The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  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.

  She opened her mouth to return this volley that did not arrive. Instead, on the end of a wary breath, she offered: “I was informed at the outset that it’s too late to enter the university for the current term.”

  He waved that aside in a flash of starched white cuff. “I shall see to it personally. You will have to join one of the women’s colleges, of course. Somerville, I think, will be best. I know the principal well; there should be no trouble at all. Have you lodgings?”

  “I am at the Crown,” she said numbly.

  He made a small black note on the paper before him. “I will see to it at once. A quiet, discreet pair of rooms. You have no companion, I take it?”

  “No. I am independent.”

  “Very good.”

  Very good. Violet absorbed the note of rich satisfaction in his voice, above the glacial white of his collar, the symmetrical dark knot of his necktie. He was wearing a tweed jacket and matching waistcoat, and when he rose to bid her a tidy good afternoon, he unfastened the top button in an absent gesture to let the sides fall apart across his flat stomach.

  Violet looked directly into his eyes, at that unsettlingly clear blue in his polished face, but her attention remained at his periphery, at that unfastened horn button, from which the tiny end of a thread dangled perhaps a quarter inch.

  Now, as she pauses once more outside her husband’s office door, she remembers longing, quite irrationally and against her finest principles, to mend it for him.

  Vivian

  By the time we reached Twenty-first Street, we were holding hands. I know, I know. I don’t consider myself the hand-holding kind of girl, either, but Doctor Paul reached for me when a checker cab screamed illegally around the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth, against the light, and what would you have me do? Shrug the sweet man off?

  So I let it stay.

  Doctor Paul had suggested walking instead of the subway, once he emerged from the hospital locker room, shiny and soapy and shaven, hair damp, body encased in a light suit of sober gray wool with a dark blue sweater-vest underneath. I would have said yes to anything at that particular instant, so here we were, trudging up Fifth Avenue, linked hands swinging between us, sun fighting to emerge above our heads.

  “You’re unexpectedly quiet,” he said.

  “Just taking it all in. I suppose you’re used to bringing home blondes from the post office, but I’m all thumbs.”

  He laughed. “I’ve never brought home a blonde from the post office, and I never will.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  “I happen to prefer brunettes.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since noon today.”

  “And what did you prefer before that?”

  “Hmm. The details are strangely hazy now.”

  I gave his hand a thankful squeeze. “Stunned you with my cosmic ray gun, did I?”

  He peered up at the sun. “I said to myself, Paul Salisbury, any girl who can say Holy Dick in the middle of a crowded post office in Greenwich Village, that girl is for keeps.”

  “Nothing to do with my irresistible face, then? My tempting figure?”

  “The thought never crossed my mind.”

  I couldn’t see for the galloping unicorns. The Empire State Building lay somewhere ahead, over the rainbow. “The blue scrubs did it for me. I’ve had a doctor complex since I was thirteen. Just ask my shrink.”

  “And to think my pops didn’t want me to go to medical school.”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to him. “You’re having me on, aren’t you?”

  He shook his head.

  “But everyone wants his son to be a doctor. No one brags about his son the banker, his son the lawyer.”

  “Not mine.”

  I squinted suspiciously. “Are you from earth?”

  “I’m from California.”

  I nodded with understanding and turned us back up the sidewalk. “Aha. That explains everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. The golden glow, the naive willingness to follow a strange girl upstairs to her squalid Village apartment. I knew you couldn’t be a native New Yorker.”

  “As you are.”

  “As I eminently am. Tell me about California. I’ve never been there.”

  He told me about cliffs and beaches and the cold Pacific current, about his family’s house in the East Bay, about the fog that rolled in during the summer afternoons, you could almost set your watch by it, and the bright red-orange of the Golden Gate Bridge against the scrubbed blue sky. Did I know that they never stopped painting that bridge? By the time they had finished the last stroke, they had to start all over again from the beginning. We were just escaping from Alcatraz when the stone lions of the New York Public Library clawed up before us.

  “After you,” said Doctor Paul.

  • • •

  “SO. I suppose we should start with Violet Schuyler,” said Doctor Paul, in his best hushed library whisper.

  “How you joke.”

  “No?”

  “My dear boy, don’t you know? It’s much easier to find out about men. Even if my aunt Violet were the most talented scientist in the Western world, she would probably only rate a small paragraph in the E.B. Either no one would have paid her any attention, or some man would have jumped in to take credit for her work.”

  “Really?” The old lifting eyebrow.

  “Really.”

  “What about Marie Curie?’

  “The exception that proves the rule. And she worked with her husband.”

  “All right, then. So what was Violet’s husband’s name?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “Shh,” said the librarian.

  The New York Times came to our rescue. “She’s a Schuyler,” I told Doctor Paul. “Even if the family disowned her, they’d still have put a wedding announcement in the paper.”

  He shook his head. “And they say Californians are the loonies.”

