by Anita Shreve
But it is not rudeness that accounts for his unnatural behavior. Not rudeness at all. And it is Catherine, in making another half turn, who sees Olympia first.
“Olympia,” she calls, her face brightening. “Oh, Olympia, look at you. John, do you see? Does she not look marvelous?”
Haskell moves his eyes in Olympia’s direction. Though there is some distance between them, she can see him clearly. His face gives nothing away. She waits for a sign, an indication of how she should behave. But he only nods briefly and does not say anything.
Catherine speaks up brightly in the manner of someone who wishes to disguise an awkwardness.
“Oh, do come up here, Olympia,” she calls. “We must look at you. I had heard your dress was a dream, but I had no idea. Of course, it is the young woman inside that makes it shimmer, do you not agree, John? And how is it that you are standing there alone, Olympia, and that every young man in your father’s house is not clamoring to speak to you?”
Haskell presses his lips together.
Does Catherine know? Olympia wonders with alarm. Has Haskell told her? And is Catherine somehow, incredibly, determined to rise above the crisis? To put it all behind her? Is that what this is all about? What happened between husband and wife this afternoon in their new cottage? Olympia searches Haskell’s face, her eyes darting all about his eyes and mouth, but she can see nothing that answers her questions.
And then he straightens and seems to draw himself together.
“Olympia, good evening,” he says. “Forgive me.”
For what? Olympia wants to cry out. For what should I forgive you?
The fact that Haskell has spoken at all produces some small measure of relief in Catherine’s features. She manages a smile.
“Come up here, Olympia, or I shall come down myself and fetch you,” she says.
Olympia does as she is asked. She lifts her skirts and climbs the side stairs, the very stairs Haskell once stood at the top of as he watched her come back from the water’s edge. But it is Catherine who is there to greet her this time, extending her gloved hand. Olympia is enveloped in an embrace of gardenias and castile and, underneath this, just the faintest whiff of stale breath.
Catherine’s dress is gathered under her bosom in the empire style and drapes appealingly over her waist and hips. She is wearing moonstones. Her hair has been allowed to float about her face, and Olympia has the distinct impression that it is weightless, that it might suddenly dissolve altogether like spun sugar. Catherine holds her arm rather like a maiden aunt who has taken a niece under her wing. Haskell turns and bends and kisses Olympia’s gloved hand. Closer to him now, she can see the tight strain of the muscles of his face.
“How do you like your new cottage?” she is compelled by politeness to ask Catherine.
Haskell turns his head away and gazes out to sea.
“Oh,” Catherine says with evident delight. She brings her hands together as though she might clap them. “It is so wonderful. I have never seen such a house. One can see the water from every window, and the sea air . . . Really, Olympia, you must come to call on us as soon as possible, for I want to show you and your mother all of the rooms. The attention to detail . . . And the girls . . . Each has her own sitting room, and they are, as you can imagine, absolutely enthralled.”
Catherine pauses. Olympia is meant to reply, but she can find no words. The silence extends for seconds. All around them are animated voices, which serve only to underscore that hers is not. Olympia feels a tightness in her chest.
Catherine looks from Haskell to her and back again.
“John is not himself tonight,” Catherine says, apologizing for her husband’s ill manners. “He has been working too hard, I fear.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” Olympia says.
Even Catherine, with all her social skills, can make no further headway into conversation. Haskell’s strained silence is suffocating, and Olympia wants to flee. She cannot stand with this couple any longer. So great is the tension that she fears either she or Haskell will blurt out the true reason for the silence.
“If you will excuse me, I must find my father,” Olympia says hastily. “He will be cross with me if I do not make an effort to introduce myself to Mr. Hale early in the evening.”
