The Secret Life of Violet Grant (12 page)

“And now,” Sally went on, with a long red kimono stretch, “I think I'll just slink on back to my cave and give you two a little privacy. There's more brandy in the cupboard if you need it. Enchanted to meet you, Dr. Salisbury.”

“Pleasure.”

I waited until the bedroom door closed. “She's wrecked. We wrecked her.”

“
I
wrecked her. You have nothing to do with it. It's on my conscience, Vivian, not yours.”

“Gallant to the last.”

“This is not the last.”

I shook my head. “I'm afraid it is.”

“Will you look at me, at least?”

I turned. He'd pushed himself away from the door frame and stood on his own two feet. His eyes were wide and desperate.

“I can't, Paul. I can't do this. I'm not perfect, God knows, I'm no angel. But I can't do this to her. I will sink like a stone if I do. I will be beyond human hope.”

“You're not doing anything to her. It's my fault. I'm the one who led her on.”

“You didn't lead her on. It's just Gogo. She's . . . she's romantic. But that doesn't change anything. In fact, it makes things worse. If she saw us together, if she knew . . .”

Doctor Paul was shaking his head. “So we'll wait a bit. We'll give her a week or two—”

“No. Never.”

“A month. Two months. Whatever it takes. We'll be as quiet as mice.”

“Never, never.”

“You're not serious. She'll understand, Vivian. She's a beautiful girl. She'll find someone else in no time.”

“You don't understand. Not ever, do you hear me? Do you not understand a single thing about women? If she were to fall madly in love and marry and have a dozen kids, and if you and I were to start an affair when we were sixty, it would still not be okay. It just wouldn't.”

He stood still and stricken, about ten feet away. The shadow from the lamp made his cheeks hollow.

“And there's my job,” I said. “Lightfoot will fire me faster than a Soviet rocket.”

“Your
job
?
”

“My gig, my career. A writer at the
Metropolitan
. It's all I ever wanted from life.”

“Vivian, there are other magazines. Look at you. The most dazzling woman in Manhattan. They'll be clamoring for you. You are sitting there, Vivian, and throwing away our happiness with your two hands.”

“For God's sake. Listen to yourself. It's Monday. When you woke up Saturday morning you didn't even know I existed.”

“Saturday morning I was a different man.”

“Oh, lose the melodrama. This is not Saturday night at the Met. People don't just fall in love in a minute and a half.”

“It was twelve hours. Plenty of time for a quick study like me.”

“You're a quick
something
, I'll give you that.”

Without warning, he whipped around and slammed his fist into the door frame.

I jumped to my feet. “What the hell was that?”

“You
can't
, Vivian. You can't just send me away. You can't pretend this never happened.” He spoke into the plaster next to his fingers.

“I'm a Schuyler, kiddo. Watch and learn.”

“I don't understand. I cannot comprehend why you're doing this.”

I whispered: “Yes, you can.”

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.

Without looking at me, Doctor Paul detached himself from the wall and picked up his jacket from my bedroom floor. He shrugged it over his shoulders and shook out his cuffs. I stared at him: handsome of face, straightforward of shoulders, sunshine of hair.

He paused with his hand on the doorknob. The entry bulb shone on the back of his neck. “One more thing. As a practical matter, after what happened Saturday night. Do you mind telling me the date of your last menstruation?”

“You sound like a doctor.”

“Imagine that.”

I fingered the wrapper on the pastrami sandwich. “Three weeks ago. We should be safe.”

“You're never safe. So will you let me know? If we're not.”

“Of course. But I'm not worried. I wouldn't have . . . I mean, I would have made you . . . I'm not that reckless.”

He opened the door. “I'm not giving up, Vivian. I'm as stubborn as you are. If I have to wait until we're sixty.”

“Trust me, Doctor. I'm not worth it.”

The back of his head swung back and forth in the doorway.

“Trust me, Vivian. You are.”

T
he day after Violet's visit to Dr. Winslow, she dressed and walked to the institute, and no one stopped her, no one told her she was no longer welcome. She did not see Walter all day, in fact.

