by Anita Shreve
Olympia moves closer to the store and stands as near to the shop door as she dares. She pretends to be examining the contents of her purse, as though searching for something she has misplaced. She puts a frown of concentration on her face.
This is madness, she thinks to herself, though she does not alter her posture. I do not even know if this is the correct woman and child.
And then, in the next instant, she thinks, Of course I do.
Around her, there are men and boys, their braces loose, their shirts collarless. She can hear them call to one another, but she cannot make out their words. When the woman and the child emerge from the shop doorway, the boy has in his hand an ice-cream cone that is dripping all around its rim and onto his tiny fist. Perhaps alarmed by this food that moves, the boy seems about to cry. The woman bends and takes the cone from him and licks all around its edge, catching the drips. She returns it to the boy, who seems much relieved.
Olympia is standing so close to the pair that she could reach out and touch the boy. The resemblance is astonishingly keen. She might be looking at the face of John Haskell as a child.
The woman in mauve cotton, perhaps aware of Olympia’s odd stare, takes the boy’s hand and leads him farther along the sidewalk. Olympia remains frozen with her purse still open, barely able to breathe. In a moment, the woman bends down and picks up the boy and kisses him on the cheek. Olympia can just make out the boy’s small brown shoes, well worn and cracked.
A hard knuckle of jealousy sends a jolt through her body, causing Olympia to drop her purse. Coins and hair combs clatter to the surface of the sidewalk.
Overcome by a momentary paralysis, she is unable to bend to collect her things. She smells cigar smoke and is dimly aware of the man in buff-and-brown check crouching to retrieve them for her.
“Now I am convinced you are not well,” the man is saying beside her. She feels a hand at her elbow.
“I followed you,” the man is saying. “I hope you will not mind, because I could see that something was not right with you.”
He leads her into the darkened shop. He tells her to sit on a metal chair. She does so, slipping heavily onto its hard surface. Between them there is a round glass table.
“And then I could not help but see you searching through your purse. You must have had a most terrible fright, for your face went dead white.” He holds up a mug from a vacant table. “As white as this cup.”
When she looks at the man, she sees unkempt eyebrows, shrewd green eyes, a plump pink mouth with a shred of tobacco on its lower lip; but, try as she might, she cannot form a coherent face. A field of bright white spots obscures the vision in her right eye.
The man leans toward her, and she can smell anew the alcohol on his stale breath. “Have you misplaced something very valuable to you?” he asks her.
The field of white spots expands, nearly blotting out the figure before her. Olympia begins to laugh, and she can see that her laugh astonishes the man.
And she thinks, as she feels herself falling — falling ever so slowly, a feather wafting lazily in the heavy air — Yes, yes, indeed. I have misplaced something of great value.
• • •
The sky is heavy and foul with a strange yellow light. The air is still, too still, worse than yesterday, sulfurous. When she reaches the bay, she takes off her boots and wades into the black muck that twice daily reveals itself at low tide. Her feet are long and white and smooth, quite the most tender part of her body, and to step inadvertently upon a clamshell or a large sea-pebble is painful. She thinks how odd it is that one should be so strong and muscular elsewhere but have the roots of the body so vulnerable.
Seaweed of many varying colors and textures has strewn itself against the tide line, along with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish that have beached themselves and lie transparent on the top of the muck. She has to watch closely where she treads to avoid their unpleasant gelatinous texture as well as their sting. The seaweed at the high-tide line resembles, in its dried state, nothing so much as shredded newsprint. She has heard of people who make soups and stews of this sea vegetation, but she is quite sure she herself would not care for it.
With the clam rake that Ezra has lent her, she harvests the small mollusks that hide in the muck. In this way she occupies herself for the better part of an hour, filling her bucket nearly to the top with littlenecks. The skirts of her yellow gingham have more than once been sucked into the mud and dragged out again, so that her feet and the hem of her dress look as though they have been coated in molasses. She walks to a large rock that enters the sea and sits on it, rinsing her feet and the bottom of her dress. When her feet are dry, she puts on her stockings and boots.
