The Secret Life of Violet Grant
“I don’t remember feeling any such urges.”
The stroking continued, an inch farther up her leg. “Nonsense, dear child. It’s perfectly natural, the sexual instinct. You should never feel ashamed of your desires; you should never feel as if you must deny the existence of these inclinations. Of what you want with me.”
Another inch.
Violet was dizzy with disbelief. She had half expected this moment, had at some level determined to accept it, and now that it had arrived, now that the impossible invitation had quite clearly been made, she found that her heart, her presumably logical and scientific heart, was beating too frantically to allow words.
Dr. Grant picked up her hand and kissed it. His beard scratched her fingers. “Have I frightened you, child?”
Violet wanted to sound worldly. “No.”
“You are very beautiful. It’s natural that men should desire you.”
“I … I suppose so.”
He kissed her hand again, and then leaned his face to hers and kissed her very gently on the lips. His beard tickled her chin; his mouth was soft and tasted like tea. His other hand still lay on her thigh, palpating, gathering the fine wool of her skirt between his fingers. His thumb crawled upward, an astonishingly long thumb. “Let me show you, child. Let me give you what you’re longing for. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid.”
Dr. Grant took her right hand and guided it to the apex of his trousers.
Violet’s memory, usually so clear and precise, turns blurry at this point. She remembers her surprise at the bony hardness of Dr. Grant’s flesh beneath her fingers; she knew the theoretical concept of the male erection, of course, but it was another thing to experience it by touch. But she can never afterward remember the true sequence of events after that: whether he kissed her again or led her to the sofa; whether he removed his own clothes first or hers. Hers, probably. He was so eager to uncover her, so explicit in his approval of her sleek newborn skin, her firm breasts, her bottom, the pretty triangle between her legs, which she attempted at first to keep closed in a vestigial show of virgin modesty.
But Dr. Grant ridiculed her clenched muscles. He drew away the fig leaf of her right hand with a murmured, Come, now, child. Don’t be silly. Let me see you. He climbed on top of her and gripped her round young bottom, and for all Violet’s fearful anticipation, the act itself was over quickly: a shove, a stab of pain, the intimate shock of penetration. He heaved once, twice, and went rigid, stretched upward in an arc of ecstasy while the violins shrieked across the room. A groan emerged from between his clenched teeth, and then Dr. Grant collapsed like a dead man atop her chest, vanquished, his tabby beard stabbing her cheek.
She lay beneath him, equally motionless, a little stunned, and observed the pattern of the ceiling plaster above her, the curtains still drawn wide against the darkness of the back garden. The music finished, and the phonograph bell released a steady cyclical scratch into the still air.
She wondered how the two of them might look to any intruder peeping through the glass: Dr. Grant’s white back covering her chest, his buttocks fixed in the cradle of her hips; her left knee raised against the cushions and her right leg slipping inexorably down the sofa’s narrow edge. The deed done, her shining virginity consigned to the past, like an unneeded relic, like the bric-a-brac on her parents’ mantel. A quarter hour ago she had been sipping tea.
Her parents. How horrified they would be, how prostrate with musty horror at her actions, her willing participation in her own seduction. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Perhaps they would simply shake their heads and say, You see? We knew she would come to a bad end, we knew nothing good would come of all this scientific nonsense.
Dr. Grant lifted his head and looked at her with affection. His face was flushed, the tip of his nose the color of candied cherries. “Good girl.” He kissed her breast. “Brave girl. You did well. At last. God, that was splendid.”
What should she say to that? Thank you? She smiled instead and touched his damp temple.
Dr. Grant rose and drew on his trousers. He poured her another glass of brandy and returned, balancing himself on the strip of damask next to her naked hip. “Drink.”
She sat up and drank the brandy. It burned less this time, spreading instead a comfortable warmth through her middle.
“How do you feel, child?”
“Quite well.”
“Good girl.” He put his fingertip to the bottom of the brandy glass and nudged it to her lips. When she was finished, he rearranged the sofa cushions at her back, he added coals to the fire and brought her cake and sandwiches from the table, which he shared with her, sitting close, his body actually touching hers, and told her how well she had pleased him, how long he had been imagining this, how he had felt when he was inside her. He spoke with total candor, a complete freedom of vocabulary.
