by Anita Shreve
Josiah, his hair matted into a comical shape, comes to the landing in his dressing gown.
“Fetch Lisette,” Olympia says.
Lisette enters the room in plaits and nightdress. She embraces Olympia and seems as excited as if it were she who is about to give birth. Since Lisette’s lack of fear and good spirits are somewhat infectious, Olympia is less apprehensive than she might be. She sits on a chair in her room and watches while Lisette changes the bedclothes. When she is finished, Olympia climbs back into bed, draws up the coverlet, and waits. It is a warm night. She asks Lisette if she has ever witnessed a birth. Lisette says yes, several times. She is the eldest of seven children, and her mother “popped them out like biscuits.”
“I have seen a birth as well,” Olympia says.
“You have? When was that?”
“When I was with John Haskell,” Olympia says, startling herself with the name spoken out loud. She has never talked of her time with Haskell with anyone, not even Lisette. “I went with him when he attended a birth. It was in a boardinghouse in Ely Falls.”
“You went into the room?”
“I saw it all. The birth was breech and the woman, a poor Franco with three other children, was nearly deranged with the pain. Dr. Haskell gave her laudanum, I think, and she quieted some. But I remember him struggling to turn the baby. He had his hands — ”
Olympia cannot go on, however, for she experiences then the first pain of her own. Rigid with surprise, she holds her breath until it is finished. When it has subsided, she lets out a long sigh.
Lisette stands above her. “You must not hold your breath,” she says. “You must breathe each time you get the pain.”
Olympia nods, shaken by the ferocity of the contraction. “Is this how it will be?” she asks.
“Listen to me,” Lisette says, drawing up a chair close to her bed. She takes Olympia’s hand in her own. “You are used to behaving in a certain way. You are very proper. You hardly ever get upset, and when you do, you keep it to yourself. But now is not the time to be proper. It is bad for the baby and for you. Do not worry about screaming with the pain. Do not worry about all the embarrassing things your body is going to do, because it is going to do plenty. Do you want me to fetch your mother?”
“No,” Olympia says. “There is no need.”
The pains come on hard then and are dreadful. Olympia is appalled, even during the first hour, which she thinks surely must be the last, since any increase of pain seems unendurable.
After daybreak, Olympia’s mother, summoned by Lisette, enters the room. She has on a blue silk dressing gown tied at the waist. Her hair is rolled back from her head with rags. “Fetch Dr. Branch,” she says at once to Lisette. Olympia’s mother wets a cloth in a basin, walks to the bed, and lays the wrung and folded towel upon her daughter’s forehead. Her face is heavily creamed and glistens in the electric-lamp light. “And I shall need hard sweets for Olympia to suck on,” her mother adds. “There are some in my room in a silver jar on the dresser.”
Olympia is mildly surprised at how easily her mother assumes the mantle of command. She holds the cloth against Olympia’s brow, even as Olympia clenches her teeth and pulls the bedclothes into knots. Lisette returns with word that the doctor is out on his rounds and will be by as soon as he can be found. When Olympia has the pains, her mother leans over the bed and pins her arms back against the bedclothes, and oddly, this seems to help. In between the pains, her mother unwinds the rags from her hair and drinks a cup of tea that Lisette has brought, and once even gets up and inspects the quilted yellow box with its tiny treasures. Thus her mother abandons her normal air of elegance and diffidence and is as involved with the mechanics of the birth as Lisette is. She shows herself to have courage and kindness and common sense, qualities that Olympia has not noticed in her in abundance before. Once Olympia emerges from a short sleep and hears her mother chatting pleasantly, even laughing, with Lisette. Despite the pain, Olympia finds their ease together reassuring. If they are not terrified, then she should not be.
The doctor comes shortly after noon, and Olympia can smell liquor on his breath. She wonders where he has been, if he has been sharing a drink with her father in his study before he came to her, though that seems unlikely so early in the day. Olympia is barely coherent, saving all her strength to withstand the hideous and constantly recurring pain. She thinks it is knowing that the pain will come again and again that exhausts her, knowing that she cannot stop it. She begs for laudanum, and Dr. Branch gives her three spoonfuls of a brownish liquid that causes her to drift in and out of sleep, only to be shocked each time she wakes to another pain and sees her mother and Lisette looming over her.
