The Secret Life of Violet Grant (26 page)

T
hey are flying down the road, while the sun sinks to the left in a pale hot sky. The air rushes against Violet's face. Lionel drives in silence, gripping the steering wheel with ungloved hands.

Violet stares straight ahead, through the dust and the insect smears to the empty road before them. She's still wearing her blue gossamer evening dress, and her hair is pinned up, pulling impatiently in the draft. She reaches up and removes the pins, one by one, and shakes her hair free.

“Good,” says Lionel, “I love your hair,” and without warning Violet's teeth begin to rattle, her chest heaves. She gasps for breath and clenches her fingers around the door frame, the cloth-covered edge of the seat, anything solid at all.

Lionel hits the brakes and swerves to the side. “Oh, damn. Oh, Christ.” He hauls her against him, and she lets herself go, heaving and sobbing into his tweed jacket. “I'm sorry. I should have taken you with me. The bloody bastard. The dirty fucking bastard.”

•   •   •

DUSK DROPS QUIETLY
behind the surge of the engine. There's no moon yet, and Lionel switches on the headlamps. Violet's eyes grow heavy, her
head lolls against the rumbling seat. Lionel's jacket covers her shoulders, smelling of him, soap, and wind and smoke.

•   •   •

WHEN VIOLET WAKES,
the world is silent and tilted. She lifts her head. There is only a scrap of moon, just enough to see by. The motorcar rests on the shoulder of the road, sloping ever so slightly toward a field dotted with shapeless black cows. A shadow of trees looms a few yards away. Next to her, Lionel is fast asleep, his exhausted head tucked at an acute angle into the crevice between his seat and the door frame.

The night is still warm. Violet reaches for Lionel's shoulders and tugs gently. He resists, muttering something in his chest, and then gives way into her lap.

She strokes his hair and stares at the silver meadow. The cows are motionless; perhaps they're not cows at all, but stumps or bushes or bales of sun-ripened hay. Lionel's breath warms her lap. She loves his heavy weight, his hair like mink beneath her hand.

•   •   •

LIONEL JOLTS AWAKE
an hour later, nearly falling off the seat. Violet draws him back, rolling him a little, so his face turns up toward her, his black hair gilt with silver, his eyes like mirrors. They watch each other warily.

“It wasn't a dream,” says Lionel.

“No.” Violet strokes his hair. “It wasn't a dream.”

She knows it's up to her, that Lionel will make no move unless she asks him. Is he like that with all women, or just her? She touches his forehead, his sunburnt cheek. With one finger she worries the tiny stubs of his beard.

“No time to shave,” he says.

“No.” Violet plucks at the buttons of his waistcoat. She spreads it open and rests her hand on his ribs, counting the slow rises of his breath,
the inner thud of his heartbeat beneath his phosphorescent shirt. The living Lionel.

As if this is the signal he's been waiting for, Lionel reaches for her with both arms and buries himself in her neck, her breast, her warm belly.

•   •   •

HE CLASPS
her afterward for ages, far longer than the frantic conjoining itself. Violet's forehead presses his cheek; her legs straddle his lap. She feels his imprint everywhere on her body, stamping out everything else, Walter and Wittenberg, Oxford and Gstaad, the young woman in emerald silk.

Neither speaks. The shared culmination came too rushed and hard, too premature on both sides; they are still dressed, still strangers to each other's secrets. Violet's drawers and stockings lie next to them on the battered cloth seat; Lionel's hands are fisted around the blue gossamer that bunches about her waist and hips. His head lolls back on the seat top, eyes wide to the sky.

Violet touches the damp hair at his temple. “If you ask me if I'm all right, I'll throttle you.”

He laughs. “And here I was simply assuming you felt the same as I did.”

“Which is?”

“Which is better than I've ever felt in my life.”

Violet rests against his chest, brimming with Lionel, too heavy to move, while he strokes her legs with his thumbs. Something rustles in the trees nearby; an owl hoots softly. The fragrant evening air lies still in her lungs. At last she disengages to collapse into the seat. Lionel helps her straighten her dress. He opens the door and goes around to the back and returns with a blanket, which he spreads under the small stand of trees near the pasture fence.

“Come with me,” he says, and lifts her from the seat.

Beneath the trees, Lionel removes her dress and underthings and
opens her to the moonlight. “My God,” he whispers, and he kisses her sleek newborn skin in awe, he makes love to her again with a slow reverence that settles into her marrow.

Later, he wraps them both in the blanket and they watch the stars, too alive to sleep. Violet's hand curls around Lionel's bare shoulder, so much larger than Walter's, thick with inelegant muscle. She thinks of Walter's crumpled body on the floor of the bedroom, defeated at a stroke.

