The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  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 lipsti
ck tubes.

  “Counselors! Sidebar’s concluded,” said the handsomest, snapping his fingers.

  Pepper turned her chin over her luminous bare shoulder and gave him the old up-and-down. “Permission to approach the bench?”

  Before the lucky young man could reply, Mums butted in between our conspiratorial shoulders.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  And that, my dears, is the point at which I should have known. I should have recognized that tone of voice, that note of almost weepy triumph.

  But what could I have done?

  She had planned all this with the skill of a master strategist. Ludendorff had nothing on Mums. She had probably invited the Greenwalds, had probably encouraged Nick Junior to bring his attentive friends, had forged an alliance with Pepper, had filled me with champagne. She had placed every pawn in its proper square before introducing the knight to the board, armor shining.

  You had to hand it to Mums.

  She spoke near my ear, in her butteriest voice. “Vivian, dearest. We have a special guest I’d like you to entertain for me tonight.”

  I turned.

  Mums’s eyes glittered as fearlessly as the Schuyler crystal. In one hand she held a drink and cigarette, and in the other she held a smiling Doctor Paul. She withdrew her arm and patted the back of his shoulder in a proprietary mother-of-the-bride way. “I think you’ve met already, isn’t that right, Vivian?”

  I turned to my sister. “Bad girl, Pepper. Very. Bad. Girl.”

  Violet

  By the time the lift clangs to a stop at the ninth floor, Violet’s face is hot with shame. The attendant stares directly ahead, not meeting her eyes, and she wants to scream, He’s not my lover! Who brings a lover home to her own married flat? But it’s her own fault. If Lionel were some innocent acquaintance, she would be talking and laughing with him as they walked across the foyer and went up the lift. There would not be this guilty silence, this tense expectancy, this flush on Violet’s cheeks.

  The attendant opens the grille. “Danke,” says Violet clearly.

  The lift opens up directly to their apartment, which covers the entire floor. Walter’s family made a fortune in pottery a hundred years ago, and the evidence of that wealth lies everywhere: the elegant rented address in Kronenstrasse, the marble entry, the black-and-white housekeeper who takes their coats and hats and asks Violet if she and her guest will be taking refreshment.

  “Thank you, Hilda, but we’ll only be a few minutes,” says Violet in German.

  She leads Lionel past the grand drawing room and into a smaller sitting room off the study, where Walter keeps a liquor cabinet. Lionel’s cane clicks rhythmically behind her on the polished parquet floor.

  “Cozy little place you’ve got here.”

  “Walter likes to entertain.”

  “And you don’t?”

  She opens the liquor cabinet. “What would you like? We’ve got just about everything, I think.”

  “Brandy will do.”

  She finds the brandy and the snifter, and though she pours with extreme care, the bottle still clinks against the edge of the glass, betraying the slight shake in her hands. She sets down the bottle and lifts the glass between her palms to warm the brandy.

  “An expert, I see.”

  “My father used to drink brandy. Well, I suppose he still does. When I wanted to ask for a favor, I started him off with a glass of his favorite.”

  “An excellent strategy. Did it work?”

  Violet hands him the glass and watches as he takes a sip. “Occasionally. Please sit. I don’t want your surgeon to come after me, shaking his fist.”

  “You first, Mrs. Grant.”

  Violet lowers herself into one end of the sofa. Lionel takes a chair, exhaling just a fraction as the weight draws off his left knee. He extends the leg in a rigid line across the rug before him, nearly touching Violet’s crossed ankles.

  Violet curls her fingers together in her lap. The lamplight is kind to Lionel, softening his face, so that the pronounced jut of his soldier’s cheekbones mellows into something more elegant. He reclines his large body, staring somewhere to Violet’s left, quite at home in Walter’s favorite chair. The brandy revolves drunkenly in his palm.

  Violet is terrible at small talk. She waits for Lionel to speak first.

  He lifts the glass and sips. “What sort of favors?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “From your father. What sort of favors did you ask?”

