The Secret Life of Violet Grant (4 page)

A
unt 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?”