At two o’clock on the afternoon of April 14, Olympia begins to cry out. She has been in labor for thirteen hours. Dr. Branch comes into the room and is suddenly more alert than he has been before. He tells Olympia’s mother and Lisette to prop up Olympia. He then ties Olympia’s feet to the bedposts. Olympia’s mother speaks constantly to her in a soothing voice.
“I cannot do this,” Olympia cries. “I cannot do this!”
And with that pronouncement, her child, a boy, is born into the world.
• • •
And how many times will Olympia regret begging for that drug from Dr. Branch? For if she had been alert and awake after the birth, she could perhaps have stopped them from taking the child from her. In years to come, she will remember only the briefest of moments with her son: waking to the surprise of the swaddled bundle tucked beside her in the bed, turning her head to peer at a wrinkled face, unwrapping the cloths just enough to free a delicate hand. But drugged and exhausted, she cannot keep herself from sleep. Indeed, her body, if not her heart, welcomes it.
Later, she will sift these brief moments a thousand — no, ten thousand — times for one stray glint or shard of memory she may have overlooked before. She will remember wet black spiky hair, blue eyes that were purely guileless, a tiny mouth, bowed, exquisite. She never puts her son to her breast. She never sees his tiny feet. She never hears him cry. And when she wakes finally to consciousness, the drug having leached itself from her bones, he is gone.
ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1900, Olympia arrives at the Hastings Seminary for Females in the western part of Massachusetts. The village in which the seminary is located is a factory town, the factory dominating the landscape, spilling down into the streets, overtaking churches and shops and the seminary itself, so that it is not possible to say where the factory begins or ends, the buildings all dark brick, even the houses of the owners. The factory produces shoes and boots, and there are many tanneries in the town, so that even the trees smell of offal. It is immediately apparent to Olympia that her father has never visited the seminary, for if he had, the near perfection of the location as a place of punishment would have strained even his sense of justice. Surely there is no crime his daughter could have committed that warrants such an exile.
Olympia will have images of this year, months that are a dull headache at the back of her neck, but no accurate sense of its passage. Cold beef on a blue willow plate. A tapestry hung over a bed. Fastidious girls who professed to be afraid of love. Darkened brick buildings in the rain. Dreams that came and went upon a fawn-colored wall. A stuck window, swollen from the wet. A girl in challis who scoured knives. A hundred eggs for custard pies. India rubbers in the washroom and a cherry desk with a green lid. A tin of matches with a slate. A wooden porch that was overhung with elms. A girl crying in the widow closet. Stiff white sheets in the drying yard. Brown-gold carpets with peacock blue chairs. An hour of recitation followed by an hour of prayer. Pale Methodist ministers who watched girls with hoops at calisthenics. Worcester’s Elements and Goldsmith’s England. Young women sent out to foreign lands. Trunks must be packed by Sunday night.
The seminary, Olympia learns, was started by Methodist philanthropists in 1873 as a place to educate the factory girls in their off-hours and therefore had the distinction of being the first evening sc
hool in the country. When it became clear to the founding fathers, however, that mill girls had precious few off-hours (and those they did have they did not want to spend in further confinement), the seminary began to direct its recruitment to the middle classes: daughters of ministers and salesmen and schoolteachers. The theory and indeed the practice of the seminary are to educate young women so that they can be sent out to teach: to Smyrna or to Turkey or to Indiana or to Worcester or to work among the Zulus in South Africa. In addition to their teaching duties, it is hoped that the graduates might also function as enlightened and Christian models for girls all over the world. It is a measure of Olympia’s disassociation from life then that she regards such a prospect with equanimity: She is neither fearful of nor enthusiastic about further exile, all locations other than the Fortune’s Rocks of her memories being a matter of similar indifference.
