The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  But a trace of unease seems to have stolen into the room with the light from outside the door. It pierces Violet’s calm preparation and winds around her chest like the thread behind a needle. She counts her pulse again: sixty-nine beats to the minute.

  What an extraordinary anomaly.

  She has never experienced this sensation before an experiment. Her nerves are cool and precise; her nerves are the very reason she was first delegated to perform this particular duty. She might go further and say that her nerves had brought her to this point in her life: her work, her unconventional marriage, her existence here in Berlin in this incandescent May of 1914, in a basement laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, waiting for her pupils to dilate to the necessary degree before she can begin an experiment at the frontier of atomic physics.

  But she can’t deny the existence of this sensation that tightens about her heart. It is real, and it is quantifiable: seven additional beats of her heart in every minute.

  A double knock strikes the door.

  “Come in,” Violet says.

  She closes her eyes as the door opens, because she doesn’t want the additional light to interrupt the adjustment of her pupils. Footsteps beat against the linoleum; the door clicks shut. Her husband, probably, come to check on her progress. To stand over her and ensure that she gets nothing wrong. That she misses nothing.

  But in the split second before he speaks, Violet knows this intruder isn’t her husband. These footsteps are too heavy, the leathery air that whirls through the door with him too brash. Her senses recognize his strangeness just before his voice confirms it.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you, Mrs. Grant.”

  Violet opens her eyes.

  “My name is Richardson, Lionel Richardson. Your husband told me you wouldn’t mind my observing the experiment.”

  Your husband told me. Walter sent this stranger to her?

  Again, that unsettling sensation in her chest. If only she could see him. His black shape outlines the blacker void around him, obstructing the light from the door without a trace. His voice rumbles from the center of a capacious chest, low and respectful, the syllables clipped by precise British scissors.

  I hope I’m not disturbing you.

  “Not at all,” Violet says crisply. “Are you a colleague of his?”

  “No, no. A former student.” He makes some movement in the darkness, indicating the apparatus. “Used to do these sorts of things myself.”

  “Then I need not apologize for the darkness. Would you like to sit?” Her heart is beating even faster now, perhaps seventy-five hard strikes a minute. It must be surprise, that’s all. She’s rarely interrupted in those experiments, which are long and repetitious and generally unworthy of spectators. Her animal brain is simply reacting to the sudden presence of an unknown organism, a possible threat. An unexpected foreign invader who might be anyone or anything, but whose vital and leathery bulk doesn’t belong in the quiet darkness of her laboratory.

  “Thank you.” A chair scrapes against the linoleum, as if Lionel Richardson can see in the dark. Or perhaps he simply memorized the location of the furniture in the brief flash of light at his entrance. “Are you nearly ready to begin, Mrs. Grant?”

  “Almost.” Violet consults her watch again. “Another three minutes.”

  Richardson laughs softly. “I remember it well. No twenty minutes ever passed so strangely. Time seems to stretch out, doesn’t it? A sort of black infinity, disconnected from everything else. All sorts of profound thoughts would pass through one’s brain. Not that I could ever recall them afterward.”

  Yes, Violet thinks. That’s it exactly. “You’re here for old times’ sake, then?”

  Another laugh. “Something like that. Dr. Grant told me someone else was performing my old duties this very minute, and I couldn’t resist a peek. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  Of course she minds. Lionel Richardson seems to take up half the room, as if he’s swallowed up the blackness to leave only his own solid limbs, his broad and rumbling chest. Violet is seized with a burst of annoyance at her husband, who surely should have known better than to send this stranger to swallow up her laboratory while she sits waiting in the darkness, alone and unsuspecting.

  Richardson says, “I’d be happy to help you with the counting. I know it’s something of an eyestrain.”

  “That’s not necessary. It takes some practice, as you know.”

  “Oh, I remember how. I was the first one, you know, back in ought-nine, when your husband began his experiments. I still see those bloody little exploding lights, sometimes, when I close my eyes.”

  Violet laughs. “I know what you mean.”

  “Maddening, isn’t it? But I see the crafty doctor has found a permanent replacement for me. A far more agreeable one, at any rate.”

  This time Violet feels the actual course of acceleration in her chest, the physical sense of quickening. How did one bring one’s heart back under proper regulation after a shock? You couldn’t simply order it to slow down. You couldn’t simply say, in a firm voice, as one spoke to a misbehaving child: Sixty-two beats is more than sufficient, thank you. The heart, an organ of instinct rather than reason, had to perceive that there was nothing to fear. The chemical signals of danger, of distress, had to disperse from the blood.

  Violet flicks open her watch. “It’s time. Are you able to see?”

  “Just barely.”

  “We can wait a few more minutes, if you like.”

  “No, no. I’m not here to interrupt your progress. Carry on.”

  Violet rises from her chair and moves to the table in the center of the room, guided more by feel than by sight. She flicks the switch on the lamp, though she doesn’t look directly at the feeble low-wattage bulb. It illuminates her notepad and pencil just enough that she can write down her notes.

  She casts her eyes over the apparatus: the small box at one end, containing a minute speck of radium; the aperture on the box’s side, through which the particles of radiation shoot unseen toward the sheet of gold foil; the glass screen, coated with zinc sulfide; and the eyepiece with its magnifying lenses.

