The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  “A penniless secretary? I’m not sure anyone would call that good sense.” Or love. How could Philip Schuyler love her? He barely knew her.

  Although, Lucy realized with surprise, he knew her a great deal better than John Ravenel did. They had worked together, day by day, hour by hour, for weeks now. He knew how she liked her coffee and that she got cranky if she waited too long for her lunch.

  Why was it, then, that when John Ravenel asked her to move to Charleston after three meetings, she had wanted to fling her arms around his neck and shout yes?

  Unlike Philip Schuyler, he had never mentioned marriage.

  “I’ve been a fool, Lucy.” Philip’s gold ring glinted in the sunlight that filtered through the grimy window. “I’ve known for a while now that I wasn’t in love with Didi. I’m not even sure I like her much. I don’t know if I’ve ever liked her. But I thought—I thought that she was the sort of woman I was meant to marry.”

  “She is the sort of woman you’re meant to marry,” said Lucy. Her voice felt scraped from the back of her throat. “Someone beautiful, someone accomplished.”

  “Accomplished in what? Spending her father’s money? I saw what my father’s marriage was like. Not my mother. I don’t remember my mother. Not much.” He was silent for a moment, and Lucy, despite herself, felt a pang of pity. How odd, how very odd, to be pitying Philip Schuyler. “But I do remember Prunella. She needed constant compliments, constant attendance, constant gifts. She was the center of the world and everyone was expected to revolve around her.”

  “Doesn’t she still?” said Lucy.

  “True. Only now there are fewer left to orbit around her. What I’m trying to say is—she was an ornament, not a partner. I could marry someone because she decorates a ballroom.” He looked up at Lucy. “Or I could marry someone like you. Someone strong. Someone sensible.”

  Lucy wasn’t entirely sure that was a compliment. “You make me sound like an old pair of shoes.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” Philip’s eyes crinkled ruefully. “If you’ll believe it, I was once accounted rather debonair.”

  “I believe it.” If he was being honest, so could she. “I’ve been half in love with you.”

  “Only half?”

  Lucy struggled to put her feelings into words. “I think, to be truly in love, there has to be—some measure of understanding.”

  That was what her parents, for all their virtues, had never had. Her father had admired her mother without ever truly understanding her. And her mother—her mother had relied on her father without appreciating him. There had been a gulf between them that couldn’t be bridged by all the goodwill in the world.

  Philip put a hand out, not touching her, just near her. “I think we understand each other pretty well. We certainly work well together.”

  Lucy shook her head. She felt as though she had just tumbled into the wrong story. The prince had proposed to the goose girl, but the goose girl wasn’t a princess in disguise; she was an entirely different sort of imposter. “There’s a great deal you don’t know about me.”

  Philip turned his cup around on its chipped saucer. “I know that you speak your mind, even when it might be easier to remain silent. I know that you won’t let me—oh, sit on a shelf and collect dust like some trophy. You challenge me. You make me a better person. A better lawyer, too.” When Lucy didn’t respond to his smile with one of her own, he said simply, “I want to be the man you see in me.”

  Was that how he saw her? Purely as a mirror for his own better self? In that case, he was due to be disappointed when he stopped to look more closely and realized that his mirror was cracked, that she had lied to him, just as John Ravenel had lied to her.

  It was time to have it all out, every last bit of it. What more, after all, did she stand to lose?

  Taking a deep breath, Lucy said, “I’m afraid you’ve been deceived in me. I’m—not what I’ve said I am. I’ve been lying to you.”

  “Are you the lost princess of Austrovia? I’ve always rather fancied myself as prince consort.”

  He would make a lovely prince consort, all shiny braid and polished buttons. Lucy shook her head. “My ancestral home is a bakery in Brooklyn. My real name isn’t Young—it’s Jungmann.”

  She looked defiantly at Philip Schuyler, waiting for the condemnation to follow.

  “Is that all?” Philip leaned back in his chair, relief written in his posture. “My maternal grandfather was named Hochstatter. From Hamburg, or thereabouts. He changed it to Howland when he brought the family shipping business over to America. You Anglicized your name. It’s been done before.”

  “There’s more.” Her name was the least of it. “I wasn’t entirely frank about my reasons for wanting employment at Cromwell, Polk and Moore. I wanted access. To the Pratt papers.” In a rush, Lucy said, “No one could ever understand why my mother married my father. She was a lady—a Van Alan. And my father was just a greengrocer. But my grandmother said—I think Harry Pratt might be my father.”

  “Oh.” To his credit, after the first stunned moment, Philip took the announcement in stride. His lean face was thoughtful. “Harry . . . He was the younger twin. He disappeared, right before Prunella married my father. There was something of a stink about it. That would have been in ’ninety-three.”

  “The year I was born,” said Lucy quietly. “I was born in November of 1893.”

  “I see.” Philip cocked his head. “That would make you my—what? Stepcousin? I think we can get a dispensation.”

  He was joking again, always joking. “You don’t understand. I lied to you. I came to work for you under false pretenses.” She blurted out the worst of it. “When you weren’t in the office, I went through your files.”

