The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  This time I reached for the clasp and hairpin with determination. I had a story to write. I had a job to do.

  Now, don’t be shocked, but I wasn’t wholly unfamiliar with the science of picking a lock. Friends in high places, the usual. I closed my eyes and poked among the tumblers as delicately as a new mother with a Q-tip, and all for nothing: the metal parts were stuck fast, beyond the might of a human hairpin. Round one, the lock.

  I rapped said hairpin against the jagged opening, which seemed, in my present mood, to be leering at me, in a bare-toothed, rusty way I found insulting.

  “All right, then, Violet Grant. My stubborn little Houdini,” I said. “You’ve left me no choice.”

  I rose to my feet and made for the under-sink cabinet in the kitchen.

  Under a tactical bombardment of WD-40, the tumblers surrendered and the edges of the valise released with a musty sigh of defeat. I opened them wide.

  The contents had been packed with an eerie tidiness. Violet herself, or some modern official who had found the valise in a forgotten corner and searched for some clue to its provenance? Given the state of the lock, I guessed the former.

  Clothes first, and not many. Maybe you didn’t need them, when you ran away with your lover. I lifted them out, one by one. I’d thought they went in for lace and frills in those days, but these threads were simple, sturdy cottons and linens in summer colors, except for one in blue gossamer that looked as if it were made of clouds. I shook it out. Creases, marks. And was that a grass stain on the back?

  Why, Aunt Violet. You naughty, naughty girl.

  A cardigan followed, a practical knit, belted at the waist. I lifted it to my nose. Just wool and dust, no sign of human habitation. What had Violet smelled like? Lysol and laboratories, probably. That acrid scent of acids in beakers. All of it gone now, lost to time and Zurich cupboards.

  Underthings! Long and tipped with a bit of lace, at least. This was more like it. I could perceive the allure of these drawers, mysterious in their lengthy modesty, especially when topped by the corset that unfolded in my hands. I rounded my lips into a soundless whistle of appreciation. She’d had a tiny waist, Aunt Violet, as she gallivanted about with her atoms and molecules. No wonder she’d snagged the eyeballs of this eminent Dr. Grant. He could have spanned her with his hands if he wanted.

  Which, obviously, he had.

  I reached inside. There were no more clothes: just books and papers and a soft felt bag filled with tantalizing bumps. I loosened the drawstring and spilled out the contents onto the bedspread.

  Jewelry. A pair of gold bracelets, wide as handcuffs, monogrammed W on one and G on the other. An amethyst brooch. A necklace made of aquamarine flowers: pretty, really, if dainty jewelry was your narcotic of choice.

  Then. A watch. A plain gold watch, unadorned except for the engraving at the back:

  To Violet

  from her sister Christina

  1911

  “Why, then the world’s mine oyster

  which I with sword will open.”

  A little chill stirred at the base of my neck, as if someone had blown on it. I turned the watch back over and opened the case. At seven-oh-three in the morning or evening, some day in late July or perhaps early August of 1914, this watch had ticked its last tock. If I rubbed my fingers against it, I might still feel Violet’s touch, her slender scientific hands winding it up. Checking the time. Sliding it into her pocket. She must have dropped her valise in a hurry, if she’d left this watch inside. She must have meant to come back for it.

  Why hadn’t she?

  I laid the watch atop the blue gossamer dress with the grass stains and pulled out the remaining contents of the valise.

  Great guns.

  Travel papers. For the love of Peter, Paul, and Mary. Travel papers.

  I snatched them up. The one on top was Violet’s, a photograph pasted to a thick sheet written in gothic German script, and there she was. Just like that.

  Violet Grant.

  Her exquisite black-and-white photograph stared sightlessly at me through melting huge eyes. Scientist? More like a Gibson girl who’d lost her tint, a girl to adorn chocolate boxes and Coca-Cola advertisements, not at all the kind of girl who bent over microscopes and singed her hair on Bunsen burners. How could this darling creature be Violet? Scientific Violet, married Violet. Adulterous Violet.

