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By Root 721 0

and sets it on the table. “Make no mistake about this, Olympia,” he says, his mouth tight with strain, his head shaking as if with palsy. “I worry about you every second of my life. But this is about your mother. This is about your mother and myself and our life together. This is about the unborn and innocent child you tell me now you are carrying within you. This is about Catherine Haskell and her children. This is about Josiah and Lisette, who have had to live through all of this horror with us. And though I can barely utter his name, this is about John Haskell as well, a man whose life is nevertheless ruined for all he is to blame. This is not, and I repeat not, only about Olympia Biddeford.”

And with that her father stands. Carefully he pushes his chair in and picks up The Scarlet Letter, only then, it would seem, realizing the coincidence of the book, for he drops it on the table. He leaves the room without further word.

• • •

After that day, her father communicates with her by means of notes left at the dining table in the morning or brought to her by Lisette, who shakes her head at her task. One note reads: “Your mother and I will be away for a fortnight.” Another: “The electrician is making repairs on Friday, so please have your room prepared.” Olympia is now allowed to read, however, and because all has been lost already, she is allowed a fair variety of reading matter: Walt Whitman and Jack London and some verse by Christina Rossetti. There is also a medical text, The Family Library of Health, the purpose of which she assumes is to educate her further about the coming labor and birth. She reads the volume as though inhaling it, and years later she will be able to recite word for word certain key passages: The dress of the patient should be the usual chemise and night-dress rolled up around her waist, so as to keep them from being soiled. . . . The cries emitted are generally more like prolonged grunts, and can be readily recognized at a considerable distance by one who is familiar with their peculiarities. . . . Puerperal Mania is a form of insanity liable to come on a week or ten days after confinement, in which there is frequently a singular aversion to the child, and perhaps to the husband also. A tendency to suicide is also prominent, and patients thus affected should be watched with the most unremitting care. But she is, despite these alarming pronouncements, not as afraid of the birth as she might be; for it is difficult for the uninitiated to imagine pain.

Through all of this, her thoughts are constantly of John Haskell. To be told not to love is useless, she discovers, for the spirit will rebel. Though she thinks it unlikely she will ever see Haskell again, she cannot stop herself from remembering him, from wondering what has happened to him, from wondering if he thinks of her as she does him. She knows only (her father entering her room and making another announcement) that the Haskell home in Cambridge has been sold. She understands that Catherine and the children will remain in York with Catherine’s mother for the foreseeable future, although one day she happens to notice their names in the newspaper as prospective passengers aboard the SS Lundgren, bound for Le Havre. Olympia tries to imagine, in the confines of her room, exactly what happened during the early morning hours of August 11 at the Haskell cottage. What did Haskell say to Catherine, and she to him? Did he leave his wife and children that evening? Or was it the other way around, Catherine rousing the children and dressing them in the dark and making a chauffeur drive them to York?

• • •

On the thirty-first of December 1899, Olympia sits at the bow window of her father’s town house, which overlooks the Public Garden. Through the lavender glass, she watches as both the reverent and the revelers pass up and down the street. A light snow is beginning to fall, thickening the dusk. Already there are people all about, most in their best cloaks and hats, hurrying in the snow to their destinations. Cabs and horses clutter the street, and as