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The Secret Life of Violet Grant
Beatriz Williams


From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked City: a story of love and intrigue that travels from Kennedy-era Manhattan to World War I Europe…Fresh from college, irrepressible Vivian Schuyler defies her wealthy Fifth Avenue family to work at cut-throat Metropolitan magazine. But this is 1964, and the editor dismisses her…until a parcel lands on Vivian’s Greenwich Village doorstep that starts a journey into the life of an aunt she never knew, who might give her just the story she’s been waiting for.In 1912, Violet Schuyler Grant moved to Europe to study physics, and made a disastrous marriage to a philandering fellow scientist. As the continent edges closer to the brink of war, a charismatic British army captain enters her life, drawing her into an audacious gamble that could lead to happiness…or disaster.Fifty years later, Violet’s ultimate fate remains shrouded in mystery. But the more obsessively Vivian investigates her disappearing aunt, the more she realizes all they have in common – and that Violet’s secret life is about to collide with hers.























Copyright (#ulink_01d719a7-3de7-50b1-8572-c139bcef96b5)


Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published by Putnam, Penguin USA 2014

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Beatriz Williams 2014

Cover design by TBC © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © TBC

Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780399162176

Ebook Edition © December 2017 ISBN: 9780008134983

Version: 2017-08-18




Dedication (#ude9b6448-d0c0-5180-9aa6-bf1e10c135c8)


To my beautiful grandmother,

Sarena Merle Baker

1924–2013


Contents

Cover (#u30b5104b-bb2b-564a-9b13-6f6610189b7b)

Title Page (#uee8e8673-06b6-5b3b-914c-a9e6160d79b3)

Copyright (#u421a47dc-0d3e-56aa-90dc-5597a386dff9)

Dedication

Prologue (#u7f5c650e-3966-55ff-9856-e7d017bbbe5f)

Part One (#u53dfec59-19c2-54c9-b7c6-8447f27c3991)

Vivian, 1964: New York City (#u8f86a5c1-0a42-54b7-ba0a-714518c754e5)

Violet, 1914: Berlin (#u30664f94-9126-5265-9e67-05d4cf4fb8d4)

Vivian (#ua00083e4-2793-587f-a021-f7bde82a4c75)

Violet (#u06830ec3-1ab9-5bcf-bc77-c7a548d2f8aa)

Vivian (#u96e18cc8-b8bc-5079-8796-8ca84486584e)

Violet (#ua0e9ead9-445b-5726-9c76-cb7918e4cb3a)

Vivian (#udd7ea6f5-b173-59da-8701-c18c4420a7fc)

Violet (#ufcd90a3f-d660-5b66-a8b7-59c8d1e4ca6c)

Vivian (#u7a46251d-1d4e-562e-aa05-6f59d248acf7)

Violet (#ue0ab42b9-bc25-5aba-9307-06fc176b444b)

Vivian (#u6994a608-f004-5782-9b57-c382f7c5ab08)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Interlude: Violet, 1912 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet, 1914 (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet, 1914 (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

Vivian (#litres_trial_promo)

Aftermath (#litres_trial_promo)

Lionel, 1914 (#litres_trial_promo)

Violet, 1964 (#litres_trial_promo)

Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Beatriz Williams (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)










In the summer of 1914, a beautiful thirty-eight-year-old American divorcée named Caroline Thompson took her twenty-two-year-old son, Mr. Henry Elliott, on a tour of Europe to celebrate his recent graduation from Princeton University.

The outbreak of the First World War turned the family into refugees, and according to legend, Mrs. Thompson ingeniously negotiated her own fair person in exchange for safe passage across the final border from Germany.

A suitcase, however, was inadvertently left behind.

In 1950, the German government tracked down a surprised Mr. Elliott and issued him a check in the amount of one hundred deutsche marks as compensation for “lost luggage.”

This is not their story.






(#ulink_2c7d8d65-f92b-5124-9474-8eab4913d397)




Vivian, 1964 (#ulink_bd5ac879-bf2e-5dab-8007-ef679dfbc04a)

NEW YORK CITY (#ulink_bd5ac879-bf2e-5dab-8007-ef679dfbc04a)


I nearly missed that card from the post office, stuck up as it was against the side of the mail slot. Just imagine. Of such little accidents is history made.

I’d moved into the apartment only a week ago, and I didn’t know all the little tricks yet: the way the water collects in a slight depression below the bottom step on rainy days, causing you to slip on the chipped marble tiles if you aren’t careful; the way the butcher’s boy steps inside the superintendent’s apartment at five-fifteen on Wednesday afternoons, when the super’s shift runs late at the cigar factory, and spends twenty minutes jiggling his sausage with the super’s wife while the chops sit unguarded in the vestibule.

And—this is important, now—the way postcards have a habit of sticking to the side of the mail slot, just out of view if you’re bending to retrieve your mail instead of crouching all the way down, as I did that Friday evening after work, not wanting to soil my new coat on the perpetually filthy floor.

But luck or fate or God intervened. My fingers found the postcard, even if my eyes didn’t. And though I tossed the mail on the table when I burst into the apartment and didn’t sort through it all until late Saturday morning, wrapped in my dressing gown, drinking a filthy concoction of tomato juice and the-devil-knew-what to counteract the several martinis and one neat Scotch I’d drunk the night before, not even I, Vivian Schuyler, could elude the wicked ways of the higher powers forever.

Mind you, I’m not here to complain.

“What’s that?” asked my roommate, Sally, from the sofa, such as it was. The dear little tart appeared even more horizontally inclined than I did. My face was merely sallow; hers was chartreuse.

“Card from the post office.” I turned it over in my hand. “There’s a parcel waiting.”

“For you or for me?”

“For me.”

“Well, thank God for that, anyway.”

I looked at the card. I looked at the clock. I had twenty-three minutes until the post office on West Tenth Street closed for the weekend. My hair was unbrushed, my face bare, my mouth still coated in a sticky film of hangover and tomato juice.

On the other hand: a parcel. Who could resist a parcel? A mysterious one, yet. All sorts of brown-paper possibilities danced in my head. Too early for Christmas, too late for my twenty-first birthday (too late for my twenty-second, if you’re going to split hairs), too uncharacteristic to come from my parents. But there it was, misspelled in cheap purple ink: Miss Vivien Schuyler, 52 Christopher Street, apt. 5C, New York City. I’d been here only a week. Who would have mailed me a parcel already? Perhaps my great-aunt Julie, submitting a housewarming gift? In which case I’d have to skedaddle on down to the P.O. hasty-posty before somebody there drank my parcel.

The clock again. Twenty-two minutes.

“If you’re going,” said Sally, hand draped over her eyes, “you’d better go now.”

Of such little choices is history made.

I DARTED into the post office building at eight minutes to twelve—yes, my dears, I have good reason to remember the exact time of arrival—shook off the rain from my umbrella, and caught my sinking heart at the last instant. The place was crammed. Not only crammed, but wet. Not only wet, but stinking wet: sour wool overlaid by piss overlaid by cigarettes. I folded my umbrella and joined the line behind a blond-haired man in blue surgical scrubs. This was New York, after all: you took the smell and the humanity—oh, the humanity!—as part of the whole sublime package.

Well, all right.

Amendment: You didn’t have to take the smell and the humanity and the ratty Greenwich Village apartment with the horny butcher’s boy on Wednesday afternoons and the beautifully alcoholic roommate who might just pick up the occasional weekend client to keep body and Givenchy together. Not if you were Miss Vivian Schuyler, late of Park Avenue and East Hampton, even later of Bryn Mawr College of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. In fact, you courted astonishment and not a little scorn by so choosing. Picture us all, the affectionate Schuylers, lounging about the breakfast table with our eggs and Bloody Marys at eleven o’clock in the morning, as the summer sun melts like honey through the windows and the uniformed maid delivers a fresh batch of toast to absorb the arsenic.

Mums (lovingly): You aren’t really going to take that filthy job at the magazine, are you?

Me: Why, yes. I really am.

Dadums (tenderly): Only bitches work, Vivian.

So it was my own fault that I found myself standing there in the piss-scented post office on West Tenth Street, with my elegant Schuyler nose pressed up between the shoulder blades of the blue scrubs in front of me. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Could not accept my gilded lot. Could not turn this unearned Schuyler privilege into the least necessary degree of satisfaction.

And less satisfied by the moment, really, as the clock counted down to quitting time and the clerks showed no signs of hurry and the line showed no sign of advancing. The foot-shifting began. The man behind me swore and lit a cigarette. Someone let loose a theatrical sigh. I inched my nose a little deeper toward the olfactory oasis of the blue scrubs, because this man at least smelled of disinfectant instead of piss, and blond was my favorite color.

A customer left the counter. The first man in line launched himself toward the clerk. The rest of us took a united step forward.

Except the man in blue scrubs. His brown leather feet remained planted, but I realized this only after I’d thrust myself into the center of his back and knocked him right smack down to the stained linoleum.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, holding out my hand. He looked up at me and blinked, like my childhood dog Quincy used to do when roused unexpectedly from his after-breakfast beauty snooze. “My word. Were you asleep?”

He ignored my hand and rose to his feet. “Looks that way.”

“I’m very sorry. Are you all right?”

“Yes, thanks.” That was all. He turned and faced front.

Well, I would have dropped it right there, but the man was eye-wateringly handsome, stop-in-your-tracks handsome, Paul Newman handsome, sunny blue eyes and sunny blond hair, and this was New York, where you took your opportunities wherever you found them. “Ah. You must be an intern or a resident, or whatever they are. Saint Vincent’s, is it? I’ve heard they keep you poor boys up three days at a stretch. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes.” Taciturn. But he was blushing, right the way up his sweet sunny neck.

“Unless you’re narcoleptic,” I went on. “It’s fine, really. You can admit it. My second cousin Richard was like that. He fell asleep at his own wedding, right there at the altar. The organist was so rattled she switched from the Wedding March to the Death March.”

The old pregnant pause. Someone stifled a laugh behind me. I thought I’d overplayed my hand, and then:

“He did not.”

Nice voice. Sort of Bing Crosby with a bass chord.

“Did too. We had to sprinkle him with holy water to wake him up, and by sprinkle I mean tip-turn the whole basin over his head. He’s the only one in the family to have been baptized twice.”

The counter shed two more people. We were cooking now. I glanced at the lopsided black-and-white clock on the wall: two minutes to twelve. Blue Scrubs still wasn’t looking at me, but I could see from his sturdy jaw—lanterns, psht—he was trying very hard not to smile.

“Hence his nickname, Holy Dick,” I said.

“Give it up, lady,” muttered the man behind me.

“And then there’s my aunt Mildred. You can’t wake her up at all. She settled in for an afternoon nap once and didn’t come downstairs again until bridge the next day.”

No answer.

“So, during the night, we switched the furniture in her room with the red bordello set in the attic,” I said, undaunted. “She was so shaken, she led an unsupported ace against a suit contract.”

The neck above the blue scrubs was now as red as tomato bisque, minus the oyster crackers. He lifted one hand to his mouth and coughed delicately.

“We called her Aunt van Winkle.”

The shoulder blades shivered.

“I’m just trying to tell you, you have no cause for embarrassment for your little disorder,” I said. “These things can happen to anyone.”

“Next,” said a counter clerk, eminently bored.

Blue Scrubs leapt forward. My time was up.

I looked regretfully down the row of counter stations and saw, to my dismay, that all except one were now fronted by malicious little engraved signs reading COUNTER CLOSED.

The one man remaining—other than Blue Scrubs, who was having a pair of letters weighed for air mail, not that I was taking note of any details whatsoever—stood fatly at the last open counter, locked in a spirited discussion with the clerk regarding his proficiency with brown paper and Scotch tape.

Man (affectionately): YOU WANT I SHOULD JUMP THE COUNTER AND BREAK YOUR KNEECAPS, GOOBER?

Clerk (amused): YOU WANT I SHOULD CALL THE COPS, MORON?

I checked my watch. One minute to go. Behind me, I heard people sighing and breaking away, the weighty doors opening and closing, the snatches of merciless October rain on the sidewalk.

Ahead, the man threw up his hands, grabbed back his ramshackle package, and stormed off.

I took a step. The clerk stared at me, looked at the clock, and took out a silver sign engraved COUNTER CLOSED.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

The clerk smiled, tapped his watch, and walked away.

“Excuse me,” I called out, “I’d like to see the manager. I’ve been waiting here for ages, I have a very urgent parcel—”

The clerk turned his head. “It’s noon, lady. The post office is closed. See you Monday.”

“I will not see you Monday. I demand my parcel.”

“Do you want me to call the manager, lady?”

“Yes. Yes, I should very much like you to call the manager. I should very much—”

Blue Scrubs looked up from his air-mail envelopes. “Excuse me.”

I planted my hands on my hips. “I’m terribly sorry to disturb the serenity of your transaction, sir, but some of us aren’t lucky enough to catch the very last post-office clerk before the gong sounds at noon. Some of us are going to have to wait until Monday morning to receive our rightful parcels—”

“Give it a rest, lady,” said the clerk.

“I’m not going to give it a rest. I pay my taxes. I buy my stamps and lick them myself, God help me. I’m not going to stand for this kind of lousy service, not for a single—”

“That’s it,” said the clerk.

“No, that’s not it. I haven’t even started—”

“Look here,” said Blue Scrubs.

I turned my head. “You stay out of this, Blue Scrubs. I’m trying to conduct a perfectly civilized argument with a perfectly uncivil post-office employee—”

He cleared his Bing Crosby throat. His eyes matched his scrubs, too blue to be real. “I was only going to say, it seems there’s been a mistake made here. This young lady was ahead of me in line. I apologize, Miss …”

“Schuyler,” I whispered.

“… Miss Schuyler, for being so very rude as to jump in front of you.” He stepped back from the counter and waved me in.

And then he smiled, all crinkly and Paul Newman, and I could have sworn a little sparkle flashed out from his white teeth.

“Since you put it that way,” I said.

“I do.”

I drifted past him to the counter and held out my card. “I think I have a parcel.”

“You think you have a parcel?” The clerk smirked.

Yes. Smirked. At me.

Well! I shook the card at his post-office smirk, nice and sassy. “That’s Miss Vivian Schuyler on Christopher Street. Make it snappy.”

“Make it snappy, please,” said Blue Scrubs.

“Please. With whipped cream and a cherry,” I said.

The clerk snatched the card and stalked to the back.

My hero cleared his throat.

“My name isn’t Blue Scrubs, by the way,” he said. “It’s Paul.”

“Paul?” I tested the word on my tongue to make sure I’d really heard it. “You don’t say.”

“Is that a problem?

I liked the way his eyebrows lifted. I liked his eyebrows, a few shades darker than his hair, slashing sturdily above his eyes, ever so blue. “No, no. Actually, it suits you.” Smile, Vivian. I held out my hand. “Vivian Schuyler.”

“Of Christopher Street.” He took my hand and sort of held it there, no shaking allowed.

“Oh, you heard that?”

“Lady, the whole building heard that,” said the clerk, returning to the counter. Well. He might have been the clerk. From my vantage, it seemed as if an enormous brown box had sprouted legs and arms and learned to walk, a square-bellied Mr. Potato Head.

“Great guns,” I said. “Is that for me?”

“No, it’s for the Queen of Sheba.” The parcel landed before me with enough heft to rattle all the little silver COUNTER CLOSED signs for miles around. “Sign here.”

“Just how am I supposed to get this box back to my apartment?”

“Your problem, lady. Sign.”

I maneuvered my hand around Big Bertha and signed the slip of paper. “Do you have one of those little hand trucks for me?”

“Oh, yeah, lady. And a basket of fruit to welcome home the new arrival. Now get this thing off my counter, will you?”

I looped my pocketbook over my elbow and wrapped my arms around the parcel. “Some people.”

“Look, can I help you with that?” asked Paul.

“No, no. I can manage.” I slid the parcel off the counter and staggered backward. “On the other hand, if you’re not busy saving any lives at the moment …”

Paul plucked the parcel from my arms, not without brushing my fingers first, almost as if by accident. “After all, I already know where you live. If I’m a homicidal psychopath, it’s too late for regrets.”

“Excellent diagnosis, Dr. Paul. You’ll find the knives in the kitchen drawer next to the icebox, by the way.”

He hoisted the massive box to his shoulder. “Thanks for the tip. Lead on.”

“Just don’t fall asleep on the way.”

GIDDY might have been too strong a word for my state of mind as I led my spanking new friend home with my spanking new parcel, but not by much. New York complied agreeably with my mood. The crumbling stoops gleamed with rain; the air had taken on that lightening quality of a storm on the point of lifting.

Mind you. I still took care to stand close, so I could hold my umbrella over the good doctor’s glowing blond head.

“Why didn’t you wear a coat, at least?” I tried to sound scolding, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“I just meant to dash out. I didn’t realize it was raining; I hadn’t been outside for a day and a half.”

I whistled. “Nice life you’ve made for yourself.”

“Isn’t it, though.”

We turned the corner of Christopher Street. The door stood open at my favorite delicatessen, sending a friendly matzo-ball welcome into the air. Next door, the Apple Tree stood quiet and shuttered, waiting for Manhattan’s classiest queens to liven it up by night. My neighborhood. I loved it already; I loved it even more at this moment. I loved the whole damned city. Where else but New York would a Doctor Paul pop up in your post office, packaged in blue scrubs, fully assembled and with high-voltage batteries included free of charge?

By the time we reached my building, the rain had stopped entirely, and the droplets glittered with sunshine on the turning leaves. I whisked my umbrella aside and winked an affectionate hello to the grime in the creases of the front door. The lock gave way with only a rusty minimum of rattling. Doctor Paul ducked below the lintel and paused in the vestibule. A patch of new sunlight shone through the transom onto his hair. I nearly wept.

“This is you?” he said.

“Only good girls live at the Barbizon. Did I mention I’m on the fifth floor?”

