The Secret Life of Violet Grant (13 page)

Violet, 1912

V
iolet cannot recall the exact moment she realized Walter was sleeping with other women.
Sleeping:
that's the wrong word. He was fucking other women, and then returning home to their marital bedroom, to bathe and change and sometimes to fuck her, too, and then fall asleep snoring in their iron-framed bed in the luxurious flat on Kronenstrasse.

There was no sudden epiphany. The suspicion crept up on her, inch by inch, nudged along by minute clues and conjectures. A woman's eyes, laughing knowingly at her at some dinner party, before turning away. A hint of perfume on Walter's linens, before the maid had a chance to launder. Lise's sympathetic face. The memory of Walter's smooth acceptance of her suspicions of pregnancy, and his practiced solution to the dilemma, his prior acquaintance with Dr. Winslow. All the evidence supported her hypothesis, that Walter was unfaithful, habitually and casually unfaithful. She began, with a curious dispassion, to imagine him with other women: what they would look like, where he would meet them. This other world of his, in which she played no part.

So the immediate encounter with Walter's infidelity came more as a shock than a surprise.

When they first moved to Berlin, and after Violet had recovered—physically, at least—from the miscarriage, she went to parties with her husband. She considered it part of her duty, since she was so unwifely in other regards: endless troglodyte hours spent in the basement of the institute, rumpled unfashionable clothes, housekeeping left entirely to the housekeeper, equations scrawled on napkins, conversation dominated by the technical, face screwed all too often in unreachable concentration. That summer and autumn, as a kind of restitution, she forced herself to depart her cramped office by six o'clock to accompany Walter to dinner parties, music parties, opera and ballet, soirées and balls, enduring them chiefly by sitting quietly near a window and contemplating the progress, or lack of it, she had made in her laboratory or her notebooks.

At one such evening, held at the Baroness von Schrager's magnificent flat near the Reichstag, knotted up and frustrated by a particularly inconclusive experiment that day, she had allowed herself to drink a glass or two of champagne and to be led into dancing. The results astonished her. Gentleman after unaccountable gentleman had walked up and asked her for the next waltz, and she had complied, even laughing a little, enjoying the new sensation of being sought after and admired.

After the fifth or sixth dance, she recalled the hour and went looking for Walter. She had found him easily, in a small sitting room at the back of the flat, his tailcoat flung over a chair, his formal black trousers about his knees, his white buttocks clenching steadily as he immersed himself in the backside of a small dark-haired matron dressed in emerald green. The woman was bent over a French escritoire: Directoire, Violet noted, though not a particularly fine example. Her ring-crusted knuckles curled about the opposite edge; her breasts and her pearls dangled together heavily from her unfastened bodice. At each thrust, she called out
Mein Gott!
in a voice so feral, she did not detect the sound of Violet's entry into the room.

Walter did, however. He turned his red and passion-bloated face in
his wife's direction, registering surprise; but instead of desisting, he merely offered Violet an apologetic shrug and continued his work. Through the open door, the Baroness von Schrager's orchestra played heedless Schubert.

Violet, frozen, misted with champagne, pictured herself lifting the statue of a curving bronze Aphrodite from the shelf nearby and dropping it over Walter's head.

She did not, however. Instead, she backed away and closed the door with a numb hand. She found herself a taxi and went to bed, thinking that she had dreamed all this before, that this new picture in her head was exactly as she had imagined it. This shock she felt, it was recognition.

The next morning, she found Walter lying next to her in bed, in remorseless slumber. Over breakfast, he reminded her that their marriage was a modern one, a new model of partnership, in which they placed no restrictions on the freedom of the other person to pursue whatever interests gave him or her happiness and pleasure. He had brought her to Berlin with him, he had given her her place at the institute; she had everything she wanted, and all because of his untiring efforts on her behalf, his unflagging ambition for her. She understood that, of course?

She did.

He reached across the breakfast table and squeezed her hand, where it lay next to her steaming coffee. He was so very glad he had married her, the only woman in the world he could have made his wife, always first in his heart. She was no narrow-minded bourgeois. She was clear-headed and scientific, thank God; she understood men were subject to physical urges from time to time, simple transactions of the body, but she, Violet, was his wife. He would always support and encourage her interests, as long as she supported and encouraged his. She understood that, too, of course?

