The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  “Oh, yeah, lady. And a basket of fruit to welcome home the new arrival. Now get this thing off my counter, will you?”

  I looped my pocketbook over my elbow and wrapped my arms around the parcel. “Some people.”

  “Look, can I help you with that?” asked Paul.

  “No, no. I can manage.” I slid the parcel off the counter and staggered backward. “On the other hand, if you’re not busy saving any lives at the moment . . .”

  Paul plucked the parcel from my arms, not without brushing my fingers first, almost as if by accident. “After all, I already know where you live. If I’m a homicidal psychopath, it’s too late for regrets.”

  “Excellent diagnosis, Dr. Paul. You’ll find the knives in the kitchen drawer next to the icebox, by the way.”

  He hoisted the massive box to his shoulder. “Thanks for the tip. Lead on.”

  “Just don’t fall asleep on the way.”

  • • •

  GIDDY might have been too strong a word for my state of mind as I led my spanking new friend home with my spanking new parcel, but not by much. New York complied agreeably with my mood. The crumbling stoops gleamed with rain; the air had taken on that lightening quality of a storm on the point of lifting.

  Mind you. I still took care to stand close, so I could hold my umbrella over the good doctor’s glowing blond head.

  “Why didn’t you wear a coat, at least?” I tried to sound scolding, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  “I just meant to dash out. I didn’t realize it was raining; I hadn’t been outside for a day and a half.”

  I whistled. “Nice life you’ve made for yourself.”

  “Isn’t it, though.”

  We turned the corner of Christopher Street. The door stood open at my favorite delicatessen, sending a friendly matzo-ball welcome into the air. Next door, the Apple Tree stood quiet and shuttered, waiting for Manhattan’s classiest queens to liven it up by night. My neighborhood. I loved it already; I loved it even more at this moment. I loved the whole damned city. Where else but New York would a Doctor Paul pop up in your post office, packaged in blue scrubs, fully assembled and with high-voltage batteries included free of charge?

  By the time we reached my building, the rain had stopped entirely, and the droplets glittered with sunshine on the turning leaves. I whisked my umbrella aside and winked an affectionate hello to the grime in the creases of the front door. The lock gave way with only a rusty minimum of rattling. Doctor Paul ducked below the lintel and paused in the vestibule. A patch of new sunlight shone through the transom onto his hair. I nearly wept.

  “This is you?” he said.

  “Only good girls live at the Barbizon. Did I mention I’m on the fifth floor?”

  “Of course you are.” He turned his doughty shoulders to the stairwell and began to climb. I followed his blue-scrubbed derriere upward, marveling anew as we achieved each landing, wondering when my alarm clock would clamor through the rainbows and unicorns and I would open my eyes to the tea-stained ceiling above my bed.

  “May I ask what unconscionably heavy apparatus I’m carrying up to your attic? Cast-iron stove? Cadaver?”

  Oh! The parcel.

  “My money’s on the cadaver.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know who it’s from.”

  He rested his foot on the next step and cocked his head toward the box. “No ticking, anyway. That’s a good sign.”

  “No funny smell, either.”

  He resumed the climb with a precious little flex of his shoulder. The landscape grew more dismal as we went, until the luxurious rips in the chintz wallpaper and the incandescent nakedness of the lightbulbs announced that we had reached the unsavory entrance to my unsuitable abode. I made a swift calculation of dishes left unwashed and roommates left unclothed.

  “You know, you could just leave it right here on the landing,” I said. “I can manage from here.”

  “Just open the door, will you?”

  “So commanding.” I shoved the key in the lock and opened the door.

  Well, it could have been worse. The dishes had disappeared—sink, perhaps?—and so had the roommate. Only the bottle of vodka remained, sitting proudly on the radiator shelf next to the tomato juice and an elegant black lace slip. Sally’s, by my sacred honor. I hurried over and draped my scarf over the shameful tableau.

  A thump ensued as Doctor Paul laid the parcel to rest on the table. “Whew. I thought I wasn’t going to make it up that last flight.”

