by Anita Shreve
“Your Honor,” says Tucker, “we have long known about this situation here in Ely Falls, but we have more or less chosen to look the other way. I believe the city officials, both Yankee and Franco alike, have concluded that ‘Petit Canada’ should police its own. Which is not the matter precisely before the court, except insofar as it is relevant to the future of one little boy, Pierre Francis Haskell.
“This boy, if left in the custody of Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc, will enter the mills sometime before his twelfth birthday. Let me tell you what this will mean for him. Not only will he be deprived of schooling, but he will also work eleven hours a day, six days a week, with no fresh air or sunshine, and most likely in a lint-filled room. He will be subject to a wide range of diseases, including measles, diphtheria, and the treacherous white lung. He will probably be stunted in his growth and will compromise his eyesight. He will have no exercise except for the repetitious motions of his job. He will live in worker housing that is commonly infested with cockroaches, rats, and mice, and where filth and poverty encourage the breeding of diseases such as smallpox and cholera. Bishop Louis Giguere himself wrote the following this year in L’Avenir: ‘The worker housing is indescribable in print. There are vile privies, stinking cellars of rubbish, and perilous stairways. Sewer pipes contain large holes that emit a noxious gas. The buildings are without adequate ventilation and water supply.’
“Your Honor, I do not mean to suggest that the specific room in which Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc reside is so indecent, but as a member of the Franco-American community, Pierre Francis Haskell will grow up in this environment. Moreover, he will emerge into adulthood, if he makes it into adulthood, with no place else to go except back to the mills. He will have no education to speak of, no other skills except the one he has learned at the looms. Is the state prepared to sentence Pierre Haskell to such a life? For make no mistake: To grant custody to Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc is to give the boy a life sentence of missed opportunities and poverty.”
Olympia glances over at the respondents’ table. Sears has his hand on Albertine’s arm, as if to restrain her. Telesphore mutters angrily, “Non, non, non.”
“Your Honor,” says Tucker, “both women in question here today stand to either suffer terribly or have great joy as a result of your decision. But as my colleague Mr. Addison Sears himself said before the court, we cannot care about the joy or suffering of the mother. We must care first and, if necessary, only about the welfare of the child. And there can be no question but that the boy will be better served by being remanded to the custody of Olympia Biddeford, who guarantees, by her own example, the boy’s education, his financial security, and very likely his higher education as well. We are speaking here today of making either a future millworker or of making a doctor or a professor or even a judge. To take these opportunities away from the boy is nothing short of a crime.”
Tucker pauses.
“Your Honor, Olympia Biddeford was herself a child when she discovered she was with child. Since that day, she has conducted herself in a manner any Christian woman might envy and aspire to: She has secured a higher education, she lives a clean and sober life, and she uses wisely the advantages given to her by dint of her birth, namely, good descent and respectable fortune. I do not think any of us here today doubts for one minute that she will be a good mother to the boy.”
At the lectern, Tucker gathers his notes together.
“The court is entrusted with the decision of a great question of morals as well as law: To whom belongs the custody of the child?”
Tucker looks pointedly at Judge Littlefield and then slowly turns to Olympia. He holds her gaze for what seems a long minute.
“Let us restore a child to his rightful mother,” he says.
Judgment to be read tomorrow three o’clock. Will collect you eleven o’clock for meal. Courage. Tucker.
She slips the yellow telegram into the pocket of her dress. Closing the back door, she watches as the lithe telegraph boy sprints out onto the road with his tip. She walks directly into the butler’s pantry and pours herself a drink to steady her nerves, which is not like her. For what occasion did she purchase this bottle of whiskey? she wonders. The decanter is old, cut-glass, her mother’s mother’s. Drink in hand, she moves into the front room and stands at the windows. The dying sun turns the water teal, a color nearly leached in the next instant. She sets her glass on the windowsill and unpins her hair, holding it in great handfuls in front of her.
A judgment has been rendered. Her fate is sealed, and she does not know what it is. She is surprised at how quickly the waiting is over. Tucker said it would take at least a week for Littlefield to arrive at an opinion, but it has been only four days. She is not prepared for this.
She sits in her Windsor chair and takes up again the nightshirt she has been working on. She slips the pearl-headed pins from the fabric and pokes them into the old horsehair pincushion she once embroidered as a child. With her scissors, she snips the tails of thread still caught in the seams. All about her on the floor are scraps of linen and cotton. The nightshirt might have been finished earlier, but all afternoon she has been disturbed by recurring images of the hours she spent in the courthouse last week, vivid pictures that make her pause in her sewing and set her needle and thread in her lap.
She thinks of Tucker and the way he returned to their table after his final address, his face white, his hands trembling slightly, and how she understood, even then, how difficult it had been for him to put forth that particular argument, knowing as he did that he was taking on an entire culture. Where another man might have been exuberant, Tucker had seemed subdued. “A risky gambit” was all that he said to her when she later tried to thank him.
