THE BUILDING we live in, 777 Garden Avenue, was built in the second decade of the twentieth century, which makes it, as we are now in the twenty-first century, nearly a hundred. The building’s centennial is coming up, and what a party we’ll have.
Garden Avenue itself is approximately twice as old, having been laid out in the grand street plan of 1811. Like Manhattan Avenue of the West Side, which runs only from 100th Street to 125th Street, Garden Avenue is one of the short avenues, starting at Seventy-second and also ending at 125th, tucked in between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue. And just like Manhattan Avenue, even many lifelong New Yorkers have never heard of it, exclaiming in surprise when they first, sometimes literally, stumble upon it.
However, some New York wags have scoffed at the avenue over the years, calling it Wannabe Park Avenue, or Poor Man’s Park, or Park Avenue Lite. “What’s next?” they say. “Backyard Avenue? Croquet Lawn Boulevard? Rolled Sod Drive?”
There may be some truth in this, but for those New Yorkers who live there (and have a little sense of humor) the avenue offers them a wonderful mix of the high and the low, the rare and the common, salmon tartare and a bagel with a schmear.
•
Number 777 was constructed at a time when large apartment buildings were taking over the avenues from downtown going up, knocking down and replacing the large family mansions, which were themselves at that time only about thirty years old. Still, times were changing in the city, many people were moving in, and the families in these mansions were selling their homes and either moving out or moving into the new buildings, sometimes into the very buildings standing on the bones of their old houses.
Naturally, this was a great time to be an architect. The architects of 777 were two gentlemen, Solomon Archer and Nathaniel Stone, of the firm Archer, Archer, Stone and Green. While Mr. Archer made sure the buildings were solid and unlikely to fall over, Mr. Stone saw to it that they looked good. Mr. Stone was a bit of a romantic, constantly falling in love with building styles of the past from all of history and from all over the world. Sometimes his designs looked like Aztec pyramids. Sometimes they looked like Egyptian palaces. And sometimes they looked like the tops of Gothic cathedrals. Mr. Stone had traveled a great deal as a young man—he grew up in Iowa—and always had a pencil and a book to draw in. The world became his department store. Having become a successful architect in New York, and traveling again, he might say, “I’ll have that tower”—pointing to the top of an Italian palazzo—“on my building at Eighty-sixth and Lex.” Or, “That Gothic entrance is just what I want for my apartments at Broadway and 103rd.” And he would busily draw everything in his sketchbook.
It then became Mr. Archer’s somewhat tedious task to make it all fit.
Number 777 Garden Avenue is perhaps the grandest building Archer and Stone ever built together. At street level it rises right up out of the ground, sheer, with no hemming or hawing. There is no moat, or hedge, or black fence holding you away from the smooth pink granite walls that form the first two floors. There are no steps up into the lobby, nor is there a carriage turnaround. Mr. Stone may have been a romantic, but he knew that carriages were on their way out. One minute you stroll on the sidewalk, and the next minute you are through the doors and into the magnificent lobby.
Stylistically, you would have to call the whole thing neo-proto-Aztec-Egyptian-Gothic.
Mr. Stone really let himself go. Zigzaggy, smooth stone surrounds the exterior doors. Swoopy Egyptian columns with terra-cotta plumes hold up the lobby ceiling. And in the oddest places both inside and out, you’ll come upon something vaguely Viking—maybe runes woven into the balustrade here, a dragon-headed downspout there.
The building goes up cleanly and evenly enough for twelve floors, as mentioned, but then breaks into all manner of ziggurat shapes—ziggurats are ancient zigzaggy pyramids— ending in a soaring tower that conceals the water tank. The odd setbacks created by the zigzagging shape allow for many strangely configured terraces on the top nine floors. In the courtyard, on the back side of the building, two three-story chimneys stand next to the central tower connected by flying arches, like a piece of a grand Roman aqueduct, just to mix things up even more.
Do you know your Norse sagas?
The top nine floors of 777 Garden Avenue are Nathaniel Stone’s vivid imagining of what Valhalla, the palace of the dead Viking warriors, should look like.
Maybe you picture it differently.