“Tell me about your stepfather,” she says.

He doesn't answer. Violet detaches herself from his arms and walks naked to the automobile. Lionel's gaze casts across her skin like a ray of moonlight, following her. His cigarette case sits in the pocket of his discarded jacket; she takes it out and returns to the blanket in the trees, where she feeds him a smoke and lights it herself.

“All right,” he says, when she has tucked herself back in the blanket. “I suppose you've a right to know. You
should
know.”

“Not if you can't speak of it.”

“Well, I haven't, have I? Not since I gave evidence.” He breathes out a slow cloud of smoke. “How much do you know?”

“That he was a brute. That he was brutal to your mother, and you shot him.”

“Brutal. Yes. He beat her regularly, when he wasn't out with some mistress or another. A chap of the old school. I don't know why she took it; I suppose she figured that having divorced an earl to marry him, she couldn't go back. She had too much pride. So she stayed. My sister was born a year or two later . . .”

“Your
sister
?”

“Charlotte. You'll love her; she's like me, only eleven years old and far nicer.”

For this casual glimpse of a shared future, Violet pinches him. He pinches her back.

“Anyway, Charlotte was born, and a few weeks later a woman turned up at the door, pregnant, by my stepfather she claimed. Mother went
hysterical. The old man was out; I picked the lock on his desk and gave the woman a hundred pounds and sent her off.”

“Good Lord.”

“He came home at one o'clock in the morning. I heard them fighting in their room. I heard him hitting her. I tried putting my face in the pillow, but it didn't help. The servants had locked themselves in their rooms by then; they always did when the fighting started. I expect they were just as scared of him as we were.”

Lionel pauses to smoke, tipping the ash into the grass beside them. “Then Charlotte started crying—Mother was nursing her herself, you see, so she had a little bassinet in their room. I don't know if you've heard a baby cry, a newborn, but you can't ignore it. You hear it in your gut.”

Violet burrows herself closer into him, not wanting to hear the rest, desperate to hear the rest. “No, I haven't. Not in many years.”

“Well, I had to do something, didn't I? I went to his study and picked the lock on the desk again, the drawer where he kept his revolver. I went back upstairs and opened the door. He was . . . well, he had her over the bed, just like you were this afternoon when I walked in, and she was crying and bloody, and the baby was crying. I told him if he touched her again, I'd kill him.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed and said he'd like to see me try. And he grabbed my mother's hair and jerked it back and told her to look at her little boy with his gun—he was very drunk, I could see that, and I didn't care—and I shot him. I shot him twice.” Lionel grinds out his cigarette and rests his arm in the grass, palm upward. “I didn't mean to kill him, actually. I was aiming for his shoulders.”

“You did the right thing. The only thing.”

“Did I? I could have rung for a constable. I could have made one of the servants come out.”

“He might have killed her in the meantime. And you were a boy, you were scared.”

“Anyway,” he says, “I made sure Mother was all right—she was in shock, of course, so I laid her in the bed and put a blanket over her. I wrapped up the baby and ran upstairs with her, to the nanny's room, and told her to ring for the police and a doctor, that I'd shot her master. The rest is a bit of a blur, I'm afraid.”

“How old were you, at the time?”

“Fourteen.”

“So you're only twenty-five,” she says in wonder, touching his chest.

“And you're only twenty-two, and yet we've both lived longer than most people, haven't we? We're as old as Methuselah.”

“Walter always called me a child.”

“He was as wrong about that as everything else.” Lionel's hand finds her hair. “When I came into your room and saw you, the two of you, I went blind, Violet. I wanted to kill him. I don't know why I didn't.”

“Because you couldn't. You've grown up, you knew he had no power over you.”

Lionel turns on his side and lifts the blanket away. “Let me look at you, Violet. Let me see you, the moonlight on you.”

She sees the tears in his eyes. She lifts her arms and takes him to her breast. “We'll be old together now.”

“Yes,” he says. “Nothing can touch us, can it?”

A
t least he had the grace to knock, instead of using his key.

I was still tying the belt on my robe, still pulling the bobby pins from my hair, which I scattered on the floor as I went. I unlocked the dead bolt and pulled open the door. “Well, hello! Look who's come to apologize for getting engaged to my dear old friend.”

Doctor Paul looked me up and down. He had undone the buttons of his overcoat, and underneath he was still dressed in his betrothal suit, every flawless crease of it, trim and tidy except for his sunshine hair, which had been raked through a few too many times, and his chest, which was moving rapidly. He took off his hat. “You've been drinking?”

