The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  “Then why didn’t you get rid of them?” Olive said cruelly.

  “Because they reminded me of him. They were your father exactly. Dreaming of great things.” She paused, folding her napkin over and over against the worn burgundy velvet of her skirt. When she spoke again, her voice had turned soft. “I loved him so. And it seems to me, when I’m wearing these . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Mrs. Van Alan whispered, “He’s still here. A little piece of his spirit, anyway, right next to my head, speaking in my ear. A little piece of his beautiful soul.”

  Olive sank back into her seat and bowed her head over her half-finished tea. The smell drifted upward, the particular spice of her mother’s favorite Ceylon blend. The tea probably cost more than the coal, but Mrs. Van Alan couldn’t seem to give that up, either. Tea and rubies.

  It was the bitterest thing, wasn’t it, to come down in the world. To watch your extravagant dreams disintegrate into the rug of your cold and narrow parlor. Your favorite things disappear, one by one, until there was nothing left of you.

  What would Olive’s mother do, if Olive ran off to the sunshine with her lover?

  A heavy knock sounded from the hallway, and it seemed to Olive like the final scene of a Mozart opera, when Death pounded like a bass drum upon Giovanni’s sinful door.

  Mrs. Van Alan placed her napkin next to her plate and rose from her chair.

  “That will be Mr. Jungmann,” she said.

  Twenty-one

  JULY 1920

  Lucy

  “Miss Young?”

  John Ravenel was waiting for her by the El, standing on the top of the steps, his hat in one hand, unconcerned amid the dust and the grime, the stream of people leaving the train. They eddied around him as he stepped easily forward, taking Lucy’s arm and tucking it comfortably beneath his own.

  Lucy pulled away a little. “How—how did you know I would take this train?”

  “It’s the nearest to the studio.” John Ravenel smiled down at her as if he hadn’t a care in the world, and, despite herself, Lucy felt her spirits rising in response, all her carefully cutting arguments as to why she shouldn’t be here dissolving.

  “The studio?”

  “Shoot. I’ve gone and given it away.” John Ravenel’s teeth flashed in a grin. “Never mind. Pretend to be surprised when I open the door, won’t you?”

  “I won’t need to pretend.” Lucy held on to her hat as she hurried to keep up with him. “I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about!”

  Apologetically, John Ravenel slowed his steps. “My favorite place in New York. It’s—well, you could call it my refuge. I never showed it to— Let’s just say that I’ve never showed it to anyone before.”

  “My.” Lucy couldn’t think what else to say. The block they were traversing, still at a brisk clip, was lined with old brownstones, houses that might have been workers’ homes once. It was a part of the city she knew not at all. “You said studio . . . Do you paint? I can’t quite imagine you in a floppy hat and a great bow of a necktie!”

  John Ravenel laughed, a great rumble of a laugh, and the sunshine seemed to brighten on the stoops and windows. “It’s not an official uniform, you know, any more than spectacles are for professors. But, no, I don’t paint.” As they reached number 147, he paused, looking down at Lucy. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate beauty when I see it.”

  Lucy could feel the blood rise in her cheeks. From the heat of the day, of course. And the exertion of the walk. Mr. Ravenel was an art dealer. Finding beauty was his business.

  Beauty with a price tag.

  “Is it hard,” she asked, as Mr. Ravenel set his hand to the knocker, “finding beauty, only to have to give it away again?”

  “I don’t give it away; I sell it, hopefully for a profit.” He leaned against the doorframe. “You learn a certain detachment after a while. And there’s the excitement of knowing that there’s always another and another and another. Ah, Luisa! I didn’t know you were in residence.”

  A woman had opened the door. At least, Lucy inferred from the curves of chest and hip that she was a woman. Her hair was shingled and she wore trousers. Smoke rose from the cigarette that she held in one hand.

  “The work,” she said, gesticulating with a trail of ash, “it struggles to be born.”