  “You’re my secretary. It’s your job to go through my files.” When Lucy didn’t crack a smile, Philip leaned forward, taking her hands in his. “I think it’s very gallant of you to come clean. But none of this makes a difference. Not to me. It wasn’t as though you were trying to embezzle money from the firm. You just wanted to know about your heritage. And who wouldn’t?”

  Lucy bit her lip, torn by his kindness. “I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t. Nothing I hear about the Pratts makes them sound terribly likable.”

  Philip was still holding her hands, his grip loose, undemanding. “If it helps,” he said, “Harry was the best of the lot of them. I was a snotty boy of eight. I can’t have been much of a joy to have around. But Harry—he saw me sitting there by myself at the back of the room. I’d been told to sit still and mind my manners. No speaking until spoken to and all that. But he came over to me. He drew a picture for me.”

  “A picture?” A little shiver ran down Lucy’s spine. A goose walked over my grave, her mother would say.

  A faint, reminiscent smile curved Philip’s lips. “I’d nearly forgotten that day. I can’t remember quite what he said—something about guessing that I wished I were outside, doing anything but sitting in that room. Because he wished he was anywhere but in that room. And right there, just like that, he whipped out a sketch pad and drew me flying a kite in Central Park. It was a very good likeness, too.”

  Lucy thought of her mother, of the mural on Lucy’s bedroom wall. Mine is only a secondhand talent. “He was an artist?”

  Philip shrugged. “Artistic, at any rate. His family wasn’t the type to encourage that sort of talent. They were . . . grubby. Moneygrubbing,” he clarified, with the easy arrogance of generations of inherited wealth. “Old Henry August Pratt didn’t approve of anything that didn’t translate into dollars and cents. But Harry—he was different.” Glancing up at Lucy, he added, “I might still have that sketch somewhere, if you’d like it.”

  Lucy’s throat was tight. She’d lied to Philip Schuyler, she’d deceived him, and here he was, offering her a piece of his past. Of her past. “Thank you. You don’t—you don’t know anyt
hing about what happened to Harry Pratt?”

  “No one does.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent on hers. “If this matters to you, we can get someone on it. Even after this many years, a good private detective should be able to follow his trail. That is—if you want to know.”

  He spoke with such easy authority. And Lucy knew, without questioning, that if she were to say yes, within hours the wheels would be put in motion, all of Philip Schuyler’s considerable resources placed at her disposal. It was a heady taste of what it would be to be Mrs. Philip Schuyler.

  And also terrifying.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said honestly. “I thought all I wanted in the world was to find my real father. But now . . . I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to make any decisions now,” Philip said, and Lucy knew he wasn’t just talking about Harry Pratt. “Sleep on it. It’s kept for this many years; what’s a few days more?”

  If I refused you, would you still find my father for me? Lucy wanted to ask. But she already knew the answer. Philip Schuyler might be many things, but he wasn’t petty.

  Lucy looked at him, at his pale blue eyes and the nose that was just a shade too long and too thin. “Didi Shippen doesn’t know what she’s losing, does she?”

  “From her point of view,” said Philip wryly, “an apartment on Park, an Italianate villa on the Hudson, and an allowance of five thousand a year. And a suitably dressed man on her arm for social occasions.”

  Lucy pushed back her chair, rising to her feet. “Then she didn’t deserve you.”

  Philip tossed some money on the table; the tip, Lucy noticed, was probably twice what their server earned in a week. “And what about you, Lucy?”

  It would be so convenient if she were in love with Philip Schuyler, as she had fancied herself two weeks ago. She knew him better now; she liked him better now. But she didn’t love him. If liking could make love . . . But, then, that was what her father had hoped, wasn’t it? And look how that had turned out.

  Lucy fumbled with her gloves. “I have—a great deal of thinking to do.”

  “All right. I won’t push you.” Philip grinned a crooked grin. “Or attempt to ply you with gin. But I can’t promise I won’t ask again.”

  “You’ll think better of it in a week,” said Lucy, as they stepped back out into the July sunshine.

  “I’m not so fickle as that.” With a tip of his hat, he dropped her back at her door. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

  “Who was that?” It was Maud, one of the other women who roomed at Stornaway, on her way out in a new hat and shoes with a strap. “He looked rich.”

  “Just my boss,” said Lucy quickly.

  “If my boss looked like that . . . ,” said Maud.

  Lucy waved to her and quickly let herself in through the front door, into the house where her mother had fallen in love with a man named Harry Pratt.

  What should I do, Mama? What happened to you? Why did you choose as you did?

  But the marble stones of the old house were silent. There was only the staircase spiraling up, up, up to eternity, around and around, like time, circling and circling, always coming back to the same point.

  Lucy’s thoughts went around and around in a similar spiral: John and Philip and Philip and John. John had lied to her. Philip had proposed to her.

  But it was John whom her heart yearned for, John with whom she felt as though she had found a missing piece of herself. And could she really condemn him for lying to her? She had done the same, and for the same reason. If Philip Schuyler could forgive her, why couldn’t she forgive John Ravenel?

  When I saw it on you— He had seen her necklace and assumed she was part of Prunella Pratt’s scheme, whatever that scheme might be.

