Fortune's Rocks

by Anita Shreve

  Curiously, during this period of time, whenever they have visitors to the house or she happens to observe Josiah going about his chores or her father reading, she begins to notice certain masculine characteristics that she has not ever observed before — or never knew she observed: the inch or two of skin that sometimes will show itself between a man’s cuff and his wristbone when he reaches for a door, for example; or the graceful languor of men standing casually with their hands in their trouser pockets; or the way the power, the heart of the body, seems to reside just below the midpoint between the shoulders. And she is certain that though she has actually seen such masculine attributes before — that is to say, physically absorbed them with the eye — they have not previously produced conscious thoughts as they do in abundance during this spate of rainy days.

  On the afternoon of the sixth day, Olympia is knitting in her room, an activity that is producing in her only a benumbed stupor. To rouse herself, she decides to make herself a cup of tea. As she descends the carpeted steps, she hears masculine voices from her father’s study. She halts in her progress, her heel poised against the riser, listening intently to discern the speakers. One voice, of course, is that of her father, and there is no mistaking the other. They are talking about a book of photographs.

  Taking deliberate breaths, Olympia continues down the stairs and walks, with deceptively casual posture, into her father’s study, as if merely looking in to see who the company is. Her father glances over at her. He stops his speech mid-sentence. Haskell, whose back has been to her, turns. After a brief heartbeat of hesitation, he advances with the perfect manners of a gentleman and takes her hand.

  “Miss Biddeford,” he says, “what a pleasure to see you again.”

  “I trust you know my daughter well enough to call her Olympia,” her father says cheerfully enough (and with what agonizing irony for both Haskell and Olympia he cannot know).

  “Olympia, then,” Haskell says pleasantly.

  He has a bowler in his hand. She can see tiny droplets of water on his overcoat. His boots are stained black from the wet in a semicircle around the toes. His hair has been somewhat flattened by the hat, and his face is flushed, as though he had been running. In the crook of his arm is a book, perhaps the excuse for his visit.

  How cunning, how capable of deceit, they show themselves to be in these few minutes as they speak the sentences of a ritual long practiced, drop their hands at precisely the right moment, and turn ever so slightly in the direction of Olympia’s father so as to include him in their greetings. Her father, who seems particularly pleased to see Haskell, whose company he genuinely enjoys and whose work he honestly admires, immediately insists that Haskell stay to tea.

  “I was just going into the kitchen to make a pot myself,” Olympia says.

  “Excellent,” her father says. “Your timing, Haskell, is rather good. Olympia, bring it into the parlor. It is too cramped in here, and too cold for me, I am afraid, on the porch.”

  Olympia leaves their company and walks with strained poise through the dining room and pantry and into the kitchen. But once she has let the swinging door shut itself, she leans heavily with her hands upon the lip of the broad worktable and bends her head. She has shocked even herself with her deceit, with the ease of her deception.

  After a time, she rights herself, fetches the kettle from the top of the stove, fills it, and returns it to the stovetop, which is still warm from lunch. Mrs. Lock, who is recently from Halifax and who will not return to the house until it is time to prepare the supper meal, has left a plate of blueberry scones on the counter. In the larder, Olympia finds butter and jam to go with the scones and sets everything on a marquetry tray from the pantry. Then she sits down on a kitchen chair to wait for the water to boil and the trembling in her hands to subside.

  The kitchen is a large room that has been painted pale green with white trim. Along one wall is a series of windows looking out on a trellis and the back garden. Set into the wall opposite is a brick hearth so tall that Martha could stand upright inside it. The floors are wide pine boards, and Olympia notes that Mrs. Lock is such a fastidious cook that there is not a particle of pastry or flour or even dust in the cracks between the boards. Behind glass-fronted cabinets are the foodstuffs and the dishes, and in a corner is a polished oak ice chest.

  She glances down at her lap and is suddenly stricken to discover that she has on her fawn calico, a dull dress not fit to be seen by anyone but family. She wore it today because she had nowhere to be and no visitors expected. She holds the dingy material in her fists and wonders frantically how she might swap the drab frock for another. But she knows at once that she cannot change her dress; for though she could easily sneak up the back stairway to her room, it will be worse to be seen to have altered her clothing than to remain as she is. Her hair, she realizes with further dismay, patting the hastily made knots at the back of her head, is so artlessly done on this day as to be not merely plain but unkempt.

  She hears the brush of the swinging door. She turns in her chair.

  “Olympia,” Haskell says, and she stands.

  His face is at first unreadable. In the better light of the kitchen, she can see dark circles around his eyes.

  “I could not stay away,” he says.

  She puts a hand on the chair back. Haskell crosses the space between them.

  “Your father is looking for a book in his study,” he says with the careful pragmatism of the secret lover. “I said I would help you with the tray. We have only a minute, two minutes at best.”

  She touches the cloth of his coat at his chest. It is damp from the rain.

