From its central building, the school has spread like a subdued stain, taking over vacated boardinghouses adjacent to the school’s property, vying with the factory itself for turf. At the time Olympia is enrolled, from
1900
to
1903
, the school owns seventeen buildings, including a gymnasium and an observatory, which has been donated by a graduate who married a Mellon. Most of the women, Olympia learns, will marry men of considerably less wealth or of no wealth at all, if indeed they marry, and not a few will remain unmarried. One woman with whom Olympia will take classes will go on to own hotels in the West, and Olympia will think of Rufus Philbrick and his predictions.
During her time at the seminary, Olympia does not have to share a room with anyone else, a circumstance for which she is grateful. (Has her father paid extra to forestall the trading of confidences with a roommate?) Her room, which is composed of a single bed with a pair of rough woolen blankets, a fireplace, a single desk, a chair, and a large window that overlooks the oval of grass at the center of the main campus, is, despite its spartan accommodations, a refuge of sorts. And since Olympia has no desire to leave or to flee this room, she begins, over time, to regard it as more of a retreat than a place of imprisonment. When she is away from it, at classes or at meals or during compulsory exercises, she thinks only of returning to its unadorned solace, where she can sit upon its narrow bed and gaze at the fawn wall opposite and see faces or imagine scenes or recall certain incidents from the past. She has left the home of nuns only to take up the habit, the habits, of the Catholic sisters. Contemplation. Meditation. Reflection. Rumination.
But not prayer. To pray is to hope, and to hope is to admit into one’s spirit the pain of hopelessness. And this Olympia is unwilling to do.
Not surprisingly, Olympia develops a reputation for reticence. For to speak of even a small part of one’s story might inadvertently lead to the revelation of another part one wishes to keep secret. And so she tells little of herself, a characteristic others regard with some suspicion. She is not popular, though she thinks she is not ill liked either. Rather, she is a neighbor one never knows well, regardless of well-intentioned overtures.
There is, however, one teacher Olympia particularly admires, a biologist, Mr. Benton from Syracuse, who keeps a study in Belcher Hall, a room filled with objets and books and a photograph of a woman (a wife?) he once suggests to Olympia he has lost. They take tea together quite often in her second year, when she has determined upon a course of study in biology; and perhaps it is that Mr. Benton, who is fair in his coloring and who is probably, when she knows him, in his late thirties, reminds her of her father as he was before the catastrophe, and this causes her to be fond of him. Mr. Benton and Olympia speak evenly, in measured tones, of anatomy and platelets and the circuitry of the brain, and if he senses a reserve in her that hides a wound, so does she suspect a story behind his pale facade: Perhaps the woman in the photograph is not his wife after all. They talk of life in the metaphors of cells and species, a language that permits no discursions into matters of the heart, though the physical heart itself is dissected often enough. And in this way, she thinks, they are kindred spirits. In later years, she will often think of writing to the man; but then she should have to tell him of her life and employ a vocabulary that would be as foreign to those twilit afternoons as Chinese or Urdu, and so she does not.
As for her actual father, whom Olympia sees only at Christmastime and summer vacations, the journey being too long for the brief holidays of Thanksgiving and Easter, he has resumed some of his former life, though the glitter has gone out of it, rather like a ring that has lost its diamond: Though the setting remains sturdy, it is incomplete, with its gaping hole. He does occasionally write to her.
I have reservations about your choice of biology as a course of study. It will limit your prospects in a way that the study of history will not. . . . I am sending with this letter twenty dollars so that you might buy yourself some warm clothing for the coming months. I am told that Mrs. Monckton on Hadley Street is a decent dressmaker. . . . Your mother is insisting that we go to Paris. I hope she is strong enough.
Her father never writes about the past, nor asks her how she is, nor alludes to anything that might prompt an emotional reply. He does not ask Olympia if she is enjoying herself, if she has found any friends, or if she has been able to forget.
And if he did, Olympia would tell him this:
I am not able to forget. Not for one day. Not for one hour.
Her father predicted she would be fine in the fall. She is not.
On no day does Olympia not wonder what has happened to her son. She feels this absence as a hole cut into the center of her body, a hole she cannot fill up with reading or with study or with imaginings, or even by bending over physically to close up the empty space. One day, when she is crossing Holyoke Street on her way to Belcher Hall, she sees a mother with a boy of about three years. His hair has a stubborn cowlick that gives him charm, and his cotton socks droop about his ankles in a manner that is nearly heartbreaking in its innocence. All about the pair is a golden light, that of the sun filtered through the translucent yellow leaves of the maples overhead. Olympia watches the boy cross the muddy street with his mother, the child certain that if he holds his mother’s hand tightly enough, no harm will ever come to him. And as they walk, a crimson leaf falls. The boy stretches out his small hand. He catches his leaf and holds his treasure aloft for his mother to see.
Olympia turns abruptly and walks back to her room, barely making it behind the closed door before she whirls in confusion and falls onto the bed. She sobs heavily, so much so that she rouses Mrs. Cowper, the housemother, who comes to Olympia’s door and insists upon entry. And Olympia has to tell her that she has just learned that her mother is dying (she can still lie brilliantly when pressed) so that Mrs. Cowper will leave her alone.
And if Olympia thinks about her unknown son every day, she thinks of Haskell even more, for she has more of him to remember and thus to imagine. It is as though he, too, becomes a habit ingrained upon the bones: Her reveries of him are constant, though often vague and unformed. Sometimes she will lose his face. Early on, she loses the timbre of his voice. Most of her thoughts are of a speculative nature: She imagines a chance meeting and what they will say. He will have his back to her at a train station. She will recognize — what? — a turned shoulder, the way he stands with his hands on his hips. She will see him check his watch. He will have on a dark suit coat, a leather satchel at his feet. He will take off a narrow-brimmed fedora and brush his hair off his forehead. Silently, she will walk to his side, and sensing her, he will turn.
Olympia,
he will say, as if she had returned from the dead.
Will he dare to touch her then? There in the station, for all to see? She imagines restraint giving way to breathless revelations, hasty absolutions. She imagines remorse and also exhilaration. And she imagines Haskell’s shock. For he will not have known he has a son. And then she will give herself over to him, and he will take care of her. These reveries are, without question, the happiest moments of her stay at Hastings.
• • •
A special feature of the seminary, Olympia discovers, is its innovative summer work program, a concept unique, she is given to understand, in American education. Since the majority of the students are girls from families of moderate means, many of whom can barely meet the tuition payments, it is the practice of the school to send the girls out in the summer to positions as governesses or near governesses or as apprentices to women who do good works, so that they might earn money to help with their bills. A typical summer post, for example, might be that of an assistant to an administrator of a settlement house or of tutor to a household of children who have not had benefit of schooling.
Toward the end of her third year of study, Olympia begins to think about where she might be assigned. If one is enterprising, she has already learned, one can request a certain post; and indeed most upperclassmen often return to positions held the previous summer, the most desirable of which are in Boston. Olympia, however, does not want to stay in Boston again, even though it means she could live there with her family (or particularly because she could live there with her family), for she has already spent the past three summers in those stifling rooms on Beacon Hill. These seasons were nearly intolerable for Olympia: She was able only to think about where she was not, which was at Fortune’s Rocks. Each of the separate days was a small torture as she ticked off the milestones: On this day a year ago, Haskell and I met on the porch. On this day two years ago, we watched a balloon ascend into the sky. On this day three years ago, we were lovers in a half-built cottage.
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.