. “I thought only that my father, having heard about the orphanage and reasoning that it was far from Boston, had made arrangements.”
“And doubtless he did,” Philbrick says. “But he made them with Haskell.”
She shakes her head. It is inconceivable to her that her father 285
communicated with John Haskell during that terrible time before the birth. Inconceivable that Haskell would have given over his own child. But then, as she removes a handkerchief from her purse beside her, she remembers an argument she and Haskell once had in a carriage on the way back from the Rivard birth, and how he advocated life in an orphanage for a child over life with an unwed mother who was ill prepared for her lot.
“You never heard from John himself then?” Philbrick asks, again quietly.
“No.”
Philbrick clears his throat. “I daresay the child is thriving,” he says. “Although it has been some time since I inquired. Actually, I am ashamed to say that it has been years. This is news to me that the child was placed out.”
“How dare my father and Haskell conspire to take the child from me!” Olympia blurts out suddenly. In an instant, anger has replaced shock.
“Oh, my dear,” Philbrick says. “Of course, you know they did it for you. I am certain they thought it best for you.”
“They could not possibly know what was best for me,” Olympia says heatedly. She stands. “I must leave you now,” she says, only then remembering her manners and the lovely lunch. “Mr. Philbrick, thank you for a truly wonderful luncheon. And I do mean that sincerely. I envy you your house.”
“Do you indeed?”
She studies him for some sign of how he lives in this modest cottage, some clue to his secret life; but he remains, in his blue linen, only a kindly, if blunt, man of finance. “You will not write my father?” she asks.
“No,” he says, walking her to the door. “I can promise you that. This matter is between you and me.”
They move out onto the front lawn. In the lane, Ezra is waiting. 286
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“I will try to discover the whereabouts of the child,” Philbrick says, “and then determine for myself if he is being well cared for before we will discuss this again. I do not like to be the arbiter of your future, but you have placed me in this position.”
“I can think of nothing else to do.”
“I shall write to you,” he says. And with that he bends and kisses Olympia at the side of her mouth, which is nearly as astonishing to her as the news she has so recently had to digest. 287
A s she hasbeen doing each of the eleven afternoons since she visited Rufus Philbrick’s cottage, Olympia sits looking out to sea, an occupation that consumes nearly all of her time. Sometimes she brings a book with her onto the porch, even occasionally her mending, but these, she has come to understand, are mere accessories to the true task at hand, which is no task at all, but rather the necessity merely to be patient, to sit and look out over the water and to wait for a letter.
She watches a fisherman working from his boat not fifty feet off the rocks at the end of the lawn. A not unfamiliar sight, the boat bobs in the slight chop while the man hauls in wooden pots from the bottom of the ocean. The craft is a sloop, no, perhaps a schooner, laden with barrels of bait and catch — a charming sight, but testament only to a life more harsh than any Olympia has ever had to endure, even during those wretched weeks at the Hardy farm. Prior to meeting Ezra, Olympia had hardly ever given any thought to such men or to their families. She has passed by the rude fish shanties from which the lobstermen work dozens of times, seeing the shacks and the boats themselves and even the men aboard them as mere backdrop to the true theater of Fortune’s Rocks, the life of the priv288
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ileged summer colony at its leisure; when of course it was much the other way around, these farmers of the sea being the time-honored inheritors of the native beach and its environs. And it strikes her again, as it has so often lately, how easy it is not to see what is actually there. With a sudden and impatient gesture, Olympia puts down the book she has been pretending to read, a dull treatise on Italian landscape painting. All her thoughts circle in upon themselves, and no progress is ever made. It is this wretched idleness, this hideous state of suspension to which she has sentenced herself. Seven, eight, sometimes ten times a day, she walks to the back door with its letter chute and stares at the barren floor, willing an envelope to the painted surface. Although the post is often irregular, she has come to know well the postman’s habits, and she frequently finds herself at the place where the back walkway meets the street, engaging the slightly bewildered man in conversation, ever hopeful of an envelope with her name on it.
She stands up and begins to pace along the length of the porch. Why is it taking Rufus Philbrick so long to reply? Is it possible he has simply decided not to pursue the inquiry after all? But would he not then write to her of this decision? He has seemed always to be a man of his word, and if he said he would try to help her, then surely he must be doing so.
Patience, she counsels herself. But she is tired of being patient, weary of remaining passive.
She picks up her book and then immediately puts it down. Surely there must be something more lively to read than the nearly impenetrable prose of an uninspired Italian art critic. She makes her way through the house and into her father’s study, where some few volumes remain, damp and swollen and sadly misshapen though they are. She has scarcely ventured into this room since her return to Fortune’s Rocks, the presence of her father having permeated the very 289
walls and flooring of this small chamber, so that it seems that he is always here, sitting in the captain’s chair, eyeing her judgmentally. So with a sidelong movement (and avoiding for the moment the sight of the captain’s chair), she enters the study and searches the nearly barren shelves for a book that can at least physically be read and that might hold the promise of engagement. As she scans the titles, however, Clapp’s Marine Biology, A Short History of the Zulu Nation, and Nepos De Vita Excellentium Imperatorum, hope of success begins to dwindle. Disappointed, she turns to leave the study, meaning to go back to the porch, but her eye then lights upon a dark volume with gilt lettering, a book held together with string and lying facedown on the floor beside her father’s chair, almost as though he had dropped it. And when Olympia realizes its title, she marvels that the book has survived at all, that it was not flung across a room or burned in the grate, for it is the very same volume that once introduced her to the breadth and scope of John Haskell’s mind.
She picks up the book and sits in the only chair in the room, forgetting for the moment its spectral occupant. She unknots the string that binds the book, and immediately a number of letters slip from the pages onto her lap. She knows well the pen, that masculine hand, not her father’s, and the sight of Haskell’s writing makes her sit back in the chair. It is some time before she can open the letters themselves. Of course, she thinks, when she unfolds the first one; of course, Haskell would have corresponded with her father that summer.
10 June 1899
My dear Biddeford,
Thank you for your most welcome invitation to join you and your family at Fortune’s Rocks the weekend of June 21st. You are 290
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quite right in discerning that Catherine and the children will not much care for hotel life on their weekend visits, but neither do we wish to . . .
26 June 1899
Dear Biddeford,
How can I possibly describe to you how very delightful our visit with your family was during this past weekend? Such an excellent stay it was, apart from the tragedy of the shipwreck, and what a considerable wrench it was for us to have to leave you all! Catherine is in high spirits, feeling as she does that she has found a true com- panion and future confidante in Rosamund. I, of course, enjoyed my discussions with you and Philbrick immensely as always. And the children are in thrall to your astonishing daughter, Olympia. . . . 2 July 1899
My estimable Biddeford,
No, I confess I do not see the point of your argument regarding the merits of Zachariah Cote as a poet and should be indifferent to the publication of his shorter works in your much-admired Quarterly. I find he lacks the muscle to temper his verse, which is shot through with baroque description and feminine whimpers. But of course, this is why you are the editor of this excellent journal and I am only a man of science. . . .
11 July 1899
Dear Biddeford,
Thank you for your kind invitation to join you for dinner at the Rye Club on the 14th, but I am expecting that day a visit from the eminent physician Dwight Williston of Baltimore, and thus will be engaged. . . .
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18 July 1899
Dearest Rosamund and Phillip,
John and I accept with pleasure your kind invitation to a Gala evening on the Tenth of August, 1899, in honor of the Sixteenth birthday of your daughter, Olympia.
With Anticipation and Fond Regards,
Catherine Haskell
Olympia crumples the letters in her fists, and then, regretting this impulse, lays them flat against her lap. How extraordinary that all that summer there was this other bond between her father and John Haskell, a man her father much admired, an admiration that was much reciprocated. And how twice (no, thrice) betrayed her father must have felt — by his daughter, by his friend, and by this fraudulent correspondence with its attendant ironies. Had her father reread these letters in light of the discoveries the night of the gala? No, she thinks, he could not have, for certainly he would have destroyed them in a fury.
The book falls open at its flyleaf, and she reads the inscription there. For Phillip Biddeford and his engaging intellect, this humble of- fering. Yours sincerely, John Haskell.
She tucks the letters back into the book and closes its covers. Is Haskell once again working in a mill town? she wonders. Or can he have forfeited his training as a physician? Has he abandoned the writing as well? Or might she one day wander into a library and open a literary or political journal there and come across his name as the author of an essay published therein? She looks through the open door that gives onto the dining room, that elegant room with its double mirrors and buffets, its graceful proportions and its view leading down to the sea. She glances up at the chandelier, a crystal confection that resembles nothing so much as a necklace strung 292
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upon a woman’s throat. She fingers, at her own neck, the locket Haskell once gave her, a locket she has never been without, not during her time at the seminary, not during her exile in Boston, and not even during the difficult moments of her son’s (their son’s) birth. She closes her eyes and lets the memories wash over her, as they are wont to do, an incoming tide she has learned to let overtake her and then ebb away. And when it is over, she sets the book down upon the marble table beside her father’s chair, and stands. She will go mad if she stays in this house a moment longer.
•
•
•
The sand has a crust upon it that crumbles as she walks. Men and women, in heavy cotton bathing dresses, stand at the water’s edge, looking forlornly out to sea. Almost every summer Olympia can remember, there is a week in August when the water seems stagnant with dark clots of seaweed, slimy with jellyfish on its surface. No one bathes in the sea during this week for fear of the stings from these gelatinous creatures. Most know well the story of the hapless Tommy Yeaton, once the lone constable of Fortune’s Rocks, who went bathing for pleasure on a Saturday afternoon in August and had the misfortune to be assaulted by a school of jellyfish. The man perished on the following morning as a result of fever caused by the stings, and Olympia remembers her father telling her this story from time to time as they walked along the beach, doubtless wishing to deliver a cautionary tale.
But soon, she knows, the beach will be deserted. There is only a week remaining until the end of the season, when most of the summerfolk will leave Fortune’s Rocks. She finds that she is looking forward intensely to the fall, when the beach will be silent but for the gulls and the sea, and the cottages will be boarded up. The days will grow colder, and inland the leaves on the trees will change their color. She will get in a good supply of tinned fruit and vegetables 293
and dried cod, and coal as well for the stoves. It might be necessary to move downstairs for the winter, she thinks; indeed, she almost certainly will have to do that. She imagines herself alone in the front room, looking through the long floor-to-ceiling windows on a cold November day, gazing down the expanse of beach, thinking of each of the other cottages shuttered and waiting for its owner once again to return to bring it back to life; and that image causes such a sudden and unexpected pang of something like grief that she stops in her progress. It is, surprisingly, she recognizes at once, grief for her father; for she sees, more clearly than she ever has (and perhaps she has not, until now, been able to allow herself to see this before), how crushed her father must have been to have his daughter, his only child, fall so far from grace, to have all his hopes dashed beyond reclamation. Was Olympia not his experiment, his pride? She remembers the night of the dinner party with Haskell and Philbrick in attendance, and the manner in which her father spoke of his daughter’s superior learning. And it was true then, she thinks; she did have a singular education. But for what purpose?
Olympia crouches on the sand and wraps her arms around her legs, resting her forehead on her knees. Her hat slips backward off her head. She thinks of all the hours her father spent instructing her, all the days of lessons and debate. What will he be doing with those hours now?
“You all right, miss?” she hears a voice beside her ask. She looks up quickly into the face of a boy. He is frowning and seems slightly puzzled by her odd posture. She sits back on the sand and props herself up with her hands.
“Yes,” she says, reassuring him. “I am fine now.”
He stands politely, in his dry navy bathing costume, his hands folded neatly behind his back, a position that incongruously suggests the military. The boy has yellow curls and a splash of freckles below his eyes, which are a blue so pale as to resemble water in a glass. 294
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“You are sad,” he says.
“A bit.”
“Because of the jellyfish?”
She smiles. “No, not exactly.”
“What is your name?”
“Olympia.”
“Oh.”
“What is yours?”
“Edward. I am nine.”
She offers her hand, which he takes, as a boy trying to be a man will do.
“Are you on holiday?” the boy asks.
“No, I live here.”
“Oh, you are lucky.”
Olympia sits up and wraps her arms around her knees. “But I have not lived through a winter yet. They say the winters are difficult.”
“I live in Boston,” the boy volunteers, sitting down beside her.
“May I?”
“Yes, of course,” she says, smiling at his attention to manners.
“You are here with your brothers and sisters?”
“One sister, but she is only a baby,” he says, implying that a baby is of not much use.
Olympia glances around her and sees no concerned adult. “Will your mother and father not worry where you are?”
“I shouldn’t think so, miss. They are in France now. I am here with my governess.”
“And will she not worry about where you have got to?”
“When I left her, she was sleeping on the porch.” He gestures toward a large, weathered-shingled cottage with white trim beyond the seawall.
Olympia nods. “But you do know all about how you should not go into the water without an adult with you?”
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“Oh, yes. But I should not go in today anyway.”
“No.”
She watches the boy stretch out his legs, which are long and spindly and dry. He digs his heels into the sand.
“Are they terrible?” the boy asks suddenly. “The stings?”
“I have never been stung myself. But I have heard that they are.”
“And you die?”
“You can die from them. But not always. Sometimes you just have the fever. There once was a policeman who got stung. His name was Tommy Yeaton. He swam into a school of jellyfish and got stung dozens of times. He died the next day.”
The boy seems to consider this new fact.
“Would you like to have a footrace?” he asks her suddenly.
“A footrace?” she asks, laughing.
“Yes,” he says. “We could start here and . . .” He scans the length of the beach. “Do you see there? That striped umbrella in the distance?”
“Yes.”
“Shall we say the first one to the umbrella wins?”
“Well . . . ,” she says, hesitating. She cannot remember the last time she participated in a footrace. Surely not since she was a child herself. But the boy’s request is so earnest, she finds it hard to resist.
“Why not?” she says, beginning to unlace her boots. The boy jumps up. He draws a long line in the sand. “This will be our start,” he announces excitedly.
“All right,” she says. She discreetly pulls off her stockings and stuffs them into her boots.
The boy steps up to the start, leans forward, and puts a foot behind him in the traditional racing stance. Olympia leaves her boots and stockings with her hat, stands on the line beside the boy, and lifts the skirts of her yellow gingham just enough so that she will not trip.
“Are you ready, miss?”
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“Yes, I think I am.”
“When I count three then?”
The boy races flat out, his chin up, his hair flying behind him, as if he had been taught to run this way at school. Olympia, feeling slightly awkward at first, bends into the run and tries to keep pace with him. Almost immediately her hair comes loose from its pins and flaps heavily against her neck. The boy, both wiry and strong, looks over his shoulder, and, seeing her so close to him, picks up his pace. The balls of Olympia’s feet dig into the sand. Her muscles feel pleasantly strong after so many weeks of domestic work. She lifts her skirts higher so that she can stretch her legs. She feels at first mildly embarrassed to be cavorting so, but then this embarrassment turns to a distinct sense of exuberance until she is nearly giddy with the event. She raises her face to the sun. My goodness, she thinks, it has been so long since I have felt like this.
As they draw closer to the striped umbrella, Olympia glances over at the boy and can see that she might inadvertently win the race. The boy runs with grace and determination, but his young legs are tiring. Olympia pretends then to be winded and slows her pace slightly. With the prize in sight, the boy, finding new energy, sprints forward to the umbrella, startling its owners, who are sitting on canvas chairs beneath it, and gathering so much momentum that he pitches into the sand. When Olympia reaches him, he is sprawled with his legs splayed open, trying to get his breath. She bends, taking in air. The boy has sand on his forehead and on his upper lip.
“You won!” she says breathlessly with her hands on her knees. He is so winded that he cannot even smile. In a moment, however, a look of concern crosses his face. “You did not let me win, did you?” he asks.
She rights herself. “Of course not,” she says. “I would never do that.”
He brushes the sand from his face and limbs.
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“I would race you again tomorrow if you like,” he offers.
“That would be fine,” she says.
