The Forgotten Room(26)
“Delmonico’s! I wish my family had friends like that.” Fran craned her neck to call back over her shoulder, “Hey, El, did you know we had a Rockefeller in the office?”
“We do?” Eleanor appeared behind Fran, searching in her purse. “Have you seen my gloves?”
Fran rolled her eyes. “Never mind your gloves. Miss Butter Won’t Melt here has a date at Delmonico’s!”
She oughtn’t to have said anything. Briskly, Lucy jammed her hat on her head, securing it with a long pin. “Never mind. I can just wear my suit. It’s no one I need to impress, after all.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Fran linked an arm through hers. “Delmonico’s! I’ll send you off right. I know this little woman on Delancey who can make you look like your dress came straight from gay Paree.”
Given that Fran had been no closer to Paris than the Bronx, Lucy took that with a grain of salt, but she let herself be towed off to the elevator, Eleanor trotting along behind.
Fran’s dressmaker might not be Parisian, but she was reasonably cheap. Passing up the gaudier options, Lucy settled on a dress of sapphire blue, with long chiffon panels over a silk slip.
It was only an imitation, she knew, but looking at herself in the long mirror, she could imagine herself at the opera with Philip Schuyler.
She couldn’t do anything about her sensible shoes or her battered leather bag, so different from the wisps of beads and silk the other ladies were carrying. But at least her dress looked right. As long as one didn’t look too closely.
Delmonico’s was housed in an imposing building on Forty-fourth and Fifth. The ma?tre d’ took in Lucy’s old hat and cheap gloves at a glance.
“Yes?” he said.
Behind the ma?tre d’, Lucy could see the dining room, the walls hung with pale yellow silk—Ach, she could hear her grandmother say in her head, such waste!—the windows shaded with cream lace. An onyx fireplace dominated one side of the room. Large palms provided an illusion of privacy for the well-dressed diners, who spoke in muted tones by the light of yellow-shaded lamps.
Lucy tried to look as though she dined out every day. “Do you have a reservation for Schuyler?”
The name appeared to have a magic effect. The twin furrows disappeared from between the man’s brows.
“Schuyler . . . ,” said the ma?tre d’, checking his book. “Ah, yes! Mr. Schuyler reserved a table in the Palm Trellis. If you would come this way?”
The Palm Trellis, it appeared, was on the roof. The ma?tre d’ handed Lucy over to a uniformed elevator operator, who whisked her upstairs to a vast room where white fans turned lazily overhead, dispelling the July heat. Window boxes spilled over with hydrangeas, and sweet-scented wisteria twined around white-painted trellises.
Back at Stornaway House, her attic room would be hot and close. The shared kitchen would be even hotter, with the depressing smell of day-old boiled cabbage that seemed to have sunk into the very walls.
On an impulse, Lucy tugged her mother’s ruby pendant from its hiding place. It was heavy and old-fashioned, but the ruby was real. It made her feel, a little bit, as though she belonged here.
Through the long windows, the sky was shading gently toward dusk. The breeze from the fan ruffled the long chiffon panels of Lucy’s dress as she followed yet another attendant through the long room, to a choice table at the back, framed in an arch of wisteria, shaded by two tall palms.
As they approached, a man unfolded himself from his seat at the table. The light was against her; Lucy could make out only a dark suit, dark hair, a broad set of shoulders.
What would Didi Shippen do?
Pinning on a stiff social smile—and trying not to trip on the hem of her gown—Lucy held out a hand. “Mr. Ravenel?”
Mr. Ravenel made no move to take her hand. He stood frozen, an expression of surprise amounting to shock on his face.
In a voice so low that Lucy could hardly hear it, he said, “Your eyes are blue.”
Ten
JUNE 1944
Kate
“Well, he is a doctor.”
I stood in the middle of the tiny single room of a three-floor walkup in a dubious East Side neighborhood south of Park and stared into the pretty freckled face of my best friend, Margie Beckwith, her eyes wide with possibilities.
“So am I,” I reminded her. “But I’d rather kiss a cockroach.”
She shuddered with an empathy that only sisters or best friends who’d known each other since they were in diapers could have. Our mothers had met on a bench in Central Park when we were babies, our prams parked next to each other by happenstance, and then by design as the women discovered they had much in common. Or, more specifically, that they both had the same delusions of grandeur.
Whereas my father had been a lawyer with a respectable pedigree, most of our family money had been lost in the crash of ’29, and while we weren’t penniless, we had most definitely become middle class. It had always been apparent to me that while both of my parents had minded our social demotion, my mother had been much less forgiving of our circumstances. She’d been a loving wife and mother, but I’d never been able to completely shake the feeling that she always believed that there had been another life, a bigger, brighter life, waiting for her somewhere around the corner.