Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [112]
Around her the hallway is spinning, and her son is in Ely Falls.
OLYMPIA LIES on her bed in her exceptionally clean house for days. It rains so much that the milk and the bread and the lobsters make a tidy and then a foul package outside her kitchen door. From time to time, she hears knocking, and she knows it must be Ezra. She does not want the man to have to worry about her in addition to all of his other responsibilities, but she cannot rouse herself to greet him.
On the third or fourth day, she climbs out of bed, weak from lack of food. Her room is stale and unpleasant. She washes herself, puts on clean clothing, and brushes her hair. She opens the kitchen door, finds the foodstuffs that have been left there, and throws them out, with the exception of a loaf of stale bread, which she toasts and eats with tea. She marvels at how her father could have given her baby to the orphanage at Ely Falls and not have told her anything about it. She thinks about how he must have blanched to have seen the Fortune’s Rocks postmark on an envelope that bore her handwriting. She wonders if he is even now worrying that she might inadvertently discover the whereabouts of the boy. She imagines him pacing in the upstairs hallway.
She has known from the moment Philbrick left her house that she will go in search of the child. The days she has lain on her bed have been spent not in indecision but rather in gathering strength for the task ahead. She has had to ask herself many times if she is prepared for such an undertaking: Suppose she finds the child, what then? Can she just simply ask for him back? And if so, will they give him to her? And if she gets him back, will she be able to care for him properly once she does? The boy will be just over three years old by now. She wonders if the child has been well tended, and she prays that he has. She does not know his name.
How, then, will she be able to find him at all? What Christian name was given to him at birth? And what of his surname? Did Olympia’s father allow the name Biddeford, or was he permitted to change the name to something else altogether? How are such things accomplished? Olympia has no idea and certainly cannot ask her father about these matters, since she would risk alerting him to the fact that she has discovered the child’s whereabouts. And risking that, she will further risk his moving the child or journeying up to Fortune’s Rocks to confront her, which she most sincerely does not want him to do.
On the morning of the seventh day, she dresses in a lavender-blue silk moiré suit left behind in her mother’s mahogany wardrobe, and wears with it a broad-brimmed rucked silk hat. Experimenting in a mirror, she discovers that if she angles the hat just so, most of her face is hidden. It is not so much that she fears discovery as that she does not want yet to admit any other persons who might know her into the fragile universe she has created.
The trolley to Ely Falls can be boarded at Ely, which is three and a half miles from the beach at Fortune’s Rocks. She has thought about walking but has reasoned that she might sully her skirts and boots were she to try it, and such a disheveled appearance might not serve her well in her mission. Thus Ezra, with whom she has spoken the day before, comes to fetch her and takes her to the trolley.
The lobsterman, whom she now knows is in his late thirties, is amiable company for her on the short ride into Ely.
“Was your father a fisherman as well?” she asks along the way.
“He was. And his father before him,” Ezra answers plainly.
“And you like the life?” she asks.
“I have two hundred pots in the water, and that keeps me busy,” he says. “I check them at daybreak before the sun is over the horizon. I have three sons, and I expect one or more of them will follow in my footsteps, though I have tried to discourage them from such