She thinks of Sears as he was delivering his own address at the end, the stout, bald man stabbing the air and hurtling accusations at Olympia, his anger at Tucker fueling every word. His summation, not unlike his opening statement — although more ferocious and perhaps more persuasive — was at least as strong as Tucker’s. Numerous times Sears made the point that one could not judge the behavior of an individual by the behavior of a culture. And when he was done, it was not at all clear to Olympia which argument might have moved the judge more.
She recalls her own time in the witness box, the wretched questions she was forced to answer about the manner in which she and Haskell had once loved each other. She thinks of her father in the box as well, pale and shrunken, clearly wondering how it was his life had arrived at this terrible juncture. She thinks of Josiah’s astonishing story of journeying up to Ely Falls with the infant, a journey that would have been a torment for Lisette. She remembers Mother Marguerite in her habit and starched wimple, each word she spoke having the weight of truth. She thinks of Dean Bardwell in her tweed suit, with her unexpected tale of Averill Hardy and his self-serving accusations. And she thinks of Cote squirming at the end of his testimony, and how deliciously satisfying it was to see the man left hanging, how even Judge Littlefield appeared to be certain Cote was lying.
And then, in her mind’s eye, she sees Albertine Bolduc in the witness box — Albertine with her broken English, her obvious love for the boy, and her painfully eloquent photographs. Olympia shakes her head quickly. She cannot think about Albertine now.
She lifts the nightshirt, holds it away from her, and studies it for a moment. Last month, in a moment of whimsy, she purchased in Ely Falls five horn buttons of different animal shapes, which she has put on the shirt: an elephant, a monkey, a bear, a giraffe, and something that might or might not be a buffalo. She walks with the shirt into the kitchen, where she has set up the ironing board and has put the iron on the stove to heat. As she presses the seams flat, she thinks about the trunk upstairs, nearly filled now with shirts and short pants and socks and underclothes and sweaters and jackets that she has sewn or knitted for the boy. It has been a true labor of love, and something more — the only thing that has kept her calm during the long winter months of waiting fo
r the hearing to begin.
The doorbell rings again, surprising her. She holds the iron in her hand and listens. Two summonses in twenty minutes? Perhaps it is another telegram. Has Littlefield, in his impatience, read his judgment today? No, surely not. She puts the iron on a brick and walks around the corner into the back hallway.
He is standing at the door, having already rung. She can see his face through the glass panes. She puts a hand out to the wall to steady herself. He has on a suit jacket, a gray fedora. A vest that buttons high on the chest. Beyond that, she cannot make out much because the sun is behind him, low in the sky and glinting painfully through the bare trees.
A moment of joy. Then of disbelief.
As if in a trance, she moves the six or seven steps to the door and opens it.
“Olympia,” he says.
She backs away from the door, and he steps over the threshold. He gazes steadily at her, as if he, too, cannot believe in the apparition before him. She turns and walks into the kitchen, knowing that he follows her. Her heart beats so hard inside her chest, she has to press a hand to the bodice of her dress to still it.
“Olympia,” he says again.
She turns, and he removes his hat.
His face is older, but still he has high color. His hair, which has been cut short, is receding slightly at his brow. He seems leaner to her, more wiry than she has remembered. But it is his eyes that claim her most. They are old eyes, older than his body, hollow and lined, as if the weight of the past four years — no, nearly five now — had settled in those orbs, had done its damage there.
They stand on either side of the kitchen table, each taking in the other.
“I came as soon as I heard,” he says finally, breaking the silence.
She cannot speak.
“I have been away. Deep in the country. I have come just now by train from Minneapolis.”
She shakes her head and puts a hand on a chair back to steady herself.
“Minnesota,” he says.
She lifts her chin.
“When I returned to the boardinghouse in Minneapolis where I was staying, there was a letter from Mr. Tucker. And I have read just now about the suit in the newspapers. Indeed, there is hardly any other news at all.”
Turning her back to him, she stares out the window over the sink.
“No one knows I have come,” Haskell continues. “I shall not tell anyone. Not even Tucker. I fear my presence, as I am still legal guardian, would complicate and perhaps jeopardize your suit.”
She sets her jaw hard.
“I am at the Dover Inn,” he says. “I daresay I shall not run into anyone I know there.”
She pivots and leans against the lip of the sink.
“Olympia,” he says, laying his hat on the table.
“Would you like some tea?” she asks in a quavering voice, and she can see that he hardly knows how to answer her. “I shall put a kettle on,” she adds. “If you would leave me for a moment, I shall bring it into the front room.”
He hesitates, but then he seems to understand. “All right,” he says, and with reluctance, he walks through the swinging door.
When he is gone, she wraps her arms over her head and sinks to the floor, the skirts of her dress billowing up and out as she falls. She leans her head forward into her arms and weeps silently. Of all her imaginings, scarcely sane, she has not imagined this. She is gullied out, like the clay in the marshes. He has done this to her.
She pulls herself to a standing position. She finds a handkerchief in the pocket of her dress and blows her nose. Hardly knowing what she is doing, she fills the kettle with water, only then realizing that she cannot leave him waiting for her in the front room.
He is looking out at the ocean, his elbow resting on the thin window ledge, his other hand in the pocket of his trousers, and she sees that he has not lost the elegance of his gestures for all his time in the country.
