Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [9]
Though that day with her father Olympia was indeed rapt by the majestic sight of five million gallons of water a minute falling a height of sixty feet into a diamond-strewn spray that fueled the spinners and the looms of the mills at Ely Falls, it was the nearby utilitarian, and indeed often shabby, town houses, where the mill girls boarded, that intrigued her more. As they rode through the city in their carriage, her father delivering, since he was a man of letters and two generations removed from the shoe manufacturing in Brockton, Massachusetts, that had produced his own family’s wealth, a lucid commentary on the exploitative economics of textile manufacturing — a commentary that was understood to be as integral to her education as the works of Ovid and Homer she had been reading in the spring — it was all Olympia could do not to cry out to her father to stop the horse. For she wanted so to gaze upon the facades of those buildings, with the odd book or feathered hat or milk glass pitcher in a window, and imagine, with only the angle of the hat or the simplicity of the pitcher to guide her, the lives of the women behind those enigmatic windows. In those rooms, Olympia believed, were girls not much older than she, living lives she desperately wanted a glimpse of, if not actually to try on. Lives so much more independent and adventurous than her own, however appreciative she was of her comfort. And she still does not know if her own restlessness, which has always seemed to be part of her spirit, is a result of her orderly and comfortable upbringing, or whether she is simply destined, by the same biological inheritance that causes her mother to be intolerant of even modest episodes of reality, to have a less complacent, and perhaps more curious, temperament than her peers. But she did not cry out to her father that day; for if she had, he would have regarded her with astonishment and dismay and would have assumed it necessary to readjust his assessment of her maturity and judgment.
In 1892 Bishop Pierre Bellefeuille of Saint Andre’s Church, having decided that the parish would be better served if the sisters moved into the city so that they could take over the management of the hospice and the orphanage, sold the convent to Olympia’s father, who happened to be in the smoking room of the Highland Hotel on the evening that Father Pierre came for a drink and mentioned the upcoming sale. Her father graciously (and rather prudently, as it happened) offered to buy the convent sight unseen and gave Father Pierre a check for the entire amount right there in the smoking room. The conversion took a month — primarily the turning of twenty tiny bedrooms into eight modest ones and one larger set of rooms for her mother, as well as the installation of indoor plumbing, a luxury the sisters had not permitted themselves.
Olympia is sitting, as she idly contemplates the nuns and their convent and the town of Ely Falls, on a wooden bench inside the deconsecrated chapel, which is attached to the northern side of the house. It is a small building with a peaked roof and clear-glass windows through which one can gaze at the many charms of nature, if not actually of God, although Olympia is sure the sisters would have had it otherwise. Apart from the shape of the chapel and its pews, the only religious artifact is its altar — a squat, heavy slab of delicately veined white marble that looks naked without its cross and candelabra and other accessories to the Catholic Mass.
It is the late morning of the day of the summer solstice, and through an open