“Of course you are.” He turned his doughty shoulders to the stairwell and began to climb. I followed his blue-scrubbed derriere upward, marveling anew as we achieved each landing, wondering when my alarm clock would clamor through the rainbows and unicorns and I would open my eyes to the tea-stained ceiling above my bed.

“May I ask what unconscionably heavy apparatus I’m carrying up to your attic? Cast-iron stove? Cadaver?”

Oh! The parcel.

“My money’s on the cadaver.”

“You don’t know?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know who it’s from.”

He rested his foot on the next step and cocked his head toward the box. “No ticking, anyway. That’s a good sign.”

“No funny smell, either.”

He resumed the climb with a precious little flex of his shoulder. The landscape grew more dismal as we went, until the luxurious rips in the chintz wallpaper and the incandescent nakedness of the lightbulbs announced that we had reached the unsavory entrance to my unsuitable abode. I made a swift calculation of dishes left unwashed and roommates left unclothed.

“You know, you could just leave it right here on the landing,” I said. “I can manage from here.”

“Just open the door, will you?”

“So commanding.” I shoved the key in the lock and opened the door.

Well, it could have been worse. The dishes had disappeared—sink, perhaps?—and so had the roommate. Only the bottle of vodka remained, sitting proudly on the radiator shelf next to the tomato juice and an elegant black lace slip. Sally’s, by my sacred honor. I hurried over and draped my scarf over the shameful tableau.

A thump ensued as Doctor Paul laid the parcel to rest on the table. “Whew. I thought I wasn’t going to make it up that last flight.”

“Don’t worry. I would have caught you.”

He was looking at the parcel: one hand on his hip, the other raking through his hair in that way we girls adore. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

“It’s my parcel. Can’t a girl have a little privacy?”

“Now, see here. I carried that … that object up five flights of Manhattan stairs. Can’t a man have a little curiosity?”

Again with the glittery smile. I pushed myself off the radiator. “Since you put it that way. Make yourself comfortable. Can I take your coat and hat?”

“That hurt.”

I slipped off my wet raincoat and slung it on Sally’s hat tree, a hundred years old at least and undoubtedly purloined. I placed my hat on the hook above my coat, taking care to give my curls an artful little shake. Well, you can’t blame me for that, at least. My hair was my best feature: brown and glossy, a hint of red, falling just so around my ears, a saucy flip. It distracted from my multitude of flaws, Monday to Sunday. Why not shake for all I was worth?

I turned around and sashayed the two steps to the table. Also purloined. Sally had told me the story yesterday, over our second round of martinis: the restaurant owner, the jealous wife, the police raid. I’ll spare you the ugly details. In any case, our table was far more important than either of us had a right to own—solid, square, genuine imitation wood—which now proved positively providential, because my mysterious gift from the post office (the parcel, not the blonde) would have overwhelmed a lesser piece of furniture. As it was, the beast sat brown and hulking in the center, battered in one corner, stained in another, patched with an assortment of foreign stamps.

“Well, well.” I peered over the top. “What have we here?”

Miss Vivian Schuyler, read the label. Of 52 Christopher Street, et cetera, et cetera, except that my first name appeared over a scribbled-out original, and my building address likewise.

“It looks as if it’s been forwarded,” I said.

“The plot thickens.”

“My mother’s handwriting.” I ran my finger over the jagged remains of Fifth Avenue. “My parents’ address, too.”

“That sounds reasonable.” He remained a few respectful feet away, arms crossed against his blue chest. “Someone must have sent it to your parents’ house.”

“Apparently. Someone from Zurich, Switzerland.”

“Switzerland?” He uncrossed his arms and stepped forward at last. “Really? You have friends in Switzerland?”

“Not that I can remember.” I was trying to read the original name, beneath my mother’s black scribble. V something something. “What do you think that is?”

“It’s not Vivian?”

“No, it ends with a t.”

An instant’s reflection. “Violet? Someone had your name wrong, I guess.”

For a man who’d just walked coatless through the dregs of an October rain, Doctor Paul was awfully warm. I wore a cashmere turtleneck sweater over my torso, ever so snug, and still I could feel the rampant excess wafting from his skin, an unconscionable waste of thermal energy. Up close, he smelled like a hospital, which bothered me not at all.

I sashayed to the kitchen drawer and withdrew a knife.

“Ah, now the truth comes out. Make it quick.”

“Silly.” I waved the knife in a friendly manner. “It’s just that I don’t have any scissors.”

“Scissors! You really are a professional.”

“Stand aside, if you will.” I examined the parcel before me. Every seam was sealed by multiple layers of Scotch tape, as if the contents were either alive or radioactive, or both. “I don’t know where to start.”

“You know, I am a trained surgeon.”

“So you say.” I sliced along one seam, and another. Rather expertly, if you must know; but then I had done the honors of the table at college since my sophomore year. Nobody at Bryn Mawr carved up a noble loin like Vivian Schuyler.

The paper shell gave way, and then the box itself. I stood on a chair and dug through the packing paper.

“Steady, there.” Doctor Paul’s helpful hands closed on the back of the chair, and it ceased its rickety-rocking obediently.

“It’s leather,” I said, from inside the box. “Leather and quite heavy.”

“Do you need any help? A flashlight? Map?”

“No, I’ve got it. Here we are. Head, shoulders, placenta.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Neither.” I grasped with both hands and yanked, propelling myself conveniently backward into Doctor Paul’s alert arms. We tumbled pleasantly, if rather ungracefully, to the disreputable rug. “It’s a suitcase.”

I CALLED my mother first. “What is this suitcase you sent me?”

“This is not how ladies greet one another on the telephone, darling.”

“Each other, not one another. One another means three or more people. Chicago Manual of Style, chapter eight, verse eleven.”

A merry clink of ice cubes against glass. “You’re so droll, darling. Is that what you do at your magazine every day?”

“Tell me about the suitcase.”

“I don’t know about any suitcase.”

“You sent me a package.”

“Did I?” Another clink, prolonged, as of swirling. “Oh, that’s right. It arrived last week.”

“And you had no idea what was inside?”

“Not the faintest curiosity.”

“Who’s it from?”

“From whom, darling.” Oh, the ring of triumph.

“From whom is the package, Mums?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Do you know anybody in Zurich, Switzerland?”

“Nobody to you. Vivian, I’m dreadfully bored by this conversation. Can’t you simply open the damned thing and find out yourself?”

“I already told you. It’s a suitcase. It was sent to Miss Violet Schuyler on Fifth Avenue from somebody in Zurich, Switzerland. If it’s not mine—”

“It is yours. I don’t know any Violet Schuyler.”

“Violet is not nearly the same as Vivian. Doctor Paul agrees with me. There’s been a mistake.”

A gratifying pause, as Mums was set back on her vodka-drenched heels. “Who is Doctor Paul?”

I swiveled and fastened my eyes on the good doctor. He was leaning against the wall next to the window, smiling at the corner of his mouth, blue scrubs revealed as charmingly rumpled now that the full force of sunlight was upon them. “Oh, just the doctor I met in the post office. The one who carried the parcel back for me.”

“You met a doctor at the post office, Vivian?” As she might say, the gay bathhouse on Bleecker Street.

I leaned my hip against the table, right next to the battered brown valise, trusting the whole works wouldn’t give way beneath me. I was wearing slacks, unbelted, as befitted a dull Saturday morning, but Doctor Paul deserved to know that my waist-to-hip ratio wasn’t all that bad, really. I couldn’t have said that his expression changed, except that I imagined his eyes took on a deeper shade of blue. I treated him to a slow wink and wound the telephone cord around my fingers. “Oh, you’d adore Doctor Paul, Mums. He’s a surgeon, very handsome, taller than me, seems to have all his teeth. Perfectly eligible, really, unless he’s married.” I put the phone to my shoulder. “Doctor Paul, are you married?”

“Not yet.”

Phone back to ear. “Nope, not married, or so he claims. He’s your dream come true, Mums.”

“He’s not standing right there, is he?”

“Oh, but he is. Would you like to speak to Mums, Doctor Paul?”

He grinned, straightened from the wall, and held out his hand.

“Oh, Vivian, no …” But her last words escaped me as I placed the receiver in Doctor Paul’s palm. His palm: wide, firm, lightly lined. I liked it already.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Schuyler … Yes, she’s behaving herself … Yes, I carried the parcel all the way up those wretched stairs. That’s the sort of gentleman I am, Mrs. Schuyler.” He returned my wink. “As a matter of fact, I do think there’s been some mistake. Are you certain there’s no one named Violet in your family? … Quite certain? … Well, I am a doctor, Mrs. Schuyler. I’m accustomed to making a diagnosis based on the symptoms presented by the subject.” A hint of a blush began to climb up his neck. “Hard to say, Mrs. Schuyler, but—”

I snatched the receiver back. “That will be enough of that, Mums. I won’t have you embarrassing my Doctor Paul with your remarks. He isn’t used to them.”

“He is a dream, Vivian. My hat’s off to you.” Clink, clink, rattle. The glass must be almost empty. “Try not to sleep with him right away, will you? It scares them off.”

“You would know, Mums.”

A deep sigh. Swallowed by the familiar crash of empty vodka glass on bedside table. “You’re coming for lunch tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Good. We’ll see you at twelve sharp.” Click.

I set the receiver in the cradle. “Well, that’s Mums. I thought I should warn you from the get-go.”

“Duly warned.”

“But not scared?”

“Not a lick.”

I tapped my fingernails against the telephone. “You’re certain there’s a Violet Schuyler somewhere in this mess?”

“Well, no. Not absolutely certain. But the fact is, it’s not your suitcase, is it?”

I cast the old gaze suitcase-ward and shuddered. “Heavens, no.”

“A cousin, maybe? On your father’s side? Lost her suitcase in Switzerland?”

“You mean a century or so ago?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

I set the telephone down on the table and fingered the tarnished brass clasp of my acquisition. As ancient as my mother’s virtue, that valise, and just as lost to history: cracked and dusty, bent in all the wrong places. A faint scent of musty leather crept up from its creases. There was no label of any kind.

I don’t mean to shock you, but I’ve never considered myself an especially shy person, now or then. And yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to undo that clasp and open the suitcase in the middle of my ramshackle Greenwich Village fifth-floor apartment. There was something odd and sacred about it, something inviolable in all that mustiness. (Quite unlike my mother’s virtue, in that respect.)

My hand fell away. I looked back at the telephone. “I think it’s time to call Great-aunt Julie.”

“VIOLET SCHUYLER, DID YOU SAY?”

“Yes, Aunt Julie. Violet Schuyler. Does she exist? Do you know her?”

“Well, well.” The line went quiet. I imagined her pacing to the limit of the telephone cord, like a horse on a gilded Park Avenue picket line. I imagined her pristine sixty-two-year-old face, her well-preserved brow making the ultimate sacrifice to this unexpected Saturday-morning conundrum.

“Aunt Julie? Are you there?”

“You’re certain the name was Violet? Foreign handwriting can be so atrocious.”

“It’s definitely Violet. Doctor Paul concurs.”

“Who’s Doctor Paul?”

“We’ll get to him later. Let’s talk about Violet. Obviously you know the name.”

She exhaled with drama, as if collapsing on the sofa. I heard the scratching of her cigarette lighter. Must be serious, then.

“Yes, I know the name.”

“And?”

A long breath against the mouth of the receiver. “Darling, she was my sister. My older sister, Violet. A scientist. She murdered her husband in Berlin in 1914 and ran off with her lover, and nobody’s heard from her since.”




Violet, 1914 (#ulink_e20551f5-87e3-52da-b114-e69816e74c0a)

BERLIN (#ulink_e20551f5-87e3-52da-b114-e69816e74c0a)


The Englishman walks through the door of Violet’s life in the middle of an ordinary May afternoon, smelling of leather and outdoors.

She’s not expecting him. In that hour, Berlin is crowded with light, incandescent with sunshine and possibility, but Violet has banished brightness within the thick redbrick walls of her basement laboratory. She closes the door and lowers herself into a wooden chair in the center of the room, where she stares without moving at the heavy blackness surrounding her.

In her blindness, Violet’s other senses rise up with primeval sharpness. She counts the careful beats of her heart, sixty-two to the minute; she hears the click of footsteps down the linoleum hallway outside her room. The sterile scents of the laboratory fill her nostrils: cleaning solutions and chemicals, paper and pencil lead. Deeper still, she feels the weight of the furniture around her, interrupting the empty space. The chairs, the table, the radioactive apparatus she is about to employ. The door in the corner, from which she can just begin to detect a few thin lines of light stealing past the cracks.

As she sits and waits, as her pupils dilate by tiny fractions of degrees, the stolen light from the doorway finds the walls and the furniture, and the intricate charcoal shadow of the apparatus atop the table. Violet removes a watch from her pocket and consults the luminous dial. She has been sitting in her shapeless void for ten minutes.

Ten more minutes left.

Violet replaces her watch and resists the urge to rise and check the apparatus. She set it up with her own hands; she has already inspected each detail; she has already performed this experiment countless times. What possible surprise could it hold?

But a trace of unease seems to have stolen into the room with the light from outside the door. It pierces Violet’s calm preparation and winds around her chest like the thread behind a needle. She counts her pulse again: sixty-nine beats to the minute.

What an extraordinary anomaly.

She has never experienced this sensation before an experiment. Her nerves are cool and precise; her nerves are the very reason she was first delegated to perform this particular duty. She might go further and say that her nerves had brought her to this point in her life: her work, her unconventional marriage, her existence here in Berlin in this incandescent May of 1914, in a basement laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, waiting for her pupils to dilate to the necessary degree before she can begin an experiment at the frontier of atomic physics.

But she can’t deny the existence of this sensation that tightens about her heart. It is real, and it is quantifiable: seven additional beats of her heart in every minute.

A double knock strikes the door.

“Come in,” Violet says.

She closes her eyes as the door opens, because she doesn’t want the additional light to interrupt the adjustment of her pupils. Footsteps beat against the linoleum; the door clicks shut. Her husband, probably, come to check on her progress. To stand over her and ensure that she gets nothing wrong. That she misses nothing.

But in the split second before he speaks, Violet knows this intruder isn’t her husband. These footsteps are too heavy, the leathery air that whirls through the door with him too brash. Her senses recognize his strangeness just before his voice confirms it.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Mrs. Grant.”

Violet opens her eyes.

“My name is Richardson, Lionel Richardson. Your husband told me you wouldn’t mind my observing the experiment.”

Your husband told me. Walter sent this stranger to her?

Again, that unsettling sensation in her chest. If only she could see him. His black shape outlines the blacker void around him, obstructing the light from the door without a trace. His voice rumbles from the center of a capacious chest, low and respectful, the syllables clipped by precise British scissors.

I hope I’m not disturbing you.

“Not at all,” Violet says crisply. “Are you a colleague of his?”

“No, no. A former student.” He makes some movement in the darkness, indicating the apparatus. “Used to do these sorts of things myself.”

“Then I need not apologize for the darkness. Would you like to sit?” Her heart is beating even faster now, perhaps seventy-five hard strikes a minute. It must be surprise, that’s all. She’s rarely interrupted in those experiments, which are long and repetitious and generally unworthy of spectators. Her animal brain is simply reacting to the sudden presence of an unknown organism, a possible threat. An unexpected foreign invader who might be anyone or anything, but whose vital and leathery bulk doesn’t belong in the quiet darkness of her laboratory.

“Thank you.” A chair scrapes against the linoleum, as if Lionel Richardson can see in the dark. Or perhaps he simply memorized the location of the furniture in the brief flash of light at his entrance. “Are you nearly ready to begin, Mrs. Grant?”

“Almost.” Violet consults her watch again. “Another three minutes.”

Richardson laughs softly. “I remember it well. No twenty minutes ever passed so strangely. Time seems to stretch out, doesn’t it? A sort of black infinity, disconnected from everything else. All sorts of profound thoughts would pass through one’s brain. Not that I could ever recall them afterward.”

Yes, Violet thinks. That’s it exactly. “You’re here for old times’ sake, then?”

Another laugh. “Something like that. Dr. Grant told me someone else was performing my old duties this very minute, and I couldn’t resist a peek. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

Of course she minds. Lionel Richardson seems to take up half the room, as if he’s swallowed up the blackness to leave only his own solid limbs, his broad and rumbling chest. Violet is seized with a burst of annoyance at her husband, who surely should have known better than to send this stranger to swallow up her laboratory while she sits waiting in the darkness, alone and unsuspecting.

Richardson says, “I’d be happy to help you with the counting. I know it’s something of an eyestrain.”

“That’s not necessary. It takes some practice, as you know.”

“Oh, I remember how. I was the first one, you know, back in ought-nine, when your husband began his experiments. I still see those bloody little exploding lights, sometimes, when I close my eyes.”

Violet laughs. “I know what you mean.”

“Maddening, isn’t it? But I see the crafty doctor has found a permanent replacement for me. A far more agreeable one, at any rate.”

This time Violet feels the actual course of acceleration in her chest, the physical sense of quickening. How did one bring one’s heart back under proper regulation after a shock? You couldn’t simply order it to slow down. You couldn’t simply say, in a firm voice, as one spoke to a misbehaving child: Sixty-two beats is more than sufficient, thank you. The heart, an organ of instinct rather than reason, had to perceive that there was nothing to fear. The chemical signals of danger, of distress, had to disperse from the blood.

Violet flicks open her watch. “It’s time. Are you able to see?”

“Just barely.”

“We can wait a few more minutes, if you like.”

“No, no. I’m not here to interrupt your progress. Carry on.”

Violet rises from her chair and moves to the table in the center of the room, guided more by feel than by sight. She flicks the switch on the lamp, though she doesn’t look directly at the feeble low-wattage bulb. It illuminates her notepad and pencil just enough that she can write down her notes.

She casts her eyes over the apparatus: the small box at one end, containing a minute speck of radium; the aperture on the box’s side, through which the particles of radiation shoot unseen toward the sheet of gold foil; the glass screen, coated with zinc sulfide; and the eyepiece with its magnifying lenses.

