Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

studying an album of private photographs.
    “I have been resting,” she says.
    “Oh, I hope you are not unwell.”
    “No, I am very well,” Olympia answers in confusion, looking at her feet.
    “Catherine,” the woman says slowly, pronouncing her name in three syllables. “Please call me Catherine. Otherwise, you will make me feel too old.”
    Olympia looks up and tries to smile, but she can see that Mrs. Haskell is examining her, the eyes straying to her waist, to her hair. And then returning to her face, which she holds for a moment before glancing away toward the porch.
    “Do you suppose,” Mrs. Haskell asks, “that I might have time to slip up to my room and change into another dress, one that has not been dragged along the sand and the sea moss?”
    It is not really a question, for surely Olympia is not the arbiter of the supper hour. Mrs. Haskell leaves the room with the same sibilant swishing of her skirts with which she entered.
    Olympia leans for a moment against the frame of the door, and as she does, she happens to see, through the screen of a window, a small seal beach itself upon a rock.
    • • •
    That night they are seven at dinner, with the addition of Rufus Philbrick from Rye, who owns hotels and boardinghouses in that town, as well as Zachariah Cote, a poet from Quincy who is having a holiday at the Highland Hotel. (A seventh place is hastily set for Olympia, who was not expected.) The children, having eaten earlier, have been removed temporarily from the house by the Haskells’ governess, who has obligingly taken them for an evening walk along the beach. Mr. Philbrick, a large man with pure white whiskers and beard, has on a striped jacket with cream trousers. Olympia takes him for a dandy as well as a man of property. Cote, whose poetry she has sampled and set aside, his saccharine and sorrowful images not to her liking, is a remarkably handsome man with dark blond hair and astonishingly white teeth, an asset he must be vain about, Olympia thinks, for he seems to smile a great deal. (And are those really lavender eyes?) Her mother, in hyacinth chiffon, with pearl combs in her hair, seems to be in an animated mood, which sets off but the faintest of alarms in Olympia’s mind, and she imagines in the mind of her father as well; for they have both known such episodes of brilliance and gaiety before and have reason to fear the collapse that sometimes follows. But such is the flickering beauty of the room with its seven diners, and with the candles reflected again and again in the double mirrors over the buffets, and with the moist air moving through the screen, air that hints of such a wealth of nights to follow that Olympia feels rich with their luxury, that she cannot be anything but exhilarated.
    Olympia is greeted and spoken to and queried early in the meal, a mild flurry of attention that she has learned to expect and respond to. When the guests have asked all the obligatory questions, and the fish chowder has been exchanged for escalloped oysters, she will be left to listen to the others, which is the part of the meal she enjoys best.
    She forms quick judgments about the guests. She sees that Zachariah Cote, in his conversation and in his gestures, is too eager to please her father, who has not yet decided whether to publish the poet’s verse. And she finds that this particular display of eagerness, as it inevitably will be under such circumstances, is more pathetic than charming. She prefers the rather gruff demeanor of Rufus Philbrick, in his odd striped suit, with his sharp-tongued replies to her father’s queries. For these in turn produce joviality in her father, since he knows his evening will contain at least a modicum of wit. Olympia’s mother seems to drink a great deal of champagne and not to touch her meal, and periodically Olympia’s father glances over at his wife or lays his fingers briefly on her hand. Olympia knows that he hopes his wife will excuse herself early in the