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your journey?
I have prided myself as well in having an instinctive under-
standing of physical matters, when in fact I did not have the
faintest comprehension, not the faintest. I thought I knew myself
well my habits have always been regular but I find today
that I am a stranger to myself, foreign. How placid I used to be,
how smug. . . .
How uncommon everything about you is to me. You know
much already about how to give pleasure to another, and I think to
yourself, which is a quality that is not true of Catherine. Despite
her love for me and her desire to please others, she does not know
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how to please herself. This is not a situation which distresses
Catherine much, I think. When such a thing is a given, one knows
not what one misses. . . . But I do not think I realized until today
how very important a woman s pleasure is to a man s (and how the
obverse, of course, must also be true).
You must not regret what you have done, Olympia. You must
not feel shame. And I sense indeed, this is one of the things that
so astound me about you that you do not, that you will not.
Not in this. Perhaps in other things, but not in this. Is this self-
deception on my part, wishful thinking? I sincerely believe not. I
think you understand that which you do. Or am I so deluded as to
see only what I wish to see? To wish, and therefore to believe, you
to be more mature than your years, to possess a physical under-
standing that eludes so many women their entire lives?
(I do not mean to suggest here that you were thinking of your
own pleasure today or even that our coming together gave you
pleasure, though you will one day feel such physical joy; of this I
am certain.)
Forgive me, Olympia. Forgive me for taking from you what is
not mine to have.
How rash this all is. How dangerous.
I met Catherine in the second year of my practice. I was much
taken with her inner repose and her tenderness. Her father is a
minister of the Methodist faith, a man of modest means, though
learned and likable, a man whose approval meant something to me.
(And, God, how this man would despise me now, if he knew! There
is between men, between father and suitor, an understanding of
certain aspects of a man s life that cannot be acknowledged outright,
and certainly not in the presence of the woman; and so there must
be, between the men, a sense of trust, of belief that the daughter
who will one day become the wife will not be harmed in any way.
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fortune s rocks
And though unspoken, it is a kind of sacred trust. I had this with
Catherine s father and felt it necessary to honor. And now I experi-
ence the greatest anguish at having betrayed that trust.)
I cannot write about this.
I meant to describe to you, you to whom I wish to tell
everything, how it was I came to love Catherine, to want her to be
my wife. I had occasion to observe her often in the role of caretaker
to her nieces, whose mother, Gertrude, had died at an early age
from tuberculosis. I admired the way Catherine was with the chil-
dren, and I saw she would be an excellent mother to her own. You
will think this opportunistic, and I fancy it was; but she, too, must
have thought me a good prospect as well, for I do not think she
loved me in any grand way when we married rather in a cheer-
ful and pleasant way, which makes for a good wife and a good
marriage. And I hope I have not been a disappointment to her.
(Although I shall be now. I shall wish her you. Every minute.
And for this reason, as well as for the secret in my heart, I dread her
return on Friday evening. I am not of a nature to enjoy deceit.)
Why, I ask myself, is passion, when it occurs in circumstances
outside of marriage, so absolutely wrong? This is a question that
vexes me. How can something that feels so true and honest and
pure, which is how I must describe my feelings for you, and I do
declare them love, which I had not thought possible after so short a
time (and how deluded I was again), be so ugly as to cause such
pain? And more vexing still, have no happy conclusion? None . . .
None . . .
I cannot deny that I have known Catherine in all the ways pos-
sible to a man and that she has been generous. So why why?
has this not been enough? Why? I seek a rational answer when rea-
son is not wanted. I seek a scientific answer where science is not
invited.
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Or is it possible that such a union as I have begun now with
you has for its origins a science of its own? Its own physical laws
and formulae? Might we one day be able to detect this blinding
thing called passion and quantify it and thus save ourselves from
this helpless agony?
And yet, could I wish for that? Could I, in truth, wish this ela-
tion, this mystery, quantified and thus tamed?
I must stop now, for these are all delusions, dangerous delusions
which exhaust me.
I am not a writer, but a man of medicine, infected with an ill-
ness so subversive, the patient wishes not for his own cure.
Olympia drops the pages of the letter onto the floor. She covers her
face with the skirt of her dress. She sits in that posture for some time.
Never has she read such a letter. Never. Nor understood so well its
meaning, nor felt that she might, apart from its specific history, have
written it herself.
She releases her skirt. With an impatient tug, she unties the sashes
of her bonnet.
My God, she thinks. What have we done?
There can be no doubt now that she has set in motion a series of
events that cannot be recalled, that she has trespassed unforgivably
upon a man and his family, upon a father s trust and a woman s
kindness. The only remedy is to cause Haskell to forget her, so as to
blunt the edges of this madness. A derangement she herself feels and
for which she must now hold herself accountable.
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