The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  He was silent for a long moment, and I glanced up, thinking he must have gone back to sleep. Instead, his eyes were focused on me with an intensity I was unfamiliar with but from which I couldn’t look away. Quietly, he said, “That’s because I’ve been drawing your likeness since I was old enough to pick up a pen.”

  Afraid he might still be suffering from delirium, I opened my mouth to ask him to explain, but froze as I stared at the wall behind his bed.

  I could debride an infected wound, amputate a limb, and wipe up bloody vomit without batting an eye. I could even flatten a rodent with an iron skillet and not blink. But the one thing I could not abide was a cockroach, most likely stemming from a childhood incident involving one of the six-legged bugs that had fallen into my bathtub while I was in it. And at the moment one of the mahogany-colored insects was currently crawling up the wall behind the captain, its long antennas casting grotesque shadows onto the white wall.

  Before I could think, I screamed.

  Captain Ravenel sat up suddenly, his face paling from the sudden movement of his still-injured leg, then looked at the wall behind him. He snagged a square of gauze from his bedside table, then reached out his hand and cupped it over the cockroach, effectively imprisoning him within his long-fingered fist.

  Utterly humiliated, I wanted to whip out my diploma and tell him that I’d graduated from medical school with honors, that I had replaced my own shoulder in its socket without passing out, and that I thought that people who fainted at the sight of blood shouldn’t be allowed to have children.

  His voice belied the smile behind his words. “Don’t worry, Doctor. The only reason why I didn’t scream is because I’m used to them in Charleston. Except there they’re so big you could saddle them. And they fly.”

  Completely annoyed now with him and myself, I yanked up the wastebasket and brought it to him, hoping the bug was at least dead before he discarded it. He kept his hand by his side so that I had to lean over to give him a better aim.

  “Closer,” he said, his voice weak.

  I turned my head to see him better. “Are you all right?” I asked with concern. Our noses were almost touching.

  “I am now,” he said, lifting his head slightly, then touched his lips to mine.

  I told myself later that it was the surprise of it, the shock of his lips against mine that created a warm light exploding behind my eyes. Or more likely it was from the anger I remembered to feel a split second afterward when I realized what was happening.

  The door flew open and Dr. Greeley stood in the threshold, his balding forehead glistening with sweat, his cold eyes quickly assessing the scenario in front of him.

  “Dr. Schuyler,” he said, his voice full of pompous righteousness. “I’ll see you in my office.”

  Waves of anger and humiliation wafted through me, most of it directed at myself. All of those years of focus and determination possibly erased in one moment of stupid recklessness. I didn’t try to defend myself or explain anything, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference.

  “Dr. Schuyler is entirely innocent, I assure you,” Captain Ravenel said, his soft consonants deceptively sweet. “I’m afraid in my delirium I’ve mistaken her for someone else.”

  Without saying anything or looking at either one of them, I carefully put down the chart on the bedside table, hoping Nurse Hathaway would take the sketch before anybody else could see it, then replaced the wastebasket before leaving the room. Slowly, I walked down the steps, ignoring the elevator so I could delay the inevitable as long as I could. My shoes tapped quietly on the marble circular staircase as I slowly descended to the fifth floor, pausing briefly to view the bas-relief of Saint George slaying the dragon.

  I stared at the frozen pair, wishing for the first time since my father died that I had a knight who would slay my dragons for me. But I’d given up those childish fantasies the day we buried him, along with hair bows and pinafores. I turned on my heel and headed toward Dr. Greeley’s office, Captain Ravenel’s words still echoing in my head. I’ve been drawing your likeness since I was old enough to pick up a pen.

  I paused outside the office door, then took a deep breath before going inside, wondering if my mother had been right and that I should have become an artist after all.

  Eight

  DECEMBER 1892

  Olive

  The greengrocer’s name was Mr. Jungmann, and his face always brightened when Olive walked into his shop on Lexington Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street to place the order for the next day’s vegetables. She liked that. How nice it was, to escape from the House of Disapproval—frowning housekeepers, frowning cooks, frowning Prunella and her frowning mother—and have someone’s face actually brighten when you entered a room.

  Ironic, wasn’t it? All of New York society longed to be invited inside the Pratt mansion, and Olive wanted only to escape from it. And her own father had built the place! Didn’t it belong to her just a little bit, not in a material way but in the way a house always belonged to all those who had lived and loved and suffered in it? As if it had kept behind a small part of your soul.

  “Miss Jones! I was beginning to lose the hope of you.”

  Olive realized she had already entered the shop and was staring at a pyramid of apples. She looked up and tried to return Mr. Jungmann’s wide smile, but failed by at least half an inch. “Good morning, Mr. Jungmann. I had a late start today, I’m afraid. I have Cook’s list right here.” She pulled the paper from her coat pocket and held it out in her mittened hand.

  “Ah, there we are.” He was so hearty and jovial, such a nice big bear of a man, loyal to the consonants of his homeland: each w rendered lovingly as a v, each j softened into a y. (Yovial, she thought.) She always imagined him with a wife and ten red-cheeked children who crawled all over him when he returned home at night (did he live above the shop, or somewhere else?) and checked his pockets for sweets, though of course she never asked him such familiar questions.