  She takes out her watch, settles her right eye on the eyepiece, and squints her left lid shut.

  A tiny green-white flash explodes in her vision, a delicate firework of breath-stopping beauty. But Violet’s breath is already stopped, already shocked by the unexpected invasion of Lionel Richardson into her laboratory, and the tiny flashes make no impression, other than the scratches of her pencil as she counts them.

  Why this oversized reaction? Why this perception of imminent danger?

  Has Walter perhaps mentioned Lionel Richardson’s name before? Is there some association buried in her subconscious that causes the synapses of her brain to crackle with electricity, to issue these messages of alarm down her neural pathways to the muscles of her heart and lungs? Or maybe it’s just that she can’t see him, can’t inspect his face and clothes and person and confirm that he’s speaking the truth, that he’s only a man, a visiting former student of her husband’s, benignly curious.

  Violet takes her eyes from the screen for an instant to check her watch. Nearly five minutes have passed. At five minutes she will draw a line under her counting marks and start again.

  “Can I help you? Keep time for you?” asks the invader.

  “It’s not necessary.” She looks at her watch. Five minutes. She draws a line.

  “Aren’t you missing your count, looking back and forth like that?”

  “A few, of course.”

  “Dr. Grant always had me take a partner to keep time. We switched off to rest our eyes.” He offers this information respectfully, without a trace of the usual scientific arrogance.

  “We don’t have the staff for that here in Berlin.”

  “You have it now.”

/>   Without taking her eye from the eyepiece, Violet grasps the watch in her left hand and holds it out. “Very well. If you insist.”

  He gathers the watch in a light brush of his fingers against her palm. “Five-minute intervals?”

  “Yes.” Violet shuts her eyes.

  “All right. Ready . . .”

  A tranquil leather-scented silence warms the air. Violet breathes it deeply inside her, once, twice.

  “Go.”

  Violet opens her eyes to the glorious flashing blackness, the stars exploding in her own minute universe. Her pencil moves on the paper, counting, counting. Lionel Richardson sits just behind her, unmoving, close enough that she can feel the heat radiating from his body. He holds her watch in his steady palm. Her gold pocket watch, unadorned, almost masculine; the watch her sister Christina gave her four years ago on a smoke-drenched pier on the Hudson River, as the massive transatlantic liner Olympic strained against her moorings a few feet away. Her watch: Violet’s only parting gift from the disapproving Schuylers.

  “Time,” says Lionel Richardson.

  Violet draws a line to begin a new count.

  “And . . . go.”

  He issues the direction with low-pitched assurance, from his invisible post at her left shoulder. He hasn’t simply swallowed the blackness, he’s become the dark space itself. Even his scent has absorbed into the air. Violet makes her tireless marks on the notepad. She sinks into the world of electric green-white scintillations, the regular strikes of radioactive particles against atomic nuclei, and somewhere in the rhythmic beauty, her heart returns at last to its usual serene pace, her nerves smooth down their ragged edges. Only the pencil, hard and sharp between her thumb and forefinger, links her to the ordinary world.

  “Time,” says Richardson, and then: “Would you like me to count this round? Your eyes must be aching.”

  Her eyes are aching. Her shoulders ache, too, and the small of her back. She straightens herself. “Yes, thank you.”

  Lionel’s chair scrapes lightly. His body slides upward in the darkness behind her. A pressure cups her right elbow: his hand, guiding her around her own chair and into his. He places the watch in her palm and settles into the seat before the eyepiece, hunching himself around the apparatus without complaint, for he’s much larger than she is.

  She lifts the watch and stares at the face. “Ready?”

  “A moment.” He adjusts himself, settles his eye back against the lint lining. His profile, lit by the dim bulb next to the notepad, reveals itself at last: firm and regular, the nose a trifle large, the hair short and dark as ink above his white collar. His forehead is high, overhanging the eyepiece, and in the soft yellow light Violet cannot detect a single line. “Ready.”

  She drops her gaze back to Christina’s watch.

  “And . . . go.”

  Vivian

  Aunt Violet. I had a great-aunt named Violet, an adulteress and murderess, about whom I’d never heard. A scientist. What sort of scientist?

  I regarded the valise on my table, and then turned to tell Doctor Paul the extraordinary news.

  Alas. Too late.

  Inexplicably, unfathomably, he lay upon my sofa, in the hollow left by Sally’s debauched corpse an hour or two earlier, so profoundly asleep I was tempted to hold my compact mirror to his mouth and check for signs of life.

  Hands to hips. “Well. There’s courtship for you.”

  But then a tiny steel ball bearing of sentiment rolled downward through the chambers of my heart. Poor dear Doctor Paul. One arm crossed atop his chest; the other dangled to the floor. His legs, far too long for the sweeping red Victorian curves of the sofa, propped themselves over the edge of the opposite armrest.

  I knelt next to him and touched the lock of hair that drooped in exhaustion to his forehead. Up close, I could see the tiny lines that fanned from the outer corners of his eyes. I bent my nose to his neck. Here, he smelled of salt instead of antiseptic, and perhaps a little long-forgotten soap, too, sweet and damp. I rubbed the tiny golden bristles of his nascent beard with my pinkie. He didn’t even flinch.

  “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.