Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [103]
Her hands begin to shake. She drops the needle and cloth to the floor.
“My God,” she says. She sits down hard in Mrs. Hardy’s chair. “This is not me,” she says.
She looks down at her hands and then up at the folded quilts upon the chest. How has she arrived at this point?
Because she has been allowed to believe that she is unworthy and inferior? And why is this? Because she once was loved? Because that love produced a child? Because her father, and the world in which he has put his faith, has declared this to be so?
She shakes her head, as if to throw off her passivity.
She turns her face to the blue haze of hills beyond the meticulously mended screen of the window. She walks to the window and throws it open and leans her head out. She inhales the air, her thoughts sharpening themselves with each breath as though she had been drugged for years and were only now, with a jolt, emerging from her torpor. The air holds a promise where before there has been none. It is air that might feed a life where before there has been only starvation.
She will leave this farm and not return, she tells herself. She will end her exile. She will go back to the one place where she has been happy.
• III •
Fortune’s Rocks Revisited
ALL THE WAY to New Hampshire from western Massachusetts — from the Berkshires to Springfield by carriage, from Springfield to Rye by train, to Ely by electric trolley, and then to Fortune’s Rocks again by hired carriage — Olympia has pondered the problem of gaining entry to a house that has been locked for years. Will it be boarded up and impenetrable, as she suspects it will be? Or have vagabonds disturbed the quiet sleep of a house in shame? Is it conceivable that Josiah and Lisette, in their rush to clean up after the disastrous gala, left the door unlocked, thus allowing the curious to enter the scene of Fortune’s Rocks’ most recent, and perhaps its greatest, scandal?
The landscape is familiar and yet not, exhilarating after so many landlocked years away but frightening in its alterations. Where once there were long stretches of sea and rocks, now there are cottages of varying sizes and styles, so many in Rye alone that if it were not for the recognizable boardwalk, she might not know where she was. They pass a bowling alley she does not recall and a new arcade that seems like a strumpet set between two dowager hotels. Already, in this second week in July, the boardinghouses are crowded with holidaymakers, the beach thick with bathers in costumes that seem more daring than she remembers. But as the carriage leaves Rye altogether and draws nearer to Fortune’s Rocks, a kind of calm begins to settle over the seascape and over her agitated spirit as well. Fewer changes have been made here, with only the odd unweathered cedar shingles signaling new construction.
She unbuttons her cloak (its wool so suitable for the cool of the Berkshires, but too hot for the coast of New England in July), and it occurs to her that little of the clothing she has brought with her in her flight from western Massachusetts will be comfortable or appropriate at the beach. Beside her, the driver, a lean and angular native with a good growth of beard on his chin, spurs on the horses, and her heart kicks a beat inside her chest. They turn into the narrow winding lane that will take them to Fortune’s Rocks, and she thinks: What if the house is no longer there at all? What if, in these intervening years, the cottage burned to the ground, and her father simply did not tell her? Or has he, unbeknownst to her, sold the house, and will she find, on its porches, small children who are unfamiliar to her?
But before she can wonder further, the driver rounds a bend, and she sees with a sudden ache the familiar crescent of summer houses, the rocks at low tide poking their black noses above