The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  This is how much I love you, Olive Van Alan, daughter of my father’s architect, the man who used to indulge my interest in drawing by showing me how to draft, and once told me about his brilliant daughter named Olive, the light of his life. Only you wouldn’t trust me enough to tell me who you were. I waited and waited, because I wanted you to trust me enough. But you never did.

  You ran off instead, and married the first man you met.

  Hans Jungmann.

  Harry patted his chest, reached into his jacket pocket, and produced that first report the Pinkerton agency had sent him. Jungmann’s photograph lay inside. He’d looked at it only once, but it wasn’t a face he could forget. Thick, round, smiling idiot head. Shoulders like an ox. Belly like Santa Claus. On the night of the tenth of January, a week and a half after Olive had risen from Harry’s bed—well, such as it was—she’d let this fat German bastard roll on top of her and make her his wife. After a little practice—Jungmann looked like the type who needed a little practice—they’d made a baby together.

  That single blurred photograph had sent Harry flying down to Cuba and into the arms of so many women he couldn’t actually remember them all, until he tired of promiscuity and settled into a kind of habit with beautiful Maria, who was kinder and more faithful than the rest, and also a very good cook. And now they had made a baby, too. Estoy embarazada, señor. Merry Christmas, Harry, you’re going to be a father.

  The old rush-seated chair still rested in its place near the easel. Harry sank down and leaned his forearms on his knees, staring at the folded letter in his hands. It was almost midnight now, and the year would be over. This unexpected year, that had turned out so vitally different from the one he had imagined, as he lay in Olive’s arms twelve months ago and drifted into a happy sleep. They were supposed to go to Italy, they were supposed to share a run-down set of rooms in Florence or a shabby little villa in Fiesole, and this baby that Olive held to her breast was supposed to be his. He had actually bought the ring. He had planned it all out. He had meant to ask her to marry him just as the sun rose on the first day of the New Year. What a romantic fellow, the old Harry Pratt.

  And this dream, it had been so close! A hairsbreadth away, a few minutes on a clock, an Olive who was perhaps a little less noble, or a little more sleepy, and he would be the father of Olive’s child instead of Maria’s.

  Did Olive think about this, too? Was she awake right now, as he was, in some room above some bakery in Brooklyn? He closed his eyes, and he thought he could almost see her, sitting in a chair with a baby in her arms, and her fat German bastard husband snoring contentedly in the bed behind her.

  Except that, for some reason, in this moment, sitting in this room stuffed with memories, while the same eternal moon poured through the skylight to pool on the floor before him, he felt no rancor toward this man. For the first time, he felt no resentment for Hans Jungmann, or for the baby he had made with Olive, the girl who should have been Harry’s daughter. His chest still hurt, but it was a warm kind of ache, and as he pictured the baby’s tiny face, and Olive’s exhausted arms, the ache turned into something else, something fulsome and tender and unending. Forgiveness. Love. The inexplicable certainty that, in a way, this child did belong to him. That she and Olive belonged to him, always, carried about in some chamber of his heart that would never close.

  Harry opened his eyes. The familiar room assembled again before him. What had happened here was gone, and he couldn’t have it back. Maybe he’d just been lucky to have it at all, even for a few weeks.

  He turned his head to the wall that contained the fireplace. There was no fire, of course, but the ashes remained in a small and tired heap, hardened by the dampness of a year’s neglect. His gaze rose to the mantel, and to the bricks above it.

  During that first frantic week of 1893, he had slid the brick out of its place every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes three times, hoping to find some message there from Olive. But the space remained empty and hopeless, and on that last day, when he had gathered up his paints and drawings, he hadn’t even bothered to look. Too mad at her. Too mad at himself. Too mad at God.

  Harry rose from his chair and walked toward the mantel. The brick slid out easily in his hand, just as it always had. A few motes of dust and mortar floated out into the air. He stuck his fingers inside and felt something hard and ridged against his fingertips.

  For a moment, he closed his eyes and let his hand rest where it was. The way you might savor a rare glass of wine before taking the first sip, because you didn’t want to rush these things. He’d learned that much from Olive, anyway. You didn’t want to rush something that happened only once, and was gone.

  He drew the object out.

  She had wrapped it in a square of old velvet. Harry stuck the envelope under his arm and unfurled the ends, one by one, taking his time. A small folded note lay on top. He opened that first. His fingers shook a little.

  Take this, in remembrance of one who will always love you.

  And his eyes filled with tears, damn it, so that when he looked down at the miniature itself, he couldn’t even see her. Couldn’t see the rare and perfect details of her face, the expression in her eyes. But he didn’t need to. He knew every brushstroke. He’d painted her himself, exactly as he wanted to remember her. Almost as if he knew he would need it one day.

  Through the glass of the doors—or maybe it was the skylight—came a faint roar of delight. Dong, dong, sang the bell of a distant church spire. Fashionable St. James’, probably, where his sister had married her prey, that tall blond man with the nice kid who always tagged along, hoping someone might give a damn.

  Eighteen ninety-four. Time to move on.

  Harry draped the velvet square back over the miniature and the folded note, and he placed them carefully into his inside jacket pocket. In the cavity above the mantel, he placed the Pinkerton report, and then, after an instant’s hesitation, the scribbled notes he’d written to Olive but never sent. Maybe she would stop by one day and find them. You never knew.

  He placed his two hands on the mantel and stood there a moment, contemplating the three terra-cotta squares—the crimson figure of Saint George, sword raised in triumph to the sky—until he couldn’t stand it anymore and turned to the corner of the room, a few yards away.

  He’d meant to throw it in the fireplace, but his arm had been more forgiving—or more sensible—than his furious head, and the little box had fallen in among the canvases stacked to the right, well away from the danger of the coals. At the time, he had thought about going to retrieve it, but instead he had gathered up his supplies and left the thing where it fell.

