Fortune's Rocks (19 page)
“Then I am mistaken,” he says, though he does not seem repentant. “But whyever are you here?” He makes a show of looking at his pocket watch. “It is so awfully early still. I am just about to go in to breakfast. I have had a walk. Will you join me?”
“No, I cannot,” she says.
He raises an eyebrow. She leaves him standing there. She discovers the stairs and heads in the direction of the sea, which is turning a dove gray as a result of a thickening cloud cover.
O
LYMPIA’S FATHER
normally takes his breakfast in solitude or, if there are others present, immersed in a book he holds beside his plate. But on the morning after Olympia’s visit to Haskell, her father looks up at her as she enters the breakfast room, and he continues to observe her as she takes her place and spreads her napkin over her lap. Though she wants to, Olympia cannot ask him to discontinue his stare, for that would be not only to acknowledge the unusual but also to speak to him in a manner that is not acceptable. Instead, she says good morning and pours herself a cup of tea. When she dares to glance up at him, she understands that his is not an angry stare, but rather one of some bewilderment, as though he needed to reassure himself that the girl before him is not, as it would appear, an imposter.
LYMPIA’S FATHER
normally takes his breakfast in solitude or, if there are others present, immersed in a book he holds beside his plate. But on the morning after Olympia’s visit to Haskell, her father looks up at her as she enters the breakfast room, and he continues to observe her as she takes her place and spreads her napkin over her lap. Though she wants to, Olympia cannot ask him to discontinue his stare, for that would be not only to acknowledge the unusual but also to speak to him in a manner that is not acceptable. Instead, she says good morning and pours herself a cup of tea. When she dares to glance up at him, she understands that his is not an angry stare, but rather one of some bewilderment, as though he needed to reassure himself that the girl before him is not, as it would appear, an imposter.
“Olympia, you look peaked,” her father says, halting a forkful of shirred egg in its progress to his mouth. “You are well? You worry me sometimes. I was particularly concerned when you did not come down for supper last night.”
“I am fine,” she says, eyeing the food before her. She is now ravenous, and the raspberry cake looks particularly appetizing. “You distress yourself too much. Really, Father, I am fine. If I were ill, I would say so.”
He takes a sip of tea.
“Well, you always have been a sensible girl,” he says. “That is a pretty dress.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“By the way, I am thinking of having a gala partially in honor of your sixteenth birthday.”
“A gala? Here?”
“Your mother and I are very proud of you, Olympia, and I have high hopes for your future.”
Though the word
future
strikes an uneasy and discordant note within her, she nods in her father’s direction. “Thank you,” she says.
future
strikes an uneasy and discordant note within her, she nods in her father’s direction. “Thank you,” she says.
“And also I have had a letter from the Reverend Edward Everett Hale. He says he may come to visit at that time. We shall have a dinner and dancing. I have in mind the tenth of August. About a hundred and twenty? Many of the summer people from Boston, of course, and Philbrick and Legny. Yes, that would be a treat. Which means I shall require you to finish Hale’s sermons before the event. You have, of course, read ‘Man Without a Country. ’”
“Yes, Father.”
“And I shall invite the Haskells as well, since I know that John is most eager to meet Hale. Haskell’s cottage is to be finished by that date, or so I am to understand. John cannot much appreciate hotel food each meal, regardless of how well prepared it is.”
“The tenth is less than four weeks away,” Olympia says.
“Yes, not much time at all. Invitations will have to go out the day after tomorrow at the latest. You and I will have to put together a guest list later this afternoon. Your mother will help us with writing out the invitations, I am sure.”
“Yes, of course,” Olympia says.
Silently, she regards her father’s plans for a gala with both dread and excitement. Dread, because it will be painful and awkward to be in public with Haskell and not be able to be with him. Excitement, because any opportunity to be with each other, even if in public, seems desirable.
“If there is someone of your own you would like to invite . . . ,” her father offers. Once again, he examines her face, which she hopes gives nothing away.
