The Forgotten Room(70)
Lucy pulled away a little. “How—how did you know I would take this train?”
“It’s the nearest to the studio.” John Ravenel smiled down at her as if he hadn’t a care in the world, and, despite herself, Lucy felt her spirits rising in response, all her carefully cutting arguments as to why she shouldn’t be here dissolving.
“The studio?”
“Shoot. I’ve gone and given it away.” John Ravenel’s teeth flashed in a grin. “Never mind. Pretend to be surprised when I open the door, won’t you?”
“I won’t need to pretend.” Lucy held on to her hat as she hurried to keep up with him. “I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about!”
Apologetically, John Ravenel slowed his steps. “My favorite place in New York. It’s—well, you could call it my refuge. I never showed it to— Let’s just say that I’ve never showed it to anyone before.”
“My.” Lucy couldn’t think what else to say. The block they were traversing, still at a brisk clip, was lined with old brownstones, houses that might have been workers’ homes once. It was a part of the city she knew not at all. “You said studio . . . Do you paint? I can’t quite imagine you in a floppy hat and a great bow of a necktie!”
John Ravenel laughed, a great rumble of a laugh, and the sunshine seemed to brighten on the stoops and windows. “It’s not an official uniform, you know, any more than spectacles are for professors. But, no, I don’t paint.” As they reached number 147, he paused, looking down at Lucy. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate beauty when I see it.”
Lucy could feel the blood rise in her cheeks. From the heat of the day, of course. And the exertion of the walk. Mr. Ravenel was an art dealer. Finding beauty was his business.
Beauty with a price tag.
“Is it hard,” she asked, as Mr. Ravenel set his hand to the knocker, “finding beauty, only to have to give it away again?”
“I don’t give it away; I sell it, hopefully for a profit.” He leaned against the doorframe. “You learn a certain detachment after a while. And there’s the excitement of knowing that there’s always another and another and another. Ah, Luisa! I didn’t know you were in residence.”
A woman had opened the door. At least, Lucy inferred from the curves of chest and hip that she was a woman. Her hair was shingled and she wore trousers. Smoke rose from the cigarette that she held in one hand.
“The work,” she said, gesticulating with a trail of ash, “it struggles to be born.”
“And Mrs. Whitney provides a good free meal,” said Mr. Ravenel, sotto voce. In his normal voice, he said, “Show it to me when you’re done. I might be able to find a home for it.” To Lucy, he added, “Luisa is a sculptor.”
“Does she own this house?” Their hostess, if such she was, was already trailing away, through a door into a room dotted with easels.
Mr. Ravenel laughed. “Lord, no. Welcome to Mrs. Whitney’s studio. She provides the space for deserving artists—and if anyone has the eye, she does. There’s a reference library and a sketching studio, even a billiards table.”
“A billiards table?” Lucy knew she was staring shamelessly, but she couldn’t help it. She’d never seen anything like this house before. It must have been a town house once—or two town houses—but walls had been knocked through and ceilings lifted, walls painted white and skylights put in.
“Apparently, the muse likes pool,” said Mr. Ravenel. “Ours not to reason why. Ours just to admire.”
Another and another and another, he had said. Always the next painting, the next beautiful thing. But never to keep. It made Lucy feel deeply uneasy. “To admire and then to sell?”
“And sell.” He nodded to two bearded men, deep in argument, before looking back to Lucy. “You sound as though you disapprove.”
“I just—” It was hard to encapsulate what bothered her about it. “Maybe it’s because we had so little. I was raised to hold on to things.”
Stability. That was what had been pounded into Lucy throughout her youth. To her grandmother, that meant the reliability of having a shop, a trade, a family, church on Sunday, and gugelhupf at Christmas.
But it wasn’t just her grandmother. Lucy remembered, in one of those rare moments of communion, her mother telling her, soberly, “You don’t know what it’s like to see your world disappear, piece by piece, item by item. Watching it all go, bit by bit. It’s terrifying, like clinging to the wreck of a ship.” Her hand had gone to the high collar of her dress, as though touching a necklace that wasn’t there. “In the end, you seek what port you can.”
She had always impressed upon Lucy how lucky she was, how lucky to have a home, a father, food on the table. But her words had always been at odds with the longing in her eyes. There was something, something else, to which her mother wished she had held.
Some grander past, Lucy had always thought. A house like the Pratt house. Jewelry. Gowns.
But maybe it had been something else, something more. Someone more.
“But these paintings aren’t mine,” said Mr. Ravenel, and Lucy recalled herself, with difficulty, to the present. “Art doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. It’s a gift to the world.”