  I smudged my thumbs around the edge of her image and examined her pointed chin, her wide cheekbones. Her eyes. Now, that was better. I knew those eyes. I wielded them myself to great effect.

  She existed. She had stood before that camera with her alluring eyes and her adorable heart-shaped face. She was a person. Name: Violet Schuyler Grant. Verheiratet. Geburtsdatum, 10 November 1891. Geburtsort, New York City, New York, U.S.A. Every fact in order. Nothing I didn’t already know, really.

  But the others. I hadn’t known there were others, plural.

  Americans. Jane Johnson Mortimer de Saint-Honoré, divorced, born 15 July 1878 in Rapid City, Iowa: Now, who the sweet social ladder was she?

  And Henry Johnson Mortimer, born 9 August 1894. I turned that one over. Jane’s son? He regarded the camera with profound gravity and too much dark hair atop his narrow face. I held him next to Jane and gasped.

  The broad was beautiful.

  She beheld the camera as if it were her dearest friend, and I mean dearest in the bedroom sense. You could not mistake that look. It ricocheted down the generations. It belonged to a different half-lidded category of allurement altogether from the huge gaze of Violet Grant, weightless with innocence, void of corruption. Whoever she was, whatever she was, this Mrs. Jane Johnson de Saint-Honoré was eminently corruptible. She knew the heat of a luxurious bed or two, if you’ll pardon my bard.

  And judging by Henry Mortimer’s date of birth, she knew it early.

  I spread the papers out before me. One, two, three. Violet, Jane, Henry.

  But Henry was only nineteen years old in July 1914. Surely this couldn’t be Violet’s lover, the one she’d murdered her husband for. Not this grave dark-haired boy traveling with his come-hither mumsy. Youth aside, he didn’t look like the kind of kid who inspired a grand passion. Or even a petit passion. He looked like the kind of kid who inspired a grand yawn of ennui. Trust me, I knew the type. They flocked to me in their heat-seeking dozens.

  Where had Violet picked them up, and why?

  And where was the lover in all this?

  I flipped through the leather-bound books that remained on the bed, searching for something else. Anything. A name, a postcard.

  The books must have been Violet’s scientific journals. They were filled with drawings and equations, inscrutable alphas and deltas that were decidedly Greek to me. Still. I liked her handwriting, quick and masculine. Rather like mine.

  But the last book wasn’t the same. Here the scrawl took a different slant, a thicker brush, smaller letters. The ink was still rich and black. The cover was stamped in gold: 1912. I turned to the back, and a folded piece of paper fell out, scattering dried rose petals over the bedspread. I collected them gently in my hand and unfolded the paper.

  proclaimed the engraved monogram at the top, marking it Violet’s, but this was a different handwriting altogether:

  Ah! So Violet is a romantic after all

  I have kissed each one to last you until I return

  Lionel

  The pulse in my neck took a flying leap off a vertical gulp.

  Lionel. Oh, my bright twinkling stars. Lionel.

  Violet’s lover.

  He was real. He had held a pen in his hand and written these words. This story handed down through discreet channels, this secret shame of the secretly shameless Schuylers, this tragic Berlin affair: it had happened. I’d found Violet’s husband, and now I knew her lover.

  His name was Lionel.

 
I opened my hands and looked again at the petals. I picked one and held it to my lips.

  After half a century, it had lost its scent and its velvet texture, but a little color still held on, a half-remembered dream of scarlet. I have kissed each one to last you until I return. Elvis Aaron Presley, give me strength. Kissed each one. Kissed each petal for you, Violet, and when I say petal, you know whereof I metaphor.

  Who could blame Violet? If this Lionel appeared in the room right now before me, I’d have him kissing my roses before you could say voulez-vous.

