The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  His hand was on the door frame. “May I come in?”

  “You might as well.”

  He stepped forward. I was weak enough to steal another peek. Well, wouldn’t you? In the harshness of the bare entry bulb, his face was still pallid with shock and gleaming damp. Even his lips look exhausted, drained of blood. He reached inside the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out his cigarette case, but instead of opening it, he fiddled the plain silver around his fingers. “Look, I’m not asking you to forgive me—”

  “You won’t be disappointed, then.”

  “I know what I did was unforgivable. I knew it when I did it. I guess I thought I could just wait until . . . until I’d fixed everything, and then—”

  “And then we could live happily ever after on Lightfoot’s money and Gogo’s heartbreak? What a brilliant plan. Devious, even.” I clapped my hands. “I applaud you.”

  “Listen to me, Vivian . . .”

  The sound of his voice hurt me. Listen to me, Vivian, said my mother, when my eleven-year-old self encountered her half dressed on the library sofa with a man not my Dadums. Listen to me, Vivian, said my professor, pale and naked on a cold February afternoon, except for a sagging Trojan and another girl’s lipstick.

  Why did I ever listen? Why did I ever crack myself open enough to allow the slightest whiff of sentiment inside? With sentiment arrived pain, they were twins, inseparable, didn’t I know that already?

  I said: “Believe me, I understand. The allure of riches for the scholarship boy. Always had your nose pressed against the glass, watching us, didn’t you? I mean, you’d have some money eventually, a nice well-padded life at the country club, but that’s the thing about medicine, they make you work for it—”

  “What a bitch you can be, Vivian. What a goddamned snob.” He said it without rancor, as if he knew why I said those things, why I needed to hurt him back. He opened up the cigarette case and took one out. “So you think I wanted the money, did you?”

  I let myself tumble onto the sofa and retracted my legs under my robe like a turtle. I couldn’t look at him straight. I couldn’t look at his symmetry, his lovely body in its thick herringbone overcoat, because if I did I’d remember how he looked without it. How just this morning, that body had huddled with mine in the tiny shower cubicle, had kissed me with its bacon-and-coffee mouth, had soaped me all over, inspecting each knob and spindle of me, describing its tip-top healthy-pink condition and its scientific Latin name. How he had wrapped me in a towel and laid me on the bed and kissed his way down my backbone, identifying each vertebra, and I’d thought how handy it was to have a doctor for your lover, you were really in the best of hands.

  And now. This. Like your heart had been carved from your rib cage with a scalpel.

  I said, “I admit, money was the logical conclusion. Don’t tell me it was true love after all?”

  “No, it was the money, all right.” He lit the cigarette and raised it to his mouth. “A week ago I got a little package in the mail. I won’t tell you what was inside. Pops had gotten himself in deep at a casino in Vegas.”

  “You don’t say. How deep?”

  “Just over three hundred.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Thousand.”

  All right, my toes went a little cold. Even if he were lying, that was a lot of bread to be tossing around so casually in a ramshackle Village apartment. “Well. So what were you planning to do with the other two hundred?”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  I held up my hands. “Look, whatever you say. Your pops had debts, Lightfoot had a deal you couldn’t refuse. I mean, who am I to stand in your way?”

  Doctor Paul picked up the vodka bottle from the center of the table and threw it against the opposite wall. I didn’t even jump.

  “You have no idea, do you? No idea what it’s like to have no money, no way on God’s earth to beg, borrow, or steal it. No idea what it’s like to have no choice. No idea what it’s like to sit there and stare at the bare walls and realize you’ve got to do something, and whatever you do, it’s the wrong thing. You could take some money, propose to a girl, and break her heart later, and in so doing lose the love of the single most breathtaking woman you’ve ever met, the love of your lonely godforsaken life. Or you could let your father get his fingers and nuts cut off by the Vegas racket . . .”

  “Oh, come on. You could have called the police.”

