The Forgotten Room Read online

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © Harley House Books, LLC; Beatriz Williams; and Lauren Willig; 2016

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Random House, 2016

  Title page art © Jenn Huls/Shutterstock.com

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  White, Karen (Karen S.)

  The forgotten room / Karen White, Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-451-47462-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-698-19101-3 (eBook)

  1. Women physicians—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Williams, Beatriz, author. II. Willig, Lauren, author. III. Title.

  PS3623.H5776F67 2016

  813’.6—dc23 2015032901

  Designed by Laura K. Corless

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  Readers Guide

  About the Authors

  To red wine, good friends, and old houses

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not have happened without the support of our fearless editor, Cindy Hwang, and the terrific team at NAL, who believed in this unconventional book since its inception.

  Thanks also to Alice’s Tea Cup—the marvelous Manhattan tearoom that saw the three of us huddled over tea and delicious scones while we hashed out the story outline. A big nod goes to the Inn at Palmetto Bluff for our plotting time, caffeine, and stronger beverages while we were in the throes of deadline dementia. And, of course, a huge thank-you to the Hospital for Special Surgery for letting us roam around, take pictures, and populate their space with imaginary people. To Anne O’Connor—thank you for all your memories of New York City during World War II and for all the time you spent looking up extraneous details. You are the perfect research assistant.

  Last but not least, thank you to our husbands, children, and assorted pets for their patience and understanding while we spent time with all those people who existed only in our imaginations until we could get them on the page.

  One

  NEW YORK CITY

  JUNE 1944

  Kate

  The patter of rain against the blacked-out stained glass dome above where I sat numbed me like a hypnotist’s gold watch. Neither the hard marble step beneath me nor the delicately carved staircase spindle pressed against my forehead was enough to override the lullaby effect of the raindrops. I tried to focus on the ornate staircase of the old mansion, to study the fine architectural details of the structure that even the conversion into a hospital couldn’t mask.

  I recalled the walks I took as a child down Sixty-ninth Street with my mother, walks that weren’t convenient to our neighborhood but instead appeared to be a destination rather than a happenstance. We’d cross the road and pause, looking up at the seven-story stone mansion, the elongated windows staring blankly out at us, seemingly as curious as I was about why we were there. My mother had once told me that she’d lived there briefly when the building had been a boardinghouse for respectable women. But she’d never mentioned why she felt compelled to return to the spot across the street again and again, until her death three years before. It had seemed almost serendipitous when I had accepted the position at Stornaway Hospital following medical school, almost as if my mother had planned it all along.

  My gaze settled on the far wall, on a bas-relief depicting a recurring motif of Saint George slaying the dragon, which I’d noticed throughout the building since I’d begun working at the hospital nearly a year before. My eyelids fluttered closed for a moment, watching the scene against the dark backdrop of my lids, imagining I could see the saint and the dragon stepping from the wall and writhing on the tiled floor in their perpetual battle.

  I forced my eyes open, if only to assure myself that the stone adversaries were still stationary. Holding on to the banister, I pulled myself to stand. I was so very, very tired. It was my second double shift in a row, and I doubted it would be my last. The city’s hospitals were being flooded with the arrival of wounded soldiers from the recent invasion of the French coast. With our ranks already spread thin by doctors enlisting and heading overseas, those remaining were working hours rarely seen past medical school.

  The blare of an approaching siren helped me to stand up straighter, to compose myself before any of the nurses could find me in such mental disarray. As the only female doctor on staff, it was hard enough maintaining the persona of a woman with no feelings or personal needs in front of the male doctors. It was nearly impossible in front of the nurses. If they’d asked me why I’d become a doctor, I would have told them. But they didn’t ask. They seemed to be of like minds when it came to me—I was a doctor because I thought I was too good to be a nurse.

  There were a few who were deferential to my status of doctor regardless of my gender, but the rest were too traditional, having worked hard to come up the ranks in nursing, to consider me to be any more than an upstart.

  I almost laughed at the thought, recalling all the bedpans I’d changed and sutures I’d sewn due to the abysmal shortage of health-care workers. But the laugh died in my throat when I realized the siren was getting louder, as if it was headed in my direction. I inwardly cursed the blackout curtains and painted windows that obscured all views from inside the hospital with the same effectiveness as blacking out the city’s skyline from potential attackers.