She takes out her watch, settles her right eye on the eyepiece, and squints her left lid shut.

A tiny green-white flash explodes in her vision, a delicate firework of breath-stopping beauty. But Violet’s breath is already stopped, already shocked by the unexpected invasion of Lionel Richardson into her laboratory, and the tiny flashes make no impression, other than the scratches of her pencil as she counts them.

Why this oversized reaction? Why this perception of imminent danger?

Has Walter perhaps mentioned Lionel Richardson’s name before? Is there some association buried in her subconscious that causes the synapses of her brain to crackle with electricity, to issue these messages of alarm down her neural pathways to the muscles of her heart and lungs? Or maybe it’s just that she can’t see him, can’t inspect his face and clothes and person and confirm that he’s speaking the truth, that he’s only a man, a visiting former student of her husband’s, benignly curious.

Violet takes her eyes from the screen for an instant to check her watch. Nearly five minutes have passed. At five minutes she will draw a line under her counting marks and start again.

“Can I help you? Keep time for you?” asks the invader.

“It’s not necessary.” She looks at her watch. Five minutes. She draws a line.

“Aren’t you missing your count, looking back and forth like that?”

“A few, of course.”

“Dr. Grant always had me take a partner to keep time. We switched off to rest our eyes.” He offers this information respectfully, without a trace of the usual scientific arrogance.

“We don’t have the staff for that here in Berlin.”

“You have it now.”

Without taking her eye from the eyepiece, Violet grasps the watch in her left hand and holds it out. “Very well. If you insist.”

He gathers the watch in a light brush of his fingers against her palm. “Five-minute intervals?”

“Yes.” Violet shuts her eyes.

“All right. Ready …”

A tranquil leather-scented silence warms the air. Violet breathes it deeply inside her, once, twice.

“Go.”

Violet opens her eyes to the glorious flashing blackness, the stars exploding in her own minute universe. Her pencil moves on the paper, counting, counting. Lionel Richardson sits just behind her, unmoving, close enough that she can feel the heat radiating from his body. He holds her watch in his steady palm. Her gold pocket watch, unadorned, almost masculine; the watch her sister Christina gave her four years ago on a smoke-drenched pier on the Hudson River, as the massive transatlantic liner Olympic strained against her moorings a few feet away. Her watch: Violet’s only parting gift from the disapproving Schuylers.

“Time,” says Lionel Richardson.

Violet draws a line to begin a new count.

“And … go.”

He issues the direction with low-pitched assurance, from his invisible post at her left shoulder. He hasn’t simply swallowed the blackness, he’s become the dark space itself. Even his scent has absorbed into the air. Violet makes her tireless marks on the notepad. She sinks into the world of electric green-white scintillations, the regular strikes of radioactive particles against atomic nuclei, and somewhere in the rhythmic beauty, her heart returns at last to its usual serene pace, her nerves smooth down their ragged edges. Only the pencil, hard and sharp between her thumb and forefinger, links her to the ordinary world.

“Time,” says Richardson, and then: “Would you like me to count this round? Your eyes must be aching.”

Her eyes are aching. Her shoulders ache, too, and the small of her back. She straightens herself. “Yes, thank you.”

Lionel’s chair scrapes lightly. His body slides upward in the darkness behind her. A pressure cups her right elbow: his hand, guiding her around her own chair and into his. He places the watch in her palm and settles into the seat before the eyepiece, hunching himself around the apparatus without complaint, for he’s much larger than she is.

She lifts the watch and stares at the face. “Ready?”

“A moment.” He adjusts himself, settles his eye back against the lint lining. His profile, lit by the dim bulb next to the notepad, reveals itself at last: firm and regular, the nose a trifle large, the hair short and dark as ink above his white collar. His forehead is high, overhanging the eyepiece, and in the soft yellow light Violet cannot detect a single line. “Ready.”

She drops her gaze back to Christina’s watch.

“And … go.”




Vivian (#ulink_1c88edb9-4a40-5c02-8b67-26bb1b1289c4)


Aunt Violet. I had a great-aunt named Violet, an adulteress and murderess, about whom I’d never heard. A scientist. What sort of scientist?

I regarded the valise on my table, and then turned to tell Doctor Paul the extraordinary news.

Alas. Too late.

Inexplicably, unfathomably, he lay upon my sofa, in the hollow left by Sally’s debauched corpse an hour or two earlier, so profoundly asleep I was tempted to hold my compact mirror to his mouth and check for signs of life.

Hands to hips. “Well. There’s courtship for you.”

But then a tiny steel ball bearing of sentiment rolled downward through the chambers of my heart. Poor dear Doctor Paul. One arm crossed atop his chest; the other dangled to the floor. His legs, far too long for the sweeping red Victorian curves of the sofa, propped themselves over the edge of the opposite armrest.

I knelt next to him and touched the lock of hair that drooped in exhaustion to his forehead. Up close, I could see the tiny lines that fanned from the outer corners of his eyes. I bent my nose to his neck. Here, he smelled of salt instead of antiseptic, and perhaps a little long-forgotten soap, too, sweet and damp. I rubbed the tiny golden bristles of his nascent beard with my pinkie. He didn’t even flinch.

“Aren’t you just too much,” I whispered.

AUNT JULIE blew into the apartment half an hour later, smelling of cigarettes and Max Factor pancake foundation. She flung her hat on the stand but kept her coat in place. When you maintained a figure like hers so far past its biblically ordained two score and ten, you lived in a perpetual state of Pleistocene chill.

“Where is this suitcase of yours?” she demanded, lighting a cigarette.

“It’s not mine. That’s the point. Drink?” I didn’t wait for an answer. The liquor filled a cabinet of honor in the kitchen—such as it was—and while Aunt Julie might not admire the quality of the refreshment provided, she had to approve of its quantity.

She whipped off her gloves just in time to accept her Bloody Mary, no celery. “Haven’t you opened it yet?”

“Of course not. It’s not mine.”

“For God’s sake, my dear. Did your mother raise you with no standards at all?” She drained down half a glass, set the tumbler on the table, and put her hand on the valise’s tarnished brass clasp. “Well, well.”

“Now, wait just a minute.” I darted over and snatched her hand away.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t think we have any right to look inside.”

“Darling, she’ll never know.”

“How do we know that?”

“Nobody’s heard from her for fifty years. I’d say that was a pretty decent indication, wouldn’t you?”

“We should make some sort of effort to track her down first.”

Aunt Julie rolled her eyes and picked up her pick-me-up. “Ah, that’s good. You’re the only one of my nieces and nephews to mix a decent drink.”

“I had the finest instruction available.”

She wagged a finger. “Teach a girl to fish—”

“Look, Aunt Julie, about this Violet of yours …”

But Aunt Julie had already turned, aiming for the kitchen and a refill, and stopped with a rattle of dying ice. “Vivian, my dear,” she said slowly, “there’s a man on your sofa.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Oh, I approve wholeheartedly. But I do feel compelled to ask, for form’s sake, where the hell you picked him up on such short notice, and why he isn’t dressed more suitably.”

I came up behind her and slipped my arm about her waist. “Isn’t he a dream? I found him at the post office.”

“Delivered and signed for?”

“Mmm. Poor thing, he works such long shifts at the hospital. He carried up the package for me with his last dying surge of energy, and then he just”—I waved my hand helplessly—“collapsed.”

“Imagine that. What do you plan to do with him?”

“What do you suggest?”

She resumed her journey to the liquor cabinet. “Just don’t sleep with him right away. It scares them off.”

“Funny, Mums already warned me. Tell me about Violet.”

“There isn’t much to tell. Not much that I know, anyway. I was the baby of the family. I was only nine years old when she left for England. That was 1911, I believe.” Aunt Julie wandered back from the kitchen and leaned against the table, drink in hand, staring lovingly at Doctor Paul.

“Why did she leave for England? Was she sent away?”

“No, the opposite. She wanted to be a scientist, and naturally that didn’t go down well in Schuylerville. I remember the most awful rows. They let her go eventually, I suppose—there’s not much you can do with a girl if she’s got her heart set on something—and washed their hands of it.” Aunt Julie cocked her head. “What color are his eyes?”

“Blue. Exactly the same shade as his scrubs. And stop trying to distract me.”

“I’ve changed my mind. Get him in bed pronto.”

“You know, I’ll bet he can hear you in his subconscious.”

“I hope he does. You could use a good love affair, Vivian. It’s the one thing you’re missing.”

I wagged my finger. “You’re the most miserable excuse for a chaperone in the history of maiden aunts.”

“I am not a maiden aunt. I’ve been married several times.”

“Regardless, I’m not going to sleep with him. Look at the poor darling. He’s exhausted.”

“I find,” said Aunt Julie, swishing her gin, “they can generally summon the energy.”

I crossed the floor to my bedroom—it didn’t take long—and took the extra blanket from the shelf. I called back: “Now talk. What did Violet do in England?”

“Got married to her professor, like the sane girl she was. She was very pretty, Violet, I’ll say that, though she didn’t care about anything except her damned atoms and molecules.”

I returned and spread the blanket over Doctor Paul, taking extra care with his doughty shoulders. “But then she murdered him.”

“Well, I don’t know the details of all that. The family hasn’t spoken of it since, never even uttered her name. I don’t think there was a trial or anything like that. But yes, the fellow was murdered, and Violet ran off with her lover. From a suite at the Adlon, of course. She did have taste.” She snapped her fingers. “And poof! That was that.”

“There must be more to it.”

“Of course there’s more.”

“And you were never curious?”

“I was young, Vivian. I hardly knew her, really. She was at school, and then she was in England.” Aunt Julie set her glass on the table and crossed her arms. “I wondered, of course. Once or twice, when I was in Europe, I asked a few questions. But nothing ever turned up.”

She was staring at the valise now, her lips turned down in a crimson crescent moon. She stretched out one claw and touched the lonely leather.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Of course you don’t. You’re young and suspicious.”

“And I know you, Aunt Julie.” I pointed at her duplicitous chest. “Out with it.”

She spread her hands. “I’ve told you all I know.”

She played her part well. Round eyes, innocent eyebrows. Mouth set irrevocably shut. I crossed my arms and tapped an arpeggio into my left elbow. “I can’t believe I had another great-aunt, all these years, and nobody ever mentioned it.”

Aunt offered me with a pitiful smile. “We’re the Schuylers, darling. Nobody ever would.”

From the window over the back courtyard came the sound of crockery smashing. A baby wailed. My first night in the apartment, with the roommate I’d met only that morning, I hadn’t slept a wink: the cramped squalor was so foreign to Fifth Avenue, to Bryn Mawr, to the rarefied quiet of a Long Island summer. I adored every piece of makeshift purloined furniture, every broken cabinet door held together with twine, every sound that shrieked through the window glass and told me I was alive, alive.

“Let’s open the valise,” said Aunt Julie. “I want to see what’s inside.”

“God, no. What if it’s a skeleton? Her dead husband?”

“All the better.”

I shook my head. “I can’t open it. Not until I know if she’s still alive.”

“You sound like a melodrama. If you really want the truth, it’s inside that bag.” She stabbed it with her finger. “That’s where you’ll find Violet.”

“Well, it’s locked,” I said. “And there’s no key.”

Doctor Paul stirred on the sofa. “Clamp, not screw,” he muttered, and turned his face into the cushion.

I dropped my voice to a whisper. “See what you’ve done! Now, be quiet. He needs his sleep.”

Nobody could invest a standard-issue eye roll with as much withering contempt as Aunt Julie. She did it now, right before she marched to the hat stand and lifted her hat—a droll little orange felt number, perfectly matching her orange wool coat—from its hook. Crimson lips, orange hat: only Aunt Julie could pull that one off.

I followed her and placed a kiss on her cheek. “Stay dry.”

She shook her head. “You won’t break open the mysterious suitcase sitting on your own kitchen table. You won’t go to bed with that adorable doctor sleeping on your sofa.”

I opened the door for her and stood back.

Aunt Julie thrust her hat pin just so and swept into the vomit-stained hallway. She called, over her shoulder: “Youth is wasted on the young.”

EONS PASSED before the scent of Aunt Julie’s Max Factor faded from the air. I spent them tidying up the apartment—as far as feeble human ability could achieve, at any rate—and generally hiding all evidence of sin.

I did this not to favorably impress Doctor Paul when he woke (at least, not exclusively) nor out of a general desire for cleanliness (of which I had little) but because I liked to keep my hands busy while my brain wrestled with a problem.

And my new aunt Violet was a doozy of a problem.

A woman scientist: now, that was interesting, something I could understand. Not that I liked the sciences particularly, but I could see her struggle as vividly as I saw mine, for all the half century of so-called progress between us. Not only was this Violet a female scientist, poor dear. She was also a scientific female. She would have sat at the lonely table, wherever she made her home. I couldn’t blame her for marrying her professor.

The question was why she killed him afterward.

My housemaidenly urgings flickered and died. I sank into the chair at the table, feather duster in hand, and touched my finger, as Aunt Julie had, to the sturdy leather. That’s where you’ll find Violet, Aunt Julie had said, but it seemed to me that she existed elsewhere. That the marks and stains of her life’s work lay scattered out there, in the wide world, and that the contents of this particular valise were instead private, the detritus of her soul. I had no right to them. What if someone opened up my suitcase?

In the wake of the earlier fracas, the courtyard had gone unnaturally still. The clock ticked mechanically in my ear, and for some reason the sound reminded me that I hadn’t had lunch, that I had packed an entire week’s worth of excitement into a single Saturday afternoon, and for all I knew it might be dinnertime already.

I glanced at the face. Two-thirty-one.

I rose from the table and went to the kitchen, where I measured water and coffee grounds into the percolator. Doctor Paul would need coffee when he woke up, and lots of it.

Two-thirty-one. I’d known the good doctor for two hours and thirty-nine minutes, and he’d been asleep for most of it. I plugged the percolator into the wall socket and opened the refrigerator. Butter, cheese. There must be some bread in the breadbox.

Doctor Paul would be hungry, too.

AH, the scent of brewing coffee. It bolts a man from peaceful slumber faster than the words Darling, I’m pregnant.

I watched his big blue eyes blink awake. I savored the astonished little jerk of his big blue body. “Hello, Doctor,” I said. “Welcome to heaven.”

He looked at me, and his head relaxed against the pillow. “You again.”

“I made you grilled cheese and tomato soup. And coffee.”

“You didn’t.”

“You carried my parcel. It was the least I could do.”

He smiled and sat up, all blinky and tousley and shaky-heady. “I don’t know how I fell asleep.”

“It seems pretty straightforward to me. You were exhausted. You made the mistake of lowering your poor overworked backside onto my unconscionably comfortable sofa. Voilà. Have some coffee.”

He accepted the cup and took a sip. Eyelids down. “I think I’m in love with you.”

“Aw, you big lug. Wait until you taste my grilled cheese.”

Another sip. “I’d love to taste your grilled cheese.”

Well, well.

I rose to my feet and went to the kitchen, where Doctor Paul’s sandwich sat in the oven, keeping warm. When I returned, his eyes lifted hopefully.

I handed him the plate. “So tell me about yourself, Doctor Paul.”

“I do have a last name, if you’d care to hear it.”

“But, Doctor, we hardly know each other. I’m not sure I’m ready to be on a last-name basis with you.”

“It’s Salisbury. Paul Salisbury.”

“You’ll always be Doctor Paul to me. Now eat your sandwich like a good boy.”

He smiled and tore away a bite. I perched myself at the edge of the armchair, such as it was, and watched him eat. I was still wearing my frilly white apron, and I smoothed it down my front like any old housewife. “Well?”

“I do believe this is the best grilled cheese I’ve ever had.”

“It’s my specialty.”

He nodded at the suitcase. “Haven’t you opened it yet?”

“Oh, that. You’ll never guess. It belonged to my secret great-aunt Violet, who murdered her husband and ran off with her lover, and the damned thing is, of course, locked tight as an oyster with a lovely fat pearl inside.”

Doctor Paul’s sandwich paused at his mouth. “You’re serious?”

“In this case, I am.”

He enclosed a ruminative mouthful of grilled cheese. “I hope you don’t mind my asking whether this sort of behavior runs in the family?”

“My behavior, or hers?”

“Both.”

I settled back in my armchair and twiddled my thoughtful thumbs. “Well. I can’t say the Schuylers are the most virtuous of human beings, though we do put on a good show for outsiders. Still and all, outright psychopathy is generally frowned upon.”

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear it.”

“That being said, and as a general note of caution, psychopaths do make the best liars.” I clapped my hands. “But enough about little old me! Let’s turn our attention to the alluring Dr. Paul Salisbury, his life and career, and, most important, when he’s due back at his hospital.”

Doctor Paul set his empty plate on the sofa cushion next to him, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward. His eyes took on that darker shade again, or maybe it was the sudden rush of blood to my head, distorting my vision. “Midnight.”

I lost my breath.

“I’m supposed to be sleeping right now. I was supposed to return to the hospital from the post office, change clothes, and go back to my apartment to sleep.”

“Where’s your apartment?”

“Upper East Side.”

“My condolences.”

“Thanks. I should have found a place closer to the hospital.”

I looked at the clock. “You’ve lost hours already.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

I untangled my legs and rose to fetch the tomato soup. “I hope you don’t mind the mug. We don’t seem to have any bowls yet.”

“Whatever you have is fine.” He took the mug with a smile of thanks. Oh, the smile of him, as wide and trusting as if the world were empty of sin. “Wonderful, in fact. Sit here.” He whisked away the plate and patted the sofa cushion next to him.

I settled deep. I was a tall girl—an unlucky soul or two might have said coltish in my impulsive adolescence—and I liked the unfamiliar way his thigh dwarfed mine. The size of his knee. I studied those knees, caught the movement of his elbow as he spooned tomato soup into his mouth. The patient clinks of metal against ceramic said it all: anticipation, discovery, certainty. The real deal, something whispered in my head.

When he had put himself on the outside of his tomato soup, Doctor Paul cupped the empty mug in his palms. “What would you like to do now, Vivian?”

