Fortune's Rocks (20 page)

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Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Boston (Mass.)

BOOK: Fortune's Rocks
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Olympia drops the pages of the letter onto the floor. She covers her face with the skirt of her dress. She sits in that posture for some time.
Never has she read such a letter. Never. Nor understood so well its meaning, nor felt that she might, apart from its specific history, have written it herself.
She releases her skirt. With an impatient tug, she unties the sashes of her bonnet.
My God,
she thinks.
What have we done?
There can be no doubt now that she has set in motion a series of events that cannot be recalled, that she has trespassed unforgivably upon a man and his family, upon a father’s trust and a woman’s kindness. The only remedy is to cause Haskell to forget her, so as to blunt the edges of this madness. A derangement she herself feels and for which she must now hold herself accountable.
She will never see the man again, she vows, nor permit him to see her. And if he comes to her house, she will absent herself.
How reckless she has been, how selfish, caring only for her own happiness when the greatest possible consequences were at stake. She knows that she would lose her father forever were he to discover her clandestine actions, that never again would he trust her.
She lies back upon the bed and digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. She lies looking at the ceiling for some time, and perhaps because she is exhausted, she sleeps.
She wakes with a start and sits up. She walks over to a table where there are a basin and a pitcher of water kept at the ready. She pours water over her head and face, soaking her hair. She dries her face and scrutinizes herself in the mirror.
And as quickly as tinder igniting, she forgets her earlier resolve. Her desire to see Haskell is so keen that she consciously has to fend off the urge to bend over, as though she had received a blow to the center of her being.
At the very least, she thinks, she and Haskell should discuss the questions and sentiments contained within his letter. Do they not owe it to themselves at least to do that? And if it is too dangerous to speak in person, then should she not write the man a letter? Yes, yes, she should. She will do that now.
And later she will think, How cleverly the mind deceives itself. For the need to respond is never-ending, is it not? He to her, and she to him, and so on?
She does not know what time it is. She has no clock in her room, and she does not want to show herself at this moment downstairs. She peers out at the sea, to discern in the color of the water and the sky the hour of the day, but she is greeted with the same flat light as earlier. Is it afternoon? Has she missed lunch? And if so, why has she not been summoned? She tries to dry her hair as best she can, brushing it and repinning it. She finds paper and pen in the drawer and sits down to write.
My dear sir,
And already I am tongue-tied, speechless (what is the equivalent of speechlessness when it be pen and paper and not the tongue?) for I cannot call you sir, nor John, which is the name that others (and I am thinking here of Catherine) give you, and in my thoughts, as I have said to you, you are always Haskell, so let me amend my greeting, and though the name may sound too formal, it is, I assure you, not at all, not in my thoughts of you, which are constant.
My dearest Haskell,
How far we have traveled in just a few short hours, hours spent not even in each other’s company, but alone with our own thoughts and words, however inadequate they may prove. I meant, upon reading your letter, which I appreciated all the more for its spontaneity and its unfinished circumstances, to insist that we not see each other again, nor communicate, nor allow ourselves to be in each other’s company, regardless of the formality of the event. And I meant to do this by not responding to your letter and by severing all that is between us with one fierce blow. But I find that I cannot. There is no part of me that can possibly hold to that resolve. Indeed, I find that I want nothing more than to be with you.
I was at first, I must confess, horrified by your letter, deeply stricken that we had gone so far, and I mean not only in the physical manner that overtook us yesterday but also in the even more consuming realm of the spiritual, which appears to have seized us and will not let us go. I wish to say to you that I am at least as responsible for what happened yesterday as you, and that no matter what happens between us, or what dreadful pass we many come to — for what good outcome can there be? None, I fear, as you do, none — I will never feel myself seduced. I do not have age, but I have will and some understanding, and though the event was new to me, I comprehended it and embraced it and could have stopped it at any point. Even now I can write truthfully that I luxuriate in the memory of yesterday, and though these memories are but faint echoes of the actual, they are treasures I would not willingly part with. The image of you is imprinted upon me as is the light upon photographic paper. I know already that no other human form shall ever be so dear.
(And yes, it was I who disturbed the photographs upon your bureau. But you knew that at once, did you not?)
