Fortune's Rocks

by Anita Shreve

  Tucker nods. His hand hovers close to hers on the tablecloth, and she senses that under different circumstances he might touch her, but now will not.

  “That is why it is so important that we establish that you did not abandon your child, but rather had the child stolen from you,” he continues. “I have some further facts I should like to tell you if you think you can bear them.”

  “Are they so terrible?”

  “They are . . . difficult.”

  “I am as ready as I ever shall be,” she says.

  “Shortly after his birth, the boy was given to Josiah Hay by your father,” Tucker begins.

  “Josiah!” Olympia exclaims before she can stop herself.

  Tucker puts up a hand. “Only to transport the child,” he says. “He and his wife, Lisette, took the child and journeyed up to Ely Falls by train the afternoon of the birth.”

  Olympia’s head swims with the news. Lisette! How is that possible? Olympia thinks back to the day of the birth. Was Lisette at her side after she delivered? She cannot remember. No, perhaps she was not. Was it not, in fact, her mother who sat with her all that long day as Olympia drifted in and out of consciousness?

  “They brought the child to John Haskell, who was staying at a hotel in Ely Falls. It is my understanding that John Haskell examined the child and dismissed Josiah and Lisette, who took the next train back to Boston. Dr. Haskell then took the child to the Saint Andre orphanage. He had already made arrangements.”

  “I find this so difficult to comprehend,” Olympia says. “I do not know how he could have given up the boy,” she adds, momentarily benumbed.

  “Do you need some time?”

  Olympia shakes her head.

  Tucker puts his glasses back on. “Very shortly,” he continues, “the boy was taken on by Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc. They have not formally adopted the child because John Haskell cannot be found, and he did not sign the appropriate waivers before he left. Such an adoption, even if the Bolducs had the money for the legal fees, which they have not, has not, therefore, been possible. It will, however, become possible simply by the fact of your bringing this suit.”

  “I can bring suit then?” Olympia asks.

  “Legally, yes. In John Haskell’s absence and considering that he has abandoned the child.”

  “But you are telling me that if I lose, the Bolducs may legally adopt the boy.”

  “They will be bound to by state law.”

  “I see,” Olympia says. “And do you know where John Haskell is?” Olympia asks.

  “No. If I did, I assure you I would tell you. We contacted the former Mrs. Haskell, who divorced her husband two years ago, but she has not responded to us and apparently will not. We did have a conversation with her attorney, however, and he gave us to understand that Dr. Haskell sends money regularly to Mrs. Haskell via an arrangement with the Bank of New Hampshire.”

  Olympia shuts her eyes, dismayed to learn that Catherine has been brought into this matter. Dismayed that Catherine has been asked to contribute information. And Olympia realizes then, in a way she has not before, that she has begun something that will be larger than herself and that she will not be able to stop.

  “Albertine and Telesphore live with the child in one room,” Tucker says. “Albertine works as a carder at the Ely Falls Mill from five-thirty A.M. to four P.M., six days a week, combing raw cotton so that it can be spun into thread. A hazardous job, I might add, because of the high incidence of white lung. You do know about the white lung?”

  “Yes.”

  “For this labor, she makes $336.96 a year.”

  Olympia looks steadily at Payson Tucker.

  “The couple seem to have made adequate arrangements for the child’s care,” Tucker continues, “however difficult these arrangements may be for the couple themselves. I am bound to tell you that their industriousness and their careful attention to the needs of the child, as well as the sacrifices that this has entailed, will be seen in a favorable light by any judge.”

  Olympia nods.

  “I have more to tell you,” Tucker says, “and I have to warn you that it is worse.”

  Olympia looks up. “How can anything be worse?”

  Tucker folds his arms on the table and leans toward her. “I will tell you right now that you should not go forward with your petition,” he says. “Let me explain what will happen to you if you do. The trial will be grueling. You will be seen to belong to the lowest rung of society, that of unwed mothers. Your transgressions will become public knowledge in ways you have never imagined. Very likely, the story of this trial will be considered newsworthy by the Boston papers. In the two cases I spoke of earlier, the damage to the principals was considerable. One of the young women committed suicide shortly after the trial.”

