The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  “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 consid
ered the possibilities: lawyer, banker, broker, doctor.

  Ha, ha. Doctor. Wouldn’t that be funny.

  “I know,” I said. “So terribly, awfully demanding, that job of his.”

  “You see? And I was right. Listen to me, Vivs.” Conspiratorial whisper. “He rang me up last night.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He did! He wants to have lunch with me today. He has something very important to tell me, he says.” She crushed my wrists with the force of her glee. “Very important. I just know he’s going to propose, Vivs! How do I look?” Elegant twirl.

  I rubbed my grateful wrists. “You look the same as always. Which is to say, no working candles for miles around.”

  She angled her million-dollar cheekbones to the light, just so. “You do say the funniest things, Vivs. What about my dress?”

  I surveyed the kelly-greenness of it. “Makes your eyes look like emeralds and your curves look like honeydews. He’ll want to marry you twice.”

  She sank into a nearby chair, no small feat for a chair as old and rackety as that one, and propped her flawless chin on her flawless fingers. “Oh, Vivs, I’m so happy. You don’t know what it’s like being me.”

  “What, infinitely gorgeous and adorable? Having men fall at your feet, like so many mosquitoes in spraying season?”

  “Having men fall at your feet, yes, and then a few weeks later . . .” Melancholy. “Drifting away.”

  “Now, Gogo . . .”

  “You know. They stop calling. The flowers stop arriving. No more notes, no more chocolates and dinners at 21. Every time, Vivian. Just as I was getting my hopes up, just as I was thinking, Oh, he’s the one, we’ll get married in June and have a dozen babies and a big white house in Darien with a big white oak tree out front and a swing on it . . .” She put her hands together and stared at the fingers. “I was starting to think there was something wrong with me.”

  I knelt at her feet and put my hands on her knees. “Honey. There’s nothing wrong with you, okay? There’s everything right with you. You are the finest person I know, Gogo Lightfoot. You are. You are true and solid gold, and if this Mr. David Perfect gives you the runaround, why, I’ll punch his lights out.”

  “Oh, don’t do that, Vivs!”

  “You see what I mean?” I folded her hands between mine. “Solid gold.”

  Now. We’ll pause a minute right here, because my conscience—such as it is—is stabbing me. Time to disabuse you of your notions. I can’t go on any longer without telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if you despise me for it.

  Because you should despise me for it.

  Sweet Margaux Lightfoot, the dearest girl in the world, that adorable little scrap of feminine virtue you see above, with the emerald eyes and the honeydew curves and the eagerly twitching womb . . . well, I became friends with her for one reason, and one reason alone: I wanted a job at the Metropolitan.

  You see? Flat-out despicable, aren’t I?

  I courted her like the most ardent suitor, starting in February of our junior year at Bryn Mawr. I became her best friend overnight. I held her hands and started her drinking when Suitor Number Eight faded back into the worm-eaten woodwork from whence he came; I kept her from drinking too much at the Penn mixer and losing her priceless virginity to a pockmarked fresher from a little house on the prairie. I went with her to the movies and shopping, I helped her study for her final exams. I did all this because I knew her father was S. Barnard Lightfoot III, owner and publisher of the Metropolitan, and there was no other grand journalistic institution in Manhattan—which is to say, the world—I more ardently wished to conquer than the malicious slick-sleek monthly Metropolitan, inscrutable cartoons and all.

  As you can see, it worked like a charm.

  But somewhere along the line, something happened I hadn’t planned for: I actually started to like her. A sort of pinprick admiration, just in passing, that expanded outward as pinpricks will do.

  Yes. Yes. I know it. You wouldn’t think she’s my type. She couldn’t be less like Pepper, for example, and in her virgin modesty she bears a passing resemblance to Tiny. But she’s just so . . .

  Sweet.

  Honestly, unaffectedly, unabashedly sweet. And I really did want to punch out the lights of Suitor Number Eight. I thought he was passing up the deal of a lifetime. Gogo would make a beautiful, loyal wife. Plop a husband at her breakfast table and a baby on her hip, and she would bloom kazoom into a nurturing mother, a thorough homemaker, a patiently charming hostess to every deadly friend and colleague Suitor Number Eight could drag home comatose from the executive boardroom. All the things, in short, that I would not.

  Well, except the loyal part. I am loyal. I’ll grant myself that.