Yours is the greater anguish, for you are married to a good woman. And though I share that anguish whenever my mind’s eye lights upon her face, I know that you must bear the heavier burden, for I cannot know what you know, what you have had with her all these years. (And the sin is knowing that we harm her, is it not? Not simply that we lay together for those moments, but that in writing even these words, we do her conscious, incalculable harm?)
I so very much admire your work. I could not be a physician, for though I have interest in the body, I do not have the courage to face daily the threat of ugliness and death. Nor, curiously, do I have much respect for physicians of the mind, as I feel the soul to be so private a place as to resist invasion. I do sometimes think I should like to be a writer of stories or of verse, though my skills are wanting, and I am not sure what good such an endeavor would serve. I am not yet persuaded of the glorification of art over other endeavors requiring skill and craft. Is there not more good, and therefore more value, in a simply constructed chair? Or a well-made coat? Surely, your poor Rivard woman might think so. I admire you as a writer, but I admire you more as a physician, the skill and kindness of which I have had ample demonstration.
Yes, come to my father’s ill-conceived gala. Come. Write my father that you will come. (And do I not now seal my fate with my greatest sin, encouraging the continuation of what we have begun, and worse, in the presence of Catherine and my father, whom we would so willingly betray?) But I cannot, in truth, write that I wish you not here. I will not speak to you beyond the expected, nor cause your wife any distress. I will be content merely to gaze upon you from a distance and know that once we were together in the most intimate of ways. I take pleasure already in imagining the silent words we shall exchange.
Know that in all things I am yours.
She reads and rereads her letter and disciplines her untrammeled thoughts with punctuation and legible cursive. She seals the note, wondering next how best to deliver it. And then she quickly conceives a plan to send it with Josiah. If Josiah should happen to mention his mission to her father, Olympia can explain by suggesting that she felt too unwell to deliver the earlier note herself and finally had to send Josiah to the Highland.
That decided, she leaves her room in search of the man. Checking her appearance for visible signs of the storm that earlier overtook her, she descends the front stairs and listens for clues as to the hour. Her father must be either asleep or in his study, she concludes, moving along the passageway to the kitchen, where she hopes to find Josiah engaged in not so great a task that he cannot be persuaded to deliver her letter. Thus it is that she moves silently through the swinging door and comes upon an extraordinary sight.
She is, for a critical second — the second during which she might have backed unseen through the door — unable to read precisely what she has inadvertently stumbled upon. She sees an indecipherable creature, half standing, half sitting, with limbs wrapped round the body in an improbable position, a flurry of clothing in disarray, a double-image of white globes of flesh, a head thrown back, the smile a rictus on the face. And then, in the next instant, propelled already inside the room, she parses the image and sees that the standing figure with his back to her — but now the face is turning toward her, the body unable to cease its thrusting — is Josiah, and that the limbs around him in a swath of stockings and petticoats are the legs of Lisette. The twinned (and then twinned again) globes of flesh are the buttocks of the man and the breasts of the woman, respectively; the rictus smile the strain of pleasure upon Lisette’s face.
The act of love, as Olympia experienced it with Haskell just the day before, was fluid, seemingly a sinuous movement of the flesh. But now, seen with the shocked eye of the unwary observer, the act appears at best comic and at worst brutal, so that nothing of love or tenderness is necessarily conveyed, only the animal-like coupling of two fleshly creatures. She thinks at once of the animality of birth, which also belies its sacred context and its beauty.
Olympia leaves the room, knowing that they have seen her. She leans against the pantry wall and feels the shame that attends the inadvertent voyeur, the shock of interrupting such a private act. Though, curiously, she does not feel horror. And she is grateful that her own knowledge of the event has come as a result of having been with Haskell and not from the sight of the ungainly creature in the kitchen. For she might have been — and who can say for how long? — put off by the notion of physical love altogether.
She holds her letter still, which she tucks into her sleeve. She walks out onto the porch for air. She guesses then that her father must be away, for Josiah would not risk such an incident were he in the house. And then, suddenly, it is all around her: the realities of the body. As she surveys the sea, she comprehends, with the shock of associative leaps, that her mother and her father, too, have shared such a physical life, and that they do still. That her mother’s rooms are so overtly feminine and sensual because
her father likes them that way.