“No, there is no one,” she says.
He nods. “I must write a note and send it. Yes, Josiah must take a note to Haskell, for I need to know whether the date is suitable for him and Catherine. I doubt John would ever forgive me if I had Hale here on an evening when he could not make it. John and the reverend share, I believe, an abnormally keen interest in motorcars.”
“Let me take it,” Olympia says impulsively. “I should welcome the walk.”
They both simultaneously turn to look through the windows at the weather, which is not particularly fine. But she knows her father will assent to her suggestion, since he is nearly as keen a believer in her physical education as he is in her intellectual one.
“Yes,” he says. “A walk is just the thing after a hearty breakfast. But leave the note at the desk. I should not like Haskell to think I am reduced to relying upon my daughter for my errands.”
“Of course,” she says, overbuttering her second piece of raspberry cake. Her appetite will not be appeased.
“A remarkable man, do you not think?” her father asks.
“I like him very much,” she answers.
“I meant Hale,” he says.
• • •
A shallow cloud cover prevents shadows and causes the landscape to take on a flat aspect that is unrelieved by color. Perhaps no palette in nature, Olympia thinks as she walks along the beach, is as capable of transformation as the seashore. Just two days earlier, the water was a vivid navy, the beach roses lovely blots of pink. But today, that very same geography is bleached of color, the sea now gray and the roses dulled.
She walks with her father’s note in her pocket and her boots in her hand. She is imagining how pleased Haskell will be if she takes the note to his room. But then she has another thought: Might he not be offended, or engaged elsewhere? She does not know his schedule, nor yet know his routine.
There are few people on the hotel porch, one a woman knitting, who smiles at Olympia when she climbs the steps, and another a governess with a small child. Olympia pushes through the door to the lobby, takes the note out of her pocket, and hands it to the clerk behind the desk, who is, fortunately, a different clerk than was there the day before.
“Oh, Dr. Haskell is it then?” the clerk asks, reading the envelope. “He is just breakfasting in the dining room, miss. . . . I will have it sent in straightaway.” He signals for the porter and gives the man the note.
“Thank you,” she says.
She walks out onto the porch and lingers by the railing. She fastens her eyes on the ocean, though she sees nothing. She hears Haskell’s footsteps behind her before he speaks.
“This is more than I could have hoped for,” he says quietly. He is dressed in a blue shirt with a gray linen waistcoat. His hair is wet and still bears its brush marks.
Olympia turns. Haskell takes an involuntary step toward her and puts a hand out, as if he would touch her, but then stops himself just in time. Although he does, Olympia thinks, give himself away in the very next moment by glancing over at the woman who is knitting.
“Olympia,” he says.
She cannot call him by the name that she has heard his wife use so endearingly.
“You were about to leave,” she says, noting his coat and satchel.
“I have to be at the clinic.” He walks closer to her. “I have thought of nothing but you,” he says in a low voice only she can hear. “It is an agony to be so distracted. Yet it is an agony I wished for. That I cannot deny.”
There is much she wants to say to him, but she cannot think how to form the words.
He misunderstands her long silence.
“You are sick at heart,” he says. “It is why you have come.”
“No,” she says, feeling a flush of confusion upon her face. She finds it difficult to meet his eye, and suddenly she is acutely aware of her youth, her naïveté. But she also knows that if she allows herself to think of the damage done, she and he will both be lost, that what they have so recently begun will be tainted. “No,” she repeats. “I am not sick at heart. I have joy in my heart, and there is no room for anything more.”
He glances again in the direction of the knitting woman, who is now unraveling her progress. He takes Olympia’s elbow and guides her down the steps. She willingly follows his lead. They walk around to the back of the hotel and stop at a small enclosure. There is a bench, a bicycle leaning against it. They are alone, though still visible from the hotel. They sit on the bench.
He trails his fingers along her skirt from her knee to her hip and lets them linger at the top of her thigh. She puts her hand over his. A chambermaid walks by the opening of the enclosure.
