The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  Mrs. Keane would then crinkle her brow in suspicion and take perhaps a closer look at Olive’s well-tended face and soft hands, her careful voice and quick eyes, and that was the last thing Olive needed.

  So the lock remained on its guard, and the row of identical little rooms on the sixth floor of the Pratt mansion on Sixty-ninth Street remained about as pregnable to the base male appetite as Miss Ellis’s Academy for Young Ladies, where Olive had been sent for her education in a lifetime lived long ago. Then as now, Olive spent those dark hours between lockdown and sleep plotting her escape, like a cat brooding in a window. She counted the minutes that passed since the careful click of Mrs. Keane’s shoes had receded down the stairs and out of hearing. She listened to the creak of bedsprings as her fellow housemaids tossed themselves to sleep. She fought the inevitable tide of languor that stole over her like a kind of drunkenness—yes, that was it!—she was plain stone drunk on the long day’s labor, scrubbing and polishing and making beds and fetching, fetching, fetching, on the double, up and down the enormous marble staircase that wound past seven floors to the stained glass dome at the top of the mansion. The temptation of sleep was like the temptation of oxygen.

  So tempting, in fact, that she had given in the previous four nights. She had woken up bemused and defeated to the unlocking of the vestibule door and the brisk summons from Mrs. Keane.

  Olive slid one hand across her body, under the blanket, and pinched her opposite arm, from shoulder to elbow, until the tears started out from her eyes and her mind sprang into a fragile alertness.

  The bedsprings were quiet now. The house was quiet, too, so quiet Olive could now pick out the few outside noises: the hum of a gentle rain against the glass dome, a distant argument in someone’s garden. The Pratt mansion stood in a residential street, far from the hurly-burly of downtown, but there seemed to be more noise every day, more commerce, and if Olive lay absolutely still, she could feel the creep of the metropolis reaching the Pratt doorstep, reaching rapaciously all the way to the tip of Manhattan island and beyond. New York was a boomtown, New York was where everybody lived or wanted to live, and its lust for fashionable new buildings—unlike the base male appetites—couldn’t be contained by any old lock on a vestibule door. Already more superb houses were rising around the Pratt mansion, which itself was only a year old, and which stood on land that had formed part of James Lenox’s farm only a decade or so before that. Poor Mr. Lenox: Even before he sold his land in building lots, it had appeared on maps with the proposed grid of streets overlaid eagerly on its hilly fields, a foregone conclusion, the ambitious blueprint for a Manhattan paved over in orderly rectangles of houses and shops.

  It was a good time to be a builder in Manhattan. It was a good time to be an architect, or so Olive’s father had believed, in that lifetime ago. A year ago.

  Many minutes had now passed since the last bedspring had squeaked, since the last pipe had trickled and groaned. The floorboards were still too new to creak. Olive pinched herself again, waited another five minutes, and rose so carefully from her bed that she didn’t disturb a single coil.

  Her flannel dressing gown lay over the wooden chair. She slid her feet into her slippers and eased the robe over her shoulders and arms.

  Mrs. Keane was right: The Pratt family housemaids weren’t locked in. Olive’s own father had, toward the dusty end of construction, insisted that the newly hung vestibule door should operate a dead bolt from the inside, because—my God!—think of the plight of the poor housemaids if, heaven forbid, a fire should tear through the house in the middle of the night! The scandal would be enormous, the headlines thick and torrid and accusatory. They would brand Mr. Henry August Pratt a heartless slayer of the innocent lower classes, a Dickensian villain of the worst sort: in short, a real prat. Possibly he might face criminal charges. So, thanks to her father’s indignant intervention, the dead bolt lifted and the new brass knob turned easily under Olive’s hand, and before she closed the door again she slid her Bible into the crack between portal and frame, a trick she’d learned at Miss Ellis’s.