Inside, Mr. Stone let his imagination run pretty freely, as well. While you aren’t likely to be suddenly face-to-face with a grinning Viking-ship dragon head, like you might be on the outside, the layout of each floor is still kind of reptilian, if you can think of long, twisting hallways and weirdly shaped rooms in that way. Most of the floors two through twelve (there are no apartments on the ground floor) are divided into five, six, or seven apartments. Then floors fourteen through seventeen (there is no thirteen) into two, three, or four apartments, floors eighteen and nineteen have one apartment each, and the very top two floors, twenty and twenty-one, are combined into one duplex apartment. This is now the apartment of old Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom, who owns the building—she is the granddaughter of Mr. Theophilus Rotterdam, who hired Mr. Archer and Mr. Stone in the first place.
Apartments were large and many-roomed when the building was new. Most families then still had people to help them, like a maid or a cook, and these helpers often had their own rooms in the apartment. Dumbwaiters, a small kind of hand-operated elevator, brought food and dishes from one floor to the next and laundry up from the basement. Apartments didn’t have dishwashers, microwaves, or flat-screen TVs. Instead, they had maid’s rooms, pantries, and nooks and crannies.
It was a comfortable, roomy life in the city at 777 Garden Avenue one hundred years ago.
In one of the grand, full-floor apartments, on the nineteenth floor to be exact, lived old Mr. Waterby, who had been there since the building’s doors were first opened. In fact, his former mansion was the one that was knocked down to build 777 in the first place. He didn’t much miss his old house. No, he preferred his airy apartment, the wonderful views down the avenues, the simpler living, no more fussing with the roof, and so on. He doted on his apartment. It had nineteen rooms: four bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, a library, maid’s and cook’s rooms, a front hall, a back hall, and so on. But Mr. Waterby’s favorite room was at the back of the apartment, behind the elevator and stairs that run up through the center of the building. The music room. You entered the room by one of two doors, one north, one south, facing each other, which gave the room a certain formality. It was small, sun-filled. Then turning to the center of the room, where the piano stood, you faced west and the French doors that opened onto a narrow terrace, just big enough to hold the small audiences that attended the impromptu concerts Mrs. Waterby gave, seated at the piano with the French doors open.
The room itself seemed happy at this time—kind of glowing. But perhaps that was just a trick the light played, the light that came first from the setting sun and then from the shaded lamps, turned on one by one as the glow in the west faded.
Afterward, guests often said “The evening was magical!” and it did seem that way as the musical notes of Mrs. Waterby’s gentle playing mingled with the distant sounds of the street below, while the thousands of lights in myriad tints came on beneath them. Somehow, perhaps because the maroon-and-blue sky was large, and the horizon was visible as a line of inky purple, it was said that the evening felt like being on a ship at high sea.
The room was magical.
Then, one fall, Mrs. Waterby died.
Mr. Waterby, while not a man to give in to despair, never having been described as dreamy—“I am not a sentimentalist,” he would often say—nevertheless locked first the French doors to the terrace and then the two doors leading to the rest of the apartment, one north and one south, and never opened them again.
Years passed. Then a second misfortune befell Mr. Waterby, though not as great a misfortune as the first; the stock market crash of 1929.
He was not ruined, financially, but he was no longer quite so wealthy. Thus, in order to save a little money, and with Mr. Rotterdam’s permission, he determined to split the apartment in half, then live in the north half and rent out the south.
Toward that end Mr. Waterby hired Solomon Archer’s son, Benjamin, to draw up the plans and get the thing done. He, Mr. Waterby, would in the meantime spend the summer in his house on Fire Island.
Now it happened that Benjamin’s parents had often been present at the music evenings at the Waterby home and Mrs. Archer always described them to Benjamin in detail and with rapturous admiration. Mr. Waterby’s instructions were to split up the apartment evenly and to leave the existing rooms intact. Now, it is difficult to divide nineteen in half and come up with a whole number, which you know if you’ve tried it, so Benjamin Archer faced a dilemma.
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it,” thought the young architect, “the nineteenth room, the music room, must go with Mr. Waterby in the north apartment.” And so he drew up the plans accordingly.
However, Mr. Waterby, with his bags packed for Fire Island and waiting in the hall, gave his parting instructions to Frank Sebastiano, the building contractor.
“Put the music room with the other apartment. I’d rather not have it a part of mine. It reminds me too much of my dear wife,” he said.
As the elevator doors closed, Mr. Waterby heard Mr. Sebastiano’s chalky voice saying, “Yo—new plans. Close up the wall on the north side of that music room there. Mr. W. don’t want it no more.”
