The chowder is watery, but Olympia forces herself to eat it. She sips it slowly, stalling for time, not wanting to leave her perfect vantage point. The waitress brings her oyster crackers and scones and sweet pastries and then excuses herself, saying she’ll be in the back room, having her own dinner.
For a time, Olympia sits at the table, which is now warmed by the afternoon sun. She has had so much to eat that she almost dozes. But at 3:50 by the clock tower, she comes alert when she sees Albertine, dressed today in a rather severe black cotton dress with a black apron, running up the stone steps into the blue doorway. Five minutes later, a man in a blue workshirt and black cloth cap (his head is bent, and Olympia cannot quite catch his face) comes out of the door and walks down the steps and onto the sidewalk. Confused now about what she should do, for she has no real intention of knocking on the blue door, Olympia sits a bit longer. And in a short time, she is rewarded for her patience. At twenty minutes past four, Albertine Bolduc once again opens the blue door. Olympia braces herself for the shock she knows will come, but when the boy emerges, standing on the top step and blinking in the sunshine, Olympia understands that no preparation will ever be adequate for the blow that hits her with such force that she has to press her knuckles to her mouth.
The boy’s thick walnut hair appears to have been recently cut, using a bowl for a pattern. It hangs fetchingly just over his eyebrows, enhancing the luminous hazel of his eyes. His eyes dominate his face, its tiny nose, its bow mouth, and its plump double chin. He reaches instinctively for his mother’s hand, and together they descend the three stone steps. He has on longer pants today and a gray handknit sweater with a matching woolen cap. Only the shoes, the cracked brown leather shoes with the ties, are the same as before.
Olympia places a number of coins on the table and leaves the shop unobserved. She follows the pair at a discreet distance. She is aware of a particular form of madness that has overtaken her and that is making her behave in ways she would not have believed were possible. She feels uncomfortably like a spy, which, of course, she is. But even understanding the absurdity of her actions, she cannot turn her eyes away, nor can she let the woman and child disappear from sight. Remaining at least a block behind them, Olympia follows the pair down to the corner of Alfred and Washington, and then along Washington to Pembroke, which is lined with boardinghouses, identical brick buildings with small windows and unpainted picket fences bordering scruffy front lawns. Albertine and the boy enter one of these boardinghouses, the boy running up the front steps and pushing open the door as though he has done this a hundred times.
Olympia, unable to follow the woman and boy onto Pembroke for fear of being caught out, stands at the corner and watches this small tableau. She wants to sit down and wait for the boy to come out again, for to leave is to let the boy go, and it is some minutes before she can bear to turn away and head back to the trolley stop. It is nearly five, and she must, she knows, catch the last car to Ely or be stranded in Ely Falls.
For a time, she walks blindly, unable to stop thinking about the boy. Will this be all she has of him? Ever? These stolen glimpses? For there can never be any interaction with Albertine, Olympia understands now. Never. Nor can Olympia continue these clandestine sightings without risking discovery. And that she is not prepared to do.
She cannot go on like this. She cannot. She must put this obsession away, as she once vowed to do. She must forget the boy and move on with her life. She must find a position, perhaps as a governess or a teacher. Possibly she could ask Rufus Philbrick for assistance in this matter. She imagines the man would be considerably more enthusiastic about helping Olympia find employment than he was about aiding her in her search for her son.
Consumed with these thoughts, Olympia walks without noticing where she is going, so that after a time, when she looks up, she discovers that although she still remains in the business district of Ely Falls, she does not know where she is. When she glances around, she notes the Bank of New Hampshire and the office of the Ely Falls Sentinel. There is a funeral parlor and an insurance company that seems to occupy all of one massive stone office building. There are various other offices with signs out front or in the windows or, more discreetly, on brass plates beside doorbells. She notices, across the street, on the ground level, a black sign over a door. A black sign with names carved in gold. TUCKER & TUCKER. ATTORNEYS AT LAW. She turns away from the sign and stares through the glass window of the bank into the lobby. The bank is closed, and she wonders what time it is.
The offices will be shut, too, she tells herself. Even if she were to knock on the door, there would be no answer. And if no one is there, this will be a sign, a message, will it not? She will then be able to walk away from this matter. She will go back to Fortune’s Rocks and stay there and not return to Ely Falls. Yes, this will be a sign. A sign she will not be able to ignore.
And thus armed with these fragile delusions, Olympia walks across Dover Street, Ely Falls, on September 14, 1903, and enters the law offices of Tucker & Tucker, father and son, attorneys at law, to announce that she intends to reclaim her boy, Pierre Francis Haskell, and that they must help her do it.
• IV •
The Writ
AND YOU SAY you met him at your father’s house,” Payson Tucker is saying.
On his lap, the young lawyer has a marbled notebook not unlike the ones in which Olympia used to practice cursive when she was younger. Tucker makes notations from time to time, dipping his pen into a striped glass inkwell behind him on his desk. The room is small — polished wood and brown leather and brass studs — and reminds Olympia of her father’s library in Boston. And perhaps it is that association, or Tucker’s serious and attentive manner, that lends his questions authority.