Yesterday, when she collapsed inside the confectionery at Ely Falls, Lyman Fogg caught her just before she fell from the stool. Almost immediately, she regained consciousness with a ferocious headache. The man fed her sips of water as she forced herself to gather her strength despite the pain in her head. She allowed him to walk her to the trolley and even to accompany her to Ely, but when they reached the station she thanked him, bade him a firm farewell, and, in spite of his many protests, took a carriage alone to her house. Once inside, she went upstairs and fell upon her bed. She drifted into a deep sleep and did not wake until nearly noon today.
She will not go back to Ely Falls, she tells herself. She has seen the boy, and that is enough. She will write Rufus Philbrick and thank him for helping her, and he will be pleased to hear that she has now put the matter to rest.
It is an effort to move in the thickish air, but Olympia collects her pail of littlenecks and makes her way back to the cottage. It is as though the sea and the shoreline and the houses beyond are covered with a dull yellow film and cannot breathe. She will steam the clams for her meal, she decides. She has oyster crackers to accompany them and some milk, and she will make a stew of the broth.
She washes the clams repeatedly, as Ezra has taught her to do. She finds a large pot and puts water on the stove to boil. Immediately, the kitchen becomes stifling. She throws open all of the windows, and when that does not help much, she walks into the front room and opens the windows there.
She gazes down at the beach, nearly deserted today, a result partially of the unpleasantness of the air and partially of the fact that so many families have already left and gone back to the city. A sharp crack of thunder startles her, and for a moment she thinks that something heavy and sharp has fallen onto the floor above. And then the sky lowers itself, like night coming on too early. The wind starts, beating against the cottage. The frames of the windows shudder from the irregular gusts of wind.
The temperature drops precipitously. Chilled, Olympia finds a shawl on a chair and wraps herself in the crocheted wool. The sky, despite its menace, is oddly beautiful; and she thinks about how a disaster, though horrific in its particulars, may create a scene of great beauty. A blazing hotel, for example, may elicit fear and sometimes bravery from the witnesses of this catastrophe, but will it not also move these same observers with its very majesty?
The shipwreck was an event she remembers for its paradoxical beauty in the midst of horror and fear. She recalls the moment John Haskell passed by her with the child. What was she thinking then? That though she did not want to be noticed, she could not mind being seen by John Haskell? That she could not then have willingly removed herself from that cool white sand, into which her bare feet had burrowed, save for the most dire threat from her father? That though she sought to attend to the rescue operation only, she could not keep her eyes from the form of John Haskell, a form that she and all around her could see only too well, since the sea had already soaked through the man’s dressing gown and the nightshirt he wore underneath?
And what precisely was it that passed between her and Haskell on the beach for those few seconds near daybreak? It cannot have been love — no, of course it cannot — nor even infatuation, which needs, she imagines, rather more experience with each other than they had then, so early in
the summer. No, it was instead a kind of recognition, she believes, as though each of them knew the other not only from the day before but also from some future date.
The rain assaults the house from a nearly horizontal angle, sneaking in under the eaves of the porch. A gust of wind knocks over a wicker chair on the porch, and too late she remembers that there are sheets on the line.
But it was love, she tells herself. Of course it was. Even then. Even that night. For had not she and Haskell already entered into that dangerous state of thrall which may be called love or obsession or romance or simply delusion, depending upon one’s proximity to the event and one’s ability to believe in the notion that two souls which stir in the universe may be destined to meet and may be meant only for each other?
Already the sea is clawing at the sand, eroding the beach and creating great gullies. The erosion will endanger the cottages, she knows. Leaning against a windowpane, she can feel the wind vibrating the glass. Did she not understand the consequences of allowing herself to fall in love with John Haskell? Can she ever have been that heedless? Or did she imagine herself charmed, untouchable, merely skimming the surface of disastrous and lethal matters, as a gull will fly above the ocean, alighting neither here nor there, but always teasing the waves?
