Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [6]
At the window, Josiah moves on the ladder, causing both of them to look up in his direction.
“I wonder . . . ,” her mother says, musing to herself. “Do you think Josiah a handsome man?”
Olympia looks at the figure framed seemingly in midair. He has light-brown hair that waves back from a high forehead and a narrow face that seems in keeping with the length of his slim build. Mildly astonished as Olympia always is by any sudden and surprising crack in her mother’s long-practiced poise, she cannot think of how to answer her.
“Do you imagine that he keeps a mistress in Ely Falls?” her mother asks, pretending to wickedness. But then, after a brief heartbeat of silence, during which Olympia imagines she hears her mother’s longing for (and immediate dismissal of) another life, she answers herself: “No, I suppose not,” she says.
Altogether, it is a day on which everyone around Olympia seems to be behaving oddly. She does not know whether this is a consequence of truly altered behavior on their part, or of her perception of herself, which she thinks she must be giving off like a scent. How else to explain the uncharacteristic inarticulateness of her father, or the forays of her mother into subjects she normally avoids?
“I should like you to take the tray with you when you go. To help Josiah, who is quite overwhelmed, I fear.”
Olympia is not as surprised by this non sequitur as she might be, since her mother has a gift for abandoning subjects she has suddenly decided she does not wish to discuss further. Olympia stands up from the chaise and bends to lift the silver tray, happy to help Josiah, whom she likes. She is relieved to be dismissed.
“You must be more protective of yourself,” her mother says as Olympia leaves the room.
• • •
After Olympia has returned the tray to the kitchen, she walks into her father’s study, where he sits, in an oversize mahogany captain’s chair, reading, she can see, The Shores of Saco Bay by John Staples Locke, the first of the many volumes he will devour during the summer. Her father is, both by profession and by inclination, a disciplined and learned man, discipline being, in his belief, a necessary hedge against dissolution; therefore, he does not like to change his routine even on this first day of vacation, despite the lack of preparation for their arrival and the resulting chaos.
During this summer, as in past summers, her father will invite to their cottage a succession of guests whom he has met largely through his position as president of the Atlantic Literary Club or as editor of The Bay Quarterly, a periodical of no small literary reputation. He will hold lengthy discussions with these people, who are most often poets or essayists or artists, in a kind of continuous salon. During the day, he will oversee the recreation of the visitors, which will be bathing at the beach or tennis at the Ely Tennis Club or boating through the pink-tinged marshes of the bay at sunset. Evening meals will be long and will last well into the night, even though his wife will excuse herself early. The women who will come to these dinners will wear white linen dresses and shawls of woven silk. Olympia has always been fascinated by the clothing and accessories of their female guests.
Her father glances down at the hem of her dress, which is still damp. She asks him what he recommends that she read first this summer. He removes his spectacles and sets them on the green marble table beside his chair, which is a replica of the table he has in his library in Boston. Around them, the windows are thrown open, and the room is flooded with the peculiar salt musk of the outgoing tide.
“I should like you to read the essays of John Warren Haskell,” he says, reaching for a volume and handing it to her. “And then you and I will discuss its contents, for the author is here at Fortune’s Rocks and is coming to stay with us for the weekend.”
And this is the first time she hears John Haskell’s name.
“Haskell is bringing his wife