  Olympia feels her hands go cold. Out of sight of Tucker, she wraps them in the folds of her skirt.

  “I am sorry to be so harsh,” Tucker says. “But I want you to understand that if you continue with your petition, you will be left with no reputation whatsoever when it is over, no matter what the outcome. I do not think the Bolducs’ lawyer will spare your sensibilities or will care for your delicacy. The irony is that even I cannot spare your delicacy. I will need to be as ruthless as the opposition.”

  “And what are my alternatives?”

  “The alternative is simple, Miss Biddeford. Do not put forth your petition.”

  Olympia looks at Payson Tucker, at his gold-rimmed spectacles, his oiled hair, his well-groomed mustaches. “Then I should never see my son,” she says.

  “That is correct.”

  “I will never hold him.”

  Tucker is silent.

  “I will never teach him,” she says, her voice rising. “I will never dress him. I will never speak to him, or he to me.”

  “No.”

  “Then there is no alternative, Mr. Tucker. I must proceed.”

  Tucker sighs and leans back in his chair. He surveys the overdressed dining room and its few patrons. “Then let me help you,” he says simply.

  • • •

  Clouds have covered the moon, and she can see only those portions of the road the headlamps of the automobile illuminate: a flash of stone wall, the shingled corner of a cottage, a stark silhouette of a telephone pole.

  “I have ridden in a motorcar only once before,” Olympia confesses. “At school. A benefactor came to visit. I was one of the students asked to accompany him in his automobile up a small mountain to visit an observatory.”

  “Where were you at school?”

  “Not a place you have ever heard of, I can assure you. The Hastings Seminary for Females. In the town of Fairbanks in the western part of Massachusetts.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “The drive or the school?”

  He smiles. “Well, both, actually.”

  “I was terrified during the drive. I was certain we would slide sideways off the mountain. I spent the entire time at the observatory wondering how I could get down without going back in the motorcar. As for the school, I disliked it intensely.”

  Olympia watches with interest as Tucker shifts the gears. And she thinks that she should like to learn to drive an automobile. She imagines the luxury of being able to drive herself back and forth to Ely Falls.

  When Tucker opens the door of the motorcar, she is enveloped in a fine mist, like cobwebs, against her face and hands. “Is it raining?” she asks.

  “Just,” he says, once again taking her elbow.

  “It is very dark tonight,” she says, feeling her way along the slate path.

  “Shall I wait while you light a lamp?” he asks when they have reached the stepping stone.

  “No, I know my way. Thank you.”

  In the dark, she cannot see his face. She extends her hand, and he takes it, his grip firm and warm against her own.

  “I am sorrier than I can say to have to be the bearer of such bad tidings,” Tucker says. “I have admired you from the moment
you entered my office.”

  Olympia withdraws her hand. She catches, on the air, a faint whiff of castile. It has been a long time since she stood this close to a man.

  “Do you love him still?” Tucker asks suddenly.

  And Olympia is not as surprised as she might be by the young lawyer’s question, for she understands that Payson Tucker has perhaps waited all evening to ask it.

  “I cannot imagine not loving him,” she answers truthfully.

  • • •

  She hears the motorcar drive away, leaving only the rumble of the surf. With her hat and gloves still on, she walks through the rooms of the house, seeing it anew, imagining it filled with young girls sentenced to silence, separated from their unforgiving families. How extraordinary that this house, in which she has known both luxury and love, in which John Haskell once kissed and held her, in which Josiah once dallied with Lisette, in which orchestras have played and women have danced and men have talked and smoked, should have had all this time such an abhorrent history and yet have given away nothing of that suffering and sorrow.

  She wanders upstairs, enters a seldom-used bedroom, and sits on the bed. It is a benign room, papered in blue forget-me-nots with delicate crewelwork curtains shrouding the windows. In the light of an amber-beaded lamp, long discarded from her mother’s dressing table, she can see the scars of wet cups and glasses that remain on the surface of a mahogany bedside table. She tries to hold in her mind the two images of the house, its past and its present, the convent and the holiday retreat, and it is then that she understands — or has a vision of — what she will one day do with her father’s summer cottage.