I turned away and sauntered to the table. I picked up the vodka bottle and gave it a healthy jiggle. “Still a bit left, if you want it. Although I suppose you can afford your own liquor now. Half a million smackeroos! And more to come! That's a lot of money for a regular kid from San Francisco. I can't blame you for taking the dough and the blonde.”

His hand was on the door frame. “May I come in?”

“You might as well.”

He stepped forward. I was weak enough to steal another peek. Well, wouldn't you? In the harshness of the bare entry bulb, his face was still pallid with shock and gleaming damp. Even his lips look exhausted,
drained of blood. He reached inside the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out his cigarette case, but instead of opening it, he fiddled the plain silver around his fingers. “Look, I'm not asking you to forgive me—”

“You won't be disappointed, then.”

“I know what I did was unforgivable. I knew it when I did it. I guess I thought I could just wait until . . . until I'd fixed everything, and then—”

“And then we could live happily ever after on Lightfoot's money and Gogo's heartbreak? What a brilliant plan. Devious, even.” I clapped my hands. “I applaud you.”

“Listen to me, Vivian . . .”

The sound of his voice hurt me.
Listen to me, Vivian,
said my mother, when my eleven-year-old self encountered her half dressed on the library sofa with a man not my Dadums
. Listen to me, Vivian,
said my professor, pale and naked on a cold February afternoon, except for a sagging Trojan and another girl's lipstick.

Why did I ever listen? Why did I ever crack myself open enough to allow the slightest whiff of sentiment inside? With sentiment arrived pain, they were twins, inseparable, didn't I know that already?

I said: “Believe me, I understand. The allure of riches for the scholarship boy. Always had your nose pressed against the glass, watching us, didn't you? I mean, you'd have some money eventually, a nice well-padded life at the country club, but that's the thing about medicine, they make you work for it—”

“What a bitch you can be, Vivian. What a goddamned snob.” He said it without rancor, as if he knew why I said those things, why I needed to hurt him back. He opened up the cigarette case and took one out. “So you think I wanted the money, did you?”

I let myself tumble onto the sofa and retracted my legs under my robe like a turtle. I couldn't look at him straight. I couldn't look at his symmetry, his lovely body in its thick herringbone overcoat, because if I did I'd remember how he looked without it. How just this morning, that
body had huddled with mine in the tiny shower cubicle, had kissed me with its bacon-and-coffee mouth, had soaped me all over, inspecting each knob and spindle of me, describing its tip-top healthy-pink condition and its scientific Latin name. How he had wrapped me in a towel and laid me on the bed and kissed his way down my backbone, identifying each vertebra, and I'd thought how handy it was to have a doctor for your lover, you were really in the best of hands.

And now. This. Like your heart had been carved from your rib cage with a scalpel.

I said, “I admit, money was the logical conclusion. Don't tell me it was true love after all?”

“No, it was the money, all right.” He lit the cigarette and raised it to his mouth. “A week ago I got a little package in the mail. I won't tell you what was inside. Pops had gotten himself in deep at a casino in Vegas.”

“You don't say. How deep?”

“Just over three hundred.”

“Dollars?”

“Thousand.”

All right, my toes went a little cold. Even if he
were
lying, that was a lot of bread to be tossing around so casually in a ramshackle Village apartment. “Well. So what were you planning to do with the other two hundred?”

“You don't believe me.”

I held up my hands. “Look, whatever you say. Your pops had debts, Lightfoot had a deal you couldn't refuse. I mean, who am I to stand in your way?”

Doctor Paul picked up the vodka bottle from the center of the table and threw it against the opposite wall. I didn't even jump.

“You have no idea, do you? No idea what it's like to have no money, no way on God's earth to beg, borrow, or steal it. No idea what it's like to have no choice. No idea what it's like to sit there and stare at the bare walls and realize you've got to do something, and whatever you do, it's the
wrong thing. You could take some money, propose to a girl, and break her heart later, and in so doing lose the love of the single most breathtaking woman you've ever met, the love of your lonely godforsaken life. Or you could let your father get his fingers and nuts cut off by the Vegas racket . . .”

“Oh, come on. You could have called the police.”

He turned to me. His pale head shook back and forth. “You are such an innocent, Vivian. Call the police. This is the Vegas racket, baby. You don't even want to know what they do after they cut off his nuts. And do you know what they do when they're all done? They hand the body over to the police for a decent burial in the Hoover Dam, that's what they do.”

My chest had stopped moving. “You could have told me. I could have helped,” I whispered.

“And do what? Could you have come up with three hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills within forty-eight hours?”

I shook my head.

The door to my bedroom squeaked open. Tibby appeared, all tousled up, made to order. “Everything all right here?”

Doctor Paul swung like a bat. “Who the hell is this?”

“A friend.”

