The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  Farewell, my love

  It wasn’t signed. It didn’t need to be. Nor was it the only one of its kind. There were three other drafts of the same letter, some crumpled, one torn down the middle, none sent.

  Lucy’s heart ached for her mother, but also for the man she had always believed to be her father, for Hans Jungmann, who had loved her mother so long and so devotedly, but always from a distance, never quite able to touch her heart.

  And now Lucy knew why.

  Why had her mother left Harry Pratt? What had he known, almost from the beginning? Why had her mother married Hans Jungmann? How could she have, knowing how she felt about Harry Pratt, particularly if—

  January. Lucy’s eyes flew to the date, riveted on the numbers, curving and elegant, bold in black ink. She had scarcely noticed the date before, too intent on the content of the letter. But there it was. January.

  Lucy had been born in late November. If Harry Pratt had followed through with his resolution, if he had left for parts unknown by the end of January, even if he had seen Lucy’s mother again before he left, there was no way he could be Lucy’s father.

  Lucy felt an unexpected surge of joy, coupled with a weakening rush of tears as a kaleidoscope of memories danced around her, rainbow bright. Her father—truly her father—wiping away her childhood tears, gently painting iodine on a scraped knee, giving her a cookie, reading her a story. The thrill of going for a walk with him, holding carefully to his large hand, the careful courtesy with which he tipped his hat to their neighbors, the joy of being swung up on his large shoulders to pick a peach from the tree in their neighbor’s backyard.

  Vati, Vati, I miss you so.

  She didn’t say it aloud, but her throat vibrated with the words. Lucy felt the sunlight through the skylight warm on her head, like her father’s hand, like a blessing, and knew that he was there with her, would be always.

  With the papers trembling in her hand, Lucy turned away from the fireplace. “John?” Her voice sounded strange in the high-ceilinged room, rusty and hoarse. “I’ve found something.”

  “So have I.” John was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the Chinese cabinet, the bottom drawer open, a pile of yellowing papers on his lap.

  “It’s—” Lucy didn’t know how to begin. Pity for her mother, love for her father, relief and confusion, all warred together. So she just blurted it out, her knuckles white against the yellowing pages. “John—I’m not Harry Pratt’s daughter.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.” John looked up, his eyes meeting Lucy’s. His face had a dazed expression, as he said, “Because I’m pretty sure that Harry Pratt was my father.”

  Twenty-eight

  AUGUST 1944

  Kate

  Danny O’Shea was an older boy in the neighborhood whom I’d grown up with and walked to school with, and I even imagined, when I was very young and didn’t know that I wanted to be a doctor, that he and I might marry one day. Danny joined the Army right after Pearl Harbor and had been killed eight months later at Guadalcanal. Before he’d left that last time, he’d given me my first kiss and made silly promises we hadn’t meant, for a future when the war would be behind us. He’d told me with the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy what he envisioned his life in the Army would be like, sharing with me how heavy all the gear was that he’d have to march and fight with. It had been inconceivable to me then, how any soldier—any person—could manage to fight battles with such a load on their backs.

  But I imagined now, as I navigated through my daily routine, a little of what it must have been like, my knees nearly buckling from the weight of my own burden as I took each step. I kept remembering Danny telling me that a person got used to it. I just had to hope that he was right.

  “Kate.”

  My hand froze on the banister. I’d seen Cooper leave with Caroline an hour before, which was the only reason I’d left the dark privacy of Dr. Greeley’s office. Cooper was leaving today, and I didn’t want to see him, to offer him a cheerful good-bye while Caroline and Dr. Greeley looked on. I didn’t want my mask to crack and reveal my true feelings.

  “Kate,” Cooper said again.

  I braced myself, then turned around to face him, but nothing could prepare me for the way the skin tightened over my bones. He stood on the landing where he’d just exited the elevator, holding his hat and cane, his eyes dark and brooding, and I almost gave in then. But I forced myself to keep hold on the railing, to forbid my feet from taking a step forward.

  “Have you been avoiding me?” he asked, his consonants slipping, his accent more prominent since he’d been spending time with Caroline.

  “No, of course not,” I stammered. “There’s just a lot of paperwork . . .” I stopped, watching as he moved to stand directly in front of me.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m just so busy . . .”

  I was interrupted by three burly orderlies approaching the large bookcase behind where Cooper and I were standing. The corner of the oversized piece of furniture had been protruding into the hallway since the first attempt to move it several weeks before. I wasn’t sure what had precipitated them being there now, but I was grateful for the interruption.

  “Excuse us, Doctor,” the largest man said. “We’ve been instructed to move this piece of furniture down to the lobby.”

  “It’s no problem. We were just finishing up here.”

  Cooper responded by taking my elbow and moving me back toward the elevator to give the men room. He continued to hold on, as if he were afraid that I would escape, as we watched the men grapple with the bookcase and slowly begin their descent down the stairs. I watched in morbid fascination, glad they were at a hospital with readily available medical help should it be required.

  While still listening to the grunts of the men, I looked up at Cooper, determined to shake his hand and give him a brisk good-bye. But his eyes were focused on something behind me, the light in his eyes so strange that I had to turn around to see what it was.