She spoke with the other fellows, she sat and worked on the equations from her latest round of experiments. At five o'clock she left and picked up dinner from a cookshop and took it home, though the smell made her queasy, and as she forced it down she thought she had better humble herself and write to Christina. Perhaps something could be worked out. She would not return to New York in shame—
pregnant!
of all the sordid and predictable female defeats!—no, she could never do that, but Christina had always supported her. Christina had a streak of adventure, had secretly longed to commit some grievous impropriety and live in freedom thereafter. Perhaps Christina would come and help her with the baby, and they could live a wonderful bohemian existence, the three of them. Like a modern novel, like something Olive Schreiner might write.

Except that Christina now had a husband and a brand-new baby of her own, a respectable existence, stamped and approved with the Schuyler seal.

She washed her plate and cup and changed into her nightgown and her soft cashmere-lined dressing gown, a relic from her brief
young-ladyhood. She added coals to her little fire and settled herself in the nearby chair with the latest
Proceedings
.

She must have dozed off, because a gentle knock startled her into alertness. “Come in,” she said.

The door cracked open. “Miss Schuyler, Dr. Grant is waiting downstairs for you. Shall I allow him up?” said her landlady. On her face was an expression of compassion that made Violet want to weep with gratitude.

“Yes, thank you.” She stood up and straightened her robe, straightened her hair. She wished she had a sword to buckle to her waist, a set of chain mail to cover her body.

Walter swept into the room with his usual assurance. He took off his hat and placed it on the table and turned to her, smiling. “Good evening, Violet. I've come to apologize.”

“Indeed.”

He walked up fearlessly and took her hands. His eyes were warm and blue. “How are you, child? Are you well?”

“Don't call me that.”

“I was wrong, I was quite wrong. You have every right to be angry.” He took up her hands and kissed them, and his beard scratched its familiar scratch against her skin. “I'm sorry, Violet.”

“Very well. You're sorry. I accept your apology.”

“Sit down, child.” He drew on her hands.

Violet paused, resisting, and then allowed herself to be lowered into the armchair she had just left. “What is it?” she asked, placing her hands in her lap.

Walter sat down on the stool next to the fire. “I think we should marry, Violet.”

“What?”

“We should marry. It's the sensible thing, the obvious solution to our little dilemma. We suit each other in every way.”

His words whirled past her ears.
Marry.
“You, Walter? But I
thought . . . I never thought . . . You don't believe in it. You told me so. Marriage is an artificial institution, it denies the essential independence of . . . of . . .” She could not remember the exact words, but their meaning was etched in her brain. After all, she hadn't disagreed with it. She had believed it, too, with all her heart.

He shook his head and took her hands again. “Ordinary marriage, child, between ordinary people. But ours will be a different sort of marriage, won't it? We'll have a new model, a marriage of equals, of like minds united in respect for the fundamental independence of the other. We won't be constrained by the rigid and hypocritical morality of the previous age. We shall place no restrictions on the freedom of the other person to pursue whatever interests give him or her happiness and pleasure.”

Violet looked into Walter's face: at his eyes, alight with sincerity. “What are you saying, Walter? Tell me plainly.”

“That I was wrong to tell you to visit Dr. Winslow. I engaged with you knowingly in the act of creation, I accepted that risk, and it is your right to handle the matter as your conscience dictates.”

“And you don't mind?” Violet's throat strained with disbelief. “You'll agree to . . . to raise the baby with me?”

“If that's what you wish, Violet.” He paused. “I admit, in all honesty, that I would have chosen differently. But I am a man of honor. If you must have this baby, then you shall do it by my side. As my wife, since society demands it, but with my assurance of partnership in any case.”

Violet couldn't speak; she couldn't collect her thoughts. The reversal was so swift and unexpected, she felt almost sick.

Walter wanted to marry her. The brilliant Dr. Walter Grant, who had lived half a century without a wife, wanted to marry
her,
Violet Schuyler.

“What are you thinking, child?” He kissed her hands again. “Do you need time to consider?”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were wet. “That is, no, I don't need time to consider. I'll marry you, Walter. You don't mind, really?”

He pulled her into her arms. “I don't mind.”

