She turns, and he removes his hat.
His face is older, but still he has high color. His hair, which has been cut short, is receding slightly at his brow. He seems leaner to her, more wiry than she has remembered. But it is his eyes that claim her most. They are old eyes, older than his body, hollow and lined, as if the weight of the past four years — no, nearly five now — had settled in those orbs, had done its damage there.
They stand on either side of the kitchen table, each taking in the other.
“I came as soon as I heard,” he says finally, breaking the silence.
She cannot speak.
“I have been away. Deep in the country. I have come just now by train from Minneapolis.”
She shakes her head and puts a hand on a chair back to steady herself.
“Minnesota,” he says.
She lifts her chin.
“When I returned to the boardinghouse in Minneapolis where I was staying, there was a letter from Mr. Tucker. And I have read just now about the suit in the newspapers. Indeed, there is hardly any other news at all.”
Turning her back to him, she stares out the window over the sink.
“No one knows I have come,” Haskell continues. “I shall not tell anyone. Not even Tucker. I fear my presence, as I am still legal guardian, would complicate and perhaps jeopardize your suit.”
She sets her jaw hard.
“I am at the Dover Inn,” he says. “I daresay I shall not run into anyone I know there.”
She pivots and leans against the lip of the sink.
“Olympia,” he says, laying his hat on the table.
“Would you like some tea?” she asks in a quavering voice, and she can see that he hardly knows how to answer her. “I shall put a kettle on,” she adds. “If you would leave me for a moment, I shall bring it into the front room.”
He hesitates, but then he seems to understand. “All right,” he says, and with reluctance, he walks through the swinging door.
When he is gone, she wraps her arms over her head and sinks to the floor, the skirts of her dress billowing up and out as she falls. She leans her head forward into her arms and weeps silently. Of all her imaginings, scarcely sane, she has not imagined this. She is gullied out, like the clay in the marshes. He has done this to her.
She pulls herself to a standing position. She finds a handkerchief in the pocket of her dress and blows her nose. Hardly knowing what she is doing, she fills the kettle with water, only then realizing that she cannot leave him waiting for her in the front room.
He is looking out at the ocean, his elbow resting on the thin window ledge, his other hand in the pocket of his trousers, and she sees that he has not lost the elegance of his gestures for all his time in the country.
He hears her skirts and turns.
“I have never been here when it was not summer,” he says. “The beach is quite majestic without people.”
“Nature is often seen at her best without people,” she says.
“You know, I hardly feel the guilt now,” he says. “What is left is the punishment.”
“Your children,” she says.
“The guilt is dulled. It is the loss I feel most keenly. The lost years one can never have back.”
“Why did you go so far away?”
“Catherine requested it. I could not refuse her.”
Olympia is silent, thinking of that request and of the circumstances under which it would have been made.
“To think I have not seen you since that night,” he says, studying her intently.
“It was a terrible night.”
“More dreadful than any I have ever experienced,” he says. “I was awed by Catherine’s pain, by its depth. It would not exhaust itself. She threw herself out of the carriage on the way to the cottage.”
“I did not know.”
“She fractured her wrist.”
“I was not told of this.”
“I had no idea she loved me in that way. She hardly felt the pain of the injury to her arm. It was the other injury that claimed her.”
“I remember her beauty,” Olympia says.
“Yes.”
He keeps his eyes on Olympia’s face. And it is she who turns away.
“What do you do in Minnesota?” she asks.
“I work among the Norwegian immigrants and the Arapaho. I have an office, but I am seldom in it. Most of my patients live far from town. Sometimes I am gone for days.”
“It is hard work?”
“Only to watch their suffering. We scarcely know the meaning of the word by comparison.”
And she can see then that the high color in his face is from the sun. His hands, too, are sunburnt. Perhaps there is, she thinks, a brute strength through the shoulders he has not had before. And in his hands, grown larger.
“You have seen the boy?”
“Yes.” She hesitates. “He is very like you.”
She watches him attempt to master the features of his face.
“Has all your work been . . . punishment?” she asks, thinking of the Indians.
“In its way. An exile.”
She smooths her skirts. She still has on her apron. Under it, a gray shirtwaist. “I, too, was sent into exile,” she says. “After the birth.”
“The school.”
“Yes. It was a kind of prison.”
“You know I had the boy,” he says. “For a day.”
“Yes.”
“I did not know I could feel so much love,” he says. “I lay on the bed with him all night. I had hired a wet nurse, who came to the room from time to time. I had planned to bring the boy to the orphanage first thing in the morning, but I could not bear to part with him. In the end, the wet nurse had to remind me that he needed better care than I could give him.”
The image of the man and the infant on the bed together seems unbearable to her now.
“I thought I would die after I left him there,” Haskell says. “Literally. I wanted to die. I thought of drowning myself in the Falls.”
“Did you not feel a similar love for your other children?” she asks.
“I must have,” he says, “but Catherine possessed them so when they were infants.” He pauses. “Martha will go to Wellesley.”
She has forgotten that Martha is of an age to go to college. “We might have been there together,” Olympia says.
