by Anita Shreve
He washes his hands and wrists in what little water remains, using a charcoal-gray soap and producing a lather of blood and gray suds that makes Olympia have to turn away. Haskell tells the old woman to massage the uterus and that he will send Malcolm around with fresh linen and gauze to stanch the bleeding. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and withdraws some paper dollars and hands them to Mrs. Bonneau. He tells her to buy oranges and milk and wheat bread for the children, not to give the money to any relative who is a man and not to spend it on drink. Undoubtedly grateful to Dr. Haskell for saving the life of the infant and possibly that of the newly arrived French Canadian mother as well, Mrs. Bonneau promises she will do exactly as he has asked. But when Olympia looks up at Haskell’s face, she notices that he has a wry, not to say sardonic, expression on his features; and she thinks that he perhaps has little faith that his instructions will be followed to the letter.
After Haskell has cleaned himself and dressed, he gestures to Olympia, and they leave the room. Arrayed along the floor, still expertly popping buttons, are the three children of the woman who has just given birth. If they know they now have another sister, they give no sign. Haskell crouches down in front of the smallest of the three, holds her head in his hands and draws back the lid of the child’s right eye. He examines her thoughtfully and then says, in French, “Why are you not outside playing on this holiday?” The child shrugs. Haskell reaches into his shirt pocket and produces a handful of saltwater taffy pieces, wrapped in waxed paper, which he distributes to the three children. Then he stands and, without knocking, opens the door to the room. He gives the old woman a further set of instructions.
“Oui, oui, oui,” Olympia hears from beyond the door.
• • •
They walk to the horse and buggy. Haskell helps her in, and then he climbs up and takes the reins. The sun has nearly set in their absence, and the sky has the appearance of indigo dust. They retrace their route along the trolley line and head out toward Ely and Fortune’s Rocks, a distance of perhaps eight miles. From time to time, Olympia begins to tremble with the memory of the extraordinary events of the afternoon and evening. She wonders how it is that Haskell does not collapse from the sheer weight of his encounters with mortal injury and illness. But then she surmises that a physician, familiar with, if not actually inured to, the physical vicissitudes of birth and death, might take the occurrences of the afternoon as merely commonplace; though she cannot imagine how seeing the human body in extremis, as they have just done, can ever be routinely absorbed. The sleeves of his shirt are spotted with blood and other matter, and he gives off a distinctly masculine odor — not unpleasant, but testament to his own labors. After some time, he speaks.
“You must not be frightened of childbirth,” he says. “What you saw just now is not unnatural or uncommon. Difficult perhaps, but not desperately so. Nature sometimes makes a thunderous entrance and a whimpering exit, though I assure you it can be otherwise. I fear I have gravely injured your sensibilities.”
“Not injured,” she says. “Stunned them, perhaps. And my sensibilities are not as tender as you might imagine. Indeed, I am grateful to you for allowing me to witness the birth, which was an astonishing miracle. And is it not better always to know the truth of a thing?”
“I have mixed opinions on that subject,” he says thoughtfully.
“But what good does a woman do herself if she hides from the physical realities of her person? So that she might be terrified in the event itself? I wonder how I should ever have learned of such matters, for I have been overly sheltered.”
“And wisely so,” Haskell says. “Your father’s protection has allowed you to grow and develop and blossom in an entirely healthy and appropriate manner. And if the alternative to sheltering is snipping buttons in conditions of filth and degradation, then I am in favor of such protection, even if that be suffocating.” He shakes the reins, and the carriage begins to move slightly faster. “The children should be given over to the orphanage,” he says heatedly.
“Taken away from their mother?” she asks.
“Why not? How can a woman who is so impoverished be an adequate mother? At least in an orphanage, under the care of the sisters, the children will have baths and regular meals and clean clothing and fresh air and some schooling. As far as I am concerned, what we just witnessed wasn’t a birth, but rather a kind of infanticide.”
“But, surely, we cannot blame the mother for her poverty,” Olympia argues. “Surely, there is a man involved, who now seems to be absent.”
“I would be more inclined to agree with you had I not seen some of these young immigrant women — Irish and Franco alike — drunk on more occasions than I care to think about. And there are other unfortunate women, desperate women, who at least have the good sense to ask for help, who beg to give over their children to orphanages if only spaces can be found for them.”
“I cannot imagine giving over a child,” Olympia says with some confusion. She has seen for herself that the Rivard children are woefully neglected, though she finds it harder than Haskell does to blame the mother. Surely a woman of her mother’s station would not be expected to give up her child even if she found herself in difficult straits following abandonment by her husband, even if she drank to excess on occasion. Was a woman, mired in poverty and grieving for her lost husband, to be denied, by decree of society, all possible pleasures, all possible relief? And yet Olympia can also understand the particular treachery of taking money meant for children’s food to spend on drink. And altogether, the issue seems to present a more complicated problem than can be sorted out in casual discussion.
The evening suddenly darkens, bringing with it an awareness that Olympia is on the verge of being unpardonably late. She can possibly excuse a daylight absence, but at night her father will almost certainly become worried.