  Now, as he moved the wooden frames aside, he thought it would be a miracle if the box was still there. He’d spent far more than he should, for a man planning to support a wife and mother-in-law abroad, and how could a small fortune like that remain unmolested, no matter how obscure its location?

  But there it was, the little square box that had once contained all his earthly ambitions, wedged between a blank canvas and the plaster wall. He bent down and picked it up and rotated it between his fingers. The velvet was still soft and new.

  He didn’t open it. He didn’t think he could. He carried it to the fireplace and reached inside the cavity below Saint George, until his fingertips brushed against the wall, and he left the box there. At the very back, so you couldn’t just see it there. You had to hunt for it. You had to want it badly.

  He replaced the brick, which went in a little more stiffly than it came out, and turned to look over the room one last time.

  In his haste, he hadn’t taken everything. He’d left all his sketches of Olive in the Chinese cabinet, and all of his old painted canvases. Some of his paints and charcoals, too. Well, let them stay. Maybe the new owner would have some use for them.

  He walked briskly to the door and hurried down the stairs, refusing to linger over the plac
e where he had seen Olive’s face for the first time, or that heavenly spot where he’d taken her against the wall because he, in the impatient lust of new love, couldn’t possibly wait another second, and she—equally eager—had just about swallowed him up with her passion. (He remembered resting against her afterward, listening to the beat of her heart, taking her breath into his lungs, and thinking that he was the luckiest man in the world, that you couldn’t connect with a human being any more perfectly than that. And sure enough, he’d been right.)

  When he came to the fifth-floor landing, he paused.

  He had finished the mural in the middle of the night, the day before he’d received the letter from the Pinkerton agency, and he hadn’t looked at it since. In fact, he had very nearly taken a bucket of turpentine and erased those naïve and idealistic images from the face of the earth. He had been ashamed of them, ashamed of his own quixotic romanticism, his schoolboy illusions. And what he drew and painted in Cuba bore no resemblance to medieval allegory; he was ruthless now in his realism, unflinching, hard, clear-eyed, a different man. He wanted to show the truth.

  But a year had passed, and now he was curious. Had they kept the mural in place, or had somebody painted it over? And if the mural was gone, then was the old Harry gone, too? Was his past erased, and only the present remained?

  If this child of his—this new life he had created with Maria in a paroxysm of grieved longing for another woman, and another life—if this child came looking one day for his father’s beginnings, would he find nothing at all?

  Harry put his hand on the door handle and pushed it open.

  He’d forgotten how beautiful it was, this magnificent column of space, soaring upward to the glass dome. Van Alan had shown him the drawings once, while it was all under construction, and the reality was even more breathtaking than he had imagined. The moonlight streamed downward, filling the air with silver, just enough light to see the steps and descend, foot by foot, to the third floor.

  The mural was still there, as fresh as the day he had painted it, and smelling familiarly of that peculiar mixture of oil and plaster. He drew a sigh of relief, as if he’d just found proof that he was still alive. For some time he stood there, contemplating the lines, admiring one figure and criticizing another: the use of color, the clever way he’d refracted the light on the dragon’s scales, creating a sense of otherworldly luminescence—well, that was a nice touch, at least. His signature, at the bottom: H. Pratt. God, what a boy he’d been, so proud of this pretty thing he’d created.

  The light began to fade as the moon moved overhead. Harry ran his finger over Saint George, eternally poised on the brink of murder, and wondered if, one day, his own child would stand here and see what his father had once created. The man his father once was. And he would wonder, wouldn’t he, what path had led Harry Pratt from this idealistic dreamworld on Sixty-ninth Street to Cuba, and Maria, and a life he had never expected to live.

  After a while, he turned and went back up the stairs, retracing his path to the seventh floor and the room that had lain forgotten for a year, steeping in dust and memories. He collected his remaining paints, his smock, a couple of old brushes that would have to do.

  And he went back downstairs and started to work.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. The Forgotten Room has three different stories and three different main characters woven together into one big story, all taking place at the same mansion. Did you like or empathize more with one particular story line or protagonist?

  2. The Forgotten Room is deliberately written as a puzzle—each chapter and character adds another piece to solving the puzzle. At what point did you figure out the truth of what really happened in each story? When did you start to realize the connections between Olive, Lucy, and Kate?

  3. Social class differences are explored in all three story lines. For the characters, do you think that the differences in social class are more important or less so than the differences caused by wealth and education?

  4. Even though none of the women is an artist, art is one of the important elements that links all three stories and the characters. What kind of role does art play in your life?

  5. As the protagonist who sets everything in motion, Olive’s decision to leave Harry and marry Hans has repercussions for several characters in the generations that follow. Do you think Olive made a mistake in leaving or that she should have trusted Harry? What choice would you have made?

  6. The history of the Pratt mansion has been fictionalized but is based on a real mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Have you ever visited a house with the kind of history the Pratt mansion has or imagined the type of people who lived and worked in such a place?

  7. The title refers to the attic room, which has a secret compartment built into the fireplace. Do you have a special place in your home where you keep or hide items?

  8. The complicated relationship between mothers and daughters is a major aspect of the novel, with three generations of women who felt loved but estranged from their mothers. Why do you think that none of them seemed to have been close to her mother? Why do you think neither Olive nor Lucy ever just tell their daughters the truth?

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of The Sound of Glass, A Long Time Gone, and The Time Between, among other novels.

  Beatriz Williams is the New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Little Thing, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, A Hundred Summers, and Overseas.

  Lauren Willig is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lure of the Moonflower, That Summer, and The Other Daughter, among other novels.

  Connect Online

  karen-white.com

  beatrizwilliams.com

  laurenwillig.com

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  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

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