The Forgotten Room(117)
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 place 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 na?ve 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?