by Anita Shreve
She stands and looks at the interior of the chapel and is flooded almost at once by grief, a torrent of seawater filling a tide pool. She sees the altar and her last desperate moments with Haskell; she observes a young girl sketching by a window without a single troubling thought in her head; she sees a boy, a small child she has never known, who might have come here to play. Alone finally, with no witnesses, she sits upon the marble bench and gives in to this grief, fatigue fueling her intermittent sobs. Tears make rivulets upon her road-dusted cheek, and she wipes her nose with the hem of her skirt. After a while, she sits up, certain she is through the worst of it, and unfastens the first two buttons of her blouse. But this gesture, this innocent fumbling, triggers a memory so sharp and so sweet, she is once again shaken by small aftershocks of longing, ripples that force their way through her body.
After a time, she removes her hands from her face and glances around her. Vandals have been in this chapel and have written with charcoal or with black ink on the marble and on the walls. Waxed papers, such as fried fish might be wrapped in, are balled in a corner. A cloth hangs from a wooden bench, and when she gets up to investigate, she discovers it is a woman’s undervest, its cheap muslin stained with something blue. She drops the garment onto the floor. She feels oddly violated. Though was it not she and Haskell who first desecrated this chamber? Or was that not a desecration, but rather the holiest of human sacraments? She does not know, though she has pondered this question for years. Even so, she thinks this new violation worse. The waxed papers, the scrawls, and the undervest are for her a desecration of memory, now the most dear of all her possessions.
She leaves the chapel and moves into the narrow passageway that connects the house itself, unlocking shutters and opening windows and doors as she goes, so that though there is only darkness ahead, there is light behind. The heels of her boots clicking satisfyingly on the slate floor, she passes through the kitchen with its bare cupboards and empty tables. Mice have skittered upon their surfaces, and rust has formed in the sink. She moves through the swinging door that once brought her unbidden to Josiah and Lisette. She makes her way through the paneled passageway where she last saw Haskell’s face, through the dining room where they dined together, and finally into the parlor, ghostly with white shapes, undisturbed, untouched. It is, she thinks, a spectral chamber, its memories waiting to be uncovered with the sheets. A salt spray on the windows seems like a frost, and though she can hear the sea in its relentless draw and spill, she cannot see it clearly. She stands in the center of the room, which smells heavily of mildew, unties her bonnet, and lets it float to the floor. She sheds her cloak and the tie at her neck, and then bends and unfastens the cracked boots she has been wearing for weeks. She unbuttons the cuffs of the shirt she has on and rolls the sleeves to the elbow.
With a theatrical sweep, she draws off a sheet that covers a red and cream silk chair. Mice have been at the upholstery, or was it always frayed just so? She tugs off another sheet and exposes a round mahogany side table with claw feet. How heavy and dark and masculine the table looks in the whitened room. She walks to a door, unlatches its safety catch, and opens it. The sudden rush of air immediately clears her head, and it seems she can see more vividly than she ever has before. She makes her way to the railing, shading her eyes with her hand from an immense expanse of glinting and silvery light. She slowly surveys the rocks, the old orchards, the seawall, the beach. She will live in this house, she tells herself, and she will be free.
• • •
“Miss?”
She startles at the voice, which is that of the carriage driver who left her just a while before. He is standing at the foot of the porch steps, gazing up at her, cap in hand, his body long and slightly stooped.
“I come back to see you were all right,” he says in his slow, unemotional drawl. “Didn’t like leaving you on that doorstep there, with the house all boarded up and looking fearful as it does.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“I see you got in.”
“Yes,” she says.
“You got the water running?”
“I do not know,” she says.
“Then likely you don’t. Your pump is going to need a good priming.”
“Yes.”
She notices that his coat, a rough navy wool, is torn at the shoulder. His arms are exceptionally long and hang like unnatural appendages at his sides. His eyes, an icy blue, shine through the stubble and grime on his face.