Violet tried to keep her gaze on his face, but she couldn’t help stealing glimpses of the delicate graying curls on his chest, the plaited tendons of his forearms as he ate his cake, which was frosted with buttercream and studded with tiny black poppy seeds. She saw the indent of his navel, just above the waist of his checked wool trousers, and his braces dangling down past his hips. An odd thrill ran through her limbs: excitement and a sort of bemused nausea. No turning back now.
After a while, he asked her again how she felt, and she had said again that she was quite well, and she realized that she meant it. The room was warm, and the brandy simmered happily in her veins. The shock had faded, leaving relief in its place. (Relief for what, she wasn’t quite sure.) Dr. Grant moved closer. He lifted her hair and kissed it. “This lovely hair. I’ve pictured it like this, spread out on my sofa cushion, from the first moment you walked into my office, months ago. You must grow it longer for me, child.”
“If you like.”
Dr. Grant put on his shirt, secured his braces, and left the room. He returned with a black rubber bulb syringe and a jar of vinegar, and told her she should use the lavatory to clean herself, and to do it thoroughly and at once to avoid any consequences of the afternoon’s work. Violet, knowing almost nothing about the prevention of pregnancy, presuming Dr. Grant was an expert, obeyed him to the letter, though the vinegar stung horribly on her raw flesh.
By now it was past seven o’clock. Dr. Grant helped her dress and walked her to her lodging house, where they stood close in the chill gloom of the hallway, at the bottom of the stairs. There was no sign of the landlady. Violet’s head was buzzing. She asked him if he wanted to come upstairs, and he smiled and said no, not this time. He recommended she soak in a warm salt bath for at least half an hour before bed.
Then he ran his hand over her hair and kissed her good night, and told her he was looking very much forward to seeing her again.
Vivian
Doctor Paul was moving invisibly around the edge of the bed, like a certain six-foot rabbit you might or might not have encountered. After all that vigorous exercise I shouldn’t have woken up, but I did. We New Yorkers are an alert and suspicious breed.
“Go back to sleep, Vivian,” he said.
“What time is it?”
He sank into the mattress next to me. It was too dark to see his face properly, but the Manhattan glow cast rings of white light around his pupils and made him less invisible. “Eleven-thirty. I have to leave for the hospital.” He brushed the hair away from my face and tucked it behind my ear, as if I were a child with a trick appendix and not a woman lying naked in his bed, flushed of skin and dreamy of eye.
“That was reckless of us,” I said.
“Fraught with danger,” he agreed. Now the thumb on my cheekbone. Was there no end to him?
I said: “You aren’t new at it, however.”
“No.” He hesitated. “But never like this.”
“No. Not even close.”
He might have sighed a little. Probably he did. “Vivian …”
“Already with the Vivian.”
“Stop it, will you? I was just going to say you’re dazzling. I’m dazzled, I’m upside down and inside out and … God, Vivian. I don’t know what to say. There aren’t words. I just want to crawl back under the blanket and spend my life doing that with you. And everything else we did today.”
“Except that you’re married? On the lam? You have a dozen ankle-biters back home in San Francisco?”
“None of those things. I just … just a loose end or two to tie up, that’s all. Nothing for you to worry about.”
I nodded. “Everyone has a loose end or two.”
“Do you?”
“I might.” I looked straight into those light-circled pupils. “But not at the moment.”
This time he sighed in earnest. “Well, then. When can I see you again?”
“When does your shift end?”
He laughed. “Twelve long hours. But I need to sleep, actually sleep this time, and clean up. And—”
“Loose ends.”
“Just one, really. So … Monday evening? Six o’clock? Dinner?”
“You don’t have my telephone number.”
“I have your address.”
I opened my arms. “Kiss me good-bye, Doctor.”
THE THIRD TIME I woke up, it was full morning, and my love-struck body was twisted into a cocoon made of Doctor Paul’s sheets. I had to untangle myself before I could reach down for the alarm clock, and then I nearly went into cardiac arrest. It was ten a.m. I’d never slept that late in my life. I’d certainly never known the luxury of waking up in a man’s bed before.
Oh, ho? You don’t believe me, Vivian Schuyler, not for a second?
Very well, then. Picture me, a wise fool of a college sophomore, caressing the dampened nape of my professor’s neck, staring up at his office ceiling, moon-eyed as all get-out. I watch him heave himself up, shuck off the Trojan, straighten his trousers, and light the obligatory cigarette.
