by Anita Shreve
“No,” she says, struggling for breath. “No.”
She is thrilled, tremulous with the event. The sun moves and makes a hot oblong of light on the topaz sateen puff, so oddly unmasculine, a spread similar to her mother’s. All around them is the soft cotton of overwashed sheets — almost silky, almost white — and beyond these the austere mahogany of the carved furnishings: the wardrobe, the bed, the side tables. There are a man’s garments strewn upon a chair and on the floorcloth, which has been painted to resemble a rug. She looks up at the pattern on the sage tin ceiling.
Only near the end, just at the end, does she feel a quickening within herself, the barest suggestion of pleasure, a foretaste of what she will one day have. Oddly, she understands this prophecy, even as she hears for the first time the low hush, the quick exhalation of breath, and knows that the event is over.
His weight, which has been great upon her, becomes even heavier. She thinks he does not understand that he will crush her. She shifts slightly beneath him, and he slides away. But as he does so, he pulls her with him, nestling her within the comma that his body makes, as one might cradle a child, as, indeed, he may have nestled his own children. She arranges herself to fit within his larger embrace.
For a time, Olympia listens to his breathing as Haskell dozes in and out of consciousness, a particular form of sleeping that she will come to treasure over time, to feel privileged to witness.
He wakes with a start.
“Olympia.”
“I am here.”
“My God. How extraordinary.”
“Yes,” she says.
“I will not say that I am sorry.”
“No, we must not say that.”
She moves so that she can see his face.
“I feel different now,” she says.
“Do you? It is not just . . . ?”
“No.” As though she can never return to the girl she used to be. “I did not even know enough to wonder about this,” she says. “I did not have any idea. Not the slightest.”
“Are you disturbed . . . ?”
“No. I am not. It seems a wondrous thing. To become one. In this way.”
“It is a wonder with you,” he says. “It is with you.”
“I should go,” she says. “Before the maids come.”
And he seems sad that she has so quickly learned the art of deception. “Not yet,” he says.
They lie together until they hear footsteps in the corridor. Reluctantly, Haskell stands up from the bed, trailing his hand along the length of her arm, as though he cannot physically bear to remove himself from her. He dresses more slowly than he might, all the while watching her on the bed. Only when they hear voices in the hallway — native accents, chambermaids — does he collect himself and finish dressing more quickly. He leaves the room for a time and returns with a cloth, which he gives to Olympia. She feels the sudden incongruity of Haskell with his clothes on while she lies naked.
“You will need this,” he says, bending to kiss her.
Discreetly, he walks into the sitting room and closes the door so that she can dress. When she climbs out of the bed, she sees, on her legs and on the sheets, what the cloth is for. It shocks her, all the blood. She did not know. But he did. Of course he did. He knows everything there is to know about these matters, does he not?
He reenters the room as she is fastening her boots. She stands and turns to him across the bed, and as she does so, she realizes that she has not covered the stain. He opens his mouth to speak, but she waves her hand to silence him. There is a decorum to the moment, an action called for, though she is not certain what it should be. She is not embarrassed, exactly, but she does not want to discuss it. No, surely, she does not want to discuss it. Reaching down, and without haste, she brings the topaz puff up to the pillows and covers the discoloration. And she is certain that they are both at that moment remembering the childbirth they once witnessed together.
They walk together to the door. There is shame, she thinks, in his having to remain behind while she goes out. It is difficult to speak. She is glad that he does not feel it necessary to make plans to see each other again. She understands that it will happen of its own accord because now they cannot be apart.
He kisses her at the door. She leaves the room and steps into the corridor. All around her are the sounds of conversations, as though the rest of the world has come awake: the high-pitched voice of a woman, insistent, making points; the low snide chuckle of a man. The air has changed and has brought with it the smell of oranges. Behind her, she hears Haskell shut the door.
Her legs feel weak as she descends the stairs. She wonders what Haskell will do with the bloody flannel and the sheet. She catches sight of herself in a mirror in the hallway and is startled to see that her mouth is blurred and indistinct. Unwilling to go out the back door like a thief, she decides to brave the lobby, but when she walks across it, she knows that a dozen pair of eyes inspect her. She guesses that the desk clerk wonders what she is doing there, when she was to have taken Dr. Haskell to see the Rivard woman. Hotel guests, who have come down for breakfast and are waiting for their companions by the door of the dining room, glance at her as she walks by. Servants eye her as they cross the lobby to and fro with folded linens in their arms. She makes her way out to the porch, where she stands for a moment by a wicker chair, recovering her strength, unwilling yet to test her legs on the steep set of stairs. The sun is well up, but the light is muted. In the distance, she can see fishermen in their lobster boats checking their buoys.
“Miss Biddeford?”
Startled, Olympia turns. There must be an expression of fright on her face, for Zachariah Cote puts out a hand to steady her.
“I did not mean to scare you,” he says.
The sight of the poet, in a gray silk waistcoat, the furtiveness of the man emphasized in the way his sudden smile appears to have nothing to do with his eyes, is like an apparition from a universe she has left behind and does not want to reenter.
“I see you in the strangest of places,” he says amiably.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asks, moving a step backward.
