Fortune's Rocks

by Anita Shreve

  To avoid a recurrence of such painful anniversaries, as well as the intense boredom and heat of the city in the summer months, Olympia seizes upon a post that is at the opposite side of the state: “Spend the summer on a farm in the Berkshires,” the advertisement outside of the dean’s office reads. “A governess is needed for three children. Duties light; payment considerable.”

  She applies for the post in writing and is accepted. The reply comes from a woman who announces herself the sister of a widowed father who seeks a governess for his three sons. This sister (who gives the impression of sharing the household with the brother, which turns out not to be the case) hastens to assure Olympia that she is likely to be very happy on her brother’s farm and to find it a pleasant refuge from the seminary. Though Olympia does not agree that she has high prospects of happiness, she does think the farm might be a refuge from both Hastings and Boston.

  Olympia writes to her father to tell him of her assignment, neglecting to mention that she has actively applied for the post. It is determined, however, that Olympia will go home immediately after final examinations to visit for a brief holiday, and that after two weeks she will travel by train to western Massachusetts.

  Olympia spends her time in Boston reading Emily Brontë to her mother, who sits upon her chaise, warmed by peacock tapestries and azure chenille, nursing a cup of tea, while Olympia reads of moors and grand passions. Her father, when not secreted in his study, paces the upper rooms of the town house with his hands in his pockets.

  Brief though her visit is, Olympia finds she is profoundly impatient, after only two weeks, to leave that household where a faint odor of shame and failure still follows her and seems to linger in the walls and in the carpets and in the furnishings of the many rooms, like smoke after a fire. She is nineteen, an age at which most young women of her station leave the cities in the summer for the watering places along the coast of New England. They go to cotillions and parties and tennis matches and then undertake engagements to handsome or silly young men. Since such an engagement can never come Olympia’s way, it is understood that it will be better if she is occupied elsewhere.

  The journey back to western Massachusetts is long and arduous, although Olympia is much taken with the gentle blue roll of the landscape west of the mill towns. After they have traveled some distance into the Berkshire Mountains, she gets off the train at what appears to be a crossroads with one general store and a small stone building. When she questions the conductor as to the accuracy of this final destination, he assures her that she is at the correct place. She waits at the crossroads until her employer, Averill Hardy, arrives to take her to his house.

  Mr. Hardy is a robust man of about thirty-five years. He has an abundance of hair, which seems to have gone silver at an early age, and a beard that reaches nearly to the middle of his chest. He has two wooden teeth in the front of his mouth, and he is nearly always sunburnt. With his wife, Mary Catherine, he had four sons, three of whom still live with him on the farm. The fourth has gone to Springfield. Since there are no women in the household, Averill Hardy explains to Olympia before they have even reached the farm, it is hoped she will take over the preparation of the meals, see to the laundry, and mend the clothes when she is not actually engaged in teaching his sons how to read and write. Olympia bristles at this suggestion, and questions Mr. Hardy rather strenuously at first, telling him that she has not been given to understand these circumstances. But later, when it becomes apparent to her that the poor man and his home are in desperate condition, she decides she will help; otherwise, she should have to live in near squalor, too. And since her only alternative is to give up the position and return to Boston, which she most profoundly does not want to do, she begins to give in to Mr. Hardy’s expectations.

  And, in fact, Olympia does not mind this work. She has learned domestic skills at Hastings, and she finds the repetition of household chores to be a calming influence upon her spirit. The farmhouse itself is similar to others in the area in that it is two stories high with white clapboards, black shutters, and an ell in the back. The building is not unpleasant, though the house is close to the barn, which houses dairy cattle and smells poorly on hot days. She has a room at the back of the house, a small room that looks out at a wall of oak and maple trees.

  The boys are shy and muscular and range in age from twelve to seventeen, and Olympia thinks it rather astonishing that they cannot read. When she wakes in the mornings, they and Mr. Hardy are already up and tending to the animals and the land, which consists of a hundred acres of feed corn. The kitchen is commodious and easy to work in, and Olympia has learned enough of the culinary arts at the seminary to be able to put together some meals. Before the evening hours, Olympia will have prepared four dinners for Mr. Hardy and his sons, including a breakfast of sausages, porridge, and eggs that she will have ready within a half hour of awakening. She never eats with the men, but rather takes her meals alone at the table when they have finished theirs and have gone out again. After the noon meal, if Mr. Hardy can spare his boys that day, they will come to the parlor, where she teaches them the most rudimentary of skills. The boys are polite, and even somewhat grateful, though the eldest child, who is called Seth, is a painfully slow learner and suffers some by comparison with his younger brothers. When Olympia sees how desperately the children need even her basic tutoring, she decides she does not mind her post.

  Sometimes Mr. Hardy will come back into the house before the afternoon and evening meals and will speak some pleasantry to her; but the true purpose of these visits, Olympia soon discovers, is to go into the parlor, and when he is certain she is not looking, to unlock a cabinet there and partake of spirits in a glass. She does not know when he washes this glass, for she never sees it in the kitchen. But she does, over time, come to understand that Mr. Hardy’s high color is not entirely due to weathering.

