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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 to their teaching duties, it is hoped that the grad-
uates might also function as enlightened and Christian models for
girls all over the world. It is a measure of Olympia s disassociation
from life then that she regards such a prospect with equanimity: She
is neither fearful of nor enthusiastic about further exile, all locations
other than the Fortune s Rocks of her memories being a matter of
similar indifference.
At the seminary, Olympia studies Latin and geography, mathe-
matics and biology, and other subjects with extra courses in com-
position, calisthenics, vocal music, dressmaking, and household
husbandry. The bent is practical; true scholars are the exception. Be-
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cause neither the curriculum nor its purveyors are particularly in-
timidating, 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 ho-
tels 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 un-
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adorned solace, where she can sit upon its narrow bed and gaze at
the fawn wall opposite and see faces or imagine scenes or recall cer-
tain 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, when she knows
him, in his late thirties, reminds her of her father as he was before
the catastrophe, and this causes her to be fond of him. Mr. Benton
and Olympia speak evenly, in measured tones, of anatomy and
platelets and the circuitry of the brain, and if he senses a reserve in
her that hides a wound, so does she suspect a story behind his pale
facade: Perhaps the woman in the photograph is not his wife after
all. They talk of life in the metaphors of cells and species, a language
that permits no discursions into matters of the heart, though the
physical heart itself is dissected often enough. And in this way, she
thinks, they are kindred spirits. In later years, she will often think of
writing to the man; but then she should have to tell him of her life
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anita shreve
and employ a vocabulary that would be as foreign to those twilit af-
ternoons as Chinese or Urdu, and so she does not.
As for her actual father, whom Olympia sees only at Christmas-
time and summer vacations, the journey being too long for the brief
holidays of Thanksgiving and Easter, he has resumed some of his
former life, though the glitter has gone out of it, rather like a ring
that has lost its diamond: Though the setting remains sturdy, it is in-
complete, with its gaping hole. He does occasionally write to her.
I have reservations about your choice of biology as a course of study. It
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