Me (dreamily): Let’s make love at your house next time. I’ll bring champagne and make you pancakes in the morning.
Professor (lovingly): Let’s just meet at the library and screw in the stacks, shall we?
But that was all in the past, wasn’t it? I rose from Doctor Paul’s bed, wrapped myself in a sheet, and found my pocketbook in the living room. I lit a cigarette and leaned against a stack of moving boxes. A piece of paper caught my eye, taped to the icebox.
Vivian
Milk in the fridge. Coffee in the pot. Toast in the cabinet. Heart in your hands. For unknown reasons, the hot water knob in the shower opens to the right.
Still dazzled.
Paul
Now, this was what I called a love note. I kissed that sweet little scrap of nonsense and slipped it into my pocketbook.
When I’d finished my cigarette, I showered, brief and scalding hot, and dressed again in my shameful clothes. I plugged in the percolator. I found fresh sheets in the box marked BEDROOM and made up Doctor Paul’s bed with precision hospital corners and lovingly fluffed-up pillows.
The clock now read eighteen minutes past eleven. I poured myself a hot one, picked up the telephone, and dialed up Margaux Lightfoot.
“Why, hello, Vivs. How was your Saturday night?”
“I met a boy, honey,” I said.
Thrilled gasp. “You didn’t!”
“I did. I’m over at his place right now, drinking coffee.”
Shocked gasp. “You didn’t!”
“I did, indeedy. Twice.” I lit another cigarette and leaned back against the cushion on the living room floor, like the tart I was. The telephone cord spiraled around my right foot.
“You’ll scare him off,” said Gogo.
“Never mind that. I’m off to Sunday lunch right now, and I need your help.”
“But what’s he like, Vivs? Is he a dreamboat?”
“The absolute boatiest. But listen. I’ve just discovered I have a long-lost aunt who murdered her husband fifty years ago. Do you think you could get your father to let me look in the archives a bit tomorrow morning?”
“Oh, Vivs, I don’t know. It’s his holiest of holies. He doesn’t even let me go in there unless it’s magazine business.”
“I could make it magazine business. I could find out what really happened and write up the story, a big investigative piece.” I unwound my foot and wound it back again the other way. “The whole thing is just so juicy, Gogo, just too succulent. Her husband was a physicist, a hotshot, entry in the E.B. and everything, and she just … disappeared. With her lover. Right before the war. Don’t you think that’s scandalous? And I never even knew!”
A current of hesitation came down the line. Gogo was the dearest of the dear, but some might say she lacked a certain je ne sais sense of adventure.
“Well, Gogo? Don’t you think it would make a perfect story?”
“Of course I do, Vivs,” she said loyally. “But you know … you aren’t really … you’re not one of the writers yet. Not officially.”
“Oh, I know I’m just fetching old Tibby’s coffee for now, but this is large change. Really large change. And you know I can tell a story. Your father knows it. I can do this, Gogo.”
“I’ll talk to him about it.”
“Mix him a martini first. You know he loves your martinis.”
“I’ll do my best, I promise. But never mind all that! I want more about this boy of yours. What’s his name? What does he do?” She lowered her voice to a whisper of guilty curiosity. “What did he do last night?”
“Oh, my twinkling stars, what didn’t he do.” I straightened from the cushion. “But I don’t have time now, Gogo. Sunday lunch starts at twelve sharp, or I’ll be heave-hoed out of the family. Which is a tempting thought, but I’ll need my inheritance one day, when my luck runs out.”
“I want details tomorrow morning, then. Especially the ones I shouldn’t hear.”
“You’ll have your details, if I have my afternoon in the archives.”
Despairing sigh. “You’re a hard woman, Vivian Schuyler.”
“One of us has to be, Gogo, dear. Go give that boy of yours a kiss from me.” I mwa-mwa’d the receiver, tossed it back in the cradle, and stared at the ceiling while I finished my coffee and cigarette.
Was I speculating about Violet, or recalling my mad honey-stained hour of excess with Doctor Paul?
I’ll let you decide that one for yourself.
NOW, you might have assumed that my mother named me Vivian after herself, and technically you’d be right. After all, we’re both Vivians, aren’t we? And we’re mother and daughter, beyond a doubt?
