The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  Tentatively, Lucy asked, “How old were you when your father married her?”

  The waiter set another martini down in front of Mr. Schuyler, the astringent smell of undiluted spirits strong enough to strip the varnish from the table.

  “Eight. I was eight when my father married her.” Philip wrapped his hands around the stem of the martini glass, his shoulders hunching forward, and, for a moment, Lucy saw not the confident man she saw in the office every day, but a lonely little boy. “I remember him telling me that he’d found a new mother for me. Mother. Ha. She’s about as maternal as a mongoose.”

  If Philip had been eight when his father had married Prunella Pratt, that meant he was old enough to remember the family; old enough, perhaps, to have noticed Lucy’s mother. Prunella Pratt had announced her engagement to Harrison Schuyler in the winter of 1892. Lucy’s mother had married her father in early 1893.

  Did you ever meet a woman there? Lucy wanted to ask. A woman who looked like me?

  If her mother was a houseguest, she would have been included in family events. But Philip Schuyler, eight years old and confined to the nursery, wasn’t likely to remember.

  Philip was still musing over his martini. “She had me fooled for a bit. You wouldn’t think of it to look at me now, but I was a very pretty child.” There was a mocking note. “Blond ringlets and all. Prunella liked to dress me up in a little velvet suit and take me to tea with her friends, so they could all exclaim over how maternal she was, how sweet. Then she’d send me back to the nursery as soon as we got home. I used to wonder what I was doing wrong. I’d try to find ways to get her attention, to make her love me. Stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid,” said Lucy softly. “I—”

  She bit her lip on what she had been planning to say. The drawings she had made, trotting to her mother with them like a dog with bones. She’d known her mother loved art, and she’d thought, maybe, if she could create it, then her mother would pay attention to her, would look at her as though she really saw her.

  “It’s not stupid,” she repeated.

  Philip shook his head. “Wasted effort. She’d make up to you when she wanted something and then forget you a moment later. It took me years to realize it.”

  “What about your father?” She was wandering away from the Pratts, but she was curious. This was a side to Philip Schuyler she’d never imagined. He’d always seemed so untouchable to her, a man in control of himself and his destiny.

  Yes, she could hear the strain in his voice sometimes when Prunella would call for the second or third time that day, but he had always covered it with a smile.

  But not now.

  Philip gave a short laugh. “My father was besotted with her. Thought she was the embodiment of all womanly virtue. He couldn’t believe his luck when she passed up all the others and chose him instead. He didn’t know that her father was about to go broke.”

  Lucy’s head went up. “I thought Mr. Pratt was one of the wealthiest men in New York.”

  “New money,” said Philip dismissively. “Easy come, easy go. They put on a good show . . . but by the time my father married Prunella, it all came out. There was nothing left but the house.”

  Lucy remembered that file in the cabinet, the Pratt trust, funded by the sale of the house on East Sixty-ninth Street. It had never occurred to her to wonder why there was nothing else.

  So much for any hopes of being a long-lost heiress, she thought wryly.

  “What happened?”

  “Railroads,” said Philip Schuyler succinctly. “One minute they were up and the next they were down. August Pratt went down with them.” With a stiff wrist, Philip knocked back his second martini. “My father wasn’t the love of Prunella’s life. He was her lifeboat.”

  He looked so miserable that Lucy cast around for something that might comfort him. “That doesn’t mean she didn’t love him.”

  “Prunella loves Prunella.” He considered for a moment. “Also diamonds.”

  Lucy saw her chance. Artfully, she said, “There were brothers, weren’t there? Surely she must have loved them.”

  Mr. Schuyler—Philip—let out a very ungentlemanly snort. “There was no love lost there. Prunella used to snoop around, look for things she could use against them.” He leaned forward confidingly. “When you’re eight, no one pays any attention. You fit in cracks and corners. I heard all sorts of things I wasn’t supposed to hear.” He nodded emphatically. “All sorts.”

  Lucy’s heart was in her throat. “What sorts of things?”