  I returned the petal to my palm and looked adoringly at the pile nestled there. The faded little dears. I imagined them sitting there in Violet’s ecru stationery all these years, beneath her gossamer dress and her underclothes, inside the journal labeled 1912: so many layers to shield them from the brutal half century that followed their secret Lionel-lipped benediction, the modern world of muddy trenches and nuclear bombs, of rock and roll and Norman Mailer and the Duchess of Argyll.

  I poured them back into the note and folded it with care. Like eggs in a nest, like my own private little secret with Aunt Violet. I opened the book to slip them safely back inside, and as I did so, a single and rather surprising word jumped out from one of the pages.

  Jumped at me not because it was unfamiliar, necessarily, but because it clashed with such contemporary force against the chivalry of Lionel’s rose-petal kisses.

  fuck

  • • •

  I PAUSED, notebook in one hand and petals in the other. I set the note on the bed, and then I flipped back through the pages of the book, intensely curious, trying to find the word again. Because. What was it doing there?

  Neither word nor book belonged to Violet or Lionel; even to my untrained eyes, the handwriting here was distinct from both the love note and the scientific notebooks. It was a journal of some kind—the dates were printed in a tiny typeface at the top of each page—and when I stopped to read an entry, my breath caught. I slid to the floor, braced my back against the bedpost, and clutched the leather in my hand.

  Once I was accustomed to the archaic shape of the letters, the near-illegibility of the hurried italic lines, it didn’t take me long to figure out who had authored them. I read on in horrified fascination, wanting to stop, unable to stop.

  I had once happened upon a gruesome street corner on Park Avenue one shiny spring day, where a taxi had so thoroughly obliterated a pedestrian that you couldn’t see if this former human being had been male or female, young or old, except for the graceful high-heeled shoe tossed into the center median, in the middle of a bed of orange and yellow tulips, with a foot still stuffed inside. I had tried to look away from that shoe, just as I did from this journal, and yet my eyes kept going back, as if they needed to know every detail, to normalize this abnormality into insignificance.

  By the time I reached the end of May, I felt physically sick. I gathered the shards of my moral composure and shut the book with a leathery snap.

  “Great guns,” I whispered to the ceiling. “Dr. Walter Grant. You filthy beast.”

  INTERLUDE

  Violet, 1912

  Violet cannot recall the exact moment she realized Walter was sleeping with other women. Sleeping: that’s the wrong word. He was fucking other women, and then returning home to their marital bedroom, to bathe and change and sometimes to fuck her, too, and then fall asleep snoring in their iron-framed bed in the luxurious flat on Kronenstrasse.

  There was no sudden epiphany. The suspicion crept up on her, inch by inch, nudged along by minute clues and conjectures. A woman’s eyes, laughing knowingly at her at some dinner party, before turning away. A hint of perfume on Walter’s linens, before the maid had a chance to launder. Lise’s sympathetic face. The memory of Walter’s smooth acceptance of her suspicions of pregnancy, and his practiced solution to the dilemma, his prior acquaintance with Dr. Winslow. All the evidence supported her hypothesis, that Walter was unfaithful, habitually and casually unfaithful. She began, with a curious dispassion, to imagine him with other women: what they would look like, where he would meet them. This other world of his, in which she played no part.

  So the immediate encounter with Walter’s infidelity came more as a shock than a surprise.

  When they first moved to Berlin, and after Violet had recovered—physically, at least—from the miscarriage, she went to parties with her husband. She considered it part of her duty, since she was so unwifely in other regards: endless troglodyte hours spent in the basement of the institute, rumpled unfashionable clothes, housekeeping left entirely to the housekeeper, equations scrawled on napkins, conversation dominated by the technical, face screwed all too often in unreachable concentration. That summer and autumn, as a kind of restitution, she forced herself to depart her cramped office by six o’clock to accompany Walter to dinner parties, music parties, opera and ballet, soirées and balls, enduring them chiefly by sitting quietly near a window and contemplating the progress, or lack of it, she had made in her laboratory or her notebooks.