“It was knowing I had only the one night,” Haskell says, explaining. “It is time that determines the intensity of love.”
“Is it?” she asks.
Restless, he begins to walk around the room. “I had started drinking,” he says. “I had been wandering. I had a post office I would call at from time to time. It was there I got your father’s letter. It was a brutal letter. But no less than I deserved.”
“I knew nothing of any of this.”
“And then after that night with the boy, I could see how banal the drinking was, how trite the ruin. So I went west.”
She tries to imagine him among the Indians.
“You are even more beautiful,” he says.
She looks away.
“You never used to wear your hair down.”
“I do not usually wear it down,” she says. “I have just taken it out.”
“I used to weep for the wreckage,” he says. “For the lives that must now always be something less.”
She thinks how familiar he is to her and yet how foreign. He is years older, not in his body, but in the eyes, which have perhaps seen too much.
“The most unforgivable,” he says, putting his hands into the pockets of his coat and shaking his head. “The most unforgivable is that I would do it again. If I believed in such a thing, I would get down on my knees and pray to have those moments with you restored to me.”
She is startled by this pronouncement. It seems blasphemous, to fly so in the face of God. And yet has she not done the same? In a Catholic orphanage? In a courthouse?
“Without the cost,” she says.
“Even with the cost.”
“You cannot mean that,” she says. “You cannot know the cost. The cumulative cost.”
“No,” he says. “I cannot.”
He sits in the Windsor chair, the scraps of linen all about his feet.
“Will you win your suit?” he asks.
“I do not know. The judgment is to be read tomorrow.”
“I shall go back, of course. Though I should like to know the judgment. I like to think of you with the boy.”
“I want him with me passionately,” she says.
“I should like to see him.”
“You could see him as I have had to,” she says harshly. “Standing across the street and hoping to catch a glimpse of him.”
“I am sorry you have had to do that.”
“I had to answer questions about you,” she says. “I had to tell them of us. When we were at the hotel together and at the cottage.”
“My God.”
“It was unspeakable,” she says. “Not the admitting to the deed. That I have long since gotten over. It was having to tell it aloud, having to tell it to people I did not know and did not want ever again to see. When I was sitting in the witness box, I felt I was being stripped of my clothing. Worse.”
“Olympia, I am so sorry.”
She shrugs, as if to say,
It does not matter now.
She asks him: “Do you enjoy practicing medicine in Minnesota?”
“The need is desperate.” He glances around. “Do you live here alone?”
“Yes.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Is it?”
“I think so.”
“I came in here to say I did not make the tea.”
“I am not sure I could hold a teacup steady,” he says.
“Would you like a drink of spirits? I was having one when you came.”
“Were you? How unlike you. But then how would I know what is like you now? Yes, thank you.”
She walks into the pantry and pours him a glass of the whiskey. When she returns, he is staring out the windows again. He takes the drink from her. There is within him, she thinks, some great strength that she herself does not have access to.
“I am so very sorry, Olympia. To think of your giving birth so young and losing the child in the same moment. It is more than anyone should have to bear.”
“I would not wish you to be sorry,” she says.
“I am happy simply to be in this room,” he says. “I have imagined this a thousand times.”
But even this happiness, she sees as she glances up at his eyes, must necessarily be less than it was. He has sacrificed his children. He has made them sacrifice him. What happiness can there be after such a loss?
“I did not ever stop loving you,” he says. “Not for one minute.” He takes a drink of the whiskey. “It must be said. There is joy, even now, in saying it. I would not have thought such love could be maintained over so long a time. But there it is. There is no point in saying anything but the truth,” he adds.
“I have felt relief in speaking the truth to Mr. Tucker,” she says. She wraps her arms around herself. With the sun down, the room is colder. “There is something I want you to see,” she says. “Upstairs. But wait here a minute.”
She walks into the kitchen to fetch the nightshirt. When she returns, she asks: “Will you come with me?”
He follows her into the front hallway and up the wide staircase. They move along a darkened corridor. She pauses outside a room, not her own, and opens the door. She walks to a table and turns on a lamp, revealing a child’s bed covered with a blue and white crocheted coverlet. On the floor is a navy hooked rug with a red star in its center. There is a nursery table and chairs, a wooden toy box, painted red. Blue curtains with a star pattern are at the window. From the ceiling hangs a mobile of tin stars.
“I found the furniture in the attic,” she says. “It used to be mine. I made the rug and the curtains and the mobile,” she adds, not without a note of pride. “My room is next door. I thought he would want to be close to me. I am sure he will be frightened. I am frightened.”
She walks to a tin trunk, kneels, and opens it. Inside is the boy’s wardrobe. She folds the nightshirt carefully and lays it on the top. She closes the trunk.
“I know that you will be a good mother to him,” Haskell says.
She looks up at him in the doorway.
“I shall go now,” he says.
She is not prepared for this so soon, and, in not being prepared, she resorts to manners. “You have a carriage?” she asks.
“I shall walk to Ely and take the trolley from there. The walk will do me good. Though I shall falter in the marshes.”
She stands.
“You have not said anything about how these years have been for you,” he says.
“No, I cannot.”