by Anita Shreve
But she is having trouble with the latch.
“Here, allow me,” her father says, bending and trailing the tails of his coat along the painted floorboards.
“You said a fire?” Her mind is only half on her task and hardly at all on her father’s words.
“Terrible fire. The Centennial Hotel. An ark of a building, long past its heyday. I am told one could not open a window for fear the glass would fall out. The bellhops had to bang on the pipes with a hammer to make the guests believe that the steam heat was coming up. There, you have got it now.”
She lifts from its case a brass and wood telescope, complete with collapsible tripod and several extensions. Her father, who seldom revels in material possessions, seems like a child with a new toy at Christmas. Immediately, he stands up and begins to try to assemble the instrument. But, like his daughter, he is impatient with instructions and therefore doesn’t read them; and in the end it takes him twice as long to set up the new device as it might have had he studied the enclosed sheet.
“It burned within an hour,” her father says. “A tinderbox. They all are. The guests smoke and fall asleep, or the fires start in the ovens. It is the fourth hotel this year to burn.”
“Not one of Mr. Philbrick’s, I hope,” she says.
“No, Rufus has been lucky. Olympia, help me with this. Why are you just sitting there staring out to sea?”
Perhaps she sighs or makes a sound of exasperation.
“Honestly, Olympia,” her father says. “I do not understand what is wrong with you. You have become so . . . so . . . I don’t know. Addled. Tell me this is not permanent.”
“You will need a wrench,” she says.
She leaves her father briefly and walks through the house to the kitchen in search of tools, which are in a chest in the back hall. It is true she is distracted. Not only has she had no reply to the letter she sent Haskell the day before but she also has no way at all of ascertaining if he has even received it. She supposes it is possible that the boy to whom she gave the letter simply threw it into the sea and made off with the coins.
“Father, I think we should install a telephone,” she says when she returns with the wrench.
“Whatever for?” he asks. “One comes away on holiday precisely to be free of such inventions.”
“We might have an emergency. We did have an emergency. We might have telephoned people to come and help us.”
“As I recall, we had quite a lot of help, and apart from the loss of life about which you and I could do nothing, we managed rather well under the circumstances.”
Olympia reclines on the hammock and watches her father, who is not particularly mechanically minded, assemble the telescope. She thinks it better not to interfere, since two mechanically inept people will inevitably be worse than one. When he finally has the optical device put together, he peers intently into it and adjusts some knobs. He exclaims at the view.
“Olympia, here, you must see this.”
She walks over to the telescope and puts her eye to the glass. At first she cannot read what she is looking at. She steps back for a moment and sees that she has the telescope focused on the post of the porch railing. Bending again, she swings the instrument up and out, and then, adjusting a knob, watches as a moving blue mass becomes the sea, a white blur a seagull, and a blot of red a fishing boat bobbing in the water. The view from the telescope is strange to her eye: She can see only highly detailed and disorienting circles within the larger reality, and it is sometimes hard to keep the whole in mind. She thinks there must be some adjustment necessary, since the picture keeps wavering in and out of focus and making her feel woozy. But when she turns the telescope in the direction of the beach, she is rewarded with the sight of the Farragut summer house with its weathered shingles, its misshapen wicker rockers, and its soft expanse of screens at its windows. She sees Victoria’s mother sitting in a corner of the porch, an open window through which two white tails of curtains whip in the shore breeze, and a clothesline to one side, where pale blue sheets and pillow slips billow out and then collapse. Leaving the Farragut cottage, Olympia maneuvers the telescope slowly along the waterfront, scanning each summer house, noting certain features she has not been able to perceive from ground level — the shapes of the roofs or the number of gables — until eventually the instrument rests upon the facade of the Highland Hotel. For a time, she studies the hotel’s porch, its long front lawn, and even the windows of certain rooms she has an interest in. There are many persons about, but since she cannot see the figure she is looking for, she deduces that Haskell must be at the clinic or still in his rooms. Thus it is that she is doubly startled to hear her father say, right behind her, and with some surprise and pleasure, “Well, hello, John.”
Haskell, in a wheat-colored suit, stands in the doorway, holding his boater in his hand. For one terrible moment, Olympia thinks he has come to tell her father of their affair and that he has brought her letter as evidence. But as soon as she sees Haskell’s eyes, and their particular mix of anguish and anticipation, her fear gives way to reason. He walks forward and takes her hand in greeting.
“Olympia,” he says, “it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“And to see you,” she says.
He lets her hand go reluctantly.
“Your father has been keeping you busy.”
“I was just commenting to Olympia that she seems abnormally distracted this summer,” her father says.
Haskell searches her face. “On such a lovely perch,” he says, “I should be more than mildly distracted myself.”
As good manners require, Haskell turns his attention to the telescope. “But what do you have here, Biddeford?”
“It arrived today,” her father says with some pride.
“Handsome instrument,” Haskell says. “May I take a look?”
He bends and peers out at the view, adjusting the focus to his own eyesight.
“This has excellent resolution, Biddeford,” he says. He swings the telescope farther down the beach and adjusts a knob. “May I show you something? Come and see, Olympia.”