  “Oh, you’ll learn to love us. And our Labrador retrievers, too.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t love you. I don’t suppose you know the wedding date?”

  “I do not. But it would have taken at least a few months from meeting to marriage, don’t you think?”

  He winked. “Would it?”

  “You’re a shameless flirt, Doctor Paul.”

  “Shh,” said the librarian.

  We started with January of 1912, and in half an hour had found our mark. I whistled low, earning myself a sharp look of hatred from the librarian, or perhaps it was jealousy. “April. What, eight months? For a confirmed old bachelor? That was quick work.”

  “Even for a daughter of the Schuylers. She must have been irresistible. A shame there’s no photograph.”

  “I suppose it’s a good thing they didn’t have
the bright idea to sail home to New York and meet her parents afterward,” I said.

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “The Titanic.”

  “Oh, right.” He turned back to the frail yellow page before us and frowned. “It’s awfully concise, isn’t it?”

  I followed him. The statement was a short one, a compact jewel box of status markers, conveying only and precisely what readers of the Times needed to know about the happy bride and groom to place them in the only world that counted.

  Miss Violet Schuyler weds Dr. Walter Grant. Miss Violet Schuyler, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Schuyler of Fifth Avenue, New York City, and Oyster Bay, Long Island, was married last Monday to Dr. Walter Grant of Oxford, England, at the Oxford town hall. A short reception followed the ceremony. The couple will reside in Oxford, where Dr. Grant is chairman of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry.

  “You’re right. There should be a photo,” I said. “My aunt Julie said she was very pretty. A genuine redhead.”

  “Funny, the announcement says nothing about Violet’s being a scientist, too.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t, would it? The horror.”

  Doctor Paul straightened from the table. “We have a name now, anyway. Violet Grant, Dr. Walter Grant. The encyclopedia should have a listing, shouldn’t it?”

  We tackled the E.B. shoulder-to-shoulder, oxen in yoke. Did I mention I was enjoying myself immensely? Working with Doctor Paul gave me the most exhilarating sense of equality, the thrill of collaborative discovery. Exactly the way I had pictured my job at the magazine, before I actually entered the office two weeks ago and knocked on my editor’s door for that first journalistic assignment. Just imagine me, fresh of face, shiny of pelt, poised of pencil, doing my best Rosalind Russell before the legendary desk of my legendary editor.

  Me (humbly): What’ll it be, Mr. Tibbs? Murder trial? Corruption investigation? Fashion shoot?

  Tibby (cheerfully): No cream, extra sugar, and make it hot.

  But this. Doctor Paul’s older and wiser fingers flipping through the wispy new pages of the latest Encyclopaedia Britannica, his voice muttering Gramophone, Graves, too far, here it is, Grant. All on my behalf. All as if I belonged by his side, reading the one-column entry for Dr. Walter Grant in tandem with his own adept brain.

  Then, the coup de be-still-my-beating-heart. Doctor Paul turned, knit his devastating brows to an inquisitive point, and said the magic words: “What do you think, Vivian?”

  I think we should marry and breed.

  “I think it was a shame she killed him.”

  GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. (1862–1914) Physical chemist, an earlier colleague of Ernest Rutherford before a professional dispute caused a rift between the two, chair of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry (Oxford), and finally a fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie in Berlin, Germany, in the years before his death. His early experimentation in the discovery of the atomic nucleus paved the way for numerous advances, though by the time of his death in July 1914, his theories had reached a dead end and he had failed to produce any major original research in several years.

  Born on August 7, 1862, the only surviving child of a Manchester solicitor and the daughter of a music teacher, Grant attended first Uppingham School in Rutland, where he excelled in mathematics and Greek and won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge.

  The circumstances of his death have never been established conclusively, due in part to the state of civic confusion as Germany hovered on the brink of the First World War. According to press reports, his body was found in his flat in Kronenstrasse with a single gunshot wound to the chest in the early morning hours of July 26, 1914. Police attempted to apprehend his wife, Violet Grant, but she escaped Berlin with a man widely rumored to have been her lover, and was not seen again. No other suspect was subsequently apprehended, and the case remained open.

  “Look how handsome he is.” I tapped the tiny gray photograph of a bearded Dr. Walter Grant, right between his smug scientific eyeballs. “A crying shame.”

  “If she killed him,” said Doctor Paul. “The case remains open, it says.”

  “Who else would have done it?”

  “The lover, for one.”

  A shadow fell over the life, work, and beard of GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. An exasperated shadow, judging by the acute angle of the elbows as hands met hips.

  “That was your last warning,” the shadow whispered bitterly. “I must ask you to leave.”

  • • •

  “I WONDER who he was, this lover of Violet’s,” I said. “The encyclopedia didn’t even give his name.”

