The Secret Life of Violet Grant (17 page)

“Ah, Berlin,” says Lionel.

“A friend of yours, perhaps?” Violet thinks of the woman's low neckline, her heavy unbound breasts like pendula beneath clouds of red silk. The mockery of that laugh.

“Not that I can recall,” says Lionel blandly.

The car turns down Französischestrasse and pulls up before a splendid block of apartments, rising perhaps sixteen floors in an extravagant explosion of stonework. Lionel springs out of the taxi, pivots gracefully about his cane, and opens the door for Henry. “I'll just be a moment,” he says to Violet.

Henry looks over his shoulder. “Good night, Mrs. Grant.”

“Good night, Mr. Mortimer. Thank you for your assistance.”

Violet stares ahead at the back of the driver's head. Französischestrasse is much quieter than Unter den Linden, a residential street, no café in sight. The sultry smell of petrol exhaust curls around her nose; the seat rumbles gently beneath her dress.

The door opens. Lionel slides in next to her and leans forward to address the driver. “Kronenstrasse. Number sixteen, isn't that right, Mrs. Grant?”

“Yes. But you don't need to take me there.”

“Nonsense. It's on my way.”

“Back to your party, I suppose.”

He lays his cane over his legs. “I suppose so.”

Kronenstrasse isn't far away, but the minutes and seconds stretch out to occupy the viscous silence between them. Violet looks out her window to avoid the sight of Lionel, though she feels him anyway, a great edifice looming perhaps eighteen inches away, so close she can touch him, so close she can feel his heat like a hot coal glowing at her side, she can feel the pitch of his chest as he breathes, the angle of the cloth seat under his weight.

The traffic has come to an ominous full stop in Friedrichstrasse; Lionel swears softly and cranes his head to see what the matter is. The movement of his body causes his cane to brush Violet's thigh. “It's hopeless,” he says. “Do you mind walking?”

“Do you?” She nods at his leg.

He shrugs. “It's only a block or two.”

Lionel gets out and pays the driver and holds out his hand for Violet. Neither of them are wearing gloves. Lionel's palm is warm and dry and strong beneath hers, his thumb firm where it crosses her fingers. She climbs out of the taxi and draws her hand away. “Thank you.”

They walk without speaking. Violet listens to the cadence of his stride along the sidewalk, the delicate chuff of the cane alongside the sturdier clacks of his shoes. His limp is almost indistinguishable, as if the cane itself is only a gentlemanly pose.

They reach Violet's apartment building. She stops and half turns toward him, wanting him to go, wanting him to stay a few more minutes, an hour, a night, a year. He stands just outside the circle of light from the entrance foyer, and she cannot see his expression properly. But there is something hesitant in the way he stands and gazes down at her: something expectant, or perhaps indecisive.

Say good night, Violet.

Lionel clears his throat. “Shall I see you up?”

“That's not necessary.”

His face moves in the darkness, and she knows he's smiling. “Doesn't a chap deserve a drink for all his hard work? Besides, I'm curious to see the apartment of the eminent Dr. Grant and his wife. Radium lying about the bric-a-brac and all that.”

“Nothing like that. Walter's very particular. What about your party?”

“Bother the party.” He's still smiling. A pair of headlamps flashes along his face, his daring eyes, his strong jaw, the curve of one ear. His shirt-points are terribly white against his neck.

Violet succumbs.

“All right, then. Come along.”

N
o one throws a party like Mums, I'll give her that. I arrived long before the fashionable hour in order to have first pop at the champagne, and I was rewarded for my early-birdness with the usual worm.

“Christ, Vivian,” said Dad, reaching for his cigar. “Do you know what we used to do to women who dressed like that?”

I kissed both cheeks. “Married them?”

“And what have you done with your eyes? You look like a cat.”

“That's the idea.”

“Now, now, Charles.” Mums took my shoulders and gave me a twirl. “I think she looks just adorable. Doesn't she look adorable, Pepper?”