  He turned to me. His pale head shook back and forth. “You are such an innocent, Vivian. Call the police. This is the Vegas racket, baby. You don’t even want to know what they do after they cut off his nuts. And do you know what they do when they’re all done? They hand the body over to the police for a decent burial in the Hoover Dam, that’s what they do.”

  My chest had stopped moving. “You could have told me. I could have helped,” I whispered.

  “And do what? Could you have come up with three hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills within forty-eight hours?”

  I shook my head.

  The door to my bedroom squeaked open. Tibby appeared, all tousled up, made to order. “Everything all right here?”

  Doctor Paul swung like a bat. “Who the hell is this?”

  “A friend.”

  Without a word, Doctor Paul took in Tibby’s gaping buttons, his ruffled hair, his absent necktie. He turned back to me, and his face was stone. Tibby’s strip of marigold Brooks Brothers silk screamed from the arm of the sofa, next to my toes. I took the ends of my robe and drew them closer together.

  “I see,” he said. “You’ve never heard that revenge is best served cold?”

  “Patience is not my favorite virtue.”

  “All right.” He found his hat and put it on. “Like I said, I didn’t expect you to forgive me. God knows I won’t forgive myself. I just wanted to explain things a little.”

  “Well, thanks for the explanation. It’s all pretty clear now.” I made no move from the sofa. I couldn’t. My bones had turned into iron.

  The telephone shrilled again. I could have sworn the ring sounded more urgent this time. Doctor Paul glanced at it.

  “Ignore,” I said.

  We stood there, eyeing each other, while Gogo trilled eagerly through the cigarette haze.

  “I meant everything I said, Vivian. This morning. Every day since I’ve known you.” He spoke as if Tibby weren’t there, standing half dressed in my bedroom entrance, where Paul himself had stood so often, and with even fewer clothes. He turned to the door and stopped. His hat tilted back, as if he were reading his next lines on the ceiling. “If you ever need me for anything, Vivian, just let me know. I know you don’t agree with what I did. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not as honorable as your kind of people, when the chips are down. When I see my dad’s ear in a box, wrapped in Kleenex. But just so you know, I’d do the same thing for your sake. I’d make a deal with fucking Khrushchev, if I had to. I’d do it a hundred times over.”

  He left, shutting the door gently behind him.

  Tibby was already shrugging clumsily into his old-fashioned waistcoat and jacket. “You know what I think?”

  I settled my forehead into my palm. “I can only imagine.”

  He picked up his marigold necktie from the sofa and went to the scrap of mirror hanging near the door. “I think you’ve been barking up the wrong tree. I don’t think Violet is the key to all this. I think it’s Lionel.”

  “Lionel?”

  His arms were moving in sloppy jerks. “Ah, women. You’re seduced by the affair itself, the evolution of adultery, the climax. Why she did it. When she did it. Every last loving pornographic detail.”

  I thought of Dr. Grant’s handwritten diary and winced.

  Tibby turned. The knot wasn’t perfect, but you had to be impressed he could arrange a necktie at all. “But think a moment. Does it really matter what happened in that B
erlin apartment? She met another man. Her husband was a brute. She killed him—”

  “We don’t know that for certain.”

  “Vivian, the facts of the case are obvious enough. That story is always the same, everywhere, every time. It’s boring, frankly. What matters—what always matters, Vivian—is what happened after the crisis. Why they disappeared. Where they went. That’s the real mystery. That’s what we don’t know. That’s what gives this story zing.”

  “Zing? We’re talking about real people here, Tibby.”

  “You’re talking about real people. I’m talking about a magazine story. I need a hook, I need an angle, I need a man biting a dog. Zing. And for zing, you need to find Lionel Richardson. The English lover, the man she killed her husband for, the man in whose hands she placed herself afterward. He’s where the mystery begins and ends.”