  Doctor Paul stretched out his long legs and fingered the rim of his cup. We were sitting in a booth at an overheated coffee shop on Forty-second Street, a hat toss from Grand Central Terminal, and I, watching the good doctor’s lugubrious hand circle its way into infinity, found myself in the absurd position of envying a hunk of white ceramic. “Some good-looking young fellow, I guess. Closer to her own age. She’d probably examined her future, decades of marriage to a man old enough to be her father, and realized it wasn’t worth it.”

  “What wasn’t worth it?”

  “Whatever she got from it. Money or security.” He shrugged and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”

  “Oh, thank God.” I snatched a cigarette from the pack. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  He laughed and lit me up like a gentleman. I might have lingered overmuch near his outstretched fist, though he didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve told myself I’ll quit when this damned residency is over with,” he said, pulling out one for himself.

  “I’ve told myself I’ll quit when I’m good and ready.” I took a sweet long drag, just to drive home my point, and drank my coffee in a reckless gulp. And why not? I couldn’t fault the coffee, hot hot hot; the same went for Doctor Paul’s cigarettes, Winstons, luxurious and masculine. Coffee and tobacco, that fusion of divine creation. I’d ordered a raisin bun some time ago and presumed the kitchen was now sending out to Madagascar for more cinnamon. I didn’t care. “I don’t think she wanted money from him. She wasn’t the type. If she wanted to marry for money, she’d have stayed in New York and done a much better day’s work of it.”

  “Fair enough. Security? She was alone in England. She’d left her family behind.”

  “Possibly. Or maybe she was in love with him.”

  “Really?” His voice was so saturated with doubt, I could have stretched out my two hands, wrung it from the air, and mopped it back up with a napkin.

  “Really. It’s a known phenomenon, after all. A rite of passage. Falling in love with your professor.”

  “Are you serious? An old man like that?”

  “You’re sure you want to hear this, golden boy?”

  Just before he answered, he checked himself. His blue eyes did that thing again, that darkening, as if the weight of realization brought about some chemical change in him. He picked through his words more carefully and said: “Is this about Violet, or about you?”

  Well, now.

  I am not a girl who evades a man’s gaze without good reason, but I dropped mine then, right through the gentle haze of smoke drifting from my fingers and into the hot black pool of coffee, kerplop.

  Here we were already, the moment of truth. It usually took a lot longer to arrive, didn’t it? Several dates at a minimum. Sometimes never, if the chemistry wasn’t bubbling enough to make the effort worthwhile. You circled around it as long as you could, until there was no putting it off, until the suitcases had to be dragged out from under the bed and opened, the contents examined. Had you slept with anyone? When? Why? How many? The answers could be elliptical or coded—we were engaged, that was a favorite—and the details left to the imagination, but you had to have your answer ready. Some boys wanted to
know you were lily-white; some just wanted to know you weren’t a livid scarlet. You needed to know whether he cared about your particular shade of pink, and what that meant, and whether you cared if he cared. You might even be curious about him—Yes? How many? What kind of girls?—and then it was time for the fork in the road, and whether the two of you would take it. It was a funny time, 1964. An in-betweener, a swirling slack tide.

  I had no answer ready for Doctor Paul. I had the truth, but what sane person ever wants the truth?

  “Never mind,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  I lifted my head. “Didn’t you?”

  “Not to make any judgments, Vivian. Just to know about you. What makes you—”

  “Tick?”

  “What makes you Vivian.”

  I liked the way he said my name, all throaty on the V’s, all stretched to its rightful three syllables. The diner was quiet, at least for the middle of Manhattan, only half full, giving me the illusion of privacy, the demi-sanctity of confessional. Something clattered onto the Formica before me. The raisin bun. “Thank you,” I said, without looking up.

  “Did he hurt you?” asked Doctor Paul, compassionate.

  “Did he hurt me.” I snatched the raisin bun. “Do I look like the kind of girl who lets herself get hurt?”

  “You tell me.”

  I went on with my mouth full, in a way that would have caused my mother to reach for her third vodka gimlet, no ice. “Look, a girl goes away to college, any girl, every girl, and she’s alone. No mother and father, especially no father. She meets a lot of boys, if she’s lucky, and they’re either painfully awkward or awkwardly pushy, and she wonders where all the men have gone, the ones who know how to speak and act and treat a lady. Oh, wait. Look. There’s one! Right at the front of the room, an expert in his field, eminent and confident as all get-out, holding the classroom in his chalk-dusted palm, maybe flashing you a smile, maybe holding your gaze a second or two. You find yourself going to his office to ask a question, to talk about your exam, and lo and behold, he can actually hold a conversation. He pulls out your chair for you and hangs your coat on a hook. He’s civilized. He’s a grown-up, and he acts as though you’re the only woman in the universe.” I reached for my pocketbook and shook out another smoke. Doctor Paul went for his lighter, but I waved him away and used my own. “So that’s how it happens. Daddy complex, whatever the shrinks want to call it. You think you’re safe with him, until you’re not. Until you’re losing your virginity on his office sofa, oopsy-daisy.”