Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [82]
She sits on the bed, fighting tears and losing. If only she could speak with Haskell, she thinks. If only she could lean upon him just a moment, she would be all right. He would know what to say to her. He would take care of her. But then, in the next moment, Olympia knows this is not true. He cannot take care of her. He is obliged to take care of someone else. She wrenches the combs from her hair and lets it fall in a tangle, undoing with one stroke the patient fashioning of just an hour before. She does not care. She will not go down to the gala. She will remain in her room, and no one will be able to make her leave it. She has at least that much control over her own life, does she not? No one can force her to the party, no one can compel her to have to enter into polite conversation with John Haskell and his wife.
But then, as she sits there, the disarray of her hair all about her shoulders, her sobbing begins to subside and she lifts her head. She will have to go down to the gala, she tells herself. Of course she will. For if she were to remain in her room, the hurt to her father would be irreparable. And how selfish of her even to contemplate such a thing. Is she so weak, so hopelessly childish, that she cannot be at the same gathering as John Haskell and his wife? She thinks of the suffering that others endure on a daily basis — the Rivard woman and her children, for example — and feels shame for her overimagined torment. So little is asked of her. Can she not at least give that? Haskell has said there might be many such gatherings. Will she absent herself from those as well?
Repairing the damage she has done to her appearance takes so long that by the time she is finished, the guests have already begun arriving. As soon as she opens the door to her room, she can hear those first ripples of greetings of an early evening that presage a sea of voices, the surf rising continuously as the night progresses. When she stands at the top of the stairs, looking down, she can see that there are perhaps twenty or thirty persons, to whom navy-bordered vellum invitations have gone out, already gathered in the hallway, the women in swaths of white silk and challis and chiffon and crinoline and moiré and satin and voile, the men all in the elegant uniform of white tie. At the bottom of the stairs, in a reception line of two, stand her parents, who make a handsome pair. Her mother, whose hair has been fashioned into an intricate series of loose knots caught with fine ropes of pearls, stands with brilliant posture and bestows a smile only Olympia and her father know as foreign, a smile that suggests complete well-being and welcome. It is a marvelous performance, nevertheless, and Olympia is, for a moment, unable to leave her perch on the upper landing for watching them.
It is said of her mother that she will be able to remember each guest’s name and make a personal greeting. That she will know the names of her visitors’ children and closest friends as well. And how she is able to do this when she is so seldom in society, Olympia does not know. She sometimes imagines her mother in her rooms, studying long lists of names like a schoolgirl prepping for exams. Her father, who also has singular posture, has achieved that rare but necessary combination in a host: poise and affability. Unlike her mother, her father does actually know all of the guests, since he has drawn up the lists himself. And unlike her mother, her father is genuinely fond of most of the people whom he has invited. He has spent considerable time thinking about the introductions he will make and how best to place a particular guest at a table or with a group of people so as to enhance the liveliness of the evening. Many of the visitors this night will be from the worlds her father inhabits: literature,