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By Root 691 0

window Olympia is trying to capture on her sketch pad the look of a wooden boat, unpainted, its sails old, a dirty ivory. But she is not, she knows, terribly gifted as an artist, and her attempts to render this boat are more impressionistic than accurate, the main purpose of her sketching being not so much to improve her drawing skills as to provide herself with an opportunity for idle thought. For at this time in her life, Olympia is much occupied with the process of thinking: not constructive thinking necessarily, and nothing that will produce brilliant solutions to problems, but rather drift thinking, like dreaming, the thoughts moving randomly from one place to another, picking something up, looking at it, putting it down again, the way people move through shops. As she takes her daily walks along the seawall (or through the Public Garden at home), or sits on the porch gazing out to sea, or joins her father’s guests at the dinner table, observing the way the flattering yellow candlelight plays amongst the faces of the visitors, her thoughts wander and the scenery shifts. Although at the dinner table she will sometimes play a game with herself in which she tries to reconcile what an individual might be saying at any given moment with the unrelated and truer thoughts she imagines the person to be having, a game that has caused her to be unusually attentive to character.

So her sketching is a ruse for a larger scheme. But though it is, and she is more than a little content simply to be left alone on a bench in the chapel, she is mildly disturbed by her inability to capture, even approximately, the relative size of the boat when compared with the islands behind it. Thus she is slightly distracted by her task when she hears, faintly at first and then with more clarity, the urgent and excited voices of children. When she stands up to peer through the window at the house, she sees that there are indeed children on the front porch; and although it seems as though an entire schoolroom has descended upon them, she can count only four slender bodies. Of course, she knows at once that this means that John Warren Haskell and his family have arrived and that she should go in to greet them.

Olympia sees immediately, as she walks across the lawn, that the children are all related: There are three dark-haired girls, ranging in age from about twelve years to three, and one boy, slightly older than the youngest girl, whose hair is thick and smooth and so yellow as to startle the eye. As Olympia reaches the porch steps, her sketchbook under her arm, and the children, curious, peer over the edge of the railing at the stranger in the white linen dress drawing nearer to them, she sees that they all have dark eyebrows (even the boy) and the same strong, wide mouth. The two older girls have shed their baby fat and are quite slender; the eldest girl, Olympia notes, will one day have considerable height since her shoulders are already broad and her legs long. The girl stands with her feet spread slightly apart and with her hands on her hips. Her pale blue dress, with its white collar and delicate embroidery, seems at odds with her athletic stance; and she is, as Olympia watches her, slightly challenging in her posture.

The other girl is shy and has a hand to her mouth. The youngest girl and the boy are continuously in motion, unable to stop at any one place upon the porch for fear of missing another vista that might prove to be almost unbearably exciting. As the children take in the lawn and the rocks and the sea and then the young woman who is approaching them, they have about them an expression Olympia recognizes from herself the previous day: a nearly frenzied inhaling of the first stingingly heady breaths of summer.

Once on the porch, she stops first to say hello to the two smaller children, who bend their heads in embarrassment, and then to the middle girl, who shyly takes Olympia’s hand but does not utter a word, and then to the oldest girl, who tells Olympia her name is Martha.

“I am Olympia Biddeford,” she says. The girl takes her