She glances up, draws the shawl more tightly around her. Where will the boy be now? she wonders. And where do he and the woman go on their walks? Why did the woman have on a black apron? Olympia recalls the boy’s worn brown leather shoes, nearly heartbreaking in their shabbiness. Hand-me-downs surely, for the boy cannot have used them so himself.
Great love comes once and one time only, Olympia understands now. For by definition, there cannot be two such occurrences: The one great love remains in the memory and on the tongue and in the eyes of the once beloved and cannot ever be forgotten.
She puts her head in her hands.
Why must love be so punishing?
• • •
A monstrous wind catches the house, and she can feel the wood shudder in its embrace. With awe, she watches as the wind beats along the beach, blowing the tips off the breakers, heaving stray brush and driftwood and seaweed high into the air. A gull remains motionless over the water, unable to make headway against the wind, and then is blown backward by a gust. Farther down the shore, a large piece of tin is lifted off a fishing shack. The wicker chairs slide along the painted porch floor and hit the railing with a series of dull thuds. Upstairs, Olympia can hear glass breaking.
The hurricane pummels the coastline all the way up to Bar Harbor. Through the night, Olympia huddles in the kitchen, listening to the crack of wood, the heaving of the sea, and the high whine of the wind. Near to the side of the house, a pine tree falls, missing the cottage by inches, and, once or twice, when the wind is particularly fierce, Olympia climbs under the kitchen table for safety. She thinks of Ezra and hopes that he made it in to shore before the storm. No one out in a boat would survive the seas this night.
From time to time, Olympia walks to the window at the north side of the house and looks out to the lifesaving cottage. Its beacon is lit, and she can hear, intermittently, like Morse code being sounded from a great instrument, the foghorn from Granite Point. The wind strains the beams of her own cottage, and Olympia is sometimes startled by the creaking of the wood, as if the house were a ship foundering at sea.
By daybreak, parts of the beach have been eroded nearly to the seawall. Houses have been lifted off their foundations and porches have been sheared clean from their pilings. Olympia’s own front lawn is littered with debris — leaves and branches and, ominously, a man’s oiled jacket. All along the crescent of Fortune’s Rocks, cottages have lost their windows and their roofs. Where the beach has not been gullied out, it is covered with metal caskets and shingles and glass and broken wood. Only the sea, as though victorious in some unnamed struggle, remains undaunted, its enormous breakers rolling in a stately manner all along the newly drafted shoreline.
Tentatively, people begin to make their way to the beach to survey the damage. Olympia throws a shawl over her shoulders and steps out onto the porch. The air is clean and sharp, as though freshly laundered. She walks to the seawall and looks back at her own cottage, where she sees that a chimney pot has fallen over. But though she studies her house, her thoughts lie elsewhere, and she wonders, as indeed she will wonder a thousand times (and it is as if she understands already that because she will never be free of this particular worry, she must claim it for her own or go mad with the distance, with the powerlessness of the distance) what has happened to the woman and the boy. Doubtless the storm will have had less impact inland, but can those boardinghouses withstand the terrifically high winds of a hurricane? And what of the electrical lines? Will there be fresh water? And is the boy, whose true name Olympia cannot yet utter, safe?
On the tenth day after the storm, Olympia boards the first trolley car out of Ely Station for what becomes an arduous journey of an hour and a half to Ely Falls, three times the length of a normal trip to the city. All along the route, Olympia and her fellow passengers are mildly dazed as they survey the wreckage of the storm: telephone and power lines still down, carriages overturned, and rooftops caved in by fallen pines whose shallow roots could not hold them upright in the high winds.