  The removal of the bookcase had created a wider hallway, but it had also laid bare the wall behind it. But the wall wasn’t bare, exactly. A mural eight to ten feet wide and just as high stretched across the plaster, its brilliant colors not dimmed by time because of its protected spot. But that’s not what mesmerized me; not the exquisite artistry of the piece or even the size and scope of it or the fact that the mural had been hidden behind a piece of furniture for decades. I’ve seen this before. Yes, that’s what it was, although I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen it. Only that I recalled every detail, from the glimmering metal of the sword to the look of fear in the dragon’s eye.

  “It’s Saint George slaying the dragon,” Cooper said, his voice almost reverential.

  “Yes,” I said. At least I think I spoke aloud. We were both cautiously moving forward, oddly hesitant to approach, as if the dragon were real and could do us harm.

  Cooper leaned down to where the artist had scrawled his signature. He stared at it for a long time before standing, his brows knitted together. “I don’t understand. I know this artist. The brushstrokes, the use of colors, the . . .” He fought to find the right word. “The movement,” he finished. “It’s undoubtedly his, but that’s not his signature.”

  I moved to stand next to him and studied the name in the bottom right corner. “H. Pratt.” I looked up at Cooper. “Who did you think it was?”

  He shook his head. “Does this look familiar to you? Do you recognize the style? It’s the same as in the sketches, isn’t it? The same artist.” He frowned at the signature. “But I know this artist, and it’s not H. Pratt.”

  I studied the mural for a long time, trying to forget how familiar this particular scene was and focus instead on the artistic style of it. I frowned at the swirl of paint that showed the cerulean sky, and then down toward the way the pigmented
light reflected off the dragon’s scales. My eyes widened as I remembered. “Yes,” I said, recalling all of those art exhibitions my mother had dragged me to when I was a little girl. “Augustus Ravenel.” My voice was breathless, as if holding back the two simple words.

  “Exactly. Augustus Ravenel.” He paused. “My grandfather.”

  “But . . .” I stopped, my own mind yawning open as I realized where I’d seen it before. “My mother had this exact mural on her bedroom wall that her mother, Olive, painted for her. I never saw it, but this is how she described it to me in such detail. It’s almost as if I had actually seen it before.” I stared at the mural, at the signature that seemed right and wrong at the same time as all the pieces in the puzzle slowly circled in my brain, each trying to slot itself into the correct space.

  Our eyes met in mutual understanding. Cooper put his hand on my arm as if to anchor himself. “It would seem that Harry Pratt and Augustus Ravenel are one and the same.”

  I recalled Harry Pratt’s sketches that Cooper had found in the small chest in the attic, the sketches of Olive wearing the ruby necklace, and the air began to thrum between us. “The woman in those sketches, the woman wearing the ruby necklace. She was my grandmother. Her name was Olive.” I paused, wondering how to tell him the rest. “My grandmother . . . ,” I began.

  “And Harry were lovers.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he’d already figured it out.

  I nodded. “But it didn’t end well, I don’t think. Harry disappeared and Olive married my grandfather, a baker named Hans Jungmann.” I touched the spot on my blouse under which the ruby necklace lay. “She never forgot Harry, though. Because she painted this same mural on my mother’s nursery room wall. And she kept this necklace.” I pulled it out of my blouse. “Harry’s sister, Prunella, said my grandmother stole it, but I don’t think that’s the truth. My grandmother cherished it, gave it to her daughter, Lucy. My mother. And she gave it to me.”

  He sent me a piercing look. “Lucy? And what did you say her maiden name was?”

  “Jungmann. But she changed it to Young when she came to work for my father’s law firm. Lucy Young.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, his cheeks noticeably paler. “On my father’s deathbed, he dictated a letter to me to a Lucy Young in New York, to the attention of the law firm of Cromwell, Polk and Moore.” He paused, weighing his words. “It was a love letter, telling Lucy that he’d never stopped loving her or wanting her. That she was the love of his life.”

  “The letter . . . did you send it?”

  Slowly, he shook his head. “I planned to mail it right after his funeral. But I left it on my dressing table and my mother found it and destroyed it. I realized how much my father had hurt her, which is why I never tried to find Lucy on his behalf. It would have been a betrayal to my own mother. I never imagined . . .”

  He stopped, unable to finish, but he didn’t need to. I knew exactly what he was going to say. Something about probabilities and fate, and the vagaries of a chaotic world that had brought us together.

  He looked away, seemingly oblivious to the sounds of the orderlies, the ringing phone and chattering nurses. It was all so removed from us and the small cocoon of time his words had created. He took a step forward, staring at something in the top right corner of the mural. It was a small crowd of people wearing medieval clothing, a dark raincloud painted behind them and making the colors of their garments stand out. “Look,” he said, pointing toward the middle of the cloud, where swirls of the paintbrush seemed to blend the fog and spectators together.