“And perhaps tomorrow you will win,” he adds shyly. She tries not to smile. “Then I shall look for you,” she says, “and tomorrow I will win.”
“Well,” the boy says. He stands up, but he seems reluctant to leave. “Do you have a boy?” he asks suddenly.
“Yes,” she says simply.
“What is his name?”
“Peter.”
“Would he like to race with us, do you think?”
“I think that perhaps he would, but actually I think we would beat him rather badly. He is only three years old.”
“Oh,” says the boy with evident disappointment.
“But I know he would like to meet you one day,” Olympia adds quickly. “He is very fond of nine-year-old boys just like yourself.”
“Is he?”
“Oh, yes.”
The statement produces an unexpected smile. He glances in the direction of the shingled cottage.
“You had better go back now,” Olympia says. “I shall look for you tomorrow,” she says.
He nods. He begins to walk slowly away, then turns and waves once quickly. She waves back to him. He breaks into a run then, and Olympia watches him sprint to the place where they met on the beach, as if he were already practicing for tomorrow’s event. She watches him until he is only a speck.
Yes, she thinks. I have a boy who is three. She glances at her feet, encrusted with sand. She touches her hair, which lies tangled in knots along her back. Inside her dress, she is perspiring from her exertion. She makes a feeble attempt to tie up her hair without pins, but its weight almost immediately pulls it loose. 298
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She does not want to go back to the cottage just yet, for to return to the house is to wait for a letter, and she does not want to reenter that numbing state of suspension. She sets off once again toward the far end of the beach. She will collect her shoes and socks and hat later.
She walks briskly, still buoyant with her earlier exercise, and it is only when she sees the Highland Hotel in the distance that she slows her steps. She has not ventured this far along the beach since she returned to Fortune’s Rocks. She takes in the porch, the guests sitting in the rockers, the windows in the upper stories, a certain window through which a gaily colored cloth snaps repeatedly, as if a woman inside were shaking out a bedspread. The hotel looks remarkably unchanged, although it seems there are more people about than she remembers from before. She recalls a sea of white linen, an opened ledger with slanted cursive. She can see muslin curtains at the windows, the way a shirt was flung upon an ochre floorcloth. She can hear a voice: If only you knew . . . She can almost feel the silky cotton of the overwashed sheets, can nearly make out the sage tin ceiling with its raised pattern. She can hear the echo of her own footsteps in the stairwell.
She notices then a gathering of people at the southern end of the porch. A late-season party, she deduces, and thinks: How fashionable the women look in their bishop’s sleeves. And then as she casually scans the guests, her eyes fall upon a familiar figure. She stiffens as she recognizes a certain self-conscious tilt of the head, a distinctive profile, a flash of white teeth. He has on a yellow-and-black checkered waistcoat, and he sports a new monocle. He has grown his whiskers in the muttonchops mode, a style Olympia has never found attractive. While she watches, Zachariah Cote throws his head back and laughs, and Olympia, even at a distance, can see that the gesture is exaggerated for his audience. She has heard that Cote is successful now, that his verse has become popular; he publishes in ladies’ mag299
azines and is admired by married women in particular. Olympia has several times seen his poems in print, and she has remained steadfast in her opinion that they are dreadful: dripping with sentiment and overlaced with a penchant for the morbid. And she is seized with a sudden bitterness that it should be Cote, of all of them, who has fared so well. That it is Cote — and not her father or her mother or John Haskell or Catherine Haskell or even she (no, especially not she) — who is welcome upon that porch on a late summer day in 1903.
And yet, was not Cote, of all of them, the only one who acted with true malice? Did not Cote actually invite Catherine Haskell to inspect the view in the telescope, knowing what she would find there?
And were not Olympia’s parents and Catherine Haskell utterly blameless but for an innocent, if intimate, association with scandal? Though Olympia would not absolve herself of any of the guilt associated with the catastrophe, her anger grows as she stands in the sand. What an ass, Catherine once said of the man. Olympia thought the observation fitting then, and does now. She wonders if Catherine Haskell herself ever had occasion to come inadvertently upon the poet’s verse, and if she did, how she managed the experience. And it is as she is having this thought that Cote, still dissembling for his audience, turns slightly and spots Olympia on the sand — in her yellow gingham, her feet bare, her hair in knots along her back. She resists the impulse to walk away and instead returns his gaze as steadily as he bestows it. She can see the man’s surprise, his momentary bewilderment, the quick questions as his mouth relaxes from its smile.
The woman beside Cote speaks, and he briefly acknowledges her; but he does not remove his eyes from Olympia. The woman glances in her direction, doubtless wondering who it is that has captured Zachariah Cote’s attention so thoroughly. But if the woman recognizes Olympia, she gives no sign. 300
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Olympia holds her ground as Cote extricates himself from the cluster of admirers and makes his way down the porch steps toward her. What extraordinary nerve, she thinks as she watches him walk closer.
He stops when he is three feet away. For a moment, neither of them speaks.
“Miss Biddeford,” he says finally. He stares at her a long time, as if assessing how this encounter might unfold. A small smile begins at one corner of his mouth, the smile of a chess player who has possibly seen his way to a checkmate. “What a delightful surprise,” he says.
“I should think there is nothing delightful about it,” Olympia responds evenly.
“Of course, I knew you were in residence,” Cote says, ignoring her rude reply. “It is hardly a secret.”
She is silent.
“But are you truly living alone?” he asks. “Astonishing to think of it.” His posture is eerily familiar to her: One arm is folded across his chest, his chin resting on the knuckles of his other hand.
“How I am living, I believe, is none of your business, Mr. Cote.”
He puts his hands to his heart. “Oh, I am wounded,” he says, mocking her.
She continues, “But I am glad for this opportunity to tell you that I consider you to be the most despicable of all men.”
She watches as he takes in her bare feet, her disheveled hair, the unfashionable yellow gingham.
“This is rather rich coming from you, do you not think? But then I must make allowances for your impertinence, as you are certainly the most unfortunate of all women.”
“No,” she says. “I think the most unfortunate of all women is the woman who will one day be your wife. Or have you been refused already?”
“My, my, but you have changed, Olympia Biddeford. You used to 301
be so sweet. And so accomplished. I did not know you for such a sharp tongue.”
“I would, on this occasion, wish my tongue as sharp as a razor,”
she says.
“You little witch.” Cote’s lips are suddenly bloodless. “How dare you address me in this manner? You who have committed the foulest of sins? You who have displayed your wanton nature for all to see?
Did you think I was blind to you and John Haskell? I knew from the moment I saw you by the side of the road in his embrace what you two were plotting. And I held my tongue. I held my tongue for weeks, Miss Biddeford. But you, you who were so much grander than I, could barely bring yourself to speak to me. Did you think that I would not notice your condescension? And did you think I would then stand idly by forever and watch you and Haskell carry on, with no thought of consequences? Did you think I could just let you ruin not only Catherine Haskell’s life but also those of your mother and father — whom I must say I can no longer admire? My God, Olympia Biddeford, you used to come to this hotel to fornicate with that man!”
He sputters this last and actually points at the hotel, causing several of the women on the porch to turn to see what the commotion is about. Olympia glances down at her hands and notices, for the first time, how red they are, how raw their knuckles. She looks up at Cote. She knows, as indeed she has known all along, that he will shortly return to the porch and will tell all of the assembled guests of this encounter; and she imagines, briefly, exactly how he will narrate the story of the scandal and her family’s disgrace. She can almost feel the exquisite pleasure he will take in retelling this familiar tale.
“What I did,” Olympia says to Cote, “I did for love. What you did, you did with the heart of a snake.”
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She turns then and walks away, slowly and with a steady gait, striving for as much dignity as a woman in bare feet and gingham can manage. Her temples are pounding, and she can barely breathe; she forces herself to move forward without looking back. When she is certain she is beyond his ken, the trembling in her body begins in earnest, so much so that she has to walk into the sea, even with its seaweed and the threat of jellyfish, so that the shock of the icy water upon her feet and shins and knees might bring her to her senses. But when she is in the water, she finds she cannot move, either one way or the other; and thus she remains in that position, the only bather on the beach, the focus of many curious stares, until her feet become so numb that she can no longer feel them beneath her skirts.
When she returns to the place where she has left her shoes and stockings and hat, the boy, Edward, is waiting for her. He jumps up when he sees her approaching.
“I was worried for you, miss. You have been such a long time in coming back.”
She reaches out to touch the top of his hair, which is thick with curls and silky.
*
*
*
1 September 1903
Dear Miss Biddeford,
Forgive my tardy reply to your request, but it took me some time to discover the answers to your queries, and more time to ponder the wisdom of passing this information on to you. Mother Marguerite, as you know from experience, is quite a formidable gate-keeper, and even as a member of the Board, I found it took nearly all of my powers of persuasion to convince her to allow me, so to speak, in the door.
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Now, Olympia, heed what I have to say here. I have written the facts you have requested on a separate piece of paper and have sealed it within the enclosed envelope. But I am going to urge you to have the courage to destroy the envelope before opening it. What is written here has the potential to cause both you and very many other persons considerable anguish.
If you have further need of me in this or in any other matter, please feel free to call upon me at any time.
I remain faithfully yours,
R. Philbrick
She lays the enclosed envelope on the table and studies it for some time, partially out of respect for Rufus Philbrick and his warning, and partially out of fear of what she might find. But within minutes, she knows that she has neither courage nor sound judgment in this matter and that her desire to discover her son’s last name and his circumstances outweighs all other considerations. With hungry eyes, she rips open the second envelope.
The boy is called Pierre Francis Haskell. He was baptized 20
May 1900 at Saint Andre’s Church. He was given into the care of Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc, both employees of the Ely Falls Mill, who reside at 137 Alfred Street in Ely Falls. He is healthy and has been so since birth.
Olympia shuts her eyes and brings the crumpled piece of paper to her breast. She has a son, she thinks calmly, and he is healthy. She has a son, and his name is Haskell.
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L ight-headed fromthe press of bodies, Olympia emerges from the trolley at the corner of Alfred and Washington Streets. The sky, too brilliant, casts a dull white light upon the streets, turning elms to nickel and women’s faces to porcelain. It is among the worst of days the New Hampshire seacoast has to offer: the hot, close air unrelieved by even a breath of east wind. Perhaps there will be a storm.
With Philbrick’s letter in her hand, she moves along the sidewalk, checking the wrought-iron numerals beside the doors. Alfred Street, she discovers, is both commercial and residential, the ground level taken over by shops, the upper stories of the buildings left for housing. Today, nearly all of the windows of those upper stories are open, with people leaning on sills, fanning themselves, hoping for an errant breeze. Olympia finds the numbers 135 and 139 and deduces that 137 must belong to the narrow building without a number sandwiched in between, an ochre brick edifice next to a dental office. She checks her piece of paper, not quite daring to believe she has found the correct address. Wishing to remain as anonymous as possible, however, she quickly puts the paper in her purse and casts about for a suitable place to linger.
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Two possibilities appear to her: a bench under an elm about twenty yards north of the house, and a bakery behind her that is advertising in its window tea cakes and jelly rolls. Deciding that the bakery might be stifling in the heat, Olympia makes her way instead to the bench.
Alfred Street is crowded with men and women trying to stand in the shade of the shop awnings, the men in collarless shirts, their braces hanging from their waists, and women in open-necked blouses with sleeves rolled. A vendor selling ice cream and tonic has attracted a considerable following of children, some of them barely dressed, who hover around the vendor, doubtless looking for a stray ice chip to suck on. Olympia, thirsty from her journey, is momentarily tempted to buy herself a cold drink, but the prospect of calling publicly to the vendor and thus drawing attention to herself seems unwise.
She wishes she had not worn her hat and that she had worn her white lawn, which is much the coolest dress she owns. As it is, she is awash in perspiration against the back of her thighs and inside her boots. She studies the signs in the windows across the street. teeth. artificial sets. $8.00, she reads. silver fillings. 50 cents. Near the dentist’s office is a drugstore promoting, in a hasty scrawl on a cardboard sign, cold sarsaparilla. All of the doors to the shops along the street have been thrown open, and Olympia can see many shop owners, identifiable by their white aprons, standing in the doorways, some smoking, some wiping sweat-stained necks with handkerchiefs.
Despite the extraordinary heat and the distractions of the street, however, Olympia keeps her eyes trained upon the small blue doorway that is poised over three stone steps nestled between the buildings of the druggist and the dentist. And as she does so, she becomes aware that a man in a suit of buff-and-brown check has taken 306
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a seat beside her. In the stagnant air, the smell of an unwashed body mixed with the cloying scent of cheap cologne, and this in turn overlaid with the smell of cigar smoke, nearly makes her gag. She moves an inch or two away. To Olympia’s dismay, the man leans even closer to her and asks her when the next trolley is. Without fully turning in his direction, she says that she is sorry, but she does not know.
“I, for one, am off to the beach,” he announces. “I cannot tolerate the heat of this foul city a minute longer.”
Olympia remains silent, unwilling to encourage the man in conversation.
“Let me make a proper introduction,” the man says. “Lyman Fogg, traveling purveyor of Boston Drug, ‘administered by the wife in coffee for the treatment of alcoholic excess in husbands.’ Our slogan, by the way.”
He extends his hand, and Olympia, who has just removed her gloves because of the heat, is forced to put her own in his. The man is absurdly overdressed in a woolen suit and top hat, which he wears at a rakish tilt and from which an oily black curl has fallen onto his forehead. With his free hand, he stabs his cigar into his mouth and takes a quick puff, the exhalation hanging as though suspended in the air in front of them. His coloring is remarkably florid, and Olympia observes that in addition to the nearly intolerable smell, the man is giving off heat as well.
“Powerful hot, is it not?” he asks. He takes off his hat, revealing a brim that is black with sweat. Olympia turns away from him to watch the doorway.
“You waiting on the trolley yourself?”
“No,” she says politely. “I am just resting.”
“Well, aren’t I the one in luck then?” the man says jovially. “Because I was just saying to myself, ‘Lyman, that is a fine-looking 307
bench with a fine-looking woman sitting upon it, so why don’t you just make yourself an introduction?’ ”
Even with her head turned slightly away, Olympia can smell alcohol on the man’s breath. He settles himself back against the bench and in doing so contrives to inch even closer to Olympia. She removes a perfumed handkerchief from her purse and puts it to her nose, hoping he will take the hint. But the man seems impervious to her distress.
“Now I would say,” he begins speculatively, and she can sense the man’s eyes upon her, “that you are not from these parts, which causes me to wonder and even to be so bold as to inquire what a fine young woman such as yourself is doing sitting on a bench on Alfred Street, which, though not without its charms, is not a fit location for a lady?”
From the corner of her eye, Olympia can see the blue door between the dentist’s office and the drugstore open. A woman in a mauve cotton dress leans against the door, apparently holding it open for someone else. She has her hand extended into the building.
“No,” the man beside her continues, “I can safely assume that you are from over to Fortune’s Rocks, where all those fancy cottages are. Am I correct in this assumption?”
Olympia watches the woman in the doorway bend slightly to speak to someone in the interior of the building.
“Miss?”
“What?” Olympia asks distractedly. “Oh. Yes. I am.”
“Well now,” the man beside her says, chuffed to have made such a good guess. “And may I ask your name?” he adds, perhaps emboldened by his success. The woman in the doorway touches her dark hair, which is arranged in a pompadour with fringe at the front. She smooths her 308
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hand over the bodice of her dress, three tucks extending from the yoke to the waist. She might be thirty, Olympia guesses. Over the skirt of her dress, the woman has on a black apron. She steps back into the building, letting the door swing almost shut. She emerges with a boy.
“Or perhaps I am being overforward,” the man beside Olympia is saying.
The mother and the boy, hand in hand, stand at the top of the cement steps, as though assessing the scene before them. Olympia can see clearly the child’s features.
Walnut hair. Hazel eyes. The resemblance is unmistakable. Olympia presses her knuckles to her mouth.
The man beside her looks over sharply. “Are you ill, miss?” he asks.