He takes a step closer to her. “I am sure it was you, on the night of the Fourth, in a carriage by the side of the road? In the marshes?”
He cups an elbow in the palm of his hand and rests his chin on his knuckles. He studies her in an altogether impertinent manner, and she suddenly feels more naked than she did in the bedroom moments earlier. Indeed, his gaze is so frank and his smile so calculating that she wants to slap his face.
“No, it cannot possibly have been,” she says.
“Then I am mistaken,” he says, though he does not seem repentant. “But whyever are you here?” He makes a show of looking at his pocket watch. “It is so awfully early still. I am just about to go in to breakfast. I have had a walk. Will you join me?”
“No, I cannot,” she says.
He raises an eyebrow. She leaves him standing there. She discovers the stairs and heads in the direction of the sea, which is turning a dove gray as a result of a thickening cloud cover.
OLYMPIA’S FATHER normally takes his breakfast in solitude or, if there are others present, immersed in a book he holds beside his plate. But on the morning after Olympia’s visit to Haskell, her father looks up at her as she enters the breakfast room, and he continues to observe her as she takes her place and spreads her napkin over her lap. Though she wants to, Olympia cannot ask him to discontinue his stare, for that would be not only to acknowledge the unusual but also to speak to him in a manner that is not acceptable. Instead, she says good morning and pours herself a cup of tea. When she dares to glance up at him, she understands that his is not an angry stare, but rather one of some bewilderment, as though he needed to reassure himself that the girl before him is not, as it would appear, an imposter.
“Olympia, you look peaked,” her father says, halting a forkful of shirred egg in its progress to his mouth. “You are well? You worry me sometim
es. I was particularly concerned when you did not come down for supper last night.”
“I am fine,” she says, eyeing the food before her. She is now ravenous, and the raspberry cake looks particularly appetizing. “You distress yourself too much. Really, Father, I am fine. If I were ill, I would say so.”
He takes a sip of tea.
“Well, you always have been a sensible girl,” he says. “That is a pretty dress.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“By the way, I am thinking of having a gala partially in honor of your sixteenth birthday.”
“A gala? Here?”
“Your mother and I are very proud of you, Olympia, and I have high hopes for your future.”
Though the word future strikes an uneasy and discordant note within her, she nods in her father’s direction. “Thank you,” she says.
“And also I have had a letter from the Reverend Edward Everett Hale. He says he may come to visit at that time. We shall have a dinner and dancing. I have in mind the tenth of August. About a hundred and twenty? Many of the summer people from Boston, of course, and Philbrick and Legny. Yes, that would be a treat. Which means I shall require you to finish Hale’s sermons before the event. You have, of course, read ‘Man Without a Country. ’”
“Yes, Father.”
“And I shall invite the Haskells as well, since I know that John is most eager to meet Hale. Haskell’s cottage is to be finished by that date, or so I am to understand. John cannot much appreciate hotel food each meal, regardless of how well prepared it is.”
“The tenth is less than four weeks away,” Olympia says.
“Yes, not much time at all. Invitations will have to go out the day after tomorrow at the latest. You and I will have to put together a guest list later this afternoon. Your mother will help us with writing out the invitations, I am sure.”
“Yes, of course,” Olympia says.
Silently, she regards her father’s plans for a gala with both dread and excitement. Dread, because it will be painful and awkward to be in public with Haskell and not be able to be with him. Excitement, because any opportunity to be with each other, even if in public, seems desirable.
“If there is someone of your own you would like to invite . . . ,” her father offers. Once again, he examines her face, which she hopes gives nothing away.
“No, there is no one,” she says.
He nods. “I must write a note and send it. Yes, Josiah must take a note to Haskell, for I need to know whether the date is suitable for him and Catherine. I doubt John would ever forgive me if I had Hale here on an evening when he could not make it. John and the reverend share, I believe, an abnormally keen interest in motorcars.”
“Let me take it,” Olympia says impulsively. “I should welcome the walk.”
They both simultaneously turn to look through the windows at the weather, which is not particularly fine. But she knows her father will assent to her suggestion, since he is nearly as keen a believer in her physical education as he is in her intellectual one.
“Yes,” he says. “A walk is just the thing after a hearty breakfast. But leave the note at the desk. I should not like Haskell to think I am reduced to relying upon my daughter for my errands.”
“Of course,” she says, overbuttering her second piece of raspberry cake. Her appetite will not be appeased.
“A remarkable man, do you not think?” her father asks.
“I like him very much,” she answers.
“I meant Hale,” he says.
• • •
A shallow cloud cover prevents shadows and causes the landscape to take on a flat aspect that is unrelieved by color. Perhaps no palette in nature, Olympia thinks as she walks along the beach, is as capable of transformation as the seashore. Just two days earlier, the water was a vivid navy, the beach roses lovely blots of pink. But today, that very same geography is bleached of color, the sea now gray and the roses dulled.
She walks with her father’s note in her pocket and her boots in her hand. She is imagining how pleased Haskell will be if she takes the note to his room. But then she has another thought: Might he not be offended, or engaged elsewhere? She does not know his schedule, nor yet know his routine.