  “Cook also wanted to know if you have any peaches. Something’s gone wrong with the trees in the hothouse in Newport, and we haven’t gotten a crate from them in weeks.”

  He studied the list, which seemed much smaller in his enormous paw than it had inside her mitten. “Peaches? Why you want peaches in December?”

  Olive shrugged. “Peaches Melba, I think. It’s all the rage these days. They’re having a dinner party.”

  Mr. Jungmann looked over the top of the list with his bright blue eyes. “When you need these peaches?”

  “Saturday?”

  He folded the paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. “For you, Miss Jones, I will find these peaches. Not for that terrible Valkyrie, Mrs. Jackins!” He shook his finger at the cook, though she was several blocks away. “But for you, Miss Jones, I find peaches in December. I deliver them Saturday morning.”

  “I hope that’s not inconvenient. I’m sure you’d rather spend the time with your family.”

  He spread his hands before her. “What family, Miss Jones? I am a poor bachelor. Is no trouble.”

  Something about the way he said the word bachelor made the blood prickle into her cheeks. “Well, thank you. Mrs. Jackins will appreciate it, I’m sure.”

  “I already tell you. The peaches, they are not for the happiness of Mrs. Jackins.”

  From another man, this might have sounded like an invitation of some kind: an invitation of the improper kind, or at least of the indelicate kind. But Mr. Jungmann had already turned away and was sorting through the potatoes, plucking out the choicest ones and placing them in the slatted wooden box that would be brought in a wagon later that afternoon to the modest delivery entrance at the extreme left-hand corner of the Pratt façade. He didn’t expect any kind of return for his trouble. He was simply providing her with peaches to make her happy.

  “Do you know what you are, Mr. Jungmann?” she said. “You’re a gentleman.” />
  “Bah. Away with you, Miss Jones. You have some chores to do, I think?”

  “Yes. But I do need to bring back a few things for the soup. Do you mind?” She held out her basket.

  “What do you need?”

  He filled the basket and gave her a beautiful rosy-cheeked apple to eat on the way home, and when he handed it to her he peered into her eyes. “Everything is good, Miss Jones? You need something?”

  “No, no. I mean yes. Everything is excellent.”

  “You need to make smile more. That is how to be happy. You smile, you are happy.”

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  He shook his head. “No, no. Smile first, that is how.”

  “I’ll try to remember that, thank you.”

  Outside, however, it was too cold to smile. Olive’s face froze at once in the chill wind blowing down Lexington Avenue from the north. She turned up Sixty-fourth Street, seeking relief, and as she walked along the quiet sidewalk, basket bumping rhythmically against her leg, she considered what Mr. Jungmann had said, and whether you could force happiness on yourself, simply by arranging your mouth in a happy expression.

  And yet, she didn’t feel unhappy, did she? You couldn’t feel unhappy, exactly, when you were as physically busy as Olive was, up and down stairs, making beds and tables and fires, forever cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. You might be frustrated and bothered and exhausted, but that was a different world entirely from the black hole in which she’d existed since she found her father’s body slumped over his desk in the cold January dawn last winter. She had begun climbing out of that hole from the moment she arrived on the service steps of the Pratt mansion—oh, that feeling of resolve, when she had let the knocker fall!—and she hadn’t slipped since.

  So what had Mr. Jungmann seen in her face that had caused him such concern?

  The air was crisp and cold, smelling of smoke. Manhattan always smelled of smoke, even up here, away from the offices and factories, and especially near Fourth Avenue, where the railway cut through, chugging toward New Haven and Boston and points north, filling the air with dirty steam. In the country, the air would smell like snow, white and sharp.

  She crossed Fourth Avenue—no trains passing, thank goodness—and continued up the street. The houses began to enlarge as she left the noisome tracks behind; trees began to sprout up from the neat new pavement. At Madison Avenue, she should have turned right, but instead she continued toward Fifth Avenue and the bare vegetation of Central Park.

  Harry.

  The name slipped free from deep in her mind, where she tried to keep it locked. It was the trees, wasn’t it? The beckoning fingers of the park, where you might almost forget you were a New York housemaid who had no business receiving notes under her door from a scion of one of the city’s most prominent families. Still less keeping the latest note, which had appeared just that morning, tucked in the pocket of her skirt so it could brush unseen against her leg—the opposite leg from the vegetable basket, one leg naughty and the other leg dutiful—as she went about the business of her day.

  You seem to think I am some kind of satyr. I assure you I am not. I have no designs on you, only an admiration that borders on veneration. Can you please have a little pity for me? At least return my glance when we pass in the hallway, so I know I still exist for you. A smile, I suppose, is too much to ask for, though I admit I harbor a secret hope that you are only saving one for Christmas. Listen to me. I am an idiot. I have never written notes like this before, and I’m afraid I don’t know how it’s done. I have been working on my sketch of you, but I can’t seem to get the way of your eyes anymore. You are slipping away, and I don’t know what to do. Except hope.

