Fortune's Rocks (28 page)
“Father, do not do this to me.”
He looks long and hard at his daughter’s face. Olympia can imagine what he sees: an overplump sixteen-year-old girl whose judgment can no longer be trusted.
“There is nothing more to be said on this subject,” he says.
She bites her lip hard to keep from crying out further. She holds the arms of her chair so tightly that she later will have cramps in her fingers.
She will refuse to obey him, she thinks. She will accept his implied challenge and set off on her own. But in the next moment, she asks herself: How will she be able to do that? Without her father’s support, she cannot hope to survive. And if she herself does not survive, then a child cannot live.
Her father pretends to be examining the revelers, but Olympia knows that all he can see is himself and her, framed by the cream molding of the window’s deep sill. He seems not to like what he sees, and turns back to her.
“After your training, I should like you to find a position somewhere away from Boston, where your story will not immediately be known,” he says, and it is clear that he has been thinking this through for days. “Even so, you must be prepared for a life in which people will eventually know your circumstances, for I doubt there is anywhere you could go where there will not at least be a possibility of the story reaching those around you. Unless you change your name . . .”
He considers this idea for a moment.
“No,” he says. “No, you will not do that. There is no need for cowardice in this family. Of course, you will be provided for. I do not think you could live very well on a teacher’s salary. I shall not be lavish, merely adequate. Olympia, despite all” — she looks sharply up at him, for she detects a tiny crack in his composure — “your mother and I do love you.”
Her eyes sting at this pronouncement, for she does not believe that her father has ever spoken of love to her.
Her father sighs, as though this confession has taken more out of him than he anticipated. He raises his chin and takes a quick breath.
“So, now,” her father says, having ventured too far into sentiment for comfort. “Fetch your cloak and hat. I shall take you for your walk this evening in the park. And then we will come back and make ourselves some cocoa, and in this modest way we shall celebrate the new century, in which I hope you will have a life of contentment, if not actually of happiness.”
Olympia tries to stand. Her father reaches for her arm, and she sees that he is disconcerted to realize just how large she has become, for it has been some time since he has stood this close to her.
She disentangles her arm from his. “You are wrong in one thing, Father,” she says as calmly as she can. “Quite wrong.”
“And what is that?” he asks almost absently, having discharged his duty in a timely fashion and now somewhat more relaxed than he was when he entered the room.
She looks at his face and waits until his eyes meet hers.
“You predict that by the fall of next year, I will be entirely recovered from this ‘episode,’ as you call it. But you are wrong. I will never recover, Father. Never. If you take the child from me, I will never get over it.”
He studies her for some seconds.
“Olympia,” he says. “You are so very young.”
• • •
Shortly after midnight, in the early morning of April
14
, Olympia wakes to a sensation of wetness. On further inspection, she discovers that her gown and her bed are soaked with warm fluid. Heavily, she climbs out of the bed and changes into a dry nightdress. She knows from the medical book what this means. She walks to the bottom of the stairs leading to the third floor and knocks as hard as she dares against the wall. She does not want to rouse either of her parents.
14
, Olympia wakes to a sensation of wetness. On further inspection, she discovers that her gown and her bed are soaked with warm fluid. Heavily, she climbs out of the bed and changes into a dry nightdress. She knows from the medical book what this means. She walks to the bottom of the stairs leading to the third floor and knocks as hard as she dares against the wall. She does not want to rouse either of her parents.
Josiah, his hair matted into a comical shape, comes to the landing in his dressing gown.
“Fetch Lisette,” Olympia says.
Lisette enters the room in plaits and nightdress. She embraces Olympia and seems as excited as if it were she who is about to give birth. Since Lisette’s lack of fear and good spirits are somewhat infectious, Olympia is less apprehensive than she might be. She sits on a chair in her room and watches while Lisette changes the bedclothes. When she is finished, Olympia climbs back into bed, draws up the coverlet, and waits. It is a warm night. She asks Lisette if she has ever witnessed a birth. Lisette says yes, several times. She is the eldest of seven children, and her mother “popped them out like biscuits.”
“I have seen a birth as well,” Olympia says.
“You have? When was that?”
“When I was with John Haskell,” Olympia says, startling herself with the name spoken out loud. She has never talked of her time with Haskell with anyone, not even Lisette. “I went with him when he attended a birth. It was in a boardinghouse in Ely Falls.”
“You went into the room?”
“I saw it all. The birth was breech and the woman, a poor Franco with three other children, was nearly deranged with the pain. Dr. Haskell gave her laudanum, I think, and she quieted some. But I remember him struggling to turn the baby. He had his hands — ”
Olympia cannot go on, however, for she experiences then the first pain of her own. Rigid with surprise, she holds her breath until it is finished. When it has subsided, she lets out a long sigh.