“Regarding your earlier point,” Haskell says, “in truth, I do not believe in shielding a young woman on the threshold of marriage and childbirth from the physical particulars of what surely awaits her. In some situations — and childbirth is one of them — ignorance can be lethal. I have come upon not a few young women in my practice who have begun birthing without ever having known they were with child.”
Olympia wonders how that might be possible, since it seems to her that such naïveté would require almost willful ignorance. They pass through Ely, noting signs of life in the small village: lanterns lit in windows and shadowy figures moving along the streets, having recently been disgorged, she knows, from the trolley. They hear singing and a few drunken shouts, but for the most part the revelers have grown weary and quiet. She thinks suddenly, in the way of perfectly obvious realizations, that all of the people on the street at that moment have entered the world in a manner similar to the one she witnessed that afternoon. And she further thinks that the wonder isn’t that she was present for the birth, but rather that she has reached the age of fifteen without having observed it sooner and more often.
“Did you attend the births of your own children?” she asks Haskell.
Her query seems to surprise him. As they enter the marshes, the half-moon rises and, with its pearly ripples of light on the surface of the water, illuminates all of the twisting and turning paths of the brackish labyrinth, so that the landscape becomes one of near magical beauty, the underground lair of a god, perhaps, or a passageway to the realm of a cool queen.
“I was absent for the births of my first two children,” Haskell says, “and present for the last three.”
“I was under the impression you had four children,” Olympia says without thinking.
“The last of them was stillborn,” he says. “This past March.”
“Oh, I am sorry — ”
“This, too, is Nature’s way,” he says, interrupting her. “The child would have been grotesquely deformed.”
Olympia is assaulted then with disturbing images. That of Haskell kneeling between the legs of his wife, an intimate picture in stark contrast
to the couple’s chaste demeanor together at the dining table; and that of an infant, not at all like the one she saw that afternoon, but rather one misshapen in its limbs, pushing ferociously to get out into the world, only to perish at the moment of birth. Olympia wraps her arms around herself.
And then, in the way of random thoughts, she remembers the photograph on the sill of the Rivard room, the small picture within the silver filigree frame, the beauty and youth of the two persons who posed on their wedding day, the fine satin of the dress and the mantilla with its crown of pearls. And she wonders at the disparity between that pose of civility on the wedding day and the animal-like posture of birth within the hideous surroundings of that boardinghouse room. And she further imagines that if the bride and groom in the picture had been able to foresee the circumstances in which that framed portrait would one day find itself, each of the innocents would have fled the altar in terrified disbelief.
Haskell stops the carriage.
“This has been too much,” he says, turning to her.
“No,” she says, “I . . .”
She inhales the salt air, as if it were her own laudanum. She tilts her head back. She can sense, but not quite see, the bats that fly near to them and then away.
“Olympia, I wish to say something to you, but not without your permission.”
She rights her head and looks at him. “You do not need to ask, nor do I need to grant, permission,” she says quietly.
“Our circumstances are not normal, though they feel as natural to me as it is to breathe.” He says this last with quiet assurance.
“If we speak of the unnaturalness of our circumstances,” she says evenly, “it will seem to us that is all we have.”
With his fingers, he turns her head so that she faces him. She gives herself freely to his direction.
“Olympia, I have thought of nothing but you since the day I left your house,” he says.
She briefly closes her eyes.
“I do you the greatest injury a man in my position can a young woman,” he says, “which is to speak of unspeakable feelings.”
In the moonlight, she can see pinpoints of moving lights in his pupils.
“This week has been unendurably long,” he adds so close to her that she can feel his breath. She wants to lean into him, to rest her head on his chest.
“Mr. Haskell,” she says. “I . . .”
“Have I not, in your thoughts at least, become John?” he asks quietly.
“In my thoughts of you, which are constant, you are always Haskell,” she answers without any hesitation.
And there is, in the confessing of this truth, a moment of the greatest joy and release of spirit Olympia has ever felt.
“This cannot be,” he says. “I cannot have created this.”
“You did not.”
“We can say no more about this.”
“No.”
“This is all,” he says. “This is all we can ever have. You understand that?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I forfeit all right to speak to you in this manner, and I have already trespassed upon your good nature beyond any hope of forgiveness. Indeed, by stopping here, I take advantage of your gentle spirit and of your youth, which is the worst sort of opportunism a man of my age and position can engage in. I can do you nothing but harm.”
“I do not for one minute believe you guilty of opportunism,” she says truthfully.
The scent of sea salt is pungent in the air, and there is as well the dank but not unpleasant aroma of mudflats and sea muck. The tide is low, but not out altogether.
“Then you are not afraid?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
He puts his hands on her wristbones and slides his fingers slowly up her arms to the elbows under her loose cuffs. He says her name and presses his palms against her, as though he means to deliver the full force of himself through her skin. He removes his hands from her arms and tucks one finger inside the collar of her blouse, opening the top button with the gesture. He leans in close to her to fit his mouth to the shallow place at the bottom of her throat where she earlier directed his hand.