There are few people on the hotel porch, one a woman knitting, who smiles at Olympia when she climbs the steps, and another a governess with a small child. Olympia pushes through the door to the lobby, takes the note out of her pocket, and hands it to the clerk behind the desk, who is, fortunately, a different clerk than was there the day before.
“Oh, Dr. Haskell is it then?” the clerk asks, reading the envelope. “He is just breakfasting in the dining room, miss. . . . I will have it sent in straightaway.” He signals for the porter and gives the man the note.
“Thank you,” she says.
She walks out onto the porch and lingers by the railing. She fastens her eyes on the ocean, though she sees nothing. She hears Haskell’s footsteps behind her before he speaks.
“This is more than I could have hoped for,” he says quietly. He is dressed in a blue shirt with a gray linen waistcoat. His hair is wet and still bears its brush marks.
Olympia turns. Haskell takes an involuntary step toward her and puts a hand out, as if he would touch her, but then stops himself just in time. Although he does, Olympia thinks, give himself away in the very next moment by glancing over at the woman who is knitting.
“Olympia,” he says.
She cannot call him by the name that she has heard his wife use so endearingly.
“You were about to leave,” she says, noting his coat and satchel.
“I have to be at the clinic.” He walks closer to her. “I have thought of nothing but you,” he says in a low voice only she can hear. “It is an agony to be so distracted. Yet it is an agony I wished for. That I cannot deny.”
There is much she wants to say to him, but she cannot think how to form the words.
He misunderstands her long silence.
“You are sick at heart,” he says. “It is why you have come.”
“No,” she says, feeling a flush of confusion upon her face. She finds it difficult to meet his eye, and suddenly she is acutely aware of her youth, her naïveté. But she also knows that if she allows herself to think of the damage done, she and he will both be lost, that what they have so recently begun will be tainted. “No,” she repeats. “I am not sick at heart. I have joy in my heart, and there is no room for anything more.”
He glances again in the direction of the knitting woman, who is now unraveling her progress. He takes Olympia’s elbow and guides her down the steps. She willingly follows his lead. They walk around to the back of the hotel and stop at a small enclosure. There is a bench, a bicycle leaning against it. They are alone, though still visible from the hotel. They sit on the bench.
He trails his fingers along her skirt from her knee to her hip and lets them linger at the top of her thigh. She puts her hand over his. A chambermaid walks by the opening of the enclosure.
“This is madness,” he says, reluctantly removing his fingers. For a time they sit in silence. After a few moments, he remembers the note from her father.
“What is this about a gala?” he asks, taking the note from his pocket. “It is your birthday?”
“Not that day,” she says.
He reads the note through again, and then puts it away. She thinks he does not want to be reminded just then of her age.
“Of course, you cannot . . . ,” Olympia says.
“But I will have to tell Catherine of this, for she will hear of it anyway,” he says. “She will want to come. There will be many instances perhaps . . .”
“It is too far away,” Olympia says. “I cannot think about it now. Your cottage will be completed, my father says.”
He nods.
“I should like one day to see its progress.”
He looks at her in a strange manner. “I cannot speak of normal things with you, Olympia, not in the normal way. It is a
s though I have lost the habit of normality overnight. The only subject I wish to think about and speak about is you. And why should we remind ourselves of a house in which I will have to live without you?”
“Because it is real,” she says. “Because it will happen.”
And he seems surprised that already she has thought of the end. “If I had any honor, I would send you away. If I cared for your honor.”
His statement rattles her. “What does honor matter in the face of this?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Nothing, nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all. You amaze me, Olympia.”
She looks away. A fog is rolling in along the back lawn.
“I have written a letter,” Haskell says. “I did this for myself yesterday afternoon. It was not written for you to see. And it is not finished yet, it is merely scribblings. I never thought to give it to you, but now I want to, however imperfect it is.”
He reaches into his satchel and removes an envelope. He holds it a minute and then hands it to her. He looks at his watch. “I have to leave you now. I am due at the clinic.”
A boy comes into the enclosure and shyly deposits his bicycle. He must be a busboy, Olympia thinks, or a stable hand. Perhaps this is the employees’ garden.
Haskell stands abruptly. “I wish it were not this way, Olympia,” he says heatedly. “I wish it were I who could come to you.”
Olympia stands with him.
“It is not worth wishing for what we cannot have,” she says.
• • •
Olympia walks with deliberately slow steps along the waterline and through the fog, which is thickening, to her house. She slips as quietly as she can up to her room. But once inside the door, she tears the envelope open. In years to come, she will remember this moment as a somewhat comical scene: her sitting on the bed in a heap, her hat not yet removed, tearing the envelope to bits.
She reads:
14 July 1899
My dearest Olympia,
If ever a man felt his spirit dissolve and meld into another’s, it was with you this morning. Why that should be so, I cannot say. This affair we have begun is disastrous for more reasons than I can even begin to enumerate. You are so young, and I am not. You have your entire life ahead of you, which I know that I have damaged irreparably. Forgive me, Olympia. No, do not. One cannot ask for forgiveness for that which one does not regret; and I cannot, as a man and as a lover, regret the precious moments I have been allowed to spend in your presence.