“We met on the twenty-first of June in 1899 at my father’s cottage in Fortune’s Rocks,” Olympia says. “I remember particularly because it was the day of the summer solstice.”
“And you were how old?”
“Fifteen.” She watches Tucker carefully for a reaction, but his face is impassive.
“And how old was Mr. Haskell?”
“He was forty-one at the time.”
“And you are how old now?”
“Twenty.”
Tucker adjusts his gold-rimmed spectacles and studies her for a moment. “And John Haskell was at your home visiting your father?” he adds.
“Yes,” she says. “He was there with his wife and children.”
“I see,” Tucker says noncommittally, and Olympia wonders what exactly he does see. She hazards a guess as to his age — twenty-five, twenty-six? — but he seems a man wishing to appear older, the already receding hairline helping with this effort. He is a slender man with mustaches, pale skin, and black silky hair that occasionally falls, when he bends his head, forward onto his cheek.
“Can you give me their names?” he asks.
“Catherine,” she says. “That is — was — his wife. Actually, I do not know if they are formally divorced. I have heard only that she is living without him, and I do not believe they have been together since August of 1899. The children’s names are Martha, Clementine, Randall, and May.”
Just moments earlier, when Olympia entered the offices of Tucker & Tucker, she interrupted Payson Tucker in the act of gathering together his case and his hat to leave for the day. She introduced herself, stammering a bit, and said she had need of a lawyer. Tucker seemed a bit startled and gestured for her to sit. Since then, she has been answering his questions as best she can.
“How old were they at the time?” he asks.
“Twelve, in the case of Martha. The others were younger.”
“And where is John Haskell now?”
“I do not know.”
Tucker puts the pen down. “Perhaps it would be better if you just told me the whole story, from the beginning,” he says.
Olympia glances away for a moment toward a towering oak bookcase. There are hundreds of volumes on its shelves, leather-bound boo
ks with difficult titles. She hesitates, uneasy about sharing the details of the most private acts of her life. For words, she knows, even in their best combinations, must inevitably fall short of the reality. And not all the words that she has could describe the joy and happiness she and Haskell had together. Instead, she fears she will risk reducing these most sublime experiences to mechanical movements, pictures only. Images at which another might cringe. At which an unwary observer, who has suddenly and inadvertently drawn back a curtain upon a pair of lovers in their most intimate moments, might be shocked. And will not such an interruption, this other pair of eyes, ultimately change the event and take something precious from it?
“I can tell you what happened,” Olympia says to the lawyer, “but first I must make you aware of something important.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Though I was very young and understood little of the magnitude of what I was doing, I was not seduced. Never seduced. I had will and some understanding. I could have stopped it at any time. Do you understand this?”
“I think so,” he says.
“Do you believe me?”
He considers her thoughtfully, holding his pen between his thumb and forefinger and unconsciously flipping it back and forth. She wonders if Tucker & Tucker means father and son, or brother and brother. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I do. I do not think you would say this if it were not true.”
It is warm in the office, and she removes her gloves. “John Haskell and I were in each other’s company several times that first weekend,” she begins. “And then we met again on the Fourth of July. We became . . . intimate . . . about two weeks after that. I knew him for only seven weeks during that summer.”
“And John Haskell and his family were living where?”
“Haskell lived at the Highland Hotel. At Fortune’s Rocks. Catherine and the children were staying in York, Maine, with her parents until their cottage at Fortune’s Rocks was completed.”
“Yes, I know the Highland. And you . . .” Tucker hesitates, removing an imagined piece of lint from the sleeve of his chalk-striped frock coat. “You went with him to this hotel? Or he came to you at your house? Or did you meet elsewhere?”
“Usually, I went to him at the hotel,” she says with difficulty, thinking, There was nothing usual about it. “He came to my house on three other occasions, one of which was the last time I ever saw him.”
“And when was that?”
“August tenth.”
“What happened on that day?”
Olympia looks down at her lap. Her hands are clasped so tightly that her knuckles are white. She thinks about the last time she saw Haskell, about all the days leading up to that last time. About all of the days during which she might have stopped Haskell and Catherine from coming to her father’s house for the gala. But she did not. For she had, she knows, already entered that phase in a love affair when all meetings with the beloved are to be desired, no matter how formal or awkward, for they offer not only an opportunity to gaze upon the lover but also a chance to experience that peculiarly delicious thrill of silent communication in the midst of an unknowing audience. Olympia could tell Payson Tucker that she wished her father had not invited the Haskells or that she was anxious lest she cause Catherine Haskell, whom she truly admired, even the smallest concern, but to do so would be disingenuous, not to say altogether false.
“My father had a party, and the Haskells came to it. Catherine Haskell discovered us together that night.”
The lawyer dips his pen into the inkwell and makes a notation. “She discovered you, or someone else did and told her?”
Olympia averts her eyes.
“If this is too painful . . . ,” he says.
“Mrs. Haskell had some help,” she says. “A man by the name of Zachariah Cote.”
