Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [2]
The cottage is a modest one by some standards, although Olympia’s father is a wealthy man. But it is unique in its proportions, and she thinks it lovely beyond words. White with dark blue shutters, the house stands two stories high and is surrounded by several graceful porches. It is constructed in the style of the grand hotels along Fortune’s Rocks, and in Rye and Hampton to the south: that is to say, its roof curves shallowly and is inset with evenly spaced dormer windows. The house has never been a hotel, but rather was once a convent, the home of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty sisters who took vows of poverty and married themselves to Jesus. Indeed, an oddity of the structure is its many cell-like bedrooms, two of which Olympia and her father occupy and three of which have been connected for her mother’s use. Attached to the ground floor of the house is a small chapel; and although it has been deconsecrated, Olympia’s family still cannot bring themselves to place their own secular belongings within its wooden walls. Except for a dozen neat wooden benches and a wide marble stone that once served as an altar, the chapel remains empty.
Outside the house and below the porches are massive tangles of hydrangea bushes. A front lawn spills down to the seawall, which is little more than a rocky barricade against the ocean and which is covered at this time of year with masses of beach roses. Thus, the view from the porch is one of emerald leaves with blots of pink against a blue so sparkling that it is not so much a color as the experience of light. To the west of the lawn are orchards of Sheepnose and Black Gilliflower apples, and to the north is the beach, which stretches two miles along the coast. Fortune’s Rocks is the name not only for the crescent of land that cradles this beach but also for the gathering of summer houses, of which the Biddefords’ is but one, on its dunes and rocks.
From the rocks, her father waves to her yet again. “Olympia, I called to you,” he says when she, with her wet hem, climbs up to the rock on which he is standing. She expects him to be cross with her. In her impatience to feel the sea on her feet, she inadvertently went to the beach during the men’s bathing hours, an activity that might be acceptable in a girl but is not in a young woman. Olympia explains as best she can that she is sorry; she simply forgot about the men’s bathing hours, and she was not able to hear him call to her because of the wind. But as she draws nearer to her father and looks up at his face and observes the manner in which he glances quickly away from her — this is not like him — she realizes that he must have witnessed her bare-legged walk from the seawall to the ocean’s edge. His eyes are watering some in the wind, and he seems momentarily puzzled, even bewildered, by her physical presence.
“Josiah has prepared a tray of bread and pastes,” her father says, turning back to her and recovering from the slight loss of his composure. “He has taken it to your mother’s room so that you both might have something to eat after the long journey.” He blinks once and bends to his watch. “My God, Olympia, what a shambles,” he adds.
He means, of course, the house.
“Josiah seems to be handling the crisis well enough,” she offers.
“Everything should have been prepared for our arrival. We should have had the cook by now.”
Her father wears his frock coat still. His boots are heavy and black and covered with dust, and she thinks