Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [98]
At the seminary, Olympia studies Latin and geography, mathematics and biology, and other subjects with extra courses in composition, calisthenics, vocal music, dressmaking, and household husbandry. The bent is practical; true scholars are the exception. Because neither the curriculum nor its purveyors are particularly intimidating, the establishment, much to the surprise of everyone, flourishes wildly and has many more applications for admission than there are places. Olympia finds it astonishing to contemplate how many young women are willing to leave their homes, that is to say, their villages in New England, to be sent to alien territories where one might perish from loneliness or become ill from infection. And she wonders if this collective passivity is a consequence of individual personal disasters that have rendered them unfit for marriage, or of a general lack of confidence in the future.
From its central building, the school has spread like a subdued stain, taking over vacated boardinghouses adjacent to the school’s property, vying with the factory itself for turf. At the time Olympia is enrolled, from 1900 to 1903, the school owns seventeen buildings, including a gymnasium and an observatory, which has been donated by a graduate who married a Mellon. Most of the women, Olympia learns, will marry men of considerably less wealth or of no wealth at all, if indeed they marry, and not a few will remain unmarried. One woman with whom Olympia will take classes will go on to own hotels in the West, and Olympia will think of Rufus Philbrick and his predictions.
During her time at the seminary, Olympia does not have to share a room with anyone else, a circumstance for which she is grateful. (Has her father paid extra to forestall the trading of confidences with a roommate?) Her room, which is composed of a single bed with a pair of rough woolen blankets, a fireplace, a single desk, a chair, and a large window that overlooks the oval of grass at the center of the main campus, is, despite its spartan accommodations, a refuge of sorts. And since Olympia has no desire to leave or to flee this room, she begins, over time, to regard it as more of a retreat than a place of imprisonment. When she is away from it, at classes or at meals or during compulsory exercises, she thinks only of returning to its unadorned solace, where she can sit upon its narrow bed and gaze at the fawn wall opposite and see faces or imagine scenes or recall certain incidents from the past. She has left the home of nuns only to take up the habit, the habits, of the Catholic sisters. Contemplation. Meditation. Reflection. Rumination.
But not prayer. To pray is to hope, and to hope is to admit into one’s spirit the pain of hopelessness. And this Olympia is unwilling to do.
Not surprisingly, Olympia develops a reputation for reticence. For to speak of even a small part of one’s story might inadvertently lead to the revelation of another part one wishes to keep secret. And so she tells little of herself, a characteristic others regard with some suspicion. She is not popular, though she thinks she is not ill liked either. Rather, she is a neighbor one never knows well, regardless of well-intentioned overtures.
There is, however, one teacher Olympia particularly admires, a biologist, Mr. Benton from Syracuse, who keeps a study in Belcher Hall, a room filled with objets and books and a photograph of a woman (a wife?) he once suggests to Olympia he has lost. They take tea together quite often in her second year, when she has determined upon a course of study in biology; and perhaps it is that Mr. Benton, who is fair in his coloring and who is probably,