In the wake of the storm, the weather has grown cooler. For the first time since returning to Fortune’s Rocks, Olympia has taken the wool suits out of her trunks, aired them out on the porch, and hung them in the shallow closets of several bedrooms. For her trip into Ely Falls, she picked out this morning her best day suit, a jacket and skirt of dove wool challis that she likes to wear with a high-necked white blouse and velvet tie. Her hat, a plum toque, sits at an angle on her chignon. Already she is aware, glancing at her fellow travelers on the trolley, that fashions have changed in the four years she has been away. Skirts are longer, sleeves are fuller, and altogether the clothing seems less fussy.
With several other travelers, Olympia alights at the corner of Alfred and Washington Streets, where men stand on scaffolds repairing a roof and reglazing windows. She has read, in the Ely Falls Sentinel, that seventeen millworkers perished when a spinnery collapsed during the hurricane, the owner of the mill unwilling to cancel the night shift despite repeated pleas from the workers to suspend operations. Olympia read the list of the dead like a wife examining a list of war casualties, her eyes skimming quickly over names, looking only for a single surname. Unlike the mood of the city on Olympia’s previous visit — which was, though oppressive with heat, oddly playful — today the city’s inhabitants seem solemn, even somber. Olympia walks along Alfred Street, noting the boarded-up windows that still remain in many of the shops.
Midway up the street, Olympia is startled by a signal whistle, much like that of an oncoming train. Within minutes, the street is thick with men and women moving quickly toward the doorways of the boardinghouses. Olympia glances up at the clock tower at the corner of Washington and Alfred: five minutes past noon. Clearly this must be a dinner break.
She finds the doorway of number 137 and once again sits on the bench across the street. Several women enter the blue doorway, but not the woman Olympia is searching for. She ponders the wisdom of accosting someone on the steps of that building and inquiring about the Bolduc family, but as there is not much common sense to be had in this proposition, she abandons the idea. She sees almost immediately that she will not be able to remain long on the bench; because the weather has grown colder, there are fewer people lingering in the streets, and thus she will be more conspicuous than she was on her last visit.
At precisely ten minutes to one, dozens of persons emerge from the boardinghouse entryway, the women pulling on gloves, checking purses, holding hats as they move briskly along the sidewalk back to work. By one o’clock, the street is silent.
Chilled beneath her dove challis, Olympia walks to the bakery and steps inside. A serving girl in a black dress with a blue apron glances up at Olympia with surprise, a
s though the bakery were closed.
“May I have a cup of tea?” Olympia asks.
“Dinners are gone now,” the serving girl says, “but I suppose I can always make up a cup of tea.”
“Thank you,” Olympia says. She takes a seat near a window and arranges for herself an excellent view of number 137. She slips off her gloves and puts them in the pocket of her suit. Emboldened by the thought that she might well leave Ely Falls without a scrap of further information about the boy, she asks the waitress when she returns with the tea if she knows of a family named Bolduc.
“I should say so,” the girl says in an accent that sounds Irish. “Dozens of Bolducs hereabouts. Which one would you be wanting?”
“Albertine?” Olympia asks, her breath catching in her throat. “Telesphore?”
“You’re in luck then,” says the waitress, wiping her hands on her apron. “They live right across the street.”
Olympia smiles at her apparent fortune.
“But which are you wanting?” the girl asks. “You won’t find Albertine at home today until after four o’clock when the first shift is ended. But if it’s Telesphore you’re wanting, he’ll be home until four. There,” the girl says, pointing at the blue door. “That one there is where they live. You don’t look a relative, so you must be a friend.”
“A friend,” says Olympia.
“I expect you know the boy.”
“Yes,” says Olympia.
“Sweet little one, isn’t he?”
Olympia nods.
“I do not know when husband and wife see each other,” the girl says. “What with the two shifts and all. One goes in, the other comes out. Ships passing in the night. I can probably get you a bowl of oyster stew if you’re hungry.”
Olympia, not wishing to reject anything the young woman has to offer, answers that stew would be most welcome.