She can see her mother’s silk nightgown laid out upon the bed each evening, the wisteria satin sheets, the candles at the bedside table, the pots of incense and the many vases of flowers, the elaborate coiffures and toilets of her mother’s evenings, and the lengthy absences of her father when he takes her mother up to her room after the evening meal. If Haskell and Josiah are sexual beings, then so, of course, are her father and mother.
Unwilling to imagine further that which should not be contemplated by a daughter, Olympia steps away from these thoughts, simultaneously catching sight of a group of boys playing with a ball on the beach. Seized by an idea, she goes up to her room, fetches some coins from her purse, and walks down to the seawall. She calls to the tallest of the boys, who runs in his short pants, his hair dried stiff into comical sculptures by the salt water and sea breezes, to where she stands.
“I want you to take a letter for me,” she says. “To Dr. Haskell, who is at the Highland Hotel. Do you know it?”
“Yes, miss.”
“And here are some pennies for your trouble. I wish it to be delivered now.”
“Yes, miss. Thank you.”
She hands the boy the letter and the coins and watches as he sprints along the hard sand near the water, his form and posture very like those of Mercury himself.
D
READFUL FIRE
last night in Rye. Have you heard?”
“A fire?” Olympia asks. She crouches on the floor of the porch, trying to unfasten the clasp of the mahogany case that holds the telescope her father ordered from New York for her sixteenth birthday. He intends for the instrument to be set up so that she might have excellent views of the sea and bird life, although privately Olympia suspects that her father and his visitors will use it more often than she, and that when they do, they will turn the instrument in the direction of the summer houses that curve in a shallow half-moon along Fortune’s Rocks.
But she is having trouble with the latch.
“Here, allow me,” her father says, bending and trailing the tails of his coat along the painted floorboards.
“You said a fire?” Her mind is only half on her task and hardly at all on her father’s words.
“Terrible fire. The Centennial Hotel. An ark of a building, long past its heyday. I am told one could not open a window for fear the glass would fall out. The bellhops had to bang on the pipes with a hammer to make the guests believe that the steam heat was coming up. There, you have got it now.”
She lifts from its case a brass and wood telescope, complete with collapsible tripod and several extensions. Her father, who seldom revels in material possessions, seems like a child with a new toy at Christmas. Immediately, he stands up and begins to try to assemble the instrument. But, like his daughter, he is impatient with instructions and therefore doesn’t read them; and in the end it takes him twice as long to set up the new device as it might have had he studied the enclosed sheet.
“It burned within an hour,” her father says. “A tinderbox. They all are. The guests smoke and fall asleep, or the fires start in the ovens. It is the fourth hotel this year to burn.”
“Not one of Mr. Philbrick’s, I hope,” she says.
“No, Rufus has been lucky. Olympia, help me with this. Why are you just sitting there staring out to sea?”
Perhaps she sighs or makes a sound of exasperation.
“Honestly, Olympia,” her father says. “I do not understand what is wrong with you. You have become so . . . so . . . I don’t know. Addled. Tell me this is not permanent.”
“You will need a wrench,” she says.
She leaves her father briefly and walks through the house to the kitchen in search of tools, which are in a chest in the back hall. It is true she is distracted. Not only has she had no reply to the letter she sent Haskell the day before but she also has no way at all of ascertaining if he has even received it. She supposes it is possible that the boy to whom she gave the letter simply threw it into the sea and made off with the coins.
“Father, I think we should install a telephone,” she says when she returns with the wrench.
“Whatever for?” he asks. “One comes away on holiday precisely to be free of such inventions.”
“We might have an emergency. We did have an emergency. We might have telephoned people to come and help us.”
“As I recall, we had quite a lot of help, and apart from the loss of life about which you and I could do nothing, we managed rather well under the circumstances.”
Olympia reclines on the hammock and watches her father, who is not particularly mechanically minded, assemble the telescope. She thinks it better not to interfere, since two mechanically inept people will inevitably be worse than one. When he finally has the optical device put together, he peers intently into it and adjusts some knobs. He exclaims at the view.
“Olympia, here, you must see this.”