  THE HEELS of Olympia’s boots echo sharply along the slate flooring of the courthouse. To either side of the cavernous hallway are bronze busts on tall stone pedestals and between them lie low leather benches, so that sitting on one as she waits for Payson Tucker, Olympia feels dwarfed and insignificant, which she supposes was the architect’s intention. The law is greater than the men who make it, the bronze men seem to be announcing. The law is greater than those who petition for its intervention.

  She watches as the snow on her boots melts into wet puddles on the stone. The glass in the high windows opposite is obscured by dirt and age, and she can neither see nor hear the snowstorm that is beginning to cripple the city outside. She will need to spend another night in the Ely Falls Hotel, she knows, since it will be almost impossible to return home in this weather.

  It has been a severe winter at Fortune’s Rocks. All through the months of January and February snow has fallen about the cottage and on the beach and even on the rocks near to the sea. As Olympia has waited for the hearing to begin, gusts have shaken the house and drifts have risen to the windows. Some weeks, she has not been able to leave her cottage, and when she does manage to make her way to Goldthwaite’s for provisions or into Ely Falls for a meeting with Payson Tucker, the talk is always of the storms. So unusual on the coast to have such snow. When will it end? She understands, from these comments, that she could not possibly have chosen a worse winter to take up residence at Fortune’s Rocks.

  In the distance, she can see Tucker coming toward her from the opposite end of the long corridor, a spindly dark figure emerging from a kind of dusk. She catches a flash of his spectacles before she can see his face. And beyond him now, there are other persons entering the corridor as well, as if a trolley had made a stop. The fur collar of Tucker’s overcoat is frosted with snow, and his spectacles fog in the sudden warmth of the building, so that when he reaches her, he seems a face without eyes. He sets down his cases in front of her.

  “Miss Biddeford,” he says, taking off his spectacles and wiping them with a handkerchief from his pocket.

  “Mr. Tucker.”

  He unwinds his muffler, and a radiator hisses beside them.

  “Are you ready?”

  “I hope I am,” she says.

  “I shall call you first, as we have discussed. Although it may not happen straightaway. It will depend on what motions and so forth are put forward by Mr. Sears.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Dreadful storm. I hope they do not postpone this hearing yet again.” Tucker looks away a moment and then back again. “There is something we need to discuss before we go in,” he says, “because I do not want you to be surprised or caught off guard in any way.”

  “Yes?”

  He sits beside her on the bench. He smells of wet wool and again castile. “I have summoned your father,” he says.

  Her face must register her considerable shock, because he immediately puts his hand over hers.

  “I have been trying to reach him for weeks,” Tucker says, “but he has been abroad with your mother.”

  “Italy,” Olympia says. “But why have you done this?”

  “I cannot prove your case without him and Josiah Hay as witnesses.”

  “You have called Josiah as well?” Olympia asks, suddenly hot inside her coat. She withdraws her hand and unfastens the top several buttons. “How could you do this without consulting me?”

  “Miss Biddeford, you have hired me to put your petition before the court,” he says, sliding his arms from his own overcoat.

  “Yes, but — ”

  “And I must do so in the best way known to me. And that may require actions or words or maneuvers that you and I will not necessarily discuss.”

  “My father is coming here? Today?”

  “Yes. I trust he might. If he can get through in the storm. I hope he came last night before it began.”

  She turns her head away. She has not even told her father that she knows of the boy’s whereabouts, never mind that she has requested a custody hearing.

  “If you truly thought you could put forth your petition without help from any other persons,” says Tucker, “then I fear I have misled you.”

  “My father knows nothing of these proceedings,” she says.

  “Well. Yes. He does now. Now he does.”

  “Was he shocked by this news?”

  Tuckers ponders the question. “He seemed a bit taken aback, but not as much as I had expected. You, however, may be surprised to learn that he was most eager to help in any way he could. In fact, I rather imagined he sounded relieved.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “I wrote to him initially — and repeatedly, I might add. I spoke to him yesterday morning by telephone.”

