Fortune's Rocks

by Anita Shreve

  All along the hallways of the cottage is a cacophony of sound — children crying, women speaking excitedly in a foreign tongue, Josiah and the other servants moving briskly from room to room. A copper tub is set up in the kitchen, a cloth hastily erected. Olympia’s job is to bathe the children, female and male alike; and thus she observes that even the most stringent of mores, kept highly polished in normal times, may be quickly abandoned in times of crisis.

  By mid-morning, some order has been established. Olympia is bathing a small girl with silver curls whose name may or may not be Anna. Though Olympia has little verbal communication with the child, they manage to convey a great deal by way of an inventive soap sculpture of a sailing vessel that floats for a time and then disappears into the cloudy water. As small children will, the girl seems recovered from her near fatal mishap, and she appears to be, for the moment, simply enjoying her bath. As Olympia kneels before the tub, enduring the child’s brief annoyance when she washes her hair, she hears a sound behind her. When she turns, she sees that John Haskell has entered the room.

  “Do not let me disturb you,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He leans against a pine table and crosses his arms. He seems tired, which she knows he must be. He has hours ago changed into dry clothes, although his hair is somewhat unkempt.

  Shielding the child’s face with her hand, Olympia pours another pitcher of water over the silvery head. The girl squeals and fidgets, encouraging her to finish the task with dispatch. Through an open window, Olympia notes the ribs of the unfortunate barque, a sight that calls to mind the skeleton of a beached and stripped whale. And how strange it is to see the lifesaving station, which was the locus of such frenetic activity just hours earlier, rendered tame and even charming in the sunlight. The building is a handsome structure with many wide windows and a large tower with a widow’s walk. Intricate carvings decorate the eaves of the red roof, which rises to a sharp peak. How tidy and neat the scene appears, she thinks. And how unapologetic Nature seems to be in her calm indifference.

  “It was a brave effort,” Haskell says.

  “Yes.”

  “Sixty-five souls saved, and only one lifesaving officer lost. That is” — he calculates a moment — “slightly less than fifty percent of the ship’s passengers and crew saved and only eight percent of the lifesavers lost.”

  She ponders his calculations.

  “Were I the wife of the man who was lost,” she says, “I might consider that poor return for the risk, for to me and my children the loss would be one hundred percent.”

  He studies her for a moment. “I think you quite beyond your years in understanding,” he says. She flushes with pleasure, though later she will wonder if the remark did not contain more hope than accuracy.

  “What of the others?” she asks quickly.

  “We have several with broken bones, one with a serious injury to the neck that may leave the man paralyzed. Philbrick is even now trying to arrange to have the injured and sick transferred to the hospital at Rye, but Mason has declared the house quarantined and has said that no one may leave.”

  Haskell refers to the health inspector from Ely Falls, who arrived in the early hours. He comes to the tub and lifts the Norwegian girl from the water, the suds falling on his shirt. Olympia hands him a flannel, and he swaddles the girl in the cloth. He lays her on the kitchen table and examines her in a way Olympia finds thoughtful and gentle, despite the demands on his time and the sense of urgency all around them. She stands to one side, not certain whether to stay or to go, and in the end, indecision keeps her still.

  She watches as Haskell retrieves a dry cloth from a basket Josiah has brought. He wraps the child again. He holds the girl in the crook of his arm — such a tiny thing in his confident grasp — and speaks to her constantly of this small thing and that, his words incomprehensible to her but their soothing quality apparent in the drowsy look in her eyes.

  “Did Mr. Mason say how long he expects the quarantine to last?” Olympia asks, thinking of the mild unpleasantness of being unable to leave the house.

  “No, he is like all petty officials in the arbitrary wielding of very little power. No, he will not say, and this is of some annoyance to me, as Catherine and the children are to leave for York later today.”

  Olympia busies herself with the wet cloths on the floor of the kitchen.

  “Where will Mrs. Haskell and your children stay in York?” she asks.

  “Catherine’s mother has a cottage. My wife will return here on weekends, of course, and then will come to stay for good in August if the new cottage is finished, which I hope it shall be.”

  Olympia drops the cloths into another basket in the corner of the room and walks toward John Haskell.

  “Let me,” she says, lifting the girl out of his arms.

  And it seems a most elemental gesture — to take a child from a man.

  ON THE THIRD DAY after the wreck of the Mary Dexter, the visitors to the house are released from quarantine. Olympia wonders what will happen to the refugees. Since they now have no assets with which to negotiate their way in America, many of them are incorporated into the mills at Ely Falls, and what happens to the very young children, such as Anna, she never learns.

  Catherine and the children travel on to York. Haskell again takes up residence at the Highland Hotel. For some time, Olympia does not see him, since he works at the clinic in Ely Falls most of the hours of the day, and there is no natural opportunity for them to meet.

