“Are you over the worst of it?” Robert asked.
She fingered a mosquito bite on her arm. The light was clarifying itself, sharpening in the sunset.
“The worst is that I can’t grieve,” Kathryn said. “How can I grieve for someone I may not even have known? Who wasn’t the person I thought he was? He’s gutted my memories.”
“Grieve for Mattie’s father,” Robert said, and she saw that he had thought about this.
Kathryn watched Mattie make a serious cut from behind a gill to the backbone.
“I couldn’t stay away,” Robert said. “I had to come.”
She realized that Robert, too, had gambled. As she was doing now with Mattie. Not revealing something when she might.
And then, turning slightly, so that she saw her garden from the porch’s edge, so that she was looking down upon it as she seldom did — or perhaps it was only this year’s particular configuration of roses — she saw it.
“There it is,” she said quietly.
Mattie, hearing the hushed surprise in her mother’s voice, glanced up from her surgery, scalpel in her hand.
“The chapel,” Kathryn said, explaining.
“What?” Mattie asked, mildly bewildered.
“The garden. The arch there. The shape. That marble thing I thought all this time was a bench? It’s not a bench at all.”
Mattie studied the garden for a moment, seeing, Kathryn knew, only a garden.
Whereas Kathryn could see the Sisters of the Order of Saint Jean de Baptiste de Bienfaisance kneeling in their summer-white habits. In a chapel made of wood in the shape of an arched window. A chapel that had perhaps burned down, leaving only the marble altar.
She walked closer to the garden.
Seeing things for what they were, she thought. And had been.
“I’ll get us something to drink,” she said to Robert, privately pleased with her discovery.
She walked into the front room, meaning to continue into the kitchen, to put iced tea into glasses, to cut a lemon into slices, but she instead paused to look out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. In the frame of the window, Mattie struggled with the fish, and Robert watched her from the railing. He might have shown her how to angle the knife, but these were Jack’s tools, and Kathryn knew that Robert would bide his time.
She thought about Muire Boland in a prison in Northern Ireland. About Jack, whose body had never been found. She thought it might be easier to bear if she could say that it had been his mother’s leaving him when he was a boy, or his father’s brutality. Or that it had been the influence of a priest at Holy Name, or the Vietnam War, or middle age, or boredom with the airline. Or a search for meaning in his life. Or a desire to share risk with a woman he loved. But she knew it might be all of those reasons or none of them. Jack’s motivation, which would always remain unknown to Kathryn, was made up of bits of all his motivations, a baffling mosaic.
She found the piece of paper where she had recently left it, tucked under the clock on the mantelpiece. She had thought, some weeks ago, that she might do this.
She unfolded the lottery ticket.
On the porch, Mattie lifted up a fillet and slid it into a plastic bag that Robert held open for her. In London, there was a silence, as Kathryn had known there would be.
“I just wanted to know if the children are all right,” she said across the sea.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anita Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction in 1998. She is the author of five previous novels: The Weight of Water, Resistance, Where or When, Strange Fits of Passion, and Eden Close
. . . AND HER MOST RECENT NOVEL
In January 2000, Little, Brown and Company will publish
Fortune’s Rocks.
Following is a preview.
IN THE TIME IT TAKES FOR HER TO WALK FROM THE bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. Desire that slows the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence, that focuses the gaze absolutely on the progress of naked feet walking toward the water. This first brief awareness of desire — and of being the object of desire, a state of which she has had no previous hint — comes to her as a kind of slow seizure, as of air compressing itself all around her, and causes what seems to be the first faint shudder of her adult life.
She touches the linen brim of her hat, as she would not have done a summer earlier, nor even a day earlier. Perhaps she fingers the hat’s long tulle sash as well. Around her and behind her, there are men in bathing costumes or in white shirts and waistcoats; and if she lifts her eyes, she can see their faces: pale, wintry visages that seem to breathe in the ocean air as if it were smelling salts, relieving the pinched torpor of long months shut indoors. The men are older or younger, some quite tall, a few boys, and though they speak to each other, they watch her.
Her gait along the shallow shell of a beach alters. Her feet, as she makes slow progress, create slight and scandalous indentations in the sand. Her dress, which is a peach silk, turns, when she steps into the water, a translucent sepia. The air is hot, but the water on her skin is frigid, and that contrast makes her shiver.
She takes off her hat and kicks up small splashes among the waves. She inhales long breaths of the sea air, which clear her head. Possibly the men observing her speculate then about the manner in which delight seems suddenly to overtake her and to fill her with the joy of anticipation. And are as surprised as she is by her acceptance of her fate. For in the space of time it has taken to walk from the seawall to the sea, perhaps a distance of a hundred yards, she has passed from being a girl, with a child’s pent-up and nearly frenzied need to sweep away the rooms and cobwebs of her winter, to being a woman.
It is the twentieth day of June in the last year of the century, and she is fifteen years old.
Olympia’s father, in his white suit, his hair a fading ginger and blowing upward from his brow, is calling to her from the rocks at the northern end of the beach. The rocks upon which it has been the fate of many sailors to founder, thus lending the beach and the land adjacent to this beach the name of Fortune. He cups his mouth with his hands, but she is deaf from the surf. A white shape amid the gray, her father is a gentle and loving man, unblemished in his actions toward her, although he believes himself in possession of both her body and her soul, as if they were his and not hers to squander or bestow.