  But was the necklace on the lady in his father’s picture really the same as the one around her neck? And, if so, how had it come to be there?

  There was a telephone booth just next to the concierge desk. Fishing in her purse, Lucy put a coin in the slot. “Can you connect me to the Waldorf, please?”

  “Just a moment,” said the disembodied voice of the operator.

  There was a fly buzzing lazily next to the receiver; the sound seemed to blur into the whirr of the wires.

  She could put the phone back now. Put the phone back and walk away. John Ravenel would go back to Charleston. And she could marry Philip Schuyler and have beautiful gowns and appear in the society pages.

  And wonder, always, if she had made the mistake of her life.

  There was a click.

  “Your party is on the line,” said the operator, as someone else said, rather curtly, “Yes?”

  “Hello,” Lucy said quickly, before she could think better of it. “Is this the Waldorf? I’d like to leave a message for Mr. John Ravenel. Yes, Ravenel. R-A-V-E-N-E-L. Would you tell him that Miss Young would like to speak to him?”

  Twenty-five

  AUGUST 1944

  Kate

  A misty rain slicked the streets as I walked the short blocks from the subway stop. I was vaguely familiar with Brooklyn, having visited my paternal great-grandmother there infrequently as a child. She’d spoken with a heavy German accent and had seemed to barely tolerate my mother. I remembered her mostly by the scent of baking bread that clung to her like a perfume. She must have died before I was ten years old, because I didn’t remember the obligatory visits much past then.

  The neighborhood I found myself in now wasn’t too dissimilar from the one of my memory, with the familiar stench of garbage and the sight of laundry floating like ghosts from lines stretched between buildings. I remembered with a certain fondness the predominant odors of sauerkraut and schnitzel that had always made me feel a part of my mother’s life, the part before she met my father and the brackets of disappointment that marked each side of her mouth had become permanent.

  I stood across from a three-story brownstone with baby carriages parked out front on the sidewalk, a tired-looking mother jostling a screaming baby on her shoulder, taking turns patting the child’s back and flicking ash from a cigarette dangling from her lips, seemingly impervious to the drizzle that dusted everything with a fine mist.

  I looked down at the crumpled piece of paper clutched in my gloved hands, double-checking that I was in the right place. Prunella Pratt Schuyler had responded to my request for a meeting with a short note scrawled out in bold script. It had been more of a summons than a response, telling me to be at this address at four o’clock Tuesday next. The expensive stationery was at jarring odds with the street on which I stood, the linen paper more appropriate to an Upper East Side debutante than to this Brooklyn neighborhood of immigrant families and the pungent scents of foreign foods. Remembering what Margie had discovered about Prunella in the society pages, I wondered if that false impression might have been intentional.

  I was quite certain this wasn’t the same place I’d visited with my parents all those years ago. I had to assume that Prunella’s fortunes since my father’s death had deteriorated drastically, at least to the point where she’d been forced to move to Brooklyn from the Upper East Side. Which, some might argue, would be a fate worse than death.

  I waited for a sputtering milk truck to pass and then crossed the street. The haggard mother barely noticed me as I passed her on the steps and entered through tall double doors into what might have once been an attractive foyer in a single residence. But now the black-and-white marble tiles of the floor were cracked and stained, the plaster ceiling moldings mostly missing or water spotted, the fireplace surround absent, presumably salvaged to grace a more deserving residence.

  I almost left the building again to check the address one more time, but stopped myself. I recalled the rest of the information Margie had discovered in the newspaper archives about the demise of the Pratt family fortunes related to bad railroad investments, and then the blow the Schuyler family fortune had su
stained during the crash of ’29. For a woman like Prunella, who since birth had been brought up and schooled to be nothing more than a society hostess, to end up in a place like this, far away from the familiar world of her youth—it must have been humbling indeed.

  The sound of a couple arguing tumbled down the narrow stairs in front of me, the dark green runner of which was threadbare and filthy. A baby cried somewhere in the building, while an out-of-tune piano plunked out a scale behind the door to my right. I looked again at the note in my hand. Apartment 1B. The door opposite the piano, with peeling white paint and only a shadow of where a number one must have once been attached.

  I hesitated only a moment before raising my hand and knocking, the sound slightly muted by my glove. I heard a movement inside, like the barest brush of satin against wood, and then nothing. I took off my glove and knocked again with all four knuckles.

  This time I heard light but quick footsteps, followed by the sound of several locks being unlatched before the door slowly opened. Two large green eyes beneath a mop of white curly hair peered out at me through the space between the door and frame.

  “Mrs. Schuyler? Aunt Prunella? It’s Kate. Kate Schuyler. Philip’s daughter.”

  The door widened and the woman stepped back, revealing an old-fashioned and ill-fitting black maid’s uniform complete with starched white apron and cap. Her wide smile alone would have been enough to tell me it wasn’t my aunt Prunella, but when she opened her mouth and words that danced with an Irish brogue fell from her tongue, I knew for certain.

  “Och, no. I’m Mona, the maid.” She leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered, “Herself is still abed, too delicate to leave her room in such weather. Between you and me, she’s the constitution of a bear and will outlive us all.”