  Haskell hooks his arm around her shoulders and draws her to him with a powerful grip. She has a distinct sense of vigor. Not accustomed to feeling small, she is nearly lost in his embrace. Releasing an arm, she reaches a hand up behind his head and pulls him toward her, her actions as instinctive to her as it is to bat a fly away from one’s face. He opens his mouth, shocking her, for she has never had such a kiss. She tastes his tongue, the inner lining of his lips. Her head is tilted at an angle, and her neck is drawn long and exposed. Haskell slowly slides his mouth all along the skin there, and she shivers against him.

  And then that is all. That is all the time they have.

  He backs away, his empty hands forming a shape, his mouth seemingly wishing to speak a word. His tie has come undone, and unable to speak herself, she points to her own collar to tell him. She can feel the weight of her disheveled hair pulling itself loose. She tries to repin it as they stand there. Haskell’s face has turned an unnatural red, and her mouth feels raw.

  Her father comes through the swinging door.

  “So you have found her,” her father says amiably, looking at them but not really looking at them. “This is the volume I wanted to show you, Haskell. The photographs are astonishing.”

  He glances from Haskell to Olympia and seems puzzled by his daughter’s immobility.

  “Can I help?” he asks.

  AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with Haskell in the kitchen, they sit on the porch, surrounded by the gray brocade of an unrelenting cloud cover. Haskell converses politely with her father, and how he manages to do that, Olympia cannot imagine. It seems incongruous — beyond incongruous — to be eating blueberry scones and speaking of photography and the new century, when only moments before, she and Haskell came together in the way they did in the kitchen. And as will happen often to her this summer, she is accosted by a moment of pure astonishment that such events can possibly be occurring in her life. If she but thinks about the kiss in the kitchen, she feels a fluttering sensation in her abdomen, and her face becomes suffused with color. She experiences the reality again and again and again, a series of brief shocks upon both her soul and her body. How can Haskell and she have done that? she wonders. They who have no right to have transgressed in that manner? And yet, in the way one may hold within the mind two separate and contradictory thoughts or theories, she believes in the next moment that t
hey have no choice but to respond as they do, that what draws her to Haskell and him to her is as natural as it is to breathe.

  She awakens the next morning to an oily green sea, the surface flat and reflecting no light at all, a pond covered with scum. She has spent a restless night and is not certain she slept at all; and she wonders if her perception of the color of the ocean isn’t a result at least as much of her sleep-deprived state as of Nature’s inclinations.

  Since it is a Sunday, and her father does not consider it proper to interrupt one’s service to God with summer pleasures, Olympia knows they will all be going to church. She dresses in a benumbed state, so preoccupied that it takes her nearly twice as long as usual to complete a perfectly ordinary toilet. She descends the stairs in a distracted flurry and takes her cloak and bonnet from Josiah. He tells her that perhaps the sun will break through the cloud cover before the day is over. He is dressed for church himself and adds that he will be accompanying them.

  “Your mother and father are in the carriage already,” he says, looking at her oddly. “You are not unwell, I hope?”

  “No, Josiah, I am well enough,” she says, burying her hair within her bonnet and grateful that the hat’s wide brim will hide the confusion on her face. At the doorway, he extends his arm, and she is relieved to have someone at this moment to lean upon.

  It is a modest brown-shingled church with its trim painted in yellow ochre. It has a tall, wooden spire above its single gable, and atop that is an unadorned cross that is visible from all of Fortune’s Rocks. At fifteen, Olympia has not yet suffered any crises of faith, but neither is she devout. God and his commandments, as interpreted by man, are for her primarily social and familial obligations. When at church, she does sometimes enjoy the sense of calm that will occasionally spread across the congregation, and the music is appealing to her. But more often than not, she finds herself restless in that darkened sanctuary, wishing she were out-of-doors.

  The roads are muddy, and the journey is slow going. The cold seeps in at the sides, and the four of them sit huddled, heads bent, against the unseasonable elements. They enter the church and move to their customary pew. All about them is the smell of wet wool, the sound of cloaks being snapped to shake off the damp. The windows are arched and leaded and stained a dark red and a brownish gold. The gloom they create is dispelled only by the candles in the sconces on the walls. It is as if it were already night in the church, the faces and forms of the parishioners at first hard to discern. The pulpit, of carved cherry, is suspended from a chain in the vaulted ceiling. More than once, as a child, Olympia imagined the links of the chain giving way and crashing the pulpit and its minister to the floor, these unkind fantasies more a result of childish restlessness than a comment upon the quality of the sermons.

  They sit quietly, none of them speaking, each engaged in separate reveries. Olympia thinks neither of her parents particularly devout as well, but who can ever truly know the extent of faith in another, she thinks, faith being among the most intimate and well guarded of possessions? Thus, it is not until the choir begins the processional that Olympia happens to glance to her right, past the straight-backed and uncurious form of her father, and sees who is sitting in the pew opposite theirs. Perhaps a small sound escapes her then and penetrates her father’s composure, for he glances quickly at her. But she is saved from a question by the need to rise for the hymn.

