The Secret Life of Violet Grant (36 page)

T
he first thing I noticed about Henry Mortimer. He had no right arm.

Naturally, I kept my gaze on his face, which had filled out considerably since the sepia days of 1914 and had become that of a square-jowled and sturdy man, not unhandsome even in his dotage. But the empty sleeve. That. It lured my attention. When had he lost it? The war, obviously. How? A shell? Infection?

He took my hand with his left and kissed it. He exclaimed his delight, his enchantment at meeting one of Violet's nieces at last. He insisted I stay for dinner—oh, for God's sake, nobody gave a damn if I was properly dressed—and for that matter I shouldn't be staying at a hotel, even the Georges Cinq, when I had family right here in Paris. I agreed to dinner but refused to inconvenience them so far as to invade their privacy overnight. The arm, I now perceived, had been lost just above the elbow.

“We were married at the end of the war,” said Violet, accepting a glass of Madeira and a slight caress from her husband. “Henry was wounded in the Meuse-Argonne, as you see, and when he came back to the Hôtel de Saint-Honoré to convalesce—Jane and I had turned the house into a private hospital, you know, when we first arrived in Paris in 1914—well, he wore down all my objections.”

“For a scientist, she's terribly superstitious.” Henry beamed at her. “But I pointed out all the logic of it. In the first place, we both wanted to turn the hospital into our own scientific institute when the war was over, and since we would be living under the same roof for the indeterminate future . . .” He shrugged.

“And in the second place, we were expecting another baby,” Violet said calmly, sipping her Madeira.

I was just lifting my own glass and nearly choked. “Another? Baby?”

“Yes, the first was born in the spring of 1915. The end of April. A little girl. I believe Henry was Papa to her right from the beginning, weren't you, darling?”

“I was smitten, I admit.”

“Charlotte was such a charming baby. And then she grew up!” Violet laughed, and Henry laughed with her. He was sitting next to her, on the arm of the decidedly English wing chair in which his wife was arranged, all alert poise and tip-turned Schuyler eyes. Her hair had turned white, like spun snow, but her skin was singularly smooth, radiant as a girl's. I hoped this was down to Schuyler genes, and that I was next in line to inherit, but I had a notion that the glow within her bones had something more to do with the feeling that existed between her and the man who sat protectively beside her, with the ions that frizzed happily in the atmosphere of the armchair. Violet went on, oblivious to her own good fortune: “Do you remember when she ran off with that package from Rutherford? The radium he gave us? A hundred thousand francs worth, and she takes it to play post office with her baby brother.”

“We had the police here, crawling about everywhere.” Henry shook his head. His hair was shot through with long bullet-trails of gray, but I recognized its darkness from the photograph. “Jane found it eventually, thank God, when she visited the nursery for tea. Luckily Rutherford's boys had lined the package properly.”

“Jane?”

Violet's eyes turned quiet, and she nodded to the portrait above the
mantel, a somewhat abstract interwar rendering with an enormous red-tinted left eye and a Dalí-eqsue alarm clock running around madly in the background. “She died five years ago. She deeded us the house as a wedding present.”

“You must have all been very happy here.”

“We were a family.” Violet's eyes climbed to mine, Schuyler to Schuyler, communicating a fact that could not possibly be articulated, but instead lay along some section of a shared chromosome, some ancestral memory, and the recognition of it shocked me. “After Berlin, after everything that happened. You do know what happened, don't you?”

“In broad brushstrokes. That you left Berlin together, you and Jane and Henry . . . and Lionel.” Well. I stopped there, because I couldn't exactly pose vulgar questions to my own great-aunt Violet, could I? Not even I, Vivian Schuyler, could do that. Especially not while Henry Mortimer's left hand curled and uncurled quietly on his quadriceps like that. I had to content myself with a questioning eyebrow, an air of longing curiosity.

“Henry, my dear,” said Violet, “would you mind telling Madame Marone we will be adding another for dinner?”

Ah, the knowing chuckle between the fond spouses. Henry rose and made a little bow. “With pleasure, my dear.”