A month later, with the work progressing smoothly, Frank Sebastiano decided he could give himself a couple of days off for fishing from his boat in New Jersey. He called his buddy Joe and asked him to take over supervising the job. So the next morning, Joe arrived and was soon scratching his head over the plans. The work was nearly done, he could see that. He scratched his head again. The plans clearly indicated that the south door of the music room should be walled up, and it still stood open. Thinking that Frank had just not gotten around to doing it, he ordered the men to wall up the south door of the music room. The workmen, who were all Polish immigrants and didn’t like arguing with the boss, especially not in their broken English, and who didn’t mind so much one way or the other, with several shrugs walled up the south door as well, being careful not to wall up themselves or any tools inside. It is ironic or something that they were closing up a room that had once been filled with Polish music—Frédéric Chopin, the great Polish composer, was one of Mrs. Waterby’s favorites.
And so both the north door and the south door of the music room were walled up.
Mr. Waterby returned at the end of the summer and happily paid Mr. Sebastiano’s bill, having first checked that everything was to his liking, which it was. And a month later, a young family moved into the south-facing apartment and happily paid their first month’s rent after having checked that everything was to their liking, which it was.
And that was that. The little room, the music room, was sealed. For some years, residents of 777 Garden Avenue remembered the little music room, especially Mr. Waterby. But no one spoke about it.
And then the little room was forgotten.
•
Years went by. Years and years and years went by. And then decades. Outside the room, life went on. Inside the room, life had stopped.
Dust, sneaking in through the cracks around the French doors, slowly piled in the corners. Paint and plaster cracked and then finally fell, breaking into bits hitting the floor, adding to the dust. When a loose paving stone in the terrace just above wasn’t repaired right away, water seeped in, loosening plaster in the ceiling, pooling on the floor, making the beautiful oak parquet warp and break.
Only the piano remained mostly intact. It was a noble Steinway and its heavily coated hardwood repelled the dust and water valiantly.
Bit by bit, the room, which had always been happy, even when Mrs. Waterby had played tearful songs, maybe especially then, was now morose, thinking only of itself and its decay, not even remembering the former days of music. The whole room was depressed and silent. The world no longer cared for it. It no longer cared for the world.
•
Then, after three-quarters of a century of solitude and depression, the forgotten room sent out an S.O.S.
A little crack formed in one of the panes of glass of the French door. It started in the lower-left corner and crept up to the upper-right. Every day, the crack rose about half an inch. After thirty days, the crack reached the top. The forgotten room was not done, however. The room waited now for the
The Forgotten Room 55 fall and winter storms to rattle the windows. In November a tremendous storm howled down the Hudson from the north, and its winds whipped and flogged the building from every direction until it knocked out half of the cracked windowpane, the glazing that had held it in place having long ago become brittle and mostly fallen out of its frame. The glittering shards of glass lay on the terrace, leaving a black hole in the window.
The S.O.S. was sent. The little music room shrank back into itself and waited and hoped.
•
Jeremy’s New Year’s Day party was in full swing when Theo arrived. High-school-aged students, some recognized and some unrecognized by Theo, sprawled, holding various drinks and cookies, throughout the apartment. When an hour later, the clinking and shouting and thumping of the party just got to be too much for him, Theo stepped onto the quiet and cold of the apartment’s terrace high up on the twentieth floor. A couple of other guests stood about as well.
Theo saw Edward from his class and walked over and leaned on the terrace railing next to him.
“Yo, Theo,” said Edward.
“Hi,” said Theo.
They stared off over the city for a bit.
“This is so awesome up here,” said Edward.
“Yup.”
Theo leaned out over the railing and shivered.
“You know, my building should be right over there somewhere,” Theo said, pointing. “Jeremy’s building is on Lexington, mine is on Garden, one block closer to the East River. And we’re on the same block.” Theo looked across the jumbled courtyard, trying to recognize the buildings by their unfamiliar back sides. “There it is!”
“Where?”
“There. The tall zigzaggy yellowy one with the chimneys. See which one I mean?”
“Yeah, that one. The goofy-looking one.”
“Yup, that’s my building. I wonder if I can find my apartment. Let’s see, we’re on the downtown side on the nineteenth floor. One, two, three, four . . .”
“This is the twentieth floor. Just count one down.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay, that must be it. It is! It is! There’s my mom’s little pine tree on the terrace and my old bike.”
Behind them the bright whitish winter sun was slowly descending on the short day, and its low slanting light lit up 777 Garden Avenue the way a member of the chorus line is lit on a Broadway stage. Never did the building look so yellow, so sparkly.