She walks over to the telescope and puts her eye to the glass. At first she cannot read what she is looking at. She steps back for a moment and sees that she has the telescope focused on the post of the porch railing. Bending again, she swings the instrument up and out, and then, adjusting a knob, watches as a moving blue mass becomes the sea, a white blur a seagull, and a blot of red a fishing boat bobbing in the water. The view from the telescope is strange to her eye: She can see only highly detailed and disorienting circles within the larger reality, and it is sometimes hard to keep the whole in mind. She thinks there must be some adjustment necessary, since the picture keeps wavering in and out of focus and making her feel woozy. But when she turns the telescope in the direction of the beach, she is rewarded with the sight of the Farragut summer house with its weathered shingles, its misshapen wicker rockers, and its soft expanse of screens at its windows. She sees Victoria’s mother sitting in a corner of the porch, an open window through which two white tails of curtains whip in the shore breeze, and a clothesline to one side, where pale blue sheets and pillow slips billow out and then collapse. Leaving the Farragut cottage, Olympia maneuvers the telescope slowly along the waterfront, scanning each summer house, noting certain features she has not been able to perceive from ground level — the shapes of the roofs or the number of gables — until eventually the instrument rests upon the facade of the Highland Hotel. For a time, she studies the hotel’s porch, its long front lawn, and even the windows of certain rooms she has an interest in. There are many persons about, but since she cannot see the figure she is looking for, she deduces that Haskell must be at the clinic or still in his rooms. Thus it is that she is doubly startled to hear her father say, right behind her, and with some surprise and pleasure, “Well, hello, John.”
Haskell, in a wheat-colored suit, stands in the doorway, holding his boater in his hand. For one terrible moment, Olympia thinks he has come to tell her father of their affair and that he has brought her letter as evidence. But as soon as she sees Haskell’s eyes, and their particular mix of anguish and anticipation, her fear gives way to reason. He walks forward and takes her hand in greeting.
“Olympia,” he says, “it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“And to see you,” she says.
He lets her hand go reluctantly.
“Your father has been keeping you busy.”
“I was just commenting to Olympia that she seems abnormally distracted this summer,” her father says.
Haskell searches her face. “On such a lovely perch,” he says, “I should be more than mildly distracted myself.”
As good manners require, Haskell turns his attention to the telescope. “But what do you have here, Biddeford?”
“It arrived today,” her father says with some pride.
“Handsome instrument,” Haskell says. “May I take a look?”
He bends and peers out at the view, adjusting the focus to his own eyesight.
“This has excellent resolution, Biddeford,” he says. He swings the telescope farther down the beach and adjusts a knob. “May I show you something? Come and see, Olympia.”
She walks to where Haskell stands, and peers into the glass. She is aware of him hovering over and behind her and feels his leg press slightly against her own. It is some moments before she can focus properly, but when she does, she can make out the wooden skeleton of a beach cottage. It is perched atop a hillock of dunes and is surrounded with sand and cut grass. It will be, she sees, a large house with its own deep porches. A wide gable has been framed and already holds in its center a massive round window with many small panes. She wonders whose room that window will one day belong to. To Martha’s? To Haskell and his wife’s?
Olympia looks up and moves to one side. Her father takes her place and studies the house. “Beautifully designed, Haskell,” he exclaims. “Truly. And the builders are making quite a progress. They still anticipate finishing by the first of August?”
“I am told they will be a week late,” Haskell says. He twirls the boater in his hands. “Why do you not come with me now to see the house, Biddeford? If you can spare the time, I have several questions I could use some advice on.”
Clearly flattered and pleased, Olympia’s father, in the next instant, looks crestfallen. “Damn,” he says with evident disappointment. “I should have loved to have visited the site with you, John, but I have promised myself to my dentist. Damn. If only I could reach him . . .”
“If we had a telephone, Father . . . ,” Olympia says, unable to resist a smile.
Her father clears his throat. “My daughter is of the opinion that we should install a telephone at Fortune’s Rocks, but I have tried to explain to her that one comes away on holiday precisely to ignore such instruments.” He shakes his head. “No, I cannot go with you,” he adds.
“Another time then,” Haskell says politely.
