The Secret Life of Violet Grant

Violet

Violet has always supposed that her liaison with Dr. Grant, and the eventual announcement of their marriage, came as a shock to their colleagues at the Devonshire Institute.

And yet how could they not have known what was taking place throughout that long winter of the affair? She was so naive and unguarded, so fearfully young and trustful. She shivers to think of it now, and yet how can she blame herself? If she were that Violet now, and Walter were that Dr. Grant, she would do it again.

The day after Dr. Grant took her virginity with tea and cake in his sitting room, Violet sat alone in the institute’s cramped dining hall, eating a typically overboiled and lukewarm lunch, when a young laboratory assistant approached her with a folded note. Miss Violet Schuyler, it was labeled, in the brusque black slashes she had come to associate with a concurrent jolt of energy inside her belly. She opened the paper to read that her presence was required in Dr. Grant’s office on a matter of immediate urgency. Five minutes later, she lay on the edge of a broad desk with her skirts raised obediently about her hips, while the head of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry conducted a rigorously invasive experiment between her legs.

That night, he walked her back to her rooms and went upstairs with her, though he was not particularly pleased by the extreme narrowness of her bed and the spartan illumination of the single lamp. He remained only half an hour, including drink and cigarette. That was a Thursday. The next evening, they met at his house and shared an intimate dinner of pheasant and a pair of 1894 Margaux in the sitting room, and afterward Violet followed Dr. Grant upstairs to his wide and well-dressed bed. “Remember, child,” he said, as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist, “nothing is unnatural that gives man and woman pleasure together. The sexual instinct is Nature itself.”

In the morning, she found three new dresses hanging in the wardrobe, next to Dr. Grant’s suits. They were for her, he said, so she would have something to wear when she stopped the night; there were also underthings in the drawer, each of them a perfect fit, and a new toothbrush in the bathroom. The housekeeper brought a tray loaded with breakfast, and Violet found she was terribly hungry.

On New Year’s Eve, Dr. Grant surprised her by driving her up to London in his motor, where they rang in the year of grace 1912 at an enormous party at the Ritz hotel and stayed all weekend in a grand suite. He took her to the theater and out to dinner, and on the final evening he presented her with a pair of thick gold bracelets, studded with tiny diamonds on the outside and engraved with his initials—WG—in a bold modern typeface on the inside. “One for each wrist,” he said, smiling, as he slid them over her amazed hands.

It still felt like a dream in those early weeks; it was a dream. Violet had never imagined herself with a lover. She knew she would never marry; she despised the thought of marriage and supposed she would eventually take a partner or two when she had the time, but she hadn’t conceived of having a whirlwind love affair like this, complete with weekends in London and extravagant gold bracelets and satiny hotel sheets. These ideas had never occurred to her.

She found, rather shamefully, that she liked it.

She liked the attention and the excitement, the sense of belonging and purpose. The shared secret, as they moved about the institute each day, each knowing what extravagant acts had occurred in Dr. Grant’s bedroom the previous night. She liked the way he looked at her when he undressed her, the fervid enjoyment he took in her young body; she liked the way he would call her into his office or wake her up in the night, as if his need for her could not be contained within respectable hours. She liked feeding his appetites. She liked the heavy drunken look of his face after he had taken her, the knowledge that she, Violet Schuyler, and she alone, had given him this intensity of pleasure he could not do without. Splendid, child, well done, that was a damned splendid fuck, he would groan, and she thought she might boil over from the joy of having satisfied the worldly and experienced Dr. Grant, of having soldered herself so thoroughly to another human being.

January fled. The afternoons began slowly to lighten as Violet danced along the Oxford streets each day, illuminating the frozen pavement, the occasional blankets of snow, the piles of exhausted slush. She could hardly now remember her despair at the beginning of September. The introductory lectures had ended, and she now worked directly in the laboratory with her eminent lover, unlocking the mysteries of the atom, every day burgeoning with the hope of some electrifying discovery. She gazed in rapture at the exquisite green-white explosions on the scintillating screen, the smacking of individual alpha particles into individual gold atoms, proving beyond doubt the existence of the atomic nucleus and the vast empty space between each one; she counted each spark as if she were counting diamonds in a crown. What did they mean? They were trying to tell her something, these flashes. They were trying to lead her to some unspeakable treasure: What was it? What was it made of, the nucleus of an atom of gold? What did it look like? And how could she find out, short of the impossible act of breaking it apart? She took her measurements, she made and remade her calculations, she ran the experiments over and over again with different isotopes. The immersion thrilled her, the sense of sinking into a three-dimensional puzzle, a new and fabulously minute universe that only a handful of men had ever seen.