  “But Violet is the one—”

  “She’s the one you care about, obviously. She’s your aunt. But Lionel’s the one who matters, historically speaking. The one who would have left the most tracks. Who was he? What sort of man? Why did Violet disappear after running away with him? He was a soldier, Vivian. An officer in the British Army. If he managed to get safely across the border, there must be some record of him. Desertion, at the very least, and some sort of official investigation into his whereabouts.”

  Christ. Of course. Hadn’t I said the same thing, in no less a monument than the New York Public Library, to Doctor Paul himself?

  It’s much easier to find out about the men.

  He might not turn up in an encyclopedia, Lionel Richardson. But he must exist somewhere.

  “Lionel.” I fingered the ends of my robe. “I’d probably have to fly to England to do that.”

  Tibby took his overcoat off the stand and levered himself inside. He squashed his hat on top of his disreputable head.

  “I think that’s the idea, Vivian. Don’t you?”

  When he left, I rose from the sofa and rummaged through the kitchen until I found the brush and dustpan. I knelt on the floor and swept up the vodka shards, every last one, and let the whole glittering mess slide into the garbage can. I found a dishcloth and wiped down the wall and the floorboards, until there was no sign that anything had occurred there at all.

  At which point. The telephone rang again, like it meant business this time.

  Sally’s voice floated out from the other bedroom. “Could you answer the goddamned phone, Vivs?” A few more obscenities trailed behind. I’ll spare you the color.

  I laid my hand on the receiver. No point in hiding any longer, was there?

  “All right, Gogo,” I said. “Give it to me straight.”

  But it wasn’t Gogo, after all. It was Mums, exasperated, telling me to hurry on up to Lenox Hill Hospital, because Aunt Julie had fallen down the stairs of her Park Avenue duplex and into a coma.

  Violet

  They reach the outskirts of Berlin just before dawn. Violet lifts her head from Lionel’s shoulder to see the pinkening rooftops, the transparency of air. “What day is it?” she asks. “I’ve lost count.”

  “The twenty-fifth of July. Serbia’s reply to Austria is due today.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Unless Serbia intends to grovel at Austria’s feet, I suppose it means war.”

  But his tone is light. He drives down the empty streets, confident of the route, whistling softly. It takes Violet a moment to recognize the tune. “Stop that,” she says, laughing. “You’ll have us arrested.”

  He breaks into his booming rich baritone, echoing from the stones. Send him victorious, happy and glorious . . .

  “Lionel, you’re an idiot.”

  But he doesn’t stop, and Violet sits up. Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light . . . she sings defiantly into the morning.

  Lionel lifts his voice. Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks . . .

  . . . Whose broad stripes and bright stars . . .

  . . . God save the King!

  They duel all the way past the Reichstag, along the empty Potsdamer Platz, laughing and singing to raise the dead, until Violet’s throat aches a happy ache. Nothing can touch us. The automobile turns the corner of Kronenstrasse, and a bolt of golden-orange sunrise hits the windscreen. Lionel parks the car along the curb, just outside Violet’s apartment building. “I’ll go up with you.”

  “You shouldn’t. The attendants will notice.”

  “Let them notice. Let them see the way I look at you.” He reaches in the back for her valise. “I don’t want to be without you, not for a minute.”

  “Well, then.”

  He jumps around the front of the car and helps her out. Together they walk through the door, they nod at the sleepy doorman. Lionel’s hand grips hers. His jacket lies about her shoulders. The attendant in the lift, a man Violet doesn’t recognize, keeps his eyes trained on the silk-lined ceiling and sees no evil.

  Violet’s heart pounds as the numbers tick upward. The machinery clangs to a stop; the attendant opens the door and the grille. A musty smell floods around her: the scent of abandonment. All of the servants have gone with them to Wittenberg.

  Lionel tugs her hand. “Come along, then.”

  There isn’t much to pack; Violet only wants enough to get by until she can find new things, a new life. She picks a couple of old dresses from the wardrobe, a woolen cardigan she bought that autumn in Oxford. She folds them carefully atop her notebooks and underthings from Wittenberg, the jewelry from Walter she plans to sell. Lionel waits in the doorway, watching her, his arms folded.