It’s a funny story, really. How you’ll laugh. I know I did, when my mother explained it to me over vodka gimlets one night, when I was thirteen. You see, she went into labor with me ten whole days before the due date, which was terribly inconvenient because she had this party to go to. Well, it was an important party! The van der Wahls were throwing it, you see, and everybody would be there, and Mums even had the perfect dress to minimize the disgusting bump of me, not that she ever had much bump to speak of, being five-foot-eleven in her stocking feet and always careful not to gain more than fifteen pounds during pregnancy.
Well. Anyway. There I inconveniently arrived, five days before the van der Wahls’ party, six pounds, ten ounces, and twenty-two gazelle inches long, and poor Mums had no more girl names because of my two older sisters, so she left unchanged the little card on my bassinet reading Baby Girl Schuyler, put on her party dress and her party shoes, and checked herself out of the hospital. Voilà! Disaster averted.
Except that when the nanny arrived the next day to check me out of the hospital, they needed a name in order to report the birth. I don’t know why, they just did. So the nanny said, hmm, Vivian seems like a safe choice. And the nurses said, Alrighty, Vivian it is.
Oh, but you’d never guess all this to see us now. Just look at the ardent way I swept into the Schuyler aerie on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street, tossed an affectionate kiss on Mums’s powdered cheek, and snatched the outstretched glass from her hand.
“You slept with him, didn’t you?” she said.
“Of course I did.” I sipped delicately. “But don’t worry. He practically asked me to marry him on the spot.”
“Practically is not actually, Vivian.”
I popped the olive down the hatch. “Trust me, Mums. Is Aunt Julie here today?”
“No, she’s having lunch with the Greenwalds.” Out came the moue, just like that.
“Ooh, and how are our darling Jewish cousins doing these days? Has Kiki had her baby yet?” I watched her consternation with delight. Poor old Mums never could quite accustom herself to what she was pleased to call the Hebrew stain in the Schuyler blood. Of which, more later.
Mums made a triumphant little cluck of her tongue. “Not yet. I hear she’s as big as a house.”
“Oh, maybe it’s twins! Wouldn’t that be lovely!” I pitched that one over my shoulder on the way to the living room, where my father wallowed on a sofa with my sister to his left and a fresh pair of trickling gimlets lined up to his right. (The vodka gimlet was one of the few points of agreement between my parents.) He staggered to his feet at the sight of me.
“Dadums! Handsome as ever, I see.” I kissed his cheek, right between two converging red capillaries.
“You look like a tramp in that dress.” He returned the kiss and crashed back down.
“That’s the point, Dad. Two guesses whether it did the trick.”
“Don’t listen to him, Vivs. You look gorgeous.” Pepper pulled me down next to her for a cuddle. “A little creased, though,” she added in a whisper.
“Imagine that,” I whispered back. We linked arms. Pepper was my favorite sister by a ladies’ mile. Neither of us could politely stand Tiny, who had by the grace of God married her Harvard mark last June and now lived in a respectably shabby house in the Back Bay with a little Boston bean in her righteous oven. God only knew how it got there.
“I want details,” said Pepper.
“Take a number, sister.”
Mums appeared in the doorway with her cigarette poised in its holder. She marched straight to the drinks tray. “Charles, tell your daughter what a man thinks of a girl who jumps into bed with him right away.”
He watched her clink away with ice and glass. “Obviously, I have no idea,” he drawled.
Pepper jumped to her feet and slapped her hands over her ears. “Not another word. Really. Stop.”
Mums turned. The stopper dangled from one hand, the cigarette holder from the other. So very Mumsy. “What are you suggesting, Charles?”
“Dad was only celebrating your renowned virtue, Mums. As do we all.”
She turned back to her mixology. “Fine. Do as you like. I’d just like to point out that among the three of you, only Tiny’s found a husband.”
“Mums, I’d rather die a virgin than marry Franklin Hardcastle,” said I.
“No chance of that,” muttered Pepper.
“Pot, meet kettle,” I muttered back.
Mums was crying. “I miss her.”
“Now, now,” I said. “No use weeping over spilled milk. Especially when the milk took so excruciatingly long to get spilled.”
“At least one of my daughters has a sense of female decorum.” Sniff, sip, cigarette.
