The poet, who’d been silent the entire time, finally spoke. “My mother was an artist, although my father insisted she give it up after they married. She’s been sick lately, but she very much misses going to museums and exhibits.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” offered Clara. “Nadine mentioned that you’re a poet?”
“Nadine is too kind in her description of me. Struggling poet, you might say. I suppose I take after my mother in that regard, having an innate love of the arts. My father is hoping I’ll give it up eventually and go into banking.”
Nadine placed a protective hand on his arm. “Oliver was accepted to Harvard and refused to go. Can you imagine? Instead, he’s slumming it with us bohemians.”
By all accounts, Nadine was hardly slumming it. But Clara understood firsthand what it was like to disappoint your family. “When I told my father I was moving to New York, he told me to not bother coming back. It’s not an easy decision, but I’m glad I made it.”
Oliver’s blue eyes danced. “So there’s hope for us miscreants?”
“Never.”
They shared a look, a quick, knowing smile, that sent Clara’s pulse racing.
Usually, men didn’t give her a second glance. Her father generously described her as “ethereal” for her blond hair, pale skin, and towering, skinny figure. Her mother said she looked washed-out and encouraged her to wear clothes that added color to her complexion, but Clara preferred blacks and grays. Her ghostly pallor and height had always been sore points, embarrassing, and she preferred to avoid drawing attention to herself.
Oliver tucked into his stew. She did the same, embarrassed. She must have imagined the exchange.
Nadine took over the reins of the conversation. “Now, where are you from, Miss Darden?”
“Arizona.” She waited for the inevitable intake of breath. The American West might as well have been Australia, for how shocked most East Coast natives were at her having come all this way.
“You’ve come all this way! Gosh. What does your father do? Is he a cowboy?”
“He sells metals.”
Clara deliberately used the present tense instead of the past when speaking of her family’s fortunes—now their misfortunes. Her father’s fraudulent scheming was no longer any of Clara’s concern, nor of anyone else’s. Luckily, Nadine went on and on about her own father’s real estate business, more for Oliver’s benefit than Clara’s, as Clara quickly finished her meal.
She looked up at the clock. “I must go; the doors will be opening soon.”
But there was no slipping away. Nadine locked arms with Clara as they walked out of the restaurant, as if they’d been friends for years. To the left and right, ramps sloped back up to the concourse, framed by glorious marble arches, and a vaulted ceiling rose above their heads in a herringbone pattern. Clara had tried to duplicate the earth-and-sable tones of the tiles in one of her illustrations to be shown tonight.
“Wait, before we go, stand over there.” Oliver pointed to a spot where two of the arches met. “Face right into the corner and listen carefully.”
Clara had no time for games but watched as Nadine did as she was told. Oliver took up a spot at the opposite corner and mouthed something Clara couldn’t hear. Nadine giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Clara asked.
“You’ve got to try it. We’re in the Whispering Gallery.”
Begrudgingly, Clara took up Nadine’s position.
“Clara, Clara.”
The words drifted over her like a ghost. Oliver might as well have been standing close by, speaking right into her ear. She looked up, trying to figure out how the shape of the ceiling transmitted sound waves so effortlessly. She faced the corner again. “Recite a poem to me.”
For a moment, she wasn’t sure if he would. Then the disembodied voice returned.
That whisper takes the voice
Of a Spirit, speaking to me,
Close, but invisible,
And throws me under a spell.
She swore she could feel the heat of Oliver’s breath. They locked eyes as they met once again in the center of the space.
“Thomas Hardy. The poem’s called ‘In a Whispering Gallery,’” Oliver volunteered.
Nadine crossed her arms, indignant. “You didn’t recite verse to me.”
“I’ll regale you next time, I promise. For now, I must head to a poetry reading downtown and amass further inspiration.”
Clara shook hands and they took their leave, the poem still echoing in her head.
The mob of nattily dressed art lovers trying to squeeze their way through the gallery’s doorway had already backed up to the elevator by the time Clara and Nadine arrived. They toddled through, taking small steps so as not to get their toes crushed, until they were safely inside.
The Grand Central Art Galleries predated the school by two years, when a businessman turned artist named Walter Clark had enlisted the help of John Singer Sargent to convert part of the sixth floor into a massive exhibition space, a kind of artists’ cooperative where commissions were kept to a minimum. Clara stopped by at least once a week to see the latest works, and she encouraged her students to do the same. The rooms were rarely empty, as visitors to New York and everyday commuters continually drifted through.
Tonight, the room buzzed with energy. The faculty’s work would stay up for a week, before being replaced with the students’ work, a celebration of the school’s spring term and its growing prestige. Clara’s illustrations would be on the same walls that once displayed Sargent’s portraits. The thought made her giddy.
Located on the south side of the terminal, the Grand Central Art Galleries were four times as long as they were wide, a warren of rooms and hallways, twenty in all, that encouraged visitors to circulate in a counterclockwise manner without ever having to double back. Clara scanned the walls of the first gallery for her work, with no luck. In the middle of the space, the sculpture teacher stood beside a table featuring two nymphs, both nude, one standing on a turtle.
“Now, that’s unremarkable,” said Nadine.
Clara agreed but kept her mouth shut. They continued on, to where a group of students surveyed an oil of an ungainly horse. Towering above them all was the artist, an instructor for the life drawing and painting class.
Clara had seen him a few times before. A foreigner, he was known to sing loudly during his classes and even dance about at times. This evening, he stood to the side, listening with intensity as his acolytes buttered him up, every so often tossing his head in a futile effort to flick a thatch of hair out of his eyes. Indeed, he was more horselike than the horse in his painting.
“That’s my teacher. Mr. Zakarian.” Nadine sidled up next to him. Clara had seen women like her before, flinging themselves into the orbits of handsome or powerful men to fend off their own insecurities. Clara had no time for such nonsense.
Back to the task at hand. The air had become stifling as more people crammed in. She ventured into room after room before circling back, and still she didn’t see her illustrations.
A flash of panic seized her. Her job with Wanamaker was ending soon. They’d recently announced that they’d be using only in-house artists going forward. Her salary of seventy-five dollars a month from teaching covered her expenses, but not much more. And she could not count on the next term.
She wormed her way back one more time through the mazelike space. Nothing. Down one hallway, off to the right, was a door marked SALES OFFICE. She’d passed by it in her first go-round, assuming it to be a place for clerks to write up invoices. The door stood halfway open, the lights on. She peered inside.
It was more a closet than a room, with a scratched-up desk against one wall and a wooden file cabinet wedged into a corner.