The Forgotten Room(62)

He shook his head, adamantly, the blond locks disarranged. In the light of the streetlamp, Lucy saw gray, gray she had never noticed before, beginning to thread its way into the blond.

“It’s not like that. Didi’s not—you’re not—”

Pity took the place of her anger, pity and an incredible sense of weariness. “Go home. Take a glass of soda water and an aspirin,” she advised. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

This time, when she started walking, he didn’t follow. He stood beneath the streetlight and watched her go, his face a mask of confusion.



When Lucy arrived at the office the next morning, there was a message with Miss Meechum. Mr. Schuyler had been called away to Philadelphia for an urgent meeting with a client.

Lucy had a shrewd idea of just who that client might be.

It was right, wasn’t it? she told herself, slamming the typewriter shuttle from one side to the other so hard that it nearly jammed. It made sense for Mr. Schuyler to go to Philadelphia to make his peace with his fiancée. She’d all but told him to. In fact, she had told him to, hadn’t she?

Either way, he’d done the right thing. He’d done the gentlemanly thing, removing himself from the office for a few days.

Why did it make her more angry, then?

When Lucy went into Mr. Schuyler’s office—always Mr. Schuyler now, never Philip—to leave him a stack of neatly typed copies of the Kiplinger contract, she found a folded piece of paper in the middle of the desk, with Miss Young written, in Mr. Schuyler’s elegant hand, across the outside.

Inside lay the same worn, crumpled dollar she had tossed on the table the night before.

No note. Just that dollar.

The phone on Mr. Schuyler’s desk rang. Didn’t that idiot at the switchboard know better than to put calls through when he was out of the office?

Lucy snatched up the phone. “Mr. Schuyler’s office,” she snapped.

“Miss Young?” The voice had a warm Carolina drawl. “You sounded so fearsome I hardly knew you.”

She hardly knew herself these days. Lucy glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I shouldn’t be talking with you at work.”

“I am a client, aren’t I?” said Mr. Ravenel mildly. Then, “Bad day?”

“Bad week.” Bad month. Bad year.

Nothing had been right since her father had died. His absence was a hollow in her heart. No matter how she had fought with her grandmother, no matter how she had yearned to move to the city, to try a new life, her father had been home for her.

She had lost him twice. Once when he died, and again that afternoon after his funeral when her grandmother had unleashed her terrible secret.

A cuckoo in the nest, her grandmother had called her. Your mother—no better than she should be.

And Lucy had remembered the pendant so hastily shoved in her pocket only a few months before, and her mother’s dying words. A legacy from her father, yes, but not the father she had believed to be hers.

“Let’s make it a good weekend, at least.” Ravenel’s rolling Southern accent felt like a balm after Philip Schuyler’s clipped, boarding school cadence. It conjured up memories of the weekend before, of sunshine and ice cream and innocent pleasures. “I have a surprise for you on Saturday.”

“I don’t know . . .” Lucy ran her finger along the blunt edge of the embossed blotter. She’d thought those drinks with Philip Schuyler were innocent, until they weren’t. “I shouldn’t.”

She could hear the amusement in his voice, all the way through the wires. “Be surprised?”

“See you.” She was amazed by the effort it cost her. “It isn’t really appropriate.”

“Isn’t there an old adage about horses and barn doors?” When Lucy didn’t say anything, John Ravenel added, “I promise, there’s nothing that your mother wouldn’t approve of.”

That was what she was afraid of. “I don’t . . .”

“One forty-seven West Fourth Street. Meet me there at noon. I promise you”—John Ravenel’s voice was warm and persuasive—“you won’t regret it.”





Nineteen




JULY 1944


Kate


Margie wiped her mouth with a napkin before folding it neatly and tucking it into her lunch pail. We sat on the same Central Park bench where our mothers had met all those years ago, a habit we’d fallen into after I’d begun working at Stornaway Hospital. It was a nod to a past we both remembered fondly while dealing with a present that seemed uncertain at best.

The day was saved from the murderously hot summer heat by a layer of thin, wispy clouds, as if even the sun agreed that the world below in all its turmoil didn’t deserve all of its light. The city was merely a shadow of its former glory, with even Lady Liberty and Times Square darkened at night. On my walk to the park I was assaulted with advertisements to buy war bonds on the sides of trolleys and buildings. Metal signage and ornamentation had been vanishing from the city since the first call for scrap metal, and I’d begun to wonder if New York would ever be the same again.

Margie shook out her cigarette case and took one, then offered it to me. I hesitated for a moment and then shook my head. “No, thank you. If I have one, I’ll only want another.”