“I was hoping you’d say that. Did you have anything particular in mind, Doctor, dear?”

“I was asking you.”

“Well, Mother said I shouldn’t go to bed with you right away. It would scare you off.”

I couldn’t see for certain, but I’ll bet my best lipstick he blushed. If I closed my eyes, I could feel the warmth on my nearby cheek.

“Aunt Julie concurred,” I added. “At first, anyway. Until she got a good look at you.”

“I’m not saying they’re right,” he said carefully, “but there’s no rush, is there?”

“You tell me.”

“No. There’s no rush.”

We sat there, side by side, legs not quite touching. Doctor Paul rotated the mug in his hands, his competent surgeon’s hands. They looked older and wiser than the rest of him. He kept his nails trimmed short, his cuticles tidy. The tiny crescents at the base were extraordinarily white.

He cleared his throat. “Of course, I didn’t mean to imply that I’m not tempted. Just to be clear. Extremely tempted.”

“Mind over matter?”

“Exactly.”

“I’d hate to lead you astray from the well-worn path of virtue.”

He cleared his throat again. Blushed again, too, the love. If he kept giving off that kind of thermodynamic spondulics, I was going to have to change into something less comfortable. “Yes, of course,” he mumbled.

I lifted my eyes, and the table appeared before me, and my great-aunt Violet’s suitcase atop it. Aunt Violet, who ran away with her lover into the Berlin summer. Had they made it to Switzerland together? She would be in her seventies now, if she were still alive. If she had succeeded.

Doctor Paul rose from the sofa in a sudden heave of dilapidated upholstery. His hand stretched toward me, palm upward, open and strong. “Let’s go somewhere, Vivian.”

“What about your sleep?”

“I’ll catch up eventually. This is more important.”

I took his hand and let him pull me upward. “If you must. Where do we go?”

He stood close as a whisker, solid as a deep-blue tree. “How about the library?”

“The library.”

“Yes, the library.” Doctor Paul reached around my back, untied my frilly apron, and lifted it over my head. “We’re going to find out all about this aunt of yours.”




Violet (#ulink_b0bae944-d960-538c-9d97-100f606c3cf0)


Your husband told me you wouldn’t mind, Lionel Richardson said. For the life of her, Violet can’t imagine why. In the course of their two and a half years together, Walter has only allowed one other man inside the darkened laboratory with her: namely, himself.

But then, like most illicit affairs, theirs was unequal from the beginning. Violet’s youth, her loneliness, her awe-swollen gratitude were no match for Dr. Grant’s experience. At nineteen—at any age—innocence doesn’t know its own power. To know that power, after all, is to lose it.

In Violet’s downcast moments—now, for example, as she locks the laboratory door and trudges in the direction of Lionel Richardson’s laughter down the hall—she forces herself to recall the instant of their meeting, the instant in which everything changed. When the chains of her attachment were first forged.

She climbs the stairs to her husband’s office, from which Richardson’s laughter originates, but she sees instead the familiar Oxford room of 1911, richly appointed, and the angular man standing in the doorway before it: the legendary Dr. Walter Grant made manifestly physical. She remembers how every aspect exuded masculine eminence, from his thin-lipped mouth surrounded by its salty trim beard to his graying hair gleaming with pomade under the masterful glow of a multitude of electric lamps. He wasn’t a large man, but neither was he small. He was built like a whip, slender and hard, and the expert tailoring of his clothes to his body gave him an additional substance that, in Violet’s eyes, he didn’t require.

At the moment of that first meeting, Violet was somewhat out of breath. She had grown agitated, speaking to his private secretary, whose job it was to protect the great man from unforeseen attacks like hers; she was also hot beneath her drab brown clothes, because it was the end of August and the heat lounged about the yellowed university stones, an old beast exhausted by the long summer and refusing to be moved. Damp with perspiration, her chest moving rapidly, Violet pushed back her loosened hair with firm fingers and announced herself.

Clearly, Dr. Grant was annoyed at the disturbance. He turned his grimace to the secretary.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, sir. The young lady will simply not be moved. Shall I call someone?” The secretary’s clipped gray voice betrayed not the slightest sense of Violet as a fellow female, as a fellow human being, as anything other than an obstacle to be removed from Dr. Grant’s eminent path.

Violet was used to this. She was used to the look of aggravation on Dr. Grant’s face. She was used to rooms like this, the smell of wooden furniture and ancient air, the acrid hint of chemicals in some distant laboratory, the clickety-click of someone’s typewriter interrupting the scholarly quiet. She tilted up her chin and held out her leather portfolio of papers. “With all respect, Dr. Grant, I will not leave until I learn why my application to your institute has once more been sent back, without any sign of its having been read and considered.”

“Application to this institute,” said the secretary scathingly. “The cheek of these American girls. I shall ring for help at once, Dr. Grant.” She lifted the receiver of a dusty black telephone box.

But Dr. Grant held up his hand. He looked at Violet, really looked, and his eyes were so genuinely and intensely blue that Violet felt a leap of childlike hope inside her ribs.

“What is your name, madame?” he asked.

“Violet Schuyler, sir. I have recently graduated with highest honors from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, with bachelor of science degrees conferred in both mathematics and chemistry. My marks are impeccable, I have letters of recommendation from—”

“When did you first make your application to the institute?”

“In March, sir. It was returned in April. I presumed there had been some misdirection, so I sent it again, and—”

He turned to the secretary. “Why have I not seen Miss Schuyler’s application?”

The secretary knit her fingers together on the desk and creased her narrow eyes at Violet. “I assumed, sir, that—”

“That I would not consider an application from a female student?”

“Dr. Grant, the institute … that is, there is not a single scientist who … It’s impossible, sir. Of course it is. Your laboratory is no place …”

Dr. Grant turned back to Violet with eyes now livid. “I apologize, Miss Schuyler. Your application should have been received with exactly the same attention as any other. If you will please do me the honor of attending me in my office, I shall read it now, with the utmost regard for your tenacity in delivering it against all obstacles.” He stood back and motioned with his arm.

And so it began, the awakening of Violet’s gratitude, in that instant of triumph over the pinched and gray-suited secretary. She swept into Dr. Grant’s office and heard the firm click of the door as he closed it behind them, the decisive shutting-out of disapproving secretaries and rigid parents from the territory around them.

“Sit, I beg you,” he said, proffering a venerable old leather chair, and Violet sat. He pulled out his pair of rectangular reading glasses and settled into his own chair, behind the desk, while the clock drummed away in the corner and a robin sang from the tree outside the open window. As he read, he remained absolutely still, as if absorbed whole into the papers before him. Violet clenched her fingers around her knee and observed his purposeful energy, the fighting trim of his whip-thin body. Dr. Grant was three years older than her own father, and yet every detail of him belonged so clearly to a newer age, the modern age. Even his graying hair, the color of burnished steel.

How on earth did she get here, in this English building, filled with a race of people to whom she did not belong? Why had she fled her family, her life, her country, her comfortable future? What was she doing?

You’re greedy, her mother had said to her quietly, that last night in New York, as she had packed her things. Greedy and selfish. It’s not the knowledge you want, you can have that from your journals. You want to be in the newspapers, you want to be Marie Curie, you want to think you’re different from all of us. That all other women are silly and complacent and conventional, except you, brilliant you.

Isn’t that right, Violet?

“I beg your pardon,” Dr. Grant said, raising his head a quarter hour later to part the curtain of silence between them. “I believe a mistake has been made. You are quite the most qualified applicant to this institute in four years.”

Despite his heroic vanquishing of the secretary, Violet had somehow been expecting resistance. Resistance was all she knew: from her parents, filling the musty Fifth Avenue air with argument and expostulation; from her brothers, jeering over the silver and crystal. The opposition of the entire world against one embattled island of Violet.

She opened her mouth to return this volley that did not arrive. Instead, on the end of a wary breath, she offered: “I was informed at the outset that it’s too late to enter the university for the current term.”

He waved that aside in a flash of starched white cuff. “I shall see to it personally. You will have to join one of the women’s colleges, of course. Somerville, I think, will be best. I know the principal well; there should be no trouble at all. Have you lodgings?”

“I am at the Crown,” she said numbly.

He made a small black note on the paper before him. “I will see to it at once. A quiet, discreet pair of rooms. You have no companion, I take it?”

“No. I am independent.”

“Very good.”

Very good. Violet absorbed the note of rich satisfaction in his voice, above the glacial white of his collar, the symmetrical dark knot of his necktie. He was wearing a tweed jacket and matching waistcoat, and when he rose to bid her a tidy good afternoon, he unfastened the top button in an absent gesture to let the sides fall apart across his flat stomach.

Violet looked directly into his eyes, at that unsettlingly clear blue in his polished face, but her attention remained at his periphery, at that unfastened horn button, from which the tiny end of a thread dangled perhaps a quarter inch.

Now, as she pauses once more outside her husband’s office door, she remembers longing, quite irrationally and against her finest principles, to mend it for him.




Vivian (#ulink_7107193e-c989-5bb6-a8fb-b7405224f577)


By the time we reached Twenty-first Street, we were holding hands. I know, I know. I don’t consider myself the hand-holding kind of girl, either, but Doctor Paul reached for me when a checker cab screamed illegally around the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth, against the light, and what would you have me do? Shrug the sweet man off?

So I let it stay.

Doctor Paul had suggested walking instead of the subway, once he emerged from the hospital locker room, shiny and soapy and shaven, hair damp, body encased in a light suit of sober gray wool with a dark blue sweater-vest underneath. I would have said yes to anything at that particular instant, so here we were, trudging up Fifth Avenue, linked hands swinging between us, sun fighting to emerge above our heads.

“You’re unexpectedly quiet,” he said.

“Just taking it all in. I suppose you’re used to bringing home blondes from the post office, but I’m all thumbs.”

He laughed. “I’ve never brought home a blonde from the post office, and I never will.”

“Promises, promises.”

“I happen to prefer brunettes.”

“Since when?”

“Since noon today.”

“And what did you prefer before that?”

“Hmm. The details are strangely hazy now.”

I gave his hand a thankful squeeze. “Stunned you with my cosmic ray gun, did I?”

He peered up at the sun. “I said to myself, Paul Salisbury, any girl who can say Holy Dick in the middle of a crowded post office in Greenwich Village, that girl is for keeps.”

“Nothing to do with my irresistible face, then? My tempting figure?”

“The thought never crossed my mind.”

I couldn’t see for the galloping unicorns. The Empire State Building lay somewhere ahead, over the rainbow. “The blue scrubs did it for me. I’ve had a doctor complex since I was thirteen. Just ask my shrink.”

“And to think my pops didn’t want me to go to medical school.”

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to him. “You’re having me on, aren’t you?”

He shook his head.

“But everyone wants his son to be a doctor. No one brags about his son the banker, his son the lawyer.”

“Not mine.”

I squinted suspiciously. “Are you from earth?”

“I’m from California.”

I nodded with understanding and turned us back up the sidewalk. “Aha. That explains everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. The golden glow, the naive willingness to follow a strange girl upstairs to her squalid Village apartment. I knew you couldn’t be a native New Yorker.”

“As you are.”

“As I eminently am. Tell me about California. I’ve never been there.”

He told me about cliffs and beaches and the cold Pacific current, about his family’s house in the East Bay, about the fog that rolled in during the summer afternoons, you could almost set your watch by it, and the bright red-orange of the Golden Gate Bridge against the scrubbed blue sky. Did I know that they never stopped painting that bridge? By the time they had finished the last stroke, they had to start all over again from the beginning. We were just escaping from Alcatraz when the stone lions of the New York Public Library clawed up before us.

“After you,” said Doctor Paul.

“SO. I suppose we should start with Violet Schuyler,” said Doctor Paul, in his best hushed library whisper.

“How you joke.”

“No?”

“My dear boy, don’t you know? It’s much easier to find out about men. Even if my aunt Violet were the most talented scientist in the Western world, she would probably only rate a small paragraph in the E.B. Either no one would have paid her any attention, or some man would have jumped in to take credit for her work.”

“Really?” The old lifting eyebrow.

“Really.”

“What about Marie Curie?’

“The exception that proves the rule. And she worked with her husband.”

“All right, then. So what was Violet’s husband’s name?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Shh,” said the librarian.

The New York Times came to our rescue. “She’s a Schuyler,” I told Doctor Paul. “Even if the family disowned her, they’d still have put a wedding announcement in the paper.”

He shook his head. “And they say Californians are the loonies.”

“Oh, you’ll learn to love us. And our Labrador retrievers, too.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t love you. I don’t suppose you know the wedding date?”

“I do not. But it would have taken at least a few months from meeting to marriage, don’t you think?”

He winked. “Would it?”

“You’re a shameless flirt, Doctor Paul.”

“Shh,” said the librarian.

We started with January of 1912, and in half an hour had found our mark. I whistled low, earning myself a sharp look of hatred from the librarian, or perhaps it was jealousy. “April. What, eight months? For a confirmed old bachelor? That was quick work.”

“Even for a daughter of the Schuylers. She must have been irresistible. A shame there’s no photograph.”

“I suppose it’s a good thing they didn’t have the bright idea to sail home to New York and meet her parents afterward,” I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

“The Titanic.”

“Oh, right.” He turned back to the frail yellow page before us and frowned. “It’s awfully concise, isn’t it?”

I followed him. The statement was a short one, a compact jewel box of status markers, conveying only and precisely what readers of the Times needed to know about the happy bride and groom to place them in the only world that counted.

Miss Violet Schuyler weds Dr. Walter Grant. Miss Violet Schuyler, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Schuyler of Fifth Avenue, New York City, and Oyster Bay, Long Island, was married last Monday to Dr. Walter Grant of Oxford, England, at the Oxford town hall. A short reception followed the ceremony. The couple will reside in Oxford, where Dr. Grant is chairman of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry.

“You’re right. There should be a photo,” I said. “My aunt Julie said she was very pretty. A genuine redhead.”

“Funny, the announcement says nothing about Violet’s being a scientist, too.”

“Well, it wouldn’t, would it? The horror.”

Doctor Paul straightened from the table. “We have a name now, anyway. Violet Grant, Dr. Walter Grant. The encyclopedia should have a listing, shouldn’t it?”

We tackled the E.B. shoulder-to-shoulder, oxen in yoke. Did I mention I was enjoying myself immensely? Working with Doctor Paul gave me the most exhilarating sense of equality, the thrill of collaborative discovery. Exactly the way I had pictured my job at the magazine, before I actually entered the office two weeks ago and knocked on my editor’s door for that first journalistic assignment. Just imagine me, fresh of face, shiny of pelt, poised of pencil, doing my best Rosalind Russell before the legendary desk of my legendary editor.

Me (humbly): What’ll it be, Mr. Tibbs? Murder trial? Corruption investigation? Fashion shoot?

Tibby (cheerfully): No cream, extra sugar, and make it hot.

But this. Doctor Paul’s older and wiser fingers flipping through the wispy new pages of the latest Encyclopaedia Britannica, his voice muttering Gramophone, Graves, too far, here it is, Grant. All on my behalf. All as if I belonged by his side, reading the one-column entry for Dr. Walter Grant in tandem with his own adept brain.

Then, the coup de be-still-my-beating-heart. Doctor Paul turned, knit his devastating brows to an inquisitive point, and said the magic words: “What do you think, Vivian?”

I think we should marry and breed.

“I think it was a shame she killed him.”

GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. (1862–1914) Physical chemist, an earlier colleague of Ernest Rutherford before a professional dispute caused a rift between the two, chair of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry (Oxford), and finally a fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie in Berlin, Germany, in the years before his death. His early experimentation in the discovery of the atomic nucleus paved the way for numerous advances, though by the time of his death in July 1914, his theories had reached a dead end and he had failed to produce any major original research in several years.

Born on August 7, 1862, the only surviving child of a Manchester solicitor and the daughter of a music teacher, Grant attended first Uppingham School in Rutland, where he excelled in mathematics and Greek and won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge.

The circumstances of his death have never been established conclusively, due in part to the state of civic confusion as Germany hovered on the brink of the First World War. According to press reports, his body was found in his flat in Kronenstrasse with a single gunshot wound to the chest in the early morning hours of July 26, 1914. Police attempted to apprehend his wife, Violet Grant, but she escaped Berlin with a man widely rumored to have been her lover, and was not seen again. No other suspect was subsequently apprehended, and the case remained open.

“Look how handsome he is.” I tapped the tiny gray photograph of a bearded Dr. Walter Grant, right between his smug scientific eyeballs. “A crying shame.”

“If she killed him,” said Doctor Paul. “The case remains open, it says.”

“Who else would have done it?”

“The lover, for one.”

A shadow fell over the life, work, and beard of GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. An exasperated shadow, judging by the acute angle of the elbows as hands met hips.

“That was your last warning,” the shadow whispered bitterly. “I must ask you to leave.”

“I WONDER who he was, this lover of Violet’s,” I said. “The encyclopedia didn’t even give his name.”

Doctor Paul stretched out his long legs and fingered the rim of his cup. We were sitting in a booth at an overheated coffee shop on Forty-second Street, a hat toss from Grand Central Terminal, and I, watching the good doctor’s lugubrious hand circle its way into infinity, found myself in the absurd position of envying a hunk of white ceramic. “Some good-looking young fellow, I guess. Closer to her own age. She’d probably examined her future, decades of marriage to a man old enough to be her father, and realized it wasn’t worth it.”

“What wasn’t worth it?”

“Whatever she got from it. Money or security.” He shrugged and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”

“Oh, thank God.” I snatched a cigarette from the pack. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

He laughed and lit me up like a gentleman. I might have lingered overmuch near his outstretched fist, though he didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve told myself I’ll quit when this damned residency is over with,” he said, pulling out one for himself.

