The Forgotten Room(88)

“You don’t have to make any decisions now,” Philip said, and Lucy knew he wasn’t just talking about Harry Pratt. “Sleep on it. It’s kept for this many years; what’s a few days more?”

If I refused you, would you still find my father for me? Lucy wanted to ask. But she already knew the answer. Philip Schuyler might be many things, but he wasn’t petty.

Lucy looked at him, at his pale blue eyes and the nose that was just a shade too long and too thin. “Didi Shippen doesn’t know what she’s losing, does she?”

“From her point of view,” said Philip wryly, “an apartment on Park, an Italianate villa on the Hudson, and an allowance of five thousand a year. And a suitably dressed man on her arm for social occasions.”

Lucy pushed back her chair, rising to her feet. “Then she didn’t deserve you.”

Philip tossed some money on the table; the tip, Lucy noticed, was probably twice what their server earned in a week. “And what about you, Lucy?”

It would be so convenient if she were in love with Philip Schuyler, as she had fancied herself two weeks ago. She knew him better now; she liked him better now. But she didn’t love him. If liking could make love . . . But, then, that was what her father had hoped, wasn’t it? And look how that had turned out.

Lucy fumbled with her gloves. “I have—a great deal of thinking to do.”

“All right. I won’t push you.” Philip grinned a crooked grin. “Or attempt to ply you with gin. But I can’t promise I won’t ask again.”

“You’ll think better of it in a week,” said Lucy, as they stepped back out into the July sunshine.

“I’m not so fickle as that.” With a tip of his hat, he dropped her back at her door. “I’ll see you on Monday.”



“Who was that?” It was Maud, one of the other women who roomed at Stornaway, on her way out in a new hat and shoes with a strap. “He looked rich.”

“Just my boss,” said Lucy quickly.

“If my boss looked like that . . . ,” said Maud.

Lucy waved to her and quickly let herself in through the front door, into the house where her mother had fallen in love with a man named Harry Pratt.

What should I do, Mama? What happened to you? Why did you choose as you did?

But the marble stones of the old house were silent. There was only the staircase spiraling up, up, up to eternity, around and around, like time, circling and circling, always coming back to the same point.

Lucy’s thoughts went around and around in a similar spiral: John and Philip and Philip and John. John had lied to her. Philip had proposed to her.

But it was John whom her heart yearned for, John with whom she felt as though she had found a missing piece of herself. And could she really condemn him for lying to her? She had done the same, and for the same reason. If Philip Schuyler could forgive her, why couldn’t she forgive John Ravenel?

When I saw it on you— He had seen her necklace and assumed she was part of Prunella Pratt’s scheme, whatever that scheme might be.

But was the necklace on the lady in his father’s picture really the same as the one around her neck? And, if so, how had it come to be there?

There was a telephone booth just next to the concierge desk. Fishing in her purse, Lucy put a coin in the slot. “Can you connect me to the Waldorf, please?”

“Just a moment,” said the disembodied voice of the operator.

There was a fly buzzing lazily next to the receiver; the sound seemed to blur into the whirr of the wires.

She could put the phone back now. Put the phone back and walk away. John Ravenel would go back to Charleston. And she could marry Philip Schuyler and have beautiful gowns and appear in the society pages.

And wonder, always, if she had made the mistake of her life.

There was a click.

“Your party is on the line,” said the operator, as someone else said, rather curtly, “Yes?”

“Hello,” Lucy said quickly, before she could think better of it. “Is this the Waldorf? I’d like to leave a message for Mr. John Ravenel. Yes, Ravenel. R-A-V-E-N-E-L. Would you tell him that Miss Young would like to speak to him?”





Twenty-five




AUGUST 1944


Kate


A misty rain slicked the streets as I walked the short blocks from the subway stop. I was vaguely familiar with Brooklyn, having visited my paternal great-grandmother there infrequently as a child. She’d spoken with a heavy German accent and had seemed to barely tolerate my mother. I remembered her mostly by the scent of baking bread that clung to her like a perfume. She must have died before I was ten years old, because I didn’t remember the obligatory visits much past then.

The neighborhood I found myself in now wasn’t too dissimilar from the one of my memory, with the familiar stench of garbage and the sight of laundry floating like ghosts from lines stretched between buildings. I remembered with a certain fondness the predominant odors of sauerkraut and schnitzel that had always made me feel a part of my mother’s life, the part before she met my father and the brackets of disappointment that marked each side of her mouth had become permanent.

I stood across from a three-story brownstone with baby carriages parked out front on the sidewalk, a tired-looking mother jostling a screaming baby on her shoulder, taking turns patting the child’s back and flicking ash from a cigarette dangling from her lips, seemingly impervious to the drizzle that dusted everything with a fine mist.