Really, thought Theo, it looked too sparkly.
“Oh my gosh! There’s broken glass all over Miss Stickleback’s terrace, and look, one of the French doors is broken.”
“I think I see it!” said Edward. “I think I don’t care!”
“I do! It’s weird that Miss Stickleback hasn’t fixed the window. I hope she’s all right. I’m going to go home. I’m tired of the party anyway. I want to see if she’s all right. Say good-bye to Jeremy for me, will you?”
“Okeydoke,” said Edward, giving Theo the thumbs-up, and then returning to staring out over the city.
Half an hour later, Theo rang the bell to Miss Stickleback’s apartment. Miss Stickleback was the great-granddaughter of the sister of old Mrs. Waterby. When Mr. Waterby had grown too old to live alone, his wife’s niece and her husband had moved in to help him, and when he died, they stayed on. That was Miss Stickleback’s grandmother.
When Miss Stickleback opened the door—first having called out, “Who is it?” and having heard Theo’s shouted, “It’s Theo!”—Theo said, “Hello, Miss Stickleback. I just wanted to say that I noticed one of the panes of your French door is broken and there’s glass on your back terrace. Didn’t you know?”
“No, no, I didn’t know that,” said Miss Stickleback. “Come in, Theo. Now, let’s take a look at this. First of all, I didn’t know I had a back terrace. Would you like a glass of milk or something? Tea?”
“A glass of milk would be great. I’ve just had a lot of chocolate, plus chocolate cookies at a friend’s house. By the way, Happy New Year, Miss Stickleback.”
“Thank you, Theo, and same to you. Here is your milk.” By now they were both sitting at Miss Stickleback’s small kitchen table. Miss Stickleback folded her hands in front of her and said, “Now what’s all this about a back terrace?”
“Well, I was at this friend’s party I was telling you about. He lives on Lexington, on the twentieth floor, straight over from us. And I was on his terrace, looking at our building. I counted the floors up, and then down, and I found our floor. And I was showing my friend Edward. And I said, ‘Hey! There’s a broken window on Miss Stickleback’s back terrace!’ Then I thought I’d come here and tell you.”
“But as I just recently mentioned, I don’t have a back terrace.”
“You don’t?” Theo drank from his glass, licked his upper lip, and set the glass carefully down. “This is weird.”
They looked at each other for a minute. Then Miss Stickleback said, “Let’s go look for it.” Getting up, they walked out of the kitchen and continued through the dining room and the living room—there was a long terrace along both of these rooms facing uptown. They passed a small library room and went down a hall. Along the way, they peeked into the empty bedrooms that also looked uptown onto Seventy-seventh Street. They passed Miss Stickleback’s bedroom and then reached the study at the end of the hall.
“We’re right at the back of the building here, and as you can see, this is it. There is no terrace. There never has been a terrace. When my great-great-uncle split up this floor, he never mentioned a terrace.”
“How strange.” Theo held his chin with his left thumb and forefinger. “Let’s go check my apartment.”
They left Miss Stickleback’s apartment, crossed the foyer serving the one elevator that made it this high in the building, and went into Theo’s apartment. Again they walked through all the rooms, stopping in the living room to say hello to Theo’s mother, who was playing solitaire on the coffee table. Finally they arrived at Theo’s parents’ large bedroom. There was no terrace to be seen here either. Windows looked out toward the backs of the buildings on Lexington Avenue, but that was it.
“I’ve an idea,” said Miss Stickleback. “Let’s do some surveying. Back to the front door. I want to measure this.”
They stepped into the foyer next to the elevator again. “This elevator,” said Miss Stickleback, “I happen to know, is right in the middle of the building. All right. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to hold the apartment doors open for me. I’m going to pace off your apartment and find out how wide it is. Here we go. One, two, three, four . . .” Miss Stickleback marched deliberately into Theo’s apartment, through the small inside front hall, into the kitchen, and to its south wall. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Times two makes twenty-eight paces across the front of the building at this height. Now the side walls go straight all the way to the back, at least it does on my side, and I presume on yours too.” Theo nodded. “So the back wall should be the same as the front.”
Miss Stickleback massaged her delicate chin with both hands. “Now let’s measure the back rooms, on your side and on my side. They should add up to twenty-eight.”
