The Forgotten Room (29 page)

N
EW
Y
EAR'S
D
AY 1893

Olive

All her life, Olive had wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new. When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again—like death, she supposed—and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future—
1893, imagine that!—
became your present reality.

But Olive was an early riser by habit and had never managed to keep her eyes open past eleven o'clock. Since the age of nineteen, when her parents had first let her stay up in the parlor, she had always woken on the settee at two or three o'clock, covered by a kindly blanket and a thick haze of bemused disappointment.

Until tonight. Like the rest of her life, New Year's Eve had now irreparably altered, and Olive lay wide awake as the clock struck midnight and the entire house seemed to shudder with the celebration far below, in the magnificent second-floor drawing room, where everybody else in the world had gathered, except Olive and Harry.

Harry, who lay against her now, the long shanks of his body resting heavily alongside hers, his breath stirring her hair. She thought he was asleep. They had made love swiftly, zealously, reaching a roaring climax within minutes of tumbling through the attic door, and then he had gone mortally quiet, so that she had listened for the thump of his heart to make sure he was still alive.

“Happy New Year,” she whispered, into the air that seemed to shiver under the weight of the new numbers, the new future that inhabited the room with them. The skylight soared directly above, each pane reflecting a faint image of their entangled nakedness. A hundred Harrys, a hundred Olives, brought together under the starry new night.

But Harry didn't answer. As she suspected, he had fallen asleep.

The minutes passed; the hours bled away. Harry slept abundantly, a deep and contented unconsciousness for which she envied him. Or did she? Maybe it was better not to sleep. Maybe it was better not to miss a single moment of this, of Harry's warm body united with hers.

She wore nothing at all except the necklace. That was how Harry liked her best, without any clothes at all: not because he was lascivious—or maybe not
only
because he was lascivious—but because he hated to have anything come between his eyes and her skin, between his skin and her skin. Only the necklace, the central stone of which had slipped down the side of her neck and lay now on the cushion beneath, just touching the top of her collar. She imagined it glittering there, priceless and memorable, the token of Harry's love.

Just like the earrings on her mother's ears.

Olive's father had loved her mother—of course he had—but Olive had always known that her father had a boundless capacity for love, a talent for it. His heart was so large and ambitious. And he had been
paid a thousand dollars on the first of December, and he had gone to a jeweler and seen a splendid set of rubies—Olive could picture it all, could actually
see
her father glowing with delight at all the beauty laid out before him—and he bought that set on an impulse with those thousand dollars, in the full and infinite optimism of his love.

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.

She turned away, without looking at the man sprawled over the cushions near the dressing screen, his beautiful limbs covered by blankets that smelled faintly of turpentine and human love.

The pain in her chest was already too great to bear.

Harry was right: nobody stirred in the great house as she crept down to the nunnery and changed into an ordinary dress, shivering as the chill air of her bedroom struck her bare arms. Outside the small window, Manhattan lay in cold and dirty quadrangles, shrouded in smoke from a million coal fires, so that you couldn't tell who was rich and who was poor. Which block contained a single breathtaking Beaux Arts mansion and which contained a row of cramped and narrow brownstones. Sprawling, striving, charcoal-dusted Manhattan. How she hated it. How she loved it.