“Now,” said Violet, when his footsteps had faded down the hall, “let us sit together on the sofa. So much nicer for intimate chats, don't you agree?”

I agreed. I nestled next to her on the broad damask cushion, and she took my hand between hers, which were quite elderly. A life of useful work, had my aunt Violet. She began: “Now tell me, Vivian. Is this a story for your magazine?”

Mouth open. Closed. “Yes.”

“I thought so.” She tapped her forehead. “Deductive skills, you see. Honed over the years. Well, I suppose it does no harm, after all these years. What do you need to know?”

My stunned throat made some noise or another. Then: “Details, I suppose. I have a draft already, if you don't mind looking that over and filling in the gaps. Up to the point you left Berlin, of course. I don't really know what happened after that. You sent a postcard to Aunt Christina from a border town.”

“I did. We reached the border, the four of us, and we were about to go through when the police found us. About the murder, you see. That was when . . . when Lionel confessed that he was the one who killed my husband—”

“Lionel killed him!”

“No.” She smiled. “Lionel didn't kill him. But he wanted to throw suspicion on himself, so the guards would let the rest of us go.”

“So you and the Mortimers would deliver the suitcase to Zurich—”

“Yes. So we would make it through the border. That was the deal, Lionel told them. He would make a detailed confession, cooperate fully, if they would let the three of us go through without any further delay.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened? We went through the border and made it to Zurich, but it was all for nothing because the valise was lost.” She looked in the corner, where it sat unopened. Neither she nor Henry had suggested I open it. “I can't believe it's there, after all these years. A miracle.”

“Would you like to see it?”

She looked down at our hands, linked together in my lap, gnarled old and ink-stained young.

I squeezed. “You don't have to, if you'd rather not.”

“No. No, let's look inside. I can hardly remember what's there.”

I rose and fetched the valise and rested it on the cushion between us. “Shall I?”

“Yes, you do it.”

I flipped the metal clasp and opened the sides, and one by one I laid the contents on her lap: clothes, notebooks, papers, jewels. I took out the gold watch and placed it into her hands, and she made a little breathless
Oh!
and her hands shook, so violently that I thought she might drop it, but she held on gamely, staring, rubbing the glass case as I had done so often. Seven-oh-three unto eternity. She turned it over and read the inscription, and that was when the tears broke under her eyelids. I took a handkerchief from my pocketbook and handed it to her.

“I know it's silly,” she said. “It's just a watch.”

“But it's
your
watch.”

“Yes, it is.” She looked down at her lap, at the artifacts piled around her. She touched the blue gossamer dress with her finger. “I was wearing this the night we left Wittenberg, the night I left Walter. Lionel drove us. God, that drive. I remember every moment. We stopped to rest—he'd been up all night, the day before—and he slept in my lap like a baby. I would have died for him, right there. I was so grateful. He saved me.”

I'll be damned if I didn't break out in goose bumps. As if Lionel's ghost were standing right there on the parquet floor, over my shoulder, smiling down on my pert bosom as I knelt next to his Violet in her chair.

“Is that why you brought along Walter's diary? To remind you why you left?”

She started, and then her body went quite still. “Walter's diary.”

“Don't you remember?”

“Of course. But I . . . my God.” She sorted through the notebooks until she found it, Dr. Walter Grant's filthy journal, his matrimonial testimony. She held it up before her as she might hold an infant's soiled napkin. “I suppose you've read it.”

“I've read enough. Too wholesome for me, really.”

She laughed. Really. “Do you know, I haven't even thought about him in years. Isn't that funny? And we shared a bed, we shared a life once.”

I tapped a worn corner. “Don't tell me you took it for sentimental reasons.”

“Oh, God, no. I only wanted evidence. For the divorce.”

“So you didn't mean to kill him?”

Oh, the slightest pause, the telltale pause. The rotten fact. “No, we didn't. There was no point.” She went on staring at the book, at the gold-stamped number
1912
in the corner. Her worn thumbnails dug into the leather.