“I’ve told myself I’ll quit when I’m good and ready.” I took a sweet long drag, just to drive home my point, and drank my coffee in a reckless gulp. And why not? I couldn’t fault the coffee, hot hot hot; the same went for Doctor Paul’s cigarettes, Winstons, luxurious and masculine. Coffee and tobacco, that fusion of divine creation. I’d ordered a raisin bun some time ago and presumed the kitchen was now sending out to Madagascar for more cinnamon. I didn’t care. “I don’t think she wanted money from him. She wasn’t the type. If she wanted to marry for money, she’d have stayed in New York and done a much better day’s work of it.”

“Fair enough. Security? She was alone in England. She’d left her family behind.”

“Possibly. Or maybe she was in love with him.”

“Really?” His voice was so saturated with doubt, I could have stretched out my two hands, wrung it from the air, and mopped it back up with a napkin.

“Really. It’s a known phenomenon, after all. A rite of passage. Falling in love with your professor.”

“Are you serious? An old man like that?”

“You’re sure you want to hear this, golden boy?”

Just before he answered, he checked himself. His blue eyes did that thing again, that darkening, as if the weight of realization brought about some chemical change in him. He picked through his words more carefully and said: “Is this about Violet, or about you?”

Well, now.

I am not a girl who evades a man’s gaze without good reason, but I dropped mine then, right through the gentle haze of smoke drifting from my fingers and into the hot black pool of coffee, kerplop.

Here we were already, the moment of truth. It usually took a lot longer to arrive, didn’t it? Several dates at a minimum. Sometimes never, if the chemistry wasn’t bubbling enough to make the effort worthwhile. You circled around it as long as you could, until there was no putting it off, until the suitcases had to be dragged out from under the bed and opened, the contents examined. Had you slept with anyone? When? Why? How many? The answers could be elliptical or coded—we were engaged, that was a favorite—and the details left to the imagination, but you had to have your answer ready. Some boys wanted to know you were lily-white; some just wanted to know you weren’t a livid scarlet. You needed to know whether he cared about your particular shade of pink, and what that meant, and whether you cared if he cared. You might even be curious about him—Yes? How many? What kind of girls?—and then it was time for the fork in the road, and whether the two of you would take it. It was a funny time, 1964. An in-betweener, a swirling slack tide.

I had no answer ready for Doctor Paul. I had the truth, but what sane person ever wants the truth?

“Never mind,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

I lifted my head. “Didn’t you?”

“Not to make any judgments, Vivian. Just to know about you. What makes you—”

“Tick?”

“What makes you Vivian.”

I liked the way he said my name, all throaty on the V’s, all stretched to its rightful three syllables. The diner was quiet, at least for the middle of Manhattan, only half full, giving me the illusion of privacy, the demi-sanctity of confessional. Something clattered onto the Formica before me. The raisin bun. “Thank you,” I said, without looking up.

“Did he hurt you?” asked Doctor Paul, compassionate.

“Did he hurt me.” I snatched the raisin bun. “Do I look like the kind of girl who lets herself get hurt?”

“You tell me.”

I went on with my mouth full, in a way that would have caused my mother to reach for her third vodka gimlet, no ice. “Look, a girl goes away to college, any girl, every girl, and she’s alone. No mother and father, especially no father. She meets a lot of boys, if she’s lucky, and they’re either painfully awkward or awkwardly pushy, and she wonders where all the men have gone, the ones who know how to speak and act and treat a lady. Oh, wait. Look. There’s one! Right at the front of the room, an expert in his field, eminent and confident as all get-out, holding the classroom in his chalk-dusted palm, maybe flashing you a smile, maybe holding your gaze a second or two. You find yourself going to his office to ask a question, to talk about your exam, and lo and behold, he can actually hold a conversation. He pulls out your chair for you and hangs your coat on a hook. He’s civilized. He’s a grown-up, and he acts as though you’re the only woman in the universe.” I reached for my pocketbook and shook out another smoke. Doctor Paul went for his lighter, but I waved him away and used my own. “So that’s how it happens. Daddy complex, whatever the shrinks want to call it. You think you’re safe with him, until you’re not. Until you’re losing your virginity on his office sofa, oopsy-daisy.”

“The difference, of course,” said Doctor Paul, in a voice from another century, “is that this Dr. Grant married her afterward.”

“Stand down, Lancelot. God forbid I should have married him. Anyway, I could have said no, and I didn’t. I was curious. I had my own urges. Don’t let any girl tell you she doesn’t.” I let the waitress refill my coffee before I exploded my next little bombshell. “And my mother made it look so easy, having affairs. I thought, well, tiddledywinks. I’m her daughter. It’s the family business, isn’t it, sleeping with married men.”

“He was married?”

“He’s not anymore. It turned out he had a thicket of notches on the arm of his office sofa, and eventually the poor wife discovered them while she was plumping the pillows one day. As I said, a rite of passage, and he was more than happy to perform the sacraments.”

Doctor Paul sat back and stubbed out his cigarette. His cheeks were faintly pink; so was the tip of his nose. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Look, I don’t regret it. I don’t think I do, anyway, except that he was married. That was wrong, that was stupid, and I’d never do that again. It seems I don’t have the stomach for adultery, genes or no genes.”

“What a relief.”

“But I can see the same thing happening to her, to Violet. Seduction, that is. She would have been much more alone than I was, wouldn’t she, with her family across the ocean, and no other women to share her midnight cocoa and a good laugh? She’d burned every bridge, God help her. So either Dr. Grant seduced her, because she was innocent and vulnerable, and then he married her out of guilt. Or else she seduced him and made him cough up the ring, ex post coitus.”

“Which one do you think it was?”

I licked the sticky from my fingers and finished off the coffee. Half a cigarette remained in the ashtray, burning quietly, but I’d had my fill.

“Maybe a little of both.” I ground out the cigarette with a little more force than strictly necessary.

Doctor Paul studied my fingers at their work. “What are you thinking?”

Perceptive, I thought. Maybe he couldn’t read my mind yet, but at least he knew when it was chewing on a bone. I folded my arms and leaned forward. “Oh, about what you said. If I’d married my professor, instead of scattering two hundred pages or so of his latest research notes over the new-fallen snow one fine February morning …”

Doctor Paul grinned. He picked up my hand and kissed my palm. “And?”

“I think I’d probably have ended up murdering him, too.”




Violet (#ulink_d1447ac8-32a3-5476-91cb-fd81fb648da4)


Violet never could pinpoint the moment in which her immense regard, her gratitude, and even awe for Dr. Grant transformed into romantic desire. For some reason, this disturbs her. Shouldn’t erotic love make its nature obvious from the beginning? Wasn’t sexual attraction the first basis for attachment between men and women?

Possibly the idea of Dr. Grant as a sexual partner simply didn’t occur to her. She had been exceptionally innocent when she first came to the institute, for all her air of independence. She’d never been kissed, never even held hands with a man. She’d been too busy, too eager to prove herself, and all the boys she knew in college and in New York were just that: boys, callow and conventional, shallow and unimaginative. She imagined herself proudly as a kind of sexless being, her mind too occupied with complex and abstract thoughts to lower itself to base human instincts. To mere physical titillation. So perhaps all that initial awe and gratitude really was a form of sexual desire, sublimated into something the virginal Violet of September 1911 could recognize and accept.

She has an answer ready, though, in case Walter or anyone else should ask.

This is another of the scenes that remains vivid in her brain, mined frequently for details: Dr. Grant standing in his office, two weeks into the start of the term, and offering her a chair. He had already called for tea, and it was arriving right now in all its lavish plenty, borne on a large tray by the gray-suited secretary. Violet heard his words in her ears: I have just finished marking your first paper, and I am stunned by the quality of your thought.

Yes: stunned, he said. His exact word. He sat in the chair next to her—not behind his desk but directly next to her, his woolen knee nearly brushing hers—and fixed her with his blue eyes and repeated the word: stunned.

When Violet rehearses this story for her imaginary audience, she usually tells them that her heart gave a skip when he said this, and it did. Her memory is exact, and she feels the emotion again, simply remembering it. Her blood tingles in her fingertips, and her breath becomes thready in her chest. She recovers that exact sense of her younger self: as if she’s an explorer, catching a glimpse of some new and undiscovered territory, just out of reach.

The scene resumed.

“Thank you,” she said.

The secretary left, and the door clicked shut.

Dr. Grant turned to the tea and poured her a cup, asked her if she took cream and sugar. Violet answered him politely, though her nerves were singing.

She had stunned Dr. Walter Grant by the quality of her thought.

She watched his elegant hands perform before her. She glanced briefly at his lips, full and rather endearingly pink, framed by his short tabby beard. When he gave her the cup and saucer, the tips of his fingers touched the tips of hers.

“I hope I have not seemed cold, this past fortnight.” He took up his own tea. “I was conscious of your peculiar status among the other fellows, and I had no wish to incur their resentment by any particular notice.”

“Yes, of course. I didn’t expect any favorable treatment, not at all. I’m just another fellow here, after all.”

“Not just another fellow, Miss Schuyler. You are by far my most promising student. With your diligence and your elegant mind, you make the others seem like factory drudges.”

Violet looked into her muddy tea. “Thank you.”

“My dear”—his tone shifted, taking on a sympathetic weight—“believe me, I do know how difficult it is for you, surrounded by these men of narrow and conservative attitudes, who don’t understand you. Isn’t it?”

“I have no cause to complain.” Her eyes stung. She kept them trained on her cup.

He shook his head and leaned in a little. “My dear, dear child. I’ve seen how they avoid you, how they refuse to include you in any of the usual social activities, lunch and tea and that sort of thing. Did you think I hadn’t?”

“I hope you haven’t wasted your time with such trivial concerns, Dr. Grant. I’m getting along just fine.”

“Tell me, my dear, has any one of them approached you outside of the institute? Has any one of them perhaps offered you any sort of outstretched hand at all?”

“Nothing of any significance.”

“Something, then?”

“I’ve received a note or two at my room. Invitations to tea.”

“Have you answered them?”

“No. I thought it improper. I didn’t even recognize the names.”

“Ah, Violet.” He placed his tea on the edge of the desk and took her hand. “You must understand, you’re an exceptionally attractive woman, young and quite obviously inexperienced. I’m afraid this university has no shortage of cads wishing to take advantage of that inexperience.”

His hand was warm around hers. “I am perfectly capable of understanding the difference, Dr. Grant. As I said, I haven’t answered the notes. I don’t have the slightest interest that way in any of my colleagues.”

“Good.” He patted their enclosed hands. “Very good. I’m relieved to hear it. I take a particular interest in you, Violet. I see you as a kind of protégé. I intend to look after your interests with all the zeal in my power.”

His kind voice made her eyes prickle with tears. She wouldn’t tell him, she couldn’t tell him how lonely she’d been, nobody saying a word to her, cold glances and cold lunches, her cramped and empty rooms at the end of the day. Studying, studying. Her coffee delivered hot in the morning by her landlady, accompanied by the only smile she would receive until her return that evening. The alien voices and vehicles and architecture, the September drizzle parted at intervals by a fickle sun. At least at Radcliffe she knew a few other girls like her, ambitious and clever girls, who were always happy to commiserate over hot cocoa at midnight. Here she had nobody, she had less than nobody: a negative space of openly hostile company.

“You are so kind,” she said.

“There, now. If you have any trouble, Violet, you’re to come to my office immediately. You may ring me at any time, day or night. You’re to think of me as an uncle, Violet, a very dear uncle who admires you greatly.”

If his words were a little more fulsome than avuncular, Violet was too grateful to notice. She blinked back her tears and returned the squeeze of his warm hands. She looked up into his face—the face of Dr. Grant, brilliant and renowned Dr. Walter Grant, gazing at her with such tenderness! She was overcome with gratitude; she was melting with it. “Thank you, sir.”

He shook his head, smiling. “You must call me Walter, in these rooms. I’m your uncle, remember? Your nearest relation here.”

“Yes, of course.” But she couldn’t quite bring herself to say Walter, not yet.

He gave her hand a last pat and picked up his cup. “You’ll come to me every week like this, Violet. You’re looking rather thin, rather pale; you must eat better. I shall stuff you with cake and sandwiches and send you on your way. Does that sound agreeable?”

She smiled. “Yes, very much.”

And so she and Dr. Grant came to take tea in his sumptuous offices every week, served without comment by his own personal secretary, talking and laughing and calling each other Dr. Grant and Violet, while the leaves changed color and fell from the trees, and the afternoon sky grew darker and darker, until it began to turn quite black by four o’clock, when she knocked punctually on his door. It was then a week before Christmas, and the air smelled of snow. Dr. Grant stood in his office with a pair of workmen, his white shirtsleeves glowing in the lamplight, wires and plaster everywhere; he was having a new telephone installed, he told her, shaking his head, and the case was hopeless.

Perhaps they should take tea at his house in Norham Gardens instead?




Vivian (#ulink_18ba2e10-e411-55a8-b575-83ffbe52809d)


Doctor Paul’s living room had potential, and I told him so.

“Your living room has potential, if you’d consider unpacking the moving boxes.” I waved my chopsticks at said boxes, which were clustered in haphazard stacks about the room, like some sort of ironic modernist furniture set. “Maybe a lick of paint, too. White is so sterile.”

“Agreed. It’s like being in a hospital.”

“How can you stand it?”

“I’m not here often. I usually sleep in an empty examining room.”

I tsked. “And you’ve lived here four weeks. If I were a shrink, I’d suggest you were having second thoughts.”

“About the apartment?”

“About the apartment. About New York.”

“Maybe I was.”

In the absence of furniture, we were lying on the floor in an exact perpendicular relationship: fully clothed, I hasten to add. Our heads were propped up by a single upholstered cushion, provenance unknown, and the little white boxes of Chinese takeout sat agape between us, like a row of teeth awaiting root canals. I picked up one of them now and dug my chopsticks deep into a shiny tangle of chow mein. “What, the charms of our humble town have worn thin already?”

“I don’t mean to offend—”

“Which means you’re about to do just that.”

“—but I haven’t seen much charm to begin with. I work in a hospital, Vivian. All I see is New York’s greasy gray underbelly. Do you know what my first patient said to me? My first patient, a little kid of eight years old, in for an appendix—”

I put down my chopsticks. “You’re a kid surgeon?”

“Yes. He said to me—”

“This is just too much. Perfect Doctor Paul is so perfectly perfect, he saves the lives of nature’s little angels.”

“I am not perfect.”

I rolled my head against the cushion and looked at him, inches away. He was staring at the ceiling, chopsticks idling in one hand, chicken chop suey balanced on his ribs. His adorable hair flopped toward the cushion, a little disordered, close enough to taste. The expression on his face wrecked my chest. I said softly: “From where I’m sitting, you’re close enough to divine.”

“Don’t say that.” He sat up, catching the chicken just in time. “My dad. Pops. He’s a gambler.”

“That’s a shame, but it’s not your fault.”

“No, I mean he really gambles. Deep. Drinks, too. I was lucky, I got out when I could, went to Princeton on scholarship. I have to send him money sometimes.”

“What about your mother?”

“Died when I was ten. Cancer. But I just want you to know, my family’s not like yours. We’re nobody special.”

“For God’s sake, why would I care about that? My special family’s a mess.” I removed the white box from his hand and replaced it with my fingers. “Lie down again, will you? You’re making me anxious.”

He laughed at that and settled back against the cushion, a tiny fraction closer to me. I felt his hair against mine, his mouth disturbing the air as he spoke. “You’ve never been anxious in your life, Vivian.”

“Oh, haven’t I? I’m anxious now.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

I let that sit for a moment in perfect tranquility, because I liked the way it sounded. You shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be anxious, Vivian, because I am the real deal, I am your Doctor Paul, and we two have an understanding, now, don’t we.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“Yes, we have an understanding, don’t we?”

He squeezed my hand against the bare parquet floor of his sterile white apartment. “We do.”

Doctor Paul evidently had a clock somewhere, buried in his boxes or else on an unseen shelf, because I could hear it ticking methodically as we lay there in perpendicular quietude, absorbing the force of our understanding. If I could see that clock, I guessed it would read somewhere between seven and eight o’clock in the evening, which meant that I had now known him for just over seven hours.

I traveled through them all again: the post office, my apartment, the walk to the library, the library itself, the coffee shop. Wandering up the dull weekend stretch of Madison Avenue, bending our way to the park, not caring where we went as long as we remained linked by this pulsing thread, this shimmering ribbon of you-and-me. How we talked. Not of ourselves, of course. We stuck to the things that mattered: books read, places traveled, friends met, ideas discarded. An hour had passed in a minute, and another hour in a few electric seconds, until we’d looked up to a lowering sky in blind amazement. “Where are we?” Doctor Paul asked.

“I think that’s the Guggenheim, through the trees over there. The museum.”

“I know the Guggenheim. My apartment’s only a few blocks away.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“Imagine that. Are you hungry?”

“Enough to eat you alive.”

“Will Chinese do?”

We ordered takeout from a tiny storefront on Eighty-ninth Street—THE PEKING DELIGHT, promised the sign above the window, in bright gold letters on a lucky red background—and Doctor Paul led me to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, on the third floor of an anodyne white-brick apartment block, the primary virtue of which was its close proximity to the express subway stop on Eighty-sixth Street. “It’s only fair,” he told me, “since I handed you such a gilded opportunity to have your psychopathic way with me this morning.”

He had opened a bottle of cheap red wine, not a good match for the Chinese, but we drank it anyway in paper Dixie cups, ounce by tannic ounce.

I listened to the clock, the irreplaceable tick of seconds and minutes.

“I should head home,” I said. “You need a few hours of sleep before you go back to the hospital.”

“I suppose I do.”

Neither of us moved.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s dark out, and that neighborhood of yours—”

I laughed. “Oh, nuts. It’s the city that never sleeps, remember? I’ll be just fine. Anyway, my parents live around here. I could always sleep there.”

“You could sleep here.”

Our hands were still entangled, his right and my left, clinging on for dear life. Not a muscle twitched in either.

Doctor Paul cleared his throat. “For the record, I meant sleep sleep. Real sleep. I’ll take the sofa.”

“You have a sofa?”