  Outwardly, Olympia passes her time in the usual manner. She reads books from a list her father has made up for her. Later she will remember The Valley of Decision, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Scarlet Letter in particular, since they are all works written in one century about another, the purpose of which is an issue her father and she debate at some length (her father taking the position that the social mores of a previous era might better highlight certain moral dilemmas of one’s own time, and Olympia holding to the notion that Edith Wharton or Charles Dickens or Nathaniel Hawthorne might simply have been drawn to the baroque language and richer color of an earlier era). As Olympia’s drawing skills have been seen to be inferior, she is given instruction by the French painter Claude Legny, who is residing at the Isles of Shoals for the season and who consents to ferry over to the mainland on Friday mornings to give her lessons. Though Olympia has a few talents, illustration is not among them, and she knows that she disappoints the man. She can see a thing well enough, can even describe it quite passably in words, but she cannot translate the subsequent vision to the fingers of her right hand. It is not unlike an adult giving instructions to a child, and the child rendering a result that, unfortunately, does not possess even a childlike charm.

  She has more success, however, with riding and tennis. As for the riding, which she takes up at the Hull farm in Ely, it is a skill she has already mastered and therefore cannot lay claim to as an accomplishment this summer. The tennis, however, is new to her and is one of the few organized activities that require all of her concentration and provide brief respites from her thoughts and daydreams.

  For more than anything else, the days that pass are ones that hold her in a state of suspension, somewhat in the way of an elongated pause in a beautiful piece of music — an interrupted prelude. Sometimes, it is all she can do to focus on any activity or task at all. She frequently feels dazed and preoccupied, unable to shake herself free of troubling thoughts. Indeed, she wonders from time to time if she is not possessed: Every moment that has passed between Haskell and her is examined and reexamined; every word that they have exchanged is heard and reheard; every look, gesture, and nuance interpreted and reinterpreted. While she sits at the dining table, or writes letters on the porch, or reads to her mother in her room, Olympia invents dialogue and debate with Haskell and weaves amusing anecdotes for him around the most seemingly banal events of her daily life. In truth, her normal routines appear now to exist solely for the purpose of self-revela
tion, of revealing herself to a man she hardly knows. But though she repeats the same conversations and scenes over and over in her mind, she cannot exhaust them. It is as if she drinks from a glass that continuously refills itself, the last long, cool swallow as necessary as the first, her thirst unquenchable. Occasionally, her relentless scrutiny of the brief time she has spent in Haskell’s presence is an agony to her, for she can see no satisfactory conclusion to what has begun, nor any possible way at all to go forward. She is only fifteen, and Haskell is nearly her father’s age. He is married and has children. She is still in her father’s care. She is but a child herself, perhaps even a deranged and obstinate child, fixed upon a fantasy that has for its roots only a few brief episodes that, for all she knows, she may have misinterpreted. Even so, she tortures herself with her endless imaginings, and there is no hour in which Haskell does not dominate her thoughts. Which causes her to wonder if there is not, existing simultaneously with the torment, an intensely pleasurable element to her self-created distress. Despite the fact that she seems barely present in the universe her physical body inhabits, the days seem more alive and arresting than any she has ever experienced before. Colors enhance themselves; music, which has before been only pleasant or difficult, now has the ability to transfix; the sea, to which she has always been drawn, takes on an epic grandeur and seems endlessly seductive — so much so that she is often sharply impatient of any demand upon her time that takes her away from simply gazing at the water and letting her thoughts float upon its surface.

  • • •

  The beach at Fortune’s Rocks has always been a democratic one, and at no time more so than on the Fourth of July, when all of the population of the summer community, as well as that of Ely and Ely Falls, gathers for the traditional clambake. The stretch of sand from the seawall to the water’s edge is crowded with summerfolk, tradesmen and their families, and many Franco-Americans and Irish from the mills. An enormous fire is built and covered with wet seaweed, so that the steam that arises appears to be rising from the sand itself. And all around this fire stand men of every class and economic means, some in formal dress, others in more casual and festive attire, nearly all of them enjoying the potent liquid refreshment in the stoneware jugs that have been dug into the sand. Periodically, large slatted baskets of clams are carried down to the fire and heaped, along with potatoes, upon the seaweed. When a particular batch is considered properly steamed, tin dishes are brought out and filled with the food. The women, some with parasols, rest on wooden stools, while the children sit cross-legged on the rugs. Since there is a kind of lawlessness associated with this event, both men and women have on bathing costumes and are frolicking in the breakers. Occasionally a bather is carried to the surf by a servant and lowered into the water to lessen the shock of the cold. The water seldom rises above sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that is announced each noon hour by blasts from the Highland Hotel (six long blasts, five short). Near the bathers, Olympia can see that the Ely Club is conducting footraces along the low-tide flats on sand so hard, one could play tennis on it. Parked along one portion of the seawall are carriages and horses and one or two motorcars as well, novelties that quite intrigue the children, who crowd about the vehicles, not daring to touch them for fear of making them start up and run away. (An odd foreshadowing of calamity, as the following summer one of the motorcars is inadvertently turned on by a young boy; and the automobile does overshoot the seawall, burying itself but fortunately not the child in the soft sand at the high end of the beach, where it remains for a year, until a team of horses is able to drag it out.)