  Philip leaned back against the banquette, squinting at the smoke-wreathed ceiling. “I ’member—I remember—Prunella threatening her brother that she was going to tell his father about some of his less ladylike lady friends.”

  Lucy tried to ask casually, tried not to show how much it mattered. “Which brother?”

  “Gus. August. He reeled in drunk that night, smelling like a brothel. I was sitting on the stairs, playing with my top—they didn’t want me in the drawing room.” A shade of childhood hurt passed across Philip’s face. He shrugged. “So I saw them. Prunella told Gus she’d make it all right if he got her a ruby brooch she wanted. Or maybe it was a necklace? Doesn’t matter. Prunella smashed a glass when Gus laughed at her.”

  “They don’t sound like very nice people.” Somehow, Lucy had always assumed that life must have been better in the Pratt household, that wealth brought with it gentility, in the muted clank of silver against porcelain, in the soft swish of the servants opening the drapes. Rudeness, lewdness, those belonged to squalor and noise, not to a place where the very sound of footsteps was swallowed up by the vastness of soaring marble ceilings.

  Apparently, she had been wrong.

  “Do you know the worst of it?” Philip leaned his elbows on the table, so close that Lucy could smell the gin sharp on his breath.

  “There’s more?” Lucy braced herself for some new revelation.

  Philip’s face was bleak. “Didi is just like her. I didn’t realize it before—I don’t think I wanted to realize it—but when I heard her on the phone today . . . Christ. They might have been twins.” He looked up, fiercely. “Do you know what Didi wanted?”

  Lucy mutely shook her head.

  “She wanted me to drop everything tomorrow and go down to Philadelphia to take her to buy a hat.”

  “A hat?” Lucy nodded her thanks as the waiter set a fresh round of drinks in front of them. She had barely touched her first, but Philip seized on his third martini gratefully.

  “A hat,” he repeated grimly. “She saw one that was just too darling and wanted me to cancel my meetings to come to the milliner with her. In Philadelphia.”

  “Perhaps she was joking?” suggested Lucy, with more optimism than hope.

  “Ha,” said Philip. “It’s a test, you know. Show of devotion. She liked to do that sort of thing to her beaux—wait till they were in the middle of a conversation, then send one to get her a drink, another to find her gloves. . . . She liked to keep ’em hopping. But I’d thought, well, it was just a game. I thought, she’s young, she’ll grow out of it. But she won’t, will she?” He looked owlishly at Lucy over the rim of his martini glass.

  Lucy wished she could tell him otherwise, could give him some comfort. But basic honesty prevented her. “No,” she said. “I think people are who they are. It’s a mistake to marry someone and believe you can change them.”

  Her father—the man she had believed to be her father—had tried, so very hard, to win her mother’s love, to make her smile.

  She missed her father. She missed her father so. He might not have been a Pratt, he might not have lived in a grand house or worn a starched cravat and a diamond stickpin, but he had been warm and loving and as reliable as a fresh loaf of bread.

  “You’re right. People don’t change, do they?” Philip sank back against the banquette, his lo
ng legs brushing Lucy’s under the table. “’S no use. ’S no use pretending that anyone thinks I’m a real lawyer.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” Lucy discreetly moved Philip’s glass out of reach. She didn’t think she had it in her to carry him downstairs. “You went to Harvard Law. Surely that makes you a real lawyer.”

  He had the diploma on the wall to prove it, magna cum laude and all.

  “Thass jus’ a degree.” Philip shoved himself back up to a sitting position, squinting for his martini. “Prunella’s right—’s not like I do real work. Old Cromwell just gave me the job as a favor to m’father. Needed someone to handle the Pratt estate.”

  “But you do so much more than handle the Pratt estate!” Wasn’t the last month proof of that? They’d spent long hours in the office, longer than anyone else. Mr. Schuyler—Philip—might pretend to be a dilettante, but he’d been working like a dog. With a smile and a starched collar, yes, but still working, and working hard. Lucy wished that Prunella Pratt were in range to hear a piece of her mind. “Mr. Cromwell always speaks highly of you. I’ve heard him.”