They were married two weeks later, as soon as Christina could be summoned by cable (Violet's parents refused to acknowledge the telegram) and carried by liner across the ocean to attend the small civil ceremony in the town hall of Oxford, attended by a few colleagues from the Devonshire and by Walter's stern-faced secretary. Violet wore a tidy blue suit and an unfashionably small hat, and a bell tolled from some nearby church as they left the building. The April air smelled of damp grass and new flowers.

After an elegant wedding breakfast at the Randolph Hotel, Christina returned to her husband and baby in New York, and Walter and Violet left for a short honeymoon in Paris, staying at the Crillon and visiting the Louvre and Versailles, where the extraordinary gardens were fully abloom with spring. Violet walked with Walter down the Hall of Mirrors and marveled at their infinite reflections, husband and wife, repeated into eternity, united by the child nestled invisibly within, united by the great ideas and great works to come. She looped her arm through Walter's and squeezed him to her ribs.

They dined sumptuously each evening. Walter took no notice of her frequent exits to the lavatory, her fussy appetite, her visceral distaste for wine and for the strong-smelling tobacco in his pipe. He did, however, insist on her having tea every afternoon, which he served her himself in the privacy of their hotel sitting room, shooing her playfully away as he measured her leaves and added her cream and sugar. He made her drink every drop.

When they arrived back at Oxford, Violet's things had been packed and moved into Walter's house, where they sat in brown boxes surrounded by uniformed removal men, who were rolling up rugs and tucking away vases. “What's this?” she asked, rotating about in confusion.

“Surprise, dear child.” He took her in his arms and kissed her nose. “I've been offered a position at the new Kaiser Wilhelm in Berlin. It's all
arranged. You've got your own place, too, I absolutely insisted, as the first condition of my employment.”

“But . . . but the baby!”

“Don't worry about the baby,” he said, and indeed, a week after their arrival in Berlin, Violet saw the first spot of blood on her drawers, and by the end of the next day she had miscarried in quiet anguish, attended by a sympathetic German physician.

Walter stopped making her tea after that. He waited a considerate six weeks before approaching her in bed, and when he did, he first opened up a box of custom-made sheepskin condoms from a chemist on Charlottenstrasse.

“No more careless mistakes, child,” he said, smiling.

W
hen the metallic crash of the front door had finished echoing up the stairs, I rose from the chair, stumbled to my bedroom, and lifted Aunt Violet's suitcase back on the bed.

My eyes had dried out. If I'd wanted numbness, I had it now: a thick blanket of it, covering my ears and fingers and heart. My mind, however, was clear and scissor-sharp. Ready for business again. Thank God. No more messy spills to impair the old intellect.

This time I reached for the clasp and hairpin with determination. I had a story to write. I had a job to do.

Now, don't be shocked, but I wasn't wholly unfamiliar with the science of picking a lock. Friends in high places, the usual. I closed my eyes and poked among the tumblers as delicately as a new mother with a Q-tip, and all for nothing: the metal parts were stuck fast, beyond the might of a human hairpin. Round one, the lock.

I rapped said hairpin against the jagged opening, which seemed, in my present mood, to be leering at me, in a bare-toothed, rusty way I found insulting.

“All right, then, Violet Grant. My stubborn little Houdini,” I said. “You've left me no choice.”

I rose to my feet and made for the under-sink cabinet in the kitchen.

Under a tactical bombardment of WD-40, the tumblers surrendered and the edges of the valise released with a musty sigh of defeat. I opened them wide.

The contents had been packed with an eerie tidiness. Violet herself, or some modern official who had found the valise in a forgotten corner and searched for some clue to its provenance? Given the state of the lock, I guessed the former.

Clothes first, and not many. Maybe you didn't need them, when you ran away with your lover. I lifted them out, one by one. I'd thought they went in for lace and frills in those days, but these threads were simple, sturdy cottons and linens in summer colors, except for one in blue gossamer that looked as if it were made of clouds. I shook it out. Creases, marks. And was that a grass stain on the back?

Why, Aunt Violet. You naughty, naughty girl.

