But soon, she knows, the beach will be deserted. There is only a week remaining until the end of the season, when most of the summerfolk will leave Fortune’s Rocks. She finds that she is looking forward intensely to the fall, when the beach will be silent but for the gulls and the sea, and the cottages will be boarded up. The days will grow colder, and inland the leaves on the trees will change their color. She will get in a good supply of tinned fruit and vegetables and dried cod, and coal as well for the stoves. It might be necessary to move downstairs for the winter, she thinks; indeed, she almost certainly will have to do that. She imagines herself alone in the front room, looking through the long floor-to-ceiling windows on a cold November day, gazing down the expanse of beach, thinking of each of the other cottages shuttered and waiting for its owner once again to return to bring it back to life; and that image causes such a sudden and unexpected pang of something like grief that she stops in her progress. It is, surprisingly, she recognizes at once, grief for her father; for she sees, more clearly than she ever has (and perhaps she has not, until now, been able to allow herself to see this before), how crushed her father must have been to have his daughter, his only child, fall so far from grace, to have all his hopes dashed beyond reclamation. Was Olympia not his experiment, his pride? She remembers the night of the dinner party with Haskell and Philbrick in attendance, and the manner in which her father spoke of his daughter’s superior learning. And it was true then, she thinks; she did have a singular education. But for what purpose?
Olympia crouches on the sand and wraps her arms around her legs, resting her forehead on her knees. Her hat slips backward off her head. She thinks of all the hours her father spent instructing her, all the days of lessons and debate. What will he be doing with those hours now?
“You all right, miss?” she hears a voice beside her ask.
She looks up quickly into the face of a boy. He is frowning and seems slightly puzzled by her odd posture. She sits back on the sand and props herself up with her hands.
“Yes,” she says, reassuring him. “I am fine now.”
He stands politely, in his dry navy bathing costume, his hands folded neatly behind his back, a position that incongruously suggests the military. The boy has yellow curls and a splash of freckles below his eyes, which are a blue so pale as to resemble water in a glass.
“You are sad,” he says.
“A bit.”
“Because of the jellyfish?”
She smiles. “No, not exactly.”
“What is your name?”
“Olympia.”
“Oh.”
“What is yours?”
“Edward. I am nine.”
She offers her hand, which he takes, as a boy trying to be a man will do.
“Are you on holiday?” the boy asks.
“No, I live here.”
“Oh, you are lucky.”
Olympia sits up and wraps her arms around her knees. “But I have not lived through a winter yet. They say the winters are difficult.”
“I live in Boston,” the boy volunteers, sitting down beside her. “May I?”
“Yes, of course,” she says, smiling at his attention to manners. “You are here with your brothers and sisters?”
“One sister, but she is only a baby,” he says, implying that a baby is of not much use.
Olympia glances around her and sees no concerned adult. “Will your mother and father not worry where you are?”
“I shouldn’t think so, miss. They are in France now. I am here with my governess.”
“And will she not worry about where you have got to?”
“When I left her, she was sleeping on the porch.” He gestures toward a large, weathered-shingled cottage with white trim beyond the seawall.
Olympia nods. “But you do know all about how you should not go into the water without an adult with you?”
“Oh, yes. But I should not go in today anyway.”
“No.”
She watches the boy stretch out his legs, which are long and spindly and dry. He digs his heels into the sand.
“Are they terrible?” the boy asks suddenly. “The stings?”
“I have never been stung myself. But I have heard that they are.”
“And you die?”
“You
can
die from them. But not always. Sometimes you just have the fever. There once was a policeman who got stung. His name was Tommy Yeaton. He swam into a school of jellyfish and got stung dozens of times. He died the next day.”
The boy seems to consider this new fact.
“Would you like to have a footrace?” he asks her suddenly.
“A footrace?” she asks, laughing.
“Yes,” he says. “We could start here and . . .” He scans the length of the beach. “Do you see there? That striped umbrella in the distance?”
“Yes.”
“Shall we say the first one to the umbrella wins?”
“Well . . . ,” she says, hesitating. She cannot remember the last time she participated in a footrace. Surely not since she was a child herself. But the boy’s request is so earnest, she finds it hard to resist.
“Why not?” she says, beginning to unlace her boots.
The boy jumps up. He draws a long line in the sand. “This will be our start,” he announces excitedly.
“All right,” she says. She discreetly pulls off her stockings and stuffs them into her boots.
The boy steps up to the start, leans forward, and puts a foot behind him in the traditional racing stance. Olympia leaves her boots and stockings with her hat, stands on the line beside the boy, and lifts the skirts of her yellow gingham just enough so that she will not trip.
“Are you ready, miss?”
“Yes, I think I am.”
“When I count three then?”
The boy races flat out, his chin up, his hair flying behind him, as if he had been taught to run this way at school. Olympia, feeling slightly awkward at first, bends into the run and tries to keep pace with him. Almost immediately her hair comes loose from its pins and flaps heavily against her neck. The boy, both wiry and strong, looks over his shoulder, and, seeing her so close to him, picks up his pace. The balls of Olympia’s feet dig into the sand. Her muscles feel pleasantly strong after so many weeks of domestic work. She lifts her skirts higher so that she can stretch her legs. She feels at first mildly embarrassed to be cavorting so, but then this embarrassment turns to a distinct sense of exuberance until she is nearly giddy with the event. She raises her face to the sun.
My goodness,
she thinks,
it has been so long since I have felt like this.
