Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [184]
“John?” she asks, surprised that they have stopped.
For answer, he turns toward her and unfastens the top three buttons of her blouse. He tucks his fingers into her corset.
She laughs. “John?” she asks again.
“In a moment, we shall be at the house,” he says, “and will be surrounded by twenty-three girls and will not have a moment to ourselves. And then I shall have to go to the clinic, and when I come home, I shall probably be so exhausted that I will fall asleep immediately.”
“No, you will not. That is just an excuse.”
“Do I need an excuse?” he asks, massaging her breast.
“No, perhaps not,” she says.
“We were here once, in the marshes,” he says, unbuttoning her blouse further.
She can see and feel that day as vividly as she can the polished wood and leather of the interior of the car. The wet seeping along the length of her skirt. The whomp and flutter of a bird’s wing. The sun stuttering through the grasses. It was the first time she understood the nature of sexual passion.
His beard brushes against the skin of her chest, and she can smell the natural oil of his hair. They do not remove their coats. They might be young lovers, she thinks, with nowhere to go.
• • •
They park in the driveway and enter, as they always do, through the back door, Haskell carrying both of their satchels. Maria is on the telephone in the hallway, reading a grocery list into the mouthpiece.
“Six dozen eggs, four pounds of that cheese you sent us on Monday, seven chickens . . . Can you wait a minute?”
Maria puts her hand over the mouthpiece and turns toward Olympia. “I am just calling in the groceries to Goldthwaite’s,” she says. “You have a visitor.”
“I do?” Olympia asks, unwinding her muffler.
“A Mr. Philbrick.”
“How extraordinary,” she says.
“I shall just run up and change my shirt,” Haskell says, hanging his coat upon a hook, “and then I shall come in and say hello.” He checks his pocket watch. “But I am needed at the clinic. Ask Rufus to stay to dinner. I shall be back by then.”
Olympia watches her husband walk through the kitchen, snatching a biscuit from under a cloth on his way. She guesses he has not eaten since breakfast.
“Maria, did you give Mr. Philbrick tea?”
Maria, who came to them only seven months ago, has proven herself the ablest of all the girls and thus has been rewarded with the job of assistant to Lisette.
“Yes.”
“And where is Josiah?”
“In his office with the accounts.”
Olympia tucks a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. When she opens the swinging door, the cacophony of the house greets her like a rush of warm air. She likes to think of it as organized cacophony, though often it is not. She walks past the dining room, remodeled to hold two long refectory tables, and then past a sitting room in which Lisette is reading from a medical text. Around her, in a circle, are eight young women, some merely girls still, between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, some Franco, some Irish, some Yankee, all pregnant. All have been dismissed by their families. When it is their time, the girls will give birth upstairs and then will stay on for as long as they need to. When they have recuperated, they will contribute to the household by assuming various jobs — in the nursery or with the laundry or with the meals. The only rule is that they may not abandon their infants.
As Olympia makes her way toward the study, she remembers the night she first had the idea, sitting on the bed in the room with the blue forget-me-nots on the walls. In the months following the custody suit, Haskell helped her to bring the idea to life, even as he was starting up his own clinic in Ely Falls. Haskell and she moved into her mother’s old rooms, refurbished the other rooms to accommodate young mothers with newborns, and gradually, over a year’s time, took in girls whom Haskell either saw at the clinic or came to his attention. By the following year, girls and their families were begging for places, and still Haskell and