  Fully awake now, I ran down the spiral staircase, past elegant rooms retrofitted into surgical theaters, a laboratory, and a convalesc
ents’ dormitory brimming at full capacity, my white coat flapping against my bare legs. It had been years since I’d had a good pair of nylons, but I’d seen too much of war to mourn their absence.

  I was the first one to reach the foyer, grabbing a flashlight on the hall table and flipping it on. The inner doors to the vestibule were temporarily affixed to the wall, requiring only a swift pull on the outer doors to access the outside. A strong gust of rain knocked into me, effectively soaking me and plastering my coat and dress to my body.

  I ran down the slippery stone steps toward the ambulance as it pulled to the curb, its headlights with the tops half painted black, its flashing lights extinguished. The driver, a large man with sad eyes peering out from beneath the brim of his dripping hat, stepped out of the ambulance.

  “Wait,” I said, blocking his path, having to shout to be heard over the din of the rain as it hammered the ambulance and streets. “We have no more room. We even have patients on cots in the dining room. We are beyond capacity.”

  “Just following orders, ma’am. We got an officer here right off the boat who’s in pretty bad shape. They told me to bring him here.”

  “But . . .”

  The man walked past me as if I were a small yipping dog just as Dr. Howard Greeley walked calmly down the stairs with an umbrella and approached the back of the ambulance. His bug eyes raked over me, taking in my sodden appearance and clothes, which had melded to my body. He didn’t offer shelter under his umbrella.

  With a quick shake of disapproval, he turned to the driver. “What do we have here?”

  “Officer, sir. He’s in bad shape.”

  “We’ll find room for him.” Dr. Greeley sent me a withering look.

  Both men continued to ignore me as the ambulance doors were thrown open by an orderly, allowing us to peer inside to where a form lay huddled beneath a blanket. Despite the June heat, the body twitched as if seized by chills.

  As the orderlies began to prepare the patient, Dr. Greeley was handed a folder that I assumed was the patient’s medical records. No longer willing to be a bystander, I grabbed the folder, then moved to stand under the doctor’s umbrella. Ignoring his scowl, I said, “Good idea. You hold the umbrella while I look at this.”

  Trying not to drip onto the pages, I skimmed the notes inside, paraphrasing for Dr. Greeley. “He sustained a bullet wound to his leg at Cherbourg—damage to the bone. Field doctor wanted to amputate, but”—my gaze drifted to the top of the page, where the soldier’s name was printed—“Captain Ravenel talked them out of it. They debrided the wound and applied a topical sulfanilamide, but lack of time prohibited delaying primary closure.” I felt my lips tighten over my teeth, understanding now how the wound had become infected. “The apparent effectiveness of the sulfanilamide led them to the conclusion that he was well enough to be stitched up and put on a ship home, seeing as how his leg, assuming it recovers, won’t be much use to an infantryman.”

  I held the flashlight higher as I scanned down to the last paragraph, written in another hand and presumably by the ship’s surgeon. “A piece of bone fragment or another foreign body must still be lodged in the leg, causing the infection, but because of a scarcity of penicillin on the ship, the captain said he’d wait for surgery until he got stateside.” I closed the folder. Fool, I thought, but with a tinge of admiration. “You’re a real hero, Captain Ravenel,” I said softly.

  The orderlies began removing the stretcher from the ambulance, eliciting a groan from its inhabitant. The exposed part of the blanket quickly darkened to a muddy brown from the rain, and, rather than wrest the umbrella from Dr. Greeley, I thrust the folder and flashlight at him before shedding my white coat, determined to shield the soldier from any further harm.

  As the orderlies carried the stretcher up the steps toward the door, I did my best to block the patient from the teeming rain, succeeding only marginally due to the saturated nature of my coat. I couldn’t see his face, but I leaned down to where it would be positioned on the stretcher and spoke to him. “Captain Ravenel, I am Dr. Kate Schuyler and you’re at Stornaway Hospital in New York City. We are going to take very good care of you.”

  It was my standard refrain to each and every patient who came through the elegant brass and wrought-iron doors, but for some reason it seemed this soldier needed to hear those words more than most.

  Two nurses held the doors as the orderlies brought in the stretcher, then looked at Dr. Greeley for instructions. “Take him to surgical theater one. It’s the only remaining bed we have. We’ll need to examine him first, of course, but my bet is we’re going to have to take off his leg.”

  “No.”

  We looked at each other in surprise, wondering where the seemingly disembodied voice had come from.