  So when Gogo had come home from a four-week graduation holiday in Los Angeles last July, bubbling over with enthusiasm for Disneyland and for Suitor Number Ten (we shall not mention Nine), I was delighted for her. He did sound like the real deal. They wrote all summer long. He came to visit her in New York. No, he was moving to New York! Actually moving here, supposedly for work, but really because he wanted to be with her, Margaux Lightfoot, which could mean only love and marriage and the baby carriage at last for the deserving Gogo. An MRS degree awarded with highest honors.

  “You are the best, best friend in the whole world, Vivs,” she said, looking into my eyes with her watery own, believing in my innocence so profoundly that I almost believed in it myself.

  All right. I hugged her. I dare anyone to resist hugging Gogo when she looked at you like that, like a koala bear lost and found again. “I want every detail. I want to know exactly how he asks. Bended knee, the works. And nobody sees the ring before I do, Gogo. Not even your father.”

  She gurgled into my hair. “I promise. Oh! That reminds me!”

  “What?” I asked innocently. Hopefully.

  She pulled back and wagged her finger near my nose. “You have your own details to spill, Miss Femme Fatale. Tell me about Saturday!”

  “I can’t now, Gogo. It’s a long story, and I have to—you know—W-O-R-K. Did you happen to speak to your little old father about my little old research?”

  Guilty. “Not yet. I was thinking . . . well, it might be easier to ask him after lunch. You know, when I tell him the good news.”

  As I said before, not the bravest fusilier in the firing line, our Gogo. Still. “Not a bad plan, I guess.”

  “And then I can join you in there, and you can tell me all about Mr. Saturday while you’re doing your research! It’s perfect!”

  “Gogo, dearest, that’s the thing about a job, you’re supposed to be actually doing it when you’re at work.” Actually, I wasn’t quite sure what Gogo was supposed to be doing at the Metropolitan, at least in an official capacity. I think she was some sort of secretary to her father, but in the natural course of things, the real secretary did all the work, and Gogo simply wandered about the office, wondering how to type, shedding sunshine like a golden tabby kitten, causing even Tibby’s eagle face to soften on occasion. Our mascot. Every magazine needs a mascot. It brings us together in times of trial. I stood up and tugged her with me. “And speaking of which, I have some facts to check. Go do whatever it is you do, and bring Mr. David Perfect by my desk before you leave.”

  “On approval?”

  “Absolutely. He has to pass the Vivian test before he’s allowed to ask my Gogo to marry him.”

  “And if he doesn’t pass?” She actually looked worried. Heartbroken, even.

  I patted her cheek. “Don’t worry. The test is rigged. You’ll be married in June, and I’ll be your maid of honor.”

  The arms flung around me. “I love you, Vivs!”

  “I love you, too, Gogo.”

  Because, really, what else could you say to that?

  • • •

  SO I CHEATED. How was I suppose
d to wait until after lunch before resuming my search for Aunt Violet’s past? I cleared my fact-checking box by eleven o’clock, and rather than dance triumphantly into Tibby’s office to ask for more work, I headed back into the Metropolitan’s private library to see what I could see. Oh, the library wasn’t the archives, but I knew how to lift its stones to reveal the crawlies underneath.

  I started where I’d left off on Saturday, with GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. Something about that encyclopedia entry tickled at the old nostrils, my truffle pig nose for rotten goods. You had the bare facts, clear and competent, but there was always the story behind them, the real story, contained in letters lost or burnt and official records moldering in official archives. So which one was the telling fact? The one that disguised the truth?

  I ran my fingers over the unromantic type. “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 . . .”

  Chair of the Devonshire Institute. Fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm.

  My nose twitched. Ah. Yes. But.

  Why would a man at the height of his career give up a chairmanship of an Oxford University institute—Oxford, mind you!—running the whole works, directing research, his own secretary, his own name on the door, subordinates up the kowtow, to become a mere fellow at an institute in a foreign country? An Englishman, for God’s sake. Everyone knew the English were allergic to foreigners, and Germans in particular.

  And all this directly after his marriage to my aunt Violet.

  Had she convinced him to do it? Did she have a lover already, and want to follow him to Berlin?

  Or something else?

  I laid my fingers on the page and closed my eyes. The trouble was, I didn’t know either of them. I didn’t know what they were like. I needed something else, some insight into their characters. Something personal. If only Grandfather or Grandmother were still alive. Or even Aunt Christina.