A cardigan followed, a practical knit, belted at the waist. I lifted it to my nose. Just wool and dust, no sign of human habitation. What had Violet smelled like? Lysol and laboratories, probably. That acrid scent of acids in beakers. All of it gone now, lost to time and Zurich cupboards.

Underthings! Long and tipped with a bit of lace, at least. This was more like it. I could perceive the allure of these drawers, mysterious in their lengthy modesty, especially when topped by the corset that unfolded in my hands. I rounded my lips into a soundless whistle of appreciation. She'd had a tiny waist, Aunt Violet, as she gallivanted about with her atoms and molecules. No wonder she'd snagged the eyeballs of this eminent Dr. Grant. He could have spanned her with his hands if he wanted.

Which, obviously, he had.

I reached inside. There were no more clothes: just books and papers and a soft felt bag filled with tantalizing bumps. I loosened the drawstring and spilled out the contents onto the bedspread.

Jewelry. A pair of gold bracelets, wide as handcuffs, monogrammed
W
on one and
G
on the other. An amethyst brooch. A necklace made of
aquamarine flowers: pretty, really, if dainty jewelry was your narcotic of choice.

Then. A watch. A plain gold watch, unadorned except for the engraving at the back:

 

To Violet

from her sister Christina

1911

“Why, then the world's mine oyster

which I with sword will open.”

 

A little chill stirred at the base of my neck, as if someone had blown on it. I turned the watch back over and opened the case. At seven-oh-three in the morning or evening, some day in late July or perhaps early August of 1914, this watch had ticked its last tock. If I rubbed my fingers against it, I might still feel Violet's touch, her slender scientific hands winding it up. Checking the time. Sliding it into her pocket. She must have dropped her valise in a hurry, if she'd left this watch inside. She must have meant to come back for it.

Why hadn't she?

I laid the watch atop the blue gossamer dress with the grass stains and pulled out the remaining contents of the valise.

Great guns.

Travel papers. For the love of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Travel papers
.

I snatched them up. The one on top was Violet's, a photograph pasted to a thick sheet written in gothic German script, and there she was. Just like that.

Violet Grant.

Her exquisite black-and-white photograph stared sightlessly at me through melting huge eyes. Scientist? More like a Gibson girl who'd lost her tint, a girl to adorn chocolate boxes and Coca-Cola advertisements,
not at all the kind of girl who bent over microscopes and singed her hair on Bunsen burners. How could this darling creature be Violet? Scientific Violet, married Violet. Adulterous Violet.

I smudged my thumbs around the edge of her image and examined her pointed chin, her wide cheekbones. Her eyes. Now, that was better. I knew those eyes. I wielded them myself to great effect.

She existed. She had stood before that camera with her alluring eyes and her adorable heart-shaped face. She was a person. Name: Violet Schuyler Grant. Verheiratet. Geburtsdatum, 10 November 1891. Geburtsort, New York City, New York, U.S.A. Every fact in order. Nothing I didn't already know, really.

But the others. I hadn't known there were others, plural.

Americans. Jane Johnson Mortimer de Saint-Honoré, divorced, born 15 July 1878 in Rapid City, Iowa: Now, who the sweet social ladder was
she
?

And Henry Johnson Mortimer, born 9 August 1894. I turned that one over. Jane's son? He regarded the camera with profound gravity and too much dark hair atop his narrow face. I held him next to Jane and gasped.

The broad was beautiful.

She beheld the camera as if it were her dearest friend, and I mean
dearest
in the bedroom sense. You could not mistake that look. It ricocheted down the generations. It belonged to a different half-lidded category of allurement altogether from the huge gaze of Violet Grant, weightless with innocence, void of corruption. Whoever she was, whatever she was, this Mrs. Jane Johnson de Saint-Honoré was eminently corruptible. She knew the heat of a luxurious bed or two, if you'll pardon my bard.

And judging by Henry Mortimer's date of birth, she knew it early.

I spread the papers out before me. One, two, three. Violet, Jane, Henry.

But Henry was only nineteen years old in July 1914. Surely this couldn't be Violet's lover, the one she'd murdered her husband for. Not
this grave dark-haired boy traveling with his come-hither mumsy. Youth aside, he didn't look like the kind of kid who inspired a grand passion. Or even a petit passion. He looked like the kind of kid who inspired a grand yawn of ennui. Trust me, I knew the type. They flocked to me in their heat-seeking dozens.

