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will the boy be now? she wonders. And where do he and the woman
go on their walks? Why did the woman have on a black apron?
Olympia recalls the boy s worn brown leather shoes, nearly heart-
breaking in their shabbiness. Hand-me-downs surely, for the boy
cannot have used them so himself.
Great love comes once and one time only, Olympia understands
now. For by definition, there cannot be two such occurrences: The
one great love remains in the memory and on the tongue and in the
eyes of the once beloved and cannot ever be forgotten.
She puts her head in her hands.
Why must love be so punishing?
" " "
A monstrous wind catches the house, and she can feel the wood
shudder in its embrace. With awe, she watches as the wind beats
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along the beach, blowing the tips off the breakers, heaving stray
brush and driftwood and seaweed high into the air. A gull re-
mains motionless over the water, unable to make headway against
the wind, and then is blown backward by a gust. Farther down
the shore, a large piece of tin is lifted off a fishing shack. The
wicker chairs slide along the painted porch floor and hit the rail-
ing with a series of dull thuds. Upstairs, Olympia can hear glass
breaking.
The hurricane pummels the coastline all the way up to Bar Har-
bor. Through the night, Olympia huddles in the kitchen, listening
to the crack of wood, the heaving of the sea, and the high whine of
the wind. Near to the side of the house, a pine tree falls, missing the
cottage by inches, and, once or twice, when the wind is particularly
fierce, Olympia climbs under the kitchen table for safety. She thinks
of Ezra and hopes that he made it in to shore before the storm. No
one out in a boat would survive the seas this night.
From time to time, Olympia walks to the window at the north
side of the house and looks out to the lifesaving cottage. Its bea-
con is lit, and she can hear, intermittently, like Morse code being
sounded from a great instrument, the foghorn from Granite Point.
The wind strains the beams of her own cottage, and Olympia is
sometimes startled by the creaking of the wood, as if the house were
a ship foundering at sea.
By daybreak, parts of the beach have been eroded nearly to the
seawall. Houses have been lifted off their foundations and porches
have been sheared clean from their pilings. Olympia s own front
lawn is littered with debris leaves and branches and, ominously, a
man s oiled jacket. All along the crescent of Fortune s Rocks, cottages
have lost their windows and their roofs. Where the beach has not
been gullied out, it is covered with metal caskets and shingles and
glass and broken wood. Only the sea, as though victorious in some
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unnamed struggle, remains undaunted, its enormous breakers roll-
ing in a stately manner all along the newly drafted shoreline.
Tentatively, people begin to make their way to the beach to survey
the damage. Olympia throws a shawl over her shoulders and steps
out onto the porch. The air is clean and sharp, as though freshly
laundered. She walks to the seawall and looks back at her own cot-
tage, where she sees that a chimney pot has fallen over. But though
she studies her house, her thoughts lie elsewhere, and she wonders,
as indeed she will wonder a thousand times (and it is as if she un-
derstands already that because she will never be free of this particu-
lar worry, she must claim it for her own or go mad with the distance,
with the powerlessness of the distance) what has happened to the
woman and the boy. Doubtless the storm will have had less impact
inland, but can those boardinghouses withstand the terrifically high
winds of a hurricane? And what of the electrical lines? Will there be
fresh water? And is the boy, whose true name Olympia cannot yet
utter, safe?
On the tenth day after the storm, Olympia boards the first trolley
car out of Ely Station for what becomes an arduous journey of an
hour and a half to Ely Falls, three times the length of a normal trip
to the city. All along the route, Olympia and her fellow passengers
are mildly dazed as they survey the wreckage of the storm: telephone
and power lines still down, carriages overturned, and rooftops caved
in by fallen pines whose shallow roots could not hold them upright
in the high winds.
In the wake of the storm, the weather has grown cooler. For the
first time since returning to Fortune s Rocks, Olympia has taken the
wool suits out of her trunks, aired them out on the porch, and hung
them in the shallow closets of several bedrooms. For her trip into Ely
Falls, she picked out this morning her best day suit, a jacket and skirt
of dove wool challis that she likes to wear with a high-necked white
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blouse and velvet tie. Her hat, a plum toque, sits at an angle on her
chignon. Already she is aware, glancing at her fellow travelers on the
trolley, that fashions have changed in the four years she has been
away. Skirts are longer, sleeves are fuller, and altogether the clothing
seems less fussy.
With several other travelers, Olympia alights at the corner of Al-
fred and Washington Streets, where men stand on scaffolds repairing
a roof and reglazing windows. She has read, in the Ely Falls Sentinel,
that seventeen millworkers perished when a spinnery collapsed dur-
ing the hurricane, the owner of the mill unwilling to cancel the
night shift despite repeated pleas from the workers to suspend oper-
ations. Olympia read the list of the dead like a wife examining a list
of war casualties, her eyes skimming quickly over names, looking
only for a single surname. Unlike the mood of the city on Olympia s
previous visit which was, though oppressive with heat, oddly
playful today the city s inhabitants seem solemn, even somber.
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