The want is instinctive and overwhelming. Later, she will recognize this strange sensation within her as a double want: for the boy as well as for the father before him.
She watches the woman and child descend the stone steps. The boy has on faded blue short pants with a matching jacket. He turns and begins to walk with his mother away from Olympia. She can see only the back of the child now, the neatly cut hair, the scuffed brown leather shoes, the short plump legs. Olympia stands.
“Oh now, miss,” the man beside her says, standing as well. “There is no need for this. I hope I have not offended you. Perhaps I am being too forward? If so, please forgive a weary salesman in this heat.”
Olympia is losing sight of the woman and the boy in the crowd on the sidewalk. Panicky, she takes a step forward.
“May I start again by suggesting that we dip into that drugstore over there, where I am bound to tell you I am rather well known, and have ourselves two of those cold sarsaparillas they are advertis309
ing in the window, which, I may assure you, will be given to us free of charge?”
Olympia shakes her head distractedly. “Leave me,” she says impatiently, although it is she who walks away.
•
•
•
She crosses the street and moves briskly, searching for a mauve dress in the crowd. She is jostled rudely, and perhaps she jostles rudely in return. She picks up her pace, nearly running now, until she sees, at the next corner, the figures of a woman and a boy entering a shop. The sign over the door reads confectionery.
Olympia moves closer to the store and stands as near to the shop door as she dares. She pretends to be examining the contents of her purse, as though searching for something she has misplaced. She puts a frown of concentration on her face.
This is madness, she thinks to herself, though she does not alter her posture. I do not even know if this is the correct woman and child.
And then, in the next instant, she thinks, Of course I do. Around her, there are men and boys, their braces loose, their shirts collarless. She can hear them call to one another, but she cannot make out their words. When the woman and the child emerge from the shop doorway, the boy has in his hand an ice-cream cone that is dripping all around its rim and onto his tiny fist. Perhaps alarmed by this food that moves, the boy seems about to cry. The woman bends and takes the cone from him and licks all around its edge, catching the drips. She returns it to the boy, who seems much relieved.
Olympia is standing so close to the pair that she could reach out and touch the boy. The resemblance is astonishingly keen. She might be looking at the face of John Haskell as a child. The woman in mauve cotton, perhaps aware of Olympia’s odd 310
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stare, takes the boy’s hand and leads him farther along the sidewalk. Olympia remains frozen with her purse still open, barely able to breathe. In a moment, the woman bends down and picks up the boy and kisses him on the cheek. Olympia can just make out the boy’s small brown shoes, well worn and cracked.
A hard knuckle of jealousy sends a jolt through her body, causing Olympia to drop her purse. Coins and hair combs clatter to the surface of the sidewalk. Overcome by a momentary paralysis, she is unable to bend to collect her things. She smells cigar smoke and is dimly aware of the man in buff-and-brown check crouching to retrieve them for her.
“Now I am convinced you are not well,” the man is saying beside her. She feels a hand at her elbow.
“I followed you,” the man is saying. “I hope you will not mind, because I could see that something was not right with you.”
He leads her into the darkened shop. He tells her to sit on a metal chair. She does so, slipping heavily onto its hard surface. Between them there is a round glass table.
“And then I could not help but see you searching through your purse. You must have had a most terrible fright, for your face went dead white.” He holds up a mug from a vacant table. “As white as this cup.”
When she looks at the man, she sees unkempt eyebrows, shrewd green eyes, a plump pink mouth with a shred of tobacco on its lower lip; but, try as she might, she cannot form a coherent face. A field of bright white spots obscures the vision in her right eye. The man leans toward her, and she can smell anew the alcohol on his stale breath. “Have you misplaced something very valuable to you?” he asks her.
The field of white spots expands, nearly blotting out the figure before her. Olympia begins to laugh, and she can see that her laugh astonishes the man. 311
And she thinks, as she feels herself falling — falling ever so slowly, a feather wafting lazily in the heavy air — Yes, yes, indeed. I have mis- placed something of great value.
•
•
•
The sky is heavy and foul with a strange yellow light. The air is still, too still, worse than yesterday, sulfurous. When she reaches the bay, she takes off her boots and wades into the black muck that twice daily reveals itself at low tide. Her feet are long and white and smooth, quite the most tender part of her body, and to step inadvertently upon a clamshell or a large sea-pebble is painful. She thinks how odd it is that one should be so strong and muscular elsewhere but have the roots of the body so vulnerable.
Seaweed of many varying colors and textures has strewn itself against the tide line, along with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish that have beached themselves and lie transparent on the top of the muck. She has to watch closely where she treads to avoid their unpleasant gelatinous texture as well as their sting. The seaweed at the high-tide line resembles, in its dried state, nothing so much as shredded newsprint. She has heard of people who make soups and stews of this sea vegetation, but she is quite sure she herself would not care for it. With the clam rake that Ezra has lent her, she harvests the small mollusks that hide in the muck. In this way she occupies herself for the better part of an hour, filling her bucket nearly to the top with littlenecks. The skirts of her yellow gingham have more than once been sucked into the mud and dragged out again, so that her feet and the hem of her dress look as though they have been coated in molasses. She walks to a large rock that enters the sea and sits on it, rinsing her feet and the bottom of her dress. When her feet are dry, she puts on her stockings and boots.
Yesterday, when she collapsed inside the confectionery at Ely 312
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Falls, Lyman Fogg caught her just before she fell from the stool. Almost immediately, she regained consciousness with a ferocious headache. The man fed her sips of water as she forced herself to gather her strength despite the pain in her head. She allowed him to walk her to the trolley and even to accompany her to Ely, but when they reached the station she thanked him, bade him a firm farewell, and, in spite of his many protests, took a carriage alone to her house. Once inside, she went upstairs and fell upon her bed. She drifted into a deep sleep and did not wake until nearly noon today. She will not go back to Ely Falls, she tells herself. She has seen the boy, and that is enough. She will write Rufus Philbrick and thank him for helping her, and he will be pleased to hear that she has now put the matter to rest.
It is an effort to move in the thickish air, but Olympia collects her pail of littlenecks and makes her way back to the cottage. It is as though the sea and the shoreline and the houses beyond are covered with a dull yellow film and cannot breathe. She will steam the clams for her meal, she decides. She has oyster crackers to accompany them and some milk, and she will make a stew of the broth. She washes the clams repeatedly, as Ezra has taught her to do. She finds a large pot and puts water on the stove to boil. Immediately, the kitchen becomes stifling. She throws open all of the windows, and when that does not help much, she walks into the front room and opens the windows there.
She gazes down at the beach, nearly deserted today, a result partially of the unpleasantness of the air and partially of the fact that so many families have already left and gone back to the city. A sharp crack of thunder startles her, and for a moment she thinks that something heavy and sharp has fallen onto the floor above. And then the sky lowers itself, like night coming on too early. The wind starts, beating against the cottage. The frames of the windows shudder from the irregular gusts of wind.
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The temperature drops precipitously. Chilled, Olympia finds a shawl on a chair and wraps herself in the crocheted wool. The sky, despite its menace, is oddly beautiful; and she thinks about how a disaster, though horrific in its particulars, may create a scene of great beauty. A blazing hotel, for example, may elicit fear and sometimes bravery from the witnesses of this catastrophe, but will it not also move these same observers with its very majesty?
The shipwreck was an event she remembers for its paradoxical beauty in the midst of horror and fear. She recalls the moment John Haskell passed by her with the child. What was she thinking then?
That though she did not want to be noticed, she could not mind being seen by John Haskell? That she could not then have willingly removed herself from that cool white sand, into which her bare feet had burrowed, save for the most dire threat from her father? That though she sought to attend to the rescue operation only, she could not keep her eyes from the form of John Haskell, a form that she and all around her could see only too well, since the sea had already soaked through the man’s dressing gown and the nightshirt he wore underneath?
And what precisely was it that passed between her and Haskell on the beach for those few seconds near daybreak? It cannot have been love — no, of course it cannot — nor even infatuation, which needs, she imagines, rather more experience with each other than they had then, so early in the summer. No, it was instead a kind of recognition, she believes, as though each of them knew the other not only from the day before but also from some future date. The rain assaults the house from a nearly horizontal angle, sneaking in under the eaves of the porch. A gust of wind knocks over a wicker chair on the porch, and too late she remembers that there are sheets on the line.
But it was love, she tells herself. Of course it was. Even then. Even 314
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that night. For had not she and Haskell already entered into that dangerous state of thrall which may be called love or obsession or romance or simply delusion, depending upon one’s proximity to the event and one’s ability to believe in the notion that two souls which stir in the universe may be destined to meet and may be meant only for each other?
Already the sea is clawing at the sand, eroding the beach and creating great gullies. The erosion will endanger the cottages, she knows. Leaning against a windowpane, she can feel the wind vibrating the glass. Did she not understand the consequences of allowing herself to fall in love with John Haskell? Can she ever have been that heedless?
Or did she imagine herself charmed, untouchable, merely skimming the surface of disastrous and lethal matters, as a gull will fly above the ocean, alighting neither here nor there, but always teasing the waves?
She glances up, draws the shawl more tightly around her. Where will the boy be now? she wonders. And where do he and the woman go on their walks? Why did the woman have on a black apron?
Olympia recalls the boy’s worn brown leather shoes, nearly heartbreaking in their shabbiness. Hand-me-downs surely, for the boy cannot have used them so himself.
Great love comes once and one time only, Olympia understands now. For by definition, there cannot be two such occurrences: The one great love remains in the memory and on the tongue and in the eyes of the once beloved and cannot ever be forgotten. She puts her head in her hands.
Why must love be so punishing?
•
•
•
A monstrous wind catches the house, and she can feel the wood shudder in its embrace. With awe, she watches as the wind beats 315
along the beach, blowing the tips off the breakers, heaving stray brush and driftwood and seaweed high into the air. A gull remains motionless over the water, unable to make headway against the wind, and then is blown backward by a gust. Farther down the shore, a large piece of tin is lifted off a fishing shack. The wicker chairs slide along the painted porch floor and hit the railing with a series of dull thuds. Upstairs, Olympia can hear glass breaking.
The hurricane pummels the coastline all the way up to Bar Harbor. Through the night, Olympia huddles in the kitchen, listening to the crack of wood, the heaving of the sea, and the high whine of the wind. Near to the side of the house, a pine tree falls, missing the cottage by inches, and, once or twice, when the wind is particularly fierce, Olympia climbs under the kitchen table for safety. She thinks of Ezra and hopes that he made it in to shore before the storm. No one out in a boat would survive the seas this night. From time to time, Olympia walks to the window at the north side of the house and looks out to the lifesaving cottage. Its beacon is lit, and she can hear, intermittently, like Morse code being sounded from a great instrument, the foghorn from Granite Point. The wind strains the beams of her own cottage, and Olympia is sometimes startled by the creaking of the wood, as if the house were a ship foundering at sea.
By daybreak, parts of the beach have been eroded nearly to the seawall. Houses have been lifted off their foundations and porches have been sheared clean from their pilings. Olympia’s own front lawn is littered with debris — leaves and branches and, ominously, a man’s oiled jacket. All along the crescent of Fortune’s Rocks, cottages have lost their windows and their roofs. Where the beach has not been gullied out, it is covered with metal caskets and shingles and glass and broken wood. Only the sea, as though victorious in some 316
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unnamed struggle, remains undaunted, its enormous breakers rolling in a stately manner all along the newly drafted shoreline. Tentatively, people begin to make their way to the beach to survey the damage. Olympia throws a shawl over her shoulders and steps out onto the porch. The air is clean and sharp, as though freshly laundered. She walks to the seawall and looks back at her own cottage, where she sees that a chimney pot has fallen over. But though she studies her house, her thoughts lie elsewhere, and she wonders, as indeed she will wonder a thousand times (and it is as if she understands already that because she will never be free of this particular worry, she must claim it for her own or go mad with the distance, with the powerlessness of the distance) what has happened to the woman and the boy. Doubtless the storm will have had less impact inland, but can those boardinghouses withstand the terrifically high winds of a hurricane? And what of the electrical lines? Will there be fresh water? And is the boy, whose true name Olympia cannot yet utter, safe?
On the tenth day after the storm, Olympia boards the first trolley car out of Ely Station for what becomes an arduous journey of an hour and a half to Ely Falls, three times the length of a normal trip to the city. All along the route, Olympia and her fellow passengers are mildly dazed as they survey the wreckage of the storm: telephone and power lines still down, carriages overturned, and rooftops caved in by fallen pines whose shallow roots could not hold them upright in the high winds.
In the wake of the storm, the weather has grown cooler. For the first time since returning to Fortune’s Rocks, Olympia has taken the wool suits out of her trunks, aired them out on the porch, and hung them in the shallow closets of several bedrooms. For her trip into Ely Falls, she picked out this morning her best day suit, a jacket and skirt of dove wool challis that she likes to wear with a high-necked white 317
blouse and velvet tie. Her hat, a plum toque, sits at an angle on her chignon. Already she is aware, glancing at her fellow travelers on the trolley, that fashions have changed in the four years she has been away. Skirts are longer, sleeves are fuller, and altogether the clothing seems less fussy.
With several other travelers, Olympia alights at the corner of Alfred and Washington Streets, where men stand on scaffolds repairing a roof and reglazing windows. She has read, in the Ely Falls Sentinel, that seventeen millworkers perished when a spinnery collapsed during the hurricane, the owner of the mill unwilling to cancel the night shift despite repeated pleas from the workers to suspend operations. Olympia read the list of the dead like a wife examining a list of war casualties, her eyes skimming quickly over names, looking only for a single surname. Unlike the mood of the city on Olympia’s previous visit — which was, though oppressive with heat, oddly playful — today the city’s inhabitants seem solemn, even somber. Olympia walks along Alfred Street, noting the boarded-up windows that still remain in many of the shops.
Midway up the street, Olympia is startled by a signal whistle, much like that of an oncoming train. Within minutes, the street is thick with men and women moving quickly toward the doorways of the boardinghouses. Olympia glances up at the clock tower at the corner of Washington and Alfred: five minutes past noon. Clearly this must be a dinner break.
She finds the doorway of number 137 and once again sits on the bench across the street. Several women enter the blue doorway, but not the woman Olympia is searching for. She ponders the wisdom of accosting someone on the steps of that building and inquiring about the Bolduc family, but as there is not much common sense to be had in this proposition, she abandons the idea. She sees almost immediately that she will not be able to remain long on the bench; because 318
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the weather has grown colder, there are fewer people lingering in the streets, and thus she will be more conspicuous than she was on her last visit.
At precisely ten minutes to one, dozens of persons emerge from the boardinghouse entryway, the women pulling on gloves, checking purses, holding hats as they move briskly along the sidewalk back to work. By one o’clock, the street is silent.
Chilled beneath her dove challis, Olympia walks to the bakery and steps inside. A serving girl in a black dress with a blue apron glances up at Olympia with surprise, as though the bakery were closed.
“May I have a cup of tea?” Olympia asks.
“Dinners are gone now,” the serving girl says, “but I suppose I can always make up a cup of tea.”
“Thank you,” Olympia says. She takes a seat near a window and arranges for herself an excellent view of number 137. She slips off her gloves and puts them in the pocket of her suit. Emboldened by the thought that she might well leave Ely Falls without a scrap of further information about the boy, she asks the waitress when she returns with the tea if she knows of a family named Bolduc.
“I should say so,” the girl says in an accent that sounds Irish.
“Dozens of Bolducs hereabouts. Which one would you be wanting?”
“Albertine?” Olympia asks, her breath catching in her throat.
“Telesphore?”
“You’re in luck then,” says the waitress, wiping her hands on her apron. “They live right across the street.”
Olympia smiles at her apparent fortune.
“But which are you wanting?” the girl asks. “You won’t find Albertine at home today until after four o’clock when the first shift is ended. But if it’s Telesphore you’re wanting, he’ll be home until four. There,” the girl says, pointing at the blue door. “That one 319
there is where they live. You don’t look a relative, so you must be a friend.”
“A friend,” says Olympia.