Without a word, Doctor Paul took in Tibby's gaping buttons, his ruffled hair, his absent necktie. He turned back to me, and his face was stone. Tibby's strip of marigold Brooks Brothers silk screamed from the arm of the sofa, next to my toes. I took the ends of my robe and drew them closer together.

“I see,” he said. “You've never heard that revenge is best served cold?”

“Patience is not my favorite virtue.”

“All right.” He found his hat and put it on. “Like I said, I didn't expect you to forgive me. God knows I won't forgive myself. I just wanted to explain things a little.”

“Well, thanks for the explanation. It's all pretty clear now.” I made no move from the sofa. I couldn't. My bones had turned into iron.

The telephone shrilled again. I could have sworn the ring sounded more urgent this time. Doctor Paul glanced at it.

“Ignore,” I said.

We stood there, eyeing each other, while Gogo trilled eagerly through the cigarette haze.

“I meant everything I said, Vivian. This morning. Every day since I've known you.” He spoke as if Tibby weren't there, standing half dressed in my bedroom entrance, where Paul himself had stood so often, and with even fewer clothes. He turned to the door and stopped. His hat tilted back, as if he were reading his next lines on the ceiling. “If you ever need me for anything, Vivian, just let me know. I know you don't agree with what I did. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not as honorable as your kind of people, when the chips are down. When I see my dad's ear in a box, wrapped in Kleenex. But just so you know, I'd do the same thing for your sake. I'd make a deal with fucking Khrushchev, if I had to. I'd do it a hundred times over.”

He left, shutting the door gently behind him.

Tibby was already shrugging clumsily into his old-fashioned waistcoat and jacket. “You know what I think?”

I settled my forehead into my palm. “I can only imagine.”

He picked up his marigold necktie from the sofa and went to the scrap of mirror hanging near the door. “I think you've been barking up the wrong tree. I don't think Violet is the key to all this. I think it's Lionel.”

“Lionel?”

His arms were moving in sloppy jerks. “Ah, women. You're seduced by the affair itself, the evolution of adultery, the climax. Why she did it. When she did it. Every last loving pornographic detail.”

I thought of Dr. Grant's handwritten diary and winced.

Tibby turned. The knot wasn't perfect, but you had to be impressed he could arrange a necktie at all. “But think a moment. Does it really matter what happened in that Berlin apartment? She met another man. Her husband was a brute. She killed him—”

“We don't know that for certain.”

“Vivian, the facts of the case are obvious enough. That story is always the same, everywhere, every time. It's boring, frankly. What matters—what always matters, Vivian—is what happened after the crisis. Why they disappeared. Where they went. That's the real mystery. That's what we don't know. That's what gives this story zing.”

“Zing? We're talking about real people here, Tibby.”

“You're talking about real people. I'm talking about a magazine story. I need a hook, I need an angle, I need a man biting a dog.
Zing.
And for zing, you need to find Lionel Richardson. The English lover, the man she killed her husband for, the man in whose hands she placed herself afterward. He's where the mystery begins and ends.”

“But Violet is the one—”

“She's the one you care about, obviously. She's your aunt. But Lionel's the one who matters, historically speaking. The one who would have left the most tracks. Who was he? What sort of man? Why did Violet disappear after running away with him? He was a soldier, Vivian. An officer in the British Army. If he managed to get safely across the border, there must be some record of him. Desertion, at the very least, and some sort of official investigation into his whereabouts.”

Christ. Of course. Hadn't I said the same thing, in no less a monument than the New York Public Library, to Doctor Paul himself?

It's much easier to find out about the men.

He might not turn up in an encyclopedia, Lionel Richardson. But he must exist somewhere.

“Lionel.” I fingered the ends of my robe. “I'd probably have to fly to England to do that.”

Tibby took his overcoat off the stand and levered himself inside. He squashed his hat on top of his disreputable head.

“I think that's the idea, Vivian. Don't you?”

When he left, I rose from the sofa and rummaged through the kitchen until I found the brush and dustpan. I knelt on the floor and swept up the
vodka shards, every last one, and let the whole glittering mess slide into the garbage can. I found a dishcloth and wiped down the wall and the floorboards, until there was no sign that anything had occurred there at all.

At which point. The telephone rang again, like it meant business this time.

Sally's voice floated out from the other bedroom. “Could you answer the goddamned phone, Vivs?” A few more obscenities trailed behind. I'll spare you the color.

I laid my hand on the receiver. No point in hiding any longer, was there?

“All right, Gogo,” I said. “Give it to me straight.”

But it wasn't Gogo, after all. It was Mums, exasperated, telling me to hurry on up to Lenox Hill Hospital, because Aunt Julie had fallen down the stairs of her Park Avenue duplex and into a coma.