Lisette stands above her. “You must not hold your breath,” she says. “You must breathe each time you get the pain.”
Olympia nods, shaken by the ferocity of the contraction. “Is this how it will be?” she asks.
“Listen to me,” Lisette says, drawing up a chair close to her bed. She takes Olympia’s hand in her own. “You are used to behaving in a certain way. You are very proper. You hardly ever get upset, and when you do, you keep it to yourself. But now is not the time to be proper. It is bad for the baby and for you. Do not worry about screaming with the pain. Do not worry about all the embarrassing things your body is going to do, because it is going to do plenty. Do you want me to fetch your mother?”
“No,” Olympia says. “There is no need.”
The pains come on hard then and are dreadful. Olympia is appalled, even during the first hour, which she thinks surely must be the last, since any increase of pain seems unendurable.
After daybreak, Olympia’s mother, summoned by Lisette, enters the room. She has on a blue silk dressing gown tied at the waist. Her hair is rolled back from her head with rags. “Fetch Dr. Branch,” she says at once to Lisette. Olympia’s mother wets a cloth in a basin, walks to the bed, and lays the wrung and folded towel upon her daughter’s forehead. Her face is heavily creamed and glistens in the electric-lamp light. “And I shall need hard sweets for Olympia to suck on,” her mother adds. “There are some in my room in a silver jar on the dresser.”
Olympia is mildly surprised at how easily her mother assumes the mantle of command. She holds the cloth against Olympia’s brow, even as Olympia clenches her teeth and pulls the bedclothes into knots. Lisette returns with word that the doctor is out on his rounds and will be by as soon as he can be found. When Olympia has the pains, her mother leans over the bed and pins her arms back against the bedclothes, and oddly, this seems to help. In between the pains, her mother unwinds the rags from her hair and drinks a cup of tea that Lisette has brought, and once even gets up and inspects the quilted yellow box with its tiny treasures. Thus her mother abandons her normal air of elegance and diffidence and is as involved with the mechanics of the birth as Lisette is. She shows herself to have courage and kindness and common sense, qualities that Olympia has not noticed in her in abundance before. Once Olympia emerges from a short sleep and hears her mother chatting pleasantly, even laughing, with Lisette. Despite the pain, Olympia finds their ease together reassuring. If they are not terrified, then she should not be.
The doctor comes shortly after noon, and Olympia can smell liquor on his breath. She wonders where he has been, if he has been sharing a drink with her father in his study before he came to her, though that seems unlikely so early in the day. Olympia is barely coherent, saving all her strength to withstand the hideous and constantly recurring pain. She thinks it is knowing that the pain will come again and again that exhausts her, knowing that she cannot stop it. She begs for laudanum, and Dr. Branch gives her three spoonfuls of a brownish liquid that causes her to drift in and out of sleep, only to be shocked each time she wakes to another pain and sees her mother and Lisette looming over her.
At two o’clock on the afternoon of April
14
, Olympia begins to cry out. She has been in labor for thirteen hours. Dr. Branch comes into the room and is suddenly more alert than he has been before. He tells Olympia’s mother and Lisette to prop up Olympia. He then ties Olympia’s feet to the bedposts. Olympia’s mother speaks constantly to her in a soothing voice.
14
, Olympia begins to cry out. She has been in labor for thirteen hours. Dr. Branch comes into the room and is suddenly more alert than he has been before. He tells Olympia’s mother and Lisette to prop up Olympia. He then ties Olympia’s feet to the bedposts. Olympia’s mother speaks constantly to her in a soothing voice.
“I cannot do this,” Olympia cries. “I cannot do this!”
And with that pronouncement, her child, a boy, is born into the world.
• • •
And how many times will Olympia regret begging for that drug from Dr. Branch? For if she had been alert and awake after the birth, she could perhaps have stopped them from taking the child from her. In years to come, she will remember only the briefest of moments with her son: waking to the surprise of the swaddled bundle tucked beside her in the bed, turning her head to peer at a wrinkled face, unwrapping the cloths just enough to free a delicate hand. But drugged and exhausted, she cannot keep herself from sleep. Indeed, her body, if not her heart, welcomes it.
Later, she will sift these brief moments a thousand — no, ten thousand — times for one stray glint or shard of memory she may have overlooked before. She will remember wet black spiky hair, blue eyes that were purely guileless, a tiny mouth, bowed, exquisite. She never puts her son to her breast. She never sees his tiny feet. She never hears him cry. And when she wakes finally to consciousness, the drug having leached itself from her bones, he is gone.