“I expect you know the boy.”
“Yes,” says Olympia.
“Sweet little one, isn’t he?”
Olympia nods.
“I do not know when husband and wife see each other,” the girl says. “What with the two shifts and all. One goes in, the other comes out. Ships passing in the night. I can probably get you a bowl of oyster stew if you’re hungry.”
Olympia, not wishing to reject anything the young woman has to offer, answers that stew would be most welcome.
The chowder is watery, but Olympia forces herself to eat it. She sips it slowly, stalling for time, not wanting to leave her perfect vantage point. The waitress brings her oyster crackers and scones and sweet pastries and then excuses herself, saying she’ll be in the back room, having her own dinner.
For a time, Olympia sits at the table, which is now warmed by the afternoon sun. She has had so much to eat that she almost dozes. But at 3:50 by the clock tower, she comes alert when she sees Albertine, dressed today in a rather severe black cotton dress with a black apron, running up the stone steps into the blue doorway. Five minutes later, a man in a blue workshirt and black cloth cap (his head is bent, and Olympia cannot quite catch his face) comes out of the door and walks down the steps and onto the sidewalk. Confused now about what she should do, for she has no real intention of knocking on the blue door, Olympia sits a bit longer. And in a short time, she is rewarded for her patience. At twenty minutes past four, Albertine Bolduc once again opens the blue door. Olympia braces herself for the shock she knows will come, but when the boy emerges, standing on the top step and blinking in the sunshine, 320
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Olympia understands that no preparation will ever be adequate for the blow that hits her with such force that she has to press her knuckles to her mouth.
The boy’s thick walnut hair appears to have been recently cut, using a bowl for a pattern. It hangs fetchingly just over his eyebrows, enhancing the luminous hazel of his eyes. His eyes dominate his face, its tiny nose, its bow mouth, and its plump double chin. He reaches instinctively for his mother’s hand, and together they descend the three stone steps. He has on longer pants today and a gray handknit sweater with a matching woolen cap. Only the shoes, the cracked brown leather shoes with the ties, are the same as before.
Olympia places a number of coins on the table and leaves the shop unobserved. She follows the pair at a discreet distance. She is aware of a particular form of madness that has overtaken her and that is making her behave in ways she would not have believed were possible. She feels uncomfortably like a spy, which, of course, she is. But even understanding the absurdity of her actions, she cannot turn her eyes away, nor can she let the woman and child disappear from sight. Remaining at least a block behind them, Olympia follows the pair down to the corner of Alfred and Washington, and then along Washington to Pembroke, which is lined with boardinghouses, identical brick buildings with small windows and unpainted picket fences bordering scruffy front lawns. Albertine and the boy enter one of these boardinghouses, the boy running up the front steps and pushing open the door as though he has done this a hundred times. Olympia, unable to follow the woman and boy onto Pembroke for fear of being caught out, stands at the corner and watches this small tableau. She wants to sit down and wait for the boy to come out again, for to leave is to let the boy go, and it is some minutes before she can bear to turn away and head back to the trolley stop. It is 321
nearly five, and she must, she knows, catch the last car to Ely or be stranded in Ely Falls.
For a time, she walks blindly, unable to stop thinking about the boy. Will this be all she has of him? Ever? These stolen glimpses? For there can never be any interaction with Albertine, Olympia understands now. Never. Nor can Olympia continue these clandestine sightings without risking discovery. And that she is not prepared to do.
She cannot go on like this. She cannot. She must put this obsession away, as she once vowed to do. She must forget the boy and move on with her life. She must find a position, perhaps as a governess or a teacher. Possibly she could ask Rufus Philbrick for assistance in this matter. She imagines the man would be considerably more enthusiastic about helping Olympia find employment than he was about aiding her in her search for her son.
Consumed with these thoughts, Olympia walks without noticing where she is going, so that after a time, when she looks up, she discovers that although she still remains in the business district of Ely Falls, she does not know where she is. When she glances around, she notes the Bank of New Hampshire and the office of the Ely Falls Sentinel. There is a funeral parlor and an insurance company that seems to occupy all of one massive stone office building. There are various other offices with signs out front or in the windows or, more discreetly, on brass plates beside doorbells. She notices, across the street, on the ground level, a black sign over a door. A black sign with names carved in gold. tucker & tucker. attorneys at law. She turns away from the sign and stares through the glass window of the bank into the lobby. The bank is closed, and she wonders what time it is.
The offices will be shut, too, she tells herself. Even if she were to knock on the door, there would be no answer. And if no one is there, 322
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this will be a sign, a message, will it not? She will then be able to walk away from this matter. She will go back to Fortune’s Rocks and stay there and not return to Ely Falls. Yes, this will be a sign. A sign she will not be able to ignore.
And thus armed with these fragile delusions, Olympia walks across Dover Street, Ely Falls, on September 14, 1903, and enters the law offices of Tucker & Tucker, father and son, attorneys at law, to announce that she intends to reclaim her boy, Pierre Francis Haskell, and that they must help her do it.
323
• IV•
The Writ
A nd you sayyou met him at your father’s house,” Payson Tucker is saying.
On his lap, the young lawyer has a marbled notebook not unlike the ones in which Olympia used to practice cursive when she was younger. Tucker makes notations from time to time, dipping his pen into a striped glass inkwell behind him on his desk. The room is small — polished wood and brown leather and brass studs — and reminds Olympia of her father’s library in Boston. And perhaps it is that association, or Tucker’s serious and attentive manner, that lends his questions authority.
“We met on the twenty-first of June in 1899 at my father’s cottage in Fortune’s Rocks,” Olympia says. “I remember particularly because it was the day of the summer solstice.”
“And you were how old?”
“Fifteen.” She watches Tucker carefully for a reaction, but his face is impassive.
“And how old was Mr. Haskell?”
“He was forty-one at the time.”
“And you are how old now?”
“Twenty.”
327
Tucker adjusts his gold-rimmed spectacles and studies her for a moment. “And John Haskell was at your home visiting your father?”
he adds.
“Yes,” she says. “He was there with his wife and children.”
“I see,” Tucker says noncommittally, and Olympia wonders what exactly he does see. She hazards a guess as to his age — twenty-five, twenty-six? — but he seems a man wishing to appear older, the already receding hairline helping with this effort. He is a slender man with mustaches, pale skin, and black silky hair that occasionally falls, when he bends his head, forward onto his cheek.
“Can you give me their names?” he asks.
“Catherine,” she says. “That is — was — his wife. Actually, I do not know if they are formally divorced. I have heard only that she is living without him, and I do not believe they have been together since August of 1899. The children’s names are Martha, Clementine, Randall, and May.”
Just moments earlier, when Olympia entered the offices of Tucker
& Tucker, she interrupted Payson Tucker in the act of gathering together his case and his hat to leave for the day. She introduced herself, stammering a bit, and said she had need of a lawyer. Tucker seemed a bit startled and gestured for her to sit. Since then, she has been answering his questions as best she can.
“How old were they at the time?” he asks.
“Twelve, in the case of Martha. The others were younger.”
“And where is John Haskell now?”
“I do not know.”
Tucker puts the pen down. “Perhaps it would be better if you just told me the whole story, from the beginning,” he says. Olympia glances away for a moment toward a towering oak bookcase. There are hundreds of volumes on its shelves, leather-bound books with difficult titles. She hesitates, uneasy about sharing the 328
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details of the most private acts of her life. For words, she knows, even in their best combinations, must inevitably fall short of the reality. And not all the words that she has could describe the joy and happiness she and Haskell had together. Instead, she fears she will risk reducing these most sublime experiences to mechanical movements, pictures only. Images at which another might cringe. At which an unwary observer, who has suddenly and inadvertently drawn back a curtain upon a pair of lovers in their most intimate moments, might be shocked. And will not such an interruption, this other pair of eyes, ultimately change the event and take something precious from it?
“I can tell you what happened,” Olympia says to the lawyer, “but first I must make you aware of something important.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Though I was very young and understood little of the magnitude of what I was doing, I was not seduced. Never seduced. I had will and some understanding. I could have stopped it at any time. Do you understand this?”
“I think so,” he says.
“Do you believe me?”
He considers her thoughtfully, holding his pen between his thumb and forefinger and unconsciously flipping it back and forth. She wonders if Tucker & Tucker means father and son, or brother and brother. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I do. I do not think you would say this if it were not true.”
It is warm in the office, and she removes her gloves. “John Haskell and I were in each other’s company several times that first weekend,”
she begins. “And then we met again on the Fourth of July. We became . . . intimate . . . about two weeks after that. I knew him for only seven weeks during that summer.”
“And John Haskell and his family were living where?”
329
“Haskell lived at the Highland Hotel. At Fortune’s Rocks. Catherine and the children were staying in York, Maine, with her parents until their cottage at Fortune’s Rocks was completed.”
“Yes, I know the Highland. And you . . .” Tucker hesitates, removing an imagined piece of lint from the sleeve of his chalk-striped frock coat. “You went with him to this hotel? Or he came to you at your house? Or did you meet elsewhere?”
“Usually, I went to him at the hotel,” she says with difficulty, thinking, There was nothing usual about it. “He came to my house on three other occasions, one of which was the last time I ever saw him.”
“And when was that?”
“August tenth.”
“What happened on that day?”
Olympia looks down at her lap. Her hands are clasped so tightly that her knuckles are white. She thinks about the last time she saw Haskell, about all the days leading up to that last time. About all of the days during which she might have stopped Haskell and Catherine from coming to her father’s house for the gala. But she did not. For she had, she knows, already entered that phase in a love affair when all meetings with the beloved are to be desired, no matter how formal or awkward, for they offer not only an opportunity to gaze upon the lover but also a chance to experience that peculiarly delicious thrill of silent communication in the midst of an unknowing audience. Olympia could tell Payson Tucker that she wished her father had not invited the Haskells or that she was anxious lest she cause Catherine Haskell, whom she truly admired, even the smallest concern, but to do so would be disingenuous, not to say altogether false.
“My father had a party, and the Haskells came to it. Catherine Haskell discovered us together that night.”
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The lawyer dips his pen into the inkwell and makes a notation.
“She discovered you, or someone else did and told her?”
Olympia averts her eyes.
“If this is too painful . . . ,” he says.
“Mrs. Haskell had some help,” she says. “A man by the name of Zachariah Cote.”
Payson Tucker lifts his eyes from his notebook. Olympia catches a flash of light from his lenses. “The poet?”
“Yes,” she says, mildly surprised that Tucker has heard of Cote. “I have not seen John Haskell since then,” Olympia adds.
“Where did he go?”
“He stayed in their new cottage the night of August tenth. I do not know where he went after that. I believe he left Fortune’s Rocks and Ely Falls.”
“He was living in Ely Falls as well?” the lawyer asks.
“No, he was a physician with the Ely Falls Mill infirmary.”
“Oh, I see. And when did you discover you were with child?”
Tucker asks the question as if it were one fact of thousands, a mere sentence in a paragraph. Olympia opens her mouth to speak, but cannot. She can feel the heat spreading into her face. Tucker, watching her closely, leans in her direction. A wing of hair falls forward, and he tucks it behind his ear.
“Miss Biddeford, I know these are terrible questions. And I think you have shown great courage in your answers. But I require this information if I am to take on your case. I also need to know if you have the stamina to face certain realities about your past. Believe me when I say to you that this is but the mildest foretaste of the questions that will be put to you if you decide to go any further with your suit.”
Olympia takes a breath and nods. “My family and I left Fortune’s Rocks on the morning of August eleventh,” she says. “My parents 331
live on Beacon Hill in Boston. I discovered I was with child on the twenty-ninth of October.”
“You were examined by a physician?”
“Not immediately.”
Tucker leans back in his chair. Behind him on the desk, fitted into a silver frame, is a photograph of a handsome woman in her thirties — his mother, surely, Olympia guesses. When she was a young woman.
“Miss Biddeford, this next question is exceedingly difficult, but I must ask it. Is there any possibility that another man, a man other than John Haskell, could be the father of the boy you speak of?”
Despite Tucker’s warning, Olympia is shocked, not so much by the question itself as by the notion that she could ever have had such a relationship with anyone but Haskell. “No,” she answers vehemently. “No possibility whatsoever.”
“Good,” he says, and he looks genuinely relieved. “That is fine. Did you then contact John Haskell to tell him of the news?”
“No.”
“Tell me what happened on the day you were delivered of the child?”
“I am not sure what happened. I had been given laudanum toward the end of my confinement, and it made me sleepy, so that when I woke from the ordeal, the child had already been taken from me.”
“But you saw the child.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew it was a boy.”
“I was told it was a boy.”
“You had a physician with you? Or a midwife?”
“A physician. Dr. Ulysses Branch of Newbury Street in Boston.”
“Was it he who took the child from you?”
“I do not know. I assume whoever it was did so at the request of 332
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my father, since he had once or twice referred to ‘arrangements’ that had been made. Though he never spoke directly to me, either then or later, about what had been done with the child.”
“Did you ever ask him outright?”
“No,” she says. “I did not.” And it strikes Olympia as odd now that she did not. How was it that she accepted her fate so willingly?
“Your father left your house that night?”
“No, he did not.”
“Then he must have given the child to someone else?”
“Yes. I do not know precisely to whom he gave the child. But I have reason to believe the baby shortly entered the care of John Haskell himself.”
“The reason that I am lingering on the details of the birth is that the issue of how and when the child was taken from you may be important,” he explains.
“Yes, I understand.”
“How was it you came to know of the child’s whereabouts?”
“By accident,” she says. “Soon after I arrived in Fortune’s Rocks — that is, returned to Fortune’s Rocks, this July — I had a visit from an old friend of my father’s, Rufus Philbrick —”
“Yes, I know the man,” Tucker says, interrupting her.
“During this visit, he inadvertently let slip about the child’s being in the Saint Andre orphanage.”
“And how would he have known this?”
“He is a member of the board of directors,” she says. “The next day I went to Saint Andre’s and spoke to a nun who I believe is called Mother Marguerite Pelletier. She told me the child had been at the orphanage but had been placed out. She told me the boy’s first name. She would not tell me his last name.”
“But you say the child’s name is” — Tucker consults his notes —
“Pierre Francis Haskell.”
“Yes,” Olympia says. “I paid a call on Rufus Philbrick and asked 333
him to find me the boy’s whereabouts. He told me the child’s name had once been — if not still was — Haskell. Later he was able to confirm this.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He could tell me little else on that particular day, but later he wrote me that the boy’s guardians are Franco-Americans, Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc. They live at one thirty-seven Alfred Street here in Ely Falls and work at the Ely Falls Mill. The boy is three years old, and Rufus Philbrick’s letter said that he was healthy. I have seen the boy, and he appears to be so. That is all I know. Oh, and he was baptized into the Catholic faith.”
“You spoke to the boy.”
“No, I saw him from a distance.”
Tucker removes his spectacles and cleans them with a handkerchief. “Did anything about the boy’s appearance suggest that he was the son of you and John Haskell?”
Olympia knows she will never forget the shock of seeing the boy’s face. “Yes. Definitely. He looks very like his father. I believe anyone would remark upon this resemblance.”
Tucker puts his spectacles back on. “Have you spoken to either Albertine or Telesphore Bolduc?”
“No.”
“Have you told anyone of your desire to reclaim your child?”
“Only Rufus Philbrick.”
“And you say you saw the boy again today?”
“Yes.”
Tucker sits back in his chair and folds his hands in front of his chin. “I cannot tell you today whether or not it is possible to pursue this case,” he says.
“I understand.”
“I will need to investigate certain matters.”
She nods.
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“To do this, I will have to hire a private investigator. This is usual in these cases. . . .”
“Yes,” says Olympia.
“I am sorry to have to broach the subject of fees, but I fear —”
“I have money,” Olympia says quickly. “Money is not a difficulty.”
“Very well then,” he says, standing, and she takes this as her cue to stand as well.
“May I call your carriage?” he asks. “Or do you have a motorcar?”
