Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [68]
She holds her letter still, which she tucks into her sleeve. She walks out onto the porch for air. She guesses then that her father must be away, for Josiah would not risk such an incident were he in the house. And then, suddenly, it is all around her: the realities of the body. As she surveys the sea, she comprehends, with the shock of associative leaps, that her mother and her father, too, have shared such a physical life, and that they do still. That her mother’s rooms are so overtly feminine and sensual because her father likes them that way. She can see her mother’s silk nightgown laid out upon the bed each evening, the wisteria satin sheets, the candles at the bedside table, the pots of incense and the many vases of flowers, the elaborate coiffures and toilets of her mother’s evenings, and the lengthy absences of her father when he takes her mother up to her room after the evening meal. If Haskell and Josiah are sexual beings, then so, of course, are her father and mother.
Unwilling to imagine further that which should not be contemplated by a daughter, Olympia steps away from these thoughts, simultaneously catching sight of a group of boys playing with a ball on the beach. Seized by an idea, she goes up to her room, fetches some coins from her purse, and walks down to the seawall. She calls to the tallest of the boys, who runs in his short pants, his hair dried stiff into comical sculptures by the salt water and sea breezes, to where she stands.
“I want you to take a letter for me,” she says. “To Dr. Haskell, who is at the Highland Hotel. Do you know it?”
“Yes, miss.”
“And here are some pennies for your trouble. I wish it to be delivered now.”
“Yes, miss. Thank you.”
She hands the boy the letter and the coins and watches as he sprints along the hard sand near the water, his form and posture very like those of Mercury himself.
DREADFUL FIRE last night in Rye. Have you heard?”
“A fire?” Olympia asks. She crouches on the floor of the porch, trying to unfasten the clasp of the mahogany case that holds the telescope her father ordered from New York for her sixteenth birthday. He intends for the instrument to be set up so that she might have excellent views of the sea and bird life, although privately Olympia suspects that her father and his visitors will use it more often than she, and that when they do, they will turn the instrument in the direction of the summer houses that curve in a shallow half-moon along Fortune’s Rocks.
But she is having trouble with the latch.
“Here, allow me,” her father says, bending and trailing the tails of his coat along the painted floorboards.
“You said a fire?” Her mind is only half on her task and hardly at all on her father’s words.
“Terrible fire. The Centennial Hotel. An ark of a building, long past its heyday. I am told one could not open a window for fear the glass would fall out. The bellhops had to bang on the pipes with a hammer to make the guests believe that the steam heat was coming up. There, you have got it now.”
She lifts from its case a brass and wood telescope, complete with collapsible tripod and several extensions. Her father, who seldom revels in material possessions, seems like a child with a new toy at Christmas. Immediately, he stands up and begins to try to assemble the instrument. But, like his daughter, he is impatient with instructions and therefore doesn’t read them; and in the end it takes him twice as long to set up the new device as it might have had he studied the enclosed sheet.
“It burned within an hour,” her father says. “A tinderbox. They all are. The guests smoke and fall asleep, or the fires start in the ovens. It is the fourth hotel this year to burn.”
“Not one of Mr. Philbrick’s, I hope,” she says.
“No, Rufus has been lucky. Olympia, help me with this. Why are you just sitting there staring