Violet picked up her coffee, drank it scalding hot, and said that of course she understood.

After all, a mutual pursuit of happiness was the foundation of a marriage of
equals.

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;

Nay, I have done, you get no more out of me

And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart

That thus so cleanly I myself can free;

Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,

And when we meet at any time again,

Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,

When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,

When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And innocence is closing up his eyes,

Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

—Michael Drayton (1563–
1631)

I
walked into the
Metropolitan
lobby Tuesday morning with considerably less
joie de travailler
than I had danced through the day before, but I wasn't about to let anyone know it.

“Good morning, Agatha! Where on earth have you been hiding that feathered comb? It sets off your hair to perfection.” I kissed the tips of my fingers.

She moved her nail file from ring finger to pinkie. “Mr. Lightfoot wants to see you.” Like a sentence of lethal injection.

“Why, thank you, Agatha. I'll just drop my pocketbook and briefcase at my desk and be with him—”

“
Now
, he says.” She snapped her Wrigley's, set down the nail file, and picked up her magazine.

I leaned over her desk. “Agatha, you have such a way with words. Why aren't you writing for the magazine, that's what I've always wondered.”

“Get lost,” she said.

“You see? Concise, to the point.” I gave my briefcase a joyous little swing as I set off down the corridor to the hallowed Lightfoot wing. “Brevity is the soul of rudeness, my mother always says.”

Outside Mr. Lightfoot's double doors, Gogo's desk overflowed with
silver-framed photos and crystal candy dishes. The only item missing was Gogo herself. His lordship's secretary looked up from her own Spartan empire on the left-hand side, dressed impeccably in neutral colors, lipstick immaculate, eyelashes extravagant. “Miss Schuyler. I'll just announce you.”

She picked up the Lightfoot Hotline and murmured a few words. I swallowed back a gum wad of anxiety and shifted my pocketbook to the same hand as my briefcase.

The secretary rose in hourglass splendor from her desk and opened the right-hand door. “You can go in, Miss Schuyler.”

I sallied forth with hips swinging. “Good morning, Mr. Lightfoot. What a charming way to start the day. We should do this more often.”

He looked up from the starched pages of
The Wall Street Journal
, spread like a rectangle of sanity atop the liquid brown of his desk, and removed his reading glasses, the better to strip me naked with.

Now. A word about S. Barnard Lightfoot III. He had three houses and four ex-wives, and the only thing he loved more than first editions and hourglass secretaries was his daughter, Margaux. (Of S. Barnard Lightfoot IV, the less said the merrier.) Having, as I've said, an agreeable waist-to-hip ratio myself, I'd found myself on the receiving end of a Lightfoot proposition within a week of my employment here at the
Metropolitan
. I'd refused it gracefully, no feelings hurt, no careers destroyed, and I hadn't entered the inner sanctum since.

So. Here I stood, the day after Gogo's heartbreak, two days after waking up in Suitor Number Ten's coveted bed. The timing was suspicious, to say the damnedest.

“Miss Schuyler.” Those famous pale eyes did an ankle-to-bosom evaluation, weighted arithmetically to the bosom. Mr. Lightfoot had a face that recalled Bath sandstone, grandly proportioned and always lightly tanned, as if he'd just stepped off a Mediterranean liner accompanied by twenty steamer trunks filled with cigars, tailcoats, and hair oil. Actually, I liked him. He made no bones about who he was and what he wanted.
He was a man I could deal with. “Please sit. I suppose you know why you're here.”

I dropped into the chair and set my briefcase on the floor. “I can't imagine. My sins are so numerous.”

“My daughter is home in bed today. I expect she'll be out all week.”

“Poor Gogo. She told me about it last night. It's awful. How is she? Is there anything I can do?”

He flipped open a silver case on his desk and withdrew a cigarette, which he lit in a single experienced strike of a gold Zippo lighter. “You can tell me the nature of your relationship with Dr. Salisbury.”

“I'm sorry, I don't—”

“I understand you had a heated conversation with him in the library, before he took my daughter out to lunch and broke her heart.”

Pale eyes could be so piercing.

“Ah, your network of spies at work again. Do you mind if I smoke, Mr. Lightfoot?”

That, at least, got a twitch of eyebrow out of him. He nudged at the silver box. “Be my guest, Miss Schuyler.”

