Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [109]
After a time, she puts the letter on the table. Under the sink, she finds a stiff-bristled brush. She fills a pail with soap and water and, squatting to the hearth, begins to scrub away the charcoal smudges of an earlier season’s fires. The stone has turned nearly black, and she has almost at once to fill her pail with clean water. She scrubs hard at the stains, for more and more it seems that only physical work can assuage the ache of irresolution.
But the pleasure she takes in those simple chores! Often, when Olympia is finished for the day, she will walk through the rooms of the house, admiring her work. She loves the way the banister gleams, the way the wavy glass in the vinegar-washed windows bends the horizon line, the manner in which the paint on the sills shines. Sometimes, when she has thoroughly cleaned a room, she will move its furniture. At first she merely shifts a table or a chair from one position to another within a room, but later, when she finds she minds the clutter, she begins to take those pieces that she can lift to the chapel for storage. The front room becomes, as a result, emptier and emptier, and she feels oddly better for this emptiness. She cannot move the piano, of course, nor the sofa, nor the English writing desk, but she takes away a crystal-fringed lamp, a chenille footstool, the furry skin of an animal that has functioned as a rug, a marbleized iron clock, an elaborate candelabra, side tables with their many skirts, a bamboo settee, tapestries that have hung upon the walls for years, heavy gold drapes that have shrouded the windows, a mahogany plant stand, a painted screen, an ornate gilt mirror, and various potted plants that have long since perished. She has a chair, a Windsor with a desk hidden beneath its seat, that she puts in the center of the room, so that when she sits on it, she can see straight out the windows to the ocean. And this she does often, occasionally getting up to make a pot of tea, or sometimes knitting, and only very seldom, reading. About books, she is cautious, for she does not want inadvertently to trigger an unwelcome emotion. For weeks now, she has been engaged in shoring up a foundation, in building scaffolds, and she does not wish the sturdy walls she has made to tumble down as a result of words on a page.
Most of the time, she wears simple dresses, since she is usually engaged in chores. But occasionally she will put on a pique or a taffeta that has been left behind in a wardrobe. Dressing and sitting in her Windsor chair and gazing out to sea is often occupation enough, and she now understands what is meant by a rest cure. She is certain that had her instincts not led her to this juncture in her life, she would never have recovered herself and might, over time, have developed various incapacitating nervous ailments that many women in their adult years, most noticeably her mother, seem to suffer.
At the end of each day, Olympia is usually deliciously fatigued, and it seems that she is always hungry. She eats sweet corn and blueberries and baking-powder biscuits and white cheese. She has milk from the milkman and bread from the bread wagon, and she strikes a bargain with Ezra so that once weekly he brings her lobster or other fresh fish. And it is, in fact, just on the heels of one of Ezra’s deliveries, just as she is packing fresh cod into the ice chest, that a polished black automobile rolls up to the back gate. Through the window, Olympia watches in astonishment as Rufus Philbrick emerges from the car.
She looks down at her dress — a dull calico — and fingers her hair, unwashed now for over a week. There is no time to dress properly. For the first time since she has arrived at Fortune’s Rocks, she laments the dearth of a servant to open the door.
“I hope this is not an inopportune moment to pay you a visit,” Philbrick says, removing his hat and taking her hand when she has opened the door to him.
“No, of course not,” she says, somewhat dazed by this entirely unexpected