The Forgotten Room(69)

“But I don’t want him to be in love with me! I certainly never encouraged him. And I can’t possibly return his affection.”

Mrs. Van Alan turned sharply. “And why not? Too good for him, are you?”

“It’s not that—”

“You do realize we are destitute, Olive? Destitute. Your father’s debts . . .” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “The money from the boarders hardly covers the housekeeping. Every month I scrape and mend and make do. I’ve run out of credit at the butcher. I’ve had to sell off all my good clothes, all the silver, all the jewelry except my earbobs. The last thing I own from your father.” Her eyes glimmered. “I shall have to sell the house next, and live in some dirty tenement—”

But Olive had stopped listening, because she had just taken notice of those earbobs in her mother’s ears, hanging from the tiny lobes as they always did on special occasions, at holidays and at church. They were made of rubies, a small round one at the top and a larger, teardrop-shaped stone dangling below, in a delicate and distinctive gold filigree setting.

A stone exactly the same shape, inside exactly the same setting, as the ruby that now dangled between Olive’s breasts.



Mrs. Van Alan produced tea and brandy cake, which Olive chewed dutifully in a mouth that seemed to have lost all sensation. She replied like an automaton to her mother’s questions, though she couldn’t remember, later, a single word they had exchanged. At half past three she glanced at the clock and said she had better be going. She needed to return to Sixty-ninth Street by four in order to start preparing the house for Christmas dinner.

“Can’t you wait a few more minutes?” said Mrs. Van Alan. “Mr. Jungmann promised to stop by this afternoon.”

“Then I should leave immediately.”

Her mother’s soft and longing face turned hard. “Don’t be stupid, Olive. Just listen to you! You’re running off to serve Christmas dinner to the people who murdered your father, when—”

“They did not murder Papa!” Olive shot back, and then, shocked by her own words: “Not all of them, anyway.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Van Alan fingered the edge of her plate—the second-best china, because the first had been sold off last spring. “Oh, I see. I see it now. You’re being drawn in, aren’t you? Seduced by their riches and glamour, just like your father was. So they can swallow you inside and digest you and spit you out again—”

Olive rose from the table. “That’s not true!”

“We have nothing, Olive. We are nothing, thanks to those—those evil people. You have this chance, this one chance, a kind and respectable man with a nice prosperous business—”

“Where did you get those earbobs, Mother?”

Mrs. Van Alan blinked and touched a finger to her right ear. “These? From your father, of course.”

“I know, but when? When did you get them?”

“Last Christmas.” The tears began to glisten again at the inner corners of her dark eyes. “He used the first installment from the Pratts to pay for them. Nothing left over for housekeeping, of course, oh, no. Your father never thought about the price of coal. Why buy coal when you could buy a beautiful—a thing of beauty—” Her voice faltered. She laid her hands in her lap and stared at the small and sizzling fire in the grate, a pitifully tiny pile of cheap bituminous lumps.

“Then why didn’t you get rid of them?” Olive said cruelly.

“Because they reminded me of him. They were your father exactly. Dreaming of great things.” She paused, folding her napkin over and over against the worn burgundy velvet of her skirt. When she spoke again, her voice had turned soft. “I loved him so. And it seems to me, when I’m wearing these . . .”

“Yes?”

Mrs. Van Alan whispered, “He’s still here. A little piece of his spirit, anyway, right next to my head, speaking in my ear. A little piece of his beautiful soul.”

Olive sank back into her seat and bowed her head over her half-finished tea. The smell drifted upward, the particular spice of her mother’s favorite Ceylon blend. The tea probably cost more than the coal, but Mrs. Van Alan couldn’t seem to give that up, either. Tea and rubies.

It was the bitterest thing, wasn’t it, to come down in the world. To watch your extravagant dreams disintegrate into the rug of your cold and narrow parlor. Your favorite things disappear, one by one, until there was nothing left of you.

What would Olive’s mother do, if Olive ran off to the sunshine with her lover?

A heavy knock sounded from the hallway, and it seemed to Olive like the final scene of a Mozart opera, when Death pounded like a bass drum upon Giovanni’s sinful door.

Mrs. Van Alan placed her napkin next to her plate and rose from her chair.

“That will be Mr. Jungmann,” she said.





Twenty-one




JULY 1920


Lucy


“Miss Young?”

John Ravenel was waiting for her by the El, standing on the top of the steps, his hat in one hand, unconcerned amid the dust and the grime, the stream of people leaving the train. They eddied around him as he stepped easily forward, taking Lucy’s arm and tucking it comfortably beneath his own.