Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [77]
“Olympia has learned to play tennis,” her mother says. Beside her, Olympia can feel Cote’s scrutiny.
“How delightful,” Catherine says.
“Catherine has returned a day early,” Olympia’s mother explains to Olympia. “She means to surprise John.”
“But I was seized with a sudden desire to visit your mother,” Catherine says, leaning toward Olympia and placing a hand on her knee. “To discuss this exciting gala in your honor on Saturday night. Your mother has been telling me all about your dress.”
“And I have come early as well,” Cote says. “I did not want to have to travel north on that dreadful Friday train, and so I have slipped out of the city early. Indeed, I think I shall stay on in Fortune’s Rocks for a while now.” He pauses for effect. “I am sure the muse will find me here,” he adds, smiling again in Olympia’s direction. He accepts another cup of lemonade from Olympia’s mother and settles back into his chair.
“I used to play tennis as well,” Olympia’s mother says in a surprising non sequitur.
Olympia hardly dares look at either her mother or Catherine.
“I was rather good,” her mother adds shyly. “Actually, I had a beau once who was a tennis player. Before Phillip, that is.”
Olympia struggles to attend to what her mother is saying. She wonders if she should alert Haskell somehow, tell him of Catherine’s arrival. She tries to remember if they left anything at the cottage.
“He was the son of a carriage-maker in Rowley,” her mother says, warming to her subject.
“Oh, Rosamund, do tell us . . . ,” says Cote.
“There is so little to tell.”
“Rosamund, you must,” Catherine insists.
Her mother looks away and then back at her hands, which are folded in her lap.
“I met him on a day that I was asked to accompany Papa on an errand to his carriage-maker,” she says. “I was young, maybe seventeen, and we had been coming north for only a half a dozen summers. Papa went into the shop, but I was left to wait in the buggy. I remember that I was very cross at this, because it was hot and I was thirsty and he seemed to be taking an inordinately long time. But while I was sitting there, a young man came over to the carriage.” She raises a hand to smooth her hair and only then seems to realize that she has committed herself to her tale.
“What did he look like?” asks Catherine.
“He had pale blond eyebrows and thick blond eyelashes,” Olympia’s mother says.
“What was his name?” asks Cote.
“Gerald,” her mother says. “He used to say that he was Welsh, but my father insisted that he was Irish. I liked him very much. We talked for quite a while that day. So that by the time Papa returned, Gerald and I had somehow already arranged a meeting at a tennis club the following morning.” She pauses. “Over the next several weeks, he and I contrived to meet often. I would leave the house and walk a ways, and we would meet at an arranged place. I do not know why, but on the last morning we were to be together, I had decided that I was going to tell him that I liked him, for I sensed that he liked me greatly in return.”
She is thoughtful for a moment, as though if she waits long enough, she might be given a reprieve and be allowed another ending to her story. “We had planned that day to drive to the beach in Hampton for a picnic. And as we were walking onto the sand, he leaned over toward me and said something to me that in all these years I have tried to reconstruct, to hear. But before he could repeat the phrase to me, a man my father had paid to follow us came up behind him and took him away.”
“Rosamund, no,” Catherine says.
“I spent the rest of the summer more or less locked in my room.”
“How dreadful,” Cote says.
“I never heard from Gerald again,” Olympia’s mother says. “You see, I had no way to reach him, nor any access to anyone who would have known him. I did not even have an address to write to. But later that summer, I was allowed out of the house to attend a tennis match in Exeter. Since I was going with my father and mother, I suppose they thought little harm could come to me.
“During the interval, however, when I went