“I can’t imagine where she got it from,” said Pepper. God, I loved Pepper. We were simpatico, Pepper and me, perhaps because we’d arrived an unseemly twelve months apart. As a teenager, I’d once spent an entire morning smuggling through Mums’s old letters to discover whether we were half sisters or full. I’d have to concede full, given the genetic evidence. Tiny, I’m not so sure.
“Apparently not from our great-aunt Violet.” I piped the words cheerfully.
Next to me, Dad exploded into a fit of coughing.
Mums’s red eyes peeped over her poisons. “Are you all right, Charles?”
“Who’s Aunt Violet?” asked Pepper.
“Oh, this isn’t about that package, is it?” said Mums.
I pounded Dad’s broad back. The hacking was beginning to break up, thank goodness, just as his face shifted from red to purple. “Deep breaths,” I said.
“What package?” asked Pepper.
“Yesterday I picked up a package from the post office. Mums had forwarded it to me.” I kept up the pounding as I spoke. “It was a suitcase belonging to a Violet Schuyler. Aunt Julie said she was our aunt, and—this is the best part, Pepper, so listen up—she murdered her husband in 1914 and ran off with her lover. Isn’t it delicious?”
Dad renewed his spasm of choking. I turned back to him. “Glass of water, Daddy, dear?”
He shook his head.
“As you see,” I told Pepper, “Dad’s heard of her. But the point is, we have a precedent in this family for independent women. It’s in our blood.”
“But Mums isn’t an independent woman,” said Pepper. “She just has a weakness for parties and married men.”
“I’m standing right here, you ungrateful child.”
“True, but she’s not a real Schuyler, is she?” I turned to Mums. “Not by blood.”
“Thank God,” said Mums. She found her favorite armchair and angled herself into it like a movie star, drink and smoke balanced exquisitely in each hand. “I have my faults, but I haven’t murdered your father. Yet.”
“Small mercies.” Dad had finally recovered. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his battered gold cigarette case, which had been to Eagle’s Nest and back, comforting him in every trial.
“That bad, is it?” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean.” He lit his cigarette with a shaky hand.
“Now, Dad. It’s been fifty years since the alleged crimes. Do spill.”
“There’s nothing to spill.”
“Are you saying she didn’t exist?”
“She existed, of course.” He exhaled a good-sized therapeutic cloud and inhaled his drink. “But you’ve just about summed up all I know. Your grandparents never talked about it.”
“But you must have heard something else. Names, rumors, something.”
A rare sharp look from old Dadums. “Why do you want to know?”
“Curiosity.”
My father heaved himself up from the sofa and walked to one of the stately sash windows perched above the park. A magnificent thirty-foot living room, the old Schuyler apartment had, thrown open to guests in 1925 by my grandfather and not much redecorated since. We took our drinks from the same crystal decanters, we wobbled across the same Oriental rugs, we sank our backsides into the same mahogany-framed furniture under the gazes of the same disapproving portraits. Possibly Mums had reupholstered at one point, but the sagging cushions were all Schuyler. Dad jiggled his empty ice. “Well, she was a scientist. Left for Cambridge or Oxford, I forget which, a few years before the war.”
“Oxford,” I said.
“She married a professor, and then they moved to Berlin at some point. He was at some sort of institute there.”
“The Kaiser Wilhelm.”
Mums did the daggering thing with her eyebrows. “How do you know all this?”
“It’s called a li-brar-y, Mums.” I dragged out the word. “You go there to read about things. They have encyclopedias, periodicals, Peyton Place. You’d be amazed. Proceed, Dad.”
“No, you go ahead. Obviously, you know more than I do.”
“Just a few facts. Nothing about her. What she was like.”
“I didn’t know her. I was born during the war.”
“But Grandfather must have said something about her. You can’t have just pretended she never existed.”
“Oh, yes, they could,” said Pepper.
“She didn’t get along with my father,” said Dad slowly. He was still looking down at the park, as if it contained the secret to his lost youth: the handsome face that had drawn in my mother’s adoration, the mobile spirit that had seen him off to war. I caught glimpses of it sometimes, when we were alone together, just him and me, walking along some quiet path in that self-same Central Park or taking in a rare Yankees game. I could almost see his jowls disappear, his eyelids tighten, his irises regain their storied Schuyler blue. His voice lose its endearing tone of sour-flavored aggression. “Anything I heard about her, I heard from Aunt Christina.”