  Not that she had memorized it, or any of the others. Not that she could picture his quick handwriting, or hear the sound of Harry Pratt’s voice as he ate with the family in the massive paneled dining room a few yards away from her, a world away from her.

  Not that she remembered each time they had passed in the hallway: the flash of the electric light on his wheat-colored hair, the brightening of his face—like Mr. Jungmann, only lit by a thousand more watts—and the glimpse of his smile before she looked down at the rug and hurried on, and on, and on, usually forgetting where she was going.

  Hoping he would touch her arm and stop her.

  Praying to God that he would not.

  He never did, and sometimes she wondered if she had imagined the whole thing: the quiet star-filled night in the room at the top of the stairs, the pencil that moved in eager little jerks, the expression on Harry’s face, the things he had said. The way he had looked at her, as if she were a goddess instead of a housemaid. An angel, instead of a bitter young woman contemplating a sordid revenge on the family under whose roof she lived.

  But it was better this way, wasn’t it? Better that she pretended it hadn’t happened. Better that the door to the room upstairs remained shut, because what beckoned beyond it—she had a vague impression of colors and vibrancy and imagination and laughter, something extraordinary and never ending—was nothing more than a fairy tale. Medieval allegory, that was what Harry called it, but what was medieval allegory except a fairy tale?

  The kind of fairy tale her father used to read to her at night, before he died.

  Olive crossed Fifth Avenue, dodging a pair of clattering half-empty omnibuses, and turned to walk northward with the park at her side. The basket was heavy now, but she didn’t care. She gazed over the wall and across the brown thicket of winter trees, the distant towers of Belvedere Castle. Above them, the sky was gray, contemplating snow. For a moment, she imagined walking through that empty demi-wilderness next to Harry, not saying anything, simply existing in a tender equilibrium in which there were no such things as housemaids and mansions and—

  “Olive.”

  A figure rose from the bench ahead, and Olive had just enough time to gasp before Harry Pratt appeared before her under a peaked wool cap, smiling and woeful at once, his jaw square against the folds of his India cashmere scarf, looking so much like he had in her imagination that she hovered, for an instant, in a kind of delicious netherworld of hope. A medieval allegory.

  “Mr. Pratt! What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you. Freezing to death.”

  “But that’s ridiculous.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it? You haven’t left me any choice, however.” He slapped his gloved hands together. “Haven’t you read my notes?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’m going to be late.”

  He laid his hand on her elbow. “Please, Olive. Only a moment. We’ll go into the park, if you like.”

  She glanced at the world to her left, and back at Harry’s pleading face.

  “Say yes,” he whispered, lifting the basket from the crook of her elbow.

  She heard herself break in two. “Just for a minute.”

  What a smile he gave her, what a reward for giving in. He held her basket with one hand and took her arm with the other, and they slipped through the gap in the wall and into the artificial urban forest, all by themselves, and Olive thought, This is so foolish. What am I doing?

  Harry said, “You’re going to model for me again.”

  “What?”

  “You must. I can’t sleep. I’ve never had so many ideas, never been so ready to work. Do you know what that’s like? As if my fingers and my brain are going to burst. Every time I see you, it all spreads in front of me with so much clarity, this perfect vision of what I have to paint. What I was meant to paint, what I was put on this earth to create. And then you disappear, and it’s gone. No, worse. It’s there, like a dream when you’ve just woken up, and you can’t quite touch it.”

  He stopped to catch his breath, as if he’d been keeping the words at bay for too long, and they had come out of him too quickly. His arm was snug around her elbow
. He smelled a little bit like the house itself, of wood and smoke but also soap, that same intimate scent that had drawn her in a week ago. She turned her face away, but it was too late. Her ribs hurt. Of all the stupid things, to be in love with the smell of soap.

  “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Go ahead and pretend you don’t feel it.”

  “I don’t feel anything at all, except a big heap of admiration for your technique. Tell me, how many housemaids have you lured in this way?”

  He stopped in the path and set down the basket and turned toward her. His white breath curled around hers, and his cheekbones were stained the most edible shade of apple pink. “None.”

  “Well, you sound like an expert.”

  Harry was frowning down at her, in such a way that even the most cynical and sensible girl in the world would want to smooth away the furrow in his brow, to push back the lock of hair on his forehead and tuck it under his cap. To let him do whatever he wanted to her.

  Until the next girl turned up.

  “All right,” he said. “Fair enough. I know I sound like an idiot. I’ll take you back to the house, and we can pretend we’ve never met before. If that’s what makes you feel better, Olive. If that’s what will make you happy. I guess, if we do, I’m only back where I was a week ago, all restless and frustrated, wanting to just get drunk and forget about everything. Thinking there was no point in anything, that I was all by myself in the middle of a wilderness. But just tell me one thing, Olive. Give me one little word.”

  “What word is that?”

  “Just that you felt it, too, even if it was only an instant. Tell me I wasn’t alone up there, Olive. God knows I’m sick to death of being alone in a crowded room.”

  She picked up her basket and turned away, back up the path toward the gap in the wall on Fifth Avenue. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She started walking. “Because you won’t leave it at that, will you? You’ll want me to come up and pose for you again, and you won’t stop until I do, and it will ruin me.”