  Outside the housemaids’ corridor, the air was almost fresh. The grand staircase, winding like a great marble ribbon up the center of the house, had been built not so much for ornamentation, Olive’s father had told her, running his finger along the neat architectural drawings before them, though ornamentation—eye-watering, breath-snatching, jaw-weakening—drove Mr. Pratt’s approval of the design. That thick vertical column of empty space, soaring into the dome, created a vital circulation of healthful air. No cramped and stuffy corridors, no atmosphere allowed to fester in place. In the summer, when the vents were opened and the rising hot molecules were allowed to escape harmlessly into the Manhattan sky, why, you might almost call it bearable. You might not even want to flee to your cottage in Newport or East Hampton or Rumson.

  But that, reflected Olive, as she turned the corner and found the back staircase with her foot, just in time to avoid tumbling down it, had been her father’s problem all along. He hadn’t understood that, to men like Mr. Pratt, the healthful aspects of his beautiful soaring staircase didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Mr. Pratt and his wife and children could stay in Manhattan in the summer, instead of spending money on an entirely different mansion in an entirely different town. The point was to show off, to demonstrate to your wealthy friends that—oh, yes—you could afford the finest, too. Even if you couldn’t, really, or wouldn’t. Even if you refused payment to your architect, after taking up two years of his undivided professional time, just because you could. Just because you’d been clever enough to seal your contract on a handshake and nothing else. A gentleman’s agreement.

  Now, that was a laugh, Olive thought. Mr. Henry August Pratt, a gentleman.

  The lights were out, and Olive didn’t dare light the candle she held in her left hand as she navigated the narrow little staircase, the poor cousin of the one so impressively occupying the center of the house. No, this was Olive’s staircase, the service stairs, plain and honest, her new lot in life, and anyway it got her where she wanted to go, didn’t it? Utility, that was the point. She could slip through quite unnoticed this way, without making any noise, without stirring the tremendous column of healthful air that fed into all the principal rooms of the Pratt mansion. She could enter Mr. Henry August Pratt’s august library without anyone knowing at all.

  Still, her pulse slammed against her throat as she pushed open the heavy door. She felt like a thief, even though she knew she was right. She was only correcting a great wrong; she was fighting for her father’s justice, since he could no longer fight for himself. The real thief, she told herself, as her shaking fingers found the small box of safety matches in the pocket of her dressing gown, as she tried and failed to strike one alight against the edge of the box, was Mr. Pratt.

  At last the tip of the match burst into light. The crisp sound of the flare, the acrid saltpeter scent, struck Olive’s senses so forcibly that she nearly gasped, certain that everyone in the house would hear and smell them, too. Her blood felt like ice as it pumped along the arteries of her body, down her limbs, up to her head, making her dizzy. My God, she was actually here. Actually standing here in Mr. Pratt’s library, five feet away from his massive desk, holding a guilty candle in the middle of the night.

  She had better get to it, hadn’t she?

  But where did one begin to find written evidence of a professional relationship that had never been properly formalized? Just send me the bill, Mr. Pratt had said indulgently, and her father had sent the bill, and it hadn’t been paid. Had Mr. Pratt saved that bill? And if he had, was it proof enough that her father had been cheated of his rightful fees?

  That Mr. Pratt had, by cheating her father, effectively destroyed his career, because who would employ an architect who gave such unsatisfactory service that his client wouldn’t pay the bill? And who would employ an architect who dared to make any trouble about those unpa
id bills?

  That Mr. Pratt had, by destroying his career, effectively destroyed his life, because if her father wasn’t an architect, he was nothing, a negation, an invisible column of empty space for whom no one was willing to pay?

  Olive realized she was trembling, that the match had nearly gone out. She whipped the candle under the flame. The wick caught instantly, and she dropped the match onto the rug just as it singed her fingers.

  She held still for a moment, while the taper flickered uncertainly in her hand. The room looked different by night, forbidding, almost Gothic in the ominous dim wavering of the candle flame. There were the bookcases she had polished so industriously that afternoon; there were the deep armchairs and the leather Chesterfield sofa near the fireplace. There was the liquor cabinet, the enormous sash windows now enclosed by damask curtains, the paneled walls, and the long-necked brass floor lamps, one poised next to each armchair.

