The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  She grinned broadly. “Because I want to be you. You’re a fine doctor, one of the best I’ve worked with. You know who you are and what you want, and you never give anybody else permission to treat you like you’re less than who you are.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I stood and gathered the sketches. I needed to speak with Cooper, to tell him about the necklace, about how my grandmother had been a maid in this building. Perhaps we would be able to figure out how the miniature came to be in his grandfather’s possession. I might even tell him that my grandmother was a thief. But I would not allow him to stand too close, and I could not allow myself to want him to.

  I smiled at the nurse. “It’s good to hear, even when I’m not so sure if I’ve made the right choices.”

  She opened the door. “Well, that’s the thing about choices, isn’t it? There are always more to make. I’ve never seen a street where you couldn’t cross to the other side.”

  She smiled again, then headed out into the corridor, her feet tapping briskly against the marble. I’d made it out the door and was shutting it behind me when Dr. Greeley and Cooper emerged from another office down the hall. It was too late to return to the office or run down the stairs. Instead, I held the sketches behind my back and stood where I was while I waited for them to approach, much as I imagined a small woodland animal waited in the middle of a road, staring at oncoming headlights.

  I stared at the small cleft in Cooper’s chin, unable to meet his, eyes. “Good afternoon, Captain. I hope you’re well.”

  “Very,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

  I felt myself coloring and my gaze jerked up to meet his, and I immediately regretted it. Everything I was feeling—the euphoria, the loss, the regret—was mirrored in his eyes.

  Dr. Greeley sounded almost gleeful. “The captain is doing so well that I’ve just completed his final exam and am pronouncing him fit enough for discharge.”

  Cooper cleared his throat. “Caroline and I are taking a train to Charleston tomorrow afternoon.”

  I almost said that it was too soon, that I needed to talk to him about the sketches, and the photo in Prunella’s scrapbook, and how I’d suddenly realized why I thought Harry Pratt looked so familiar. But I couldn’t, of course. It was too late. I needed to go, needed to get away as quickly as I could before I shattered into so many pieces that I could never put myself together again.

  “That’s wonderful news,” I said to the cleft in his chin, still unable to meet his eyes. The color of winter grass. I remembered thinking that the first time I’d seen him, and how now it seemed that I had seen them before, had always known him.

  “Good-bye, then,” I said, spinning on my heel and racing toward the steps before I made a fool of myself. I headed outside onto the pavement and into the hot sunshine, wanting to feel anything except the sharp sting of regret that filled the cavity in my chest where my heart had once been.

  Twenty-six

  NEW YEAR’S DAY 1893

  Olive

  All her life, Olive had wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new. When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again—like death, she supposed—and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future—1893, imagine that!—became your present reality.

  But Olive was an early riser by habit and had never managed to keep her eyes open past eleven o’clock. Since the age of nineteen, when her parents had first let her stay up in the parlor, she had always woken on the settee at two or three o’clock, covered by a kindly blanket and a thick haze of bemused disappointment.

  Until tonight. Like the rest of her life, New Year’s Eve had now irreparably altered, and Olive lay wide awake as the clock struck midnight and the entire house seemed to shudder with the celebration far below, in the magnificent second-floor drawing room, where everybody else in the world had gathered, except Olive and Harry.

  Harry, who lay against her now, the long shanks of his body resting heavily alongside hers, his breath stirring her hair. She thought he was asleep. They had made love swiftly, zealously, reaching a roaring climax within minutes of tumbling through the attic door, and then he had gone mortally quiet, so that she had listened for the thump of his heart to make sure he was still alive.

  “Happy New Year,” she whispered, into the air that seemed to shiver under the weight of the new numbers, the new future that inhabited the room with them. The skylight soared directly above, each pane reflecting a faint image of their entangled nakedness. A hundred Harrys, a hundred Olives, brought together under the starry new night.

  But Harry didn’t answer. As she suspected, he had fallen asleep.

  The minutes passed; the hours bled away. Harry slept abundantly, a deep and contented unconsciousness for which she envied him. Or did she? Maybe it was better not to sleep. Maybe it was better not to miss a single moment of this, of Harry’s warm body united with hers.

  She wore nothing at all except the necklace. That was how Harry liked her best, without any clothes at all: not because he was lascivious—or maybe not only because he was lascivious—but because he hated to have anything come between his eyes and her skin, between his skin and her skin. Only the necklace, the central stone of which had slipped down the side of her neck and lay now on the cushion beneath, just touching the top of her collar. She imagined it glittering there, priceless and memorable, the token of Harry’s love.

  Just like the earrings on her mother’s ears.

  Olive’s father had loved her mother—of course he had—but Olive had always known that her father had a boundless capacity for love, a talent for it. His heart was so large and ambitious. And he had been paid a thousand dollars on the first of December, and he had gone to a jeweler and seen a splendid set of rubies—Olive could picture it all, could actually see her father glowing with delight at all the beauty laid out before him—and he bought that set on an impulse with those thousand dollars, in the full and infinite optimism of his love.