She walks to where Haskell stands, and peers into the glass. She is aware of him hovering over and behind her and feels his leg press slightly against her own. It is some moments before she can focus properly, but when she does, she can make out the wooden skeleton of a beach cottage. It is perched atop a hillock of dunes and is surrounded with sand and cut grass. It will be, she sees, a large house with its own deep porches. A wide gable has been framed and already holds in its center a massive round window with many small panes. She wonders whose room that window will one day belong to. To Martha’s? To Haskell and his wife’s?
Olympia looks up and moves to one side. Her father takes her place and studies the house. “Beautifully designed, Haskell,” he exclaims. “Truly. And the builders are making quite a progress. They still anticipate finishing by the first of August?”
“I am told they will be a week late,” Haskell says. He twirls the boater in his hands. “Why do you not come with me now to see the house, Biddeford? If you can spare the time, I have several questions I could use some advice on.”
Clearly flattered and pleased, Olympia’s father, in the next instant, looks crestfallen. “Damn,” he says with evident disappointment. “I should have loved to have visited the site with you, John, but I have promised myself to my dentist. Damn. If only I could reach him . . .”
“If we had a telephone, Father . . . ,” Olympia says, unable to resist a smile.
Her father clears his throat. “My daughter is of the opinion that we should install a telephone at Fortune’s Rocks, but I have tried to explain to her that one comes away on holiday precisely to ignore such instruments.” He shakes his head. “No, I cannot go with you,” he adds.
“Another time then,” Haskell says politely.
“But Olympia would love to go,” her father says suddenly to Haskell, as if she were not even present on the porch. “In fact, it would be
an excellent diversion for her,” he adds. “She has not been herself of late and could do with an outing.”
Haskell catches Olympia’s eye. “I would be honored to show her the site,” he says. “If you think she would not become too bored.”
“I doubt I should become bored,” Olympia says quietly.
“Then that is settled,” her father says wistfully. “And I hope you have also come to tell me, John, that you and Catherine will attend the gala we are having. Did I write you that it is in honor of Olympia’s sixteenth birthday?”
The reminder of Olympia’s age in both Haskell’s and her father’s presence sends, for a moment, a slight tremor into the air that Olympia thinks even her father must notice, for he looks first at Haskell and then at her.
“An important milestone, surely,” Haskell says. “Of course, I must ask Catherine first before I can commit us to the event.”
“Hale will be here,” her father announces proudly.
“Hale,” Haskell says, looking at Olympia as if he cannot remember why he knows the name. “Hale,” he repeats. “Yes, of course.” There is a pause. “Olympia, shall we go?”
• • •
He helps her up into the bottle green carriage.
“I could not stay away,” he says. He climbs up beside her. “I inhaled your letter. If I could, I would have you write me every day.”
“I shall write to you every day then,” Olympia says. “But you must promise to destroy the letters.”
“I am not sure I will be able to do that.”
“Then I will not write them, because I will not take the chance that they might be discovered by Catherine.”
“Well, then, I will tell you I will destroy them, but actually I will not,” he says.
And she cannot help but smile.
Haskell does not take them along the coast road, as he suggested to Olympia’s father he would, but rather veers immediately onto the Ely road. The tide is low, and the marshes are gullied out for as far as Olympia can see. The mud makes miniature cliffs and canyons within the larger labyrinth. When the two of them are out of sight of the house, Haskell draws abruptly to the side of the road.
“I have something for you,” he says.
He takes a tiny velvet box out of his pocket and opens it. She is not prepared for the locket, an exquisite gold oval with her initials delicately engraved on its surface.
“I cannot,” she says.
“Yes, Olympia, you can. I want you to.”
The gold shines warmly in the sunlight.
“There is so little I can give you,” he says. “Please accept this. Let me have the pleasure of knowing that you wear it.”
He turns her shoulders so that he can fasten the clasp behind her neck.
“I shall never take it off,” she says, turning back.
“I know that you cannot allow others to see it,” he says. “But you can wear it like this.” He slips the pendant beneath the collar of her dress. She can feel the gold falling between her breasts. He rubs the back of his finger against the cloth where the locket has fallen. And perhaps it is that intimate gesture, that one gesture out of a hundred gestures, that makes the tears come into her eyes.
“I meant to make you happy,” he says, pulling her toward him. “Oh, Olympia, this is all wrong for you.”
She draws away from him and dries her eyes. She sniffs once. “The question of whether or not what we do is wrong for me is irrelevant,” she says, unwilling to repudiate what they have so recently won. “Of course it is wrong for me. More so for you. It is wrong altogether. But I thought we had agreed not to squander our joy by chastising ourselves.”
Her hat falls backward and tumbles into the grass. He laces his fingers through the bun of her hair and draws her head back so that her throat is exposed. She is twisted, contorted on the wooden seat, and her skirt is already rucked up to her knees. Their embrace is awkward, and he cannot reach her from the side. He jumps down from the wooden seat, takes her hand, and leads her into the marshes.