As they draw closer to the striped umbrella, Olympia glances over at the boy and can see that she might inadvertently win the race. The boy runs with grace and determination, but his young legs are tiring. Olympia pretends then to be winded and slows her pace slightly. With the prize in sight, the boy, finding new energy, sprints forward to the umbrella, startling its owners, who are sitting on canvas chairs beneath it, and gathering so much momentum that he pitches into the sand. When Olympia reaches him, he is sprawled with his legs splayed open, trying to get his breath. She bends, taking in air. The boy has sand on his forehead and on his upper lip.
“You won!” she says breathlessly with her hands on her knees.
He is so winded that he cannot even smile. In a moment, however, a look of concern crosses his face. “You did not let me win, did you?” he asks.
She rights herself. “Of course not,” she says. “I would never do that.”
He brushes the sand from his face and limbs.
“I would race you again tomorrow if you like,” he offers.
“That would be fine,” she says.
“And perhaps tomorrow you will win,” he adds shyly.
She tries not to smile. “Then I shall look for you,” she says, “and tomorrow I
will
win.”
“Well,” the boy says. He stands up, but he seems reluctant to leave. “Do you have a boy?” he asks suddenly.
“Yes,” she says simply.
“What is his name?”
“Peter.”
“Would he like to race with us, do you think?”
“I think that perhaps he would, but actually I think we would beat him rather badly. He is only three years old.”
“Oh,” says the boy with evident disappointment.
“But I know he would like to meet you one day,” Olympia adds quickly. “He is very fond of nine-year-old boys just like yourself.”
“Is he?”
“Oh, yes.”
The statement produces an unexpected smile. He glances in the direction of the shingled cottage.
“You had better go back now,” Olympia says. “I shall look for you tomorrow,” she says.
He nods. He begins to walk slowly away, then turns and waves once quickly. She waves back to him. He breaks into a run then, and Olympia watches him sprint to the place where they met on the beach, as if he were already practicing for tomorrow’s event.
She watches him until he is only a speck.
Yes,
she thinks.
I have a boy who is three
.
She glances at her feet, encrusted with sand. She touches her hair, which lies tangled in knots along her back. Inside her dress, she is perspiring from her exertion. She makes a feeble attempt to tie up her hair without pins, but its weight almost immediately pulls it loose.
She does not want to go back to the cottage just yet, for to return to the house is to wait for a letter, and she does not want to reenter that numbing state of suspension. She sets off once again toward the far end of the beach. She will collect her shoes and socks and hat later.
She walks briskly, still buoyant with her earlier exercise, and it is only when she sees the Highland Hotel in the distance that she slows her steps. She has not ventured this far along the beach since she returned to Fortune’s Rocks. She takes in the porch, the guests sitting in the rockers, the windows in the upper stories, a certain window through which a gaily colored cloth snaps repeatedly, as if a woman inside were shaking out a bedspread. The hotel looks remarkably unchanged, although it seems there are more people about than she remembers from before. She recalls a sea of white linen, an opened ledger with slanted cursive. She can see muslin curtains at the windows, the way a shirt was flung upon an ochre floorcloth. She can hear a voice:
If only you knew . . .
She can almost feel the silky cotton of the overwashed sheets, can nearly make out the sage tin ceiling with its raised pattern. She can hear the echo of her own footsteps in the stairwell.
She notices then a gathering of people at the southern end of the porch. A late-season party, she deduces, and thinks:
How fashionable the women look in their bishop’s sleeves.
And then as she casually scans the guests, her eyes fall upon a familiar figure. She stiffens as she recognizes a certain self-conscious tilt of the head, a distinctive profile, a flash of white teeth. He has on a yellow-and-black checkered waistcoat, and he sports a new monocle. He has grown his whiskers in the muttonchops mode, a style Olympia has never found attractive. While she watches, Zachariah Cote throws his head back and laughs, and Olympia, even at a distance, can see that the gesture is exaggerated for his audience. She has heard that Cote is successful now, that his verse has become popular; he publishes in ladies’ magazines and is admired by married women in particular. Olympia has several times seen his poems in print, and she has remained steadfast in her opinion that they are dreadful: dripping with sentiment and overlaced with a penchant for the morbid. And she is seized with a sudden bitterness that it should be Cote, of all of them, who has fared so well. That it is Cote — and not her father or her mother or John Haskell or Catherine Haskell or even she (no, especially not she) — who is welcome upon that porch on a late summer day in
1903.
And yet, was not Cote, of all of them, the only one who acted with true malice? Did not Cote actually
invite
Catherine Haskell to inspect the view in the telescope, knowing what she would find there? And were not Olympia’s parents and Catherine Haskell utterly blameless but for an innocent, if intimate, association with scandal? Though Olympia would not absolve herself of any of the guilt associated with the catastrophe, her anger grows as she stands in the sand.
What an ass,
Catherine once said of the man. Olympia thought the observation fitting then, and does now. She wonders if Catherine Haskell herself ever had occasion to come inadvertently upon the poet’s verse, and if she did, how she managed the experience.
And it is as she is having this thought that Cote, still dissembling for his audience, turns slightly and spots Olympia on the sand — in her yellow gingham, her feet bare, her hair in knots along her back. She resists the impulse to walk away and instead returns his gaze as steadily as he bestows it. She can see the man’s surprise, his momentary bewilderment, the quick questions as his mouth relaxes from its smile.
The woman beside Cote speaks, and he briefly acknowledges her; but he does not remove his eyes from Olympia. The woman glances in her direction, doubtless wondering who it is that has captured Zachariah Cote’s attention so thoroughly. But if the woman recognizes Olympia, she gives no sign.