  “He was friends with my father.” Philip gestured for another martini. “They don’t take me seriously, any of them.”

  Lucy absently took a sip of Philip’s old martini. The gin made her cough. “That’s nonsense,” she said crisply. At least, she tried to say it crisply. If it came out just a bit slurred, Philip was in no state to notice. “You’re a wonderful lawyer.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Philip moodily. “No one deals with the clients like I do. By which they mean that I can keep the drinks coming, tell jokes in four languages, and play a good game of tennis.”

  “No.” The gin was remarkably freeing. Without conscious volition, Lucy’s hand was on Mr. Schuyler’s arm, her fingers making creases in his perfectly pressed jacket. “That’s not it at all. You’re not just a good host; you’re a good lawyer. You know what Mr. Cochran’s drafts look like.”

  “Well . . . Cochran,” said Philip with a shrug.

  “I won’t have you selling yourself short. You’re good at it. And I know you care, even if you pretend you don’t.”

  Philip’s eyes focused on her face. There was a curious, wistful expression on his face. “I do, do I?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a good woman, Lucy Young.” Philip toasted her with his new martini, baptizing the table with gin. “Where were you when I was proposing to Didi?”

  Commuting from Brooklyn.

  “On my yacht in the South of France,” Lucy quipped. She hadn’t minded telling John Ravenel that she’d grown up above a bakery, but she still, even with her tongue loosened by gin, found that she didn’t want Philip Schuyler to know. She liked when he spoke to her like this, like an equal, with that admiring light in his eyes, a light that would go away if he knew the truth about her.

  New money, Philip had said dismissively.

  She wasn’t money at all, new or old, just a working girl with sensible shoes and an attic room that cost too much of her weekly salary.

  As for being a Pratt . . . Maybe she had thought, once, that that would provide some social cachet, but she was reluctant to blurt that out, not just because she didn’t want Philip to know she’d been using him, but also because they sounded like horrible people. She didn’t want him to look at her and see Prunella Pratt. She didn’t want him to talk about her the way he did Didi.

  Philip Schuyler reached across the table, took her hand, and, before Lucy realized what he was doing, raised her knuckles to his lips. “I don’t know when I’ve ever been so grateful to anyone for breaking her leg. Here’s to Meg and her multiple fracture!”

  “You can’t mean that,” protested Lucy, flattered and appalled—but she left her hand in his.

  “Oh, I’m sorry about her leg—don’t get me wrong—but I can’t be sorry about you.” Philip’s hand tightened on hers, his thumb moving in an intimate caress against her wrist. “There you were, in the secretarial pool, all that time, and I never saw you.”

  “You said hello to me once,” said Lucy, and then wished she hadn’t. It made her sound like a besotted teenager.

  “Did I? If I’d known better, I wouldn’t have just said hello. I would have asked you for a drink.”

  There was something mesmeric about the way he was looking at her, his face so close to her, his hand on hers, the culmination of a thousand guilty daydreams. This wasn’t happening, not really. Philip Schuyler flirted, yes, all the time, but this was more than flirting, this was . . .

  Not right.

  Reluctantly, Lucy drew her hand away. “And I would have said no.”

  “Don’t say no, Lucy.” Philip touched a finger to her lower lip, and Lucy felt the tingle of it, stronger than the gin, so exciting and so wrong all at the same time. “These lips weren’t made for saying no.”

  And before Lucy could say no, before Lucy could say anything at all, Philip Schuyler leaned in and kissed her.

  Sixteen

  JULY 1944

  Kate

  The whine of sirens pierced the still night, jerking my eyes open. I was on call and still wore my clothes, making it easier to exit the sleeping quarters with only a quick hand-swipe of my eyes and a brief toe-search for my shoes before sliding them on. The air-raid drills were a weekly occurrence, and I moved through the mansion still half-asleep, my motions automatic. I no longer had to look at the drill instructions taped on most doors inside the hospital at the instruction of Mayor La Guardia; the familiar words and graphics of various siren sounds seemed to be imprinted on the inside of my eyelids.