Payson Tucker lifts his eyes from his notebook. Olympia catches a flash of light from his lenses. “The poet?”
“Yes,” she says, mildly surprised that Tucker has heard of Cote. “I have not seen John Haskell since then,” Olympia adds.
“Where did he go?”
“He stayed in their new cottage the night of August tenth. I do not know where he went after that. I believe he left Fortune’s Rocks and Ely Falls.”
“He was living in Ely Falls as well?” the lawyer asks.
“No, he was a physician with the Ely Falls Mill infirmary.”
“Oh, I see. And when did you discover you were with child?”
Tucker asks the question as if it were one fact of thousands, a mere sentence in a paragraph. Olympia opens her mouth to speak, but cannot. She can feel the heat spreading into her face. Tucker, watching her closely, leans in her direction. A wing of hair falls forward, and he tucks it behind his ear.
“Miss Biddeford, I know these are terrible questions. And I think you have shown great courage in your answers. But I require this information if I am to take on your case. I also need to know if you have the stamina to face certain realities about your past. Believe me when I say to you that this is but the mildest foretaste of the questions that will be put to you if you decide to go any further with your suit.”
Olympia takes a breath and nods. “My family and I left Fortune’s Rocks on the morning of August eleventh,” she says. “My parents live on Beacon Hill in Boston. I discovered I was with child on the twenty-ninth of October.”
“You were examined by a physician?”
“Not immediately.”
Tucker leans back in his chair. Behind him on the desk, fitted into a silver frame, is a photograph of a handsome woman in her thirties — his mother, surely, Olympia guesses. When she was a young woman.
“Miss Biddeford, this next question is exceedingly difficult, but I must ask it. Is there any possibility that another man, a man other than John Haskell, could be the father of the boy you speak of?”
Despite Tucker’s warning, Olympia is shocked, not so much by the question itself as by the notion that she could ever have had such a relationship with anyone but Haskell. “No,” she answers vehemently. “No possibility whatsoever.”
“Good,” he says, and he looks genuinely relieved. “That is fine. Did you then contact John Haskell to tell him of the news?”
“No.”
“Tell me what happened on the day you were delivered of the child?”
“I am not sure what happened. I had been given laudanum toward the end of my confinement, and it made me sleepy, so that when I woke from the ordeal, the child had already been taken from me.”
“But you saw the child.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew it was a boy.”
“I was told it was a boy.”
“You had a physician with you? Or a midwife?”
“A physician. Dr. Ulysses Branch of Newbury Street in Boston.”
“Was it he who took the child from you?”
“I do not know. I assume whoever it was did so at the request of my father, since he had once or twice referred to ‘arrangements’ that had been made. Though he never spoke directly to me, either then or later, about what had been done with the child.”
“Did you ever ask him outright?”
“No,” she says. “I did not.” And it strikes Olympia as odd now that she did not. How was it that she accepted her fate so willingly?
“Your father left your house that night?”
“No, he did not.”
“Then he must have given the child to someone else?”
“Yes. I do not know precisely to whom he gave the child. But I have reason to believe the baby shortly entered the care of John Haskell himself.”
“The reason that I am lingering on the details of the birth is that the issue of how and when the child was taken from you may be important,” he explains.
“Yes, I understand.”
“How was it you came to know of the child’s whereabouts?”
“By accident,” she says. “Soon after I arrived in Fortune’s Rocks — that is, returne
d to Fortune’s Rocks, this July — I had a visit from an old friend of my father’s, Rufus Philbrick — ”
“Yes, I know the man,” Tucker says, interrupting her.
“During this visit, he inadvertently let slip about the child’s being in the Saint Andre orphanage.”
“And how would he have known this?”
“He is a member of the board of directors,” she says. “The next day I went to Saint Andre’s and spoke to a nun who I believe is called Mother Marguerite Pelletier. She told me the child had been at the orphanage but had been placed out. She told me the boy’s first name. She would not tell me his last name.”
“But you say the child’s name is” — Tucker consults his notes — “Pierre Francis Haskell.”
“Yes,” Olympia says. “I paid a call on Rufus Philbrick and asked him to find me the boy’s whereabouts. He told me the child’s name had once been — if not still was — Haskell. Later he was able to confirm this.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He could tell me little else on that particular day, but later he wrote me that the boy’s guardians are Franco-Americans, Albertine and Telesphore Bolduc. They live at one thirty-seven Alfred Street here in Ely Falls and work at the Ely Falls Mill. The boy is three years old, and Rufus Philbrick’s letter said that he was healthy. I have seen the boy, and he appears to be so. That is all I know. Oh, and he was baptized into the Catholic faith.”
“You spoke to the boy.”
“No, I saw him from a distance.”
Tucker removes his spectacles and cleans them with a handkerchief. “Did anything about the boy’s appearance suggest that he was the son of you and John Haskell?”
Olympia knows she will never forget the shock of seeing the boy’s face. “Yes. Definitely. He looks very like his father. I believe anyone would remark upon this resemblance.”
Tucker puts his spectacles back on. “Have you spoken to either Albertine or Telesphore Bolduc?”
“No.”