At the seminary, Olympia studies Latin and geography, mathematics and biology, and other subjects with extra courses in composition, calisthenics, vocal music, dressmaking, and household husbandry. The bent is practical; true scholars are the exception. Because neither the curriculum nor its purveyors are particularly intimidating, the establishment, much to the surprise of everyone, flourishes wildly and has many more applications for admission than there are places. Olympia finds it astonishing to contemplate how many young women are willing to leave their homes, that is to say, their villages in New England, to be sent to alien territories where one might perish from loneliness or become ill from infection. And she wonders if this collective passivity is a consequence of individual personal disasters that have rendered them unfit for marriage, or of a general lack of confidence in the future.
From its central building, the school has spread like a subdued stain, taking over vacated boardinghouses adjacent to the school’s property, vying with the factory itself for turf. At the time Olympia is enrolled, from 1900 to 1903, the school owns seventeen buildings, including a gymnasium and an observatory, which has been donated by a graduate who married a Mellon. Most of the women, Olympia learns, will marry men of considerably less wealth or of no wealth at all, if indeed they marry, and not a few will remain unmarried. One woman with whom Olympia will take classes will go on to own hotels in the West, and Olympia will think of Rufus Philbrick and his predictions.
During her time at the seminary, Olympia does not have to share a room with anyone else, a circumstance for which she is grateful. (Has her father paid extra to forestall the trading of confidences with a roommate?) Her room, which is composed of a single bed with a pair of rough woolen blankets, a fireplace, a single desk, a chair, and a large window that overlooks the oval of grass at the center of the main campus, is, despite its spartan accommodations, a refuge of sorts. And since Olympia has no desire to leave or to flee this room, she begins, over time, to regard it as more of a retreat than a place of imprisonment. When she is away from it, at classes or at meals or during compulsory exercises, she thinks only of returning to its unadorned solace, where she can sit upon its narrow bed and gaze at the fawn wall opposite and see faces or imagine scenes or recall certain incidents from the past. She has left the home of nuns only to take up the habit, the habits, of the Catholic sisters. Contemplation. Meditation. Reflection. Rumination.
But not prayer. To pray is to hope, and to hope is to admit into one’s spirit the pain of hopelessness. And this Olympia is unwilling to do.
Not surprisingly, Olympia develops a reputation for reticence. For to speak of even a small part of one’s story might inadvertently lead to the revelation of another part one wishes to keep secret. And so she tells little of herself, a characteristic others regard with some suspicion. She is not popular, though she thinks she is not ill liked either. Rather, she is a neighbor one never knows well, regardless of well-intentioned overtures.
There is, however, one teacher Olympia particularly admires, a biologist, Mr. Benton from Syracuse, who keeps a study in Belcher Hall, a room filled with objets and books and a photograph of a woman (a wife?) he once suggests to Olympia he has lost. They take tea together quite often in her second year, when she has determined upon a course of study in biology; and perhaps it is that Mr. Benton, who is fair in his coloring and who is probably, when she knows him, in his late thirties, reminds her of her father as he was before the catastrophe, and this causes her to be fond of him. Mr. Benton and Olympia speak evenly, in measured tones, of anatomy and platelets and the circuitry of the brain, and if he senses a reserve in her that hides a wound, so does she suspect a story behind his pale facade: Perhaps the woman in the photograph is not his wife after all. They talk of life in the metaphors of cells and species, a language that permits no discursions into matters of the heart, though the physical heart itself is dissected often enough. And in this way, she thinks, they are kindred spirits. In later years, she will often think of writing to the man; but then she should have to tell him of her life and employ a vocabulary that would be as foreign to those twilit afternoons as Chinese or Urdu, and so she does not.
As for her actual father, whom Olympia sees only at Christmastime and summer vacations, the journey being too long for the brief holidays of Thanksgiving and Easter, he has resumed some of his former life, though the glitter has gone out of it, rather like a ring that has lost its diamond: Though the setting remains sturdy, it is incomplete, with its gaping hole. He does occasionally write to her. I have reservations about your choice of biology as a course of study. It will limit your prospects in a way that the study of history will not. . . . I am sending with this letter twenty dollars so that you might buy yourself some warm clothing for the coming months. I am told that Mrs. Monckton on Hadley Street is a decent dressmaker. . . . Your mother is insisting that we go to Paris. I hope she is strong enough.