“Somewhere underneath all these boxes.”

“These boxes you won’t unpack.”

“I will now.” Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to the bone. I listened to the cadence of his breath and stared at the nubby white ceiling. I will now. I will unpack for you, Vivian, because if New York is your home, it must be mine, too.

He spoke softly. “I don’t want you to go, Vivian.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“But I’d love to hear you say it.”

He turned on his side to face me. “I’m afraid that if you go, we’ll lose it. This.” He held up our combined hands. “What happened today.”

“No, we won’t. We couldn’t if we tried.” I detached his hand and rose to my feet. “Go to bed. I’ll clean up.”

He rose, too. “Vivian.”

“Go to bed.”

“Like hell I will.”

We cleaned up together, because he wouldn’t hear of anything else, finishing off the wine as we went along. I made him unpack the box marked KITCHEN so we could drink from genuine glassware next time. His kitchen was even smaller than mine, an L cut short by an old wooden table wedged against the wall, and a stack of plates had to be stored atop the asthmatic Frigidaire.

“I have an idea.” Doctor Paul folded his dish towel and placed both hands on my shoulders. “I’ll nap on the sofa while you take the bed, and when it’s time for me to go to work, I can drop you off at your own apartment. For one thing, your roommate will be wondering where you are.”

“Sally will be wondering no such thing. Sally will be out earning herself a new pair of shoes, maybe a nice new bracelet if she puts in a little elbow grease. She wouldn’t notice if I didn’t come home until Monday morning.”

Doctor Paul looked stricken. I patted his cheek. “But it’s a lovely plan. Where do I sign?”

A look came into his eyes, perilously close to mine: a look that said he knew exactly where I should sign on to his plan. His hands sank into my shoulders. He blinked his blue eyes slowly, like a cat readying for naptime, and I knew by the prickling of my skin that he was about to kiss me.

I’ve already explained that I’m not a shy girl, but some impulse overcame me as Doctor Paul’s warm breath bathed my face in chop suey promise. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted to make a meal of him; I most thoroughly wanted him to make a meal of me, and yet, at the last perilous instant, I dodged him.

Yes, you heard that right.

I dodged him.

Instead of tilting my face conveniently upward, parted of lips, closed of eyes, trip-hammer of pulse, I stepped into his chest and crushed my nose into his windpipe. His startled arms wrapped around me. A hearty consolation prize of an embrace.

We stood there in awkward disappointment. I felt the need to explain myself. “If we start now, we’ll never stop,” I said, next to his ear.

“And we can’t have that.”

He owned a terribly comfortable chest, my Doctor Paul. Solid and clean-smelling, his breath flavored with wine and dinner. He stroked my hair until I wanted to stretch like a cat.

He whispered to me, “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking about Violet again.”

“She’s on your mind, isn’t she?”

“I can’t stop wondering. What she was like, what happened to her. How she lost that suitcase.” I pulled a little more Doctor Paul into my lungs. “I was thinking that maybe she was miserable with her professor. Maybe she had finally found someone to love. Someone to trust.”

“Do you think that excuses what she did?”

“I don’t know. We don’t know what he was like, do we? What he did to her. This Dr. Grant of hers.”

Doctor Paul kissed my hair. “Time to sleep, Vivian.”

“Please take the bed. You won’t be able to excavate the sofa in time.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“If I sleep—which I doubt—I’ll just curl up on the cushion.”

He pulled back. “It’s not very gentlemanly of me.”

“Nuts to that. Go put on your pajamas.”

We looked at each other for a moment longer, goofy with infatuation, and then he leaned forward to kiss me on the forehead like a good brother.

I AWOKE on the cushion an hour later, one arm stiff beneath my face, one head exploding with bizarre disconnected dreams in which I was my great-aunt Violet, and my chemistry lab was full of jars of old curiosities like two-headed snakes and rabbit fetuses in formaldehyde, and a naked professor chased me around the counter of a post office in Istanbul. And those were just the scenes I remembered.

In case you were wondering, I knew it was an hour later because I had located the source of all that thunderous ticking and discovered a battery alarm clock in a box marked BEDROOM, still set to California time. I had wound the hands ahead three hours and set it next to me so neither I nor Doctor Paul would oversleep. Eight-twenty-two, it said, and in my Violettinged confusion I thought perhaps this was morning, and we were doomed.

But the cracks between the metal blinds were still black, and my brain, returning bit by broken bit to the sanity of consciousness, knew an immense and bone-rattling craving to see how my good doctor was faring alone in his bedroom.

I didn’t even remember him going to bed. I remembered watching him drink down a few glasses of water to flush the wine out; I remembered taking in an eyeful of Doctor Paul as he opened the bathroom door, half dressed, and slipped away from me. Then the screen turned black and Violet stepped out with her embryonic tortoises and her naked professor.

I rose to my feet, also numb, and padded to the bedroom.

It was a tiny space, just large enough for the metal mattress frame he called a bed, blanketed in an uninspiring white, and a bent metal chair stacked with books. In the glow from the sleepless city outside, I saw Doctor Paul sprawled on his back in the center. He had flung one arm up on the pillow beside him, and his head was turned toward it, as if he were whispering secrets to his elbow. I watched the rise and fall of his white-blanket chest. Even in sleep, his hair achieved a perfect flop that ached to be set right by a loving hand.

I had to turn away.

I had drunk a couple of glasses of water, too. I stopped in the bathroom for relief, and as I stood at Doctor Paul’s sink and washed my hands with Doctor Paul’s soap and stared into Doctor Paul’s mirror, I caught a glimpse not of myself but of Violet: her beauty, her ravenous ambition, her newborn self standing, as I did, on the brink of a jaw-dropping precipice.

I shed my shoes and dress and stockings and folded them neatly. I was surprised to see that my hands were a little shaky. I looked at myself in my shining silk slip, my cat on a hot tin roof. I kissed my finger and touched it to the mirror.

He came awake the instant I slid under the warm white blanket, or maybe he’d never fallen asleep. At any rate, he seemed remarkably lucid. “You again.”

“Like a bad penny.”

He found the edge of my shining silk slip. He lifted it up and over my head.

I whispered: “I’m not scaring you off, am I?”

“Not even close,” he said, that was all, and his skilled surgeon’s hands wrapped around me and took me apart, piece by piece, from my face to my throat, to my breasts and hungry young thighs. I took his face and kissed his sweet mouth, his salty skin, the lovely burnished belly of my dear new Doctor Paul, and there was no stopping us now. It was like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: no sooner had we finished, salt-licked and panting, than we had to start all over again from the beginning.




Violet (#ulink_4e52916e-1a90-5dfc-bbd8-cbc67dae6b5e)


Violet knows she had only herself to blame for what happened that day. Walter might have made the invitation, but while the Violet Schuyler of 1911 was still sexually innocent, she was nobody’s fool.

As she walked down the darkened paving stones of Magdalen Street, with Dr. Grant at her side keeping up a reassuring stream of chatter, she knew his suggestion of a private meeting had not been made thoughtlessly. They might have gone to a tea shop on the high street, or even a respectable hotel lobby, some public place, well lit and filled with people. There was no need to rendezvous at his house.

He was speaking of telephones. “I’ve never quite liked the things, to be perfectly honest. As a means of communication, they’re wholly unsatisfying. One can’t hear the other party properly, one hasn’t the assistance of gesture and tone. It has all the disadvantages of communicating by letter, without the advantage of being able to express oneself with any sort of detail or subtlety.”

Violet, who hated telephones, found herself saying, “But at least they’re immediate. If you want a doctor, or the police—”

“Yes, for emergencies, of course. But it’s a disaster for human communication.”

“And you pride yourself on being so very modern.”

Dr. Grant laughed. “Yes. I suppose one’s got to be old-fashioned about something.”

They crossed Broad Street, under the dull orange glow of an arc lamp, and for an instant, as a motor-omnibus rattled near in a jangling chaos of headlamps and petrol fumes, Dr. Grant laid a protective hand at her elbow.

Violet knew the way; her own rooms were not far from Dr. Grant’s imposing house. The buildings slid past the sides of her vision, gray Oxford stone blurred by the settling darkness, illuminated in lurid patches by the arc lamps. People hurried past, buried deep in their overcoats, never looking up, never noticing the pair of them, Violet and Dr. Grant, his hand now permanently affixed to her elbow. The heavy damp chill in the air froze her lungs.

She could have said no. She could still stop and say she had changed her mind, she’d rather go to the tea shop, she’d rather go home and study. Dr. Grant’s limbs struck out confidently next to her, his voice cheered the frosted air. Dr. Walter Grant, taking her to tea in his private residence.

Red-brown and Gothic outside, Dr. Grant’s house surprised Violet on the inside. Its high-ceilinged grace reminded her of home, of the elegantly proportioned rooms over which her mother competently presided, except that these light-colored walls and clean furnishings disdained the cluttered excess of the past. A silent housekeeper took her coat, and Dr. Grant ushered her into a small sitting room at the back, where not a single silver-framed photograph decorated the side table, and a coal fire fizzed comfortably under a mantel nearly bare of objects, except for a pair of small Delftware vases standing at either end. A phonograph horn bellowed upward from a square end table near the wall.

Dr. Grant walked to the fire and spread out his hands. “Ah, that’s better. What a devil of a chill out there today. I shouldn’t be surprised if it snows.”

“It certainly feels like snow.”

He turned to her. He was smiling, quite at ease. He spread out his hands behind him, catching the warmth from the fire. “You, of course, have the advantage of youth. A man of my advanced years feels the cold more acutely every year.”

“You’re hardly that,” Violet said, taking her cue. But she meant it, too. Though Dr. Grant was older than her own father, he existed in a separate category altogether from parents and uncles and middle-aged men, whose waistcoats strained over their comfortable bellies. Dr. Grant’s stance was elastic, his eyes bright and blue, the mind behind those eyes quick and supple. His brilliant mind: it excited her; it had excited her for years, long before she arrived in England. She couldn’t quite believe that she was standing in Dr. Walter Grant’s own private sitting room, waiting for his housekeeper to bring tea. That he had chosen to bring her to his home.

“The tea should be ready directly,” he said, as if he’d read her own mind, “by virtue of that very telephone I’ve just been reviling. Though perhaps a drink of brandy might not come amiss, in this chill?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully.

“Yes, brandy. Of course.”

He poured and offered; Violet sipped hers watchfully. She was not a drinker of brandy. It burned down her throat to her empty stomach. She disguised the shock with a bright smile.

“Drink it down, child,” Dr. Grant said. “All of it. Brandy warms the soul.”

Violet drank obediently. She was surprised to find that the glass trembled slightly in her hand.

Dr. Grant walked to the phonograph and settled a disc on the turntable. “Do you like Stravinsky?” he asked. Before she could think of a reply, a violin zigzagged tinnily from the scalloped edges of the bell.

A knock, and the door opened. The housekeeper arranged the tea things on the side table. Dr. Grant offered Violet a chair and poured her a cup. She sat and drank her tea, trying to think of something clever to say, while Dr. Grant carried another chair from near the sofa and placed it beside hers. He settled himself into it, tea in hand.

“Here we are, quite comfortable,” he said.

Looking back, Violet is never able to pinpoint the moment in which the tenor of the conversation began to change. Perhaps the note had always been there, from the beginning, from the morning she first walked into his office. Perhaps it had only amplified slowly, decibel by decibel, week by week, tea by intimate tea, so that Violet was not quite alarmed when Dr. Grant’s hand found its way to her knee, half an hour after she had entered his house, and he asked her whether she had left any admirers languishing behind her in New York.

“No, none at all. I was far too busy for that.”

“Surely some young man awakened your interest?”

“No. Not one.” She met his gaze honestly. She could feel the pressure of his hand in every nerve of her body, heavy with significance. The music behind her built into an arrhythmic climax, and then fell away again.

His fingers stroked the inside of her knee in languid movements. His other hand reached for his cup, applied it to his lips, and set it back carefully in the saucer. “You were wise, child, not to succumb to your natural physical urges with such unworthy objects. Young men who don’t understand you, as I do.”

“I don’t remember feeling any such urges.”

The stroking continued, an inch farther up her leg. “Nonsense, dear child. It’s perfectly natural, the sexual instinct. You should never feel ashamed of your desires; you should never feel as if you must deny the existence of these inclinations. Of what you want with me.”

Another inch.

Violet was dizzy with disbelief. She had half expected this moment, had at some level determined to accept it, and now that it had arrived, now that the impossible invitation had quite clearly been made, she found that her heart, her presumably logical and scientific heart, was beating too frantically to allow words.

Dr. Grant picked up her hand and kissed it. His beard scratched her fingers. “Have I frightened you, child?”

Violet wanted to sound worldly. “No.”

“You are very beautiful. It’s natural that men should desire you.”

“I … I suppose so.”

He kissed her hand again, and then leaned his face to hers and kissed her very gently on the lips. His beard tickled her chin; his mouth was soft and tasted like tea. His other hand still lay on her thigh, palpating, gathering the fine wool of her skirt between his fingers. His thumb crawled upward, an astonishingly long thumb. “Let me show you, child. Let me give you what you’re longing for. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Dr. Grant took her right hand and guided it to the apex of his trousers.

Violet’s memory, usually so clear and precise, turns blurry at this point. She remembers her surprise at the bony hardness of Dr. Grant’s flesh beneath her fingers; she knew the theoretical concept of the male erection, of course, but it was another thing to experience it by touch. But she can never afterward remember the true sequence of events after that: whether he kissed her again or led her to the sofa; whether he removed his own clothes first or hers. Hers, probably. He was so eager to uncover her, so explicit in his approval of her sleek newborn skin, her firm breasts, her bottom, the pretty triangle between her legs, which she attempted at first to keep closed in a vestigial show of virgin modesty.

But Dr. Grant ridiculed her clenched muscles. He drew away the fig leaf of her right hand with a murmured, Come, now, child. Don’t be silly. Let me see you. He climbed on top of her and gripped her round young bottom, and for all Violet’s fearful anticipation, the act itself was over quickly: a shove, a stab of pain, the intimate shock of penetration. He heaved once, twice, and went rigid, stretched upward in an arc of ecstasy while the violins shrieked across the room. A groan emerged from between his clenched teeth, and then Dr. Grant collapsed like a dead man atop her chest, vanquished, his tabby beard stabbing her cheek.

She lay beneath him, equally motionless, a little stunned, and observed the pattern of the ceiling plaster above her, the curtains still drawn wide against the darkness of the back garden. The music finished, and the phonograph bell released a steady cyclical scratch into the still air.

She wondered how the two of them might look to any intruder peeping through the glass: Dr. Grant’s white back covering her chest, his buttocks fixed in the cradle of her hips; her left knee raised against the cushions and her right leg slipping inexorably down the sofa’s narrow edge. The deed done, her shining virginity consigned to the past, like an unneeded relic, like the bric-a-brac on her parents’ mantel. A quarter hour ago she had been sipping tea.

Her parents. How horrified they would be, how prostrate with musty horror at her actions, her willing participation in her own seduction. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Perhaps they would simply shake their heads and say, You see? We knew she would come to a bad end, we knew nothing good would come of all this scientific nonsense.

Dr. Grant lifted his head and looked at her with affection. His face was flushed, the tip of his nose the color of candied cherries. “Good girl.” He kissed her breast. “Brave girl. You did well. At last. God, that was splendid.”

What should she say to that? Thank you? She smiled instead and touched his damp temple.

Dr. Grant rose and drew on his trousers. He poured her another glass of brandy and returned, balancing himself on the strip of damask next to her naked hip. “Drink.”

She sat up and drank the brandy. It burned less this time, spreading instead a comfortable warmth through her middle.

“How do you feel, child?”

“Quite well.”

“Good girl.” He put his fingertip to the bottom of the brandy glass and nudged it to her lips. When she was finished, he rearranged the sofa cushions at her back, he added coals to the fire and brought her cake and sandwiches from the table, which he shared with her, sitting close, his body actually touching hers, and told her how well she had pleased him, how long he had been imagining this, how he had felt when he was inside her. He spoke with total candor, a complete freedom of vocabulary.

Violet tried to keep her gaze on his face, but she couldn’t help stealing glimpses of the delicate graying curls on his chest, the plaited tendons of his forearms as he ate his cake, which was frosted with buttercream and studded with tiny black poppy seeds. She saw the indent of his navel, just above the waist of his checked wool trousers, and his braces dangling down past his hips. An odd thrill ran through her limbs: excitement and a sort of bemused nausea. No turning back now.

After a while, he asked her again how she felt, and she had said again that she was quite well, and she realized that she meant it. The room was warm, and the brandy simmered happily in her veins. The shock had faded, leaving relief in its place. (Relief for what, she wasn’t quite sure.) Dr. Grant moved closer. He lifted her hair and kissed it. “This lovely hair. I’ve pictured it like this, spread out on my sofa cushion, from the first moment you walked into my office, months ago. You must grow it longer for me, child.”

“If you like.”

Dr. Grant put on his shirt, secured his braces, and left the room. He returned with a black rubber bulb syringe and a jar of vinegar, and told her she should use the lavatory to clean herself, and to do it thoroughly and at once to avoid any consequences of the afternoon’s work. Violet, knowing almost nothing about the prevention of pregnancy, presuming Dr. Grant was an expert, obeyed him to the letter, though the vinegar stung horribly on her raw flesh.

By now it was past seven o’clock. Dr. Grant helped her dress and walked her to her lodging house, where they stood close in the chill gloom of the hallway, at the bottom of the stairs. There was no sign of the landlady. Violet’s head was buzzing. She asked him if he wanted to come upstairs, and he smiled and said no, not this time. He recommended she soak in a warm salt bath for at least half an hour before bed.

Then he ran his hand over her hair and kissed her good night, and told her he was looking very much forward to seeing her again.




Vivian (#ulink_b03144c7-5a86-5ab6-a3c9-a40f8087b2a1)


Doctor Paul was moving invisibly around the edge of the bed, like a certain six-foot rabbit you might or might not have encountered. After all that vigorous exercise I shouldn’t have woken up, but I did. We New Yorkers are an alert and suspicious breed.