“Mr. Tucker, I live alone,” Olympia says. “I have neither carriage nor motorcar, and I believe I have missed the last trolley to Ely. If you would be so kind as to call me a cab. . . .”
Tucker takes the gold watch from his vest pocket and consults it. “Yes, yes, of course,” he says. He turns and appears to be looking for something on his desk. “Can you be reached on the telephone?”
“No.”
“I shall need your address then.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I may have to visit you in Fortune’s Rocks from time to time to discuss this case,” Tucker says casually. He turns back to her with an address book in his hand. And she is surprised to see, in his face, that Payson Tucker finds her interesting, or intriguing, or possibly even attractive. And that because of this, he will take her case. For a moment, Olympia ponders the uneasy question of whether or not to use this attraction to gain what she wants.
And then she thinks about the boy, her son, in his cracked leather shoes.
“I will look forward to your visits,” she says.
•
•
•
When Olympia returns to Fortune’s Rocks, she writes to Rufus Philbrick to tell him that she has hired a lawyer to look into the 335
matter of the boy. She also writes to her father to ask him for money, neglecting to explain the reason. While she awaits a reply from each, she contemplates possible ways in which she might earn extra funds to pay for an eventual custody suit; but she can see no immediate manner in which to secure a living, apart from hiring herself out again as a governess, which she most sincerely does not want to do. To pass the time, she reads books and newspapers, but the outside world seems to her more and more remote, particularly as the summerfolk desert Fortune’s Rocks. The days grow colder still, and she wonders if she will, after all, be able to remain in her cottage.
On the twenty-eighth of September, Olympia receives a letter —
but not from Rufus Philbrick or her father.
27 September 1903
Dear Miss Biddeford,
I shall be staying at the Highland Hotel on 2 October and would be pleased if you would dine with me there. I understand that this may be awkward for you, and if you prefer, I will be happy to suggest an alternative venue. In either event, may I call for you at six o’clock on the evening of the second? I have some in- formation regarding your custody suit that I think you will want to hear.
Respectfully yours,
Payson Tucker, Esq.
Olympia sits down at her kitchen table with the letter in her hand and reads it through once more. The Highland Hotel. She can see its high ceilings, its cavernous lobby, its long mahogany desks. She has not thought she would ever again be able to enter the Highland, but 336
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it seems cowardly now to have to say to Payson Tucker that she cannot do that, particularly so if she wishes to impress him with her courage and resolve. She takes her pen and ink from the drawer in the kitchen table and begins to write.
29 September 1903
Dear Mr. Tucker,
I should be pleased to dine with you at the Highland Hotel on the evening of the second of October. I shall expect you to call for me at six o’clock. I look forward most sincerely to hearing your in- formation.
In anticipation of your arrival, I remain,
Olympia Biddeford
She blots the letter, puts it into an envelope, and seals it with wax. She glances about her kitchen.
So it is beginning, she thinks.
•
•
•
Olympia dresses for the evening of October 2 in an emerald velvet suit with black braid piping and frog closures. The suit, though somewhat out of date, squares her shoulders and flatters her waist. With the suit, she wears a high-necked ivory silk blouse that once belonged to her mother and was left behind in her closets. Olympia chooses pearls for her jewelry: drop earrings, a rope at her neck, and a bracelet. She fusses for nearly an hour with her hair, forming wide wings at the sides and a double bun at the back. When she is dressed, she studies herself in the glass in the kitchen and is somewhat surprised to see that her face looks considerably older than she has remembered it, its planes more accentuated. Her figure is thinner as 337
well, somehow longer, or perhaps this is just an illusion created by the suit. No, she is definitely thinner. She seems foreign to herself and yet oddly familiar, familiar from a time when it was not unusual to dress in velvet and pearls or to spend an hour on one’s hair. Payson Tucker comes for Olympia at precisely six o’clock, as he said he would, in a smart lemon and black motorcar. His white shirt shines in the headlamps as he passes in front of the automobile after helping her in. He seems larger, more adroit than she has remembered him. Since it is only Olympia’s second time in a motorcar (though she does not tell Tucker this), she is more than a little tremulous when they begin to move faster than seems prudent along the winding narrow lane that abuts the seawall and the summer cottages of Fortune’s Rocks.
“You must be one of the few people still in residence on the beach,” he says.
“I think I may be.”
“You do not mind being so isolated?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “In fact, I am rather afraid I am enjoying it.”
At the hotel, a valet takes the car from Tucker, who touches Olympia’s elbow gently as he guides her up the long set of stairs. Although she has prepared herself, she hesitates a bit when they enter the lobby, a misstep she tries to hide with conversation.
“What brings you to the Highland so late in the season?” she asks Tucker.
“I have business in Fortune’s Rocks both today and tomorrow,” he answers, moving her firmly through the lobby, “and it seemed pointless to make the journey back and forth to Exeter, which is where I live. And besides, it has given me an excellent opportunity to see you again.”
He leads her into the dining room, which seems not to have changed at all. There are, she notes, only a few diners on this Tuesday in October. Olympia and Tucker are led to a table with white 338
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candles and late-summer roses, and as she sits, she takes in the sparkling goblets, the silver champagne buckets, the heavy cutlery, the massive crystal chandelier at the dining room’s center, and then the menu (haricot mutton, turkey with oyster sauce, mock turtle soup, apple brown Betty), reflecting that it has been four years since she was last in society. And she further reflects how very much, when she was, she took for granted its luxury, its furnishings, its food, its accoutrements, as if they were her birthright, her due, with hardly a thought — barely even an imagining — of those who would never have such luxury offered to them. Perhaps obliviousness is necessary, she thinks, to enjoy, or even to bear, this excess.
“The hotel will be open only a week longer,” says Tucker.
“It seems there are not many in residence. You shall be rattling around.”
“If I may say so — and I hope you will not be offended by this —
you look very lovely tonight,” Tucker says. He takes off his spectacles and puts them on the table beside his plate. She is startled to see, without the buffer of the gold-rimmed eyeglasses, how intensely black his eyes are, how long and silky his lashes.
“If I am offended by such a pronouncement,” Olympia says, “I do not know how we shall proceed with my case. As I recall, we spoke of rather more disturbing matters during our first meeting at your office.”
Tucker’s hair, worn straight back from his forehead tonight, is shiny with hair wax or with oil. This must be a new fashion as well, Olympia thinks, and she is certain that her emerald suit, no matter how altered, will be seen to be hopelessly out of date.
“You live with your family in Exeter?” she asks.
“I live with my mother and father and sister,” he says. “I am in practice with my father, who was kind enough to take me in. Had you come a half hour earlier to our offices, it would be he who would be your advocate.”
339
“Well, then, for once in my life, I must be glad that I was late,”
she says.
“And I, too, am exceedingly glad,” Tucker says with perhaps rather more warmth than Olympia is comfortable with. A waiter arrives with champagne, which, when she takes her first sip, is so dry that it seems to bubble right up through Olympia’s nose.
“Do you like oysters?” he asks.
“Yes, I do.”
“I feel obliged to mention, since I do not wish to deceive you, nor compromise your suit in any way, that I am only one year out of the Yale School of Law,” Tucker says disarmingly when the waiter has left them. “I have discussed your case with my father, and if you would prefer that he represent you, I will not be insulted in any way. In fact, I would advise you to consider this option carefully. My father has rather more experience with the state courts than I do, although your case is unusual, and I am sorry to say my father has not brought forth a suit similar to yours. In fact, I cannot find a like case in the county files at all.”
“Is it so unusual? My case?” she asks.
“It would appear so. As far as I can tell, such a suit has been put forth before only twice in New England.”
He seems about to speak further, but stops himself, brushing his mustaches with the back of his fingers.
“And the outcome of these two suits?” she asks after a time.
“In neither case was the petitioner successful,” he says quietly.
“I see,” Olympia says.
“I was quite fascinated to read of the history of your house,”
Tucker says, in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
“You have had occasion to read of my house?” she asks, looking up.
“I thought I recognized the address when you were in my office. Six months ago, while I was working on a case for the Catholic Dio340
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cese in Ely Falls, I came across a few old documents relating to the convent,” he says. “Did you know that the church was forced to close the convent’s doors? It appears there was something of a scandal there.”
“No,” she says. “I was always under the impression that the church had decided to move the sisters into Ely Falls so that they could run the hospice and the orphanage. I am sure that was what my father was told.”
“Yes, I do not doubt that it was. The scandal seems to have been kept rather quiet. The Catholic Church had — has — tremendous political influence in Ely Falls.” He pauses while the waiter serves the oysters in a large silver tray with cracked ice and lemon and horseradish sauce. “The house was set up in the late 1870s to house young women who were felt by their families to be wayward or to have gone astray. A convent within a convent, as it were,” Tucker explains.
“Schoolgirls?”
“Some were as young as twelve. Others as old as twenty. A few of them were victims of brutalities upon their persons or were servant girls who had been taken advantage of by their masters.”
Olympia lays down her oyster fork. “Mr. Tucker, you surprise me with this story.”
“Miss Biddeford,” he says in the manner of a man who has become aware of a terrible social gaffe, “I am so very sorry. Forgive me.”
“Not with the story itself,” she says. “But with its obvious parallel to my own situation. I assume we are speaking of unwed mothers.”
“Of course, I did not intend . . . I cannot think why I have . . . I suppose I simply do not think of you as I do those unfortunate girls. I am most sincerely sorry if I have offended you.”
“No, no,” she says, waving her hand. “Do not trouble yourself. I cannot pretend that I am not surprised by this news, and I am clearly more than a little sensitive about my own situation, but I must tell you, Mr. Tucker, in the same breath, how tremendous a relief it has 341
been for me to have someone to speak to of such matters. I have kept them in my heart for all these years and have confided in no one. And in not being able to speak of facts that are true, one watches them grow and distort themselves and take on greater significance than one ought to allow, the result being that one is crippled by the actions of one’s past. Indeed, I have lived these four years with no other reality.”
Tucker is silent for a moment. “I am sorry that the past has burdened you so, Miss Biddeford,” he says with evident concern, “and yet I confess I am honored to be the recipient of these closely held truths.”
Olympia touches her mouth with her napkin. “I am not usually this priggish,” she says quickly. “Please continue with your story. You have whetted my curiosity.”
“Well, it is a grim tale altogether. The infants were taken from the girls at birth and given to the orphanage. In those days, such infants made up the bulk of the population of the orphanage and were largely the reason for its existence. But not all of the girls were in such dire straits. Some were merely thought, because of excessively high spirits, to be troublesome to their families.”
“And the families had them put away because of this?”
“Yes, with the idea that the girls would then be ‘broken’ — like horses, I suppose. The discipline was quite severe. The girls were forced to take vows of silence, as the members of the order themselves had.” He pauses. “It beggars the imagination.”
“I am dismayed, Mr. Tucker, to think of my father’s house being used in this manner. I had envisioned something altogether different, something rather more peaceful and contemplative.”
“Quite.”
The waiter brings the next course, which is the turkey. “The scandal came to light when one young woman, who had been com342
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mitted by her guardian for ‘wanton and lascivious behavior,’ accused a priest of assaulting her and took him to court,” Tucker continues.
“Before the case was settled, it was discovered that the priest —
whose name has been stricken from the records, I might add — had been physically examining the young women to ascertain if they were . . .” Tucker pauses. Olympia can see that he is blushing. “It is impossible to put this delicately,” he says. “According to the results of this examination, the girls were then segregated on the theory that those who were seen to be less than . . . intact . . . might corrupt the innocents.”
“I see.”
“The case was settled out of court. And as part of the settlement, the church agreed to close the house down. The nuns, most of them of course blameless, were moved into Ely Falls. The two sisters who collaborated with the priest were sent back to Canada. As you are doubtless aware, the Sisters of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance now have a remarkable record of good works, many at considerable sacrifice. And they no longer keep vows of silence as they once used to do.”
“Not very practical.”
“No. Quite. Indeed, the silence was seen in retrospect to have allowed the molestation to continue.”
“And what happened to the girls?”
“There is no mention of that in the records.”
Olympia tries to imagine their fate. “Would their families have taken them back in?” she asks.
“I do not know.”
“I see. The oysters were delicious, by the way,” she says. He smiles. “You have an appetite, Olympia Biddeford.”
Somewhat abashed, she smooths the napkin in her lap. “That is the second time I have heard that said of me this fall,” she says. 343
“It is an admirable quality, your considerable appetite,” Tucker says. “I cannot bear women who feel obliged to appear delicate in their constitutions, when, in fact, they are not. Most women must eat as regularly and as heartily as men. And why should a woman not enjoy her food? Indeed, it is one of life’s greater pleasures, do you not think?”
He waits until the waiter has left them. “Miss Biddeford, there are some matters which we must discuss,” he says. “If I could, I would delay mentioning such unpleasant subjects forever, but clearly I cannot if we are to proceed with your suit. But I should like to say before I begin that I am thoroughly enjoying your company, and I am hopeful that we shall one day have a meal together when it will not be necessary to discuss business.”
“Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”
“May I speak frankly now?” he asks.
“Please.”
“I do not wish to discourage you,” he says, “but I must warn you that your case is difficult. In most states that have decided the matter, the biological mother has fewer rights than the surrogate maternal figure. You, of course, are the biological mother, and Albertine Bolduc will be seen to be the surrogate mother.”
Olympia is discomfited by the mention of another woman as the mother of her son, however much she has known this to be true.
“Furthermore, an unwed mother is the least likely person to be given custody of a child. An unwed mother who has been seen to have abandoned her child has essentially no rights to the child at all.”
“I see,” she says.
“I know that this is difficult,” Tucker says. “Please tell me if I am already upsetting you too greatly.”
Olympia struggles for composure. She must, she knows, steel herself for all manner of revelations. She cannot afford to be discour344
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aged so soon. And she thinks now that Tucker’s discussion about the provenance of her father’s cottage must have been a deliberate attempt to prepare her in some small way for the even more difficult matter of her own case.
“No, I am fine,” she says. “Well, I am not fine. Of course I am not. But I understand I must hear what you have to say. Indeed, I wish to know everything you know, for I cannot make any intelligent decisions otherwise.”
Tucker nods. His hand hovers close to hers on the tablecloth, and she senses that under different circumstances he might touch her, but now will not.
“That is why it is so important that we establish that you did not abandon your child, but rather had the child stolen from you,” he continues. “I have some further facts I should like to tell you if you think you can bear them.”
“Are they so terrible?”
“They are . . . difficult.”
“I am as ready as I ever shall be,” she says.
“Shortly after his birth, the boy was given to Josiah Hay by your father,” Tucker begins.
“Josiah!” Olympia exclaims before she can stop herself. Tucker puts up a hand. “Only to transport the child,” he says.
“He and his wife, Lisette, took the child and journeyed up to Ely Falls by train the afternoon of the birth.”
Olympia’s head swims with the news. Lisette! How is that possible? Olympia thinks back to the day of the birth. Was Lisette at her side after she delivered? She cannot remember. No, perhaps she was not. Was it not, in fact, her mother who sat with her all that long day as Olympia drifted in and out of consciousness?
“They brought the child to John Haskell, who was staying at a hotel in Ely Falls. It is my understanding that John Haskell examined the child and dismissed Josiah and Lisette, who took the next 345
train back to Boston. Dr. Haskell then took the child to the Saint Andre orphanage. He had already made arrangements.”
“I find this so difficult to comprehend,” Olympia says. “I do not know how he could have given up the boy,” she adds, momentarily benumbed.
“Do you need some time?”
Olympia shakes her head.
Tucker puts his glasses back on. “Very shortly,” he continues, “the boy was taken on by Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc. They have not formally adopted the child because John Haskell cannot be found, and he did not sign the appropriate waivers before he left. Such an adoption, even if the Bolducs had the money for the legal fees, which they have not, has not, therefore, been possible. It will, however, become possible simply by the fact of your bringing this suit.”
“I can bring suit then?” Olympia asks.
“Legally, yes. In John Haskell’s absence and considering that he has abandoned the child.”
“But you are telling me that if I lose, the Bolducs may legally adopt the boy.”
