The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  “Get lost,” she said.

  “You see? Concise, to the point.” I gave my briefcase a joyous little swing as I set off down the corridor to the hallowed Lightfoot wing. “Brevity is the soul of rudeness, my mother always says.”

  Outside Mr. Lightfoot’s double doors, Gogo’s desk overflowed with silver-framed photos and crystal candy dishes. The only item missing was Gogo herself. His lordship’s secretary looked up from her own Spartan empire on the left-hand side, dressed impeccably in neutral colors, lipstick immaculate, eyelashes extravagant. “Miss Schuyler. I’ll just announce you.”

  She picked up the Lightfoot Hotline and murmured a few words. I swallowed back a gum wad of anxiety and shifted my pocketbook to the same hand as my briefcase.

  The secretary rose in hourglass splendor from her desk and opened the right-hand door. “You can go in, Miss Schuyler.”

  I sallied forth with hips swinging. “Good morning, Mr. Lightfoot. What a charming way to start the day. We should do this more often.”

  He looked up from the starched pages of The Wall Street Journal, spread like a rectangle of sanity atop the liquid brown of his desk, and removed his reading glasses, the better to strip me naked with.

  Now. A word about S. Barnard Lightfoot III. He had three houses and four ex-wives, and the only thing he loved more than first editions and hourglass secretaries was his daughter, Margaux. (Of S. Barnard Lightfoot IV, the less said the merrier.) Having, as I’ve said, an agreeable waist-to-hip ratio myself, I’d found myself on the receiving end of a Lightfoot proposition within a week of my employment here at the Metropolitan. I’d refused it gracefully, no feelings hurt, no careers destroyed, and I hadn’t entered the inner sanctum since.

  So. Here I stood, the day after Gogo’s heartbreak, two days after waking up in Suitor Number Ten’s coveted bed. The timing was suspicious, to say the damnedest.

  “Miss Schuyler.” Those famous pale eyes did an ankle-to-bosom evaluation, weighted arithmetically to the bosom. Mr. Lightfoot had a face that recalled Bath sandstone, grandly proportioned and always lightly tanned, as if he’d just stepped off a Mediterranean liner accompanied by twenty steamer trunks filled with cigars, tailcoats, and hair oil. Actually, I liked him. He made no bones about who he was and what he wanted. He was a man I could deal with. “Please sit. I suppose you know why you’re here.”

  I dropped into the chair and set my briefcase on the floor. “I can’t imagine. My sins are so numerous.”

  “My daughter is home in bed today. I expect she’ll be out all week.”

  “Poor Gogo. She told me about it last night. It’s awful. How is she? Is there anything I can do?”

  He flipped open a silver case on his desk and withdrew a cigarette, which he lit in a single experienced strike of a gold Zippo lighter. “You can tell me the nature of your relationship with Dr. Salisbury.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “I understand you had a heated conversation with him in the library, before he took my daughter out to lunch and broke her heart.”

  Pale eyes could be so piercing.

  “Ah, your network of spies at work again. Do you mind if I smoke, Mr. Lightfoot?”

  That, at least, got a twitch of eyebrow out of him. He nudged at the silver box. “Be my guest, Miss Schuyler.”

  I rose and took a cigarette, and then I leaned forward so he could light me up. I settled back in my chair. It was a modern number, low-slung, designed to lull the sitter with an excess of ergonomic comfort. Also to hold him in place a good foot or two lower than the boss. “I’ll be candid, Mr. Lightfoot, if I may speak in confidence.”

  “Please do.”

  “I am acquainted with Dr. Salisbury. We met over the weekend. I didn’t realize he was Suitor Number Ten.”

  “Suitor Number Ten?”

  I waved my smoky hand. “Gogo and I are close, as you know.”

  “Not close enough, evidently.”

  “No, no, Mr. Lightfoot. You’ve got it all wrong. If I’d known who Dr. Salisbury was, I’d never have . . .” A flutter of the fingers.

  “Hmm.” He considered. “May I ask what occurred between you?”

  “You may not.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, I expect you do. However, once he walked into the office yesterday and I put one and one together into three, if you take my meaning, I told him it was off. That I was off. I am very fond of Gogo, Mr. Lightfoot, and I would never indulge myself at her expense.” I looked at him straight and true, piercing eye for piercing eye.

  “By God,” he said. “Then why did he break things off with her after all?”

  And here we are again, Vivian and her shortcomings. If you weren’t well disposed to me before, you’re really going to despise me now. I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. I am who I am. And that Tuesday morning, in contrast to Monday, I had nothing to lose. I had no more Doctor Paul. I had a suitcase full of unsolved Violet and Lionel. I had a promise to keep to myself, a resolution to guard and protect against human weakness.

  So here’s what I said next.

  “Because he’s in love with me, Mr. Lightfoot. Passionately in love.”

  “After a single weekend?”

  I shrugged modestly. Lightfoot’s eyes dropped back to my bosom.

  “I can’t explain it, sir. I suppose the heart has its reasons. As you can imagine, the confrontation was taxing for us both.” I dragged hard on my cigarette and stared out the window to Lightfoot’s private terrace, thick with potted chrysanthemums. “He refused to give me up. He says he’ll keep trying until he’s sixty.”

  “I see. And what do you intend to do about it?”

  I turned bravely back to him. “Well, I have my career, don’t I? I suppose I’ll just have to throw myself into my work at the Metropolitan and hope for the best. Hope it can distract me from all this.”