  “Don’t worry. I would have caught you.”

  He was looking at the parcel: one hand on his hip, the other raking through his hair in that way we girls adore. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “It’s my parcel. Can’t a girl have a little privacy?”

  “Now, see here. I carried that . . . that object up five flights of Manhattan stairs. Can’t a man have a little curiosity?”

  Again with the glittery smile. I pushed myself off the radiator. “Since you put it that way. Make yourself comfortable. Can I take your coat and hat?”

  “That hurt.”

  I slipped off my wet raincoat and slung it on Sally’s hat tree, a hundred years old at least and undoubtedly purloined. I placed my hat on the hook above my coat, taking care to give my curls an artful little shake. Well, you can’t blame me for that, at least. My hair was my best feature: brown and glossy, a hint of red, falling just so around my ears, a saucy flip. It distracted from my multitude of flaws, Monday to Sunday. Why not shake for all I was worth?

  I turned around and sashayed the two steps to the table. Also purloined. Sally had told me the story yesterday, over our second round of martinis: the restaurant owner, the jealous wife, the police raid. I’ll spare you the ugly details. In any case, our table was far more important than either of us had a right to own—solid, square, genuine imitation wood—which now proved positively providential, because my mysterious gift from the post office (the parcel, not the blonde) would have overwhelmed a lesser piece of furniture. As it was, the beast sat brown and hulking in the center, battered in one corner, stained in another, patched with an assortment of foreign stamps.

  “Well, well.” I peered over the top. “What have we here?”

  Miss Vivian Schuyler, read the label. Of 52 Christopher Street, et cetera, et cetera, except that my first name appeared over a scribbled-out original, and my building address likewise.

  “It looks as if it’s been forwarded,” I said.

  “The plot thickens.”

  “My mother’s handwriting.” I ran my finger over the jagged remains of Fifth Avenue. “My parents’ address, too.”

  “That sounds reasonable.” He remained a few respectful feet away, arms crossed against his blue chest. “Someone must have sent it to your parents’ house.”

  “Apparently. Someone from Zurich, Switzerland.”

  “Switzerland?” He uncrossed his arms and stepped forward at last. “Really? You have friends in Switzerland?”

  “Not that I can remember.” I was trying to read the original name, beneath my mother’s black scribble. V something something. “What do you think that is?”

  “It’s not Vivian?”

  “No, it ends with a t.”

  An instant’s reflection. “Violet? Someone had your name wrong, I guess.”

  For a man who’d just walked coatless through the dregs of an October rain, Doctor Paul was awfully warm. I wore a cashmere turtleneck sweater over my torso, ever so snug, and still I could feel the rampant excess wafting from his skin, an unconscionable waste of thermal energy. Up close, he smelled like a hospital, which bothered me not at all.

  I sashayed to the kitchen drawer and withdrew a knife.

  “Ah, now the tr
uth comes out. Make it quick.”

  “Silly.” I waved the knife in a friendly manner. “It’s just that I don’t have any scissors.”

  “Scissors! You really are a professional.”

  “Stand aside, if you will.” I examined the parcel before me. Every seam was sealed by multiple layers of Scotch tape, as if the contents were either alive or radioactive, or both. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You know, I am a trained surgeon.”

  “So you say.” I sliced along one seam, and another. Rather expertly, if you must know; but then I had done the honors of the table at college since my sophomore year. Nobody at Bryn Mawr carved up a noble loin like Vivian Schuyler.

  The paper shell gave way, and then the box itself. I stood on a chair and dug through the packing paper.

  “Steady, there.” Doctor Paul’s helpful hands closed on the back of the chair, and it ceased its rickety-rocking obediently.

  “It’s leather,” I said, from inside the box. “Leather and quite heavy.”

  “Do you need any help? A flashlight? Map?”

  “No, I’ve got it. Here we are. Head, shoulders, placenta.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Neither.” I grasped with both hands and yanked, propelling myself conveniently backward into Doctor Paul’s alert arms. We tumbled pleasantly, if rather ungracefully, to the disreputable rug. “It’s a suitcase.”