“They will be bound to by state law.”
“I see,” Olympia says. “And do you know where John Haskell is?”
Olympia asks.
“No. If I did, I assure you I would tell you. We contacted the former Mrs. Haskell, who divorced her husband two years ago, but she has not responded to us and apparently will not. We did have a conversation with her attorney, however, and he gave us to understand that Dr. Haskell sends money regularly to Mrs. Haskell via an arrangement with the Bank of New Hampshire.”
Olympia shuts her eyes, dismayed to learn that Catherine has been brought into this matter. Dismayed that Catherine has been asked to contribute information. And Olympia realizes then, in a 346
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way she has not before, that she has begun something that will be larger than herself and that she will not be able to stop.
“Albertine and Telesphore live with the child in one room,”
Tucker says. “Albertine works as a carder at the Ely Falls Mill from five-thirty a.m. to four p.m., six days a week, combing raw cotton so that it can be spun into thread. A hazardous job, I might add, because of the high incidence of white lung. You do know about the white lung?”
“Yes.”
“For this labor, she makes $336.96 a year.”
Olympia looks steadily at Payson Tucker.
“The couple seem to have made adequate arrangements for the child’s care,” Tucker continues, “however difficult these arrangements may be for the couple themselves. I am bound to tell you that their industriousness and their careful attention to the needs of the child, as well as the sacrifices that this has entailed, will be seen in a favorable light by any judge.”
Olympia nods.
“I have more to tell you,” Tucker says, “and I have to warn you that it is worse.”
Olympia looks up. “How can anything be worse?”
Tucker folds his arms on the table and leans toward her. “I will tell you right now that you should not go forward with your petition,”
he says. “Let me explain what will happen to you if you do. The trial will be grueling. You will be seen to belong to the lowest rung of society, that of unwed mothers. Your transgressions will become public knowledge in ways you have never imagined. Very likely, the story of this trial will be considered newsworthy by the Boston papers. In the two cases I spoke of earlier, the damage to the principals was considerable. One of the young women committed suicide shortly after the trial.”
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Olympia feels her hands go cold. Out of sight of Tucker, she wraps them in the folds of her skirt.
“I am sorry to be so harsh,” Tucker says. “But I want you to understand that if you continue with your petition, you will be left with no reputation whatsoever when it is over, no matter what the outcome. I do not think the Bolducs’ lawyer will spare your sensibilities or will care for your delicacy. The irony is that even I cannot spare your delicacy. I will need to be as ruthless as the opposition.”
“And what are my alternatives?”
“The alternative is simple, Miss Biddeford. Do not put forth your petition.”
Olympia looks at Payson Tucker, at his gold-rimmed spectacles, his oiled hair, his well-groomed mustaches. “Then I should never see my son,” she says.
“That is correct.”
“I will never hold him.”
Tucker is silent.
“I will never teach him,” she says, her voice rising. “I will never dress him. I will never speak to him, or he to me.”
“No.”
“Then there is no alternative, Mr. Tucker. I must proceed.”
Tucker sighs and leans back in his chair. He surveys the overdressed dining room and its few patrons. “Then let me help you,” he says simply.
•
•
•
Clouds have covered the moon, and she can see only those portions of the road the headlamps of the automobile illuminate: a flash of stone wall, the shingled corner of a cottage, a stark silhouette of a telephone pole.
“I have ridden in a motorcar only once before,” Olympia confesses. “At school. A benefactor came to visit. I was one of the stu348
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dents asked to accompany him in his automobile up a small mountain to visit an observatory.”
“Where were you at school?”
“Not a place you have ever heard of, I can assure you. The Hastings Seminary for Females. In the town of Fairbanks in the western part of Massachusetts.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“The drive or the school?”
He smiles. “Well, both, actually.”
“I was terrified during the drive. I was certain we would slide sideways off the mountain. I spent the entire time at the observatory wondering how I could get down without going back in the motorcar. As for the school, I disliked it intensely.”
Olympia watches with interest as Tucker shifts the gears. And she thinks that she should like to learn to drive an automobile. She imagines the luxury of being able to drive herself back and forth to Ely Falls.
When Tucker opens the door of the motorcar, she is enveloped in a fine mist, like cobwebs, against her face and hands. “Is it raining?”
she asks.
“Just,” he says, once again taking her elbow.
“It is very dark tonight,” she says, feeling her way along the slate path.
“Shall I wait while you light a lamp?” he asks when they have reached the stepping stone.
“No, I know my way. Thank you.”
In the dark, she cannot see his face. She extends her hand, and he takes it, his grip firm and warm against her own.
“I am sorrier than I can say to have to be the bearer of such bad tidings,” Tucker says. “I have admired you from the moment you entered my office.”
Olympia withdraws her hand. She catches, on the air, a faint 349
whiff of castile. It has been a long time since she stood this close to a man.
“Do you love him still?” Tucker asks suddenly.
And Olympia is not as surprised as she might be by the young lawyer’s question, for she understands that Payson Tucker has perhaps waited all evening to ask it.
“I cannot imagine not loving him,” she answers truthfully.
•
•
•
She hears the motorcar drive away, leaving only the rumble of the surf. With her hat and gloves still on, she walks through the rooms of the house, seeing it anew, imagining it filled with young girls sentenced to silence, separated from their unforgiving families. How extraordinary that this house, in which she has known both luxury and love, in which John Haskell once kissed and held her, in which Josiah once dallied with Lisette, in which orchestras have played and women have danced and men have talked and smoked, should have had all this time such an abhorrent history and yet have given away nothing of that suffering and sorrow.
She wanders upstairs, enters a seldom-used bedroom, and sits on the bed. It is a benign room, papered in blue forget-me-nots with delicate crewelwork curtains shrouding the windows. In the light of an amber-beaded lamp, long discarded from her mother’s dressing table, she can see the scars of wet cups and glasses that remain on the surface of a mahogany bedside table. She tries to hold in her mind the two images of the house, its past and its present, the convent and the holiday retreat, and it is then that she understands — or has a vision of — what she will one day do with her father’s summer cottage.
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T he heelsof Olympia’s boots echo sharply along the slate flooring of the courthouse. To either side of the cavernous hallway are bronze busts on tall stone pedestals and between them lie low leather benches, so that sitting on one as she waits for Payson Tucker, Olympia feels dwarfed and insignificant, which she supposes was the architect’s intention. The law is greater than the men who make it, the bronze men seem to be announcing. The law is greater than those who petition for its intervention. She watches as the snow on her boots melts into wet puddles on the stone. The glass in the high windows opposite is obscured by dirt and age, and she can neither see nor hear the snowstorm that is beginning to cripple the city outside. She will need to spend another night in the Ely Falls Hotel, she knows, since it will be almost impossible to return home in this weather. It has been a severe winter at Fortune’s Rocks. All through the months of January and February snow has fallen about the cottage and on the beach and even on the rocks near to the sea. As Olympia has waited for the hearing to begin, gusts have shaken the house and drifts have risen to the windows. Some weeks, she has not been able to leave her cottage, and when she does manage to make her way to 351
Goldthwaite’s for provisions or into Ely Falls for a meeting with Payson Tucker, the talk is always of the storms. So unusual on the coast to have such snow. When will it end? She understands, from these comments, that she could not possibly have chosen a worse winter to take up residence at Fortune’s Rocks.
In the distance, she can see Tucker coming toward her from the opposite end of the long corridor, a spindly dark figure emerging from a kind of dusk. She catches a flash of his spectacles before she can see his face. And beyond him now, there are other persons entering the corridor as well, as if a trolley had made a stop. The fur collar of Tucker’s overcoat is frosted with snow, and his spectacles fog in the sudden warmth of the building, so that when he reaches her, he seems a face without eyes. He sets down his cases in front of her.
“Miss Biddeford,” he says, taking off his spectacles and wiping them with a handkerchief from his pocket.
“Mr. Tucker.”
He unwinds his muffler, and a radiator hisses beside them.
“Are you ready?”
“I hope I am,” she says.
“I shall call you first, as we have discussed. Although it may not happen straightaway. It will depend on what motions and so forth are put forward by Mr. Sears.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Dreadful storm. I hope they do not postpone this hearing yet again.” Tucker looks away a moment and then back again.
“There is something we need to discuss before we go in,” he says,
“because I do not want you to be surprised or caught off guard in any way.”
“Yes?”
He sits beside her on the bench. He smells of wet wool and again castile. “I have summoned your father,” he says.
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Her face must register her considerable shock, because he immediately puts his hand over hers.
“I have been trying to reach him for weeks,” Tucker says, “but he has been abroad with your mother.”
“Italy,” Olympia says. “But why have you done this?”
“I cannot prove your case without him and Josiah Hay as witnesses.”
“You have called Josiah as well?” Olympia asks, suddenly hot inside her coat. She withdraws her hand and unfastens the top several buttons. “How could you do this without consulting me?”
“Miss Biddeford, you have hired me to put your petition before the court,” he says, sliding his arms from his own overcoat.
“Yes, but —”
“And I must do so in the best way known to me. And that may require actions or words or maneuvers that you and I will not necessarily discuss.”
“My father is coming here? Today?”
“Yes. I trust he might. If he can get through in the storm. I hope he came last night before it began.”
She turns her head away. She has not even told her father that she knows of the boy’s whereabouts, never mind that she has requested a custody hearing.
“If you truly thought you could put forth your petition without help from any other persons,” says Tucker, “then I fear I have misled you.”
“My father knows nothing of these proceedings,” she says.
“Well. Yes. He does now. Now he does.”
“Was he shocked by this news?”
Tuckers ponders the question. “He seemed a bit taken aback, but not as much as I had expected. You, however, may be surprised to learn that he was most eager to help in any way he could. In fact, I rather imagined he sounded relieved.”
353
“You spoke to him?”
“I wrote to him initially — and repeatedly, I might add. I spoke to him yesterday morning by telephone.”
“My father has a telephone?” she asks.
•
•
•
The room is small, wood-paneled, a chamber meant for hearings and not for audiences. Its intimacy is unnerving to Olympia, for within minutes Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc enter the room and sit, as instructed by the bailiff, across the aisle from Olympia and Payson Tucker. The Franco-Americans are as close to Olympia as they might be in a church. Though Olympia has twice seen Albertine, the Franco woman has never seen Olympia, and so for a long moment the two women regard each other across the aisle. Their mutual gaze is disconcerting, but Olympia forces herself not to glance away. If she would go forth with her petition, she tells herself, she must be able to look this woman in the eye.
And such deep-set eyes they are. The features of the woman’s face, though not fine, are sharply delineated. It is a face one reads immediately, and thus immediately Olympia can see that Albertine Bolduc is angry. But mixed with the anger is also curiosity. Is she searching for a likeness in Olympia’s face? Or a reason for this suit?
Or an indication of Olympia’s resolve? Albertine’s thick dark hair begins low on her brow, and there is perhaps the merest hint of a mustache. Her lips and cheeks are red — by nature, Olympia is certain, and not with paint. She has on a black woolen suit, either inexpertly tailored or borrowed from another woman. Despite her ill-fitting garments, Albertine holds herself with good posture, the ruffles of her collar barely touching her chin. Her husband, who sits just beyond her, suddenly leans forward to see what it is his wife stares at so intently. He seems then to remember his cloth cap and removes it. His mustaches are damp, his cheeks coarsened by the weather. He 354
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says a word to his wife, and when she answers him, she hardly moves her mouth, shocked perhaps into rigidity.
A stout balding man with side whiskers and a monocle takes his place next to Albertine, blocking Olympia’s view. He sets a leather case on the table in front of him. And then before Olympia can absorb further the presence of her adversaries, the bailiff is announcing the judge.
“All rise for presiding Judge Levi Littlefield.”
The judge enters the chamber with a vigorous sweep of his robes. He is short and slight and sandy-haired, with no beard or mustaches or spectacles, and he looks considerably younger than Olympia has expected. Only his robes lend the man authority, as do those of a minister.
“He seems so young,” Olympia says to Tucker when they sit.
“He is not as young as he appears,” Tucker says. “And do not let his looks fool you. He is quite shrewd and tough.”
“Mr. Payson Tucker,” says Judge Littlefield, reviewing the documents laid out in front of him, “as counsel for the relator, you have a matter to put before the court.”
Tucker stands and approaches a lectern set up between the lawyers’ tables. He is so tall that he has to stoop to read what he has written. He has cut his hair, Olympia notes, and oiled it back from his forehead. Sitting as she is, behind and to the left of him, she can see only a profile. There is a slight tremor in Tucker’s hand. Is it possible this is Tucker’s first case? she wonders. She has never asked.
“I have here a writ of habeas corpus for the body of a male infant child, Pierre Francis Haskell, aged three years, ten months, and thirteen days, currently of Ely Falls, New Hampshire.”
“Yes, Mr. Tucker. Proceed.”
“That Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc of one thirty-seven Alfred Street, Ely Falls, New Hampshire, have for three years and approximately ten months restrained the said child of his liberty. That this 355
restraint of liberty is a result of an unlawful and clandestine removal and retention of the child on fourteen April 1900 from the mother of the child, the relator, Olympia Biddeford. That this unlawful removal was carried out at the direction of the petitioner’s father, Phillip Arthur Biddeford of Boston, Massachusetts, thereby depriving the infant child of his liberty and depriving the said mother of her maternal rights and solace. That on fourteen April 1900, the child was unlawfully delivered unto the care of the father of the infant male, Dr. John Warren Haskell, address unknown. That on fifteen April 1900, said father unlawfully delivered the child into the care of the Orphanage of Saint Andre of Ely Falls, New Hampshire, unlawfully charging them with placing out the child.”
“Mr. Tucker, is the child here?” Littlefield asks, interrupting the lawyer.
“Your Honor,” says Tucker, “the respondents have requested permission to have the child remain with Albertine Bolduc’s parents, who live a block from the courthouse, during this hearing. He will stay with them until the day the judgment will be read, at which time the boy shall be brought to the courthouse.”
“And this is acceptable to you?”
“Yes, sir, it is. We should not like to see a small child confined in unfamiliar surroundings.”
“No, quite. Are Phillip Biddeford and the Orphanage of Saint Andre represented here today?”
“Phillip Biddeford has declined representation and agrees to provide testimony on behalf of the relator. I believe the Orphanage of Saint Andre has also declined representation and has agreed to provide testimony on behalf of the respondents, who are represented by my colleague Mr. Addison Sears.”
“Is this true, Mr. Sears?”
“Yes, Your Honor, it is.”
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Looking up from his notes, Tucker addresses the judge less formally. “Your Honor, because this trail of unlawful events inevitably leads to the child being in the custody of Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc, and because this is not a criminal case but rather a petition for custody, the relator can only sue the Bolducs as foster parents for custody. It remains to be seen whether criminal charges will be brought at a later date.”
“Am I to understand that the father of the infant male child cannot be located?” Littlefield asks.
“That is correct,” says Payson Tucker.
“Very well,” says Judge Littlefield. “Let us proceed.”
•
•
•
Addison Sears, who is not even as tall as Olympia, rises and moves to the lectern and adjusts his monocle. Olympia notes that he has not one but several diamond rings on the soft fingers of his left hand. His frock coat is finely cut, in stark contrast to the clothes of his clients. He takes a long drink from a glass of water he has carried to the lectern.
“Good morning, Your Honor,” Sears says in a tone that suggests he knows the judge personally.
“Good morning, Mr. Sears,” the judge says amiably.
“Your Honor, this is a simple case,” Sears begins, still riffling through his notes as if he were not really beginning at all. “There is no statute in the land that would prompt a court to give custody of Pierre Francis Haskell to the young person sitting to my left.”
He pauses to let the implications of the words young person have their full effect.
