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.”