And her, Violet Schuyler.

By February, her colleagues at the institute, perhaps encouraged by Dr. Grant’s example, began to soften toward her, even to speak with her. One evening, she fell to talking with one of the second-year fellows, a shy and handsome young man with friendly brown eyes, as they happened to leave the institute together. Before she realized it they had walked all the way to her own lodging house.

She had stopped, embarrassed, at the little black wrought-iron gate at the front entrance, and at that instant Dr. Grant had come swinging around the corner on his way to his own house, where they were to meet later that night, after dusk had fallen.

The greetings had been awkward, the second-year fellow sensing the current of Dr. Grant’s disapproval. In bed that night, Walter (she had finally grown used to his Christian name) had asked her how she knew young Mr. Hansbury.

“We happened to be walking out at the same time. We were talking about electrons.”

“You didn’t look as if you were talking about electrons.”

“Well, we were. What else would we be talking about?”

“He looked as if he wanted to fuck you.” Walter used those words with her, fuck and spunk and prick. They had shocked her at first, but she soon grew to appreciate their earthiness, their total absence of hypocritical Victorian euphemism. My prick is up you, child, Walter would say, with his lugubrious bedroom grin, and who could refute this fact? What point was it to pretend away man’s basic carnal urges, to deny the existence of such vital elements of the human body and the use to which they were put?

“Oh, for God’s sake, Walter. You’re not jealous.”

“You shouldn’t encourage them. Someone will find out about us.”

“I’m not encouraging anyone. Except you, of course.” She smiled.

Walter rose from the sheets and lit his pipe from a packet of matches on the bureau. “I fail to see how you could lead a man to your lodging house door without having encouraged some hope of reward, child.”

She had soothed him back to bed, but a new note had entered the air between them, and after that afternoon in late February, Walter insisted that she leave the institute every day by the rear door and meet him in the alley, from which they would walk directly to his house. If she happened to be late, the walk took place in a frigid silence; and the more frigid the silence, the more immediate and forceful were Walter’s requirements once inside. His staff seemed to recognize his moods. One look in the hallway, and the maid and housekeeper melted away downstairs, leaving free the sitting room at the back, the study, the conservatory, until Walter rang the bell for dinner.

Having never had a lover before, Violet presumed this was natural, that Walter’s need for frequent copulation—for copulation in quantity and variety and sometimes bruising intensity, for copulation at an instant’s notice—demonstrated the flattering largeness of his regard for her. When, in the middle of the afternoon, he locked the laboratory door and lifted her skirts and tailed her over a workbench, Violet felt powerful, irresistible, so uniquely and magnificently alluring that even the great Dr. Walter Grant could not rein in his animal desire for her. In his ownership of her flesh, she felt her ownership of his massive masculine will. Of, in consequence, his heart.

In April, as the watery English sun ducked around fistfuls of showers, Violet helped Walter put the finishing touches on a paper he was delivering at a conference in Brussels. The task nearly defeated her. His handwriting was impossible, his spelling atrocious, his equations riddled with the careless errors—positives and negatives unceremoniously reversed, variables switched without explanation, basic arithmetic ignored—of a man accustomed to larger thoughts. As a reward for her diligence, he included her among the small group of Devonshire fellows making the journey across the channel.

He treated her with impeccable professional indifference during the day, as any other colleague. No one could possibly have suspected that the serious and dowdily dressed Miss Schuyler crept to Dr. Grant’s nearby suite once the hotel hallways were clear at night, that he stripped away her dowdy clothes and her professional indifference and instructed her in the finer points of fellatio as he sat on the edge of the bed and scribbled notes on the text of his prepared remarks.