He hears her skirts and turns.
“I have never been here when it was not summer,” he says. “The beach is quite majestic without people.”
“Nature is often seen at her best without people,” she says.
“You know, I hardly feel the guilt now,” he says. “What is left is the punishment.”
“Your children,” she says.
“The guilt is dulled. It is the loss I feel most keenly. The lost years one can never have back.”
“Why did you go so far away?”
“Catherine requested it. I could not refuse her.”
Olympia is silent, thinking of that request and of the circumstances under which it would have been made.
“To think I have not seen you since that night,” he says, studying her intently.
“It was a terrible night.”
“More dreadful than any I have ever experienced,” he says. “I was awed by Catherine’s pain, by its depth. It would not exhaust itself. She threw herself out of the carriage on the way to the cottage.”
“I did not know.”
“She fractured her wrist.”
“I was not told of this.”
“I had no idea she loved me in that way. She hardly felt the pain of the injury to her arm. It was the other injury that claimed her.”
“I remember her beauty,” Olympia says.
“Yes.”
He keeps his eyes on Olympia’s face. And it is she who turns away.
“What do you do in Minnesota?” she asks.
“I work among the Norwegian immigrants and the Arapaho. I have an office, but I am seldom in it. Most of my patients live far from town. Sometimes I am gone for days.”
“It is hard work?”
“Only to watch their suffering. We scarcely know the meaning of the word by comparison.”
And she can see then that the high color in his face is from the sun. His hands, too, are sunburnt. Perhaps there is, she thinks, a brute strength through the shoulders he has not had before. And in his hands, grown larger.
“You have seen the boy?”
“Yes.” She hesitates. “He is very like you.”
She watches him attempt to master the features of his face.
“Has all your work been . . . punishment?” she asks, thinking of the Indians.
“In its way. An exile.”
She smooths her skirts. She still has on her apron. Under it, a gray shirtwaist. “I, too, was sent into exile,” she says. “After the birth.”
“The school.”
“Yes. It was a kind of prison.”
“You know I had the boy,” he says. “For a day.”
“Yes.”
“I did not know I could feel so much love,” he says. “I lay on the bed with him all night. I had hired a wet nurse, who came to the room from time to time. I had planned to bring the boy to the orphanage first thing in the morning, but I could not bear to part with him. In the end, the wet nurse had to remind me that he needed better care than I could give him.”
The image of the man and the infant on the bed together seems unbearable to her now.
“I thought I would die after I left him there,” Haskell says. “Literally. I wanted to die. I thought of drowning myself in the Falls.”
“Did you not feel a similar love for your other children?” she asks.
“I must have,” he says, “but Catherine possessed them so when they were infants.” He pauses. “Martha will go to Wellesley.”
She has forgotten that Martha is of an age to go to college. “We might have been there together,” Olympia says.
“It was knowing I had only the one night,” Haskell says, explaining. “It is time that determines the intensity of love.”
“Is it?” she asks.
Restless, he begins to walk around the room. “I had started drinking,” he says. “I had been wandering. I had a post office I would call at from time to time. It was there I got your father’s letter. It was a brutal letter. But no less than I deserved.”
“I knew nothing of any of this.”<
br />
“And then after that night with the boy, I could see how banal the drinking was, how trite the ruin. So I went west.”
She tries to imagine him among the Indians.
“You are even more beautiful,” he says.
She looks away.
“You never used to wear your hair down.”
“I do not usually wear it down,” she says. “I have just taken it out.”
“I used to weep for the wreckage,” he says. “For the lives that must now always be something less.”
She thinks how familiar he is to her and yet how foreign. He is years older, not in his body, but in the eyes, which have perhaps seen too much.
“The most unforgivable,” he says, putting his hands into the pockets of his coat and shaking his head. “The most unforgivable is that I would do it again. If I believed in such a thing, I would get down on my knees and pray to have those moments with you restored to me.”
She is startled by this pronouncement. It seems blasphemous, to fly so in the face of God. And yet has she not done the same? In a Catholic orphanage? In a courthouse?
“Without the cost,” she says.
“Even with the cost.”
“You cannot mean that,” she says. “You cannot know the cost. The cumulative cost.”
“No,” he says. “I cannot.”
He sits in the Windsor chair, the scraps of linen all about his feet.
“Will you win your suit?” he asks.
“I do not know. The judgment is to be read tomorrow.”
“I shall go back, of course. Though I should like to know the judgment. I like to think of you with the boy.”
“I want him with me passionately,” she says.
“I should like to see him.”
“You could see him as I have had to,” she says harshly. “Standing across the street and hoping to catch a glimpse of him.”
“I am sorry you have had to do that.”
“I had to answer questions about you,” she says. “I had to tell them of us. When we were at the hotel together and at the cottage.”
“My God.”
“It was unspeakable,” she says. “Not the admitting to the deed. That I have long since gotten over. It was having to tell it aloud, having to tell it to people I did not know and did not want ever again to see. When I was sitting in the witness box, I felt I was being stripped of my clothing. Worse.”