“This is madness,” he says, reluctantly removing his fingers. For a time they sit in silence. After a few moments, he remembers the note from her father.
“What is this about a gala?” he asks, taking the note from his pocket. “It is your birthday?”
“Not that day,” she says.
He reads the note through again, and then puts it away. She thinks he does not want to be reminded just then of her age.
“Of course, you cannot . . . ,” Olympia says.
“But I will have to tell Catherine of this, for she will hear of it anyway,” he says. “She will want to come. There will be many instances perhaps . . .”
“It is too far away,” Olympia says. “I cannot think about it now. Your cottage will be completed, my father says.”
He nods.
“I should like one day to see its progress.”
He looks at her in a strange manner. “I cannot speak of normal things with you, Olympia, not in the normal way. It is as though I have lost the habit of normality overnight. The only subject I wish to think about and speak about is you. And why should we remind ourselves of a house in which I will have to live without you?”
“Because it is real,” she says. “Because it will happen.”
And he seems surprised that already she has thought of the end. “If I had any honor, I would send you away. If I cared for your honor.”
His statement rattles her. “What does honor matter in the face of this?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Nothing, nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all. You amaze me, Olympia.”
She looks away. A fog is rolling in along the back lawn.
“I have written a letter,” Haskell says. “I did this for myself yesterday afternoon. It was not written for you to see. And it is not finished yet, it is merely scribblings. I never thought to give it to you, but now I want to, however imperfect it is.”
He reaches into his satchel and removes an envelope. He holds it a minute and then hands it to her. He looks at his watch. “I have to leave you now. I am due at the clinic.”
A boy comes into the enclosure and shyly deposits his bicycle. He must be a busboy, Olympia thinks, or a stable hand. Perhaps this is the employees’ garden.
Haskell stands abruptly. “I wish it were not this way, Olympia,” he says heatedly. “I wish it were I who could come to you.”
Olympia stands with him.
“It is not worth wishing for what we cannot have,” she says.
• • •
Olympia walks with deliberately slow steps along the waterline and through the fog, which is thickening, to her house. She slips as quietly as she can up to her room. But once inside the door, she tears the envelope open. In years to come, she will remember this moment as a somewhat comical scene: her sitting on the bed in a heap, her hat not yet removed, tearing the envelope to bits.
She reads:
14 July 1899
My dearest Olympia,
If ever a man felt his spirit dissolve and meld into another’s, it was with you this morning. Why that should be so, I cannot say. This affair we have begun is disastrous for more reasons than I can even begin to enumerate. You are so young, and I am not. You have your entire life ahead of you, which I know that I have damaged irreparably. Forgive me, Olympia. No, do not. One cannot ask for forgiveness for that which one does not regret; and I cannot, as a man and as a lover, regret the precious moments I have been allowed to spend in your presence.
I thought that I was not of the sort to experience a great passion, that such states were fictions written by persons who wished to make more of a natural physical event than was necessary or even advisable. Indeed, my equanimity in such matters was a quality I often congratulated myself in possessing, and having in Catherine as well, who has not ever shown herself to be demonstrably passionate. I am sorry if I offend you by writing to you in such a forthright manner. God knows that if I could, I would apologize to Catherine, too, for exposing her in this way, although I know that she would not permit any apology, just as surely as I know that she would be heartsick by my betrayal of her.
Dearest Olympia, my life has been upended ever since the moment I first saw you at the beach. You do not remember me, but I remember you: a young woman in a dusty pink silk dress that seemed barely to contain the life within its folds. You walked barefooted along the sand, and every man on that beach watched you and desired you. Later, on the porch, when we met for the first time, I felt a profound shock upon seeing you, as if we two had already met.
Heretofore, my life has been one of self-satisfaction, of pride in my work, service to the community, and gratification in my family; but all that must now be something less than it was. Not enough. No, never again enough. How can I explain this to myself, let alone to you? You who are so young and have hardly begun on your journey?