Miss Stickleback carefully paced off the back of Theo’s apartment, which was his parents’ large bedroom. Then they returned to Miss Stickleback’s apartment to measure her two back rooms. Theo’s parents’ bedroom and Miss Stickleback’s study and bedroom together had each equaled ten of Miss Stickleback’s paces.
Theo said, “Ten times two is twenty. We’re missing eight paces.”
“Eight paces. Eight missing paces. Could it be the terrace you saw, I wonder?” Miss Stickleback rocked on her heels a little. “Let’s make one last test to make sure our math is correct.
As far as I’ve always believed, this wall here”—Miss Stickleback knocked on a wall of her study—“the south wall of my study should be the north wall of your parents’ bedroom. Funny I’ve never ever heard anything through here. At the same time, it’s not an outside wall. It never gets cold. Tell you what. You run around to your parents’ bedroom and knock three times loud on the wall.”
Theo nodded in understanding.
“Then come back here.”
A minute and a half later, Theo stood breathing heavily in front of Miss Stickleback.
“Well?” he said, between breaths.
“Nothing,” said Miss Stickleback. “Didn’t hear a thing. Something mysterious sits between our apartments. Is it the terrace? Might it even be a forgotten room?” Miss Stickleback rubbed her slim hands together. “We must get to the bottom of this. Follow me.”
They headed back to the foyer between the apartments. Theo put his head into his own apartment and shouted, “Mom, I’m going downstairs with Miss Stickleback. We’re going sleuthing! We’re hunting for clues!”
“Okay, dear,” came the quiet voice from the living room.
Theo and Miss Stickleback took the elevator to the basement. “Do you think Oskar will be on duty today?” said Theo.
“I think he usually comes in, even on his days off,” said Miss Stickleback.
In the basement, they walked along the gray-painted halls until they reached the superintendent’s office. They could hear music coming from within. They knocked.
In a moment the door was whisked open with an upswell of music and there in the warm, bright light stood Oskar, large and well-bellied, with a red face, white hair over his ears, and a broad smile, holding a large glass of beer.
“Happy New Year!” he said. “Miss Stickleback. Theo! What took you so long? Theo, have a beer. Miss Stickleback, tea?”
Oskar ushered them into the small windowless room and had them sit on the low, battered, red leather sofa—salvaged from the castoffs of a departing resident long ago—as Marilyn, the building manager’s assistant, stood up from it. Mr. Bunchley, sitting on a metal chair next to Oskar’s desk, held a glass of white wine and smiled.
Mr. Bunchley, putting down his glass, walked to the back of the office and filled an electric kettle at a small sink, saying over his shoulder, “Perhaps you’d prefer tea as well, Theo?”
“Thanks, Mr. Bunchley,” said Theo.
“So, so, so,” said Oskar. “What brings you to the basement? Besides the elevator!”
Miss Stickleback sat as straight as she could on the battered sofa.
“You may or may not believe this, Oskar, but we believe that Theo has discovered a forgotten room. There is a missing eight paces!”
“What? That cannot be.” Oskar took a large gulp of beer. “Start from the beginning.”
Miss Stickleback first told Theo’s story and then their story together, while accepting the cup of Earl Grey tea that Mr. Bunchley silently handed her.
“My goodness. Is it possible?”
Getting up, and politely asking Marilyn to step to the right, Oskar pulled open a long, low metal drawer of a flat filing cabinet. He lifted out an enormous—nearly three foot by four foot—book and laid it upon his desk. “Here are the building’s original plans,” he said. “Now you probably know,” he continued, slowly lifting and smoothing over the pages, “your floor was rebuilt in the 1930s. In 1930 to be exact, I believe.”
“Yes, my great-great-uncle used to have the entire floor.”
“Exactly,” said Oskar. “Ah, here we are.”
Oskar smoothed out the page marked Floor 19.
“So, as you can see from the plan, here is the elevator. The stairs. You can see a main entry to the apartment doesn’t exist no more now it’s two apartments. Yours and yours. But you can see where it was.”
“Yes, I see,” said Miss Stickleback, putting down her tea, and moving to Oskar’s side at the desk. “Here’s where my living room is, and kitchen. Bedrooms. Library. My study. Yes.”
“And here’s my apartment,” said Theo, at Miss Stickleback’s side. “Our living room got put there and the kitchen is here. What’s this little X thing?”
“That is the old dumbwaiter. Gone now.”