“You won’t have the electric or the gas on either then,” he says. “You got somewhere to go for the night?”
“I shall stay here,” she says.
He scratches his beard and looks skeptical. “It is my feeling, miss, that this is not a fit place for a young woman such as yourself,” he says plainly. She tries to guess his age. Thirty-five? Forty? His face, coarsened by constant exposure to the weather, gives nothing away. “And as it is growing late in the day, I suggest you find yourself somewhere to sleep before it gets dark. Most places is full up this time of year, but my sister, Alice, she takes in boarders what are desperate.”
Olympia has not thought of herself as desperate. But, reluctantly, she considers the man’s proposal. He is right: If she has no water, she cannot stay here, however much she wants to.
“Yes,” she says finally. “Thank you.”
“You ready to go now?”
She hesitates. She cannot bear to leave this house so soon. “I . . .”
“You be ready in one hour then,” he says.
“Thank you,” she says. “You are very kind. What is your name?”
“Ezra Stebbins. I used to come by and deliver lobster to the house when your father and mother lived here.”
“I see,” she says. “You are a fisherman.”
“That I am.”
“You live nearby?”
“In Ely, ma’am.”
She turns away for a moment and gazes out over the railing. She wonders if he knows as well why the house has been empty all these years. She draws herself up. This is but one encounter out of many she will have to endure in the coming weeks if she is to take up residence in Fortune’s Rocks. She glances over to speak to the fisherman, but when she looks down at the foot of the porch steps, she sees that he is gone.
• • •
There are no chairs on the porch, only an old stool wedged into a corner of the railing. She dislodges the stool, puts it at the center of the porch, and sits on it, her skirts rumpling all about her knees. Four years ago, she and Haskell met at this porch railing. She can remember only too well the way they greeted each other, with Martha and Clementine and Randall and May in attendance, and the way she, Olympia, seemed already to understand that her meeting with John Warren Haskell was not precisely as it should be, not in any observable manner but only in that she felt, through the body, in addition to a sensation that was a combination of both shame and confusion, the distinct impression that there were layers within layers inside of which their simple, seemingly innocent gestures might one day come to be interpreted. And she wonders now if in every life there are not moments in time, perhaps four or five or even seven such moments, in which the life is transformed utterly or careens off in a direction unthought of, a direction that has seemed to be too fantastical or too harrowing to have been previously contemplated. These moments may come unbidden, when one least expects them, and often under awkward or disastrously wrong or even banal circumstances; and they may alight so softly or so fleetingly that they seem only like small birds swooping down upon the outermost branch of a tree. Except that these particular birds do not then fly away. Such a moment may be had within an evasive glance on a lover’s face, or the first unwary sighting of a single word in a telegram (and there, one can almost see it, the life begins to veer away from its initial advance). And, most extraordinary of all, in the finite continuum of time along which each person travels, the terrible moment is fixed, immovable, incapable of being blotted out, however fervently or p
assionately one may later wish for this erasure.
The moment she met Haskell on the porch was one such moment, Olympia knows; and surely another was the precise instant in time when Catherine bent to the telescope, a moment Olympia shudders even to bring to consciousness (and if only one could erase such a moment as that, she thinks now). But was there not as well, she asks herself, a point in time when a life was made? And when was that moment exactly? That first afternoon in Haskell’s room? When they lay together in the half-built cottage? In the sand, in the dark of night, when she had slipped out of the house unseen? Haskell once explained to her the manner in which he tried to prevent conception, and she sometimes saw and felt the small, wet balloons; but he also told her that such a method might not always be effective. And thus, lying on the floor of the unfinished cottage, he asked her about her monthlies, and it moves her now to think that they once had such a conversation, that she once spoke to a man of such intimate considerations; and yet how easy that was to do then. A new sadness takes hold of her, a sadness she has to shake roughly from her body as she stands up and abandons the porch for the beach.
