The Forgotten Room(72)

“My mother was in love with someone before my father.” The words came out before Lucy thought about them. She felt the color rising in her cheeks and gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Obviously. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Whoever he was”—John Ravenel squeezed both her hands in his—“he was a very lucky man to have you as a daughter.”

“If I can ever find him.” Harry Pratt had disappeared off the map so many years ago. Dead? Missing. “And if I do find him . . . what if he doesn’t want me?”

John Ravenel didn’t make light of her fears. “People make new lives for themselves. Look at my father, with a new name. If he doesn’t want a daughter appearing out of nowhere—then it’s to do with him, not you. Never you.”

Lucy looked up at him through a haze of tears that made the lights in the chandelier jump and dance. “Would you claim me?”

“If you were mine, I would never have let you go.”

His hands were on her shoulders now, her head tilted toward his. Dimly, Lucy realized that they weren’t talking about fathers and daughters anymore. And that they were smack in the middle of the billiards room of the Whitney Studio.

With a jerky movement, she stepped away, lifting her gloved hands to her damp cheeks. “If you succeed in finding your father’s people,” she said in a muffled voice, “what will you do?”

“I—” John Ravenel shook his head, as if to clear it. “I don’t know. I thought once that I wanted to wave my father’s achievements in their face, show them what they’d lost. Now? I’m not sure I even need to see them. I just want to know who they are, who my father was. Just to know.”

It sounded so wise, but there was something about it that rang false to Lucy. “You can tell yourself that, but it’s never just knowing, is it? Everything you know changes you. And you can’t go back.”

His face clouded. “No, you can’t. I’d thought, after the war—but when I came back . . .” With an attempt at levity, he said, “Who made you so wise, Miss Young?”

“The school of hard knocks.” The moment of intimacy was over. Lucy rubbed her gloved knuckles beneath her eyes, striving to match his tone. “You must think I’m very silly. Talk about baring your soul!”

“No,” said Mr. Ravenel lightly, stepping back, away from her. “I think you argue like an attorney. There’s no judge in the world could stand up against you.”

He had begun moving, strolling toward the door, as though they were two sightseers at a museum. Lucy fell into step beside him, groping after her lost poise. “I’d like to see that,” she said. “A woman attorney.”

“Why not? I met a woman doctor when I was serving overseas.” Mr. Ravenel glanced down at her. “She was doing twice the work of the men and just as well.”

Lucy had never hankered after bloodstained bandages or bottles of pills, but the idea of being the one sitting behind the desk, dictating memos, making the decisions, had a powerful appeal.

Regretfully, Lucy banished the image. “Maybe my daughter will be the attorney. Or the doctor.”

“Not you?”

She might as well have sighed for the moon as for a college education. That was for other women. Women whose fathers had money to burn. “I had to fight to finish at the high school. My grandmother didn’t believe in education for women. She thought it would give me the wrong sort of ideas.”

A woman didn’t need education, her grandmother had said. She would only marry anyway. It was a waste of time when she might be helping at the bakery.

A good gugelhupf. Now, there was a way to a man’s heart.

John Ravenel looked at her thoughtfully. “But here you are, a model of the new woman.”

The new woman. Scarlet women, according to her grandmother. Lucy squirmed at the memory of the scent of gin, Philip Schuyler’s lips on hers, the high-pitched laugh of the woman in the backless dress.

“Not entirely. I like being useful. I like working. But I’m not fast,” she said fiercely. “I’m not.”

John Ravenel looked at her, puzzled. “I never thought you were.” His lips lifted in a half smile. “You can tell just from looking at you that you’re a lady.”

“Even now that you—know my background?”

“What your parents did isn’t who you are.” They were back in the front hall. Lucy could hear the sound of a gramophone from somewhere up the stairs, and a spirited argument coming from the room with the sculpture. “Aren’t I proof of that?”

Lucy looked at John Ravenel, wanting to say yes, wanting to agree with him, but she couldn’t help thinking, traitorously, that he was what his parents did. “Would you have found art if your father hadn’t been a painter?”

“I don’t know. But I do know that I love art for its own sake, not my father’s. He gave me my start, but—” John Ravenel shook his head. “I guess we can’t get away from them entirely, but we can pick and choose what we want our legacies to be. What do you want your legacy to be, Miss Young?”

The words came out in a rush, out of nowhere. “If I have children, I want them to feel like they belong to something.” She had never felt as though she belonged. Not in Brooklyn. Not in Manhattan. Not with the Jungmanns. Not with the Pratts. She was betwixt and between and adrift. She took a deep breath. “I want them to know where they come from. No mysteries, no secrets. I want something solid, stable. It sounds pretty petty, doesn’t it? Here you are, planning to change the world one painting at a time—and all I want is a safe home.”