  • • •

  I CALLED my mother first. “What is this suitcase you sent me?”

  “This is not how ladies greet one another on the telephone, darling.”

  “Each other, not one another. One another means three or more people. Chicago Manual of Style, chapter eight, verse eleven.”

  A merry clink of ice cubes against glass. “You’re so droll, darling. Is that what you do at your magazine every day?”

  “Tell me about the suitcase.”

  “I don’t know about any suitcase.”

  “You sent me a package.”

  “Did I?” Another clink, prolonged, as of swirling. “Oh, that’s right. It arrived last week.”

  “And you had no idea what was inside?”

  “Not the faintest curiosity.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  “From whom, darling.” Oh, the ring of triumph.

  “From whom is the package, Mums?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Do you know anybody in Zurich, Switzerland?”

  “Nobody to you. Vivian, I’m dreadfully bored by this conversation. Can’t you simply open the damned thing and find out yourself?”

  “I already told you. It’s a suitcase. It was sent to Miss Violet Schuyler on Fifth Avenue from somebody in Zurich, Switzerland. If it’s not mine—”

  “It is yours. I don’t know any Violet Schuyler.”

  “Violet is not nearly the same as Vivian. Doctor Paul agrees with me. There’s been a mistake.”

  A gratifying pause, as Mums was set back on her vodka-drenched heels. “Who is Doctor Paul?”

  I swiveled and fastened my eyes on the good doctor. He was leaning against the wall next to the window, smiling at the corner of his mouth, blue scrubs revealed as charmingly rumpled now that the full force of sunlight was upon them. “Oh, just the doctor I met in the post office. The one who carried the parcel back for me.”

  “You met a doctor at the post office, Vivian?” As she might say, the gay bathhouse on Bleecker Street.

  I leaned my hip against the table, right next to the battered brown valise, trusting the whole works wouldn’t give way beneath me. I was wearing slacks, unbelted, as befitted a dull Saturday morning, but Doctor Paul deserved to know that my waist-to-hip ratio wasn’t all that bad, really. I couldn’t have said that his expression changed, except that I imagined his eyes took on a deeper shade of blue. I treated him to a slow wink and wound the telephone cord around my fingers. “Oh, you’d adore Doctor Paul, Mums. He’s a surgeon, very handsome, taller than me, seems to have all his teeth. Perfectly eligible, really, unless he’s married.” I put the phone to my shoulder. “Doctor Paul, are you married?”

  “Not yet.”

  Phone back to ear. “Nope, not married, or so he claims. He’s your dream come true, Mums.”

  “He’s not standing right there, is he?”

  “Oh, but he is. Would you like to speak to Mums, Doctor Paul?”

  He grinned, straightened from the wall, and held out his hand.

  “Oh, Vivian, no . . .” But her last words escaped me as I placed the receiver in Doctor Paul’s palm. His palm: wide, firm, lightly lined. I liked it already.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Schuyler. . . . Yes, she’s behaving herself. . . . Yes, I carried the parcel all the way up those wretched stairs. That’s the sort of gentleman I am, Mrs. Schuyler.” He returned my wink. “As a matter of fact, I do think there’s been some mistake. Are you certain there’s no one named Violet in your family? . . . Quite certain? . . . Well, I am a doctor, Mrs. Schuyler. I’m accustomed to making a diagnosis based on the symptoms presented by the subject.” A hint of a blush began to climb up his neck. “Hard to say, Mrs. Schuyler, but—”

  I snatched the receiver back. “That will be enough of that, Mums. I won’t have you embarrassing my Doctor Paul with your remarks. He isn’t used to them.”

  “He is a dream, Vivian. My hat’s off to you.” Clink, clink, rattle. The glass must be almost empty. “Try not to sleep with him right away, will you? It scares them off.”

  “You would know, Mums.”