“But Olympia would love to go,” her father says suddenly to Haskell, as if she were not even present on the porch. “In fact, it would be an excellent diversion for her,” he adds. “She has not been herself of late and could do with an outing.”
Haskell catches Olympia’s eye. “I would be honored to show her the site,” he says. “If you think she would not become too bored.”
“I doubt I should become bored,” Olympia says quietly.
“Then that is settled,” her father says wistfully. “And I hope you have also come to tell me, John, that you and Catherine will attend the gala we are having. Did I write you that it is in honor of Olympia’s sixteenth birthday?”
The reminder of Olympia’s age in both Haskell’s and her father’s presence sends, for a moment, a slight tremor into the air that Olympia thinks even her father must notice, for he looks first at Haskell and then at her.
“An important milestone, surely,” Haskell says. “Of course, I must ask Catherine first before I can commit us to the event.”
“Hale will be here,” her father announces proudly.
“Hale,” Haskell says, looking at Olympia as if he cannot remember why he knows the name. “Hale,” he repeats. “Yes, of course.” There is a pause. “Olympia, shall we go?”
• • •
He helps her up into the bottle green carriage.
“I could not stay away,” he says. He climbs up beside her. “I inhaled your letter. If I could, I would have you write me every day.”
“I
shall
write to you every day then,” Olympia says. “But you must promise to destroy the letters.”
“I am not sure I will be able to do that.”
“Then I will not write them, because I will not take the chance that they might be discovered by Catherine.”
“Well, then, I will tell you I will destroy them, but actually I will not,” he says.
And she cannot help but smile.
Haskell does not take them along the coast road, as he suggested to Olympia’s father he would, but rather veers immediately onto the Ely road. The tide is low, and the marshes are gullied out for as far as Olympia can see. The mud makes miniature cliffs and canyons within the larger labyrinth. When the two of them are out of sight of the house, Haskell draws abruptly to the side of the road.
“I have something for you,” he says.
He takes a tiny velvet box out of his pocket and opens it. She is not prepared for the locket, an exquisite gold oval with her initials delicately engraved on its surface.
“I cannot,” she says.
“Yes, Olympia, you can. I want you to.”
The gold shines warmly in the sunlight.
“There is so little I can give you,” he says. “Please accept this. Let me have the pleasure of knowing that you wear it.”
He turns her shoulders so that he can fasten the clasp behind her neck.
“I shall never take it off,” she says, turning back.
“I know that you cannot allow others to see it,” he says. “But you can wear it like this.” He slips the pendant beneath the collar of her dress. She can feel the gold falling between her breasts. He rubs the back of his finger against the cloth where the locket has fallen. And perhaps it is that intimate gesture, that one gesture out of a hundred gestures, that makes the tears come into her eyes.
“I meant to make you happy,” he says, pulling her toward him. “Oh, Olympia, this is all wrong for you.”
She draws away from him and dries her eyes. She sniffs once. “The question of whether or not what we do is wrong for me is irrelevant,” she says, unwilling to repudiate what they have so recently won. “Of course it is wrong for me. More so for you. It is wrong altogether. But I thought we had agreed not to squander our joy by chastising ourselves.”
Her hat falls backward and tumbles into the grass. He laces his fingers through the bun of her hair and draws her head back so that her throat is exposed. She is twisted, contorted on the wooden seat, and her skirt is already rucked up to her knees. Their embrace is awkward, and he cannot reach her from the side. He jumps down from the wooden seat, takes her hand, and leads her into the marshes.
Together, they sink to their knees, the tall grass bending beneath them, and he pulls her farther down so that they are lying together on their sides, facing each other. He struggles out of his jacket and slips out of his braces. He unfastens the front of her dress while she pulls his shirt from his trousers. The cloth billows out like a parachute. She slips her hand up the length of his chest, and it seems the boldest touch of her life.
Nearby, she can hear the low whomp and flutter of a bird’s wing beating against the water. Something sharp digs into her side. The sun is so blinding, she has to shift his face over hers to shield her eyes. She wants to say the word
beloved
aloud. She hesitates, then does so — once, then twice, then three times — the word emerging in gasps, as if she were being pummeled.
Olympia,
Haskell whispers into the side of her hair.

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