“We?” I said.

She handed me the journal, and by
handed
I mean slapped me in the chest with it, case closed, keep your truffle-pig nose to yourself, Miss
Metropolitan.
“You can take this back with you. I don't need it any more, obviously.” She picked up the watch again and wrapped it up in the tear-stained handkerchief.

I said: “There's one more thing inside. A small thing. I don't know if you still want it.”

I took out Lionel's note, very carefully, so I wouldn't spill a single one of the fourteen faded scarlet rose petals.

For a second or two, she said nothing. I thought, maybe she doesn't remember.

“Oh, my God,” she said, “oh, God, Lionel.”

Her body shook with sobs, spasmed with them. Her throat was choked with shock, or grief, or whatever it was she was feeling. I was afraid Henry might hear her and return. I folded the petals back into the paper, but just as I opened the valise to tuck them inside, she took my wrist.

“Wait. I'm all right. Let me see.”

So I opened the paper back up, and she touched each petal.

“Do you remember what the note said?” I asked.

She said, “What note?”

I showed her.

Ah! So Violet is a romantic after all

I have kissed each one to last you until I return

Lionel

This time, she didn't cry. As if her store of tears were exhausted, exhumed in their entirety, and she was scientific Violet again, examining a natural curiosity. She only touched the ink with her fingers, and then she said, dry-voiced, “The petals, they were in my hair, that night in Wittenberg. The night he kissed me. I folded them away in a leaf of notepaper. He must have found it, when he put the papers in my valise.”

“You never saw him again, after the border?”

She held up a petal to the lamplight. “I never saw Lionel again. No. I think . . . I
know
he died that day. He would have tried to escape, of course. No, Lionel Richardson did not survive the night.”

“Did you love him?”

“Love him. Yes. Oh, yes, I loved him with all my heart.” She looked down again at the words before her. “But I will say this. The love I have for Henry, the love we share, it's so much deeper and dearer and finer. Wrought by a thousand fires. The flight to Paris, on foot for the most part, since all the trains were taken up for mobilization. All that awful uncertainty, knowing we'd failed with the valise, realizing I was pregnant with Lionel's child. And it was a difficult birth, hair-raising really, and he was so good, so loving to us both. He just worshipped Charlotte, right from the start. Then the war, my God, the war. We worked together in the hospital, side by side, until America declared, that was 1917, and his commission came through that very afternoon. The children—we had four, in the end. And then our work, of course. As Violet Mortimer I was able to continue on after the war, to publish our work under Henry's name with the help of the others.”

“The others?”

“Lise and Otto. Max and Albert always encouraged us. They never breathed a word of what happened, though of course . . . well, they were all there in Wittenberg, except Max.”

Her voice fell away, and I had the feeling she was seeing it all again, that summer. Across the room, an ormolu clock ticked softly beneath the piecemeal portrait of the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré. Dusk was dropping
bleakly behind the tall windows, and I watched the glow of someone's headlamps grow and grow on the street outside, until the car itself flashed by, a taxi.

“Do you think . . .” I read the lines again, and again I wondered how a man could write such words and not mean them.
He could make you believe anything
, James Merriwether had said in awe. “Do you think he loved you? Lionel?”

She placed the petals on the paper and folded it up again. She took her time. When she spoke, it was as if she had hand-selected each word from a dictionary of mercy.

“I think he loved me as much as it was possible for him to love another person.”

•   •   •

IT WAS
nearly eleven o'clock by the time I stepped through the revolving doors and into the golden-lit lobby of the Georges Cinq. I was almost too exhausted to breathe. I stumbled for the elevators, and I hardly noticed the tall figure who rose from the red velvet bench near the bell station.

“Vivian,” he called softly. If the lobby weren't empty, I might not have heard him.

I stopped. Turned. “You again.”

Doctor Paul took off his hat, and the damned light gleamed on his too-long sunshine hair, making my ribs ache. He kept a respectful distance. As well he might. “I called your mother. She told me where to find you.”