Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [7]
“Of course,” she says, smoothing her palm across the book’s brown silk cover and fingering its gilt-embossed title, “but as to these essays, I do not know the author.”
“Haskell is a man of medicine, and lectures occasionally at the college, which is where I originally met him; but his true calling, in my estimation, is as an essayist, and I have published several of his best. Haskell’s interests lie with labor, and he seems most particularly keen on improving living and working conditions for mill girls. Hence his further interest in Ely Falls.”
“I see,” she says to her father as she riffles through the pages of the modest book. And though she is already slightly bored with this topic, later she will sift and resift through the memory of this conversation for any tiny morsel she might have missed and thus might savor.
“Haskell keeps a clinic in east Cambridge,” her father says. “He is offering his services at Ely Falls for the season, as he is replacing one of the staff physicians who is taking a leave.” Her father clears his throat. “Haskell regards this as the most fortunate of circumstances, for not only will it allow him to remain close by while his own cottage is being constructed farther down the beach, but he should be able to study firsthand the conditions that interest him so. And as for me, I also regard his visit as a fortunate circumstance, for I do enjoy the man’s wit and company. I think you will be charmed by Catherine, who is Haskell’s wife, as well as by the children.”
“Am I to be a governess then?” Olympia asks, mostly in jest, but her father takes the question seriously and looks appalled.
“My dear, certainly not,” he says. “The Haskells are our guests for the weekend only, after which Haskell shall stay on, as he has been doing, at the Highland Hotel until their cottage is finished, which should be by the end of July. Catherine and the children will stay in York with her family until then. Heavens, Olympia, how could you have imagined I would exploit you in such a manner?”
Her father’s study is dark, though the windows are open; and his books, which have been partially unpacked by Josiah, are already beginning to warp in the damp air. Each Monday throughout the summer, Josiah will place the books in tall stacks and weight these stacks with heavy irons to help return them, for a few hours, to their original shape and thickness.
Olympia moves about the room, touching various familiar objects that her father has collected through the years and keeps at Fortune’s Rocks: a malachite paperweight from East Africa; a bejeweled cross her father purchased in Prague when he was nineteen; a stained ivory letter opener from Madagascar; the silver box that contains all of her mother’s letters written when her father was in London for a year before they were married; and a stained-glass desk lamp fringed with amber crystals at the edges that once belonged to Olympia’s grandmother. Her father also collects shells, as a small boy might, and when they walk together at the beach, he is never without a container in which to put them. On his shelves are delicately edged scallop shells, the darkly iridescent casings of lowly mussels, and encrusted white oyster shells. When her father smokes, he uses the shells for ashtrays.
He watches her move about his study.
“You enjoyed your first visit to the beach?” he asks her carefully.
She picks up the malachite paperweight. She is not certain she could describe her walk along the beach even if she wanted to.
“It was excellent, after so long a winter, to feel the sea and the sea air,” she answers. But when she looks up at him, she sees that he has put on his spectacles in a mild gesture of dismissal.
• • •
From her father’s study, she walks out onto the porch. She has the book her father gave her, but she is too distracted to open it. During the winter, she attained her full height, so that when she sits on a chair on the porch, she can now see over the railing and down the lawn, which