Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [3]
In the bright sunlight, Olympia can see her father’s face more clearly than she has all winter. It is a strong face, full of character, a face he inherited from his father before him and then later, through his own behavior, has come to deserve. His most striking feature is the navy of his eyes, a blue so vivid that his eyes alone, even with the flecks of rust in the irises, suggest moral rectitude. A fan of wrinkles, however, as well as folds of skin at the lids, soften the suggested righteousness. His hair is graying at the sides and thinning at the front, but he has high color and has not yet begun to grow pale, as is so often the fate of ginger-haired men in their middle age. Olympia is not sure if she has ever thought about her father’s height, nor can she accurately say how tall he is — only that he is taller than her mother and her, which seems in keeping with the proper order of the universe. His face is elongated, as Olympia’s will one day be, although neither of them is precisely thin.
“When you have finished your tea, I should like to see you in my study,” her father says in the ordinary manner in which he is accustomed to speak to her, though even she can see that something between them has changed. The sun etches imperfections in his skin, and there are, in that unforgiving light, tiny glints of silver and ginger spread along his jawline. He squints in the glare.
“I have some matters I need to discuss with you. Matters relating to your summer study and so forth,” he adds.
Her heart falls at the mention of summer study, since she is eager to have a respite from her singular, yet intense, schooling. Her father, having lost faith in the academies, has taken her education upon himself. Thus she is his sole pupil and he her sole teacher. He remains convinced that this education is progressing at a pace not dreamt of in the academies and seminaries, and that its breadth is unsurpassed anywhere in New England, which is to say, the United States. Possibly this is true, Olympia thinks, but she cannot say: It has been four years since she last attended classes with other girls.
“Of course,” she answers.
He looks at her once and then lets his eyes drift over her right shoulder and out to sea. He turns and begins to walk back to the cottage. As she gazes at his slightly hunched posture, a physical characteristic she has not ever noticed before, she feels suddenly sad for her father, for the thing that he is losing, which is the guardianship of her childhood.
• • •
She floats through the house, appreciating the sculptures made by the white sheets strewn over the furnishings. A coatrack becomes a maiden ghost; a long dining room table, an operating theater; a set of chairs piled one on top of the other and shrouded in white becomes a throne. She climbs the stairs in the front hall to her mother’s rooms.
Her mother is resting unperturbed on a peacock chaise that has been uncovered and looks directly out to sea. She seems not to notice the man perched on a ladder just outside her window. He has in one hand a bottle of vinegar and in the other a crumpled wad of newsprint. Josiah wears an overall for this task, although he also has on a waistcoat and a formal collar underneath. Later, when the windows have been cleaned, he will take off the overall, put his suit coat back on, adjust his cuffs under the sleeves, and walk into the study, where he will ask Olympia’s father if he wishes his customary glass of London porter. And then Josiah, a man who has been with her father for seventeen years, before her father’s marriage and her birth, and who has without complaint taken upon himself the washing of the windows in her mother’s rooms because he does not want her view of the ocean to be obscured on this, the first day of her summer visit (even though such a task is thoroughly beneath him), will walk down the long pebbled drive and onto Hampton Street to lay