A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [8]
When the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:05, the windows of the houses near the harbor shattered, sending slivers of glass into the faces and eyes of many of those who were watching. Before day’s end, 2,000 people died, 9,000 were wounded, and nearly 200 were completely or partially blinded, many of them children.
One of the reasons Agnes had begun writing about the Halifax explosion was that she’d had some visual disturbances of her own—odd liquid blips at the periphery of her eyesight that rose like oily bubbles in a cylinder. For a few weeks now, she’d been considering going to an ophthalmologist. Of course her eyesight was precious to her. She could hardly do her job without it. For seventeen years, she had been a history teacher as well as the coach of the girls’ varsity field hockey team at Kidd Academy, a coed preparatory school located in northeastern Maine, a school to which she herself had gone.
Agnes particularly liked the history of Kidd Academy, founded in 1921 by textile manufacturer James Kidd, who had bought several of the larger summerhouses on the bluff just outside the village of Fenton, Maine, thinking to make of them a small boarding school for exceptional students—his son, of course, being one of them. Acquiring in a quiet manner most of the twenty-room “cottages” from the summer folk who’d been coming to the seacoast village for generations (but who were finding it harder and harder to keep up the behemoths without the legions of servants their own parents had employed), Kidd had the empty buildings winterized and set up as classrooms or dormitories. The old houses lent themselves to dorms, with their long corridors and many small bedrooms, and Agnes was sometimes amazed at how the school continued to have about it the air of a summer community. There were no Gothic spires at Kidd, no vast lawns. The weathered, shingled buildings were rarely taller than two or three stories. Cars were not permitted on campus, though the students managed them anyway, striking bargains with the natives for their garages in advance of the school year.
Agnes first joined the faculty of Kidd, where she had been a student, in the early 1980s, having spent five years teaching in the public schools, to which she was ill suited and vice versa. She was what she supposed people in Halifax in 1917 would have called a spinster. It was a hateful word that Agnes hesitated to say even in her thoughts, not only because of its antiquated and insulting nature but also because it suggested a bloodless woman of indeterminate age, whereas Agnes, apart from the new thing with the eyes, was in good health, excellent physical condition, and of a very precise age, which was forty-four.
When Agnes thought about the Halifax explosion, she imagined a man named Innes Finch, a young surgeon trained at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin, arriving in Halifax on the afternoon of December 5. So far, Agnes had written:
Innes stood on a street in the Richmond section of the city and watched the sun fall below a layer of olive cloud. The light moved along the road toward the surgeon, illuminating first a wooden house at the far corner, then a buggy with a pair of Clydesdales, and finally a woman struggling with a baby carriage on the cindered pavement. The luster of the wet street made Innes squint. He set down his cardboard suitcase—dented from its journey in the hold of the ferry and streaked with something that resembled axle grease—and covered the sun with his palm.