  At one such evening, held at the Baroness von Schrager’s magnificent flat near the Reichstag, knotted up and frustrated by a particularly inconclusive experiment that day, she had allowed herself to drink a glass or two of champagne and to be led into dancing. The results astonished her. Gentleman after unaccountable gentleman had walked up and asked her for the next waltz, and she had complied, even laughing a little, enjoying the new sensation of being sought after and admired.

  After the fifth or sixth dance, she recalled the hour and went looking for Walter. She had found him easily, in a small sitting room at the back of the flat, his tailcoat flung over a chair, his formal black trousers about his knees, his white buttocks clenching steadily as he immersed himself in the backside of a small dark-haired matron dressed in emerald green. The woman was bent over a French escritoire: Directoire, Violet noted, though not a particularly fine example. Her ring-crusted knuckles curled about the opposite edge; her breasts and her pearls dangled together heavily from her unfastened bodice. At each thrust, she called out Mein Gott! in a voice so feral, she did not detect the sound of Violet’s entry into the room.

  Walter did, however. He turned his red and passion-bloated face in his wife’s direction, registering surprise; but instead of desisting, he merely offered Violet an apologetic shrug and continued his work. Through the open door, the Baroness von Schrager’s orchestra played heedless Schubert.

  Violet, frozen, misted with champagne, pictured herself lifting the statue of a curving bronze Aphrodite from the shelf nearby and dropping it over Walter’s head.

  She did not, however. Instead, she backed away and closed the door with a numb hand. She found herself a taxi and went to bed, thinking that she had dreamed all this before, that this new picture in her head was exactly as she had imagined it. This shock she felt, it was recognition.

  The next morning, she found Walter lying next to her in bed, in remorseless slumber. Over breakfast, he reminded her that their marriage was a modern one, a new model of partnership, in which they placed no restrictions on the freedom of the other person to pursue whatever interests gave him or her happiness and pleasure. He had brought her to Berlin with him, he had given her her place at the institute; she had everything she wanted, and all because of his untiring efforts on her behalf, his unflagging ambition for her. She understood that, of course?

  She did.

  He reached across the breakfast table and squeezed her hand, where it lay next to her steaming coffee. He was so very glad he had married her, the only woman in the world he could have made his wife, always first in his heart. She was no narrow-minded bourgeois. She was clear-headed and scientific, thank God; she understood men were subject to physical urges from time to time, simple transactions of the body, but she, Violet, was his wife. He would always support and encourage her interests, as long as she supported and encouraged his. She understood that, too, of cours
e?

  Violet picked up her coffee, drank it scalding hot, and said that of course she understood.

  After all, a mutual pursuit of happiness was the foundation of a marriage of equals.

  PART TWO

  Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;

  Nay, I have done, you get no more out of me

  And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart

  That thus so cleanly I myself can free;

  Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,

  And when we meet at any time again,

  Be it not seen in either of our brows

  That we one jot of former love retain.

  Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,

  When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,

  When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

  And innocence is closing up his eyes,

  Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

  From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

  —Michael Drayton (1563–1631)

  Vivian

  I walked into the Metropolitan lobby Tuesday morning with considerably less joie de travailler than I had danced through the day before, but I wasn’t about to let anyone know it.

  “Good morning, Agatha! Where on earth have you been hiding that feathered comb? It sets off your hair to perfection.” I kissed the tips of my fingers.

  She moved her nail file from ring finger to pinkie. “Mr. Lightfoot wants to see you.” Like a sentence of lethal injection.

  “Why, thank you, Agatha. I’ll just drop my pocketbook and briefcase at my desk and be with him—”

  “Now, he says.” She snapped her Wrigley’s, set down the nail file, and picked up her magazine.

  I leaned over her desk. “Agatha, you have such a way with words. Why aren’t you writing for the magazine, that’s what I’ve always wondered.”