Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [118]
“You may be certain that I will beg and plead and fight and use all of the resources available to me,” Olympia says carefully. “But I will one day find out my son’s full name, and I will one day have him with me.”
In a statement of dismissal, the mother superior crosses herself, a gesture Olympia finds distasteful as well as mildly frightening.
* * *
16 August 1903
Dear Mr. Philbrick,
You said to me recently that I might write you if I had need of your assistance. I would not bother you if the situation were not of the utmost importance, and I hope you will find it in your heart to permit me to call upon you and hear what I have to say.
I should like to visit Tuesday next at eleven o’clock in the morning if that is convenient for you. Please do not write my father about this letter or our previous visit. I am now twenty years of age and may speak to you, if you would permit this, as an adult.
I shall await your reply.
Most respectfully,
Olympia Biddeford
17 August 1903
Dear Miss Biddeford,
Of course, I shall help you in any way I can. I shall look forward to your visit on Tuesday, the 21st, at eleven o’clock. I trust you still have my card with my address.
I hope you are well.
Yours sincerely,
R. Philbrick
* * *
Tuesday dawns a brilliant day, which Olympia takes as an omen of a happy outcome. She is nervous at the thought of presenting her case to Rufus Philbrick, but whenever she feels her resolution falter, she thinks of the incomparable reward should her quest be successful. She imagines a boy named Peter sitting on her lap upon the porch while she talks to him of the ocean and the tides and the sun that always rises in the east. Of the summer solstice, of a game called tennis, and of strange-looking crusty creatures called lobsters. She will introduce him to Ezra and will take him with her to the grocer’s. Together they will walk the beach and look for shells that he will put into a bucket.
Olympia dresses this day in a pale peach shirtwaist, which she irons and starches to within an inch of its life so that she will appear to be domestically capable and skilled. In her nervousness, she miscalculates how long her toilet will take, and she is ready nearly an hour before she is scheduled to be picked up. She rehearses her prepared speech, trying for a delicate balance between reason and passion. Rufus Philbrick’s help is essential to her cause.
Ezra comes for her at the appointed time, and so anxious is she about her proposal that she finds it difficult in the extreme to make conversation with the fisherman. And as Ezra is by nature taciturn, the two pass the journey in near silence. When they enter the township of Rye, Olympia takes Philbrick’s card from her purse and gives Ezra the address. He seems at first puzzled, even though he appears to know where it is. After a series of turns onto roads that become narrower and narrower, finally reaching a lane that is barely wide enough for the carriage, Ezra stops before a small cottage.
“This is it?” Olympia asks incredulously.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I do not think this can possibly be correct,” she says.
She surveys the cottage, nestled into a landscape of thick honeysuckle with the sea not far in the distance. The cottage is weathered-shingled with two multipaned windows in the front and a large glassed-in sun parlor to the side. In the second story, if it is indeed a second story and not an attic, there are long, narrow windows that span the length of the house. It is a charming building, one that reminds her more of a gardener’s cottage than of the home of a man of finance. Surely, there has been some mistake.
But then she sees Rufus Philbrick himself, in a light-blue linen suit, emerging from the sun parlor to greet her; and she can do nothing but climb down from the carriage and walk forward to take his hand.
“Mr. Philbrick.