  Olympia has worn this day a costume she particularly likes: a thin, light-gray chemise, belted at the waist, over a simple navy linen skirt. For some reason she cannot articulate, possibly having to do with the general air of license that infects the day, she has not worn a hat. She also has on a navy shawl in anticipation of sea breezes that do not come; indeed, so warm is it this day that she soon abandons the shawl altogether and unbuttons the cuffs of her blouse and rolls the cloth along her forearms. And she supposes the reason she likes these clothes so well is that they are easy and free and do not call attention to themselves. For what she most covets is the freedom to observe the people around her while remaining if not invisible, then not obvious in her scrutiny. As to the infection of liberty, she has heard that there are more love affairs begun, proposals offered, and dormant marriages rekindled on this day than on any other of the year, a supposition borne out annually by the abnormally large number of births during the first week in April.

  Her tolerance for public occasions being unnaturally thin, Rosamund Biddeford sits with Olympia for a short time, eats precisely one clam that somehow the communal cooking seems to have tainted for her, complains mildly of a headache from the sun, and summons Josiah to see her back to the house. As none of this is unexpected, Olympia is quite content to sit upon her canvas chair by herself, sated with a dish of steamed clams and oyster crackers, and observe the comings and goings of all the celebrants in their various attire. And as she does so, she keeps a weather eye on her father, who hovers near to the fire with several other men and who appears to be drinking an immoderate amount of whiskey. Occasionally neighbors speak to Olympia, and some invite her to join them; but she declines, saying untruthfully that she is awaiting her mother’s return.

  After a time, however, Olympia finds herself restless, unwilling to sit still for so long on such a fine day. And so she begins to stroll along the beach, weaving in and out of families and social groupings, some of them rather elaborate with canvas gazebos, ice chests, and fine linen and silver. Others are more humble with only the tin plates and the cups of lemonade that have been provided for the occasion. She sees one family, even the children, dressed as if for church, sitting as formally as their posture will allow. And near to them is a Franco-American family from the mills, likewise dressed in their best finery, but not as stiff, for clearly they have put the several bottles of wine they have brought with them to excellent use. Their gathering seems joyous, if not actually raucous.

  All along the beach, on the cottage porches, informal parties are being held, as is traditional on the Fourth. Olympia and her family have been invited to some of these parties. Because this is the first year Olympia is allowed to call upon someone of her own acquaintance alone, without the assistance or protection of her parents, she earlier thought of making a point of stopping by the Farragut cottage; Victoria Farragut is a young woman whose company she has sometimes enjoyed. But Olympia finds that she is reluctant, as she digs the toes of her boots into the sand, to enter into conversation with others, and so she passes by the Farragut cottage, noting the conviviality of all the people on the porch, but keeping her face averted. She does not want to be seen and called to.

  After a time, she sheds her boots and begins to walk barefoot, which she has been encouraged to do by not a few good-natured strangers she has passed. Since she fully intends to slip her boots back on when she returns to the clambake fire, she is not concerned about being seen by her father, who would, of course, disapprove. For some time, she feels bold and flirts with the sea, lifting her skirts just enough for her feet to skim the spills of water upon the shallow sand and jumping quickly out of the way when a more substantial wave threatens.

  As she draws nearer to the Highland Hotel, however, her progress grows more tentative. The hotel is grand in the way of many of the hotels scattered along that part of the coast; but none of them, she thinks, is as appealing as the Highland, with its excessively deep porches, its pristine white railings, and its black wicker rockers lined up against the railings like sentries on their watch. Men and women, on their way to and from the hotel, pass by her, carrying with them a distinct air of festivity. She watches as a cluster of employees poses on the steps of the hotel porch for a photograph; they seem unable to contain their merriment at the enterprise, much to the consternation of the hapless photographer. Behind them, plates of oysters are being pa
ssed among the many hotel guests, some of whom are splendidly dressed, the women with hats so large and ornate that they seem like lush peonies that might bend the slender stems beneath them. Other men and women, with racquets in hand, lounge less formally at the far end of the porch and appear to be waiting for a game of tennis to begin.

  Her eye scans the porch and pauses at a figure seated in a rocker. Collarless and hatless, he is reading a pamphlet. She stops abruptly in the sand. Her sudden stillness must stand out in the scene, for he glances in her direction.

  She turns around and begins to walk briskly along the beach, her boots in her hand. She can hear nothing but the surf of foolishness in her head: Whatever was she thinking to be so bold as to present herself at the hotel? Knowing that she might encounter Haskell? Knowing how inappropriate such a presentation would be? With her body bent forward, she is determined to retreat to the other end of the beach as soon as possible. And so it is that she does not at first hear her name called, and it is only when she feels a restraining hand upon her arm that she stops and turns.

  “Olympia,” Haskell says, breathless from trying to overtake her. “I spotted you from the porch.”

  She drops her skirts.

  He bends to catch his breath. “I have regretted not having had the chance to visit with you and your father,” he says, “as I very much enjoyed my stay with your family.”

  “And we as well,” she says politely.