Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [136]
At precisely ten minutes to one, dozens of persons emerge from the boardinghouse entryway, the women pulling on gloves, checking purses, holding hats as they move briskly along the sidewalk back to work. By one o’clock, the street is silent.
Chilled beneath her dove challis, Olympia walks to the bakery and steps inside. A serving girl in a black dress with a blue apron glances up at Olympia with surprise, as though the bakery were closed.
“May I have a cup of tea?” Olympia asks.
“Dinners are gone now,” the serving girl says, “but I suppose I can always make up a cup of tea.”
“Thank you,” Olympia says. She takes a seat near a window and arranges for herself an excellent view of number 137. She slips off her gloves and puts them in the pocket of her suit. Emboldened by the thought that she might well leave Ely Falls without a scrap of further information about the boy, she asks the waitress when she returns with the tea if she knows of a family named Bolduc.
“I should say so,” the girl says in an accent that sounds Irish. “Dozens of Bolducs hereabouts. Which one would you be wanting?”
“Albertine?” Olympia asks, her breath catching in her throat. “Telesphore?”
“You’re in luck then,” says the waitress, wiping her hands on her apron. “They live right across the street.”
Olympia smiles at her apparent fortune.
“But which are you wanting?” the girl asks. “You won’t find Albertine at home today until after four o’clock when the first shift is ended. But if it’s Telesphore you’re wanting, he’ll be home until four. There,” the girl says, pointing at the blue door. “That one there is where they live. You don’t look a relative, so you must be a friend.”
“A friend,” says Olympia.
“I expect you know the boy.”
“Yes,” says Olympia.
“Sweet little one, isn’t he?”
Olympia nods.
“I do not know when husband and wife see each other,” the girl says. “What with the two shifts and all. One goes in, the other comes out. Ships passing in the night. I can probably get you a bowl of oyster stew if you’re hungry.”
Olympia, not wishing to reject anything the young woman has to offer, answers that stew would be most welcome.
The chowder is watery, but Olympia forces herself to eat it. She sips it slowly, stalling for time, not wanting to leave her perfect vantage point. The waitress brings her oyster crackers and scones and sweet pastries and then excuses herself, saying she’ll be in the back room, having her own dinner.
For a time, Olympia sits at the table, which is now warmed by the afternoon sun. She has had so much to eat that she almost dozes. But at 3:50 by the clock tower, she comes alert when she sees Albertine, dressed today in a rather severe black cotton dress with a black apron, running up the stone steps into the blue doorway. Five minutes later, a man in a blue workshirt and black cloth cap (his head is bent, and Olympia cannot quite catch his face) comes out of the door and walks down the steps and onto the sidewalk. Confused now about what she should do, for she has no real intention of knocking on the blue door, Olympia sits a bit longer. And in a short time, she is rewarded for her patience. At twenty minutes past four, Albertine Bolduc once again opens the blue door. Olympia braces herself for the shock she knows will come, but when the boy emerges, standing on the top step and blinking in the sunshine, Olympia understands that no preparation will ever be adequate for the blow that hits her with such force that she has to press her knuckles to her mouth.
The boy’s thick walnut hair appears to have been recently cut, using a bowl for a pattern. It hangs fetchingly just over his eyebrows, enhancing the luminous hazel of his eyes. His eyes dominate his face, its tiny nose, its bow mouth, and its