Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [48]
“I was under the impression you had four children,” Olympia says without thinking.
“The last of them was stillborn,” he says. “This past March.”
“Oh, I am sorry — ”
“This, too, is Nature’s way,” he says, interrupting her. “The child would have been grotesquely deformed.”
Olympia is assaulted then with disturbing images. That of Haskell kneeling between the legs of his wife, an intimate picture in stark contrast to the couple’s chaste demeanor together at the dining table; and that of an infant, not at all like the one she saw that afternoon, but rather one misshapen in its limbs, pushing ferociously to get out into the world, only to perish at the moment of birth. Olympia wraps her arms around herself.
And then, in the way of random thoughts, she remembers the photograph on the sill of the Rivard room, the small picture within the silver filigree frame, the beauty and youth of the two persons who posed on their wedding day, the fine satin of the dress and the mantilla with its crown of pearls. And she wonders at the disparity between that pose of civility on the wedding day and the animal-like posture of birth within the hideous surroundings of that boardinghouse room. And she further imagines that if the bride and groom in the picture had been able to foresee the circumstances in which that framed portrait would one day find itself, each of the innocents would have fled the altar in terrified disbelief.
Haskell stops the carriage.
“This has been too much,” he says, turning to her.
“No,” she says, “I . . .”
She inhales the salt air, as if it were her own laudanum. She tilts her head back. She can sense, but not quite see, the bats that fly near to them and then away.
“Olympia, I wish to say something to you, but not without your permission.”
She rights her head and looks at him. “You do not need to ask, nor do I need to grant, permission,” she says quietly.
“Our circumstances are not normal, though they feel as natural to me as it is to breathe.” He says this last with quiet assurance.
“If we speak of the unnaturalness of our circumstances,” she says evenly, “it will seem to us that is all we have.”
With his fingers, he turns her head so that she faces him. She gives herself freely to his direction.
“Olympia, I have thought of nothing but you since the day I left your house,” he says.
She briefly closes her eyes.
“I do you the greatest injury a man in my position can a young woman,” he says, “which is to speak of unspeakable feelings.”
In the moonlight, she can see pinpoints of moving lights in his pupils.
“This week has been unendurably long,” he adds so close to her that she can feel his breath. She wants to lean into him, to rest her head on his chest.
“Mr. Haskell,” she says. “I . . .”
“Have I not, in your thoughts at least, become John?” he asks quietly.
“In my thoughts of you, which are constant, you are always Haskell,” she answers without any hesitation.
And there is, in the confessing of this truth, a moment of the greatest joy and release of spirit Olympia has ever felt.
“This cannot be,” he says. “I cannot have created this.”
“You did not.”
“We can say no more about this.”
“No.”
“This is all,” he says. “This is all we can ever have. You understand that?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I forfeit all right to speak to you in this manner, and I have already trespassed upon your good nature beyond any hope of forgiveness. Indeed, by stopping here, I take advantage of your gentle spirit and of your youth, which is the worst sort of opportunism a man of my age and position can engage in. I can do you nothing but harm.”
“I do not for one minute believe you guilty of opportunism,” she says truthfully.
The scent of sea salt is pungent in the air, and there is as well the dank but not unpleasant aroma of mudflats and sea muck. The tide is low, but not out altogether.
“Then you are not afraid?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
He puts his hands on her wristbones and slides his fingers slowly up her arms to the elbows under her loose cuffs. He says