  “No,” the voice came again, yet this time it was accompanied by a firm grip on my wrist, the fingers strong and warm.

  For the first time, I looked down into the face of Captain Ravenel, and the air between us stilled. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, with eyes the color of winter grass illuminated under fine dark brows and straight black hair. His skin, though drawn and pale around his mouth, was deeply tanned.

  But it wasn’t even his looks that made it impossible for me to glance away. It was the way he was looking at me. As if he knew me.

  “Don’t let them take my leg,” he said, speaking only to me. Sweat beaded his forehead and the chills continued, yet his plea did not seem to come from delirium. “Please,” he added softly, his eyes boring into mine. Then his grip slipped from my wrist until his arm lay useless at his side, his eyes closed.

  “Operating room one, please,” Dr. Greeley repeated as if he hadn’t heard the man’s plea.

  A nurse led the way toward the small elevator.

  “No,” I said, as surprised as everyone else that I’d said the word aloud. I faced Dr. Greeley. “We should clear up any infection before we can operate, and that can take days. He can have my room.”

  Because of my long hours at the hospital, I’d been given an attic room on the seventh floor of the building. It had been meant to be temporary, but when my apartment lease had come due, I’d allowed it to expire, realizing that I was wasting rent money by sleeping there only rarely. I had no remaining family, and it seemed almost natural to move into the top room, where I could pretend, if just for a little while, that this was my home and that I had family in the rooms below.

  The room itself was currently used as a storeroom. But with its domed skylight and rows of tall, fanned windows, I imagined that the room had once had a much more glamorous existence.

  “That’s hardly appropriate,” Dr. Greeley said, looking affronted, as if he’d never made inappropriate suggestions to me.

  “I’ll move into the overnight nurses’ room. Even if I have to sleep on blankets on the floor—it’s just for a little while.”

  He frowned. “I can’t be running up and down those stairs all day to see to him. He’ll be much better off in the operating room.”

  “Then I will,” I said, sensing the restlessness of the stretcher-bearers as they waited. I wasn’t sure why I was fighting so hard for this man I didn’t even know. But I remembered his eyes, and the feel of his fingers on my bare skin. Remembered the way he seemed to recognize me.

  “After we examine him and begin treatment, we will set him up in my room and I will be responsible for his care. And if I cannot clear up the infection and his leg needs to be amputated, then you will have my full support.”

  Slightly mollified and delighted to have the opportunity to watch me fail, Dr. Greeley gave a curt nod. “Fine. Let’s take him to the operating room to examine him, and if all looks well we’ll move him to the top of the building. Just know that he is your full responsibility along with all of your other duties. It would be a shame if his condition worsens because you are not up to the task.”

  “I won’
t shirk my duties,” I said, wondering at my vehemence. I looked down at the officer again, surprised to find his eyes open. But they were glazed, and even though he was looking at me, I wasn’t sure he was seeing me.

  “Victorine,” he said softly before his eyelids slowly fluttered closed.

  I watched as the stretcher disappeared into the elevator, feeling suddenly bereft.

  Two

  DECEMBER 1892

  Olive

  On the night Olive Van Alan discovered what lay at the top of the mansion on East Sixty-ninth Street, she was planning a different kind of mischief altogether. But that was how these things happened, wasn’t it? You were always too busy looking in the wrong direction.

  So there Olive lay in her narrow bed, turning over her plans, as blind as a mole in the darkened room. If she felt any foreboding at all, it was focused on the housekeeper, who was making her usual final inspection down the corridor—petticoats rustling starchily against her rumored legs, knuckles rapping against the doors, each crisp Good night, Mona and Good night, Ellen followed by the automatic Good night, Mrs. Keane—before she locked the vestibule behind her.

  The lock, Olive had been told, was for her own protection. Mrs. Keane came from England—apparently it was a prestigious thing, in these circles, to have an English housekeeper—and she had explained, in her voice like the cracking of eggs, that the girls were not being locked in, goodness no, but rather the outside world and particularly its base male appetites locked out.

  Olive, as she went about her daily business, encountering males in every corner, had wondered where these base appetites were hidden, and why their owners could not be expected to control them without the support of a stout Yale dead bolt lock—apparently these were nocturnal appetites, as well as base—but she hadn’t dared to ask Mrs. Keane outright. Don’t be cheeky, Mrs. Keane would say, cheekiness being classified among the most subversive and therefore the most dangerous crimes among a domestic staff run along strict English lines.