“Not nearly enough bosom,” said Pepper.

Mums stepped back with her critical eye, and by critical I mean slice 'em and dice 'em and serve 'em for elevenses. “Yes. Yes, I see what you mean,” she said, and without further ado took the edge of my neckline with both hands and yanked it down a good two inches. My father made a strangled noise and headed for the bar.

Pepper nodded. “That should do the trick.”

“Do what trick?”

“Never you mind,” said Mums. “Have some champagne.”

It didn't take a truffle-pig nose to detect the presence of a few suspicious truffles lying about the old Schuyler aerie, but I wasn't the girl to look a gift bubbly in the bubbles. I poured myself a heaping tablespoon and dragged Pepper out on the terrace for a smoke and a grilling.

“What was that about?” Once the preliminaries had been performed.

Pepper made busy with her cigarette. “What was what about?”

“The Marilyn makeover just now. You want I should dye my little old hair and speak all Babykins, too?” I did a fair impression.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

“Pepper.”

She zipped her lips.

“You
cannot
be plotting with Mums, Pepper. You can't do that to me. I need someone on my side.”

“Try Dadums. Your bosom gives him the vapors. He'll be happy to help.”

“He'll be passed out by nine o'clock.”

“Oh, right. Well, who needs the big lug, anyway?” Champagne, smoke. “Is it cold out here, or is it just my dress?”

“Speaking of bosom.”

“I wasn't going to let you steal the show, was I?” She linked arms and dragged me to the edge of the terrace. “You see? This is what I mean by sisterly solidarity. The Schuyler girls, on top of the world. Look at that park, Vivian. Do you ever get tired of a view like that?”

I gazed down at the bumpy dark rectangle of Central Park, the sharp and twinkling edges of the towers around it. No, you could not ever get tired of a view like this. You could never ever get tired of Manhattan.

Pepper squeezed my arm. “How's Violet these days?”

“Playing violin with Einstein. I can't figure her out.”

Pepper turned around and propped herself against a planter filled with purpling cabbage. “How so?”

“How she could live with him. Her husband, I mean. She had to have known what he was like. Why did she put up with it?”

Pepper laughed. “Oh, listen to you.
Why did she put up with it?
Why do any of them put up with it? Mums, Dadums. I think the secret to marriage is just old-fashioned tolerance.”

“Tolerance of lovers?”

“Tolerance of whatever your husband's sins. Or vice versa. Obviously Mr. Pepper Schuyler would have to put up with a few.”

“You make it sound so tempting.”

She nodded to the glowing terrace doors. “Everyone makes their own bed, Vivian. Everyone makes their own bargain. Anyway, Violet didn't put up with it in the end, did she?”

“No, something set her off at last. I just wish I could find out what it was.”

Pepper leaned her head back and let the Manhattan moon bathe her face. Her beauty was so sudden and sharp, it stunned me. She crossed her long legs at the glittery ankle straps. “You'll let me know when you do.”

“Girls! What are you doing, shivering out here like this?”

We turned in tandem.

“Cousin Lily!” I ran up to her as fast as my skittering heels would allow and pressed kisses to both her sweet little cheeks. She beamed back at me, the old darling, just before Pepper grabbed her for equal treatment.

“I don't know how you can stand it,” she said. “Look at you in your little dresses.”

“Look at you in yours.”

“You like it? Your aunt Julie took me shopping this week.”

“Say no more,” said Pepper.

I took Lily's right arm and Pepper took her left, and together we jiggled champagne, cigarettes, and cousin back into the living room, where Lily's husband, Nick Greenwald, was locked in stiff conversation with Dad. He cast her a look as we entered, a look containing an entire quarter century of shared spousal amusement, and my toes ached.