  I joined an orderly and a nurse as we each picked up a flashlight from the bucket on the landing, and I began systematically turning off all lights I passed as the steady scream of the siren continued outside. I peered through one of the drawn shades in a blackened room and spotted an air-raid patrol car racing down the street, pausing so its air-raid warden could jump out and douse a phantom fire.

  One of the men from the ballroom turned hospital dormitory screamed from a nightmare, an unholy side effect of the drills. So many of the patients returned to their recent battles when they closed their eyes, the innocuous sounds of sirens more menacing to them, transforming into the sounds of falling bombs and spiraling planes.

  I was headed in his direction when I spotted Nurse Hathaway and an orderly in the doorway. “We’ve got this,” she said.

  I nodded, listening to the sound of scrambling feet throughout the hospital. I looked up the stairs, knowing I should make sure that Captain Ravenel was prepared to move if the siren sound began to waver, signaling us that it was no longer just a drill. Still, I paused. Since meeting his fiancée, I’d done everything in my power to avoid the attic room except to retrieve personal items when I knew he was sleeping and his fiancée wasn’t there. But nobody was running up to the attic. The captain hadn’t been coherent during the last drill and I pictured him up in the attic room, in the dark and alone, wondering what all the commotion was about. I had my foot on the first step when I heard my name.

  “Dr. Schuyler?”

  I groaned inwardly as I turned. “Yes, Dr. Greeley?”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, although it was clear he knew exactly where I’d been heading.

  “To see to Captain Ravenel. The attic room wasn’t included in the original drill plans because it wasn’t a . . .”

  Dr. Greeley took my elbow. “The patient is fine. I saw to him myself. It looks like all that’s still needed is for you and me to find a safe place.”

  “I’m quite . . .”

  Before I could finish my sentence, he’d opened a door—to what had once been a cloak closet outside the ballroom but had been converted to store medical supplies—and pushed me inside, making me drop my flashlight in the process. He closed the door behind us and I had two sudden thoughts: He’d had onions for dinner,
and the space was too small for him to do much of anything.

  I tried to turn to the side but managed only to elbow him slightly in his soft abdomen. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But this is quite unnecessary . . .”

  “You’ve been avoiding me, Kate.” I’d always liked the sound of my name. Until now.

  “I haven’t been avoiding you. I’ve just been incredibly busy, as you are aware.”

  “You haven’t accepted my invitations to dinner.” He sounded genuinely hurt. As if he really believed that the two of us had a future together.

  “We are overloaded with patients right now, and I need my sleep so I can be the best doctor they need me to be. I really don’t have time for leisurely dinners, as lovely as they sound.”

  He was my height, so that when he smiled his sparse mustache tickled my ear. I found myself almost hoping that a bomb would actually fall nearby just so I’d have a reason to get out of this closet.

  I felt his fingers playing with my hair. “I hope you understand that it’s in your best interests to make me happy. I don’t think dinner with me would be so hard for you to manage.”

  Damn. It wasn’t fair. Nothing about being a woman was fair, especially not a woman whose only dream was to be a good doctor. But none of that would matter if I didn’t give Dr. Greeley what he wanted. “I’ll check my schedule. I’m sure I can find an hour.”

  “Or two,” he said.

  I kept my head turned to the side so when he tried to kiss me, he got only my cheek.

  Reaching behind him, I grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, but his hand on mine stopped me. “Before you go, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve received word that we are scheduled to be getting more patients. You’re going to have to make room for two more beds up in the attic. No more private quarters for Captain Ravenel, and you’ll have to make other permanent arrangements for yourself.”

  The siren stopped, lending an uneasy stillness to the air. I turned the knob hard and pushed the doctor, making him stumble backward. I grabbed hold of his upper arms to make it look like it had been an accident. “Sorry, Doctor. I’ll get started on that first thing in the morning.” I picked up my flashlight and began jogging up the flight of circular stairs, not really sure where I was going, just that I needed to get away.