“Let us consider the facts,” he continues. “A wanton fifteen-yearold girl, a mere child herself, with a child’s faculties and lack of mature judgment, fornicates with a man nearly three times her age, 357
causing this man to commit adultery and to leave his wife and four children.” Sears pauses to allow the impact of this moral transgression to settle upon the court. “She then gives birth to an infant male, whom she abandons,” he continues. “Through the years, she shows no interest whatsoever in his welfare. She does not support the child, either morally or financially. She does not inquire as to his health and well-being. She never visits him. And then she seeks custody of this child ? ”
Sears shakes his head, as though bewildered.
“In truth, Your Honor, if these were not such serious proceedings, this situation would be laughable.”
Judge Littlefield does not laugh. Sears tucks his fingers into his paisley vest pockets.
“Without resorting to the obfuscation of the language of our esteemed profession, I should like permission to set forth the respondents’ position in a manner that the young person to my left might understand,” says Sears, looking pointedly at Tucker, who did not, of course, think to reject the obfuscation of the language of the law himself.
“Very well, Mr. Sears. Proceed.”
“The task of the respondents today is twofold,” says Sears.
“We shall prove that Olympia Biddeford is not a fit parent for this or any other child. And we shall prove as well that it is in the best interests of the child to remain in the care of Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc, who have been the boy’s foster parents almost from birth.”
Sears takes another drink of water and then clears his throat.
“We shall show, Your Honor, that the relator, Olympia Biddeford, when she was only fifteen years of age, an age, I might add, when one’s character is being formed, participated in an improper sexual relationship with a man who was married and had four children of his own. That Olympia Biddeford not only is guilty of wanton and 358
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lascivious behavior but also has shown herself to be depraved, vulgar, and vile.”
Sears slowly turns and looks directly at Olympia. Despite her desire to remain calm, her cheeks burn, as though proving Sears correct in his accusations. He then abruptly turns his back on Olympia, suggesting that he cannot even bear to look at her.
“Your Honor, the courts of this land have consistently decided that if a child is left with an immoral mother, then that child is in danger of becoming immoral himself. Unwed mothers have, in nearly all cases brought before the courts, been denied not only custody but also visitation rights.
“Olympia Biddeford has shown no interest in the child’s welfare,”
Sears continues. “She abandoned the boy on the day of his birth, never inquired as to his whereabouts, never contributed a penny to his care, never knew where he was until last fall. Moreover, she has never even met with or spoken to the child. According to the law of the land, a mother who abandons her child, who lets this child remain too long with a surrogate family, loses her custodial rights and legal standing. As there are no other cases on point with written decisions in the state of New Hampshire, making the case before us today one of first impression, I should like to make reference to other cases stated in the respondents’ memorandum. If I may refer to the 1888 decision of the Connecticut Supreme Court in Hoxie v. Potter:
‘The courts do not feel called upon to sunder the ties that have been per- mitted to grow up, and believe that the happiness of the boy and the rights and feelings of his foster parents will be best subserved by leaving custody where it now is.’ ”
Olympia glances at Tucker, who is staring at his notes in front of him.
“Olympia Biddeford may be a mother by nature, but she is not by nurture,” Sears pronounces. “And even if she were a morally upright woman, which she clearly is not, she would have to be considered an 359
unfit guardian on the basis of her age at the time of the child’s conception, which was fifteen years, her marital status, which continues to be unwed, and her inability to provide a religious education for the boy. She herself is not a member of any church, nor does she attend services on any regular basis.”
Sears turns quickly and points at Olympia, a gesture so sudden that she flinches.
“Perhaps Olympia Biddeford seeks rehabilitation by having the child restored to her,” the lawyer says, as though the idea were a novel one. “This was once, in fact, a not uncommon if misguided notion of the courts. And I quote now from the 1873 decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court: ‘That if a woman be an unmarried mother, the surrendering of her child removes the one great influence toward a restoration of character through maternal affection. Her love for the child and fear of separation may prove her salvation.’ ”
Sears looks up at the judge and holds out his hands, palms up.
“But, Your Honor, the state of New Hampshire does not care about the rehabilitation of the mother. It must and does care first and foremost about the welfare of the child.”
Olympia presses her own hands tightly together in her lap. But I, too, care about the welfare of the child, she wants to cry out.
“So let us, for the moment, put aside the character of Olympia Biddeford,” Sears continues. “And let us consider only the best interests of the child.”
Now Sears turns and gazes at Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc, who both immediately look down into their laps, as if about to be chastised themselves. The couple appear to be at least as uncomfortable with these proceedings as Olympia is.
“Citing for a moment the New York case of Chapsky v. Wood in 1881,” Sears says, “ ‘When reclamation is not sought until a lapse of years, when new ties have been formed and a certain current given to the child’s life and thought, much attention should be paid to the unlikeli- 360
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hood of a benefit to the child from the change. It is an obvious fact that ties of blood weaken and ties of companionship strengthen by lapse of time; and the prosperity and welfare of the child depend on the ability to do all which the prompting of these ties compels.’ ”
Sears, seeming to study his notes for a moment, creates another pause.
“Mr. and Mrs. Bolduc have been foster parents to Pierre Francis Haskell since ten days after his birth — in effect, all of his life. The child knows no other parents. The Bolducs have lavished upon the boy all the love and affection they might have lavished upon their own blood child had Albertine not been a barren woman. Mr. and Mrs. Bolduc are of sufficient age to care for the boy: They are both thirty-two years old. They have a stable marriage, having cohabited in a state of wedded solace and bliss for eleven years. They are both longtime members of the Parish of Saint Andre, the Roman Catholic church of Ely Falls, and attend services regularly. They have expressed a passionate desire to extend to the boy a proper religious education. Moreover, they are deeply woven into the fabric of the Franco-American community here in Ely Falls and are part of a large extended family with many cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents who dote on the little boy. As Your Honor is doubtless aware, the Franco-Americans are known for their strong family and cultural ties, which they refer to as la Foi. In addition, these foster parents are hardworking. Though both are employed by the Ely Falls Mill, Mr. and Mrs. Bolduc have made adequate, not to say excellent, arrangements for the boy’s care at great sacrifice to themselves. You shall hear testimony from Albertine Bolduc regarding her love and devotion to the boy.”
Sears removes his monocle and lets it fall upon his chest.
“Your Honor, it would be a crime — a crime — to take the boy away from the only parents he has ever known. And as the state of New Hampshire is not generally in the business of committing 361
crimes against its citizens, the respondents request that the writ of habeas corpus put before us today by the counsel for the relator be set aside forthwith.”
The lawyer takes his seat next to the Bolducs and then pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, as if he already knew the judge’s disposition.
“Motion to set aside the writ of habeas corpus denied,” says Judge Littlefield matter-of-factly, and Olympia understands that Sears’s speech was never intended to persuade the judge to dismiss the suit, but rather to put forth the arguments of the respondents. And this the lawyer has done, she has to concede in spite of her agitation, in rather excellent fashion.
Beside her, Tucker is standing.
“Your Honor,” he says. “I should like to call Olympia Biddeford to the stand.”
•
•
•
She and Tucker have agreed that she should dress conservatively, neither hiding her class and wealth nor flaunting them. To this end, Olympia has purchased a suit of charcoal gray gabardine, which she has on over a high-collared white blouse. With it, she has worn a matching hat, a black velvet tie, and small pearl earrings. Tucker, without notes, stands up slowly and approaches her in the witness box.
“Miss Biddeford,” he says kindly and with a smile, which, though doubtless much rehearsed, puts her at ease, as it is meant to do.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty years.”
“And you live where?”
“Fortune’s Rocks.”
“And prior to living at Fortune’s Rocks?”
“I was a student at the Hastings Seminary for Females in Fair362
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banks, Massachusetts,” she answers, making sure, as Tucker has advised, that the word seminary is emphasized.
“For how long were you in residence at this seminary?”
“Three years.”
“And the purpose of this female academy?”
“To train young women so that they might be sent out to foreign lands for the purposes of teaching children and setting good examples of Christian womanhood.”
“And were you in agreement with the aims of this seminary?”
“I was not in disagreement,” she says carefully.
“You fully intended to be such a missionary yourself?” Tucker asks, emphasizing the word missionary.
“I assumed that was my future. Yes.”
“And how did you acquit yourself at this school?”
“I acquitted myself well, I trust.”
“Is it not a fact that you consistently ranked number one or number two in a class of two hundred and seventy young women?”
“Yes.”
“Is it not a fact that you could, if you so chose, accept a teaching position right now, without further schooling?”
“Yes,” she says. “I imagine I could.”
“Then tell the court why you have chosen not to do so at this moment.”
“I wish to have my son with me.”
There is a muffled gasp from Albertine Bolduc, who brings a gloved hand to her mouth. Her husband puts his arm around her shoulders.
“I think that we can safely say,” says Tucker, ignoring the small outburst, but looking pointedly at Sears, “that the staff of this religiously oriented seminary considered you neither wanton or lascivious nor depraved, vulgar, and vile.”
“Your Honor.” Addison Sears is on his feet. “Would you be so kind 363
as to ask counsel for the relator to desist in this line of questioning, as the answer calls for conjecture on the part of the witness?”
“Mr. Tucker,” says the judge.
Tucker seems unruffled by the mild reproof. “Miss Biddeford, how do you support yourself?”
“I have money from my father.”
“Would it be correct to say that as far as the foreseeable future is concerned, money is not a subject you need worry about?”
“One always wishes to be prudent with money,” she says carefully,
“but, yes, I think you could say that was true.”
“So that, if you were to receive custody of your son, you would not have to leave the house to go to work?”
“No, I would not.”
“And thus you could care for the young boy full-time?”
“Yes, I could.”
Tucker turns and glances at Albertine Bolduc, as if physically to point out the difference between his client and the Franco woman. He walks back to the table, where he briefly consults his notes.
“Miss Biddeford, I know that these are painful questions. But let us now go back to the day of the child’s birth.”
Olympia takes in a long, slow breath. No matter how many times she and Tucker have rehearsed these questions, they always make her anxious.
“Where did you give birth to the child?”
“In my bedroom in my father’s house in Boston.”
“And what day and time was this?”
“Two o’clock on the afternoon of April fourteenth, 1900.”
“Was it a normal birth?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened immediately after this birth?”
“The boy was taken from me.”
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“By whom?”
“I do not know. But I do know that it was upon the instructions of my father. I doubt, however, that he personally handled the child himself.”
“And why is it you do not know for certain who removed your child from your arms?”
“I had been given laudanum by my mother’s doctor.”
“This would be Dr. Ulysses Branch of Newbury Street in Boston.”
“Yes.”
“How much laudanum were you given?”
“I believe three spoonfuls.”
“So you were asleep.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the boy at all?”
Not once during their informal rehearsals has Olympia been able to answer this question without her eyes welling up. “Yes,” she says as evenly as she can. “I remember some things. I was drifting in and out of consciousness.”
“Tell the court what you remember.”
“I was told the child was a boy. He was swaddled and laid beside me. I remember black spiky hair, beautiful eyes. . . .” She bites her lip.
“That is fine,” Tucker says quickly, having established his point.
“Was it your desire that the child be taken from you at birth?”
“No.”
“Had you made your feelings on this subject clear?”
“Yes, I had spoken of this to my father.”
“And what did he say?”
“That he had made what he called ‘arrangements.’ And that if I kept the child, he would disown me.”
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“But, Miss Biddeford, did you not care more about the child than about being disinherited?”
“Yes, I did care more about the child,” Olympia says with fervor.
“But I reasoned that if I went against my father’s wishes, I would have no way to support myself and that I could not survive. And that if I did not survive, the child would not survive.”
“Miss Biddeford, tell the court why it is you have put forth your petition now, as opposed to, say, two years ago or one year ago.”
Olympia looks at Tucker and then takes in the entire courtroom before her — Judge Littlefield, the clerk, the bailiff, the Bolducs, Mr. Sears. What she says now, Tucker has told her, may be everything.
“My child was stolen from me,” Olympia says. “I have suffered greatly with this loss. I have thought about my son every single day since his birth and have wanted him with me. But until recently, I was not of an age nor was I in the proper circumstances to petition for the child’s return to me. Nor did I even know where he was, as this knowledge was kept from me all these years.”
Tucker nods encouragingly. And it occurs to Olympia then that something is profoundly missing from these proceedings. The boy himself. Her son. Though she would not wish him here, would not wish him to have to listen to any of this testimony, the event seems patently hollow without him.
“But I do not seek to have the child returned to me simply because I wish to have my ‘property’ restored,” Olympia says. “No, I believe that I shall be a good and loving mother for the boy, that I can offer the boy certain advantages in terms of comfort and education that are not normally available to all children.”
The intensity of Albertine Bolduc’s angry stare is almost more than Olympia can bear. She tries to focus only on Tucker’s face, his spectacles.
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“Mr. Tucker, my heart aches for the loss of my son,” Olympia says with unfeigned passion. “Our separation has been unnatural and painful. I pray that the court will redress the terrible wrong that has been done both to me and to the boy and that we will one day be reunited, as God and Nature have meant us to be.”
Albertine Bolduc closes her eyes. Telesphore, who still has his arm around his wife, glares at Olympia with what can only be hatred. Tucker stands motionless, allowing Olympia’s words to settle over the courtroom.
“No further questions, Your Honor,” Tucker says, taking a seat. And then Addison Sears is standing. “Your Honor, I have some questions I should like to put to the relator.”
“Yes, Mr. Sears, proceed.”
The portly Mr. Sears takes his time shuffling his notes as he approaches Olympia. It is so cold in the chamber that for a brief moment, Olympia can see the lawyer’s breath.
“Good morning, Miss Biddeford,” Sears says, not even looking at her, but rather at his notes.
“Good morning,” she says in a low voice.
Sears glances sharply up at her. “I think you will need to speak up, Miss Biddeford, or the court will not be able to hear you.”
And immediately, she understands that he is setting a pattern of scolding, of chastising the child. She raises her chin. “Good morning,” she repeats in a louder and clearer voice.
“Miss Biddeford, are you or have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“And if you were to receive custody of the boy, you would, of necessity, be forced to care for him as an unwed mother. Is this not true?”
“Yes,” she says simply.
“Miss Biddeford, you have told the court that before arriving at 367
Fortune’s Rocks you were at school. But is it not true that directly before coming to Fortune’s Rocks, you were in fact in the employ of Averill Hardy of Tetbury, Massachusetts, and not, as you have said, at the Hastings School for Girls?”
The deliberate misnaming of the school is not lost on Olympia, nor, she imagines, on the judge. “Yes,” she says, “that is true. But as it was a summer work-study program administered by the Hastings Seminary for Females, it was considered part of my education at the seminary. It took place under the auspices of the staff there.”
“Yes, quite,” says Sears. “You were employed as governess to Mr. Hardy’s three sons, is that not correct?”
“Yes.”
“And is it not true that on twelve July of last year you abandoned this post? That you left these three boys without a tutor and did not even tell them you were leaving?”
“The circumstances were such that . . .”
“Did you not in fact leave Mr. Hardy’s employ under suspicious circumstances?”
“Your Honor.” Tucker is standing. “Mr. Sears is not allowing the witness to finish her answer.”
“Mr. Sears.”
Addison Sears makes a show of bowing slightly to the judge. When he turns back to Olympia, he is smiling. “I apologize for my small interruption, Miss Biddeford. Doubtless I am too eager to discover the truth. Please, by all means, finish your answer.”
But Olympia cannot finish her answer. For while Tucker and Sears have been sparring, the bailiff has responded to a knock on the courtroom door and has opened it. Phillip Biddeford, his overcoat dusted with snow, his bowler in his hand, stands at the threshold. He seems flustered, disturbed by his surroundings, as if unable to read them immediately. And then he catches sight of his daughter 368
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in the witness box with the judge towering over her, and this sight must appear to him so unnatural, so wrong, that he pales and actually brings a hand to his chest. Olympia leans forward as if she would go to him, realizing only then how utterly confining the witness box is, a small and temporary prison. She cannot go to her father, nor can she even speak to him. And worse, she will have to continue to answer Sears’s hideous questions with her father in the room. The bailiff leads Mr. Biddeford to a bench. Tucker, who has leaned around in his seat in an unsuccessful effort to signal to Biddeford, turns back again to Olympia. But it is Sears who has the floor.