  “And Mrs. Whitney provides a good free meal,” said Mr. Ravenel, sotto voce. In his normal voice, he said, “Show it to me when you’re done. I might be able to find a home for it.” To Lucy, he added, “Luisa is a sculptor.”

  “Does she own this house?” Their hostess, if such she was, was already trailing away, through a door into a room dotted with easels.

  Mr. Ravenel laughed. “Lord, no. Welcome to Mrs. Whitney’s studio. She provides the space for deserving artists—and if anyone has the eye, she does. There’s a reference library and a sketching studio, even a billiards table.”

  “A billiards table?” Lucy knew she was staring shamelessly, but she couldn’t help it. She’d never seen anything like this house before. It must have been a town house once—or two town houses—but walls had been knocked through and ceilings lifted, walls painted white and skylights put in.

  “Apparently, the muse likes pool,” said Mr. Ravenel. “Ours not to reason why. Ours just to admire.”

  Another and another and another, he had said. Always the next painting, the next beautiful thing. But never to keep. It made Lucy feel deeply uneasy. “To admire and then to sell?”

  “And sell.” He nodded to two bearded men, deep in argument, before looking back to Lucy. “You sound as though you disapprove.”

  “I just—” It was hard to encapsulate what bothered her about it. “Maybe it’s because we had so little. I was raised to hold on to things.”

  Stability. That was what had been pounded into Lucy throughout her youth. To her grandmother, that meant the reliability of having a shop, a trade, a family, church on Sunday, and gugelhupf at Christmas.

  But it wasn’t just her grandmother. Lucy remembered, in one of those rare moments of communion, her mother telling her, soberly, “You don’t know what it’s like to see your world disappear, piece by piece, item by item. Watching it all go, bit by bit. It’s terrifying, like clinging to the wreck of a ship.” Her hand had gone to the high collar of her dress, as though touching a necklace that wasn’t there. “In the end, you seek what port you can.”

  She had always impressed upon Lucy how lucky she was, how lucky to have a home, a father, food on the table. But her words had always been at odds with the longing in her eyes. There was something, something else, to which her mother wished she had held.

  Some grander past, Lucy had always thought. A house like the Pratt house. Jewelry. Gowns.

  But maybe it had been something else, something more. Someone more.

  “But these paintings aren’t mine,” said Mr. Ravenel, and Lucy recalled herself, with difficulty, to the present. “Art doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. It’s a gift to the world.”

  Fine words, but Lucy wasn’t ready to let him off that easily. She raised her brows at him. “A gift with a price tag?”

  “Artists have to live—and there’s only one Mrs. Whitney.” With a hand at the small of her back, Mr. Ravenel escorted her through a room crowded with plaster models, into another, dominated by the aforementioned billiards table. “Selling their paintings is how artists survive to paint once more.” He spoke simply, but there was no mistaking the genuine emotion in his voice. “And the world gets something wonderful.”

  Lucy didn’t entirely see the wonder in some of the pictures in front of her, but the wonder on John Ravenel’s face was real enough.

  “I don’t have the talent myself, but I have talent enough to recognize it. Getting to see this,” he said, gesturing around the room, the partially dried canvases on their easel
s, the paintings on the walls, “humbles me. The idea that I might do something, anything, to promote this kind of talent . . . It’s like getting to shake Michelangelo’s hand.”

  Lucy cocked her head. “I thought your gallery sold your father’s pictures.”

  “My father’s pictures started the business, but this”—John Ravenel waved a hand at the paintings on the walls—“this is the future. If I held on to my father’s paintings, I’d be running a museum, not a gallery. There’s a place for that—but it’s not my place. It’s not what I want to do. It’s not what I want my legacy to be.”

  “Then—” Lucy rested a hand on the green baize of the billiards table. The felt was springy beneath her fingers, virtually unworn. “I’d thought you were here to search for your father’s past.”

