The Secret Life of Violet Grant (5 page)

“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.”

Y
our 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.

B
y 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?