Olympia feels her body, for the first time, transform itself, become liquid, open itself up, wanting nothing more than more. An absolute stillness follows. It is a long kiss, if such a touch may be called a kiss, although Olympia experiences it as something different: The memory of the Franco woman with her legs open, the unruly living mass pushing against her, overtakes Olympia and seems now not an event to be feared, but rather a sensation to be savored; and it is as though she understands a thing about what will come to her in good time. She touches the back of Haskell’s neck and feels the fine hairs that twirl in a comma there. He removes his mouth from her throat and presses his forehead to hers, sighing once as if only this particular embrace could give him ease.
They remain in that posture as the half-moon rises higher in its arc and the crickets scratch their repetitive tune. In the distance, they hear another carriage approaching.
“It is late, and I must go,” she says. “Take me to the seawall near my house, and I will walk from there.”
The other carriage comes into view, and they part reluctantly. The driver passes them with a greeting. Haskell takes up the reins, and he and Olympia journey on. When they arrive at the seawall, which is crowded with evening revelers, he helps her down from the carriage, takes her hand, and bids her good night in a manner so necessarily formal as to belie any intimacy they shared just minutes earlier.
• • •
Her father is sitting on the porch when she returns. He is smoking — a dark figure in a chair, with only the ember of his cigar clearly visible.
“Is that you, Olympia?” he calls.
“Yes, Father,” she says, climbing the steps. She moves into his line of sight. He lights a candle and holds it out to her. He studies her face, her clothing.
“We have been worried about you,” he says. “It is after ten o’clock.”
“I went for a long walk on the beach and met Julia Fields, with whom I had a meal,” she says, discerning at once that to tell the obvious lie, that she has been at the Farragut party, will lead to discovery.
“I am not certain I ever met Julia Fields,” he says, somewhat puzzled. “When you did not appear at dusk, I went to fetch you at Victoria Farragut’s,” he adds, thus justifying at once her pragmatic deceit.
“I stopped there briefly on the porch,” she says, “but I saw that to gain entrance I would have to engage in a lengthy discussion with Zachariah Cote, and so I fled, preferring my own company for a time.”
It is a clever lie, for her father will easily be able to empathize with the unpleasantness of being trapped in conversation with a man who proved sycophantic and boring at table. Her father partially smiles; but then, as Olympia takes the candle from him, she sees him looking at her collar, which she has not thought to refasten. His incipient smile vanishes, and his expression turns to one of faint alarm.
“I am exhausted, Father,” she says quickly, stepping past him. “Let me say good night.”
But she does not bend to kiss him, as is her custom, for all about her is the distinct smell of John Haskell, as though the pores of her skin had absorbed the essence of the man, a foreign essence she luxuriates in even as she fears its consequences.
DAYS PASS into days, and it seems the entire coast lies under a gray pall that, for nearly a week, neither breaks nor gathers enough momentum to become an actual storm. But there is rain, a steady drizzle that renders nearly all outdoor pursuits unmanageable. Her sense of isolation, of being set apart from those around her, only intensifies with the poor weather; and it is as though she inhabits a warm and impenetrable cocoon in a damp and irrelevant world.
Though she paces alone on the porch, or soaks herself as she walks the beach, or eats at her dining table, or converses, albeit distractedly, with her father, or tries to read John Greenleaf Whittier or to play backgammon with her mother
, every moment is devoted to — no, claimed by — John Haskell, so that she has no conscious thought or unconscious dream that does not include him.
Her distraction does not go unnoticed, even though those around her do not know its cause. As the days pass, she grows less able (or less willing) to dissemble and to hide her feelings; and several times she comes perilously close to revealing the true reason for her agitation. Once or twice she dangerously mentions Haskell in conversation with her father, referring more often than is prudent to the volume Haskell has written or to the work that he is doing in Ely Falls. And at a party at which Rufus Philbrick and Zachariah Cote are both present, she contrives to steer the conversation to a discussion of the mills and of progressive reforms; for simply to speak the word mills or progressive aloud in their company is rewarding and even thrilling in a secretive way. She imagines, after she does so, however, that Mr. Cote regards her with an odd and thoughtful gaze and then with the faintest of smiles, all of which causes her to wonder if she is so transparent that her true thoughts can be read upon her face.
All around her, she can see that others study her, their puzzlement turning to a smile or to a frown, depending upon what they deduce from her behavior. Her father is careful with her: He can hardly accuse her of something for which he has no evidence. And she believes that though there was between them on the porch that night the barest recognition of waywardness, he has chosen willfully to dismiss it from his thoughts. Olympia thinks her mother may be more watchful than before, but since she seldom ventures farther than her own room, there is not a great deal for her to observe. If her parents think about her distraction at all consciously, she is certain they attribute it to that temperamental state that claims many young women of her age. Or else they imagine for her an innocent romance with a boy she has recently met. Or they think she is participating in a harmless flirtation in which she, in her naïveté, has doubtless invested too much significance.