Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [79]
The comment sends a small jolt of alarm through Olympia.
Catherine seems not to notice the reference to her husband and Olympia in the same sentence, even though the suggestive way in which Cote has put Olympia’s name before her mother’s is unsettling, not to say rude.
“He . . . well, of course . . . I think he regards Rosamund . . . and Olympia . . . Yes, surely,” Catherine finishes, uncharacteristically flustered.
“Has Hale arrived yet?” Cote asks Olympia’s mother, giving away, Olympia thinks, the reason for his visit.
“No. Phillip says he will not arrive until Saturday.”
A quick flash of disappointment crosses the poet’s face. “He will come up from Exeter or Boston?” he asks.
“Boston. Do you know the family?”
“Well, yes, I do rather,” Cote says. “The New York branch. Hale’s cousin married a Plaisted, did he not?”
“Lavinia. Yes.”
“She is a second cousin to my aunt,” Cote says, perhaps wishing to emphasize his Yankee connections. “Of course, my cousins regard Hale as something of a black sheep. Not done to have a writer in the family, is it?” he asks in what is meant to be self-deprecating wit but which somehow fails to elicit the proper response in his audience. He takes a long sip of lemonade and turns toward Olympia. “We were sorry to miss you on the Fourth. I rather think the Farraguts were expecting you at their party.”
The mention of Haskell and the holiday within seconds of each other cannot be unintentional on Cote’s part, Olympia thinks. She breathes shallowly so as not to betray her concern. For Cote, she realizes, is cannily feral in his instincts and will smell out any note of fear.
“I was engaged elsewhere,” Olympia says.
“I daresay you were,” says Cote. “But I have had the great joy of running into Olympia this summer in all manner of places,” he adds to the two older women.
“Oh?” asks Olympia’s mother, looking at her daughter. “And where might that have been? I should most sincerely like to know. Olympia has been rather a puzzle to me for weeks.”
“Has she indeed?” he says. He gestures toward the sandwiches. “May I?”
“Of course,” her mother says. “Olympia, a sandwich?”
“I am not hungry,” she says quickly. “And, actually, I must go. I told Julia I would ride with her.”
“In this heat?” Cote asks. “Surely not. It would be a crime upon the horses.”
Olympia thinks, The gall of the man.
“Of course, we now have the pleasurable anticipation of the gala in Olympia’s honor,” Cote says, ignoring Olympia’s discomfort and fastidiously wiping a dab of mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. “You will be how old?”
“Sixteen,” she says.
“Such a lovely age, do you not think, Catherine?”
“Indeed,” says Catherine. “A lovely age. I was just saying so to Rosamund before you arrived.”
Cote gazes at Olympia with open impertinence. “Why so glum, child?” he asks, taking another bite of sandwich. “Smile. Life cannot possibly be all that bad.”
And Olympia, never having liked being told to smile by anyone, much less Zachariah Cote, and suddenly weary of innuendo, sycophantic banter, and a nearly intolerable moral unease, stands up from her chair and excuses herself. She walks through the house, out the back door, and down to the seawall, where she takes off her boots and her stockings, abandons them where they lie, and runs as fast as ever she has along the hard-packed surface of the beach.
ON THE MORNING of the tenth, Olympia sits in her room, gazing out the window, unable to move or speak or read or think, enclosed within a catatonic state, as if deaf and dumb. Try as she might to banish such thoughts, she can think of nothing other than the fact that Catherine and the children are moving into the new cottage right at this very hour; and she cannot help but be pierced with the irony of Mrs. Haskell’s gliding about the house, unaware of its previous tenants, thinking it is her own, all her own, which of course it now is. Olympia tries to imagine, her imagination sharpened by intimate knowledge of both Haskell and the cottage, how he will manage in such an awkward and painful