Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [147]
Olympia watches with interest as Tucker shifts the gears. And she thinks that she should like to learn to drive an automobile. She imagines the luxury of being able to drive herself back and forth to Ely Falls.
When Tucker opens the door of the motorcar, she is enveloped in a fine mist, like cobwebs, against her face and hands. “Is it raining?” she asks.
“Just,” he says, once again taking her elbow.
“It is very dark tonight,” she says, feeling her way along the slate path.
“Shall I wait while you light a lamp?” he asks when they have reached the stepping stone.
“No, I know my way. Thank you.”
In the dark, she cannot see his face. She extends her hand, and he takes it, his grip firm and warm against her own.
“I am sorrier than I can say to have to be the bearer of such bad tidings,” Tucker says. “I have admired you from the moment you entered my office.”
Olympia withdraws her hand. She catches, on the air, a faint whiff of castile. It has been a long time since she stood this close to a man.
“Do you love him still?” Tucker asks suddenly.
And Olympia is not as surprised as she might be by the young lawyer’s question, for she understands that Payson Tucker has perhaps waited all evening to ask it.
“I cannot imagine not loving him,” she answers truthfully.
• • •
She hears the motorcar drive away, leaving only the rumble of the surf. With her hat and gloves still on, she walks through the rooms of the house, seeing it anew, imagining it filled with young girls sentenced to silence, separated from their unforgiving families. How extraordinary that this house, in which she has known both luxury and love, in which John Haskell once kissed and held her, in which Josiah once dallied with Lisette, in which orchestras have played and women have danced and men have talked and smoked, should have had all this time such an abhorrent history and yet have given away nothing of that suffering and sorrow.
She wanders upstairs, enters a seldom-used bedroom, and sits on the bed. It is a benign room, papered in blue forget-me-nots with delicate crewelwork curtains shrouding the windows. In the light of an amber-beaded lamp, long discarded from her mother’s dressing table, she can see the scars of wet cups and glasses that remain on the surface of a mahogany bedside table. She tries to hold in her mind the two images of the house, its past and its present, the convent and the holiday retreat, and it is then that she understands — or has a vision of — what she will one day do with her father’s summer cottage.
THE HEELS of Olympia’s boots echo sharply along the slate flooring of the courthouse. To either side of the cavernous hallway are bronze busts on tall stone pedestals and between them lie low leather benches, so that sitting on one as she waits for Payson Tucker, Olympia feels dwarfed and insignificant, which she supposes was the architect’s intention. The law is greater than the men who make it, the bronze men seem to be announcing. The law is greater than those who petition for its intervention.
She watches as the snow on her boots melts into wet puddles on the stone. The glass in the high windows opposite is obscured by dirt and age, and she can neither see nor hear the snowstorm that is beginning to cripple the city outside. She will need to spend another night in the Ely Falls Hotel, she knows, since it will be almost impossible to return home in this weather.
It has been a severe winter at Fortune’s Rocks. All through the months of January and February snow has fallen about the cottage and on the beach and even on the rocks near to the sea. As Olympia has waited for the hearing to begin, gusts have shaken the house and drifts have risen to the windows. Some weeks, she has not been able to leave her cottage, and when she does manage to make her way to Goldthwaite’s for provisions or into Ely Falls for a meeting with Payson Tucker,