Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [69]
Perhaps she sighs or makes a sound of exasperation.
“Honestly, Olympia,” her father says. “I do not understand what is wrong with you. You have become so . . . so . . . I don’t know. Addled. Tell me this is not permanent.”
“You will need a wrench,” she says.
She leaves her father briefly and walks through the house to the kitchen in search of tools, which are in a chest in the back hall. It is true she is distracted. Not only has she had no reply to the letter she sent Haskell the day before but she also has no way at all of ascertaining if he has even received it. She supposes it is possible that the boy to whom she gave the letter simply threw it into the sea and made off with the coins.
“Father, I think we should install a telephone,” she says when she returns with the wrench.
“Whatever for?” he asks. “One comes away on holiday precisely to be free of such inventions.”
“We might have an emergency. We did have an emergency. We might have telephoned people to come and help us.”
“As I recall, we had quite a lot of help, and apart from the loss of life about which you and I could do nothing, we managed rather well under the circumstances.”
Olympia reclines on the hammock and watches her father, who is not particularly mechanically minded, assemble the telescope. She thinks it better not to interfere, since two mechanically inept people will inevitably be worse than one. When he finally has the optical device put together, he peers intently into it and adjusts some knobs. He exclaims at the view.
“Olympia, here, you must see this.”
She walks over to the telescope and puts her eye to the glass. At first she cannot read what she is looking at. She steps back for a moment and sees that she has the telescope focused on the post of the porch railing. Bending again, she swings the instrument up and out, and then, adjusting a knob, watches as a moving blue mass becomes the sea, a white blur a seagull, and a blot of red a fishing boat bobbing in the water. The view from the telescope is strange to her eye: She can see only highly detailed and disorienting circles within the larger reality, and it is sometimes hard to keep the whole in mind. She thinks there must be some adjustment necessary, since the picture keeps wavering in and out of focus and making her feel woozy. But when she turns the telescope in the direction of the beach, she is rewarded with the sight of the Farragut summer house with its weathered shingles, its misshapen wicker rockers, and its soft expanse of screens at its windows. She sees Victoria’s mother sitting in a corner of the porch, an open window through which two white tails of curtains whip in the shore breeze, and a clothesline to one side, where pale blue sheets and pillow slips billow out and then collapse. Leaving the Farragut cottage, Olympia maneuvers the telescope slowly along the waterfront, scanning each summer house, noting certain features she has not been able to perceive from ground level — the shapes of the roofs or the number of gables — until eventually the instrument rests upon the facade of the Highland Hotel. For a time, she studies the hotel’s porch, its long front lawn, and even the windows of certain rooms she has an interest in. There are many persons about, but since she cannot see the figure she is looking for, she deduces that Haskell must be at the clinic or still in his rooms. Thus it is that she is doubly startled to hear her father say, right behind her, and with some surprise and pleasure, “Well, hello, John.”
Haskell, in a wheat-colored suit, stands in the doorway, holding his boater in his hand. For one terrible moment, Olympia thinks he has come to tell her father of their affair and that he has brought her letter as evidence. But as soon as she sees Haskell’s eyes, and their particular mix of anguish and anticipation, her fear gives way to reason. He walks forward and takes her hand in greeting.
“Olympia,” he says, “it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“And to see you,” she says.
He lets her hand go reluctantly.
“Your father has been keeping