The result of all this hard work was a resounding triumph. Walter delivered his paper with great verve to an enthusiastic reception. Violet sat at his feet, incandescent with pride as she watched him speak, in full command of the stage, displaying the array of equations and drawings she had prepared so carefully for him. At the dinner afterward, he had been deluged with company, and Violet had stolen off directly after dessert to wait for the coast to clear, to slip into his suite and congratulate him more privately, when all his well-wishers had left and there was only the two of them, Walter and Violet.

Around eleven o’clock, the footsteps and voices began to die down outside her door, and Violet gathered her anticipation about her and left the room.

But when she turned the lock and ducked through Walter’s door, she saw no sign of him.

Well, it was hardly surprising, after such a victory. No doubt he had been delayed in cordial argument with some officious rival and would be up shortly. Tomorrow morning she and Walter were leaving for a week’s holiday, in some discreet Alpine resort of which Violet had never heard. He would want to say good-bye to his scientific friends, to perhaps share a last drink. She took off her clothes and hung them in the wardrobe and readied herself for the night.

But the minutes had ticked by, and still Violet waited in Walter’s bed, counting the repeats in the floral wallpaper by the streak of brown light from the crack in the curtains, dozing off only to jolt back awake, until the door had at last squeaked open at three o’clock in the morning. She pretended to be sleeping. Walter went to the bathroom and opened the tap in the tub, and after he had bathed and brushed his teeth, he slipped into the sheets beside her.

“Are you awake, child?” he asked gently.

She didn’t reply, but when morning arrived, and after Walter’s reassuring body had found hers in the early spring sunshine, she bent her forehead into his damp shoulder and told him that despite the diligent applications of vinegar each time they were together, she thought she might be pregnant.

Vivian

Monday morning! Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always relished the idea of a new week, and never more than when it contained the prospect of a Doctor Paul ringing my doorbell right smack at the beginning.

But first. Work. And even work had its charms today! I whistled my way up the Lexington Avenue subway and sang my way through the brass-framed revolving doors into the musty lobby of the Metropolitan building on Forty-ninth Street. My great-aunt Violet lurked somewhere in the holy sanctity of the archives here. I was sure of it! And I would find her!

“Good morning, Agatha!” I trilled to the receptionist, the instant the elevator doors staggered open on the eleventh floor.

“Miss Schuyler,” she said, in that charming voice of hers, somewhere between a rasp and a mutter. She didn’t so much as raise her shellacked gray head from her magazine, which, by the way, was not the Metropolitan, not even close, unless you took a big black permanent marker and scrawled Metro over the Cosmo. She took a long draw of her cigarette and—again, without looking, the modern miracle of her!—tipped it into the ashtray just before a long crumb tumbled from the end.

And this was the storied magazine’s face to visitors.

The switchboard rang as I swished past the desk. “Metropolitan!” Agatha snapped, like an accusation of manslaughter.

But don’t you worry. Things got better as I went along, past the industrious typing pool (to which, thank God and Gogo, I had leapfrogged membership), past secretaries with scarlet nails and towering nests of hair, past secretaries with bitten nails and limp heads of hair, past office doors and distracted editors and clench-jawed columnists pecking wit at typewriters, until I reached my own humble corner and humbler desk, of which the only redeeming features were its convenient proximity to the office of Edmund Tibbs, managing editor, and its exclusion from the incessant clacking of the typing pool.

I dropped my pocketbook into the bottom desk drawer and headed to the kitchenette.

Tibby hadn’t been kidding around about sugar, no cream. He liked a single teaspoon of the white stuff, not a grain more, and it had better be hot and it had better be brimming, and if so much as a precious drop spilled over the edge and into the saucer below, I would make it up in my own crimson blood: with sugar, no cream.

Still, regardless of that anomaly before heading into Doctor Paul’s bedroom Saturday night, I was not of the trembly-handy tribe, and this Monday morning, as every morning, I delivered Tibby his medicine intact and stood before his desk, smiling my best smile, curving my best hip, even though I knew for a fact that Tibby liked his coffee black and sweet and his chromosomes strictly XY.

He winced at the first sip, but he always did.

“Good morning, Mr. Tibbs,” I said.

“Miss Schuyler.”

“Is there anything I can do for you this morning? Any facts to check?”