  John Ravenel lifted a billiard ball, turned it between his fingers. Light winked off the surface. “Do I want to know where I came from? Yes. But that doesn’t impact who I want to be. My past—that’s the work of other people. What I do—that’s up to me.” Setting the ball down, he looked sheepishly at Lucy. “My apologies, Miss Young. I promised you art and instead I go baring my soul.”

  “No,” said Lucy slowly. “No, you’ve given me just what I needed.”

  She had thought of the future once. When she’d fought her grandmother and taken that secretarial course. When she’d won the job at Sterling Bates and forged her way into Manhattan, feeling like a pioneer, like an explorer, every morning as she rode the train in from Brooklyn, swaying from the overhead strap, evading the pinches of men who thought that working girls were fair game. It had been exhilarating, exciting. And her father—her father had been so proud when she had graduated from high school.

  And then her father had died.

  She hadn’t realized how much his quiet presence had bolstered her, how much just knowing he was there had mattered to her, until he was gone. After the funeral, the barber had brought back his shaving mug, caked with the remnants of the soap that smelled like her father’s chin, his name in gold on white porcelain.

  Lucy, who had remained straight-backed through the funeral, found herself brought low by the smell of that soap. She had managed to murmur the right words to the barber, her fingers clutched tight around the mug, the paint with her father’s name already chipping and flaking, faded in parts. She had clung to that mug like a child with a doll, smelling that smell, wanting her father badly, so very badly. She could close her eyes, and smell the soap, and imagine him there, her quiet, loving father, the blond hair grizzled with gray, the blue eyes a little dimmer since her mother’s death, but still, always, her father, her port in a storm.

  And that was when her grandmother had uttered those hateful words. Did you think he was really your father?

  She had spoken in German, as she always did at home, partly, Lucy always suspected, as a means of excluding Lucy’s mother.

  Did you think he was really your father?

  And with that one spiteful phrase, her world had collapsed in on itself. She had lost her father. She had lost herself.

  “I—” Lucy spoke hesitantly. “I’ve been chasing the past. When my father died”—she licked her dry lips—“well, he might not have been my father. I’ve been trying to find out what I can about the man who might have been my father.”

  It sounded so garbled put like that, so silly. She couldn’t believe she was blurting it out to a virtual stranger, the fact of her illegitimacy, her confusion.

  But John Ravenel didn’t recoil or look at her with disgust. Instead, he took her gloved hand in his and gave it a squeeze. “You poor kid,” he said softly.

  Lucy managed a crooked smile. “I’m twenty-six. I’ll be twenty-seven in November.”

  “Even so. When it comes to our parents we’re all still children, aren’t we?” His voice was so warm, so understanding, his hand on hers so comforting. Lucy let herself lean into him, into the support he offered. His hand tightened on hers. “It knocked me sideways when I found out that my father had a life before Cuba. I’d always heard the stories about Cuba and I’d never thought to ask about what came before. Then he died, and a friend of his gave me—”

  Lucy tilted her head up at him. “Gave you what?”

  “A picture of a woman. Not my mother. It was just a miniature, but the fact that he’d kept it secret—well, that said something.”

  “My mother was in love with someone before my father.” The words came out before Lucy thought about them. She felt the color rising in her cheeks and gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Obviously. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Whoever he was”—John Ravenel squeezed both her hands in his—“he was a very lucky man to have you as a daughter.”

  “If I can ever find him.” Harry Pratt had disappeared off the map so many years ago. Dead? Missing. “And if I do find him . . . what if he doesn’t want me?”

  John Ravenel didn’t make light of her fears. “People make new lives for themselves. Look at my father, with a new name. If he doesn’t want a daughter appearing out of nowhere—then it’s to do with him, not you. Never you.”

  Lucy looked up at him through a haze of tears that made the lights in the chandelier jump and dance. “Would you claim me?”

  “If you were mine, I would never have let you go.”

