Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [124]
26 June 1899
Dear Biddeford,
How can I possibly describe to you how very delightful our visit with your family was during this past weekend? Such an excellent stay it was, apart from the tragedy of the shipwreck, and what a considerable wrench it was for us to have to leave you all! Catherine is in high spirits, feeling as she does that she has found a true companion and future confidante in Rosamund. I, of course, enjoyed my discussions with you and Philbrick immensely as always. And the children are in thrall to your astonishing daughter, Olympia. . . .
2 July 1899
My estimable Biddeford,
No, I confess I do not see the point of your argument regarding the merits of Zachariah Cote as a poet and should be indifferent to the publication of his shorter works in your much-admired Quarterly. I find he lacks the muscle to temper his verse, which is shot through with baroque description and feminine whimpers. But of course, this is why you are the editor of this excellent journal and I am only a man of science. . . .
11 July 1899
Dear Biddeford,
Thank you for your kind invitation to join you for dinner at the Rye Club on the 14th, but I am expecting that day a visit from the eminent physician Dwight Williston of Baltimore, and thus will be engaged. . . .
18 July 1899
Dearest Rosamund and Phillip,
John and I accept with pleasure your kind invitation to a Gala evening on the Tenth of August, 1899, in honor of the Sixteenth birthday of your daughter, Olympia.
With Anticipation and Fond Regards,
Catherine Haskell
Olympia crumples the letters in her fists, and then, regretting this impulse, lays them flat against her lap. How extraordinary that all that summer there was this other bond between her father and John Haskell, a man her father much admired, an admiration that was much reciprocated. And how twice (no, thrice) betrayed her father must have felt — by his daughter, by his friend, and by this fraudulent correspondence with its attendant ironies. Had her father reread these letters in light of the discoveries the night of the gala? No, she thinks, he could not have, for certainly he would have destroyed them in a fury.
The book falls open at its flyleaf, and she reads the inscription there. For Phillip Biddeford and his engaging intellect, this humble offering. Yours sincerely, John Haskell.
She tucks the letters back into the book and closes its covers. Is Haskell once again working in a mill town? she wonders. Or can he have forfeited his training as a physician? Has he abandoned the writing as well? Or might she one day wander into a library and open a literary or political journal there and come across his name as the author of an essay published therein? She looks through the open door that gives onto the dining room, that elegant room with its double mirrors and buffets, its graceful proportions and its view leading down to the sea. She glances up at the chandelier, a crystal confection that resembles nothing so much as a necklace strung upon a woman’s throat. She fingers, at her own neck, the locket Haskell once gave her, a locket she has never been without, not during her time at the seminary, not during her exile in Boston, and not even during the difficult moments of her son’s (their son’s) birth.
She closes her eyes and lets the memories wash over her, as they are wont to do, an incoming tide she has learned to let overtake her and then ebb away. And when it is over, she sets the book down upon the marble table beside her father’s chair, and stands. She will go mad if she stays in this house a moment longer.
• • •
The sand has a crust upon it that crumbles as she walks. Men and women, in heavy cotton bathing dresses, stand at the water’s edge, looking forlornly out to sea. Almost every summer Olympia can remember, there is a week in August when the water seems stagnant with dark clots of seaweed, slimy with jellyfish on its surface. No one bathes