  And the desk.

  Of course, the huge brown desk, supported by curved legs and feet in the shape of lions’ paws, covered by a red baize blotter and a small Chinese lamp and a sleek black enamel fountain pen perched in its sleek black enamel holder at the very top and center.

  Olive picked up the spent match, placed it in the pocket of her dressing gown, and stepped carefully across the rug and around the corner of the desk, where the drawers lined up on either side of an immense leather chair. (Mr. Pratt was a large man to begin with, six feet tall and framed like a Cossack, and he had allowed a layer of prosperous fat to gather and thicken over that frame, steeped with smoke from the finest imported cigars, so that Olive imagined if he were slaughtered and brought to market, he would taste exactly like a well-cured side of bacon.) The chair was too large to fit between the drawers, so Olive had to pull it away. The wheels squeaked softly, and she froze for an instant, horrified, waiting for doors to bang and footsteps to drum along the stairs. Sleepwalk? She would pretend to be sleepwalking. It might work; you never knew.

  But the house remained still. Olive counted the gentle ticks of the clock above the mantel, until her heartbeat slowed to match them. A curious dark spot appeared before the curtains, and another, and she realized she had stopped breathing. A silly thing to do.

  She released her lungs and bent down to address the first drawer on the right.

  It was locked.

  Of course it was locked. My God. What had she been thinking? Even her father had locked up all his papers, and her father’s papers consisted of nothing more than drawings and bills and technical correspondence. She rattled the drawer gently, hoping the lock might somehow wake up and take pity on her, the way one took pity on the beggar children who inhabited the street corners downtown. But of course it didn’t. How stupid. How disastrously stupid, to think she could just steal into Henry Pratt’s library and find incriminating papers, hey presto, lying about unguarded. When even the housemaids’ virtue was kept under lock and key in the Pratt mansion.

  Still she went on staring at the desk drawer, unable to accept her defeat. Just to give up and go back to her bed, after all that effort. To admit that, perhaps, the entire project was beyond her: Olive, reader of books, dreamer of dreams, middle-class daughter of a failed middle-class architect. Absurd, to think that she could carry off a deception like this, a plot for revenge (justice, not revenge, she reminded herself), a clandestine midnight search for papers that, if they did exist, would be hidden well beyond the reach of a common housemaid, even a clever one.

  Olive’s hand fell away from the handle of the drawer.

  The climb back upstairs was cold and weary. The library lay on the third floor, along with the billiards room at the back (the masculine floor, she called it in her mind); the next floor held Mr. and Mrs. Pratt’s stately bedrooms, and the next held the children’s bedrooms. Well, not children, really. The youngest was Prunella, who was eighteen years old and newly engaged to a wealthy idiot, a widower with a young child; Olive couldn’t remember his name. Then there were the twin boys, August and Harry, who had just returned home from Harvard for the Christmas holiday. It was their last year of university, and everybody was speculating what they would do next: the family home or bachelor apartments? Professional ambitions? Wedding bells? Olive hadn’t listened much. One of them was supposed to be quite wild and artistic; the other was supposed to be simply wild. They had gotten into daily scrapes when they were younger, said one of the maids, who had been with the Pratts at their old house on Fifty-seventh Street. One of them had gotten some poor woman with child—so it was rumored, anyway—some earlier housemaid; Mr. Pratt had dealt with the matter himself, so Mrs. Pratt wouldn’t be bothered.

  Olive paused with her foot on the final step at the sixth-floor landing. Now, that might serve Mr. Pratt right. If the story was true, of course, and if it reached the newspapers . . .

  A soft sound reached her ears.

  Olive glanced down the stairwell and saw a faint triangle of light on the floor below.