  She snaps the valise shut. Lionel steps forward and takes it from her. “Is that all?”

  “No. There’s something else.”

  Lionel follows her to the study. She selects a book from one of the shelves, opens it, and takes a small key from the hollowed-out center. Lionel examines the spine and snorts. “The Hound of the Baskervilles. How clever.”

  Violet unlocks the glass shelves near the desk and flips through Walter’s journals until she finds the one she wants.

  Lionel props himself on the desk and watches her lazily. His arms are crossed against the bottom of his ribs. The valise sits next to him, atop Walter’s empty green leather blotter. “What’s that?” he asks.

  “Nothing. Just to satisfy my curiosity.” She tucks the journal into the valise and snaps it shut.

  He holds out his hand. “Shall I?”

  She hands Walter’s key to him. He slips it into its hollowed-out nest of Conan Doyle and slides the book back into the slot on the library shelf. He turns to her and smiles. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to, exactly?”

  “I thought we’d go to my hotel. Clean up and have breakfast. Do you object?” He picks up the valise and holds out his other hand for her.

  She takes it. “Not at all.”

  • • •

  THE STAFF at the Adlon is far too polite to notice their disheveled appearance, the road dust and the faint whiff of petrol. It might be Lionel’s confidence, the way he strides up to the desk with Violet’s hand indisputably enclosed within his elbow, and asks for his key.

  “My luggage is in the motor out front,” he says in German. “The Daimler. Could you have it sent up immediately.” More command than question.

  “Yes, Herr Richardson.”

  They cross the marble lobby toward the multitude of lifts. “Did they save your room for you, all this time?” asks Violet.

  “I should hope so. I paid in advance for the entire summer.”

  The lift whisks them upward. Lionel still carries Violet’s valise, as if he doesn’t trust it to any other hands. She curls her hand around his arm and wonders if he’s brought any other women into this elevator. Jane, perhaps, or some woman from a party, some wealthy baroness or an official’s bored wife. To her horror, she
hears herself asking him.

  Lionel twists his hand to knit her fingers with his. “No, Violet.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not my business, is it?”

  “Christ. Of course it is.”

  They reach his room, a comfortable corner suite with a double-doored entrance. “I wanted something comfortable, as I was staying all summer,” says Lionel, standing back to allow her through.

  The room is beautiful, furnished elegantly in pinks and greens, a large sitting room and a bedroom door to the right. The early sunlight gushes through the tall windows. Lionel sets the valise on a desk and turns to her, smiling, rubbing his unshaven cheek. “Bath first, don’t you think?”

  They bathe together in the luxurious enamel tub, surrounded by steam and a weightless translucency of sunlight. Violet lathers his chest an inch thick; she fills her hands with suds and lavishes him all over, his arms and legs and privates, his toes and ears and the sharp tip of his nose. “Now you’re all clean,” she says, “clean and bright and lovely.”

  “And scruffy.” He touches his chin.

  “Clean and bright and lovely and scruffy.”

  Lionel turns her around, against his oaken chest. He unpins her hair and washes it with gentle movements of his strong fingers. He rinses it clean. When the water cools, he wraps her in a towel and takes her to bed.

  • • •

  VIOLET LOVES the way she and Lionel make love: his exuberant movements, the impish way he tickles her and nudges unexpected parts of her body into wakefulness; the snatches of delighted laughter, the luxurious stopping and lingering. She loves the morning beauty of his body, his black hair and golden skin, his burly strength, the way the light curves around his shoulders as she rolls him over for more. The way he looks at her, as if he’s about to swallow her whole, and then he does.

  Now he clasps both her hands, now he tightens his fingers and dares her to look away. Now she finishes with a violent cry, under his naked stare, his tender pummeling, and a moment later she finishes him, too. They lie joined and senseless in the sunlit bed. He keeps his palms locked with her palms, his fever skin pressed into her fever skin, his body safe inside hers as long as he possibly can.