Mr. Ravenel laughed. “Lord, no. Welcome to Mrs. Whitney’s studio. She provides the space for deserving artists—and if anyone has the eye, she does. There’s a reference library and a sketching studio, even a billiards table.”
“A billiards table?” Lucy knew she was staring shamelessly, but she couldn’t help it. She’d never seen anything like this house before. It must have been a town house once—or two town houses—but walls had been knocked through and ceilings lifted, walls painted white and skylights put in.
“Apparently, the muse likes pool,” said Mr. Ravenel. “Ours not to reason why. Ours just to admire.”
Another and another and another, he had said. Always the next painting, the next beautiful thing. But never to keep. It made Lucy feel deeply uneasy. “To admire and then to sell?”
“And sell.” He nodded to two bearded men, deep in argument, before looking back to Lucy. “You sound as though you disapprove.”
“I just—” It was hard to encapsulate what bothered her about it. “Maybe it’s because we had so little. I was raised to hold on to things.”
Stability. That was what had been pounded into Lucy throughout her youth. To her grandmother, that meant the reliability of having a shop, a trade, a family, church on Sunday, and gugelhupf at Christmas.
But it wasn’t just her grandmother. Lucy remembered, in one of those rare moments of communion, her mother telling her, soberly, “You don’t know what it’s like to see your world disappear, piece by piece, item by item. Watching it all go, bit by bit. It’s terrifying, like clinging to the wreck of a ship.” Her hand had gone to the high collar of her dress, as though touching a necklace that wasn’t there. “In the end, you seek what port you can.”
She had always impressed upon Lucy how lucky she was, how lucky to have a home, a father, food on the table. But her words had always been at odds with the longing in her eyes. There was something, something else, to which her mother wished she had held.
Some grander past, Lucy had always thought. A house like the Pratt house. Jewelry. Gowns.
But maybe it had been something else, something more. Someone more.
“But these paintings aren’t mine,” said Mr. Ravenel, and Lucy recalled herself, with difficulty, to the present. “Art doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. It’s a gift to the world.”
Fine words, but Lucy wasn’t ready to let him off that easily. She raised her brows at him. “A gift with a price tag?”
“Artists have to live—and there’s only one Mrs. Whitney.” With a hand at the small of her back, Mr. Ravenel escorted her through a room crowded with plaster models, into another, dominated by the aforementioned billiards table. “Selling their paintings is how artists survive to paint once more.” He spoke simply, but there was no mistaking the genuine emotion in his voice. “And the world gets something wonderful.”
Lucy didn’t entirely see the wonder in some of the pictures in front of her, but the wonder on John Ravenel’s face was real enough.
“I don’t have the talent myself, but I have talent enough to recognize it. Getting to see this,” he said, gesturing around the room, the partially dried canvases on their easels, the paintings on the walls, “humbles me. The idea that I might do something, anything, to promote this kind of talent . . . It’s like getting to shake Michelangelo’s hand.”
Lucy cocked her head. “I thought your gallery sold your father’s pictures.”
“My father’s pictures started the business, but this”—John Ravenel waved a hand at the paintings on the walls—“this is the future. If I held on to my father’s paintings, I’d be running a museum, not a gallery. There’s a place for that—but it’s not my place. It’s not what I want to do. It’s not what I want my legacy to be.”
“Then—” Lucy rested a hand on the green baize of the billiards table. The felt was springy beneath her fingers, virtually unworn. “I’d thought you were here to search for your father’s past.”
John Ravenel lifted a billiard ball, turned it between his fingers. Light winked off the surface. “Do I want to know where I came from? Yes. But that doesn’t impact who I want to be. My past—that’s the work of other people. What I do—that’s up to me.” Setting the ball down, he looked sheepishly at Lucy. “My apologies, Miss Young. I promised you art and instead I go baring my soul.”
“No,” said Lucy slowly. “No, you’ve given me just what I needed.”
She had thought of the future once. When she’d fought her grandmother and taken that secretarial course. When she’d won the job at Sterling Bates and forged her way into Manhattan, feeling like a pioneer, like an explorer, every morning as she rode the train in from Brooklyn, swaying from the overhead strap, evading the pinches of men who thought that working girls were fair game. It had been exhilarating, exciting. And her father—her father had been so proud when she had graduated from high school.