• • •
For ten days, Olympia lives at the boardinghouse of Alice Stebbins, sister to Ezra, the fisherman who has befriended her. Olympia has a small room at the top of the house, and three meals are provided for her daily. Since the boardinghouse is in Ely, she cannot easily visit her father’s cottage during this time, but she arranges nevertheless to hire a new caretaker. Water is drawn from the well and is seen to flow freely through the pumps. The electrical wires leading into the house are discovered to be in poor condition and in need of extensive repairs, a fact that does not deter Olympia from deciding to take up residence at Fortune’s Rocks, as there are many kerosene lamps in the cottage. When she finally moves in, Olympia has cause to be grateful for her years at Hastings, since they have taught her enough of the rudiments of housekeeping and cooking to allow her to make the house habitable, a source of great satisfaction to her. She sweeps floors and shakes out rugs. With the water from the hand pump in the kitchen, she launders linens and bedclothes and washes windows. She rids cupboards of generations of moths; she captures cobwebs, prunes bushes, dusts furniture, and irons blouses. She airs clothing that has been abandoned, and where there are holes, she mends. She puts paper liners in all of the drawers and drags the mattresses out into the sun and beats them with a stick. She scours pots, mops floors, polishes woodwork, and takes the tarnish off the brass andirons. Gradually, the cottage begins to emerge from its neglect and even to gleam in the sunlight. The bedclothes smell of sun and sea air, and it is a joy to slip, exhausted, between the sweet, clean sheets at night.
With the small amount of money she has left from the travel expenses her father gave her before the summer began, she is able to buy food and some supplies in the village. It is a considerable walk to the store, but she goes early in the mornings, when she will be less likely to come upon someone who might recognize her. For though there are many who know the story of the catastrophe, there are fewer who might recognize her face, which, in any event, has changed in the four years she has been away. Her brow has grown more defined, her chin perhaps is sharper. When the sun is out, she wears darkened spectacles she once purchased when she was at Hastings. She knows, however, that she cannot remain unnoticed for long, nor keep the fact that she is in residence from her nearest neighbors. Already there has been some curiosity — passersby looking in at the wash on the line in the backyard, small boys peering at her as she rakes dried leaves from the underbrush — and if her neighbors know about her presence, it will be only a matter of time before her father does. Thus one afternoon not long after she takes up residence, she sits down at her old writing desk and composes a letter.
She writes her father that she is at Fortune’s Rocks and that she has decided to remain there for some time. She writes that she cannot be dissuaded from her intent and that she will not return to Hastings Seminary in the fall. She adds that if he insists upon ousting her from the cottage, she will sever her ties with her family forever. She does not wish to hurt him, she says; she merely wishes to be left alone. Finally, she tells him that she is in need of funds, since the house requires many repairs, which she enumerates. In addition, she has little money of her own left.
For days after Olympia writes the letter, she expects a reply. When a letter does not immediately come, she anticipates, and then dreads, her father’s arrival in person. Every time she hears a carriage on the road, she starts. On the twelfth day, however, the postman brings an envelope with familiar handwriting.
3 August 1903
My dear Olympia,
I was shocked to hear that you are at Fortune’s Rocks. I do not think it a suitable place for you to be. And I am sorrier than I can say to learn that you wish to abandon your studies at Hastings. I confess I had harbored hopes that you would find some satisfaction in teaching and that you would take solace in being independent. But I cannot find it in my heart to chastise you further. Perhaps satisfaction and solace are not what you wish for yourself. I confess that I would not have cared greatly for such virtues at your age, though I value them most highly now.
You should have written to me at once, Olympia. I had a letter from Dean Bardwell within days of your abandoning your post. She was necessarily quite alarmed that you had vanished, and she managed to pass that considerable alarm on to me. I was given to understand that you had left voluntarily, but even so, I was greatly worried for you. For a time, I thought that somehow that man had made contact with you, and you had run away with him. I assume you are telling me the truth, and that you are not, in fact, with him now.
