by Anita Shreve
And in years to come, Olympia will ask herself if she did not, in fact, enter into a kind of love affair with Catherine Haskell, if her curiosity about the woman and about the years she had with John Haskell that Olympia did not, years in which marriage vows were made and celebrated, children were born and treasured, a marriage bed was entered and left a thousand times, did not constitute a twisted form of love itself, a love that could never, by its very nature, be returned or sated.
• • •
Olympia makes the decision to go down to supper and confronts the reality of her unkempt appearance in the mirror over the dresser. Although they have a laundress at Fortune’s Rocks, Olympia does not have a personal maid (nor does she in Boston), since her father believes self-sufficiency in matters of dress and personal hygiene to be an essential part of the education of a young woman. Nor does he approve of vanity in a girl, and to that end he has urged Olympia to keep her toilet and her wardrobe as uncomplicated as possible, without straying into the realm of the eccentric. It would appear that this schooling in simple taste applies only to his daughter, however, and not to his wife: Her father seems pleased with her mother’s lavender-blue silks and navy voiles and also with the elaborate and time-consuming coils and combs of her hair. Olympia’s mother, of course, does have a personal maid, who is Lisette.
Olympia has never minded her father’s admonitions to her on the subject of dress and appearance, for she has grown accustomed to caring for herself. Indeed, she thinks she would find it distasteful to share, for the purposes of maintenance only, the intimacies of her body. That being true, however, she does have an unpleasant half hour in her room, discarding one dress for another, bewildered by a modest assortment of jewelry, and unsure of whether to let her hair down or keep it pinned up, both choices seemingly fraught with underlying resonance: Is she a girl or is she a woman? Is this supper a casual event or is it more formal? Would her father like to see her with her hair down but her mother with it up? Olympia settles for loose hair with a ribbon and a navy blue and white linen dress that has about the bodice rows of white piping that suggest a sailor’s collar. But just as she is about to leave the room, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and she is somewhat horrified to see that she resembles more an overgrown schoolgirl than a young woman about to attend a supper party on the evening of the summer solstice. Frantically unfastening the buttons of the bodice and pulling the offending dress over her head, she selects from the clothes on the bed a white handkerchief linen blouse and a long black wool challis skirt with a high-fitted waist. She tears the equally offensive ribbon from her head and begins to pin her hair into a high knot. Her hair at this time of year, before it has collected its summer highlights, is oak-colored and heavy and requires an extraordinary number of hairpins to secure it in place. Even so, she finds she has to allow loose strands to wander to her shoulders, or she will miss supper altogether. Prudently, she decides not to glance at her appearance in the mirror as she leaves the room.
• • •
She hears muffled voices in the direction of the porch and so takes a detour to the dining room, unwilling yet to enter into conversation. Since it is the first supper party of the season, the table has been more elaborately set than usual, with cloisonné china, her mother’s cut-crystal goblets, and masses of miniature cream roses strewn seemingly haphazardly, but with her mother’s artful eye, upon the white damask of the tablecloth. Dozens of candles, in sconces and in candelabra, have been lit and are reflected in double mirrors over two opposing mahogany buffets, so that everywhere there seems to be an infinite number of yellow-warm flickering lights. As it is still only dusk, she can see, through the large screens at the windows, hedges of beach roses that border the south side of the lawn, and beyond them the orchards. The air through the screens is soft and swims over the body like a spirit making its way through the room. Olympia follows this spirit’s trail by watching the flickering flames of the candles. Beyond the door to the butler’s pantry, she can hear raised voices and the sound of metal clanging upon metal. And then she hears another sound, the sibilant rustling of skirts in the doorway.
“You must be Olympia.”
Olympia notices first, as doubtless everyone must, the wide green eyes, a green as transparent as sea glass. Catherine Haskell advances, and Olympia is surprised to discover that the woman is not as tall as she and that she has an almost imperceptible limp.