I have prided myself as well in having an instinctive understanding of physical matters, when in fact I did not have the faintest comprehension, not the faintest. I thought I knew myself well — my habits have always been regular — but I find today that I am a stranger to myself, foreign. How placid I used to be, how smug. . . .
How uncommon everything about you is to me. You know much already about how to give pleasure to another, and I think to yourself, which is a quality that is not true of Catherine. Despite her love for me and her desire to please others, she does not know how to please herself. This is not a situation which distresses Catherine much, I think. When such a thing is a given, one knows not what one misses. . . . But I do not think I realized until today how very important a woman’s pleasure is to a man’s (and how the obverse, of course, must also be true).
You must not regret what you have done, Olympia. You must not feel shame. And I sense — indeed, this is one of the things that so astound me about you — that you do not, that you will not. Not in this. Perhaps in other things, but not in this. Is this self-deception on my part, wishful thinking? I sincerely believe not. I think you understand that which you do. Or am I so deluded as to see only what I wish to see? To wish, and therefore to believe, you to be more mature than your years, to possess a physical understanding that eludes so many women their entire lives?
(I do not mean to suggest here that you were thinking of your own pleasure today or even that our coming together gave you pleasure, though you will one day feel such physical joy; of this I am certain.)
Forgive me, Olympia. Forgive me for taking from you what is not mine to have.
How rash this all is. How dangerous.
I met Catherine in the second year of my practice. I was much taken with her inner repose and her tenderness. Her father is a minister of the Methodist faith, a man of modest means, though learned and likable, a man whose approval meant something to me. (And, God, how this man would despise me now, if he knew! There is between men, between father and suitor, an understanding of certain aspects of a man’s life that cannot be acknowledged outright, and certainly not in the presence of the woman; and so there must be, between the men, a sense of trust, of belief that the daughter who will one day become the wife will not be harmed in any way. And though unspoken, it is a kind of sacred trust. I had this with Catherine’s father and felt it necessary to honor. And now I experience the greatest anguish at having betrayed that trust.)
I cannot write about this.
I meant to describe to you, you to whom I wish to tell everything, how it was I came to love Catherine, to want her to be my wife. I had occasion to observe her often in the role of caretaker to her nieces, whose mother, Gertrude, had died at an early age from tuberculosis. I admired the way Catherine was with the children, and I saw she would be an excellent mother to her own. You will think this opportunistic, and I fancy it was; but she, too, must have thought me a good prospect as well, for I do not think she loved me in any grand way when we married — rather in a cheerful and pleasant way, which makes for a good wife and a good marriage. And I hope I have not been a disappointment to her.
(Although I shall be now. I shall wish her you. Every minute. And for this reason, as well as for the secret in my heart, I dread her return on Friday evening. I am not of a nature to enjoy deceit.)
Why, I ask myself, is passion, when it occurs in circumstances outside of marriage, so absolutely wrong? This is a question that vexes me. How can something that feels so true and honest and pure, which is how I must describe my feelings for you, and I do declare them love, which I had not thought possible after so short a time (and how deluded I was again), be so ugly as to cause such pain? And more vexing still, have no happy conclusion? None . . . None . . .
I cannot deny that I have known Catherine in all the ways possible to a man and that she has been generous. So why — why? — has this not been enough? Why? I seek a rational answer when reason is not wanted. I seek a scientific answer where science is not invited.
Or is it possible that such a union as I have begun now with you has for its origins a science of its own? Its own physical laws and formulae? Might we one day be able to detect this blinding thing called passion and quantify it and thus save ourselves from this helpless agony?
And yet, could I wish for that? Could I, in truth, wish this elation, this mystery, quantified and thus tamed?
I must stop now, for these are all delusions, dangerous delusions which exhaust me.
I am not a writer, but a man of medicine, infected with an illness so subversive, the patient wishes not for his own cure.
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