Together, they sink to their knees, the tall grass bending beneath them, and he pulls her farther down so that they are lying together on their sides, facing each other. He struggles out of his jacket and slips out of his braces. He unfastens the front of her dress while she pulls his shirt from his trousers. The cloth billows out like a parachute. She slips her hand up the length of his chest, and it seems the boldest touch of her life.
Nearby, she can hear the low whomp and flutter of a bird’s wing beating against the water. Something sharp digs into her side. The sun is so blinding, she has to shift his face over hers to shield her eyes. She wants to say the word beloved aloud. She hesitates, then does so — once, then twice, then three times — the word emerging in gasps, as if she were being pummeled. Olympia, Haskell whispers into the side of her hair.
He takes her earlobe into his mouth and presses the heel of his hand against her through the cloth of her dress. There is a quickening through her body. With an instinct she has not known she possesses, her hips rise to meet his hand. How is it that the body knows? She stretches her legs and pushes herself urgently against him. The new sensations within her are keen and knife-edged. Her shoulders slide down against the grass, and she arches her back. Haskell holds her tightly, his face buried in her neck.
They lie together in the marshes. The wet seeps through the grass.
“I could not have imagined this,” she says.
She wants to speak further of this thing that has shaken her body as if it were a rag doll, this thing that has left her with a curious thread of lingering desire. She wants Haskell to be inside of her, as he was in his room. She cannot think of how to tell him this except to raise her skirts.
How astonishingly bold she is becoming, she thinks.
“Is this how it is?” she asks him. “Is this the secret all men and women share?”
“Some have this,” he says. “Not all. Most men do. There are women who do not ever have this, who cannot allow themselves to have it.”
And Catherine, Olympia instantly wonders. How is it with Catherine?
“We cannot lie here,” he says.
They help each other up, and he kisses her. “I will take you to the cottage now,” he says. “We will sit in the sun, and our clothes will dry there.”
Her legs are wobbly, and she has to pull herself up into the carriage with her hands. Her dress is damp all along one side.
Haskell takes up the reins, turns the horses around, and heads in the direction of the new cottage. He reaches for her hand, which he holds in the folds of her skirt.
“You flirt with risk,” she says.
“It is not normally my nature.” He presses his hand against her leg. “Sometimes I say to myself that we must never see each other again, and I am resolved in this — ”
Her heart seizes up at this pronouncement.
“—and then, within seconds, I understand that such discipline will not ever be possible.”
They travel the length of the coast road, Olympia praying that they will not encounter anyone known to her. After a time, he draws the buggy up to the skeleton of the new cottage. Olympia can see that it will have a stunning view, with only the Atlantic for a front yard. He helps her down from the carriage and takes her arm. She wonders if her father is even now trying to see them through the telescope, if she now exists in its circular universe. Most of the cottage has been framed, and there are many places through which one can see the ocean. Olympia begins to imagine fancifully what it would be like to enclose such a house entirely in windows — to have light always, to feel surrounded by sand and ocean.
“I am not sure I have ever seen a house being built,” she says.
Together they enter the cottage and move through rooms that for now exist only in the imagination, rectangular and oblong chambers framed in pine and oak, forming a house that will one day shelter a family. She wonders how such a structure might be built, how one knows precisely where to put a post or a
beam, how exactly to make a window. From time to time, Haskell murmurs beside her, “This will be the kitchen,” or “This will be the sun parlor,” but she does not attend him closely. She prefers, for the moment, to think of the house as ephemeral and insubstantial.
“This is the dining room,” he says when they have come to a stopping place that has been partially enclosed.
And she cannot help but think of the dozens of dinners he and Catherine will one day have in this room. Perhaps even Olympia might be invited to such a dinner and will sit where she is standing now. She shakes her head quickly and turns away.
“What is it?” he asks.
“This . . . ,” she says. “It is not important.”
“I should not have brought you here.”
“How old is Catherine?” Olympia asks.
“Thirty-four,” Haskell says tentatively.
“And how old are you?”
“Forty-one.”
“Do you have family? I mean, do you have brothers and sisters? Are your parents still living?”
“My mother is still living. My father is not. My mother lives with my sister in Cambridge. I have a brother who is a minister in Milton.”
A sensation, as though her chest were being squeezed, overtakes her. Why, she asks herself, the first of many times she will ask this question, must love be so punishing? Why, so quickly upon the heels of the moments of her greatest joy, must she be haunted with images that produce only pain: images of Haskell with another, speaking words that might have been saved for her, sharing intimacies that she can hardly bear to think about? Why, she asks herself, as she stands in this room that is not yet a room, does she have to imagine, in the greatest of detail, a meal Haskell will share not with her but with his wife? In his letter to her, he wrote that he has known Catherine in “all the ways possible to a man.” The phrase is haunting in its implications. Even as Haskell takes Olympia’s hand, she is visited by an image of Haskell holding Catherine’s hand; and though the persistent touch of him slowly brings Olympia to her senses and momentarily overwhelms all thoughts of the past, she feels an ache that will, if she lets it, blunt her joy and abrade the edges of her pleasure.