If looks could growl. “Check your desk.”

“Right away, Mr. Tibbs.”

I turned heel smartly and checked said desk, where two new articles had found their way into the wire tray that controlled my fact-checking inflow. Yes, I was a fact-checker. That was my official duty, anyway; Tibby’s coffee was for free and for the understanding that a year or two of perfectly delivered joe might lead to bigger and better things.

Not that fact-checking constituted a minor patch of sand on the sunny Metropolitan beach. No no no. Our writers were brilliant wordsmiths, elegant stylists, provocative storytellers, but they rarely let an inconvenient fact get in the way of a good exposez-vous. My job was to check these baser impulses—note the double meaning—and level the Metropolitan’s chances of a messy libel lawsuit from an embarrassed husband, a shamed politician, a misbehaving starlet.

And as it turned out, I had a truffle pig’s nose for a rotten fact. Jocular reference to a Napoleonic princess giving birth to an heir and a spare? Hardly apropos, when Consuelo Vanderbilt bitterly coined the term in 1895. Andover graduate claims he gave Jack Kennedy a concussion at the Choate game in 1934? Must have occurred in an alternative universe in which pigs took wing and Andover played Choate that season.

This particular Monday morning, however, I was having an itty-bitty problem with the fact-checking, at least of the sort that I was being paid so unhandsomely to do. As I stood in the Metropolitan’s private library, poring over an encyclopedia entry for P. G. Wodehouse, my eyes kept darting to the volume that contained the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, known in imperial bygones as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut.

And a few minutes later, as I made notes about varieties of Indian tea versus those from China, I closed my eyes quite out of the blue and recalled how my fingers had traced along Doctor Paul’s interesting clavicle on Saturday night, how he had turned me onto my belly and stretched me long and wide and bit my shoulder very gently …

“Vivs! There you are.”

“Gogo. You shouldn’t sneak up on a girl.”

She turned me around. “Why, you’re flushed! Do you have a fever? Can I get you some water?”

“No, honey. Just a passing whatever. You’re looking particularly perfect this morning.”

“Do you think so?” She fluffed her pale hair and leaned forward, woman to woman. “He’s coming today, Vivs.”

“Who’s coming? Your honey bun?”

“Yes!” Gogo darted a look around my shoulder, grabbed my hand, and made like a bandit for the corner of the library. “I didn’t want to say anything. I had just about given up on him.”

“What, Mr. Perfect? I thought you were madly in love.”

“We were. I thought we were. And then … well, you know what it’s like. That feeling when he’s losing interest.” She sighed.

“But you’ve had new flowers on your desk every week.”

“Most weeks.”

“And … and you’ve gone out on dates every Saturday night.”

“Most Saturday nights.”

“And he moved to New York to be with you, didn’t he? After all your reckless passion over the summer?”

Now the blush. “Well, I don’t know about reckless passion …”

I chucked her flawless chin. “You were madly in love. Admit it.”

“Madly, Vivs.” She took my hands. “He’s the handsomest, smartest, kindest, most gentlemanly—”

“Et cetera, et cetera, ne plus ultra, to the ends of terra firma—”

“Aw, Vivs. You know I wasn’t any good at Latin.”

I smiled and squeezed her hands. “Look at your shining eyes. He’s a lucky man, this Mr. Perfect.”

“His name is David, Vivs. Da-vid.” She said it slowly, as if I might not have heard the handle before.

“David Perfect.” I waved my hand. “So why the doubt? Surely Mr. David Perfect wants to make you Mrs. David Perfect? Who better for the job than the loveliest girl in the history of Bryn Mawr College, Hepburn included?”

“Hardly.”

“And the sweetest.”

“Oh, Vivs. You’re too much.” Bubbly bubbles of laughter. “I know I was silly to doubt him; he’s not the kind of man who would ever lead a girl on. I think he must have been distracted with his new job. You know how demanding his job can be.”

I ransacked the old vault, trying to locate some mention of Mr. David Perfect’s mode of employment amid the endless reels of Gogo’s pleasant background chatter while I was checking my facts. But. Look. I couldn’t even remember the man’s first name without prompting. What chance did his career have? I considered the possibilities: lawyer, banker, broker, doctor.