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A Novel
by Anita Shreve
"Am I to be a governess then?" Olympia asks, mostly in jest, but her father takes the question seriously and looks appalled.
"My dear, certainly not," he says. "The Haskells are our guests for the weekend only, after which Haskell shall stay on, as he has been doing at the Highland Hotel until their cottage is finished, which should be by the end of July. Catherine and the children will stay in York with her family until then. Heavens, Olympia, how could you have imagined I would exploit you in such a manner?"
Her father's study is dark, though the windows are open; and his books, which have been partially unpacked by Josiah, are already beginning to warp in the damp air. Each Monday throughout the summer, Josiah will place the books in tall stacks and weight these stacks with heavy irons to help return them, for a few hours, to their original shape and thickness.
Olympia moves about the room, touching various familiar objects that her father has collected through the years and keeps at Fortune's Rocks: a malachite paperweight from East Africa; a bejeweled cross her father purchased in Prague when he was nineteen; a stained ivory letter opener from Madagascar; the silver box that contained all of her mother's letters written when her father was in London for a year before they were married; and a stained-glass desk lamp fringed with amber crystals at the edges that once belonged to Olympia's grandmother. Her father also collects shells, as a small boy might, and when they walk together at the beach, he is never without a container in which to put them. On his shelves are delicately-edged scallop shells, the darkly iridescent casings of lowly mussels, and encrusted white oyster shells. When her father smokes, he uses the shells for ashtrays.
He watches her move about his study.
"You enjoyed your first visit to the beach?" he asks her carefully.
She picks up the malachite paperweight. She is not certain she could describe her walk along the beach even if she wanted to.
"It was excellent, after so long a winter, to feel the sea and the sea air," she answers. But when she looks up at him, she sees that he has put on his spectacles in a mild gesture of dismissal.
From her father's study, she walks out onto the porch. She has the book her father gave her, but she is too distracted to open it. During the winter, she attained her full height, so that when she sits on a chair on the porch, she can now see over the railing and down the lawn, which needs cutting. A blossom she cannot identify is sending a luscious scent into the air, and that scent, combined with the sea, is creating an intoxicating and soporific cloud all about her.
She unfastens the top two buttons of her dress and fans her neck with the cloth. She takes off her hat and lays it down, whereupon it immediately skitters along the porch floor until it wedges itself on the bottom rung of the railing. She slips her hands under her dress and removes her stockings from her garters as she did earlier at the bathhouse before walking down to the sea. She rolls the stockings into a ball and sits on them, and then lifts the hem of her dress, which has now grown stiff from the seawater, to her knees. She stretches out her legs, startled by the whiteness of her skin, which she has hardly ever in her life given any thought to. The coolish moist breeze tickles the backs of her knees and the calves of her legs. She imagines the shocked faces of Josiah or her father or her mother were any of them to come around the corner and catch her in her dishabille; but she decides the exquisite pleasure of the air against her limbs worth the later mortgage of the consequences. She fixes her eyes upon that most peaceful of all horizon lines, the place where the sea meets the sky, where it appears that all movement has been suspended. And indeed, it seems that day that she herself hovers in a state of suspension—that she is waiting for something she can hardly imagine and is only beginning to be prepared for.
© 1999 by Anita Shreve
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