Fortune's Rocks (6 page)
Olympia is greeted and spoken to and queried early in the meal, a mild flurry of attention that she has learned to expect and respond to. When the guests have asked all the obligatory questions, and the fish chowder has been exchanged for escalloped oysters, she will be left to listen to the others, which is the part of the meal she enjoys best.
She forms quick judgments about the guests. She sees that Zachariah Cote, in his conversation and in his gestures, is too eager to please her father, who has not yet decided whether to publish the poet’s verse. And she finds that this particular display of eagerness, as it inevitably will be under such circumstances, is more pathetic than charming. She prefers the rather gruff demeanor of Rufus Philbrick, in his odd striped suit, with his sharp-tongued replies to her father’s queries. For these in turn produce joviality in her father, since he knows his evening will contain at least a modicum of wit. Olympia’s mother seems to drink a great deal of champagne and not to touch her meal, and periodically Olympia’s father glances over at his wife or lays his fingers briefly on her hand. Olympia knows that he hopes his wife will excuse herself early in the evening before she begins to disintegrate. Catherine Haskell, in a dress of heliotrope crepe de chine, which dramatically sets off her blond and silver hair, responds politely to queries from the men and gravitates protectively toward Olympia’s mother, complimenting her with apparent sincerity on the masses of miniature roses on the table and asking her opinion about the advisability of the girls’ boating in the marshes in the morning.
John Haskell is seated at the far end of the table, and from time to time Olympia can hear his voice. It seems that the men, including Haskell, are relating to Cote, who is not familiar with the area, a story involving the poetess Celia Thaxter, whom her father has published often and admires. Thaxter, Olympia knows, had a peripheral, though critical, role in a local murder some twenty-five years earlier. But since this is an oft-told tale for Olympia, and a rather gruesome one at that, she lets her thoughts drift for a period of minutes until such time as the lamb medallions and the rice croquettes will be served and good manners will once again compel the guests to include her. She is informed enough this summer on some subjects to enter into conversation if invited to do so, a fact that her father knows; and it is possible that at any moment he might demonstrate the education of his daughter by drawing her into a debate about American liberalism or Christian social reform. But that night she observes that her father, too, seems to be more than usually animated, almost flushed, and she thinks this must somehow be attributable to the double beauty of Mrs. Haskell and her mother, and the further doubling — no, quadrupling — of their handsomeness in the double mirrors over the buffets. Indeed, Olympia discovers, as she looks around the table, that all of the men are well positioned in regard to the double mirrors and thus are recipients of an infinite multiplication of the charms inherent in a certain tilt of a head, a long throat leading to a cloud of silver and gold gossamer, a smile quickly bestowed, a slight furrowing of the brow, the drape of pearls upon a white bosom, the fall of a strand of hair that has come loose from a jet and diamond-studded comb. And she, too, is deeply attentive to these charms, as an apprentice will be to a carpenter or a smith. But when, in the course of her drifting thoughts, she glances over at the opposite end of the table, she sees that John Haskell is gazing not at the charms of his wife or of Rosamund Biddeford, either in the flesh or in the double mirrors, but at her.
There is no mistaking this gaze. It is not a look that turns itself into a polite moment of recognition or a nod of encouragement to speak. Nor is it the result of an absentminded concentration of thought. It is rather an entirely penetrating gaze with no barriers or boundaries. It is scrutiny such as Olympia has never encountered in her young life. And she thinks that the entire table must be stopped in that moment, as she is, feeling its nearly intolerable intensity.
She bends her head, but perceives nothing, not the fork in her hand, the lace at the sleeve of her blouse, nor the lamb medallions on her plate. When she raises her eyes, she sees that his gaze is still unbroken. She cannot, finally, keep the bewilderment from her face. Perhaps because of her confusion, which must suddenly be apparent, he turns his head away quickly toward her father, as if he would speak to him. And it is then that her father, doubtless startled by Haskell’s abrupt attention (or possibly unconsciously aware of the man’s gaze in his daughter’s direction), says to the assembled group, “I have given Olympia John’s new book to read.”
The silence that follows is more dreadful than any untutored comment she might have uttered in its place, a silence in which her father and his guests wait for her to speak, a silence during which she risks turning her father’s pleasure into disappointment. So that after a time, he is compelled to say, with the faint echo of the schoolmaster in his voice, “Is not that so, Olympia? Or perhaps you have not yet had time to glance at Haskell’s essays.”
She raises her chin with a bravado she does not feel and says to John Haskell rather than to her father, “I have read nearly all of the essays, Mr. Haskell, and I like them very much.”
She breathes so shallowly that she cannot get air into her lungs. Another silence ensues, one that, as it unfolds, begins to annoy her father.
“Surely, Olympia, you can be more specific,” he says finally.
She takes a breath and lays down her fork.
“The form of your essays is deceptively simple, Mr. Haskell,” she says. “You appear to have written seven stories without judgment or commentary, yet the portraits, in the accretion of detail, are more persuasive, I believe, than any rhetoric could possibly be.”
“Persuasive of what?” asks Philbrick, who has not read the essays.
“Persuasive of the need to improve the living conditions of millworkers,” she answers.
John Haskell looks quickly at Philbrick, who does, after all, own a number of boardinghouses in Rye, as if to ascertain whether the man will be offended by further discussion of the topic. But Haskell doubtless also sees, as she does, the small smile on her father’s face, a smile that indicates to her that perhaps his insistence that she speak about the book is, in fact, part of his plan to engage in lively debate. Haskell then turns from Philbrick to Olympia. She prays that he will not say that she is too kind in her comments, for she knows that to do so will be to dismiss her entirely.