Earlier this day, Olympia and her father and her mother journeyed north by train to a cottage that, when they entered, was white with sheets and oddly without dust. Olympia wished when she saw the sheets that her mother would not ask Josiah, who is her father’s manservant, to take them off the furniture, because they made fantastical abstract shapes against the six pairs of floor-to-ceiling windows of the long front room. Beyond the glass and the thin glaze of salt spray lay the Atlantic, with its cap of brilliant haze. In the distance, there were small islands that seemed to hover above the horizon line.
The cottage is a modest one by some standards, although Olympia’s father is a wealthy man. But it is unique in its proportions, and she thinks it lovely beyond words. White with dark blue shutters, the house stands two stories high and is surrounded by several graceful porches. It is constructed in the style of the grand hotels along Fortune’s Rocks, and in Rye and Hampton to the south: that is to say, its roof curves shallowly and is inset with evenly spaced dormer windows. The house has never been a hotel, but rather was once a convent, the home of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty sisters who took vows of poverty and married themselves to Jesus. Indeed, an oddity of the structure is its many cell-like bedrooms, two of which Olympia and her father occupy and three of which have been connected for her mother’s use. Attached to the ground floor of the house is a small chapel; and although it has been deconsecrated, Olym
pia’s family still cannot bring themselves to place their secular belongings within its wooden walls. Except for a dozen neat wooden benches and a wide marble stone that once served as an altar, the chapel remains empty.
Outside the house and below the porches are massive tangles of hydrangea bushes. A front lawn spills down to the seawall, which is little more than a rocky barricade against the ocean and which is covered at this time of year with masses of beach roses. Thus, the view from the porch is one of emerald leaves with blots of pink against a blue so sparkling it is not so much a color as the experience of light. To the west of the lawn are orchards of Sheep’s Nose and Black Gilliflower apples, and to the north is the beach, which stretches two miles along the coast. Fortune’s Rocks is the name not only for the horseshoe of land that cradles this beach, but also for the gathering of summer houses, of which the Biddefords’, on its dunes and rocks, is but one.
“Olympia, I called to you,” her father says when she, with her wet hem, climbs up to the rock on which he is standing. She expects him to be cross with her. In her impatience to feel the sea on her feet, she inadvertently went to the beach during the men’s bathing hours, an activity that might be acceptable in a girl, but is not in a young woman. Olympia explains as best she can that she is sorry, she simply forgot about the men’s bathing hours, and she was not able to hear him call to her because of the wind. But as she draws nearer to her father and looks up at his face and observes the manner in which he glances quickly away from her — this is not like him — she realizes that he must have witnessed her bare-legged walk from the seawall to the ocean’s edge. His eyes are watering some in the wind, and he seems momentarily puzzled, even bewildered, by her physical presence.
“Josiah has prepared a tray of bread and pastes,” her father says, turning back to her and regaining the slight loss of his composure. “He has taken it to your mother’s room so that you both might have something to eat after the long journey.” He blinks once and bends to his watch. “My God, Olympia, what a shambles,” he adds.
He means, of course, the house.
“Josiah seems to be handling the crisis well enough,” she offers.
“Everything should have been prepared for our arrival. We should have had the cook by now.”
Her father wears his frock coat still. His boots are heavy and black and covered with dust, and she thinks he must be extraordinarily hot and uncomfortable. Clearly, he dressed that day with some indecision — trailing Boston behind him even as he was anticipating the sea.
In the bright sunlight, Olympia can see her father’s face more clearly than she has all winter. It is a strong face, one that suggests character, a face he inherited from his father before him and then later, through his own behavior, came to deserve. His most striking feature is the navy of his eyes, a blue so vivid that his eyes alone, even with the flecks of rust in the irises, suggest moral rectitude. A fan of wrinkles, however, as well as folds of skin at the lids, soften the suggested righteousness. His hair is graying at the sides and thinning at the front, but he has high color and has not yet begun to grow pale, as is so often the fate of ginger-haired men in their middle age. Olympia is not sure if she has ever thought about her father’s height, nor can she accurately say how tall he is — only that he is taller than her mother and herself, which seems in keeping with the proper order of the universe. His face is elongated, as Olympia’s will one day be, although neither of them is precisely thin.
“When you have finished your tea, I should like to see you in my study,” her father says in the ordinary manner in which he is accustomed to speak to her, though even she can see that something between them has changed. The sun etches imperfections in his skin, and there are, in that unforgiving light, tiny glints of silver and ginger spread along his jawline. He squints in the glare.
“I have some matters I need to discuss with you. Matters relating to your summer study and so forth,” he adds.
Her heart falls at the mention of summer study, since she is anxious to have a break from her singular, yet intense, schooling. Her father, having lost faith in the academies, has taken her education upon himself. Thus she is his sole pupil and he her sole teacher. He remains convinced that this education is progressing at a pace not dreamt of in the academies and seminaries, and that its breadth is unsurpassed anywhere in New England, which is to say the United States. Possibly this is true, Olympia thinks, but she cannot say: It has been four years since she last attended classes with other girls.
