The Forgotten Room(101)
I recalled Harry Pratt’s sketches that Cooper had found in the small chest in the attic, the sketches of Olive wearing the ruby necklace, and the air began to thrum between us. “The woman in those sketches, the woman wearing the ruby necklace. She was my grandmother. Her name was Olive.” I paused, wondering how to tell him the rest. “My grandmother . . . ,” I began.
“And Harry were lovers.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he’d already figured it out.
I nodded. “But it didn’t end well, I don’t think. Harry disappeared and Olive married my grandfather, a baker named Hans Jungmann.” I touched the spot on my blouse under which the ruby necklace lay. “She never forgot Harry, though. Because she painted this same mural on my mother’s nursery room wall. And she kept this necklace.” I pulled it out of my blouse. “Harry’s sister, Prunella, said my grandmother stole it, but I don’t think that’s the truth. My grandmother cherished it, gave it to her daughter, Lucy. My mother. And she gave it to me.”
He sent me a piercing look. “Lucy? And what did you say her maiden name was?”
“Jungmann. But she changed it to Young when she came to work for my father’s law firm. Lucy Young.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his cheeks noticeably paler. “On my father’s deathbed, he dictated a letter to me to a Lucy Young in New York, to the attention of the law firm of Cromwell, Polk and Moore.” He paused, weighing his words. “It was a love letter, telling Lucy that he’d never stopped loving her or wanting her. That she was the love of his life.”
“The letter . . . did you send it?”
Slowly, he shook his head. “I planned to mail it right after his funeral. But I left it on my dressing table and my mother found it and destroyed it. I realized how much my father had hurt her, which is why I never tried to find Lucy on his behalf. It would have been a betrayal to my own mother. I never imagined . . .”
He stopped, unable to finish, but he didn’t need to. I knew exactly what he was going to say. Something about probabilities and fate, and the vagaries of a chaotic world that had brought us together.
He looked away, seemingly oblivious to the sounds of the orderlies, the ringing phone and chattering nurses. It was all so removed from us and the small cocoon of time his words had created. He took a step forward, staring at something in the top right corner of the mural. It was a small crowd of people wearing medieval clothing, a dark raincloud painted behind them and making the colors of their garments stand out. “Look,” he said, pointing toward the middle of the cloud, where swirls of the paintbrush seemed to blend the fog and spectators together.
I leaned forward, too, staring at where he indicated. “What am I supposed to see?” And then I did. Hidden among the group of people and nearly obscured by the gray smokelike fog was a woman. A woman who looked exactly like me, and whose face had been re-created in a small oil miniature and handed down through three generations of men in the same family. I stepped back, my hand pressed against my chest, the solid feel of Cooper behind me.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, then stopped, realizing that it wasn’t just the woman he was showing me. Cooper’s fingers traced over her arm toward her hand. “She’s pointing at something.”
The background of the mural seemed to shift in front of me like an optical illusion, the leaves of trees in the surrounding forest seemingly transforming themselves into something else entirely. Something that looked astonishingly like a square made of painted bricks, a design that resembled a heraldic coat of arms. A design I was very familiar with.
Without a word Cooper took my arm and propelled me to the elevator, his limp hardly evident. Neither one of us spoke as he slid open the gate and then closed it again before pressing the button for the sixth floor.
“Cooper, really, this isn’t a good idea. Whatever happened between our grandparents and parents has nothing to do with us, don’t you see?”
He faced me and I realized that he was angry. But there was something else, too, a look of desperation in his eyes that resembled what I saw in my own reflection when I bothered to study it closely enough. Without warning, he leaned forward and kissed me, his mouth hard and demanding, my head pressed against the wall of the elevator. I told myself that I would have pulled away if I’d had somewhere to move, that I didn’t want him to touch me, to kiss me. But neither thought stopped me from kissing him back.
The elevator shuddered to a stop, and he lifted his face away from mine, his eyes still dark. He slid open the gate and followed me from the elevator and toward the stairs that led to the seventh floor. I knew without asking that we were headed to the attic room, and I balked, not wanting to be confronted with the memories of the night we’d spent there, of the moonlight mixed with the smell of paint and dust and us.
But I knew, too, that this was where the bricks Olive pointed to in the mural were, and how neither Cooper nor I could leave it alone until we had all the tarnished pieces of Olive and Harry’s love affair laid open and exposed before us. The only thing I was unsure of was what we were supposed to do once we had all the answers.
Cooper’s bed had been stripped of its sheets, the brown blanket folded neatly at the bottom and matching the other two empty beds. The room appeared to be more of a dormitory now instead of a room forgotten at the top of the old mansion, a room whose walls contained more than just bricks and mortar. I stood by the wall opposite the window, not looking in that direction so I wouldn’t remember. As if I could block out that night any more than I could forget the color of my own hair.