Before either Catherine or Haskell can answer, Olympia leaves them and begins to make her way along the porch and into the house. Does the crowd part for her, or does she push them away? No, no, it is not so dramatic as that. She merely moves, nodding politely, slipping through breaks in the throng, feinting away from engagement. She walks into the house and through the sitting room, which is awash with persons and gaiety. She continues gliding, having no destination, wanting only to put a distance between herself and Catherine Haskell, to whom she can no longer in good conscience allow herself to speak.
As she walks, she silently chastises herself: She must never, under any circumstances, visit the woman again. She must discourage Catherine from ever coming to the house. She must avoid, at all costs, any possible chance encounters, all social engagements at which they might meet. She must leave Fortune’s Rocks and go back to Boston. An excuse will have to be invented, but she can do that. Her father can be persuaded to send her back. She will go immediately. In the morning. She is in a hallway, moving away from people. She hears an orchestra tuning its instruments. The music will soon begin. Oh God, she thinks, how will I be able to do this?
She reaches the empty corridor that connects the main house to the chapel and slows for breath. She leans against a wall and puts her head back and closes her eyes. She stands in that posture, trying to calm herself, for some minutes. She can hear a viola, a waltz beginning. Will Haskell dance with Catherine? Olympia puts her hands to her eyes. She pulls the pearl combs roughly from her hair and studies them in her hands. She holds them tightly, digging the teeth into her palms.
She hears footsteps on the polished floor and turns her head. She realizes she has known that he would follow her. She watches him walk toward her, and she does not move. On his face is an expression she knows well: an expression of both anguish and expectation. He comes close to her, and she can feel his breath on her eyes. She hears a shudder, an exhalation. He bends and presses his mouth hard into her shoulder, and for a moment, Olympia is frightened. She can feel his teeth. He has not done this before. There is a wetness on her skin, and she knows suddenly that he is crying. He cries the way a man does, both silently and noisily, gulping for air. It is a loss of control so complete that the weeping triggers the lust, or perhaps it is the other way around. She wants to hold his face, to bring it up to hers, to calm him, but his mouth is on her breast, and he presses his hands so hard against her back, she can hardly breathe. They move, or lurch, along the passageway, looking for darkness, for shelter, anything to hide them. She bangs against the wall, and a picture falls. It is a wonder they do not rouse a servant or a guest. She holds his head, and they turn so that his back is against the wall. She steps on the hem of her dress and hears it tear slightly at the waist. They enter the chapel and stand looking at its deconsecrated altar, its wooden pews. Behind her, she hears the door shut. Haskell fastens the latch. Olympia glides toward the marble slab and sits on it. Haskell hovers over her. She cannot see his face.
“What happened?” she asks.
“I did not tell her,” he says.
She wraps her arms around his legs and bends her head to them.
“I cannot live in that house,” he says. “I cannot. I cannot.”
“No,” she says, rolling her forehead back and forth. And like Haskell, she is crying.
“I will go away from here,” he says. “I will find a reason. I cannot be in this town.”
“Let me,” she says, looking up at him. “Let me be the one to go. You are needed; I am not. I have already resolved to speak to my father tomorrow.”
He crouches down to put his face opposite hers. He digs his hands deep into her hair. “No, I cannot stay,” he says. “There
is no vista that does not remind me of you, that does not make me want you.”
He puts his mouth on hers. It is a kiss, but more than a kiss. Something akin to drowning perhaps.
But the body cannot content itself with kisses, no matter how encompassing or generous. The body will go forward on its urgent course. Thus she lies down, her head against the cool marble, her legs straddling the stone. The marble is hard and uncomfortable, and she feels ungainly, her legs spread, her slippers touching the floor on either side. Haskell kneels. His cheek is wet on her thigh. He unfastens one stocking and puts his hands on her leg. She tries to raise herself up to look at his face. She calls his name. But he is lost to the most powerful sort of lust there is: that which stems from hopelessness. She is frightened — at least as much for him as for herself. And yet she knows that she cannot stop this, that it will have its own momentum, its own beginning and its own end.
