Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [15]
“You must be Mrs. Haskell,” Olympia responds, finding her tongue.
“I can never get used to the gloriousness of Fortune’s Rocks, no matter how often we come here,” Catherine says, trying to twist a stray strand of hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Olympia is struck by her smile, which is not exactly a smile of self-satisfaction, but seems rather to be one of genuine contentment.
“I have been walking,” Mrs. Haskell says, explaining the hat and lifting it in her hand. She has on a green taffeta dress with many underskirts — an odd choice, Olympia thinks, for a walk. Perhaps Catherine Haskell was simply too impatient to change her clothes, as Olympia was the day before. Olympia notices that her boots and the hems of her skirts have dust on them.
“I was afraid I would delay supper,” she says.
Olympia shakes her head.
“I hope the children have not been pestering you,” Catherine says. “Have you met them? I know that Martha will have been charmed by you and will want to question you about all manner of things, and you must send her away whenever you want.”
“Oh, not at all,” Olympia says, thinking that Martha was not in the slightest charmed by her. “I have hardly seen them, except to meet them, as I have been in my room all afternoon.”
“Really? On such a fine day? Whatever for?”
Instantly Olympia regrets having confessed confinement in her room, and she sees as well that she cannot tell this woman that she has spent the entire afternoon reading her husband’s essays. Although Olympia cannot articulate precisely why at that moment, the idea feels ill-mannered and intrusive, as if she had been studying an album of private photographs.
“I have been resting,” she says.
“Oh, I hope you are not unwell.”
“No, I am very well,” Olympia answers in confusion, looking at her feet.
“Catherine,” the woman says slowly, pronouncing her name in three syllables. “Please call me Catherine. Otherwise, you will make me feel too old.”
Olympia looks up and tries to smile, but she can see that Mrs. Haskell is examining her, the eyes straying to her waist, to her hair. And then returning to her face, which she holds for a moment before glancing away toward the porch.
“Do you suppose,” Mrs. Haskell asks, “that I might have time to slip up to my room and change into another dress, one that has not been dragged along the sand and the sea moss?”
It is not really a question, for surely Olympia is not the arbiter of the supper hour. Mrs. Haskell leaves the room with the same sibilant swishing of her skirts with which she entered.
Olympia leans for a moment against the frame of the door, and as she does, she happens to see, through the screen of a window, a small seal beach itself upon a rock.
• • •
That night they are seven at dinner, with the addition of Rufus Philbrick from Rye, who owns hotels and boardinghouses in that town, as well as Zachariah Cote, a poet from Quincy who is having a holiday at the Highland Hotel. (A seventh place is hastily set for Olympia, who was not expected.) The children, having eaten earlier, have been removed temporarily from the house by the Haskells’ governess, who has obligingly taken them for an evening walk along the beach. Mr. Philbrick, a large man with pure white whiskers and beard, has on a striped jacket with cream trousers. Olympia takes him for a dandy as well as a man of property. Cote, whose poetry she has sampled and set aside, his saccharine and sorrowful images not to her liking, is a remarkably handsome man with dark blond hair and astonishingly white teeth, an asset he must be vain about, Olympia thinks, for he seems to smile a great deal. (And are those really lavender eyes?) Her mother, in hyacinth chiffon, with pearl combs in her hair, seems to be in an animated mood, which sets off but the faintest of alarms in Olympia’s mind, and she imagines in