Confession. I'd had an itty-bitty girlhood crush on Nick Greenwald
when I was just beginning to have such thoughts. Well, goodness, he was a war hero! And handsome and exceptionally tall, and with that irresistible air of the forbidden about him, being half Jewish and therefore Not Quite One of Us, as Mums put it.
Not quite one of us, is he
, she would say, making her eyebrow do that thing of hers, that insolent right angle, while she stubbed her cigarette viciously into the tray. I would think,
Thank Jehovah and all the prophets for that
. He and Lily were like a bulwark, knit together at every stitch against the pick pick pick of implicit Schuyler disapproval. I marveled at them. Lily was my aunt Christina's daughter. After Christina died, she and Nick had raised her younger sister, Kiki, along with five children of their own, two of them born after the war. Maybe that was where the crush started. I'd been twelve years old, and there was tall Nick cradling Baby Number Five against his shoulder with the delicate reverence he might lavish on a Fabergé egg (I still remembered Mums's disapproval, her sneering
Forty-three years old and she lets herself get pregnant again
) and who couldn't fall a little in love with that?

Nick Greenwald was in his fifties now, so was Lily, and his brown hair was sprinkled with gray, his hazel eyes crinkled deeply at the corners, but he still had it. Especially standing next to old Dadums, who only had
it
if
it
were a gut rounded out with too many cocktails and a face sagging downward with too much pick pick pick. Maybe that's why Mums resented Nick. He stood up so well to scrutiny. He loved his wife. He loved his kids. He was too damned happy.

The living room was trickling full now. Pepper fled to the bar for a refill. I started to follow her, but Lily's arm tightened around mine. “Hold on. Before you flutter away, you bird of paradise, I have something for you.”

“A present? For little old me?”

“Little old you. Come sit down.”

My dress wasn't made for sitting, but with a wee trifle of leg crossing I made myself decent. Lily eased herself next to me in the sinuous athletic
style of a woman who kept herself busy, which Lily did. Apart from her husband and her merry band, she swam daily—I'd tried and failed to keep up with her at the Colony Club pool one morning—and wrote. Wrote for real money, actual checks made out in her name. Mostly articles about New England history, that kind of thing, but rumor had it she'd been short-listed for the Pulitzer one year for her book about the hurricane of 1938. She'd doled out generous helpings of advice to me over the years, not that I'd followed more than a few green peas of it, but she persevered because she was Lily and she'd give you the food off her own plate if you needed it, the brassiere off her back.

She propped her elbow atop the back of the settee and gave me the old conspiratorial smile. “How are you, Vivian? How's the
Metropolitan
? How's old Tibby?”

“He likes his coffee black and sweet. But I have a plan.” I tapped my temple.

Laugh laugh. “I knew you would. Now, listen up. Julie had lunch with us this past week and told me you were poking into the old stories about Aunt Violet.”

The heart leapt. “I might be.”

She patted her pocketbook, a sleek blue wedge that matched her sleek blue dress, and which must also have been picked out for her by said Aunt Julie during the aforementioned shopping expedition, for among Lily Greenwald's many virtues was not, how shall I put it, the eye of style. “Then I might just have her letters to my mother tucked away in here.”

The heart crashed into the moon. I itched my fingers at her. “
Ooh. Ooh.
You always were my favorite cousin.”

“Now, now. Wait a moment, you greedy thing.” She laid a protective hand over the pocketbook. “I also received a fascinating telephone call from your mother later that day—she's looking at us right this second, as a matter of fact, now don't look so alarmed—asking me whether I possessed any such letters—”

“That Mums.”

“—and if I did, could I please burn them down to ash and then dispose permanently of the ash itself, at my earliest convenience.”

“And you told her to get lost?”

She assumed an angelic aspect. “I would never use those words, Vivian. I just told her that I had no idea where any such letters might be. Which was true, to a point.”

“Which point was that?”

“I mean I had no idea which box they were in. We put all my mother's old letters in boxes after she died. A storage closet in the apartment building. I didn't have the heart to go through them all at the time, and then . . . well, we had Nick Junior right away, and got so busy. Anyway.”