  His hands were on her shoulders now, her head tilted toward his. Dimly, Lucy realized that they weren’t talking about fathers and daughters anymore. And that they were smack in the middle of the billiards room of the Whitney Studio.

  With a jerky movement, she stepped away, lifting her gloved hands to her damp cheeks. “If you succeed in finding your father’s people,” she said in a muffled voice, “what will you do?”

  “I—” John Ravenel shook his head, as if to clear it. “I don’t know. I thought once that I wanted to wave my father’s achievements in their face, show them what they’d lost. Now? I’m not sure I even need to see them. I just want to know who they are, who my father was. Just to know.”

  It sounded so wise, but there was something about it that rang false to Lucy. “You can tell yourself that, but it’s never just knowing, is it? Everything you know changes you. And you can’t go back.”

  His face clouded. “No, you can’t. I’d thought, after the war—but when I came back . . .” With an attempt at levity, he said, “Who made you so wise, Miss Young?”

  “The school of hard knocks.” The moment of intimacy was over. Lucy rubbed her gloved knuckles beneath her eyes, striving to match his tone. “You must think I’m very silly. Talk about baring your soul!”

  “No,” said Mr. Ravenel lightly, stepping back, away from her. “I think you argue like an attorney. There’s no judge in the world could stand up against you.”

  He had begun moving, strolling toward the door, as though they were two sightseers at a museum. Lucy fell into step beside him, groping after her lost poise. “I’d like to see that,” she said. “A woman attorney.”

  “Why not? I met a woman doctor when I was serving overseas.” Mr. Ravenel glanced down at her. “She was doing twice the work of the men and just as well.”

  Lucy had never hankered after bloodstained bandages or bottles of pills, but the idea of being the one sitting behind the desk, dictating memos, making the decisions, had a powerful appeal.

  Regretfully, Lucy banished the image. “Maybe my daughter will be the attorney. Or the doctor.”

  “Not you?”

  She might as well have sighed for the moon as for a college education. That was for other women. Women whose fathers had money to burn. “I had to fight to finish at the high school. My grandmother didn’t believe in education for women. She thought it would give me the wrong sort of ideas.”

  A woman didn’t need education, her grandmother had said. She would only marry anyway. It was a waste of time when she might be helping at the bakery.

 
A good gugelhupf. Now, there was a way to a man’s heart.

  John Ravenel looked at her thoughtfully. “But here you are, a model of the new woman.”

  The new woman. Scarlet women, according to her grandmother. Lucy squirmed at the memory of the scent of gin, Philip Schuyler’s lips on hers, the high-pitched laugh of the woman in the backless dress.

  “Not entirely. I like being useful. I like working. But I’m not fast,” she said fiercely. “I’m not.”

  John Ravenel looked at her, puzzled. “I never thought you were.” His lips lifted in a half smile. “You can tell just from looking at you that you’re a lady.”

  “Even now that you—know my background?”

  “What your parents did isn’t who you are.” They were back in the front hall. Lucy could hear the sound of a gramophone from somewhere up the stairs, and a spirited argument coming from the room with the sculpture. “Aren’t I proof of that?”

  Lucy looked at John Ravenel, wanting to say yes, wanting to agree with him, but she couldn’t help thinking, traitorously, that he was what his parents did. “Would you have found art if your father hadn’t been a painter?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that I love art for its own sake, not my father’s. He gave me my start, but—” John Ravenel shook his head. “I guess we can’t get away from them entirely, but we can pick and choose what we want our legacies to be. What do you want your legacy to be, Miss Young?”

  The words came out in a rush, out of nowhere. “If I have children, I want them to feel like they belong to something.” She had never felt as though she belonged. Not in Brooklyn. Not in Manhattan. Not with the Jungmanns. Not with the Pratts. She was betwixt and between and adrift. She took a deep breath. “I want them to know where they come from. No mysteries, no secrets. I want something solid, stable. It sounds pretty petty, doesn’t it? Here you are, planning to change the world one painting at a time—and all I want is a safe home.”