“Of course,” she answers.
He looks at her once and then lets his eyes drift over her right shoulder and out to sea. He turns and begins to walk back to the cottage. As she gazes at his slightly hunched posture, a physical characteristic she has never noticed before, she feels suddenly sad for her father, for the thing that he is losing, which is the guardianship of her childhood.
She floats through the house, appreciating the sculptures made by the white sheets strewn over the furnishings. A coatrack becomes a maiden ghost, a long dining-room table an operating theater, a set of chairs piled one on top of another and shrouded in white becomes a throne. She climbs the stairs in the front hall to her mother’s rooms.
Her mother is resting unperturbed on a peacock chaise that has been uncovered and looks directly out to sea. She seems not to notice the man perched on a ladder just outside her window. He has in one hand a bottle of vinegar and in the other a crumpled wad of newsprint. Josiah wears an overall for this task, although he also has on a waistcoat and a formal collar underneath. Later, when the windows have been cleaned, he will take off the overall, put his suit coat back on, adjust his cuffs under the sleeves, and walk into the study, where he will ask Olympia’s father if he wishes his customary glass of London porter. And then Josiah, a man who has been with her father for twenty-three years, since before her father’s marriage and her birth, and who has without complaint taken upon himself the washing of the windows in her mother’s rooms because he does not want her view of the ocean to be obscured on this, the first day of her summer visit (even though such a task is thoroughly beneath him), will walk down the long pebbled drive and onto Hampton Street to lay in to the new man, Ezra Branch, who was to have had the house prepared before Olympia’s family arrived.
Since Olympia’s mother is partial to hues of blue, even in the summer months, she has on a wisteria crepe blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons and long deep cuffs that hide her wrist bones and flatter her hands. At her waist is a sash of Persian silk. This preference for blue is to be seen as well in the fabrics of her room — the pale beryl sateen puff on the bed, the peacock silk brocade of the chaise, the powder velvet drapes at the windows. Her mother’s rooms, Olympia thinks, suggest excessive femininity: They form a boudoir, separate, cut off from the rest of the house, the excess not to be condoned, not to be seen by others, not echoed anywhere else in the austere furnishings of the cottage.
Her mother lifts a cup to her lips.
“Your skin is pink,” she says to Olympia lightly, but not without a suggestion of parental admonition. Olympia has been told often to wear a hat to protect her face from the sun. But she was unable to forgo for those few happy moments at the water’s edge the sensation of heat on the top of her head. She knows, however, that her mother does not seriously begrudge her this small pleasure, despite her inordinate regard for beauty.
Beauty, Olympia has come to understand, has incapacitated her mother and ruined her life, for it has made her dependent upon people who are desirous of seeing her and of serving her: her own father, her husband, her physician, and her servants. Indeed, the preservation of beauty seems to be all that remains of her mother’s life, as though the other limbs of the spirit — industriousness, curiosity, and philanthropy — have atrophied, and only this one appendage has survived. Her mother’s hair, which has been hennaed so that it has taken on the color of a roan, is caught with combs at the sides and rolled into a complex series of knots that Olympia herself has yet to maste
r. Her mother has pale, pearl gray eyes. Her face, which is both handsome and strong, belies her spirit, which is uniquely fragile — so fragile that Olympia herself has often seen it splinter into glittering bits.
“Josiah has prepared a tray,” her mother says, gesturing to the display of paste sandwiches.
Olympia sits at the edge of the chaise. Her mother’s knees make small hillocks in the indigo landscape of her skirt. “I am not hungry,” Olympia says, which is true.
“You must eat something. Dinner will not be for hours yet.” To please her mother, Olympia takes a sandwich from the tray. For the moment, she avoids her mother’s acute gaze and studies her room. They do not have their best furnishings at Fortune’s Rocks, because the sea air and the damp are ruinous to their shape and surface. But Olympia does like particularly her mother’s skirted dressing table with its many glass and silver boxes, which contain her combs and her perfumes and the fine white powder she uses in the evenings. Also on the dresser are her mother’s many medicines and tonics. Olympia can see, from where she sits, the Pigeon Milk, the Pennyroyal Pills, the Ginger Tonic, and Johnson’s Liniment.
For as long as Olympia can remember, her mother has been referred to, within her hearing and without, as an invalid — an appellation that does not seem to distress her mother and indeed appears to be one she herself cultivates. Her ailments are vague and unspecific, and Olympia is not certain she has ever been properly diagnosed. She is said to have sustained a back injury as a girl, and Olympia has heard the phrase “liver ailment” tossed about from time to time. There is, in Boston, a physician who visits her frequently, and perhaps he is not the charlatan Olympia’s father thinks him. Although even as a girl, Olympia was certain that Dr. Ulysses Dibble visited her mother for her company rather than for her rehabilitation. Her mother never seems actually to be unwell, and Olympia sometimes thinks about the term invalid as it is applied to her mother: invalid, in valid, not valid, as though, in addition to physical strength, her mother lacked a certain authenticity.