Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [123]
With a sudden and impatient gesture, Olympia puts down the book she has been pretending to read, a dull treatise on Italian landscape painting. All her thoughts circle in upon themselves, and no progress is ever made. It is this wretched idleness, this hideous state of suspension to which she has sentenced herself. Seven, eight, sometimes ten times a day, she walks to the back door with its letter chute and stares at the barren floor, willing an envelope to the painted surface. Although the post is often irregular, she has come to know well the postman’s habits, and she frequently finds herself at the place where the back walkway meets the street, engaging the slightly bewildered man in conversation, ever hopeful of an envelope with her name on it.
She stands up and begins to pace along the length of the porch. Why is it taking Rufus Philbrick so long to reply? Is it possible he has simply decided not to pursue the inquiry after all? But would he not then write to her of this decision? He has seemed always to be a man of his word, and if he said he would try to help her, then surely he must be doing so.
Patience, she counsels herself. But she is tired of being patient, weary of remaining passive.
She picks up her book and then immediately puts it down. Surely there must be something more lively to read than the nearly impenetrable prose of an uninspired Italian art critic. She makes her way through the house and into her father’s study, where some few volumes remain, damp and swollen and sadly misshapen though they are. She has scarcely ventured into this room since her return to Fortune’s Rocks, the presence of her father having permeated the very walls and flooring of this small chamber, so that it seems that he is always here, sitting in the captain’s chair, eyeing her judgmentally.
So with a sidelong movement (and avoiding for the moment the sight of the captain’s chair), she enters the study and searches the nearly barren shelves for a book that can at least physically be read and that might hold the promise of engagement. As she scans the titles, however, Clapp’s Marine Biology, A Short History of the Zulu Nation, and Nepos De Vita Excellentium Imperatorum, hope of success begins to dwindle. Disappointed, she turns to leave the study, meaning to go back to the porch, but her eye then lights upon a dark volume with gilt lettering, a book held together with string and lying facedown on the floor beside her father’s chair, almost as though he had dropped it. And when Olympia realizes its title, she marvels that the book has survived at all, that it was not flung across a room or burned in the grate, for it is the very same volume that once introduced her to the breadth and scope of John Haskell’s mind.
She picks up the book and sits in the only chair in the room, forgetting for the moment its spectral occupant. She unknots the string that binds the book, and immediately a number of letters slip from the pages onto her lap. She knows well the pen, that masculine hand, not her father’s, and the sight of Haskell’s writing makes her sit back in the chair. It is some time before she can open the letters themselves. Of course, she thinks, when she unfolds the first one; of course, Haskell would have corresponded with her father that summer.
10 June 1899
My dear Biddeford,
Thank you for your most welcome invitation to join you and your family at Fortune’s Rocks the weekend of June 21st.