  “My father has a telephone?” she asks.

  • • •

  The room is small, wood-paneled, a chamber meant for hearings and not for audiences. Its intimacy is unnerving to Olympia, for within minutes Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc enter the room and sit, as instructed by the bailiff, across the aisle from Olympia and Payson Tucker. The Franco-Americans are as close to Olympia as they might be in a church. Though Olympia has twice seen Albertine, the Franco woman has never seen Olympia, and so for a long moment the two women regard each other across the aisle. Their mutual gaze is disconcerting, but Olympia forces herself not to glance away. If she would go forth with her petition, she tells herself, she must be able to look this woman in the eye.

  And such deep-set eyes they are. The features of the woman’s face, though not fine, are sharply delineated. It is a face one reads immediately, and thus immediately Olympia can see that Albertine Bolduc is angry. But mixed with the anger is also curiosity. Is she searching for a likeness in Olympia’s face? Or a reason for this suit? Or an indication of Olympia’s resolve? Albertine’s thick dark hair begins low on her brow, and there is perhaps the merest hint of a mustache. Her lips and cheeks are red — by nature, Olympia is certain, and not with paint. She has on a black woolen suit, either inexpertly tailored or borrowed from another woman. Despite her ill-fitting garments, Albertine holds herself with good posture, the ruffles of her collar barely touching her chin. Her husband, who sits just beyond her, suddenly leans forward to see what it is his wife stares at so intently. He seems then to remember his cloth cap and removes
it. His mustaches are damp, his cheeks coarsened by the weather. He says a word to his wife, and when she answers him, she hardly moves her mouth, shocked perhaps into rigidity.

  A stout balding man with side whiskers and a monocle takes his place next to Albertine, blocking Olympia’s view. He sets a leather case on the table in front of him. And then before Olympia can absorb further the presence of her adversaries, the bailiff is announcing the judge.

  “All rise for presiding Judge Levi Littlefield.”

  The judge enters the chamber with a vigorous sweep of his robes. He is short and slight and sandy-haired, with no beard or mustaches or spectacles, and he looks considerably younger than Olympia has expected. Only his robes lend the man authority, as do those of a minister.

  “He seems so young,” Olympia says to Tucker when they sit. “He is not as young as he appears,” Tucker says. “And do not let his looks fool you. He is quite shrewd and tough.”

  “Mr. Payson Tucker,” says Judge Littlefield, reviewing the documents laid out in front of him, “as counsel for the relator, you have a matter to put before the court.”

  Tucker stands and approaches a lectern set up between the lawyers’ tables. He is so tall that he has to stoop to read what he has written. He has cut his hair, Olympia notes, and oiled it back from his forehead. Sitting as she is, behind and to the left of him, she can see only a profile. There is a slight tremor in Tucker’s hand. Is it possible this is Tucker’s first case? she wonders. She has never asked.

  “I have here a writ of habeas corpus for the body of a male infant child, Pierre Francis Haskell, aged three years, ten months, and thirteen days, currently of Ely Falls, New Hampshire.”

  “Yes, Mr. Tucker. Proceed.”

  “That Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc of one thirty-seven Alfred Street, Ely Falls, New Hampshire, have for three years and approximately ten months restrained the said child of his liberty. That this restraint of liberty is a result of an unlawful and clandestine removal and retention of the child on fourteen April 1900 from the mother of the child, the relator, Olympia Biddeford. That this unlawful removal was carried out at the direction of the petitioner’s father, Phillip Arthur Biddeford of Boston, Massachusetts, thereby depriving the infant child of his liberty and depriving the said mother of her maternal rights and solace. That on fourteen April 1900, the child was unlawfully delivered unto the care of the father of the infant male, Dr. John Warren Haskell, address unknown. That on fifteen April 1900, said father unlawfully delivered the child into the care of the Orphanage of Saint Andre of Ely Falls, New Hampshire, unlawfully charging them with placing out the child.”