  A pair of ruby earrings for his beloved wife.

  A matching necklace for his lover.

  His lover. Mrs. Henry August Pratt, the wife of his employer.

  The truth. It had been clawing for freedom at the back of Olive’s head, as some sensible and logical part of her brain had put all the pieces together, one by one: what she knew of her father, what she knew of the Pratts. The argument after Miss Prunella’s debut, one year ago. The necklace that Mrs. Pratt had given tearfully afterward to her favorite son. (It was given to her in love, Harry said, when everyone knew that couples like the Pratts didn’t love each other, not really. Love and marriage were two entirely different objects to the Pratts, requiring two entirely different partners.) And then, the day after that, the angry word REFUSED on the final invoice for services rendered.

  Prunella’s sneering voice: He stole something; that’s for sure.

  And now the truth broke free at last, floating magically around Olive’s head, bumping up against the sides of her skull.

  She hadn’t seen her mother since Christmas Day. There was too much to do: readying the great house for the New Year’s Eve ball, engaging in a passionate love affair under the noses of her employers. The fairyland she had inhabited this past week did not allow visits to narrow, shabby brownstone houses on the wrong side of the Fourth Avenue railroad tracks.

  But Mrs. Van Alan would be expecting her to visit today. She would be expecting Olive to knock on the door in the early afternoon, and she would probably contrive to have that dear, respectable, dependable Mr. Jungmann in the parlor with her. Just paying a call, Olive. Wasn’t that nice of him?

  What would Mrs. Van Alan do if Olive didn’t walk through that door, after all? If she received a note instead, explaining that Olive had run off to Italy to live in sin and sunshine with one of the Pra
tt boys. If, a few days later, Miss Prunella Pratt took her revenge for the whole affair, either by anonymous message or in person, and Mrs. Van Alan would know that her precious earrings were only half of a matched set.

  We’ll take her with us, Harry had said, but that was ridiculous, a dear and ridiculous fantasy nearly as impossible as loving each other in the first place. Her mother would never agree, for one thing—run off to Italy with your lover, indeed!—and for another, how could such a project end in anything else than disaster? Inevitably life would take hold. Inevitably there would be babies and bills and arguments. Inevitably Harry would find out who she really was—Prunella would see to that—and the rosy glow with which he perceived her would sharpen to an ordinary harsh daylight, until she stood before him as she really was, and he would no longer adore her.

  And dear Harry, he was so good and true that maybe he wouldn’t leave her, not after she had given everything up for him. He would feel some responsibility for the mistress he no longer loved, for the children he had recklessly fathered. But he would regret his youthful impulse, wouldn’t he? When she stood exposed before him, the real Olive, in all her human flaws. And she couldn’t bear that, never, to stand before him and see the disappointment in his eyes. Disappointment, where until now she had seen only love: love of the purest possible distillation.

  No. She wanted to remember him like this, exactly as he was now, sated and trustful in her arms.

  Oh, but it had been beautiful while it lasted, hadn’t it? She lifted her hand and sifted Harry’s hair around her fingers, his golden waves that she loved. She stared and stared at the skylight, and the ghostly reflection of the two of them together, enrobed in each other. She had known pleasure, and she had known what it was to be fully and perfectly united with another human being, and surely that was enough to last a lifetime. Surely that was more than most people ever knew.

  She was lucky, really.

  At some point, the light began to stir below the unseen horizon.

  Olive lifted away the heavy arm that draped across her middle and slipped carefully out from under Harry’s body. He stirred. “Come back,” he said, reaching for her hand.

  “I have to go back, Harry. It’s almost dawn.”

  “’S all right.” He was still half-asleep. “’S New Year’s Day. No one’s awake.”

  “Cook will be awake.”

  He tugged on her hand. “Come back. Just another moment.”

  She almost obeyed him. God help her, she almost gave in. But crawling back into Harry’s embrace meant making love to him again, as inevitably as light poured from the sun, and she couldn’t do that to him. It would be like telling him a lie, and she didn’t want to end it with a lie.

  She bent down and kissed his forehead instead. “Go back to sleep.”

  Harry closed his eyes, and his hand fell back into the blankets.

  Olive’s body was exhausted, aching, but her mind remained painfully alert. She gathered up her scattered garments and put them on again, one by one, struggling a little with the corset, even though it was designed for a woman in service, who had no servant of her own. For women like her. She pinned her hair back in its usual sedate knot, but she shoved her white cap in the pocket of her pinafore apron.

  When she was done, when there was not a single excuse for remaining, she stood by the door and allowed her gaze to travel along the brick walls, along the floor stacked with canvases, to the easel, to the drawings and paintings leaning against every possible vertical surface, to the careless bits and pieces of the artist’s trade strewn about. (She had tried to tidy it up for him once, but he had only laughed and told her to stop, because he wouldn’t be able to find anything if she put it all away.) Her gaze fell at last on the unfinished study for his mural, the one of Saint George, every line of which was sewn into her memory, and for an instant, she saw it as a stranger might: a visitor off the street outside, unfamiliar with the artist and his studio and his work. She thought, in wonder, My God, he has such an immense talent, such a boundless imagination. And her chest hurt, because she saw his future spreading out before him, grand and ambitious and full of color, and she had no place in it.