  I leaned forward, too, staring at where he indicated. “What am I supposed to see?” And then I did. Hidden among the group of people and nearly obscured by the gray smokelike fog was a woman. A woman who looked exactly like me, and whose face had been re-created in a small oil miniature and handed down through three generations of men in the same family. I stepped back, my hand pressed against my chest, the solid feel of Cooper behind me.

  “Do you see it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, then stopped, realizing that it wasn’t just the woman he was showing me. Cooper’s fingers traced over her arm toward her hand. “She’s pointing at something.”

  The background of the mural seemed to shift in front of me like an optical illusion, the leaves of trees in the surrounding forest seemingly transforming themselves into something else entirely. Something that looked astonishingly like a square made of painted bricks, a design that resembled a heraldic coat of arms. A design I was very familiar with.

  Without a word Cooper took my arm and propelled me to the elevator, his limp hardly evident. Neither one of us spoke as he slid open the gate and then closed it again before pressing the button for the sixth floor.

  “Cooper, really, this isn’t a good idea. Whatever happened between our grandparents and parents has nothing to do with us, don’t you see?”

  He faced me and I realized that he was angry. But there was something else, too, a look of desperation in his eyes that resembled what I saw in my own reflection when I bothered to study it closely enough. Without warning, he leaned forward and kissed me, his mouth hard and demanding, my head pressed against the wall of the elevator. I told myself that I would have pulled away if I’d had somewhere to move, that I didn’t want him to touch me, to kiss me. But neither thought stopped me from kissing him back.

  The elevator shuddered to a stop, and he lifted his face away from mine, his eyes still dark. He slid open the gate and followed me from the elevator and toward the stairs that led to the seventh floor. I knew without asking that we were headed to the attic room, and I balked, not wanting to be confronted with the memories of the night we’d spent there, of the moonlight mixed with the smell of paint and dust and us.

  But I knew, too, that this was where the bricks Olive pointed to in the mural were, and how neither Cooper nor I could leave it alone until we had all the tarnished pieces of Olive and Harry’s love affair laid open and exposed before us. The only thing I was unsure of was what we were supposed to do once we had all the answers.

  Cooper’s bed had been stripped of its sheets, the brown blanket folded neatly at the bottom and matching the other two empty beds. The room appeared to be more of a dormitory now instead of a room forgotten at the top of the old mansion, a room whose walls contained more than just bricks and mortar. I stood by the wall opposite the window, not looking in that direction so I wouldn’t remember. As if I could block out that night any more than I could forget the color of my own hair.

  Cooper walked toward the bed and placed his hat and cane on top of the blanket. After a quick glance in my direction, he approached the fireplace where three squares had been painted on the bricks in a heraldic design. But the one in the middle was different, displaying Saint George, the red cross over his chest like a beacon marking treasure. Cooper reached out his hand, hesitating only a moment, then gently pressed his fingers against the cross. A cluster of bricks slid out from below the square, revealing a shallow opening.

  Looking back at me, he raised an eyebrow. “I feel like Caesar, fixin’ to cross the Rubicon.”

  I almost laughed at his Southernism but found I was trembling too much to do anything else but watch. I didn’t come forward, choosing instead to look over his shoulder into the dark space within. At first I thought the hole was empty, hoped it was empty. Because then there would be nothing that would bind us together, nothing that would make our good-bye less than permanent.

  But when Cooper reached in and pulled out a stack of paper, I knew that the connection between us that I’d felt the first time I’d seen him was as real and constant as morning following night.

  He sat down on the bed and smoothed his hand over the top sheet of paper, staring at the heavily embossed letterhead. “Pinkerton Detective Agency.” He looked up at me as if it were my decision for him to proceed. But we both knew that we were already on the far bank
of the Rubicon.

  I waited quietly while he bent his head to read. When he was done, he slowly raised his head, his eyes troubled.

  “What does it say?”

  He looked from me to the letter then back again. “Harry hired a detective to find Olive, to make sure she was all right. It says she married Hans Jungmann in 1893. It’s dated end of January, the same month you told me that Harry Pratt disappeared. Which, coincidentally, is right before my grandfather, Augustus Ravenel, went to Cuba.”

  “And changed his name from Harry Pratt.” My legs didn’t feel strong enough to hold me up anymore, and I moved to the bed and sat down next to Cooper, being careful not to touch him. “I think I know why Olive and Harry were separated.”

  Cooper turned to me with a lifted brow.

  “Prunella,” I whispered.

  “Prunella, as in Harry’s sister. My great-aunt Prunella, apparently.”

  I nodded. “When I visited her, she told me that she’d always wanted to see Harry again so she could make amends for something horrible she’d done. Maybe she said something or did something that tore them apart. Something they were both powerless to stop.”

  Cooper nodded slowly. “The timing of it all certainly lends itself to that theory. His sudden disappearance from New York and reappearance in Cuba, and Olive’s marriage all in the same year.” He gave me an odd look. “When was your mother born?”

  I sucked in a quick breath as I found my thoughts wandering down the same dark path. “Not until November of 1893.”

  “Thank God,” he said under his breath.

  I glanced at the other letter still folded on his lap. “What’s that?”

  Laying aside the detective report, he pulled out what appeared to be several attempts at the same letter and then held them between us so we could read them together.