The Forgotten Room(71)

Fine words, but Lucy wasn’t ready to let him off that easily. She raised her brows at him. “A gift with a price tag?”

“Artists have to live—and there’s only one Mrs. Whitney.” With a hand at the small of her back, Mr. Ravenel escorted her through a room crowded with plaster models, into another, dominated by the aforementioned billiards table. “Selling their paintings is how artists survive to paint once more.” He spoke simply, but there was no mistaking the genuine emotion in his voice. “And the world gets something wonderful.”

Lucy didn’t entirely see the wonder in some of the pictures in front of her, but the wonder on John Ravenel’s face was real enough.

“I don’t have the talent myself, but I have talent enough to recognize it. Getting to see this,” he said, gesturing around the room, the partially dried canvases on their easels, the paintings on the walls, “humbles me. The idea that I might do something, anything, to promote this kind of talent . . . It’s like getting to shake Michelangelo’s hand.”

Lucy cocked her head. “I thought your gallery sold your father’s pictures.”

“My father’s pictures started the business, but this”—John Ravenel waved a hand at the paintings on the walls—“this is the future. If I held on to my father’s paintings, I’d be running a museum, not a gallery. There’s a place for that—but it’s not my place. It’s not what I want to do. It’s not what I want my legacy to be.”

“Then—” Lucy rested a hand on the green baize of the billiards table. The felt was springy beneath her fingers, virtually unworn. “I’d thought you were here to search for your father’s past.”

John Ravenel lifted a billiard ball, turned it between his fingers. Light winked off the surface. “Do I want to know where I came from? Yes. But that doesn’t impact who I want to be. My past—that’s the work of other people. What I do—that’s up to me.” Setting the ball down, he looked sheepishly at Lucy. “My apologies, Miss Young. I promised you art and instead I go baring my soul.”

“No,” said Lucy slowly. “No, you’ve given me just what I needed.”

She had thought of the future once. When she’d fought her grandmother and taken that secretarial course. When she’d won the job at Sterling Bates and forged her way into Manhattan, feeling like a pioneer, like an explorer, every morning as she rode the train in from Brooklyn, swaying from the overhead strap, evading the pinches of men who thought that working girls were fair game. It had been exhilarating, exciting. And her father—her father had been so proud when she had graduated from high school.

And then her father had died.

She hadn’t realized how much his quiet presence had bolstered her, how much just knowing he was there had mattered to her, until he was gone. After the funeral, the barber had brought back his shaving mug, caked with the remnants of the soap that smelled like her father’s chin, his name in gold on white porcelain.

Lucy, who had remained straight-backed through the funeral, found herself brought low by the smell of that soap. She had managed to murmur the right words to the barber, her fingers clutched tight around the mug, the paint with her father’s name already chipping and flaking, faded in parts. She had clung to that mug like a child with a doll, smelling that smell, wanting her father badly, so very badly. She could close her eyes, and smell the soap, and imagine him there, her quiet, loving father, the blond hair grizzled with gray, the blue eyes a little dimmer since her mother’s death, but still, always, her father, her port in a storm.

And that was when her grandmother had uttered those hateful words. Did you think he was really your father?

She had spoken in German, as she always did at home, partly, Lucy always suspected, as a means of excluding Lucy’s mother.

Did you think he was really your father?

And with that one spiteful phrase, her world had collapsed in on itself. She had lost her father. She had lost herself.

“I—” Lucy spoke hesitantly. “I’ve been chasing the past. When my father died”—she licked her dry lips—“well, he might not have been my father. I’ve been trying to find out what I can about the man who might have been my father.”

It sounded so garbled put like that, so silly. She couldn’t believe she was blurting it out to a virtual stranger, the fact of her illegitimacy, her confusion.

But John Ravenel didn’t recoil or look at her with disgust. Instead, he took her gloved hand in his and gave it a squeeze. “You poor kid,” he said softly.

Lucy managed a crooked smile. “I’m twenty-six. I’ll be twenty-seven in November.”

“Even so. When it comes to our parents we’re all still children, aren’t we?” His voice was so warm, so understanding, his hand on hers so comforting. Lucy let herself lean into him, into the support he offered. His hand tightened on hers. “It knocked me sideways when I found out that my father had a life before Cuba. I’d always heard the stories about Cuba and I’d never thought to ask about what came before. Then he died, and a friend of his gave me—”

Lucy tilted her head up at him. “Gave you what?”

“A picture of a woman. Not my mother. It was just a miniature, but the fact that he’d kept it secret—well, that said something.”