“What a lovely room,” Catherine says, removing her hat and taking in the table in a glance. Her hair, Olympia sees, is a most unusual color: a dark blond woven with a fair percentage of silver threads, so that it has taken on the appearance of gossamer.
“You must be Mrs. Haskell,” Olympia responds, finding her tongue.
“I can never get used to the gloriousness of Fortune’s Rocks, no matter how often we come here,” Catherine says, trying to twist a stray strand of hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Olympia is struck by her smile, which is not exactly a smile of self-satisfaction, but seems rather to be one of genuine contentment.
“I have been walking,” Mrs. Haskell says, explaining the hat and lifting it in her hand. She has on a green taffeta dress with many underskirts — an odd choice, Olympia thinks, for a walk. Perhaps Catherine Haskell was simply too impatient to change her clothes, as Olympia was the day before. Olympia notices that her boots and the hems of her skirts have dust on them.
“I was afraid I would delay supper,” she says.
Olympia shakes her head.
“I hope the children have not been pestering you,” Catherine says. “Have you met them? I know that Martha will have been charmed by you and will want to question you about all manner of things, and you must send her away whenever you want.”
“Oh, not at all,” Olympia says, thinking that Martha was not in the slightest charmed by her. “I have hardly seen them, except to meet them, as I have been in my room all afternoon.”
“Really? On such a fine day? Whatever for?”
Instantly Olympia regrets having confessed confinement in her room, and she sees as well that she cannot tell this woman that she has spent the entire afternoon reading her husband’s essays. Although Olympia cannot articulate precisely why at that moment, the idea feels ill-mannered and intrusive, as if she had been studying an album of private photographs.
“I have been resting,” she says.
“Oh, I hope you are not unwell.”
“No, I am very well,” Olympia answers in confusion, looking at her feet.
“Catherine,” the woman says slowly, pronouncing her name in three syllables. “Please call me Catherine. Otherwise, you will make me feel too old.”
Olympia looks up and tries to smile, but she can see that Mrs. Haskell is examining her, the eyes straying to her waist, to her hair. And then returning to her face, which she holds for a moment before glancing away toward the porch.
“Do you suppose,” Mrs. Haskell asks, “that I might have time to slip up to my room and change into another dress, one that has not been dragged along the sand and the sea moss?”
It is not really a question, for surely Olympia is not the arbiter of the supper hour. Mrs. Haskell leaves the room with the same sibilant swishing of her skirts with which she entered.
Olympia leans for a moment against the frame of the door, and as she does, she happens to see, through the screen of a window, a small seal beach itself upon a rock.
• • •
That night they are seven at dinner, with the addition of Rufus Philbrick from Rye, who owns hotels and boardinghouses in that town, as well as Zachariah Cote, a poet from Quincy who is having a holiday at the Highland Hotel. (A seventh place is hastily set for Olympia, who was not expected.) The children, having eaten earlier, have been removed temporarily from the house by the Haskells’ governess, who has obligingly taken them for an evening walk along the beach. Mr. Philbrick, a large man with pure white whiskers and beard, has on a striped jacket with cream trousers. Olympia takes h
im for a dandy as well as a man of property. Cote, whose poetry she has sampled and set aside, his saccharine and sorrowful images not to her liking, is a remarkably handsome man with dark blond hair and astonishingly white teeth, an asset he must be vain about, Olympia thinks, for he seems to smile a great deal. (And are those really lavender eyes?) Her mother, in hyacinth chiffon, with pearl combs in her hair, seems to be in an animated mood, which sets off but the faintest of alarms in Olympia’s mind, and she imagines in the mind of her father as well; for they have both known such episodes of brilliance and gaiety before and have reason to fear the collapse that sometimes follows. But such is the flickering beauty of the room with its seven diners, and with the candles reflected again and again in the double mirrors over the buffets, and with the moist air moving through the screen, air that hints of such a wealth of nights to follow that Olympia feels rich with their luxury, that she cannot be anything but exhilarated.
Olympia is greeted and spoken to and queried early in the meal, a mild flurry of attention that she has learned to expect and respond 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.”