“Your portraits are raw and have passages that are to me both illuminating and difficult to read,” she continues before he can speak, “not in their language but in the images they create, particularly as regards accidents and medical matters.”
“This is quite true, Olympia,” her father says, beginning slightly to recover his pride in his daughter.
“I think it would be the rare reader indeed who could come away from those portraits unmoved,” she adds.
“Your perceptions would seem to belie your age,” Rufus Philbrick interjects suddenly, appraising her with keen eyes. She finds she does not mind the frankness of his gaze.
“Not at all,” her father says. “My daughter is exceptionally well schooled.”
“And what school might that be?” Zachariah Cote asks, addressing her politely. Olympia does not like the man’s sudden smile, nor the exceptional length of his side-whiskers, nor, more important, the way in which the conversation has turned to her rather than to the work of John Haskell.
“The school of my father,” she says.
“Is that so?” asks Rufus Philbrick with some surprise. “You do not attend classes?”
Her father answers for her. “My daughter went to the Commonwealth Seminary for Females in Boston for six years, at which time it became painfully apparent that Olympia’s learning was far superior to that of her instructors. I removed her and have been schooling her at home instead; although a year from now, I hope to enroll her at Wellesley College.”
“Have you minded?” Catherine Haskell asks quietly, turning in her direction. “Being separated from other girls your age?”
“My father is a gifted and kind teacher,” Olympia says diplomatically.
“So you know a great deal about the mills?” Rufus Philbrick asks John Haskell.
“Not as much as I would like,” he answers. “One of the disadvantages of creating portraits to tell one’s story is that they seldom allow the writer to reveal a full historical perspective, and I fear this is a major flaw of the book. I think that understanding the history of any given situation is critical to comprehending it in the present. Do you not agree?”
“Oh, I think so,” Olympia’s father says.
“In the early days of the mills,” Haskell continues, “when the workers were mostly girls from Yankee farms, the mill owners took a benevolent attitude toward their employees and felt obliged to provide decent housing and clean infirmaries. The girls were housed two to a room and were fed communally three times a day in the dining room. In many ways, the boardinghouse was a home away from home, something like a college dormitory. There were libraries and literary societies for the girls, for example, and concerts and plays and so on. A young woman could be said to have had her horizons broadened if she went into the mills.”
“Even so, I have heard,” says Rufus Philbrick, “that the girls worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week, and to ruin one’s eyesight or to become diseased was not uncommon.”
“This is absolutely true, Philbrick. But my point is that when the Yankee girls began to go home and were replaced by the Irish and French Canadians, conditions deteriorated rapidly. These immigrants have come in families, large families that are forced to crowd into rooms previously meant only for two. The original housing cannot sustain such a large population, and the sanitary and health conditions have broken down. It is only in the past several years that progressive groups have begun to take on the cause of better housing and clinics and care for children.”
“I have heard something of these progressive groups,” Zachariah Cote says, looking around at the assembled group.
“Last April,” says Haskell, “I and several other physicians from Cambridge journeyed up to Ely Falls and conducted a survey of as many men, women, and children as we could cajole into participating. The inducement, seven dollars per family, was sufficiently appealing that we were able to examine five hundred and thirty-five persons. Of these, only sixty could be considered to be entirely healthy.”
“That is an astoundingly poor ratio,” Olympia’s mother says.
“Yes, it is. The boardinghouses, we discovered, were riddled with disease — tuberculosis, measles, white lung, cholera, consumption, scarlet fever, pleurisy — I could go on and on. I have already gone on and on.”
“One of the difficulties, John, as I understand it,” says Olympia’s father, “is that some of the immigrants do not have strong cultural opposition to child labor. The Francos, for example, see whole families as
working
families, and thus they try to evade the child-labor laws by having the children do piecework at home, sometimes, depending upon how desperate the family is, for fourteen hours a day in a room with little or no ventilation.”
working
families, and thus they try to evade the child-labor laws by having the children do piecework at home, sometimes, depending upon how desperate the family is, for fourteen hours a day in a room with little or no ventilation.”
“What sort of piecework?” Catherine Haskell asks.
“The children sew or baste or rip out stitches,” her husband explains. “Simple, repetitive tasks.” He shakes his head. “You would not believe these children if you saw them, Philbrick. Many are diseased. Some are stunted in their growth and have ruined their eyesight. And these children are not twelve years old.”
The conversation pauses for the contemplation of this startling fact that must be properly digested before the talk can continue. Olympia pokes at her rice croquettes. With the fleeting bravery that comes of being encouraged in conversation, she once again addresses John Haskell.
“And something else, Mr. Haskell,” she says. “There is a fondness in your portraits. I think you must bear these workers no small amount of affection.”
John Haskell responds with a small but distinct smile in her direction. “I had quite hoped that such affection would be apparent to the reader,” he says, “but it seems to have escaped the notice of my reviewers entirely.”
“I believe the critic Benjamin Harrow is better known for his gravity than for his good humor,” says her father, smiling.
“I wonder if these are not, strictly speaking, something other than essays, John,” says Zachariah Cote, still trying to find a way into the conversation, which has been moving along well enough without him.
“They are not essays in the strictest sense, to be sure,” says John Haskell. “They are profiles only. But I like to think the details of a life form a mosaic that in turn informs the reader about something larger than the life. I have drawings as well of these workers, which I commissioned and which I should have liked to have included in my book, but my publisher persuaded me that pictures would detract from the seriousness of my work, and so I did not — a decision I regret, by the way.”
“I regret it as well,” Olympia says. “I, for one, would very much like to see drawings of the people you have written of.”
“Then I shall oblige you, Miss Biddeford,” he says.
And Olympia can see, in the quick turn of her mother’s head, that she has perhaps been too bold with her request.
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