  One day, after Olympia has been at the farm for three weeks and has mastered the routines of housekeeping as well as the rudiments of teaching, Mr. Hardy lingers at the table after the noon meal. This distresses Olympia mildly, since she is hungry and normally doesn’t sit down to her own meal until after he has left the kitchen. Generally, when she has put the noon meal on the table, she retreats to the second story of the house, where she does some mending in a chair in Mr. Hardy’s room, the room he once shared with his wife and which still holds her sewing table and case. It is a pleasant room in which to linger, quite the most pleasant room in the house, Olympia thinks, and in fact the only room with any light to speak of. Mrs. Hardy was clearly skilled in the domestic arts and decorated her bedroom with much of her handiwork. Olympia is impressed by the multihued and complex-patterned hooked rugs, of which there are many, as well as the hand-pieced and intricately sewn quilts that are folded upon a chest, waiting for the winter months.

  When Olympia hears footsteps on the stairs, she is startled and lays down her work. It occurs to her that Mr. Hardy might be ill and that he is returning to his room to lie down on the bed. She gets up from her chair, holding the cloth and needle at her waist.

  He comes to the doorway and stands in its span. She sees that his eyes glisten or are watery, and she has a new thought: He is grieving for his lost wife. It is hot in the bedroom, with a rectangle of sun on the varnished floorboards.

  “You are a good girl,” Mr. Hardy says from the doorway. She thinks he may be trying to smile at her, although she is not sure of this, since he has never smiled before, and his mouth takes on a curiously crooked aspect, due to his wooden teeth, which are not pleasant to look at. It seems to her as well that Mr. Hardy is, in his demeanor, more nervous than she has seen previously.

  Olympia is embarrassed to be standing there and have him speaking to her in this way when she has no hope of forming a suitable reply, and moreover not a clear understanding of why he has come up to his room. She steps toward him, thinking he will move out of the way and allow her to pass. But he takes her movement toward him as something else. There is a co
nfused moment when she does not know where to place her foot.

  Mr. Hardy, who is doubtless under the spell of too large an amount of spirits, put his arms clumsily around her and pulls her to him so that she is squashed up against his chest. She tries to resist, but cannot, and she is not certain he understands that she is resisting. Mr. Hardy, who is a foot taller, bends his head and finds her face and kisses her. It is a wet, unpleasant kiss. She feels the blunt edges of his wooden teeth. His beard is abrasive and prickly on her face and throat. She smells his bad breath, which is, she knows better than anyone else, a mixture of drink and sausage and aged cheese. Then, before she has any chance to recover, he places a large palm at the bodice of her apron and pushes against her as if he means to flatten her bosom. In this moment, she struggles and manages to turn away.

  “No!” she cries.

  He releases her, and she stumbles backward.

  “Did you not like that?” Mr. Hardy asks in a hoarse voice. And Olympia is astonished to see that he is genuinely dismayed and possibly even surprised by her reaction.

  But Olympia is speechless from the shock of the smell and feel of his person. She stands, unable to move or to answer him, still holding the needle and the cloth, praying for the incident to be over, when suddenly it is, and she realizes he has left the room.

  Her hands begin to shake. She drops the needle and cloth to the floor.

  “My God,” she says. She sits down hard in Mrs. Hardy’s chair. “This is not me,” she says.

  She looks down at her hands and then up at the folded quilts upon the chest. How has she arrived at this point?

  Because she has been allowed to believe that she is unworthy and inferior? And why is this? Because she once was loved? Because that love produced a child? Because her father, and the world in which he has put his faith, has declared this to be so?

  She shakes her head, as if to throw off her passivity.

  She turns her face to the blue haze of hills beyond the meticulously mended screen of the window. She walks to the window and throws it open and leans her head out. She inhales the air, her thoughts sharpening themselves with each breath as though she had been drugged for years and were only now, with a jolt, emerging from her torpor. The air holds a promise where before there has been none. It is air that might feed a life where before there has been only starvation.

  She will leave this farm and not return, she tells herself. She will end her exile. She will go back to the one place where she has been happy.

  • III •

  Fortune’s Rocks Revisited

  ALL THE WAY to New Hampshire from western Massachusetts — from the Berkshires to Springfield by carriage, from Springfield to Rye by train, to Ely by electric trolley, and then to Fortune’s Rocks again by hired carriage — Olympia has pondered the problem of gaining entry to a house that has been locked for years. Will it be boarded up and impenetrable, as she suspects it will be? Or have vagabonds disturbed the quiet sleep of a house in shame? Is it conceivable that Josiah and Lisette, in their rush to clean up after the disastrous gala, left the door unlocked, thus allowing the curious to enter the scene of Fortune’s Rocks’ most recent, and perhaps its greatest, scandal?

  The landscape is familiar and yet not, exhilarating after so many landlocked years away but frightening in its alterations. Where once there were long stretches of sea and rocks, now there are cottages of varying sizes and styles, so many in Rye alone that if it were not for the recognizable boardwalk, she might not know where she was. They pass a bowling alley she does not recall and a new arcade that seems like a strumpet set between two dowager hotels. Already, in this second week in July, the boardinghouses are crowded with holidaymakers, the beach thick with bathers in costumes that seem more daring than she remembers. But as the carriage leaves Rye altogether and draws nearer to Fortune’s Rocks, a kind of calm begins to settle over the seascape and over her agitated spirit as well. Fewer changes have been made here, with only the odd unweathered cedar shingles signaling new construction.