“Go back to sleep, Vivian,” he said.

“What time is it?”

He sank into the mattress next to me. It was too dark to see his face properly, but the Manhattan glow cast rings of white light around his pupils and made him less invisible. “Eleven-thirty. I have to leave for the hospital.” He brushed the hair away from my face and tucked it behind my ear, as if I were a child with a trick appendix and not a woman lying naked in his bed, flushed of skin and dreamy of eye.

“That was reckless of us,” I said.

“Fraught with danger,” he agreed. Now the thumb on my cheekbone. Was there no end to him?

I said: “You aren’t new at it, however.”

“No.” He hesitated. “But never like this.”

“No. Not even close.”

He might have sighed a little. Probably he did. “Vivian …”

“Already with the Vivian.”

“Stop it, will you? I was just going to say you’re dazzling. I’m dazzled, I’m upside down and inside out and … God, Vivian. I don’t know what to say. There aren’t words. I just want to crawl back under the blanket and spend my life doing that with you. And everything else we did today.”

“Except that you’re married? On the lam? You have a dozen ankle-biters back home in San Francisco?”

“None of those things. I just … just a loose end or two to tie up, that’s all. Nothing for you to worry about.”

I nodded. “Everyone has a loose end or two.”

“Do you?”

“I might.” I looked straight into those light-circled pupils. “But not at the moment.”

This time he sighed in earnest. “Well, then. When can I see you again?”

“When does your shift end?”

He laughed. “Twelve long hours. But I need to sleep, actually sleep this time, and clean up. And—”

“Loose ends.”

“Just one, really. So … Monday evening? Six o’clock? Dinner?”

“You don’t have my telephone number.”

“I have your address.”

I opened my arms. “Kiss me good-bye, Doctor.”

THE THIRD TIME I woke up, it was full morning, and my love-struck body was twisted into a cocoon made of Doctor Paul’s sheets. I had to untangle myself before I could reach down for the alarm clock, and then I nearly went into cardiac arrest. It was ten a.m. I’d never slept that late in my life. I’d certainly never known the luxury of waking up in a man’s bed before.

Oh, ho? You don’t believe me, Vivian Schuyler, not for a second?

Very well, then. Picture me, a wise fool of a college sophomore, caressing the dampened nape of my professor’s neck, staring up at his office ceiling, moon-eyed as all get-out. I watch him heave himself up, shuck off the Trojan, straighten his trousers, and light the obligatory cigarette.

Me (dreamily): Let’s make love at your house next time. I’ll bring champagne and make you pancakes in the morning.

Professor (lovingly): Let’s just meet at the library and screw in the stacks, shall we?

But that was all in the past, wasn’t it? I rose from Doctor Paul’s bed, wrapped myself in a sheet, and found my pocketbook in the living room. I lit a cigarette and leaned against a stack of moving boxes. A piece of paper caught my eye, taped to the icebox.

Vivian

Milk in the fridge. Coffee in the pot. Toast in the cabinet. Heart in your hands. For unknown reasons, the hot water knob in the shower opens to the right.

Still dazzled.

Paul

Now, this was what I called a love note. I kissed that sweet little scrap of nonsense and slipped it into my pocketbook.

When I’d finished my cigarette, I showered, brief and scalding hot, and dressed again in my shameful clothes. I plugged in the percolator. I found fresh sheets in the box marked BEDROOM and made up Doctor Paul’s bed with precision hospital corners and lovingly fluffed-up pillows.

The clock now read eighteen minutes past eleven. I poured myself a hot one, picked up the telephone, and dialed up Margaux Lightfoot.

“Why, hello, Vivs. How was your Saturday night?”

“I met a boy, honey,” I said.

Thrilled gasp. “You didn’t!”

“I did. I’m over at his place right now, drinking coffee.”

Shocked gasp. “You didn’t!”

“I did, indeedy. Twice.” I lit another cigarette and leaned back against the cushion on the living room floor, like the tart I was. The telephone cord spiraled around my right foot.

“You’ll scare him off,” said Gogo.

“Never mind that. I’m off to Sunday lunch right now, and I need your help.”

“But what’s he like, Vivs? Is he a dreamboat?”

“The absolute boatiest. But listen. I’ve just discovered I have a long-lost aunt who murdered her husband fifty years ago. Do you think you could get your father to let me look in the archives a bit tomorrow morning?”

“Oh, Vivs, I don’t know. It’s his holiest of holies. He doesn’t even let me go in there unless it’s magazine business.”

“I could make it magazine business. I could find out what really happened and write up the story, a big investigative piece.” I unwound my foot and wound it back again the other way. “The whole thing is just so juicy, Gogo, just too succulent. Her husband was a physicist, a hotshot, entry in the E.B. and everything, and she just … disappeared. With her lover. Right before the war. Don’t you think that’s scandalous? And I never even knew!”

A current of hesitation came down the line. Gogo was the dearest of the dear, but some might say she lacked a certain je ne sais sense of adventure.

“Well, Gogo? Don’t you think it would make a perfect story?”

“Of course I do, Vivs,” she said loyally. “But you know … you aren’t really … you’re not one of the writers yet. Not officially.”

“Oh, I know I’m just fetching old Tibby’s coffee for now, but this is large change. Really large change. And you know I can tell a story. Your father knows it. I can do this, Gogo.”

“I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Mix him a martini first. You know he loves your martinis.”

“I’ll do my best, I promise. But never mind all that! I want more about this boy of yours. What’s his name? What does he do?” She lowered her voice to a whisper of guilty curiosity. “What did he do last night?”

“Oh, my twinkling stars, what didn’t he do.” I straightened from the cushion. “But I don’t have time now, Gogo. Sunday lunch starts at twelve sharp, or I’ll be heave-hoed out of the family. Which is a tempting thought, but I’ll need my inheritance one day, when my luck runs out.”

“I want details tomorrow morning, then. Especially the ones I shouldn’t hear.”

“You’ll have your details, if I have my afternoon in the archives.”

Despairing sigh. “You’re a hard woman, Vivian Schuyler.”

“One of us has to be, Gogo, dear. Go give that boy of yours a kiss from me.” I mwa-mwa’d the receiver, tossed it back in the cradle, and stared at the ceiling while I finished my coffee and cigarette.

Was I speculating about Violet, or recalling my mad honey-stained hour of excess with Doctor Paul?

I’ll let you decide that one for yourself.

NOW, you might have assumed that my mother named me Vivian after herself, and technically you’d be right. After all, we’re both Vivians, aren’t we? And we’re mother and daughter, beyond a doubt?

It’s a funny story, really. How you’ll laugh. I know I did, when my mother explained it to me over vodka gimlets one night, when I was thirteen. You see, she went into labor with me ten whole days before the due date, which was terribly inconvenient because she had this party to go to. Well, it was an important party! The van der Wahls were throwing it, you see, and everybody would be there, and Mums even had the perfect dress to minimize the disgusting bump of me, not that she ever had much bump to speak of, being five-foot-eleven in her stocking feet and always careful not to gain more than fifteen pounds during pregnancy.

Well. Anyway. There I inconveniently arrived, five days before the van der Wahls’ party, six pounds, ten ounces, and twenty-two gazelle inches long, and poor Mums had no more girl names because of my two older sisters, so she left unchanged the little card on my bassinet reading Baby Girl Schuyler, put on her party dress and her party shoes, and checked herself out of the hospital. Voilà! Disaster averted.

Except that when the nanny arrived the next day to check me out of the hospital, they needed a name in order to report the birth. I don’t know why, they just did. So the nanny said, hmm, Vivian seems like a safe choice. And the nurses said, Alrighty, Vivian it is.

Oh, but you’d never guess all this to see us now. Just look at the ardent way I swept into the Schuyler aerie on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street, tossed an affectionate kiss on Mums’s powdered cheek, and snatched the outstretched glass from her hand.

“You slept with him, didn’t you?” she said.

“Of course I did.” I sipped delicately. “But don’t worry. He practically asked me to marry him on the spot.”

“Practically is not actually, Vivian.”

I popped the olive down the hatch. “Trust me, Mums. Is Aunt Julie here today?”

“No, she’s having lunch with the Greenwalds.” Out came the moue, just like that.

“Ooh, and how are our darling Jewish cousins doing these days? Has Kiki had her baby yet?” I watched her consternation with delight. Poor old Mums never could quite accustom herself to what she was pleased to call the Hebrew stain in the Schuyler blood. Of which, more later.

Mums made a triumphant little cluck of her tongue. “Not yet. I hear she’s as big as a house.”

“Oh, maybe it’s twins! Wouldn’t that be lovely!” I pitched that one over my shoulder on the way to the living room, where my father wallowed on a sofa with my sister to his left and a fresh pair of trickling gimlets lined up to his right. (The vodka gimlet was one of the few points of agreement between my parents.) He staggered to his feet at the sight of me.

“Dadums! Handsome as ever, I see.” I kissed his cheek, right between two converging red capillaries.

“You look like a tramp in that dress.” He returned the kiss and crashed back down.

“That’s the point, Dad. Two guesses whether it did the trick.”

“Don’t listen to him, Vivs. You look gorgeous.” Pepper pulled me down next to her for a cuddle. “A little creased, though,” she added in a whisper.

“Imagine that,” I whispered back. We linked arms. Pepper was my favorite sister by a ladies’ mile. Neither of us could politely stand Tiny, who had by the grace of God married her Harvard mark last June and now lived in a respectably shabby house in the Back Bay with a little Boston bean in her righteous oven. God only knew how it got there.

“I want details,” said Pepper.

“Take a number, sister.”

Mums appeared in the doorway with her cigarette poised in its holder. She marched straight to the drinks tray. “Charles, tell your daughter what a man thinks of a girl who jumps into bed with him right away.”

He watched her clink away with ice and glass. “Obviously, I have no idea,” he drawled.

Pepper jumped to her feet and slapped her hands over her ears. “Not another word. Really. Stop.”

Mums turned. The stopper dangled from one hand, the cigarette holder from the other. So very Mumsy. “What are you suggesting, Charles?”

“Dad was only celebrating your renowned virtue, Mums. As do we all.”

She turned back to her mixology. “Fine. Do as you like. I’d just like to point out that among the three of you, only Tiny’s found a husband.”

“Mums, I’d rather die a virgin than marry Franklin Hardcastle,” said I.

“No chance of that,” muttered Pepper.

“Pot, meet kettle,” I muttered back.

Mums was crying. “I miss her.”

“Now, now,” I said. “No use weeping over spilled milk. Especially when the milk took so excruciatingly long to get spilled.”

“At least one of my daughters has a sense of female decorum.” Sniff, sip, cigarette.

“I can’t imagine where she got it from,” said Pepper. God, I loved Pepper. We were simpatico, Pepper and me, perhaps because we’d arrived an unseemly twelve months apart. As a teenager, I’d once spent an entire morning smuggling through Mums’s old letters to discover whether we were half sisters or full. I’d have to concede full, given the genetic evidence. Tiny, I’m not so sure.

“Apparently not from our great-aunt Violet.” I piped the words cheerfully.

Next to me, Dad exploded into a fit of coughing.

Mums’s red eyes peeped over her poisons. “Are you all right, Charles?”

“Who’s Aunt Violet?” asked Pepper.

“Oh, this isn’t about that package, is it?” said Mums.

I pounded Dad’s broad back. The hacking was beginning to break up, thank goodness, just as his face shifted from red to purple. “Deep breaths,” I said.

“What package?” asked Pepper.

“Yesterday I picked up a package from the post office. Mums had forwarded it to me.” I kept up the pounding as I spoke. “It was a suitcase belonging to a Violet Schuyler. Aunt Julie said she was our aunt, and—this is the best part, Pepper, so listen up—she murdered her husband in 1914 and ran off with her lover. Isn’t it delicious?”

Dad renewed his spasm of choking. I turned back to him. “Glass of water, Daddy, dear?”

He shook his head.

“As you see,” I told Pepper, “Dad’s heard of her. But the point is, we have a precedent in this family for independent women. It’s in our blood.”

“But Mums isn’t an independent woman,” said Pepper. “She just has a weakness for parties and married men.”

“I’m standing right here, you ungrateful child.”

“True, but she’s not a real Schuyler, is she?” I turned to Mums. “Not by blood.”

“Thank God,” said Mums. She found her favorite armchair and angled herself into it like a movie star, drink and smoke balanced exquisitely in each hand. “I have my faults, but I haven’t murdered your father. Yet.”

“Small mercies.” Dad had finally recovered. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his battered gold cigarette case, which had been to Eagle’s Nest and back, comforting him in every trial.

“That bad, is it?” I said.

“I don’t know what you mean.” He lit his cigarette with a shaky hand.

“Now, Dad. It’s been fifty years since the alleged crimes. Do spill.”

“There’s nothing to spill.”

“Are you saying she didn’t exist?”

“She existed, of course.” He exhaled a good-sized therapeutic cloud and inhaled his drink. “But you’ve just about summed up all I know. Your grandparents never talked about it.”

“But you must have heard something else. Names, rumors, something.”

A rare sharp look from old Dadums. “Why do you want to know?”

“Curiosity.”

My father heaved himself up from the sofa and walked to one of the stately sash windows perched above the park. A magnificent thirty-foot living room, the old Schuyler apartment had, thrown open to guests in 1925 by my grandfather and not much redecorated since. We took our drinks from the same crystal decanters, we wobbled across the same Oriental rugs, we sank our backsides into the same mahogany-framed furniture under the gazes of the same disapproving portraits. Possibly Mums had reupholstered at one point, but the sagging cushions were all Schuyler. Dad jiggled his empty ice. “Well, she was a scientist. Left for Cambridge or Oxford, I forget which, a few years before the war.”

“Oxford,” I said.

“She married a professor, and then they moved to Berlin at some point. He was at some sort of institute there.”

“The Kaiser Wilhelm.”

Mums did the daggering thing with her eyebrows. “How do you know all this?”

“It’s called a li-brar-y, Mums.” I dragged out the word. “You go there to read about things. They have encyclopedias, periodicals, Peyton Place. You’d be amazed. Proceed, Dad.”

“No, you go ahead. Obviously, you know more than I do.”

“Just a few facts. Nothing about her. What she was like.”

“I didn’t know her. I was born during the war.”

“But Grandfather must have said something about her. You can’t have just pretended she never existed.”

“Oh, yes, they could,” said Pepper.

“She didn’t get along with my father,” said Dad slowly. He was still looking down at the park, as if it contained the secret to his lost youth: the handsome face that had drawn in my mother’s adoration, the mobile spirit that had seen him off to war. I caught glimpses of it sometimes, when we were alone together, just him and me, walking along some quiet path in that self-same Central Park or taking in a rare Yankees game. I could almost see his jowls disappear, his eyelids tighten, his irises regain their storied Schuyler blue. His voice lose its endearing tone of sour-flavored aggression. “Anything I heard about her, I heard from Aunt Christina.”

“Well, that’s not much use, is it? She died eons ago.”

“Vivian, really,” said Mums.

But Dad turned to me with a touch of smile. “Twenty-five years may seem like eons to you, my dear, but I can remember that hurricane like it was yesterday.”

“And she was close to Aunt Christina?”

“I don’t know if they were close.” He found the ashtray on the drinks table. “But they wrote to each other. Kept in touch. I remember she said that Violet was an odd bird, a lonely girl. I don’t think she was happy.”

“Did Aunt Christina know what happened? The murder? The lover? Did she know his name?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Mums rolled her head back to face the ceiling.

“Hardly the kind of thing she would tell me,” said my father.

“Anything, Dad.”

He didn’t look surprised at my curiosity. The sacks beneath his eyes hoisted thoughtfully upward, and he folded his arms and leaned against the window frame. “I don’t know. There might have been a baby.”

“Charles, must you be vulgar?”

“Or not.” He shook his head. The fumes wafted. “You’d have to ask Aunt Christina.”

“Many thanks.”

“I have a Ouija board somewhere,” said Pepper helpfully.

At which point the housekeeper saved us, announcing lunch, and we shifted ground to the dining room and a tasteful selection of sliced meats and cooked eggs and salads with mayonnaise. It was not until the end of the meal that the shadow of Aunt Violet cast itself once more upon our protruding eggy bellies. Naturally, Pepper was to blame. She stirred cauldrons like a witch in a Scottish play.

“Here’s what I think.” She helped herself to Mums’s cigarette case. “Vivian should do a story on Aunt Violet for the Metropolitan.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Pepper,” said the pot to the kettle.

“I’m not being sarcastic. The whole thing screams Metropolitan feature. Compromising photographs, the works. Don’t you think, Vivian?”

I tossed back a final trickle of straw-colored Burgundy. “Already thunk.”

“Thought,” said Dad.

“Vivian!” said Mums.

“Why not? It could be my breakthrough.”

“Because it’s vulgar. Because it’s … it’s … it’s family.”

Mums, caught in a stammer! Now I knew I was onto something big.

“Why not? The Schuylers haven’t given a damn about Violet in half a century. There’s no need to start now.”

Pepper spoke up. “That’s where you’re wrong, Vivs. We’ve obviously done our Schuyler best to ignore Violet out of existence for half a century. It’s a completely opposite thing, ignoring versus indifference. Justice for Violet, that’s what I say! Down with Schuyler oppression!” She shook her fist.

“You will not write this story, Vivian,” said Mums. “I forbid it.”

“You can’t forbid me; I’m twenty-two years old. Besides, it’s freedom of speech. Journalistic integrity. All those darling little Constitutional rights that separate us from the communists.” I put my fist down on the mayonnaise-stained tablecloth, right next to Pepper’s wineglass. “Violet must have a voice.”

“Oh, not your damned women’s lib again,” said Dad. “I fought the Nazis for this?”

“It’s not my damned women’s lib, Dadums. It’s all-American freedom of the press.”