A shadow cast across our conspiratorial laps. I looked up and smiled.

“Mums. I was just telling Cousin Lily how lovely she looks tonight. Doesn't she look lovely in that shade of blue? It brings out her eyes.”

“Lovely. Vivian, my sweet, you need to mingle.”

“Why do I need to mingle?”

The lips pursed. “Because that's how you meet people, dear. When I was your age, I had already been engaged three times—”

“The lucky dears,” I said.

“Now, Vivian. Your mother's right. You shouldn't spend your Saturday night all tucked up in the corner with your old cousin Lily.” Lily rose to her feet and held out her hand for me. “Come with me, and I'll have Nick Junior introduce you to his friends.”

Mums's face went all hallelujah, as good as a facelift. “That's so dear of you, Lily. She only seems to be interested in the most unsuitable young men.”

“Well, now,” said Lily. “I'd be disappointed if she weren't. Distraction,” she whispered to me as we drew away. “I learned that trick as a mother myself. Anyway, I'll slip you the letters before I go. There aren't many, to be honest, so I hope you can get something useful from them. But be warned: your mother doesn't want any of this to come to light.”

“This I already know.”

Lily stopped and turned around to face me. “No. I mean she really doesn't want this. So you need to decide, Vivian Schuyler, if the prey is worth the hunt.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you may find yourself on the outside of the cozy Schuyler circle if you find Violet's corpse and dig it up for a public viewing. And trust me”—she glanced at her husband with a wistful old smile—“that's no place for the faint of heart.”

•   •   •

NOW.
I don't know if you could exactly call me and Nicholson Greenwald Jr. kissing cousins. I mean, we'd only kissed once. Well, twice. But we had a zing, he and I, if you know what I mean, and my poor wounded little heart revived just a smidgen at the way his handsome old scoundrelly face lit to blazes at the sight of me.

“Nick Junior, you handsome old scoundrel.” I bussed him soundly on the cheek, right there in front of his friends, and slapped a little mustard on the
Junior.
“How many hearts have you broken this week?”

“Aw, Vivian. Always busting my chops.” He slipped his hand down my back to give the old derrière a friendly warning squeeze. “Boys, this is my cousin Vivian Schuyler. Proceed at your own risk.”

I extended my hand to the handsomest and tilted my cat eyes to a welcoming angle. “Enchanted.”

“Damn it, Vivian. Will you go easy on the poor fellas?” said Nick Junior.

Oh, Cousin Nick. Bless you. Not tonight.

Well, I was human, wasn't I? I'd taken a blow, a nasty witch of a blow to the solar plexus, and nothing soothes the battered solar plexus like a nice reassuring Epsom salt bath of male admiration. I had them fetching my drinks. I had them laughing at my jokes. I had them on the beaches, I had them on the landing grounds, I had them in the fields and in the
streets. And great God almighty, it felt good. It felt reckless and self-indulgent, the old Vivian, the one who didn't care. Triumphant Vivian, back on top.

Somewhere in the middle of my fourth glass of champagne, Pepper found me. She fluttered her fingers. “Hello, boys.”

“Boys, this is my sister Pepper,” I said.

Chorus of approval.

“Tell me why they call you Pepper,” said one strapping lad, a little quicker on the wit than his mates.

“Because I'm that bad.”

“Aw, Pepper,” said poor Nick Junior. “That's not true. Tell them why.”

She shrugged. “Not on your life.”

“Vivian?”

I zipped my lips. “Code of sisterly honor.”

“You two.” He threw up his hands. “And they wonder why I don't go to more of these nice little family get-togethers.”

Pepper leaned into me. “This is perfect. They're eating out of your hand.”

“Perfect for what?”

“Never you mind. Here.”

She nudged me. I looked down. A small packet of envelopes lay in her hand.

“The letters from Cousin Lily?”

“You betcha, dollface. Don't read them all in one place.” She unfastened my pocketbook and slipped the envelopes in between the lipstick tubes.