Miss Stickleback and Theo walked their fingers along the floor plans of their own halves of the apartment slowly calling out the names of the rooms they must be passing through. Stopping when they arrived at where the back rooms are now, they turned to look at each other.
“Look,” Miss Stickleback exclaimed in her sharp, high voice, tapping a finger loudly on the book. “There’s a room!”
Theo, Miss Stickleback, Oskar, Mr. Bunchley, and Marilyn bent their heads close together as they peered over the yellow paper of the large page.
“And a little terrace,” said Theo.
“My Gott,” said Oskar.
•
Fifteen minutes later all five of them stood in Miss Stickleback’s study, staring at the side wall. The book of plans lay open on her lilac love seat.
“The old door should be behind that,” said Oskar, pointing at a large armoire. “We’ll have to move it. All right?”
Mr. Bunchley and Oskar heaved, pushed, and cajoled the heavy armoire away from the wall.
As the armoire moved inch by inch like a crotchety old elephant, Theo and Miss Stickleback stood staring at the slowly widening space behind. The armoire had been her mother’s and had always stood in just that spot. Even the painters had never moved it. “Just paint around,” Miss Stickleback had said, and they always did.
Now the widening yellowy-white rectangle of ancient uncovered wall held everyone spellbound until Theo exclaimed, “There it is!”
The outline of a door showed clearly in the wall where the doorway itself had been walled up in plaster. Though the moldings had been removed, as the building had shifted and fidgeted over the decades, little cracks showed exactly where the doorway had been.
•
The next morning, the second day of the new year, as the January gray of the New York sky got a little less gray, the forgotten room woke up to the sound of drilling in its north wall. The drilling rattled away at a high pitch. Then a heavier, lower rattle droned and shook the wall becoming slowly louder until with a hiss the end of a large, spinning, silver bit poked through, sending dust and small pieces of plaster onto the floor. The silver bit withdrew. There was a pause. And then there was even louder drilling. Another bit appeared and disappeared. Then the end of a tough red finger emerged and tapped and probed around the edge of the hole.
The finger went away and a watery brown eye appeared. It was replaced by a bright gray-blue one and then a dusty green one.
Some muffled conversation could be heard but not understood through the hole.
Another pause.
Then the sound of a hammer striking hard repeated steadily a dozen times, stopping and then beginning again. After fifteen minutes of this, a piece of wall the size of a framed diploma broke through and fell heavily to the floor, sending bits of itself skidding over to the draped legs of old Mrs. Waterby’s piano.
Oskar’s face appeared in the hole, along with a “Son of a gun!,” then Mrs. Stickleback’s face, then Theo’s.
Now there was more furious pounding, loud talking, laughter, and more pounding.
Some while later, Oskar, Mrs. Stickleback, and Theo stood by the piano in the center of the forgotten room and slowly looked around. Dust motes floated slowly in the thin morning light.
•
On the second Saturday of April of that year, around dusk of that early-spring day, the first notes of Chopin’s Nocturne no. 6 in G minor sounded, echoing gently between the embracing walls to the north and south before falling lightly into the courtyards below.
Miss Stickleback sat at her great-great-aunt’s piano and carefully struck the keys with her elegant fingers and touched the pedals with her feet.
Theo sat between his parents in the first row of chairs on the terrace along with the fifteen other invited neighbors, including Mrs. MacDougal.
Oskar and Mr. Bunchley stood on the other side of the piano near the door to Miss Stickleback’s apartment.
In the months since its discovery the forgotten room had recuperated, Oskar overseeing all the work. Its walls and ceiling had been replastered, new coats of paint in eggshell and high gloss, Naples yellow and bright white had been gently applied. The old Persian rug was cleaned by experts who brought its reds and blacks beautifully back to vigor. The floor was replaced in bamboo, and, of course, the piano was cleaned carefully top to bottom, low to high, and tuned. Miss Stickleback had placed a photograph of her great-great-aunt, showing a graceful young woman, on the piano lid. The terrace was swept and waterproofed, and Mr. Bunchley contributed a potted rosebush, which was placed along the railing. Together Theo and Miss Stickleback carefully washed each glass bead of the small chandelier.
The last chord of Chopin slowly moved into each corner of the room and lingered there until its notes had become a part of the walls themselves. There’s not another way to say it— the forgotten room was fully awake once more, its long uncomfortable sleep was over. It was alive again. And it was magical.
Miss Stickleback turned to Beethoven.