Mums threw up her hands. “You see, Charles? This is what comes of letting your daughter become a career girl.” As she might say call girl.

“I didn’t let her become a career girl.”

“I certainly didn’t.”

Agreement at last! I gazed lovingly back and forth between the pair of them.

“I hate to interrupt another petty squabble, dear ones, but I’m afraid you can’t have the satisfaction of laying blame at each other’s doorsteps this time. It just so happens I gave myself permission to start a career. The two of you had nothing to do with it, except to prod me on with all your lovely objections.” I dabbed the corners of my mouth with an ancient linen napkin and rose to my feet, orator-style, John Paul Jones in a sleek little red wool number that would have sizzled off the powder from the Founding Fathers’ wigs. “And I am damned well going to use said hard-won career to find out what happened to Violet Schuyler.”

“Bravo.” Pepper clapped her hands. “Count me in.”

Dad pulled out his cigarette case. “Here’s what I’d like to know, Vivian, my sweet. Whose damned idiot idea was it to send girls off to college?”




Violet (#ulink_e9dfde20-7ddc-5330-a895-a4920a0b831e)


Violet has always supposed that her liaison with Dr. Grant, and the eventual announcement of their marriage, came as a shock to their colleagues at the Devonshire Institute.

And yet how could they not have known what was taking place throughout that long winter of the affair? She was so naive and unguarded, so fearfully young and trustful. She shivers to think of it now, and yet how can she blame herself? If she were that Violet now, and Walter were that Dr. Grant, she would do it again.

The day after Dr. Grant took her virginity with tea and cake in his sitting room, Violet sat alone in the institute’s cramped dining hall, eating a typically overboiled and lukewarm lunch, when a young laboratory assistant approached her with a folded note. Miss Violet Schuyler, it was labeled, in the brusque black slashes she had come to associate with a concurrent jolt of energy inside her belly. She opened the paper to read that her presence was required in Dr. Grant’s office on a matter of immediate urgency. Five minutes later, she lay on the edge of a broad desk with her skirts raised obediently about her hips, while the head of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry conducted a rigorously invasive experiment between her legs.

That night, he walked her back to her rooms and went upstairs with her, though he was not particularly pleased by the extreme narrowness of her bed and the spartan illumination of the single lamp. He remained only half an hour, including drink and cigarette. That was a Thursday. The next evening, they met at his house and shared an intimate dinner of pheasant and a pair of 1894 Margaux in the sitting room, and afterward Violet followed Dr. Grant upstairs to his wide and well-dressed bed. “Remember, child,” he said, as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist, “nothing is unnatural that gives man and woman pleasure together. The sexual instinct is Nature itself.”

In the morning, she found three new dresses hanging in the wardrobe, next to Dr. Grant’s suits. They were for her, he said, so she would have something to wear when she stopped the night; there were also underthings in the drawer, each of them a perfect fit, and a new toothbrush in the bathroom. The housekeeper brought a tray loaded with breakfast, and Violet found she was terribly hungry.

On New Year’s Eve, Dr. Grant surprised her by driving her up to London in his motor, where they rang in the year of grace 1912 at an enormous party at the Ritz hotel and stayed all weekend in a grand suite. He took her to the theater and out to dinner, and on the final evening he presented her with a pair of thick gold bracelets, studded with tiny diamonds on the outside and engraved with his initials—WG—in a bold modern typeface on the inside. “One for each wrist,” he said, smiling, as he slid them over her amazed hands.

It still felt like a dream in those early weeks; it was a dream. Violet had never imagined herself with a lover. She knew she would never marry; she despised the thought of marriage and supposed she would eventually take a partner or two when she had the time, but she hadn’t conceived of having a whirlwind love affair like this, complete with weekends in London and extravagant gold bracelets and satiny hotel sheets. These ideas had never occurred to her.

She found, rather shamefully, that she liked it.

She liked the attention and the excitement, the sense of belonging and purpose. The shared secret, as they moved about the institute each day, each knowing what extravagant acts had occurred in Dr. Grant’s bedroom the previous night. She liked the way he looked at her when he undressed her, the fervid enjoyment he took in her young body; she liked the way he would call her into his office or wake her up in the night, as if his need for her could not be contained within respectable hours. She liked feeding his appetites. She liked the heavy drunken look of his face after he had taken her, the knowledge that she, Violet Schuyler, and she alone, had given him this intensity of pleasure he could not do without. Splendid, child, well done, that was a damned splendid fuck, he would groan, and she thought she might boil over from the joy of having satisfied the worldly and experienced Dr. Grant, of having soldered herself so thoroughly to another human being.

January fled. The afternoons began slowly to lighten as Violet danced along the Oxford streets each day, illuminating the frozen pavement, the occasional blankets of snow, the piles of exhausted slush. She could hardly now remember her despair at the beginning of September. The introductory lectures had ended, and she now worked directly in the laboratory with her eminent lover, unlocking the mysteries of the atom, every day burgeoning with the hope of some electrifying discovery. She gazed in rapture at the exquisite green-white explosions on the scintillating screen, the smacking of individual alpha particles into individual gold atoms, proving beyond doubt the existence of the atomic nucleus and the vast empty space between each one; she counted each spark as if she were counting diamonds in a crown. What did they mean? They were trying to tell her something, these flashes. They were trying to lead her to some unspeakable treasure: What was it? What was it made of, the nucleus of an atom of gold? What did it look like? And how could she find out, short of the impossible act of breaking it apart? She took her measurements, she made and remade her calculations, she ran the experiments over and over again with different isotopes. The immersion thrilled her, the sense of sinking into a three-dimensional puzzle, a new and fabulously minute universe that only a handful of men had ever seen.

And her, Violet Schuyler.

By February, her colleagues at the institute, perhaps encouraged by Dr. Grant’s example, began to soften toward her, even to speak with her. One evening, she fell to talking with one of the second-year fellows, a shy and handsome young man with friendly brown eyes, as they happened to leave the institute together. Before she realized it they had walked all the way to her own lodging house.

She had stopped, embarrassed, at the little black wrought-iron gate at the front entrance, and at that instant Dr. Grant had come swinging around the corner on his way to his own house, where they were to meet later that night, after dusk had fallen.

The greetings had been awkward, the second-year fellow sensing the current of Dr. Grant’s disapproval. In bed that night, Walter (she had finally grown used to his Christian name) had asked her how she knew young Mr. Hansbury.

“We happened to be walking out at the same time. We were talking about electrons.”

“You didn’t look as if you were talking about electrons.”

“Well, we were. What else would we be talking about?”

“He looked as if he wanted to fuck you.” Walter used those words with her, fuck and spunk and prick. They had shocked her at first, but she soon grew to appreciate their earthiness, their total absence of hypocritical Victorian euphemism. My prick is up you, child, Walter would say, with his lugubrious bedroom grin, and who could refute this fact? What point was it to pretend away man’s basic carnal urges, to deny the existence of such vital elements of the human body and the use to which they were put?

“Oh, for God’s sake, Walter. You’re not jealous.”

“You shouldn’t encourage them. Someone will find out about us.”

“I’m not encouraging anyone. Except you, of course.” She smiled.

Walter rose from the sheets and lit his pipe from a packet of matches on the bureau. “I fail to see how you could lead a man to your lodging house door without having encouraged some hope of reward, child.”

She had soothed him back to bed, but a new note had entered the air between them, and after that afternoon in late February, Walter insisted that she leave the institute every day by the rear door and meet him in the alley, from which they would walk directly to his house. If she happened to be late, the walk took place in a frigid silence; and the more frigid the silence, the more immediate and forceful were Walter’s requirements once inside. His staff seemed to recognize his moods. One look in the hallway, and the maid and housekeeper melted away downstairs, leaving free the sitting room at the back, the study, the conservatory, until Walter rang the bell for dinner.

Having never had a lover before, Violet presumed this was natural, that Walter’s need for frequent copulation—for copulation in quantity and variety and sometimes bruising intensity, for copulation at an instant’s notice—demonstrated the flattering largeness of his regard for her. When, in the middle of the afternoon, he locked the laboratory door and lifted her skirts and tailed her over a workbench, Violet felt powerful, irresistible, so uniquely and magnificently alluring that even the great Dr. Walter Grant could not rein in his animal desire for her. In his ownership of her flesh, she felt her ownership of his massive masculine will. Of, in consequence, his heart.

In April, as the watery English sun ducked around fistfuls of showers, Violet helped Walter put the finishing touches on a paper he was delivering at a conference in Brussels. The task nearly defeated her. His handwriting was impossible, his spelling atrocious, his equations riddled with the careless errors—positives and negatives unceremoniously reversed, variables switched without explanation, basic arithmetic ignored—of a man accustomed to larger thoughts. As a reward for her diligence, he included her among the small group of Devonshire fellows making the journey across the channel.

He treated her with impeccable professional indifference during the day, as any other colleague. No one could possibly have suspected that the serious and dowdily dressed Miss Schuyler crept to Dr. Grant’s nearby suite once the hotel hallways were clear at night, that he stripped away her dowdy clothes and her professional indifference and instructed her in the finer points of fellatio as he sat on the edge of the bed and scribbled notes on the text of his prepared remarks.

The result of all this hard work was a resounding triumph. Walter delivered his paper with great verve to an enthusiastic reception. Violet sat at his feet, incandescent with pride as she watched him speak, in full command of the stage, displaying the array of equations and drawings she had prepared so carefully for him. At the dinner afterward, he had been deluged with company, and Violet had stolen off directly after dessert to wait for the coast to clear, to slip into his suite and congratulate him more privately, when all his well-wishers had left and there was only the two of them, Walter and Violet.

Around eleven o’clock, the footsteps and voices began to die down outside her door, and Violet gathered her anticipation about her and left the room.

But when she turned the lock and ducked through Walter’s door, she saw no sign of him.

Well, it was hardly surprising, after such a victory. No doubt he had been delayed in cordial argument with some officious rival and would be up shortly. Tomorrow morning she and Walter were leaving for a week’s holiday, in some discreet Alpine resort of which Violet had never heard. He would want to say good-bye to his scientific friends, to perhaps share a last drink. She took off her clothes and hung them in the wardrobe and readied herself for the night.

But the minutes had ticked by, and still Violet waited in Walter’s bed, counting the repeats in the floral wallpaper by the streak of brown light from the crack in the curtains, dozing off only to jolt back awake, until the door had at last squeaked open at three o’clock in the morning. She pretended to be sleeping. Walter went to the bathroom and opened the tap in the tub, and after he had bathed and brushed his teeth, he slipped into the sheets beside her.

“Are you awake, child?” he asked gently.

She didn’t reply, but when morning arrived, and after Walter’s reassuring body had found hers in the early spring sunshine, she bent her forehead into his damp shoulder and told him that despite the diligent applications of vinegar each time they were together, she thought she might be pregnant.




Vivian (#ulink_9da08395-8ba7-5f0d-87a9-3882bbb804ae)


Monday morning! Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always relished the idea of a new week, and never more than when it contained the prospect of a Doctor Paul ringing my doorbell right smack at the beginning.

But first. Work. And even work had its charms today! I whistled my way up the Lexington Avenue subway and sang my way through the brass-framed revolving doors into the musty lobby of the Metropolitan building on Forty-ninth Street. My great-aunt Violet lurked somewhere in the holy sanctity of the archives here. I was sure of it! And I would find her!

“Good morning, Agatha!” I trilled to the receptionist, the instant the elevator doors staggered open on the eleventh floor.

“Miss Schuyler,” she said, in that charming voice of hers, somewhere between a rasp and a mutter. She didn’t so much as raise her shellacked gray head from her magazine, which, by the way, was not the Metropolitan, not even close, unless you took a big black permanent marker and scrawled Metro over the Cosmo. She took a long draw of her cigarette and—again, without looking, the modern miracle of her!—tipped it into the ashtray just before a long crumb tumbled from the end.

And this was the storied magazine’s face to visitors.

The switchboard rang as I swished past the desk. “Metropolitan!” Agatha snapped, like an accusation of manslaughter.

But don’t you worry. Things got better as I went along, past the industrious typing pool (to which, thank God and Gogo, I had leapfrogged membership), past secretaries with scarlet nails and towering nests of hair, past secretaries with bitten nails and limp heads of hair, past office doors and distracted editors and clench-jawed columnists pecking wit at typewriters, until I reached my own humble corner and humbler desk, of which the only redeeming features were its convenient proximity to the office of Edmund Tibbs, managing editor, and its exclusion from the incessant clacking of the typing pool.

I dropped my pocketbook into the bottom desk drawer and headed to the kitchenette.

Tibby hadn’t been kidding around about sugar, no cream. He liked a single teaspoon of the white stuff, not a grain more, and it had better be hot and it had better be brimming, and if so much as a precious drop spilled over the edge and into the saucer below, I would make it up in my own crimson blood: with sugar, no cream.

Still, regardless of that anomaly before heading into Doctor Paul’s bedroom Saturday night, I was not of the trembly-handy tribe, and this Monday morning, as every morning, I delivered Tibby his medicine intact and stood before his desk, smiling my best smile, curving my best hip, even though I knew for a fact that Tibby liked his coffee black and sweet and his chromosomes strictly XY.

He winced at the first sip, but he always did.

“Good morning, Mr. Tibbs,” I said.

“Miss Schuyler.”

“Is there anything I can do for you this morning? Any facts to check?”

If looks could growl. “Check your desk.”

“Right away, Mr. Tibbs.”

I turned heel smartly and checked said desk, where two new articles had found their way into the wire tray that controlled my fact-checking inflow. Yes, I was a fact-checker. That was my official duty, anyway; Tibby’s coffee was for free and for the understanding that a year or two of perfectly delivered joe might lead to bigger and better things.

Not that fact-checking constituted a minor patch of sand on the sunny Metropolitan beach. No no no. Our writers were brilliant wordsmiths, elegant stylists, provocative storytellers, but they rarely let an inconvenient fact get in the way of a good exposez-vous. My job was to check these baser impulses—note the double meaning—and level the Metropolitan’s chances of a messy libel lawsuit from an embarrassed husband, a shamed politician, a misbehaving starlet.

And as it turned out, I had a truffle pig’s nose for a rotten fact. Jocular reference to a Napoleonic princess giving birth to an heir and a spare? Hardly apropos, when Consuelo Vanderbilt bitterly coined the term in 1895. Andover graduate claims he gave Jack Kennedy a concussion at the Choate game in 1934? Must have occurred in an alternative universe in which pigs took wing and Andover played Choate that season.

This particular Monday morning, however, I was having an itty-bitty problem with the fact-checking, at least of the sort that I was being paid so unhandsomely to do. As I stood in the Metropolitan’s private library, poring over an encyclopedia entry for P. G. Wodehouse, my eyes kept darting to the volume that contained the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, known in imperial bygones as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut.

And a few minutes later, as I made notes about varieties of Indian tea versus those from China, I closed my eyes quite out of the blue and recalled how my fingers had traced along Doctor Paul’s interesting clavicle on Saturday night, how he had turned me onto my belly and stretched me long and wide and bit my shoulder very gently …

“Vivs! There you are.”

“Gogo. You shouldn’t sneak up on a girl.”

She turned me around. “Why, you’re flushed! Do you have a fever? Can I get you some water?”

“No, honey. Just a passing whatever. You’re looking particularly perfect this morning.”

“Do you think so?” She fluffed her pale hair and leaned forward, woman to woman. “He’s coming today, Vivs.”

“Who’s coming? Your honey bun?”

“Yes!” Gogo darted a look around my shoulder, grabbed my hand, and made like a bandit for the corner of the library. “I didn’t want to say anything. I had just about given up on him.”

“What, Mr. Perfect? I thought you were madly in love.”

“We were. I thought we were. And then … well, you know what it’s like. That feeling when he’s losing interest.” She sighed.

“But you’ve had new flowers on your desk every week.”

“Most weeks.”

“And … and you’ve gone out on dates every Saturday night.”

“Most Saturday nights.”

“And he moved to New York to be with you, didn’t he? After all your reckless passion over the summer?”

Now the blush. “Well, I don’t know about reckless passion …”

I chucked her flawless chin. “You were madly in love. Admit it.”

“Madly, Vivs.” She took my hands. “He’s the handsomest, smartest, kindest, most gentlemanly—”

“Et cetera, et cetera, ne plus ultra, to the ends of terra firma—”

“Aw, Vivs. You know I wasn’t any good at Latin.”

I smiled and squeezed her hands. “Look at your shining eyes. He’s a lucky man, this Mr. Perfect.”

“His name is David, Vivs. Da-vid.” She said it slowly, as if I might not have heard the handle before.

“David Perfect.” I waved my hand. “So why the doubt? Surely Mr. David Perfect wants to make you Mrs. David Perfect? Who better for the job than the loveliest girl in the history of Bryn Mawr College, Hepburn included?”

“Hardly.”

“And the sweetest.”

“Oh, Vivs. You’re too much.” Bubbly bubbles of laughter. “I know I was silly to doubt him; he’s not the kind of man who would ever lead a girl on. I think he must have been distracted with his new job. You know how demanding his job can be.”

I ransacked the old vault, trying to locate some mention of Mr. David Perfect’s mode of employment amid the endless reels of Gogo’s pleasant background chatter while I was checking my facts. But. Look. I couldn’t even remember the man’s first name without prompting. What chance did his career have? I considered the possibilities: lawyer, banker, broker, doctor.

Ha, ha. Doctor. Wouldn’t that be funny.

“I know,” I said. “So terribly, awfully demanding, that job of his.”

“You see? And I was right. Listen to me, Vivs.” Conspiratorial whisper. “He rang me up last night.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did! He wants to have lunch with me today. He has something very important to tell me, he says.” She crushed my wrists with the force of her glee. “Very important. I just know he’s going to propose, Vivs! How do I look?” Elegant twirl.

I rubbed my grateful wrists. “You look the same as always. Which is to say, no working candles for miles around.”

She angled her million-dollar cheekbones to the light, just so. “You do say the funniest things, Vivs. What about my dress?”




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