  She turned away, without looking at the man sprawled over the cushions near the dressing screen, his beautiful limbs covered by blankets that smelled faintly of turpentine and human love.

  The pain in her chest was already too great to bear.

  Harry was right: nobody stirred in the great house as she crept down to the nunnery and changed into an ordinary dress, shivering as the chill air of her bedroom struck her bare arms. Outside the small window, Manhattan lay in cold and dirty quadrangles, shrouded in smoke from a million coal fires, so that you couldn’t tell who was rich and who was poor. Which block contained a single breathtaking Beaux Arts mansion and which contained a row of cramped and narrow brownstones. Sprawling, striving, charcoal-dusted Manhattan. How she hated it. How she loved it.

  She gathered up her petty belongings and put them into the small valise with which she had arrived here, two months ago, on a November morning that now seemed like another lifetime. She settled her threadbare wool coat over her back and wrapped her muffler over the collar, and still she shivered a little. Maybe the cold wasn’t on the outside, after all.

  As she slipped down the staircase, she caught sight of the handsome Louis Quatorze commode that stood near the study door, and she paused. The empty wineglass had already been removed by some industrious housemaid. Poor Prunella, she thought, and the words surprised her. Poor Prunella? But it was true. The fury in Olive’s heart last night had ebbed into pity. Poor Prunella, trapped in her pretty gilded body, behind her pretty gilded face, with no way to break free from herself. No possibility of finding happiness, even for a day, even for a single night. No possibility of redemption.

  Olive had come to a stop, standing there in the landing, staring at the priceless piece of furniture before her. The rich golden detail was almost invisible in the smoky dawn that filtered from the dome at the top of the staircase. How perfectly silent the house lay! Each chair and beam and tendon, each square of marble and inch of plaster, seemed to hold its breath, as if waiting for some extraordinary turn of destiny.

  Another thought came to her through the stillness: that it was in her power, just now, to perform an act of grace.

  The study door was closed, but Olive opened it without hesitation. She was surprised to see that the room had not been attended to; each paper lay exactly where she had left it last night. She arranged everything back in its neat leather portfolio and put the portfolio back in its place, and when she was done, and the desk was tidy once more, she opened the topmost drawer with her key and took out a sheet of fine ecru stationery and a black fountain pen.

  If a man is wise, he will sell his assets in the P&R at the earliest opportunity.

  From a Well-Wisher

  She left the paper on the desk, in the center of the leather blotter.

  As Olive opened the small service door in the basement, then climbed up the iron staircase to the street, she heard sounds of life at last. A commotion was taking place on the street outside, a most untoward commotion, involving a delivery wagon and a number of men in a high state of furor. They were carrying something from the back of the wagon, long and thick and wrapped in blankets, and as Olive paused in astonishment next to the small iron gate, a head lolled to the side from one end of the bundle, blond-haired and bloodstained, and she realized that it belonged to Gus Pratt.

  “Why, what’s happened?” she exclaimed, and one of the men turned and spoke in an Irish lilt.

  “Got himself in a wee bit of a brawl, didn’t he, poor bugger. Knocked on the old head.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Only just, miss.”

  Two of the men began to pound on the great double door, while the others hoisted Gus on their shoulders, in the manner of pallbearers. Ol
ive clutched her valise and stared at Gus’s senseless head, and she thought, So this is what the house was waiting for.

  She stood there until the door opened at last, and a cry sounded from within. The men hustled Gus inside, and the door slammed behind them, echoing down the empty street, into the dawn of the New Year.

  Twenty-seven

  JULY 1920

  Lucy

  “Young!”

  It was Dottie, one of the other residents, shouting through Lucy’s door. The door was closed, but the wood was thin, not like the thick oak of the doors downstairs.

  Lucy cracked the door open. “Yes?”

  She didn’t much like Dottie, who had a rude laugh and a habit of leaving her stockings hanging in the bathroom.

  “Gentleman caller to see you,” said Dottie. She jerked a thumb toward the stairs. “With Matron.”

  Lucy started to close the door. “I’ll be right down.”

  “Well, la-di-da,” said Dottie, and flounced off in a wave of scent.

  With trepidation, Lucy pinned on her collar, straightened her cuffs, anchored the pins that held up her hair in a low knot on the back of her neck. There was something about the way Dottie had said gentleman . . . a leer and a hint of envy. Philip had promised to give her time, but Philip was Philip and accustomed to being granted his every whim.

  Was that what she was? A whim? Lucy’s fingers went automatically to the chain around her throat. Much, she suspected, as her mother had been to Harry Pratt.

  Philip had offered her answers, but she wasn’t sure, now, that she wanted those answers. Or the price she would have to pay for them.