Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [127]
“Yes,” she says simply.
“What is his name?”
“Peter.”
“Would he like to race with us, do you think?”
“I think that perhaps he would, but actually I think we would beat him rather badly. He is only three years old.”
“Oh,” says the boy with evident disappointment.
“But I know he would like to meet you one day,” Olympia adds quickly. “He is very fond of nine-year-old boys just like yourself.”
“Is he?”
“Oh, yes.”
The statement produces an unexpected smile. He glances in the direction of the shingled cottage.
“You had better go back now,” Olympia says. “I shall look for you tomorrow,” she says.
He nods. He begins to walk slowly away, then turns and waves once quickly. She waves back to him. He breaks into a run then, and Olympia watches him sprint to the place where they met on the beach, as if he were already practicing for tomorrow’s event.
She watches him until he is only a speck.
Yes, she thinks. I have a boy who is three.
She glances at her feet, encrusted with sand. She touches her hair, which lies tangled in knots along her back. Inside her dress, she is perspiring from her exertion. She makes a feeble attempt to tie up her hair without pins, but its weight almost immediately pulls it loose.
She does not want to go back to the cottage just yet, for to return to the house is to wait for a letter, and she does not want to reenter that numbing state of suspension. She sets off once again toward the far end of the beach. She will collect her shoes and socks and hat later.
She walks briskly, still buoyant with her earlier exercise, and it is only when she sees the Highland Hotel in the distance that she slows her steps. She has not ventured this far along the beach since she returned to Fortune’s Rocks. She takes in the porch, the guests sitting in the rockers, the windows in the upper stories, a certain window through which a gaily colored cloth snaps repeatedly, as if a woman inside were shaking out a bedspread. The hotel looks remarkably unchanged, although it seems there are more people about than she remembers from before. She recalls a sea of white linen, an opened ledger with slanted cursive. She can see muslin curtains at the windows, the way a shirt was flung upon an ochre floorcloth. She can hear a voice: If only you knew . . . She can almost feel the silky cotton of the overwashed sheets, can nearly make out the sage tin ceiling with its raised pattern. She can hear the echo of her own footsteps in the stairwell.
She notices then a gathering of people at the southern end of the porch. A late-season party, she deduces, and thinks: How fashionable the women look in their bishop’s sleeves. And then as she casually scans the guests, her eyes fall upon a familiar figure. She stiffens as she recognizes a certain self-conscious tilt of the head, a distinctive profile, a flash of white teeth. He has on a yellow-and-black checkered waistcoat, and he sports a new monocle. He has grown his whiskers in the muttonchops mode, a style Olympia has never found attractive. While she watches, Zachariah Cote throws his head back and laughs, and Olympia, even at a distance, can see that the gesture is exaggerated for his audience. She has heard that Cote is successful now, that his verse has become popular; he publishes in ladies’ magazines and is admired by married women in particular. Olympia has several times seen his poems in print, and she has remained steadfast in her opinion that they are dreadful: dripping with sentiment and overlaced with a penchant for the morbid. And she is seized with a sudden bitterness that it should be Cote, of all of them, who has fared so well. That it is Cote — and not her father or her mother or John Haskell or Catherine Haskell or even she (no, especially not she) — who is welcome upon that porch on a late summer day in 1903.
And yet, was not Cote, of all of them, the only one who acted with true malice? Did not Cote actually invite Catherine Haskell to inspect the view in the telescope, knowing what she would find there? And were not Olympia’s parents and Catherine Haskell utterly