  It has been only a glance: a hat with a brim that all but hides a mass of silvery blond hair; a kid glove with a pearl button; a child’s small boot swinging back and forth; the strain in the fabric of a blue cotton smock as a shoulder is turned to the side; the cuff of a trouser leg, wet at its hem; and above that a perfect masculine profile with no beard or mustache. He must have seen her, she thinks at once. He must know that she is there. It must have been Catherine, then, who quite innocently allowed herself to be led by the usher to the seat opposite Olympia’s father, whom she doubtless plans to greet when the service is over.

  Olympia sits as still as wood, determined to give nothing away. The excessive stiffness of her posture must in some small measure betray her, however, for her father glances at her again and again. But he does not speak, church etiquette requiring his silence.

  If ever Olympia is conscious of another person in a room, aware only of another’s physical presence — though there are at least a hundred other people in the congregation — it is that morning, during that hour and a half when she might pray, might ask for guidance, might vow to banish Haskell from her thoughts. But though she makes an attempt to speak to God, she cannot, not for the white noise inside her head, nor for the unwillingness of her soul to relinquish what it has so recently gained. And though she yearns for a glimpse of the man, it is enough just to see, from the corner of her eye, the cloth that drapes his leg, the movement of his foot.

  Later, Olympia will believe that it was during that hour and a half, in that brown and ochre church, with all their families around them, with a congregation of witnesses, that she came to understand that she and Haskell would one day have a future. And that she would not put up any impediment to its unfolding.

  • • •

  Catherine invites them to lunch at the Highland, an invitation so genially proffered that even Olympia’s mother cannot hide her pleasure at the prospect of a diversion from the claustrophobic imprisonment of the weather. In fact, Mrs. Haskell exclaims, having almost certainly planned the wording of the invitation during the pastoral prayers, they needn’t return home at all; they can simply follow the Haskells to the hotel. This is all said and done in the center aisle of the church, while Olympia stands gazing fixedly at an uncharacteristically lurid depiction of the Last Supper. It would not be proper of Haskell to speak to her then; and he does not, nor she to him. But once, as they are moving to the nave, she catches his eye in the turn, and the gaze is so intimate, so knowing, that she colors immediately, a fact he cannot fail to notice.

  Olympia takes it as an omen that the sky has brightened during the hour and a half they have been inside, that the west wind, now palpable, has blown out nearly all of the clouds, which form a line one can watch as they make their way out to sea. The week of constant rain has left the world shimmering with droplets on every leaf, every blade of sea grass, every beach rose. On the way to the hotel, the sheen on the rocks is so ferocious, Olympia can hardly bear to look.

  At the Highland, they pass through the glass-paned front doors to a cavernous lobby with a thirty-foot-long mahogany desk; and from there to the dining room that is so large, it might accommodate a thousand diners. Set as it is for Sunday lunch, with its starched linen, polished silver plate, and clean white crockery, the dining room seems, upon entering it, an ocean itself of welcome, so far removed from the gloomy interior of the church they left just minutes earlier. And she wonders why it is that the men who design places of worship do not consider more often the appeal of light and beauty in their architecture.

  Catherine, in her role as hostess, seats Olympia with her mother to one side and Martha to the other, as though Olympia were neither woman nor girl, but rather inhabited some world in between. Their posture and gestures are formal, as befits a Sunday dinner, but the meal is infused with warmth and even gaiety; and it may be that the current which Olympia knows passes between her and Haskell, who sits at the head of the table, is drawn off in part by the others. Catherine invites Josiah to dine with them, but he excuses himself immediately on the grounds that he deeply desires a walk along the beach and with it the rare opportunity to take the fine air after so long a confinement. Were it not for Haskell’s presence, Olympia would have ached to join him.

  Olympia listens to the light banter that accompanies the settling in to a meal.

  Catherine, you are looking well.

  I am well now that the sun is out.

  Has Josiah gone?

  Mother, must I sit next to Randall?

  And so you say you have not received your supplies yet?

  Those ar
e lovely pearls.

  I thought it was rather a brilliant sermon.

  And who was the soloist?

  I understand they do a marvelous lamb here.

  Do they?

  Glancing at her from his end of the table, Haskell seems more an attractive stranger than someone with whom she has been intimate. And it strikes Olympia then as astonishing how willing we are to give our hearts — and indeed our souls — to someone we hardly know.

  Olympia notes that more than one person entering the dining room turns to look at Catherine and Haskell together, the dark and the fair, Catherine no longer hiding with her hat the loveliness of her face or the silvery gossamer of her hair. Idly, as Olympia watches them, Catherine reaches over to her husband and smooths a tendril of hair behind his ear, a wifely gesture that causes Olympia to have to look away. And she thinks that Haskell himself cannot be unaware of the irony of suffering such a caress in her presence.

  Around them is an agreeable clinking of silver against china, of ice rattling in goblets, of the low murmur of gentle and even animated discourse. Through the windows, which are sparkling with a vinegar wash, is the ever present surf — a steady rumble occasionally punctuated with the calling and cawing of seagulls.

  Her father monopolizes Haskell’s attention, which is, Olympia thinks, a relief to both Haskell and her. Catherine, buoyed by her own good spirits or perhaps simply the joy of the sunshine after so many days of gloom, keeps her mother in continuous conversation — no easy task, although even she seems infected with conviviality.