The Forgotten Room(94)
A pair of ruby earrings for his beloved wife.
A matching necklace for his lover.
His lover. Mrs. Henry August Pratt, the wife of his employer.
The truth. It had been clawing for freedom at the back of Olive’s head, as some sensible and logical part of her brain had put all the pieces together, one by one: what she knew of her father, what she knew of the Pratts. The argument after Miss Prunella’s debut, one year ago. The necklace that Mrs. Pratt had given tearfully afterward to her favorite son. (It was given to her in love, Harry said, when everyone knew that couples like the Pratts didn’t love each other, not really. Love and marriage were two entirely different objects to the Pratts, requiring two entirely different partners.) And then, the day after that, the angry word REFUSED on the final invoice for services rendered.
Prunella’s sneering voice: He stole something; that’s for sure.
And now the truth broke free at last, floating magically around Olive’s head, bumping up against the sides of her skull.
She hadn’t seen her mother since Christmas Day. There was too much to do: readying the great house for the New Year’s Eve ball, engaging in a passionate love affair under the noses of her employers. The fairyland she had inhabited this past week did not allow visits to narrow, shabby brownstone houses on the wrong side of the Fourth Avenue railroad tracks.
But Mrs. Van Alan would be expecting her to visit today. She would be expecting Olive to knock on the door in the early afternoon, and she would probably contrive to have that dear, respectable, dependable Mr. Jungmann in the parlor with her. Just paying a call, Olive. Wasn’t that nice of him?
What would Mrs. Van Alan do if Olive didn’t walk through that door, after all? If she received a note instead, explaining that Olive had run off to Italy to live in sin and sunshine with one of the Pratt boys. If, a few days later, Miss Prunella Pratt took her revenge for the whole affair, either by anonymous message or in person, and Mrs. Van Alan would know that her precious earrings were only half of a matched set.
We’ll take her with us, Harry had said, but that was ridiculous, a dear and ridiculous fantasy nearly as impossible as loving each other in the first place. Her mother would never agree, for one thing—run off to Italy with your lover, indeed!—and for another, how could such a project end in anything else than disaster? Inevitably life would take hold. Inevitably there would be babies and bills and arguments. Inevitably Harry would find out who she really was—Prunella would see to that—and the rosy glow with which he perceived her would sharpen to an ordinary harsh daylight, until she stood before him as she really was, and he would no longer adore her.
And dear Harry, he was so good and true that maybe he wouldn’t leave her, not after she had given everything up for him. He would feel some responsibility for the mistress he no longer loved, for the children he had recklessly fathered. But he would regret his youthful impulse, wouldn’t he? When she stood exposed before him, the real Olive, in all her human flaws. And she couldn’t bear that, never, to stand before him and see the disappointment in his eyes. Disappointment, where until now she had seen only love: love of the purest possible distillation.
No. She wanted to remember him like this, exactly as he was now, sated and trustful in her arms.
Oh, but it had been beautiful while it lasted, hadn’t it? She lifted her hand and sifted Harry’s hair around her fingers, his golden waves that she loved. She stared and stared at the skylight, and the ghostly reflection of the two of them together, enrobed in each other. She had known pleasure, and she had known what it was to be fully and perfectly united with another human being, and surely that was enough to last a lifetime. Surely that was more than most people ever knew.
She was lucky, really.
At some point, the light began to stir below the unseen horizon.
Olive lifted away the heavy arm that draped across her middle and slipped carefully out from under Harry’s body. He stirred. “Come back,” he said, reaching for her hand.
“I have to go back, Harry. It’s almost dawn.”
“’S all right.” He was still half-asleep. “’S New Year’s Day. No one’s awake.”
“Cook will be awake.”
He tugged on her hand. “Come back. Just another moment.”
She almost obeyed him. God help her, she almost gave in. But crawling back into Harry’s embrace meant making love to him again, as inevitably as light poured from the sun, and she couldn’t do that to him. It would be like telling him a lie, and she didn’t want to end it with a lie.
She bent down and kissed his forehead instead. “Go back to sleep.”
Harry closed his eyes, and his hand fell back into the blankets.
Olive’s body was exhausted, aching, but her mind remained painfully alert. She gathered up her scattered garments and put them on again, one by one, struggling a little with the corset, even though it was designed for a woman in service, who had no servant of her own. For women like her. She pinned her hair back in its usual sedate knot, but she shoved her white cap in the pocket of her pinafore apron.
When she was done, when there was not a single excuse for remaining, she stood by the door and allowed her gaze to travel along the brick walls, along the floor stacked with canvases, to the easel, to the drawings and paintings leaning against every possible vertical surface, to the careless bits and pieces of the artist’s trade strewn about. (She had tried to tidy it up for him once, but he had only laughed and told her to stop, because he wouldn’t be able to find anything if she put it all away.) Her gaze fell at last on the unfinished study for his mural, the one of Saint George, every line of which was sewn into her memory, and for an instant, she saw it as a stranger might: a visitor off the street outside, unfamiliar with the artist and his studio and his work. She thought, in wonder, My God, he has such an immense talent, such a boundless imagination. And her chest hurt, because she saw his future spreading out before him, grand and ambitious and full of color, and she had no place in it.