Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [174]
“I did not know.”
“She fractured her wrist.”
“I was not told of this.”
“I had no idea she loved me in that way. She hardly felt the pain of the injury to her arm. It was the other injury that claimed her.”
“I remember her beauty,” Olympia says.
“Yes.”
He keeps his eyes on Olympia’s face. And it is she who turns away.
“What do you do in Minnesota?” she asks.
“I work among the Norwegian immigrants and the Arapaho. I have an office, but I am seldom in it. Most of my patients live far from town. Sometimes I am gone for days.”
“It is hard work?”
“Only to watch their suffering. We scarcely know the meaning of the word by comparison.”
And she can see then that the high color in his face is from the sun. His hands, too, are sunburnt. Perhaps there is, she thinks, a brute strength through the shoulders he has not had before. And in his hands, grown larger.
“You have seen the boy?”
“Yes.” She hesitates. “He is very like you.”
She watches him attempt to master the features of his face.
“Has all your work been . . . punishment?” she asks, thinking of the Indians.
“In its way. An exile.”
She smooths her skirts. She still has on her apron. Under it, a gray shirtwaist. “I, too, was sent into exile,” she says. “After the birth.”
“The school.”
“Yes. It was a kind of prison.”
“You know I had the boy,” he says. “For a day.”
“Yes.”
“I did not know I could feel so much love,” he says. “I lay on the bed with him all night. I had hired a wet nurse, who came to the room from time to time. I had planned to bring the boy to the orphanage first thing in the morning, but I could not bear to part with him. In the end, the wet nurse had to remind me that he needed better care than I could give him.”
The image of the man and the infant on the bed together seems unbearable to her now.
“I thought I would die after I left him there,” Haskell says. “Literally. I wanted to die. I thought of drowning myself in the Falls.”
“Did you not feel a similar love for your other children?” she asks.
“I must have,” he says, “but Catherine possessed them so when they were infants.” He pauses. “Martha will go to Wellesley.”
She has forgotten that Martha is of an age to go to college. “We might have been there together,” Olympia says.
“It was knowing I had only the one night,” Haskell says, explaining. “It is time that determines the intensity of love.”
“Is it?” she asks.
Restless, he begins to walk around the room. “I had started drinking,” he says. “I had been wandering. I had a post office I would call at from time to time. It was there I got your father’s letter. It was a brutal letter. But no less than I deserved.”
“I knew nothing of any of this.”
“And then after that night with the boy, I could see how banal the drinking was, how trite the ruin. So I went west.”
She tries to imagine him among the Indians.
“You are even more beautiful,” he says.
She looks away.
“You never used to wear your hair down.”
“I do not usually wear it down,” she says. “I have just taken it out.”
“I used to weep for the wreckage,” he says. “For the lives that must now always be something less.”
She thinks how familiar he is to her and yet how foreign. He is years older, not in his body, but in the eyes, which have perhaps seen too much.
“The most unforgivable,” he says, putting his hands into the pockets of his coat and shaking his head. “The most unforgivable is that I would do it again. If I believed in such a thing, I would get down on my knees and pray to have those moments with you restored to me.”
She is startled by this pronouncement. It seems blasphemous, to fly so in the face of God. And yet has she not done the same? In a Catholic orphanage? In a courthouse?
“Without the cost,” she says.
“Even with the cost.”
“You cannot mean that,” she says. “You cannot know the cost. The cumulative cost.”
“No,” he says. “I cannot.”
He sits in the Windsor chair, the scraps of linen all about his feet.
“Will you win your suit?” he asks.
“I do not know. The judgment is to be read tomorrow.”
“I shall go