O
N
S
EPTEMBER
27
,
1900
,
Olympia arrives at the Hastings Seminary for Females in the western part of Massachusetts. The village in which the seminary is located is a factory town, the factory dominating the landscape, spilling down into the streets, overtaking churches and shops and the seminary itself, so that it is not possible to say where the factory begins or ends, the buildings all dark brick, even the houses of the owners. The factory produces shoes and boots, and there are many tanneries in the town, so that even the trees smell of offal. It is immediately apparent to Olympia that her father has never visited the seminary, for if he had, the near perfection of the location as a place of punishment would have strained even his sense of justice. Surely there is no crime his daughter could have committed that warrants such an exile.
N
S
EPTEMBER
27
,
1900
,
Olympia arrives at the Hastings Seminary for Females in the western part of Massachusetts. The village in which the seminary is located is a factory town, the factory dominating the landscape, spilling down into the streets, overtaking churches and shops and the seminary itself, so that it is not possible to say where the factory begins or ends, the buildings all dark brick, even the houses of the owners. The factory produces shoes and boots, and there are many tanneries in the town, so that even the trees smell of offal. It is immediately apparent to Olympia that her father has never visited the seminary, for if he had, the near perfection of the location as a place of punishment would have strained even his sense of justice. Surely there is no crime his daughter could have committed that warrants such an exile.
Olympia will have images of this year, months that are a dull headache at the back of her neck, but no accurate sense of its passage. Cold beef on a blue willow plate. A tapestry hung over a bed. Fastidious girls who professed to be afraid of love. Darkened brick buildings in the rain. Dreams that came and went upon a fawn-colored wall. A stuck window, swollen from the wet. A girl in challis who scoured knives. A hundred eggs for custard pies. India rubbers in the washroom and a cherry desk with a green lid. A tin of matches with a slate. A wooden porch that was overhung with elms. A girl crying in the widow closet. Stiff white sheets in the drying yard. Brown-gold carpets with peacock blue chairs. An hour of recitation followed by an hour of prayer. Pale Methodist ministers who watched girls with hoops at calisthenics.
Worcester’s Elements
and
Goldsmith’s England.
Young women sent out to foreign lands.
Trunks must be packed by Sunday night.
Worcester’s Elements
and
Goldsmith’s England.
Young women sent out to foreign lands.
Trunks must be packed by Sunday night.
The seminary, Olympia learns, was started by Methodist philanthropists in
1873
as a place to educate the factory girls in their off-hours and therefore had the distinction of being the first evening school in the country. When it became clear to the founding fathers, however, that mill girls had precious few off-hours (and those they did have they did not want to spend in further confinement), the seminary began to direct its recruitment to the middle classes: daughters of ministers and salesmen and schoolteachers. The theory and indeed the practice of the seminary are to educate young women so that they can be sent out to teach: to Smyrna or to Turkey or to Indiana or to Worcester or to work among the Zulus in South Africa. In addition to their teaching duties, it is hoped that the graduates might also function as enlightened and Christian models for girls all over the world. It is a measure of Olympia’s disassociation from life then that she regards such a prospect with equanimity: She is neither fearful of nor enthusiastic about further exile, all locations other than the Fortune’s Rocks of her memories being a matter of similar indifference.
1873
as a place to educate the factory girls in their off-hours and therefore had the distinction of being the first evening school in the country. When it became clear to the founding fathers, however, that mill girls had precious few off-hours (and those they did have they did not want to spend in further confinement), the seminary began to direct its recruitment to the middle classes: daughters of ministers and salesmen and schoolteachers. The theory and indeed the practice of the seminary are to educate young women so that they can be sent out to teach: to Smyrna or to Turkey or to Indiana or to Worcester or to work among the Zulus in South Africa. In addition to their teaching duties, it is hoped that the graduates might also function as enlightened and Christian models for girls all over the world. It is a measure of Olympia’s disassociation from life then that she regards such a prospect with equanimity: She is neither fearful of nor enthusiastic about further exile, all locations other than the Fortune’s Rocks of her memories being a matter of similar indifference.
At the seminary, Olympia studies Latin and geography, mathematics and biology, and other subjects with extra courses in composition, calisthenics, vocal music, dressmaking, and household husbandry. The bent is practical; true scholars are the exception. Because neither the curriculum nor its purveyors are particularly intimidating, the establishment, much to the surprise of everyone, flourishes wildly and has many more applications for admission than there are places. Olympia finds it astonishing to contemplate how many young women are willing to leave their homes, that is to say, their villages in New England, to be sent to alien territories where one might perish from loneliness or become ill from infection. And she wonders if this collective passivity is a consequence of individual personal disasters that have rendered them unfit for marriage, or of a general lack of confidence in the future.
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