The Secret Life of Violet Grant

“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?”

“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.”

Violet

Your 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.