I rose and took a cigarette, and then I leaned forward so he could light me up. I settled back in my chair. It was a modern number, low-slung, designed to lull the sitter with an excess of ergonomic comfort. Also to hold him in place a good foot or two lower than the boss. “I'll be candid, Mr. Lightfoot, if I may speak in confidence.”

“Please do.”

“I am acquainted with Dr. Salisbury. We met over the weekend. I didn't realize he was Suitor Number Ten.”

“Suitor Number Ten?”

I waved my smoky hand. “Gogo and I are close, as you know.”

“Not close enough, evidently.”

“No, no, Mr. Lightfoot. You've got it all wrong. If I'd known who Dr. Salisbury was, I'd never have . . .” A flutter of the fingers.

“Hmm.”
He considered. “May I ask what occurred between you?”

“You may not.”

“I see.”

“Yes, I expect you do. However, once he walked into the office yesterday and I put one and one together into three, if you take my meaning, I told him it was off. That
I
was off. I am very fond of Gogo, Mr. Lightfoot, and I would never indulge myself at her expense.” I looked at him straight and true, piercing eye for piercing eye.

“By God,” he said. “Then why did he break things off with her after all?”

And here we are again, Vivian and her shortcomings. If you weren't well disposed to me before, you're really going to despise me now. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. I am who I am. And that Tuesday morning, in contrast to Monday, I had nothing to lose. I had no more Doctor Paul. I had a suitcase full of unsolved Violet and Lionel. I had a promise to keep to myself, a resolution to guard and protect against human weakness.

So here's what I said next.

“Because he's in love with me, Mr. Lightfoot. Passionately in love.”

“After a single weekend?”

I shrugged modestly. Lightfoot's eyes dropped back to my bosom.

“I can't explain it, sir. I suppose the heart has its reasons. As you can imagine, the confrontation was taxing for us both.” I dragged hard on my cigarette and stared out the window to Lightfoot's private terrace, thick with potted chrysanthemums. “He refused to give me up. He says he'll keep trying until he's sixty.”

“I see. And what do you intend to do about it?”

I turned bravely back to him. “Well, I have my career, don't I? I suppose I'll just have to throw myself into my work at the
Metropolitan
and hope for the best. Hope it can distract me from all this.”

Lightfoot twiddled his thumbs. He lifted his cigarette. He blew out a sizable cloud and tipped the ash into a handsome glass tray. He pushed it toward me.

“Thank you.” I leaned over and did the necessary.

“Admirable sentiments, Miss Schuyler,” he said. “Of course, I stand ready to support you in any way I can.”

“I appreciate the gesture, sir. I do so happen to have a bit of research I'm working on, in my spare time. An exposé, of a sort.”

“Do you, now?”

“Yes. A fifty-year-old murder mystery. High-society wife murders husband, disappears into the German countryside with lover. If the
Metropolitan
is interested in that kind of thing.”

“Have you spoken to Tibby about this?”

I extended my crossed legs, fatale-style. “I'm afraid Mr. Tibbs doesn't possess quite so much eagerness to support my noble intentions, sir.”

“I can speak to him.”

“I'd appreciate that, sir. It would certainly keep me busy. Keep my mind off personal matters for some time.” I brushed at my skirt. “I might need a little help from the
Metropolitan
archives.”

“They are at your disposal, of course. I'll tell my secretary to give you a key.”

I nearly swallowed my cigarette. “That would be very helpful, Mr. Lightfoot. I'd be most appreciative.”

“Hmm.”
He dropped his smoke in the ashtray and rose from his desk. I took the hint and unwound my legs.

“I'm glad we had this talk, Miss Schuyler.” Lightfoot came around the desk and motioned me ahead of him. “I think we've come to an excellent understanding, don't you?”

“It's so lovely to be understood.”

His hand appeared on the doorknob in front of me. His voice dropped an octave. “All in one weekend,
hmm
? Dr. Salisbury must have been favorably impressed.”

“It's a mistake I don't mean to repeat, sir,” I said.
“Ever.”

“I see.” He opened the door for me and extended his other hand. “Good day, Miss Schuyler.”

I shook his hand. “Good day, Mr. Lightfoot.”

•   •   •

I STRODE
down the corridor, away from the Lightfoot wing. My eyeballs began to sting just as I reached my desk. I placed my briefcase on the floor and my pocketbook in the bottom drawer. Tibby's head poked out from his office. His bark followed with considerable bite. “Where the hell is my coffee, Miss Schuyler?”