  A deep sigh. Swallowed by the familiar crash of empty vodka glass on bedside table. “You’re coming for lunch tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Good. We’ll see you at twelve sharp.” Click.

  I set the receiver in the cradle. “Well, that’s Mums. I thought I should warn you from the get-go.”

  “Duly warned.”

  “But not scared?”

  “Not a lick.”

  I tapped my fingernails against the telephone. “You’re certain there’s a Violet Schuyler somewhere in this mess?”

  “Well, no. Not absolutely certain. But the fact is, it’s not your suitcase, is it?”

  I cast the old gaze suitcase-ward and shuddered. “Heavens, no.”

  “A cousin, maybe? On your father’s side? Lost her suitcase in Switzerland?”

  “You mean a century or so ago?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  I set the telephone down on the table and fingered the tarnished brass clasp of my acquisition. As ancient as my mother’s virtue, that valise, and just as lost to history: cracked and dusty, bent in all the wrong places. A faint scent of musty leather crept up from its creases. There was no label of any kind.

  I don’t mean to shock you, but I’ve never considered myself an especially shy person, now or then. And yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to undo that clasp and open the suitcase in the middle of my ramshackle Greenwich Village fifth-floor apartment. There was something odd and sacred about it, something inviolable in all that mustiness. (Quite unlike my mother’s virtue, in that respect.)

  My hand fell away. I looked back at the telephone. “I think it’s time to call Great-aunt Julie.”

  • • •

  “VIOLET SCHUYLER, DID YOU SAY?”

  “Yes, Aunt Julie. Violet Schuyler. Does she exist? Do you know her?”

  “Well, well.” The line went quiet. I imagined her pacing to the limit of the telephone cord, like a horse on a gilded Park Avenue picket line. I imagined her pristine sixty-two-year-old face, her well-preserved brow making the ultimate sacrifice to this unexpected Saturday-morning conundrum.

  “Aunt Julie? Are you there?”

  “You’re certain the name was Violet? Foreign handwriting c
an be so atrocious.”

  “It’s definitely Violet. Doctor Paul concurs.”

  “Who’s Doctor Paul?”

  “We’ll get to him later. Let’s talk about Violet. Obviously you know the name.”

  She exhaled with drama, as if collapsing on the sofa. I heard the scratching of her cigarette lighter. Must be serious, then.

  “Yes, I know the name.”

  “And?”

  A long breath against the mouth of the receiver. “Darling, she was my sister. My older sister, Violet. A scientist. She murdered her husband in Berlin in 1914 and ran off with her lover, and nobody’s heard from her since.”

  Violet, 1914

  BERLIN

  The Englishman walks through the door of Violet’s life in the middle of an ordinary May afternoon, smelling of leather and outdoors.

  She’s not expecting him. In that hour, Berlin is crowded with light, incandescent with sunshine and possibility, but Violet has banished brightness within the thick redbrick walls of her basement laboratory. She closes the door and lowers herself into a wooden chair in the center of the room, where she stares without moving at the heavy blackness surrounding her.

  In her blindness, Violet’s other senses rise up with primeval sharpness. She counts the careful beats of her heart, sixty-two to the minute; she hears the click of footsteps down the linoleum hallway outside her room. The sterile scents of the laboratory fill her nostrils: cleaning solutions and chemicals, paper and pencil lead. Deeper still, she feels the weight of the furniture around her, interrupting the empty space. The chairs, the table, the radioactive apparatus she is about to employ. The door in the corner, from which she can just begin to detect a few thin lines of light stealing past the cracks.

  As she sits and waits, as her pupils dilate by tiny fractions of degrees, the stolen light from the doorway finds the walls and the furniture, and the intricate charcoal shadow of the apparatus atop the table. Violet removes a watch from her pocket and consults the luminous dial. She has been sitting in her shapeless void for ten minutes.

  Ten more minutes left.

  Violet replaces her watch and resists the urge to rise and check the apparatus. She set it up with her own hands; she has already inspected each detail; she has already performed this experiment countless times. What possible surprise could it hold?