Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [8]
She unfastens the top two buttons of her dress and fans her neck with the cloth. She takes off her hat and lays it down, whereupon it immediately skitters along the porch floor until it wedges itself on the bottom rung of the railing. She slips her hands under her dress and removes her stockings from her garters as she did earlier at the bathhouse before walking down to the sea. She rolls the stockings into a ball and sits on them, and then lifts the hem of her dress, which has now grown stiff from the seawater, to her knees. She stretches out her legs, startled by the whiteness of her skin, which she has hardly ever in her life given any thought to. The coolish moist breeze tickles the back of her knees and the calves of her legs. She imagines the shocked face of Josiah or her father or her mother were any of them to come around the corner and catch her in her dishabille; but she decides the exquisite pleasure of the air against her limbs worth the later mortgage of the consequences. Her eyes relax at the horizon, the place where the sea meets the sky, where it appears that all movement has been suspended. And indeed, it seems this day that she herself hovers in a state of suspension — that she is waiting for something she can hardly imagine and is only beginning to be prepared for.
OLYMPIA LIKES TO THINK about the original inhabitants of the house, the sisters of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty French Canadian girls and women from the province of Quebec. Though the sisters had taken vows of poverty and were attached to the parish of Saint Andre in Ely Falls, they lived in the cottage at Fortune’s Rocks with all the beauty that such a prospect had to offer. Sometimes Olympia imagines the nuns sitting contemplatively on the porch, looking out to sea; or lying on their narrow horsehair beds in cells adorned with only a single cross above a rustic table; or praying together in the small wooden chapel with French thoughts and Latin words; and then traveling across the large expanse of salt marsh between Fortune’s Rocks and Saint Andre’s so that they could attend services with the French Canadian priests and immigrants. Olympia is sometimes puzzled by the contrast between the lush grounds of the cottage and the austere habits of the women who dwelt in it; but since she is not a Catholic, she cannot think too long about the theology behind this paradox. In fact, she does not, early in the summer of 1899, when she is lost in speculation about the women who must have glided in slippers along the polished floors of the house, know a single person of the Catholic faith — a deficit that troubles her, since it seems to be yet another manifestation of her overly sheltered existence.
She has been to Ely Falls only once, and that was the previous summer, when her father took her into the city to see that natural phenomenon that empties into the Ely River and makes the location such a desirable one on which to build a textile mill. They journeyed by carriage from Fortune’s Rocks into the heart of the city, with its massive dark-brick mills and its narrow tiers of worker housing, and it was, as they made their way, she thought, as though they moved through layers of names: from the Whittiers and Howells of Fortune’s Rocks, a class of wealth and some leisure who come north from Boston each year for the summer months; to the Hulls and Butlers of Ely proper, old Yankee families who live in sturdy clapboard houses and who own and run the mills and the surrounding shops; to the Cadorettes and Beaudoins of Ely Falls, first- and second-generation French Canadians from Quebec who emigrated to southern Maine and to the coast of New Hampshire looking for work. Residents of Fortune’s Rocks, which is largely uninhabitable in the winter because of the severity of the storms out of the northeast, are continually trying to secede from the government