Where had Violet picked them up, and why?

And where was the lover in all this?

I flipped through the leather-bound books that remained on the bed, searching for something else. Anything. A name, a postcard.

The books must have been Violet's scientific journals. They were filled with drawings and equations, inscrutable alphas and deltas that were decidedly Greek to me. Still. I liked her handwriting, quick and masculine. Rather like mine.

But the last book wasn't the same. Here the scrawl took a different slant, a thicker brush, smaller letters. The ink was still rich and black. The cover was stamped in gold:
1912
. I turned to the back, and a folded piece of paper fell out, scattering dried rose petals over the bedspread. I collected them gently in my hand and unfolded the paper.

 

 

proclaimed the engraved monogram at the top, marking it Violet's, but this was a different handwriting altogether:

Ah! So Violet is a romantic after all

I have kissed each one to last you until I return

Lionel

The pulse in my neck took a flying leap off a vertical gulp.

Lionel. Oh, my bright twinkling stars.
Lionel.

Violet's lover.

He was real. He had held a pen in his hand and written these words. This story handed down through discreet channels, this secret shame of the secretly shameless Schuylers, this tragic Berlin affair: it had happened. I'd found Violet's husband, and now I knew her lover.

His name was Lionel.

I opened my hands and looked again at the petals. I picked one and held it to my lips.

After half a century, it had lost its scent and its velvet texture, but a little color still held on, a half-remembered dream of scarlet.
I have kissed each one to last you until I return.
Elvis Aaron Presley, give me strength.
Kissed each one.
Kissed each petal for you, Violet, and when I say petal, you know whereof I metaphor.

Who could blame Violet? If this Lionel appeared in the room right now before me, I'd have him kissing my roses before you could say
voulez-vous
.

I returned the petal to my palm and looked adoringly at the pile nestled there. The faded little dears. I imagined them sitting there in Violet's ecru stationery all these years, beneath her gossamer dress and her underclothes, inside the journal labeled
1912
: so many layers to shield them from the brutal half century that followed their secret Lionel-lipped benediction, the modern world of muddy trenches and nuclear bombs, of rock and roll and Norman Mailer and the Duchess of Argyll.

I poured them back into the note and folded it with care. Like eggs in a nest, like my own private little secret with Aunt Violet. I opened the book to slip them safely back inside, and as I did so, a single and rather surprising word jumped out from one of the pages.

Jumped at me not because it was unfamiliar, necessarily, but because it clashed with such contemporary force against the chivalry of Lionel's rose-petal kisses.

fuck

•   •   •

I PAUSED,
notebook in one hand and petals in the other. I set the note on the bed, and then I flipped back through the pages of the book, intensely curious, trying to find the word again. Because. What was it doing there?

Neither word nor book belonged to Violet or Lionel; even to my untrained eyes, the handwriting here was distinct from both the love note and the scientific notebooks. It was a journal of some kind—the dates were printed in a tiny typeface at the top of each page—and when I stopped to read an entry, my breath caught. I slid to the floor, braced my back against the bedpost, and clutched the leather in my hand.

Once I was accustomed to the archaic shape of the letters, the near-illegibility of the hurried italic lines, it didn't take me long to figure out who had authored them. I read on in horrified fascination, wanting to stop, unable to stop.

I had once happened upon a gruesome street corner on Park Avenue one shiny spring day, where a taxi had so thoroughly obliterated a pedestrian that you couldn't see if this former human being had been male or female, young or old, except for the graceful high-heeled shoe tossed into the center median, in the middle of a bed of orange and yellow tulips, with a foot still stuffed inside. I had tried to look away from that shoe, just as I did from this journal, and yet my eyes kept going back, as if they needed to know every detail, to normalize this abnormality into insignificance.

By the time I reached the end of May, I felt physically sick. I gathered the shards of my moral composure and shut the book with a leathery snap.

“Great guns,” I whispered to the ceiling. “Dr. Walter Grant. You filthy beast.”