“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.
D
AYS 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.
Curiously, during this period of time, whenever they have visitors to the house or she happens to observe Josiah going about his chores or her father reading, she begins to notice certain masculine characteristics that she has not ever observed before — or never knew she observed: the inch or two of skin that sometimes will show itself between a man’s cuff and his wristbone when he reaches for a door, for example; or the graceful languor of men standing casually with their hands in their trouser pockets; or the way the power, the heart of the body, seems to reside just below the midpoint between the shoulders. And she is certain that though she has actually seen such masculine attributes before — that is to say, physically absorbed them with the eye — they have not previously produced conscious thoughts as they do in abundance during this spate of rainy days.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, Olympia is knitting in her room, an activity that is producing in her only a benumbed stupor. To rouse herself, she decides to make herself a cup of tea. As she descends the carpeted steps, she hears masculine voices from her father’s study. She halts in her progress, her heel poised against the riser, listening intently to discern the speakers. One voice, of course, is that of her father, and there is no mistaking the other. They are talking about a book of photographs.
Taking deliberate breaths, Olympia continues down the stairs and walks, with deceptively casual posture, into her father’s study, as if merely looking in to see who the company is. Her father glances over at her. He stops his speech mid-sentence. Haskell, whose back has been to her, turns. After a brief heartbeat of hesitation, he advances with the perfect manners of a gentleman and takes her hand.
“Miss Biddeford,” he says, “what a pleasure to see you again.”
“I trust you know my daughter well enough to call her Olympia,” her father says cheerfully enough (and with what agonizing irony for both Haskell and Olympia he cannot know).
“Olympia, then,” Haskell says pleasantly.
He has a bowler in his hand. She can see tiny droplets of water on his overcoat. His boots are stained black from the wet in a semicircle around the toes. His hair has been somewhat flattened by the hat, and his face is flushed, as though he had been running. In the crook of his arm is a book, perhaps the excuse for his visit.
How cunning, how capable of deceit, they show themselves to be in these few minutes as they speak the sentences of a ritual long practiced, drop their hands at precisely the right moment, and turn ever so slightly in the direction of Olympia’s father so as to include him in their greetings. Her father, who seems particularly pleased to see Haskell, whose company he genuinely enjoys and whose work he honestly admires, immediately insists that Haskell stay to tea.