Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [97]
At two o’clock on the afternoon of April 14, Olympia begins to cry out. She has been in labor for thirteen hours. Dr. Branch comes into the room and is suddenly more alert than he has been before. He tells Olympia’s mother and Lisette to prop up Olympia. He then ties Olympia’s feet to the bedposts. Olympia’s mother speaks constantly to her in a soothing voice.
“I cannot do this,” Olympia cries. “I cannot do this!”
And with that pronouncement, her child, a boy, is born into the world.
• • •
And how many times will Olympia regret begging for that drug from Dr. Branch? For if she had been alert and awake after the birth, she could perhaps have stopped them from taking the child from her. In years to come, she will remember only the briefest of moments with her son: waking to the surprise of the swaddled bundle tucked beside her in the bed, turning her head to peer at a wrinkled face, unwrapping the cloths just enough to free a delicate hand. But drugged and exhausted, she cannot keep herself from sleep. Indeed, her body, if not her heart, welcomes it.
Later, she will sift these brief moments a thousand — no, ten thousand — times for one stray glint or shard of memory she may have overlooked before. She will remember wet black spiky hair, blue eyes that were purely guileless, a tiny mouth, bowed, exquisite. She never puts her son to her breast. She never sees his tiny feet. She never hears him cry. And when she wakes finally to consciousness, the drug having leached itself from her bones, he is gone.
ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1900, Olympia arrives at the Hastings Seminary for Females in the western part of Massachusetts. The village in which the seminary is located is a factory town, the factory dominating the landscape, spilling down into the streets, overtaking churches and shops and the seminary itself, so that it is not possible to say where the factory begins or ends, the buildings all dark brick, even the houses of the owners. The factory produces shoes and boots, and there are many tanneries in the town, so that even the trees smell of offal. It is immediately apparent to Olympia that her father has never visited the seminary, for if he had, the near perfection of the location as a place of punishment would have strained even his sense of justice. Surely there is no crime his daughter could have committed that warrants such an exile.
Olympia will have images of this year, months that are a dull headache at the back of her neck, but no accurate sense of its passage. Cold beef on a blue willow plate. A tapestry hung over a bed. Fastidious girls who professed to be afraid of love. Darkened brick buildings in the rain. Dreams that came and went upon a fawn-colored wall. A stuck window, swollen from the wet. A girl in challis who scoured knives. A hundred eggs for custard pies. India rubbers in the washroom and a cherry desk with a green lid. A tin of matches with a slate. A wooden porch that was overhung with elms. A girl crying in the widow closet. Stiff white sheets in the drying yard. Brown-gold carpets with peacock blue chairs. An hour of recitation followed by an hour of prayer. Pale Methodist ministers who watched girls with hoops at calisthenics. Worcester’s Elements and Goldsmith’s England. Young women sent out to foreign lands. Trunks must be packed by Sunday night.
The seminary, Olympia learns, was started by Methodist philanthropists in 1873 as a place to educate the factory girls in their off-hours and therefore had the distinction of being the first evening school in the country. When it became clear to the founding fathers, however, that mill girls had precious few off-hours (and those they did have they did not want to spend in further confinement), the seminary began to direct its recruitment to the middle classes: daughters of ministers and salesmen and schoolteachers. The theory and indeed the practice of the seminary are to educate young women so that they can be sent out to teach: to Smyrna or to Turkey or to Indiana or to Worcester or to work among the Zulus in South Africa. In addition