And it is then that she turns her head to the side and looks through the open window of the chapel and sees Zachariah Cote move graciously away from his place upon the porch, allowing Catherine Haskell to step up to the telescope, lower her face to the eyepiece, and briefly adjust the knobs until finally the scene onto which Cote has precisely trained the instrument comes incomprehensibly into clear focus.
SHE IMAGINES it to have been like this: Catherine would have stood up, her mouth slightly parted, one silk-gloved hand pressed flat against her bosom. Cote, feigning curiosity, would have bent to the telescope and then would have righted himself, seemingly shocked by what he had just seen. My dear, he might have said. I am so sorry. How dreadful for you. Which might have penetrated the shock, might have made Catherine look up at Cote’s face and see the concerned frown about the brow that could not entirely hide the sly smile at the lips. And perhaps she flinched and then drew away and had the wherewithal to slap the man. Olympia hopes that she did.
• • •
By the time Olympia reaches the center hallway, holding her dress closed at the waist where it has torn, it seems that all about her is a screeching, the sound of all the clocks of the world out of sync. Have she and Haskell caused this, this chaos, this pandemonium? Around her, people and objects are swirling, moving very fast. Haskell has gone before her, and she looks for him, for Catherine.
Her mother’s face is white and frozen, and she cannot speak. Her father comes to her, a question in his eyes. Is this true, Olympia? he asks. She answers him, but it is as though she speaks a foreign tongue; he seems not to be able to comprehend her words. And then she sees the moment of recognition in his face, that slight shiver, and watches as the knowledge finally sets in: the ruin, the loss of everything he values — his daughter, her reputation, the possibility of ever coming to Fortune’s Rocks again, the house that he loves so, the life that he loves so. And she thinks the saddest moment of the entire night is the brave manner in which her father then draws himself up and tries to maintain his poise even as the awful knowledge is seeping into his pores, the way he tries to speak to his guests, to reassure them, to remain ever the able and affable captain, even as the hull is cracking and the sea is pouring through the bulkheads.
Her father tries to take her hand, but she pulls away. She runs from room to room. Guests are leaving, calling for their carriages. She has to see Haskell. She has to find Catherine. She has to say something to Catherine.
Olympia comes upon them finally in the passageway that leads to the kitchen. Catherine has been crying and will not let her husband touch her, even though he is trying to. He looks at Olympia and does not speak. His face is ravaged.
We cannot have done this, she wants to cry out to him. We cannot have done this.
They go out the back entrance together. Husband and wife. He has to go with his wife. He has to see her to their new home, does he not? But what horrors will await them there? Olympia wonders. What cries will sound in the night as Catherine sleeps and then wakes and then sleeps and then wakes again, a cruel and relentless pattern?
Olympia watches Haskell leave her house, leave her standing in the passageway. The orchestra has long since stopped playing. She goes down onto her knees. She sees the back of Haskell’s coat as he moves through an open door. And it is only then that she truly understands what she was meant to have known from the very beginning. He is not hers. He was never hers.
• II •
In Exile
OLYMPIA AND her parents depart Fortune’s Rocks on the morning of August 11 by train, leaving Josiah and Lisette, who have not, after all, been given time to make their personal announcement to her father, in charge of an army of temporary servants whose mission it is to rid the house of any trace of the disastrous gala. Her mother is tight-lipped during the journey and needs to be revived with salts from time to time by the nurse who accompanies her. Her father does not speak to Olympia until they reach the privacy of the sitting room in their house in Boston, which is not yet overly peopled with help. With barely controlled fury, he announces that Olympia has ruined the family and destroyed any chance of happiness for any of its members. Furthermore, her foolish disregard of consequences has thoroughly shredded her own future. Though he considers her seduced by a scoundrel, she will be held responsible for her actions for the rest of her life. And does she understand, he adds, spitting and spraying his question across the room with all the fury of a father whose worst nightmare has come to pass almost before he has had time to imagine it, that such an accounting not only includes the ruin of Catherine Haskell, an entirely blameless and thoroughly wronged woman, but also must encompass the lives of her innocent children as well? As for John Haskell himself, her father cannot speak, being unable even to utter the name and wanting, in these early days, to do the man, whom he has trusted as a friend, grievous bodily harm.
