Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [138]
On his lap, the young lawyer has a marbled notebook not unlike the ones in which Olympia used to practice cursive when she was younger. Tucker makes notations from time to time, dipping his pen into a striped glass inkwell behind him on his desk. The room is small — polished wood and brown leather and brass studs — and reminds Olympia of her father’s library in Boston. And perhaps it is that association, or Tucker’s serious and attentive manner, that lends his questions authority.
“We met on the twenty-first of June in 1899 at my father’s cottage in Fortune’s Rocks,” Olympia says. “I remember particularly because it was the day of the summer solstice.”
“And you were how old?”
“Fifteen.” She watches Tucker carefully for a reaction, but his face is impassive.
“And how old was Mr. Haskell?”
“He was forty-one at the time.”
“And you are how old now?”
“Twenty.”
Tucker adjusts his gold-rimmed spectacles and studies her for a moment. “And John Haskell was at your home visiting your father?” he adds.
“Yes,” she says. “He was there with his wife and children.”
“I see,” Tucker says noncommittally, and Olympia wonders what exactly he does see. She hazards a guess as to his age — twenty-five, twenty-six? — but he seems a man wishing to appear older, the already receding hairline helping with this effort. He is a slender man with mustaches, pale skin, and black silky hair that occasionally falls, when he bends his head, forward onto his cheek.
“Can you give me their names?” he asks.
“Catherine,” she says. “That is — was — his wife. Actually, I do not know if they are formally divorced. I have heard only that she is living without him, and I do not believe they have been together since August of 1899. The children’s names are Martha, Clementine, Randall, and May.”
Just moments earlier, when Olympia entered the offices of Tucker & Tucker, she interrupted Payson Tucker in the act of gathering together his case and his hat to leave for the day. She introduced herself, stammering a bit, and said she had need of a lawyer. Tucker seemed a bit startled and gestured for her to sit. Since then, she has been answering his questions as best she can.
“How old were they at the time?” he asks.
“Twelve, in the case of Martha. The others were younger.”
“And where is John Haskell now?”
“I do not know.”
Tucker puts the pen down. “Perhaps it would be better if you just told me the whole story, from the beginning,” he says.
Olympia glances away for a moment toward a towering oak bookcase. There are hundreds of volumes on its shelves, leather-bound books with difficult titles. She hesitates, uneasy about sharing the details of the most private acts of her life. For words, she knows, even in their best combinations, must inevitably fall short of the reality. And not all the words that she has could describe the joy and happiness she and Haskell had together. Instead, she fears she will risk reducing these most sublime experiences to mechanical movements, pictures only. Images at which another might cringe. At which an unwary observer, who has suddenly and inadvertently drawn back a curtain upon a pair of lovers in their most intimate moments, might be shocked. And will not such an interruption, this other pair of eyes, ultimately change the event and take something precious from it?
“I can tell you what happened,” Olympia says to the lawyer, “but first I must make you aware of something important.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Though I was very young and understood little of the magnitude of what I was doing, I was not seduced. Never seduced. I had will and some understanding. I could have stopped it at any time. Do you understand this?”
“I think so,” he says.
“Do you believe me?”
He considers her thoughtfully, holding his pen between his thumb and forefinger and unconsciously flipping it back and forth. She wonders if Tucker & Tucker means father and son, or brother and brother. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I do. I do not think you would say this if it were not true.”
It is warm in the office, and she removes her gloves. “John Haskell and I were in