I worry about you, Olympia. I do not know how you will manage in that draughty cottage. But if you are determined to take up residence there, I shall not stand in your way. I have no desire ever to return to that house or to the coast of New Hampshire again. I will, of course, be forced to sell the cottage one day, but I have no plans for that at the moment, since I doubt I should get any great price for it in today’s financial climate.
Your mother and I are sorry not to be with you on your twentieth birthday. Please know that we think of you daily. And please write to me from time to time. I need to know that you are well.
Your loving father
P.S. Please find enclosed a check for one hundred and fifty dollars. All bills for major repairs to the house should be sent directly to me.
When Olympia has finished reading the letter, she bends her forehead to the kitchen table. She cannot bear to think of her father sad. For a few moments, all she wants is to pack a valise and make her way to the train station so that she might return to Boston and be embraced by her parents. She thinks of all the days her father spent with her at her lessons, how much of himself he once invested in her future.
After a time, she puts the letter on the table. Under the sink, she finds a stiff-bristled brush. She fills a pail with soap and water and, squatting to the hearth, begins to scrub away the charcoal smudges of an earlier season’s fires. The stone has turned nearly black, and she has almost at once to fill her pail with clean water. She scrubs hard at the stains, for more and more it seems that only physical work can assuage the ache of irresolution.
But the pleasure she takes in those simple chores! Often, when Olympia is finished for the day, she will walk through the rooms of the house, admiring her work. She loves the way the banister gleams, the way the wavy glass in the vinegar-washed windows bends the horizon line, the manner in which the paint on the sills shines. Sometimes, when she has thoroughly cleaned a room, she will move its furniture. At first she merely shifts a table or a chair from one position to another within a room, but later, when she finds she minds the clutter, she begins to take those pieces that she can lift to the chapel for storage. The front room becomes, as a result, emptier and emptier, and she feels oddly better for this emptiness. She cannot move the piano, of course, nor the sofa, nor the English writing desk, but she takes
away a crystal-fringed lamp, a chenille footstool, the furry skin of an animal that has functioned as a rug, a marbleized iron clock, an elaborate candelabra, side tables with their many skirts, a bamboo settee, tapestries that have hung upon the walls for years, heavy gold drapes that have shrouded the windows, a mahogany plant stand, a painted screen, an ornate gilt mirror, and various potted plants that have long since perished. She has a chair, a Windsor with a desk hidden beneath its seat, that she puts in the center of the room, so that when she sits on it, she can see straight out the windows to the ocean. And this she does often, occasionally getting up to make a pot of tea, or sometimes knitting, and only very seldom, reading. About books, she is cautious, for she does not want inadvertently to trigger an unwelcome emotion. For weeks now, she has been engaged in shoring up a foundation, in building scaffolds, and she does not wish the sturdy walls she has made to tumble down as a result of words on a page.
Most of the time, she wears simple dresses, since she is usually engaged in chores. But occasionally she will put on a pique or a taffeta that has been left behind in a wardrobe. Dressing and sitting in her Windsor chair and gazing out to sea is often occupation enough, and she now understands what is meant by a rest cure. She is certain that had her instincts not led her to this juncture in her life, she would never have recovered herself and might, over time, have developed various incapacitating nervous ailments that many women in their adult years, most noticeably her mother, seem to suffer.
At the end of each day, Olympia is usually deliciously fatigued, and it seems that she is always hungry. She eats sweet corn and blueberries and baking-powder biscuits and white cheese. She has milk from the milkman and bread from the bread wagon, and she strikes a bargain with Ezra so that once weekly he brings her lobster or other fresh fish. And it is, in fact, just on the heels of one of Ezra’s deliveries, just as she is packing fresh cod into the ice chest, that a polished black automobile rolls up to the back gate. Through the window, Olympia watches in astonishment as Rufus Philbrick emerges from the car.
