The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  “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.”

  “Well, that’s not much use, is it? She died eons ago.”

  “Vivian, really,” said Mums.

  But Dad turned to me with a touch of smile. “Twenty-five years may seem like eons to you, my dear, but I can remember that hurricane like it was yesterday.”

  “And she was close to Aunt Christina?”

  “I don’t know if they were close.” He found the ashtray on the drinks table. “But they wrote to each other. Kept in touch. I remember she said that Violet was an odd bird, a lonely girl. I don’t think she was happy.”

  “Did Aunt Christina know what happened? The murder? The lover? Did she know his name?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Mums rolled her head back to face the ceiling.

  “Hardly the kind of thing she would tell me,” said my father.

  “Anything, Dad.”

  He didn’t look surprised at my curiosity. The sacks beneath his eyes hoisted thoughtfully upward, and he folded his arms and leaned against the window frame. “I don’t know. There might have been a baby.”

  “Charles, must you be vulgar?”

  “Or not.” He shook his head. The fumes wafted. “You’d have to ask Aunt Christina.”

  “Many thanks.”

  “I have a Ouija board somewhere,” said Pepper helpfully.

  At which point the housekeeper saved us, announcing lunch, and we shifted ground to the dining room and a tasteful selection of sliced meats and cooked eggs and salads with mayonnaise. It was not until the end of the meal that the shadow of Aunt Violet cast itself once more upon our protruding eggy bellies. Naturally, Pepper was to blame. She stirred cauldrons like a witch in a Scottish play.

  “Here’s what I think.” She helped herself to Mums’s cigarette case. “Vivian should do a story on Aunt Violet for the Metropolitan.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Pepper,” said the pot to the kettle.

  “I’m not being sarcastic. The whole thing screams Metropolitan feature. Compromising photographs, the works. Don’t you think, Vivian?”

  I tossed back a final trickle of straw-colored Burgundy. “Already thunk.”

  “Thought,” said Dad.

  “Vivian!” said Mums.

  “Why not? It could be my breakthrough.”

  “Because it’s vulgar. Because it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s family.”

  Mums, caught in a stammer! Now I knew I was onto something big.

  “Why not? The Schuylers haven’t given a damn about Violet in half a century. There’s no need to start now.”

  Pepper spoke up. “That’s where you’re wrong, Vivs. We’ve obviously done our Schuyler best to ignore Violet out of existence for half a century. It’s a completely opposite thing, ignoring versus indifference. Justice for Violet, that’s what I say! Down with Schuyler oppression!” She shook her fist.

  “You will not write this story, Vivian,” said Mums. “I forbid it.”

  “You can’t forbid me; I’m twenty-two years old. Besides, it’s freedom of speech. Journalistic integrity. All those darling little Constitutional rights that separate us from the communists.” I put my fist down on the mayonnaise-stained tablecloth, right next to Pepper’s wineglass. “Violet must have a voice.”

  “Oh, not your damned women’s lib again,” said Dad. “I fought the Nazis for this?”

  “It’s not my damned women’s lib, Dadums. It’s all-American freedom of the press.”

  Mums threw up her hands. “You see, Charles? This is what comes of letting your daughter become a career girl.” As she might say call girl.

  “I didn’t let her become a career girl.”

  “I certainly didn’t.”

  Agreement at last! I gazed lovingly back and forth between the pair of them.

  “I hate to interrupt another petty squabble, dear ones, but I’m afraid you can’t have the satisfaction of laying blame at each other’s doorsteps this time. It just so happens I gave myself permission to start a career. The two of you had nothing to do with it, except to prod me on with all your lovely objections.” I dabbed the corners of my mouth with an ancient linen napkin and rose to my feet, orator-style, John Paul Jones in a sleek little red wool number that would have sizzled off the powder from the Founding Fathers’ wigs. “And I am damned well going to use said hard-won career to find out what happened to Violet Schuyler.”

  “Bravo.” Pepper clapped her hands. “Count me in.”

  Dad pulled out his cigarette case. “Here’s what I’d like to know, Vivian, my sweet. Whose damned idiot idea was it to send girls off to college?”

  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, displayi
ng 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.