“Please, Miss Biddeford. I believe the question was: ‘Did you not abandon these three boys with no explanation and without even bidding them farewell?’ ”
Instinctively, Olympia reaches for the locket inside her blouse and touches it through the cloth. “Mr. Hardy made unwanted and improper advances toward me, and I thought it prudent, for my own personal safety, to leave at once. It was hardly a situation I could explain to Mr. Hardy’s three sons.”
“I see. So you found yourself once again involved in an improper amorous relationship.”
Tucker leaps to his feet, furious this time. “Objection!”
“Miss Biddeford’s moral character is a relevant issue,” Sears says quietly, as though he has anticipated Tucker’s consternation.
“Your Honor, in describing Miss Biddeford’s interactions with Averill Hardy as a relationship, and, moreover, an amorous one, counsel is mischaracterizing the witness’s testimony,” says Tucker heatedly. “Miss Biddeford was molested by Mr. Hardy — not the other way around.”
“Do we not agree that this is a matter Miss Biddeford might clarify for us herself?” Sears asks. 369
“Yes, the court agrees,” says Judge Littlefield. “In future, Mr. Sears, you will put appropriate boundaries around your questions.”
“Yes, Your Honor, I shall.”
Sears bends a finger under his nose as if lost for a time in deep thought. Then he turns suddenly in Olympia’s direction.
“Miss Biddeford, when did your sexual relations with Dr. Haskell begin?”
The bluntness of the question not only stuns Olympia but also seems to startle Tucker, who looks sharply up from his notes. Neither has prepared for such a frontal attack. Despite Olympia’s best intentions, and Tucker’s advice, Olympia glances down into her lap. My God, she thinks, I cannot have my father listen to this. I cannot pos- sibly answer these questions in front of him. She looks up and silently implores Tucker to do something.
Tucker, either seeing the desperation on Olympia’s face or having similar thoughts of his own, stands. “Your Honor, counsel for the relator requests that Mr. Phillip Biddeford, the relator’s father, who has just arrived, be removed from the courtroom during this sensitive questioning of his daughter.”
Littlefield nods. “Bailiff, please show Mr. Biddeford to another room, where he can await a summons or” — Judge Littlefield checks his pocket watch — “a recess.”
Olympia watches as her father is led away, and it seems to her that he has to lean on the bailiff ’s arm for support. Sears returns his attention to Olympia.
“The question, once again, is, ‘When did your sexual relations with Dr. Haskell begin?’ ”
“On July fourteenth, 1899.”
“And what was the nature of these sexual relations?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” says Tucker from his seat. “Does the witness have to answer this abhorrent question?”
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“Objection sustained,” Littlefield says. “Mr. Sears, the court will not countenance such questioning of the witness.”
“Miss Biddeford,” Sears says, “where did you meet Dr. Haskell for the purpose of this sexual congress?”
“At his hotel.”
“This would be the Highland Hotel of Fortune’s Rocks?”
“Yes.”
“You went to his room?”
“Yes.
“This is a room he occasionally shared with his wife when she came to visit on weekends?”
“I believe so,” Olympia says, wondering how Sears can possibly know such facts.
“Would it be accurate to say you initiated these relations?”
Olympia thinks a moment. It is a question she has long pondered herself. “Yes,” she says finally.
“And you were aware Dr. Haskell had a wife and children?”
“Yes.”
“You had, in fact, met this wife and children and had dealings with them?”
“Yes.”
“They were, indeed, guests at your house from time to time?”
“Yes.”
“On how many occasions did you engage in sexual congress with Dr. Haskell?”
“I do not know.”
“More than a dozen?”
“Possibly.”
“Did you always go to the hotel?”
“No.”
“Where else did you go?”
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“To a building site.”
“To a building site?” Sears asks incredulously. He turns away from Olympia and glances at Albertine and Telesphore.
“Dr. Haskell was building a cottage,” Olympia adds.
“At Fortune’s Rocks?”
“Yes.”
“And you engaged in sexual congress with him in this half-built cottage?” Sears asks.
“I have already said that I did.”
The tension of Sears’s inquisition is producing an excruciating headache at the back of Olympia’s neck. For how long will these terrible questions go on?
“Miss Biddeford, at the time you were engaging in these reprehensible acts, did you consider your actions wrong?”
“I considered it wrong to harm Catherine Haskell,” she says. “I did not consider it wrong to love John Haskell.”
“Catherine Haskell being Dr. Haskell’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“Do you now consider your conduct during that time to have been sinful?”
“No, I do not.”
“Truly, Miss Biddeford? Do you attend church services?”
“I have done so.”
“When was the last time you attended a church service?”
“Last June,” she says.
“I see. That would be eight months ago. Will you, if you are given custody of the boy, then consider your conduct sinful?”
“Your Honor,” says Tucker, again on his feet. “The witness cannot know how she will feel at some future date.”
“Mr. Sears.”
“Let me put the question another way, Your Honor. Miss Biddeford, how will you explain the circumstances of your son’s birth to 372
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him when he is of an age to understand such things — if, indeed, such unnatural acts can ever be understood?”
“I shall explain them in the way I would hope Albertine Bolduc would explain them. That is to say, I shall tell my son the truth.”
Shaking her head, Albertine whispers to her husband.
“Miss Biddeford, have you ever contacted the child?”
“No.”
“Have you shown any interest in his welfare?”
“I have put this petition forward.”
“In any other way?”
“I have had interest in the boy ever since he was born.”
“Have you indicated any such interest to any other person prior to moving to Fortune’s Rocks in July of last year?”
“No.”
“Have you ever met the child?”
“No.”
“Miss Biddeford, do you love John Haskell still?”
The question is swift and clean, a blade slicing to the bone. But Olympia does not hesitate in her answer. “Yes,” she says at once, and it is the first time during the proceedings that Addison Sears himself looks at all surprised. He takes a drink of water. “Can you possibly now foresee a day when you might repudiate, in the interests of your child, your love for John Haskell?” he asks.
Tucker is on his feet, but Olympia is answering the question.
“No,” she says in a clear voice. “It will never be in the interest of the child to repudiate my love for John Haskell.”
“Your Honor, I have no further questions.”
•
•
•
Olympia meets her father during the noontime recess in a small chamber to one side of the courtroom. He falters and has to use his hands on a table edge to pull himself upright. It has been only eight 373
months since Olympia last saw her father, but he seems scarcely familiar to her. His face is chalky in color, and he appears to be frail; and she does not know if this is a result of his shock in the courtroom, at the sight of his daughter in the witness box, or of age. Perhaps her father is unwell. When she embraces him, she kisses him, even though it is not their custom.
“My dear,” her father says.
They clasp each other’s hands, the kiss having unleashed a torrent of feeling in Olympia. They sit in the leather chairs at a library table. Tucker stands discreetly at the door.
“Must you go through with this, Olympia?” her father asks.
“I will have my son restored to me, Father,” she says. “But I am distressed at the thought of the anguish this is causing you.”
“I do not have anguish if you do not,” he says. “And I no longer care about scandal. You should know that your mother did not agree to my . . . disposing . . . of the boy in the manner I did. She was most upset with me. And now . . . Well, I can hardly speak of now.”
“You have told her?”
“Yes, of course. I felt I must. She is bound to hear of it. Olympia, please let me help you. I wish to make amends. I shall stay here as long as I am needed. I will tell you, however, that I am bound to testify, for I have been summoned.”
“Do so, Father,” she says. “Tell the truth. It can only help me.”
“You must need money.”
Olympia sits up straighter and glances over at Tucker. “Mr. Tucker has been kind enough to defer all fees until such time as I can pay him.”
“Well, that is a matter Mr. Tucker and I shall settle between us,”
her father says. “You must not try to be so independent, Olympia. It is not good for the heart.”
And she thinks, as she gazes all about her father’s face and his coat, 374
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rumpled and wet from his journey, that of course her father has wisdom about some matters.
“Father — ,” she says, but she cannot finish her sentence, for the door opens. Judge Levi Littlefield enters the room.
“Oh, excuse me,” he says. “I did not realize anyone was in here.”
Littlefield, who appears considerably smaller without his robes, seems for the first time to see the other person in the room.
“Phillip,” he says, advancing.
Olympia’s father stands. “Levi,” he says, putting out his hand.
“I am sorry you have had to appear in this matter. You came last night?”
“This morning.”
“And missed the brunt of the storm, I hope?”
“Just.”
“Well, I shall leave you to your conference.”
With a small nod in Olympia’s direction, and hesitating only slightly, Littlefield backs through the door.
“You and Judge Littlefield know each other,” Tucker says to Phillip Biddeford.
“A matter of pigs straying into the orchards and creating a general nuisance, as I recall,” Olympia’s father says. “Levi settled the matter with considerable grace and wit.”
Olympia remembers the invasion of the pigs from the Trainer farm. Six years ago? Seven?
Tucker smiles. “I imagine it was one of the more amusing matters to come before the court.”
“I daresay it was.”
“Father,” Olympia says, “let us take Mr. Tucker to lunch, and ascertain as well that you have a room at the hotel. There can be no thought of your journeying back to Boston until this weather has turned fine again.”
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“Olympia,” her father says, turning to her, his face having regained some of its color. “I have missed you so very much.”
•
•
•
Counsel for the relator calls Phillip Arthur Biddeford to the stand:
“Mr. Biddeford, did you on the afternoon of fourteen April 1900
conspire to unlawfully remove the infant male child Pierre Francis Haskell from his mother, your daughter, Olympia Biddeford?”
“Yes, Mr. Tucker, I did.”
“Did you take the child yourself?”
“No, I did not. I had my wife’s personal maid take the child and bring him downstairs to me, whereupon I immediately bade my personal manservant, Josiah Hay, to transfer the child to its father, Dr. John Haskell.”
“And you had made prior arrangements with Dr. Haskell?”
“Yes, I had.”
“How so?
“By post.”
“At your instigation or at his?”
“At mine. I had written to the man through his lawyer.”
“And your agreement was?”
“That he would undertake to place the child with an orphanage. He was well suited to do this, since he had often worked with charitable institutions in Ely Falls and elsewhere.”
“Mr. Biddeford, tell the court why you made these arrangements and contrived in a clandestine manner to steal the child from your daughter.”
“I was concerned for her reputation.”
“Do you regret having done this?”
“Yes, very much so. I pray my daughter will one day forgive me.”
•
•
•
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Counsel for the respondents wishes to put questions to Phillip Arthur Biddeford:
“Mr. Biddeford. When you discovered your daughter was with child, what were your thoughts?”
“I was horrified.”
“Did you consider your daughter too young to bear a child?”
“Yes, Mr. Sears, I did.”
“Did you consider her too young to raise a child?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Your daughter was sixteen at the time?”
“Yes.”
“Did you consider her a child herself?”
“Yes, Mr. Sears, I did.”
“Did you, at the time, give any thought to the welfare of the child himself?”
“Some, yes.”
“And what was that?”
“I thought, at the time, that he would be better cared for by an institution, but now I regret —”
“We will confine ourselves to answering the questions at hand, Mr. Biddeford.”
“Yes.”
“And if you gave, at the time, some thought to the welfare of the infant child, what other concerns did you have?”
“I was concerned for the ruination of my daughter.”
•
•
•
Counsel for the relator calls Josiah Hay:
“Mr. Hay, we have heard testimony that on fourteen April 1900, you were given temporary custody of the infant male issue of Olympia Biddeford by her father, Phillip Biddeford, for the purposes of transporting the child to Dr. John Haskell. Is this true?”
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“Yes, Mr. Tucker, it is.”
“What did you then do with the child?”
“My wife, Lisette, packed a suitcase of the little boy’s things and we took a carriage to North Station and there boarded the train for Rye, New Hampshire.”
“Your wife went with you?”
“Yes, sir, she did, and she cried all the way, I can tell you.”
“Were you aware that all of this was done without the knowledge of Olympia Biddeford, who was barely conscious as a result of drugs that had been given to her during her confinement?”
“Yes, sir, and that is why my wife was crying.”
“And what happened when you got to Rye?”
“We took a carriage to Ely Falls direct. Mr. Biddeford had given us quite a sum of money for the journey.”
“And there you met with Dr. John Haskell?”
“Yes.”
“And where was this?”
“At the Ely Falls Hotel.”
“Tell the court what happened at that meeting.”
“We went up to the man’s room. I had known him from before, from when he used to visit Mr. Biddeford’s house. And we handed over the child.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then Dr. Haskell, he lets out this great cry. Oh, it is too terrible to report.”
“I am afraid you must. Tell us precisely what happened, Mr. Hay.”
“Well, he lets out this great cry, and then he puts the child on the bed and undresses it and looks it over in a tender manner, and he seems to collect himself and he tells us the child is healthy, which had been worrying my wife greatly, so she was much relieved, sir.”
“And then what happened?”
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“Then Dr. Haskell walked over to the door, where my wife and I were standing, and he thanked us, and he shook my hand, and my wife says to him, ‘You make sure that child is well placed out,’ and Dr. Haskell says that he will.”
“And then?”
“And then he asked after Miss Biddeford and wanted to know how she was and how the birth had gone, which my wife was able to inform him on, having been present through the whole ordeal. And then the baby started to cry and I handed over the suitcase and Dr. Haskell went to the child and held him, and my wife and I left the room. We spent the night in the hotel, since it was too late to start back for Boston.”
•
•
•
Counsel for the relator wishes to call Mother Marguerite Pelletier:
“You are a mother superior in the Order of the Sisters of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance, is that correct?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And, as such, you are director of the Orphanage of Saint Andre?”
“That is correct.”
“Prior to fifteen April 1900 had Dr. John Haskell ever contacted you?”
“Well, yes, the doctor had been in touch with the orphanage on several matters prior to the fifteenth of April of that year, since he was often in a position of needing to place out infants of mothers who had perished giving birth or of young girls who could not care for the infants.”
“I see. And had he been in touch with you regarding the matter of the issue of Olympia Biddeford?”
“Yes, sir, he had. Though he did not tell us the mother’s name. Only that he would be bringing to us sometime in April an infant who would be without mother or father, and would we make certain 379
that there would be a place for the child. And, of course, there always would be, since Dr. Haskell had treated so many of our children and had not ever charged for his services.”
“And did Dr. Haskell bring that infant to you on the morning of fifteen April 1900?”
“Actually, sir, it was in the afternoon of April fifteenth. He came to my office with the infant.”
“And what happened?”
“He seemed most distraught by the plight of the child and deeply concerned that it be well cared for. Although he did not tell me of the circumstances of the infant’s birth, and I did not feel in a position to ask, I did think that perhaps the matter concerned Dr. Haskell personally, since he was in such a distraught state and also because he gave the child his name. Though not unheard-of, this was unusual. And also he gave the orphanage a considerable sum of money for the child’s care. He was insistent that we place the child out as soon as possible, and he charged us with finding the infant a household with two parents.”
“And then what happened?”
“He kissed the boy on the forehead and gave the child to me.”
“And did you place the boy out as you had been charged?”
“Yes, sir. We placed the boy with Mr. and Mrs. Bolduc.”
•
•
•
Counsel for the respondents wishes to put questions to Mother Mar- guerite Pelletier:
“Mother Marguerite, did you have occasion last August to meet the relator in this case?”
“Yes, Mr. Sears, I did.”
“Can you describe for the court that meeting?”
“She came to my door wanting to inquire about a certain child. I 380
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believe I quickly ascertained that the child in question was hers. She gave me some facts about her situation.”
“And what fact led you to discover that her child was the infant child Dr. Haskell had left in your charge on fifteen April 1900?”
“She told me the name of the father.”
“I see. And then what happened?”
“I left her in my office and went to have a discussion about this matter with Bishop Louis Giguere, who is also one of the directors of the orphanage.”
“And what did you and Bishop Giguere determine?”
“We determined that we would tell the young woman that her child had been in our care but had been placed out to a loving couple. We also decided to tell the young woman the first name of the boy, but not his surname.”