The Forgotten Room(21)

“Cook also wanted to know if you have any peaches. Something’s gone wrong with the trees in the hothouse in Newport, and we haven’t gotten a crate from them in weeks.”

He studied the list, which seemed much smaller in his enormous paw than it had inside her mitten. “Peaches? Why you want peaches in December?”

Olive shrugged. “Peaches Melba, I think. It’s all the rage these days. They’re having a dinner party.”

Mr. Jungmann looked over the top of the list with his bright blue eyes. “When you need these peaches?”

“Saturday?”

He folded the paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. “For you, Miss Jones, I will find these peaches. Not for that terrible Valkyrie, Mrs. Jackins!” He shook his finger at the cook, though she was several blocks away. “But for you, Miss Jones, I find peaches in December. I deliver them Saturday morning.”

“I hope that’s not inconvenient. I’m sure you’d rather spend the time with your family.”

He spread his hands before her. “What family, Miss Jones? I am a poor bachelor. Is no trouble.”

Something about the way he said the word bachelor made the blood prickle into her cheeks. “Well, thank you. Mrs. Jackins will appreciate it, I’m sure.”

“I already tell you. The peaches, they are not for the happiness of Mrs. Jackins.”

From another man, this might have sounded like an invitation of some kind: an invitation of the improper kind, or at least of the indelicate kind. But Mr. Jungmann had already turned away and was sorting through the potatoes, plucking out the choicest ones and placing them in the slatted wooden box that would be brought in a wagon later that afternoon to the modest delivery entrance at the extreme left-hand corner of the Pratt fa?ade. He didn’t expect any kind of return for his trouble. He was simply providing her with peaches to make her happy.

“Do you know what you are, Mr. Jungmann?” she said. “You’re a gentleman.”

“Bah. Away with you, Miss Jones. You have some chores to do, I think?”

“Yes. But I do need to bring back a few things for the soup. Do you mind?” She held out her basket.

“What do you need?”

He filled the basket and gave her a beautiful rosy-cheeked apple to eat on the way home, and when he handed it to her he peered into her eyes. “Everything is good, Miss Jones? You need something?”

“No, no. I mean yes. Everything is excellent.”

“You need to make smile more. That is how to be happy. You smile, you are happy.”

“I thought it was the other way around.”

He shook his head. “No, no. Smile first, that is how.”

“I’ll try to remember that, thank you.”

Outside, however, it was too cold to smile. Olive’s face froze at once in the chill wind blowing down Lexington Avenue from the north. She turned up Sixty-fourth Street, seeking relief, and as she walked along the quiet sidewalk, basket bumping rhythmically against her leg, she considered what Mr. Jungmann had said, and whether you could force happiness on yourself, simply by arranging your mouth in a happy expression.

And yet, she didn’t feel unhappy, did she? You couldn’t feel unhappy, exactly, when you were as physically busy as Olive was, up and down stairs, making beds and tables and fires, forever cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. You might be frustrated and bothered and exhausted, but that was a different world entirely from the black hole in which she’d existed since she found her father’s body slumped over his desk in the cold January dawn last winter. She had begun climbing out of that hole from the moment she arrived on the service steps of the Pratt mansion—oh, that feeling of resolve, when she had let the knocker fall!—and she hadn’t slipped since.

So what had Mr. Jungmann seen in her face that had caused him such concern?

The air was crisp and cold, smelling of smoke. Manhattan always smelled of smoke, even up here, away from the offices and factories, and especially near Fourth Avenue, where the railway cut through, chugging toward New Haven and Boston and points north, filling the air with dirty steam. In the country, the air would smell like snow, white and sharp.

She crossed Fourth Avenue—no trains passing, thank goodness—and continued up the street. The houses began to enlarge as she left the noisome tracks behind; trees began to sprout up from the neat new pavement. At Madison Avenue, she should have turned right, but instead she continued toward Fifth Avenue and the bare vegetation of Central Park.

Harry.

The name slipped free from deep in her mind, where she tried to keep it locked. It was the trees, wasn’t it? The beckoning fingers of the park, where you might almost forget you were a New York housemaid who had no business receiving notes under her door from a scion of one of the city’s most prominent families. Still less keeping the latest note, which had appeared just that morning, tucked in the pocket of her skirt so it could brush unseen against her leg—the opposite leg from the vegetable basket, one leg naughty and the other leg dutiful—as she went about the business of her day.


You seem to think I am some kind of satyr. I assure you I am not. I have no designs on you, only an admiration that borders on veneration. Can you please have a little pity for me? At least return my glance when we pass in the hallway, so I know I still exist for you. A smile, I suppose, is too much to ask for, though I admit I harbor a secret hope that you are only saving one for Christmas. Listen to me. I am an idiot. I have never written notes like this before, and I’m afraid I don’t know how it’s done. I have been working on my sketch of you, but I can’t seem to get the way of your eyes anymore. You are slipping away, and I don’t know what to do. Except hope.