  She bolted without thinking, right past the entry to the sixth floor and up the last narrow flight to the seventh floor. A storeroom, wasn’t it? She’d never been there. But she couldn’t go to her room; the intruder would hear her opening the vestibule door, would hear her creeping down the corridor to her cramped little chamber.

  But no one would be going as high as the seventh-floor stairs.

  She waited in the shadows of the landing. There was no door here; the stairs opened right out to a short hallway. A small round window let in a hint of moonlight, illuminating a narrow portal at the end of the hall, six or seven feet away.

  A voice called out in a low, rumbling whisper.

  “Is someone there?”

  Olive took a single step back, toward the door.

  “Hello?” the voice whispered again. Not a threatening whisper at all; only curious. Curious and quite male, she thought. There was no doubt of that. The whisper had resonance; it had timbre; it matched, somehow, the expansive, backslapping voices she’d overheard a few hours ago, when the boys had arrived home together in a cab from the station.

  He’s sneaking out, she thought. Sneaking out to see a shopgirl, perhaps, or to meet his friends for God knew what mischief.

  Olive stood quietly, hardly breathing, while her heart smacked and smacked against the wall of her chest.

  Then footsteps, careful and quiet and heavy. Making their way not down toward the first floor, Olive realized in horror, as the tread became louder, but up. Up toward the seventh floor, and Olive’s helpless and guilty body on the landing.

  She took another silent step back, and another. The door was at her shoulders now.

  A shadow lifted itself up the final steps and came to rest on the landing. Olive could see a large hand on the newel post, a large frame blocking the moonlight from the small round window.

  “Hello there,” said the voice, surprisingly gentle. “Who the devil are you?”

  “I’m Olive,” she whispered. “The new housemaid. I—I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Ah, of course. I couldn’t sleep, either.”

  Olive fingered her dressing gown.

  A hand extended toward her. “I’m Harry Pratt. The younger son, by about twelve minutes.”

  Olive, not knowing what else to do, reached out and took the offered hand and gave it a too-brisk shake. His palm was warm and dry and quite large, swallowing hers in a single gulp, and he smelled very faintly of tobacco. She whispered, without thinking, “Are you the wild one or the artistic one?”

  The outline of his face adjusted, as if he were smiling. “Both, I expect.”

  “Well. It’s—It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pratt.”

  “Just Harry. Have you been having a look in there?” He nodded to the door behind her.

  She hesitated. What else could she say? “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Of what?”
<
br />   “Of my paintings, of course.”

  “I—I don’t know. I couldn’t see much.” She turned the last word upward, like a question.

  “You didn’t switch the light on?”

  “No.”

  The young man took a single step forward, and good Lord, just like that, the moonlight from the window poured in around them, and Olive lost her breath.

  Harry Pratt was the handsomest man she had ever seen.

  She thrust her hand behind her back and braced it against the door.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “Y—you’re not?” She was stammering like a schoolgirl, utterly unnerved by the angle of his cheekbones, drenched in moonlight. It was unfair, she thought, the effect of unexpected beauty on a sensible mind. (Olive had always prided herself on her sensible mind.) He was Henry Pratt’s son; he was probably a reprobate, a complete ass, undeserving in every way, no doubt just chock-full of those base male appetites that had to be locked up every night by Mrs. Keane. And yet Olive stammered for him. That was biology for you.

  Harry Pratt was tilting his head as he stared at her. “No,” he said, a little absent, and Olive had to think back and remember what question he was answering. He tilted his head the other way, and then he moved to her side and peered, eyes narrowed, muttering to himself, as if she were a specimen brought up for his inspection.

  “What’s wrong?” Olive whispered.

  “I need you,” said Harry Pratt, and he snatched her hand, threw open the narrow door, and pulled her inside.

  Three

  JULY 1920

  Lucy

  “There’ll be no gentleman callers in the rooms.” Matron looked at Lucy sternly over the rims of her spectacles, spectacles that appeared to be there for no purpose other than overlooking potentially problematic young female persons. “A gentleman in one of the rooms is a cause for immediate expulsion.”