  She unbuttons her cloak (its wool so suitable for the cool of the Berkshires, but too hot for the coast of New England in July), and it occurs to her that little of the clothing she has brought with her in her flight from western Massachusetts will be comfortable or appropriate at the beach. Beside her, the driver, a lean and angular native with a good growth of beard on his chin, spurs on the horses, and her heart kicks a beat inside her chest. They turn into the narrow winding lane that will take them to Fortune’s Rocks, and she thinks: What if the house is no longer there at all? What if, in these intervening years, the cottage burned to the ground, and her father simply did not tell her? Or has he, unbeknownst to her, sold the house, and will she find, on its porches, small children who are unfamiliar to her?

  But before she can wonder further, the driver rounds a bend, and she sees with a sudden ache the familiar crescent of summer houses, the rocks at low tide poking their black noses above the sea like seals, the beach at Fortune’s Rocks. She strains forward in the carriage. They round yet a farther bend, and then she sees the house itself: her father’s cottage, once a convent, now abandoned.

  A sound escapes her, and the driver looks over at her.

  The windows and doors of the cottage are shuttered, so that the house seems a face with its eyes and mouth tightly closed, betraying no secrets.

  “You can’t mean here, miss,” the driver says with alarm in his accent of broad vowels.

  She cannot, for the moment, answer the man. Does she mean here? Is this the place where women in white linen once dined in mirrored lights with glissandi of Chopin in the background? Is this the cottage that John Haskell and his wife and children fatefully visited, none of them capable of even imagining the calamity that awaited? Paint is peeling from the clapboards and the grass is two feet tall, but in the cottage of her memories, light flooded through windows and slippered feet glided silently upon polished floors.

  “Yes, this is the place,” she says to the driver beside her.

  No houses have sprung up near to her father’s cottage, and she wonders why that is. Does her father own all the land adjacent? Was this land perhaps deeded to the convent years ago? The nearest neighbor, she sees, is still the lifesaving station, its fresh white paint and red trim gleaming in the sun and causing her father’s cottage to appear particularly shabby. At the shoreline, she can see many figures in varying states of undress. She remembers — the memory now bolstered by the sight of the actual landscape and thus more vivid than it has been in years — her slow walk from the bathhouse to the shoreline four summers ago, while Haskell, a man unknown to her then, watched her tentative steps.

  Olympia pays the reluctant driver the fare and waits as he fetches her trunk down from the carriage. He bends with its weight. Though he offers to carry it into the house, she asks him to leave the luggage at the back door, for she does not want to reveal the fact that she has no key and cannot open that door or any other. She stands on the doorstep and watches as the driver pulls away. She waves once, hoping that she appears merely to be waiting for an unseen, if lazy, caretaker to throw open the door and invite her in.

  But no such caretaker can or does emerge. When Olympia is certain that the driver has gone on, she begins to circle the house, looking for some means of entry. In her urgency to leave the Berkshires and travel to Fortune’s Rocks, she has missed several meals and has hardly slept. She tries the shutters (faded now and peeling) and is not surprised to discover that they are locked from the inside. A bulkhead leading to the cellar is similarly fastened, as are all of the four doors of the cottage. She would gladly break a window if only she could gain access to one, but she cannot at first see any opening in the house’s formidable armor. She does not want to summon help, for to seek aid is to announce her presence; and though she knows she will not be able to keep her residency a secret for long, she would at least like to be inside the cottage before she is assaulted by the curious.

  Out by the chapel, sh
e stands back from the house and surveys it from the lawn. Wild grasses poke beneath her skirts and tickle her legs. Shingles have come loose from the roof, she sees, and the clapboards are badly in need of paint. The porch railing has been battered by a storm, perhaps the same tempest that has denuded the dormers of their trim. There are, in fact, many repairs that should be attended to, repairs she herself cannot make, and she surprises herself with the sudden realization that she is looking at these failings of the house — a crack in a newel post, a doorframe that has warped from the damp, bricks from the chimney that have come loose — in a way she has not before, which is to say, in a proprietary manner. And it is then, during this inspection, that she sees the broken hinge.

  She searches for something to stand on, for the shuttered window is just beyond her reach, and finds, to one side of the house, a table such as might be used for gardening. With considerable effort (but, oh, how her arms and legs have been toughened by her work at Hastings, work she cannot bear now even to think about), she drags the worktable beneath the window. She climbs onto its rough surface and, with a series of abrupt wrenching pulls, loosens the wayward shutter, finally tearing it free of its remaining hinge and flinging it to the ground. She brushes the rust off her fingers. She bangs on the frame of the window with the heel of her hand to dislodge it from its damp-swollen lock, and when the window gives, she cannot suppress a cry of triumph. She hitches herself over the ledge of the window, balancing for a moment on its sill and then falling to the stone flooring below.