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By Root 650 0

experience. In On the Banks of the Rivers, John Warren Haskell presents to the reader seven stories, or rather, Olympia thinks, portraits — portraits that are extraordinarily detailed and drawn with seeming objectivity — of seven persons associated with the mills at Lowell, Holyoke, and Manchester: four female workers and three male. In the rendering of these portraits, there is little rhetoric and no observable attempt on the part of the author to praise or to injure any of the men or women. Instead, the reader is given a depiction of a way of life that speaks, through the images of the daily struggles alone, more eloquently, Olympia decides, than rhetoric ever could of the nearly intolerable lot of the millworker. The portraits are raw and have passages that are to her both illuminating and difficult to read — not in their language but in the pictures they call forth; for the knowledge of the author in domestic and medical matters is exceedingly detailed. She wonders briefly about her father’s motivation in exposing her to this material, although this is not the first time he has given her difficult or questionable subject matter that other teachers might suppress. He has always encouraged Olympia, in their dialogues, not to turn away from the painful or the ugly, at least not in print.

That afternoon, in her room, without moving from her chair, she lingers over words: male-spinner and scabs and colomel. She flinches at the description of a surgical intervention for an early cancer. She is fascinated by the plumbing of the boardinghouse. And she wonders, more than a little idly, how John Haskell can know of machine knitting as well as the pain of childbirth. As she reads and wonders these things, she is admitted, page by page, into the breadth of the man’s knowledge of the human body and of human nature, so that she feels as though she has spoken with John Haskell at length, when, of course, she has not.

When she looks up, she sees that the light has reached that excellent period in the day when all objects are given more clarity than they have had before. And she is able to convince herself that she has somehow deftly managed to trade an unacceptable set of feelings for an acceptable set, namely, to have spun respect from confusion, admiration from agitation, and that this alchemy permits her to contemplate descending for the evening meal in an almost normal state.

IN TIME Olympia will learn of the obsession with the “other,” that person from whom the theft is made — the wife, the former mistress, the fiancée. Of the relentless prurience that causes another woman to become an object of nearly intolerable curiosity. Of tormenting fascination that doesn’t abate. She will discover that summer that she wants to know the most intimate of details about Catherine Haskell’s life: if she sleeps alone in her bed or entwined with her husband; what words of tenderness she whispers and thus receives; if she hears, as Olympia does, the momentary pause and then the low, hushed cry, secretive and thrilling, that only a lover should be privy to. Do they share, she will wonder, Catherine Haskell and she, certain memories, events replayed at different points in the continuum of time, so that her memories are not her own at all, but merely repetitions of Catherine’s? So that, in the continuum of time, each woman is similarly betrayed?

And in years to come, Olympia will ask herself if she did not, in fact, enter into a kind of love affair with Catherine Haskell, if her curiosity about the woman and about the years she had with John Haskell that Olympia did not, years in which marriage vows were made and celebrated, children were born and treasured, a marriage bed was entered and left a thousand times, did not constitute a twisted form of love itself, a love that could never, by its very nature, be returned or sated.

• • •

Olympia makes the decision to go down to supper and confronts the reality of her unkempt appearance in the mirror over the dresser. Although they have a laundress at Fortune’s Rocks, Olympia does not have a personal