“In a moment, Mr. Tibbs.”

I found the bathroom just in time. I locked myself in the far stall, the one nobody used because the latch always stuck and made your nail varish chip. I sat on the seat and folded six squares of toilet tissue and cried silently into them, careful not to smudge my mascara, blotting as I went so no one would ever, ever suspect.

•   •   •

BY THE TIME
I'd delivered Tibby's coffee black, no sugar, everything was arranged except his willing cooperation. His unwilling cooperation, I had in spades.

He gulped his coffee straight before he began. At the second bob of his throat, I realized I'd forgotten the sugar. He didn't seem to notice. “Your work has been reassigned to one of the junior writers,” he said, investing the sentence with as much irony as it could legally bear. “I will expect a full draft of this article on my desk within a week.”

“That won't be possible. I have a tremendous amount of research to do. This is a big story, Tibby. Big big big.”

He flinched. “Two weeks.”

“I believe Mr. Lightfoot wants me to do the job as thoroughly as possible.”

“Three. Or I hand in my resignation.”

I held out my hand and gave him a blinding smile. “Done.”

When I returned to my desk, the key to the hallowed
Metropolitan
archives lay in a plain white envelope on my desk. I kissed it and danced
to the elevator, taking care to wave Agatha a cheery farewell as I passed her desk.

Now, let's be clear: the
Metropolitan
archives did not exist, officially speaking. I don't even remember how I first heard about them. They were like a myth handed down, somewhere between the third Scotch and the fifth martini, in a hushed and reverent whisper obscured by a miasma of tobacco smoke. Gogo once told me they were located on the nineteenth floor of the building, behind a door marked
FURNITURE REPOSITORY
, but I doubt she would have recalled this small indiscretion the next morning. All I knew was that I needed those archives, because wherever the story of Walter and Violet and Lionel existed, it was not in the official library, the biographies, the encyclopedias, the
New York Times
.

It existed in the drawing rooms and bedrooms of 1914 Germany, where it would have caused a delicious scandal that summer; and if the affair had made its way to 1964 Manhattan at all, it would be contained in the gossipy correspondence of those who dined on it.

Like, for example, that sent by the
Metropolitan
correspondent in Berlin to his editor back in New York.

I know. I like the way my brain works, too.

But first. You had to appreciate the sight that stretched before you, as you used your private key to open up the battered metal door on the nineteenth floor marked
F
URNITURE REPOSITORY
. I know I did. Rows and rows of wooden filing cabinets, covered with the thinnest layer of dust, just for atmosphere. The single bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, looking as if Edison himself had installed it. That dark and musty flavor of the same million-billion particles of air rubbing against one another for weeks on end. I sighed it all in and out. The splendors of the world lay in wait.

It occurred to me, as I made my way to the first filing cabinet, as I touched it with my index finger as I might touch the Ark of the Covenant, that Lightfoot hadn't imposed any conditions on my visit here. No vow of secrecy, no injunction on copying or removing or destroying as
I saw fit. Maybe all that was implicit in the granting of the key itself. I was the inner circle now; I was the archives. You did not befoul your own bed.

I rolled open the first drawer. Secret the archives might be, but they were arranged impeccably by date and office, in crisp manila folders rarely exposed to the horrors of oxidation. I pulled out the first, just for the sake of curiosity. Paris office, 1888. From the Baroness Pauline Marie Plessis de Meaux to Mr. S. Barnard Lightfoot, written in French, deeply apologetic that she had not written since last month, but she had been
très
,
très occupée
with the redecoration of her salon, and the races at Deauville had been divine, divine, and please would he remember that these little notices were to be kept strictly confidential? Her dear husband would not be pleased, and perhaps not her friends, either.

As I said. The splendors of the world.

Still. Work to be done. I put the baroness back where she belonged and dragged my greedy fingers along the cabinets until I came to the year 1914, which in fact filled two separate filing cabinets, so great was the flood of information pouring into S. Barnard Lightfoot Jr.'s mailbox in that tumultuous year. (Lightfoot
père
had died happily of asphyxiation between his mistress's breasts in the summer of 1905, as everyone knew.) I flipped past tantalizing folders for Paris, Rome, London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and finally came upon one marked
BERLIN, JAN–MAR
.