Her father never writes about the past, nor asks her how she is, nor alludes to anything that might prompt an emotional reply. He does not ask Olympia if she is enjoying herself, if she has found any friends, or if she has been able to forget.
And if he did, Olympia would tell him this: I am not able to forget. Not for one day. Not for one hour.
Her father predicted she would be fine in the fall. She is not.
On no day does Olympia not wonder what has happened to her son. She feels this absence as a hole cut into the center of her body, a hole she cannot fill up with reading or with study or with imaginings, or even by bending over physically to close up the empty space. One day, when she is crossing Holyoke Street on her way to Belcher Hall, she sees a mother with a boy of about three years. His hair has a stubborn cowlick that gives him charm, and his cotton socks droop about his ankles in a manner that is nearly heartbreaking in its innocence. All about the pair is a golden light, that of the sun filtered through the translucent yellow leaves of the maples overhead. Olympia watches the boy cross the muddy street with his mother, the child certain that if he holds his mother’s hand tightly enough, no harm will ever come to him. And as they walk, a crimson leaf falls. The boy stretches out his small hand. He catches his leaf and holds his treasure aloft for his mother to see.
Olympia turns abruptly and walks back to her room, barely making it behind the closed door before she whirls in confusion and falls onto the bed. She sobs heavily, so much so that she rouses Mrs. Cowper, the housemother, who comes to Olympia’s door and insists upon entry. And Olympia has to tell her that she has just learned that her mother is dying (she can still lie brilliantly when pressed) so that Mrs. Cowper will leave her alone.
And if Olympia thinks about her unknown son every day, she thinks of Haskell even more, for she has more of him to remember and thus to imagine. It is as though he, too, becomes a habit ingrained upon the bones: Her reveries of him are constant, though often vague and unformed. Sometimes she will lose his face. Early on, she loses the timbre of his voice. Most of her thoughts are of a speculative nature: She imagines a chance meeting and what they will say. He will have his back to her at a train station. She will recognize — what? — a turned
shoulder, the way he stands with his hands on his hips. She will see him check his watch. He will have on a dark suit coat, a leather satchel at his feet. He will take off a narrow-brimmed fedora and brush his hair off his forehead. Silently, she will walk to his side, and sensing her, he will turn. Olympia, he will say, as if she had returned from the dead.
Will he dare to touch her then? There in the station, for all to see? She imagines restraint giving way to breathless revelations, hasty absolutions. She imagines remorse and also exhilaration. And she imagines Haskell’s shock. For he will not have known he has a son. And then she will give herself over to him, and he will take care of her. These reveries are, without question, the happiest moments of her stay at Hastings.
• • •
A special feature of the seminary, Olympia discovers, is its innovative summer work program, a concept unique, she is given to understand, in American education. Since the majority of the students are girls from families of moderate means, many of whom can barely meet the tuition payments, it is the practice of the school to send the girls out in the summer to positions as governesses or near governesses or as apprentices to women who do good works, so that they might earn money to help with their bills. A typical summer post, for example, might be that of an assistant to an administrator of a settlement house or of tutor to a household of children who have not had benefit of schooling.
Toward the end of her third year of study, Olympia begins to think about where she might be assigned. If one is enterprising, she has already learned, one can request a certain post; and indeed most upperclassmen often return to positions held the previous summer, the most desirable of which are in Boston. Olympia, however, does not want to stay in Boston again, even though it means she could live there with her family (or particularly because she could live there with her family), for she has already spent the past three summers in those stifling rooms on Beacon Hill. These seasons were nearly intolerable for Olympia: She was able only to think about where she was not, which was at Fortune’s Rocks. Each of the separate days was a small torture as she ticked off the milestones: On this day a year ago, Haskell and I met on the porch. On this day two years ago, we watched a balloon ascend into the sky. On this day three years ago, we were lovers in a half-built cottage.
