The Forgotten Room(7)
“It would be so tedious to live too near where you work, don’t you think?” said Lucy glibly. “And, besides, it’s not really so far. It’s just a quick ride on the Third Avenue El. And the air is fresher up here near the park.”
Lucy sniffed enthusiastically, getting a noseful of cleaning fluid and someone’s stockings left out to dry.
Matron looked long at Lucy, but what she saw there must have convinced her, because she said, in her brisk way, “You will find all the rules posted in the lobby. Gentlemen guests are welcome in the back parlor on the third floor between the hours of four and six Wednesday through Saturday. The front door is locked at midnight and will remain locked until six the following morning. Baths are taken by rota—”
The list went on and on, in Matron’s calm voice. Hot baths allotted at the rate of one every other day, no more than ten minutes apiece; towels and sheets to be laundered on alternate Mondays . . .
Was breathing rationed, too? No more than ten exhalations per tenant per minute, except on Easter Sunday and Christmas, when they might have extra for a treat?
Lucy began to wonder just what she was letting herself in for. In the July sunshine, the attic room was stifling. She could feel the sweat trickling beneath the collar of her suit jacket; her blouse clung damply to her back. The only window was high and small, nailed shut. Through a film of decades of coal smoke, the sunshine swam dimly, painting the walls of the room with dingy shadows.
She found herself seized with a longing for her room in Brooklyn, with the bookcases her father had built for her with his own hands and the mural on the wall that her mother had painted when she was quite small, a mural of spreading trees and wandering lanes, of castle towers peeping just over the horizon, and, in the middle of it all, a knight on a rearing horse raising his sword high above his head, a dragon cringing at his feet.
Right now, Lucy rather knew how that dragon felt, cornered, frantic.
“Well?” said Matron, and Lucy fought the urge to tell her thank you very much, but this wasn’t what she wanted at all, and flee down the back stairs, her smart heels click-clacking on the worn treads.
But this was what she wanted, she reminded herself, through a haze of heat and confusion. When she had heard that the old Pratt mansion had been turned into a women’s boardinghouse, with rooms to let, it seemed nothing short of heaven-sent.
Even if the temperature in the room was more reminiscent of the other place.
That was, after all, where her German grandmother believed she was headed. Lipstick, paugh! Just one little slip . . . no corset . . . skirts up past the ankles . . . And that typing course—what did she need with more school? The bakery had been good enough for her father; it should have been good enough for Lucy, too. It was that mother of hers, putting ideas in her head, making her think she was more than she was.
Mother . . . Lucy felt an ache in her chest, beneath the place where her corset wasn’t. They hadn’t been particularly close, but her mother’s death the previous summer had left her reeling, for more reasons than one.
Lucy gathered herself together, drawing herself up to her full height. “It’s exactly what I wanted,” she lied. “How much is it?”
“It’s eight dollars a week,” said Matron, and Lucy had to pinch herself to hide her surprise. Eight dollars for a cubby in an attic? She had known prices were higher in Manhattan than Brooklyn, but she’d had no idea how much. “Will that be acceptable, Miss . . .”
“Young,” said Lucy briskly.
It was Jungmann, really, but a German name was hardly an asset, not now, with so many still mourning their dead. She wasn’t lying; she was merely Anglicizing.
Lucy had left her German name behind in Brooklyn with her grandmother’s disapproval, with sauerkraut and sausages and the squish of dough between her fingers. An entire life, gone with a twist of the tongue.
But what of it? If her grandmother was to be believed, she had no more right to Jungmann than to Young.
Lucy raised her head high. “It’s Young. Lucy Young. And yes, it is acceptable.”
“In that case, Miss Young”—Matron held out a hand—“welcome to Stornaway House.”
“Stornaway House?” Lucy couldn’t quite hide her quick look of surprise. “I thought this house belonged to the Pratt family.”
She had done her research, thumbing through back issues of the World, the Sun, and the Herald, in which the Pratts were frequently featured, richly garbed, attending the opera, departing for Newport, returning from Newport, playing tennis, creating scandal. Even the house itself had been notorious, a nasty squabble between Mr. Pratt and his architect that dragged through the papers, and led, it seemed, to the suicide of the architect.
A house born in blood, one paper had dramatically termed the house on East Sixty-ninth Street, and so it would seem, given all that had happened after.
Lucy had snuck out from her work in the stenographic pool at Sterling Bates, squinting at old papers in the library, putting the pieces together.
All except the one piece she needed.
“It used to belong to the Pratts,” said Matron placidly, closing and locking the door of the room behind her with one of the many keys she wore at her waist. She ushered Lucy to the back stair. “The house was bought by Mr. Stornaway five years ago, and dedicated for use as a home for respectable women.”
Was it Lucy’s imagination, or was there just a hint of emphasis on those last words?