  “My freedom, mostly. To go to college, to go to Oxford afterward. To study chemistry instead of English or history.”

  “Nothing wrong with English or history.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with chemistry, either, unless you’re a seventeen-year-old girl just out of school whose sole purpose in life is to marry well and make brilliant conversation at dinner parties.”

  “But you weren’t that girl.”

  “No, not at all.”

  He smiles and leans forward. His eyes smile at her, too, reflecting the color of the brandy in his glass. “Good. You’re better this way. Anyway, if you had done the conventional thing, you wouldn’t be here now.”

  Violet springs to her feet and goes to the window. “And wouldn’t that be a shame.”

  “I’d be devastated.”

  Sexual attraction. Violet knows what it is; she knows she’s feeling it now, that she’s felt it from the moment he prowled into the middle of her dark laboratory room ten days ago. Why not? Lionel Richardson is a strapping, healthy specimen of a man, an animal in its prime, manifestly ready to mate. She would be made of stone if the chemistry of her body did not respond to the proximity of his.

  But what should she do about it?

  Outside the window, night has fallen like a cloak over the streets of Berlin, but Berlin hasn’t noticed. Violet can’t hear the revelry, but she knows it’s there: people laughing and drinking and smoking, in the cafés along Unter den Linden and in the grand apartments around the Tiergarten. In one of those apartments, her husband is laughing and drinking and smoking, talking with his friends, politicians and generals and minor German royalty, professional American divorcées like the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré. Committing adultery in his heart, and perhaps in actual deed. Probably not even perhaps. Parties are Walter’s favorite hunting ground, after all: the prey is well-groomed, is relaxed and daring with drink. Possibly, at this very instant, Walter is with another woman.

  “Have I offended you, Mrs. Grant?”

  She turns to face him. “Of course not. I know it was only one of your jokes. Have you finished your brandy? You must be desperate to get back to your party.”

  He hasn’t finished his brandy; he’s hardly touched it. He’s only toying with it, back and forth between his hands. “I'm not, in fact. I think you’re much more interesting than another damned party.”

  “I’m not, actually.”

  “You are. You’re fascinating. Do you know what I love most about you?”

  “I can’t imagine. We hardly know each other.”

  He taps the wide bowl of the snifter with one finger. “Among other things, that I could pull out a sheet of paper and a pencil and sit here and talk all night with you about bloody atoms, and it would be the most interesting and illuminating conversation I’ve had in years.”

  Violet laughs drily. “Then why did you leave the institute in the first place, all those years ago, and join the Army? Of all things.”

  “Ah.” He leans back in the chair and watches her with a speculative expression. “Funnily enough.”

  “Was it something to do with Walter?”

  In a swift and unexpected movement, Lionel lifts the brandy to his lips and swallows it all. Violet watches in astonishment as his throat works, as his white-tipped fingers grip the bowl.

  “I know he can be difficult,”
Violet says quietly.

  Lionel sets the glass on the table and rises to his feet. “Listen, Mrs. Grant—”

  “Violet,” says some other woman, not her at all.

  “Violet.” He lingers over the vowels. His teeth gleam briefly at her. “I’m not going to tell you the story. You’re loyal to him; I can see that. I believe I rather admire that about you. Add it to the list in my head, number thirty-seven: Violet is loyal as the devil. But if I may be unpardonably bold, I suggest you ask yourself just how well Dr. Grant returns your loyalty.”

  Violet’s fingers curl around the window frame. In his evening dress, Lionel looks even larger than before: the black tailcoat stretches across his bulky shoulders, his rifle-bearing soldier’s shoulders; the white waistcoat swoops below his thick chest to button trimly at his waist. There are no shades of gray to Lionel. “Walter has his own brand of loyalty.”

  “Mostly to himself, I imagine.” Lionel raises his hand and taps the starched white board of his shirtfront. “I have many faults, Violet, God knows. But I know what loyalty is, and what it isn’t.”