She sits in silence and listens to the specifics of her sentence: She will not be permitted to leave the house for the foreseeable future, and for at least a month, while he and her mother consider what to do with her and how to salvage the few remaining bits of her future, she will not be allowed to leave her room. Indeed, she is to be confined to that room with no companionship, with no access to letters or the outside world, and without any books to distract her. Her meals will be brought to her on a tray, and she will not be permitted even a walk in the park. The purpose of this deprivation, her father explains carefully, is to allow her suitable time to contemplate the gravity of her position. And then, to Olympia’s dismay, her father suddenly begins to sob, right there in the sitting room, which is far worse than his ferocious scolding. He sits down hard in a chair, as if he has collapsed. She leaves her own chair and crouches down before him and implores him to stop, for she cannot bear his sadness. He draws himself up then and insists that she get off her knees. He asks if she would be so kind in future weeks and months as to omit any theatrics from their discourse, which he gives her to understand will be limited to only those sentences absolutely necessary to utter to another human being with whom one shares living space. And thus with chilly dismissal, he bids her leave the room and begin her confinement.
A worse punishment her father could not, with all the forethought in the world, have devised for her. To sit in a chair, hour after hour, and contemplate her own demise is bad enough: She will not have a husband or a family; she will not be able to continue her education, either with her father or in any institution; she will be relegated to the worst of circumstances for a woman, that of spinsterhood and utter uselessness; for the rest of her years, the scandal, which might alternately titillate or alarm others, will follow her; she will be held up as an example to young women of the ravages of sin; and, in short, she will be the recipient of that most remorseless and despicable of sentiments, which is pity. But to know that one is responsible for the ruin of innocents is nearly unendurable. Occasionally, her father knocks on the door and enters her room and feeds her bits of information he considers instructive or likely to whet the knife edges of her punishment. Catherine Haskell and her children returned
to York on the eleventh of August, her father briefly announces one day, permitting her no questions in reply. Later she is told that that man has been stripped of his position at the college and at the clinics in both Cambridge and Ely Falls. She is not informed as to his whereabouts or how he might now make his living. She is not told how Catherine and her children will survive, only that the new cottage, in which the doomed couple spent just the one dreadful night, has been put up for sale.
Olympia is left to her own thoughts and speculations, which renew themselves each morning upon awakening and only very slowly begin to seem familiar. But after a month has passed, she learns a curious fact about herself: Her capacity for remorse is finite. The spirit does not easily submit to annihilation, she finds, and thus it will devise a way, though the path may run through the most complicated of mazes with hazards all about, to ease itself and to salve its wounds. And this she does, in the confines of her bedroom, with memory. She has recollections, both visceral and ephemeral, that no one can take away from her; and even though the events that have occasioned these memories have led only to catastrophe, they contain within them nuggets of sweetness that subsequent consequences cannot entirely sour. Thus the past becomes her companion.
• • •
Toward the end of October, Olympia begins to feel physically unwell. For days, she tastes something metallic at the back of her throat, and she is plagued with biliousness. On the twenty-ninth of October, she finally summons her courage and tells Lisette of her malady, for she wishes her to fetch Dr. Branch. Lisette regards Olympia silently for some minutes and then sighs gravely. Olympia knows then, with a kind of clarity that has previously eluded her, the exact nature of her condition. She feels light-headed for a moment, but then, as she puts her hand to her forehead and passes through the sensations of disbelief and shame, she cannot entirely keep a smile from her mind, if not actually from her lips. For though she understands fully the calamity of her situation, she also feels a seed of joy for the seed that has lingered from her days and weeks with John Haskell. It is something. It is something. . . .