  Lightfoot twiddled his thumbs. He lifted his cigarette. He blew out a sizable cloud and tipped the ash into a handsome glass tray. He pushed it toward me.

  “Thank you.” I leaned over and did the necessary.

  “Admirable sentiments, Miss Schuyler,” he said. “Of course, I stand ready to support you in any way I can.”

  “I appreciate the gesture, sir. I do so happen to have a bit of research I’m working on, in my spare time. An exposé, of a sort.”

  “Do you, now?”

  “Yes. A fifty-year-old murder mystery. High-society wife murders husband, disappears into the German countryside with lover. If the Metropolitan is interested in that kind of thing.”

  “Have you spoken to Tibby about this?”

  I extended my crossed legs, fatale-style. “I’m afraid Mr. Tibbs doesn’t possess quite so much eagerness to support my noble intentions, sir.”

  “I can speak to him.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir. It would certainly keep me busy. Keep my mind off personal matters for some time.” I brushed at my skirt. “I might need a little help from the Metropolitan archives.”

  “They are at your disposal, of course. I’ll tell my secretary to give you a key.”

  I nearly swallowed my cigarette. “That would be very helpful, Mr. Lightfoot. I’d be most appreciative.”

  “Hmm.” He dropped his smoke in the ashtray and rose from his desk. I took the hint and unwound my legs.

  “I’m glad we had this talk, Miss Schuyler.” Lightfoot came around the desk and motioned me ahead of him. “I think we’ve come to an excellent understanding, don’t you?”

  “It’s so lovely to be understood.”

  His hand appeared on the doorknob in front of me. His voice dropped an octave. “All in one weekend, hmm? Dr. Salisbury must have been favorably impressed.”

  “It’s a mistake I don’t mean to repeat, sir,” I said. “Ever.”

  “I see.” He opened the door
for me and extended his other hand. “Good day, Miss Schuyler.”

  I shook his hand. “Good day, Mr. Lightfoot.”

  • • •

  I STRODE down the corridor, away from the Lightfoot wing. My eyeballs began to sting just as I reached my desk. I placed my briefcase on the floor and my pocketbook in the bottom drawer. Tibby’s head poked out from his office. His bark followed with considerable bite. “Where the hell is my coffee, Miss Schuyler?”

  “In a moment, Mr. Tibbs.”

  I found the bathroom just in time. I locked myself in the far stall, the one nobody used because the latch always stuck and made your nail varish chip. I sat on the seat and folded six squares of toilet tissue and cried silently into them, careful not to smudge my mascara, blotting as I went so no one would ever, ever suspect.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME I’d delivered Tibby’s coffee black, no sugar, everything was arranged except his willing cooperation. His unwilling cooperation, I had in spades.

  He gulped his coffee straight before he began. At the second bob of his throat, I realized I’d forgotten the sugar. He didn’t seem to notice. “Your work has been reassigned to one of the junior writers,” he said, investing the sentence with as much irony as it could legally bear. “I will expect a full draft of this article on my desk within a week.”

  “That won’t be possible. I have a tremendous amount of research to do. This is a big story, Tibby. Big big big.”

  He flinched. “Two weeks.”

  “I believe Mr. Lightfoot wants me to do the job as thoroughly as possible.”

  “Three. Or I hand in my resignation.”

  I held out my hand and gave him a blinding smile. “Done.”

  When I returned to my desk, the key to the hallowed Metropolitan archives lay in a plain white envelope on my desk. I kissed it and danced to the elevator, taking care to wave Agatha a cheery farewell as I passed her desk.

  Now, let’s be clear: the Metropolitan archives did not exist, officially speaking. I don’t even remember how I first heard about them. They were like a myth handed down, somewhere between the third Scotch and the fifth martini, in a hushed and reverent whisper obscured by a miasma of tobacco smoke. Gogo once told me they were located on the nineteenth floor of the building, behind a door marked FURNITURE REPOSITORY, but I doubt she would have recalled this small indiscretion the next morning. All I knew was that I needed those archives, because wherever the story of Walter and Violet and Lionel existed, it was not in the official library, the biographies, the encyclopedias, the New York Times.

  It existed in the drawing rooms and bedrooms of 1914 Germany, where it would have caused a delicious scandal that summer; and if the affair had made its way to 1964 Manhattan at all, it would be contained in the gossipy correspondence of those who dined on it.

  Like, for example, that sent by the Metropolitan correspondent in Berlin to his editor back in New York.

  I know. I like the way my brain works, too.

  But first. You had to appreciate the sight that stretched before you, as you used your private key to open up the battered metal door on the nineteenth floor marked FURNITURE REPOSITORY. I know I did. Rows and rows of wooden filing cabinets, covered with the thinnest layer of dust, just for atmosphere. The single bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, looking as if Edison himself had installed it. That dark and musty flavor of the same million-billion particles of air rubbing against one another for weeks on end. I sighed it all in and out. The splendors of the world lay in wait.

  It occurred to me, as I made my way to the first filing cabinet, as I touched it with my index finger as I might touch the Ark of the Covenant, that Lightfoot hadn’t imposed any conditions on my visit here. No vow of secrecy, no injunction on copying or removing or destroying as I saw fit. Maybe all that was implicit in the granting of the key itself. I was the inner circle now; I was the archives. You did not befoul your own bed.

  I rolled open the first drawer. Secret the archives might be, but they were arranged impeccably by date and office, in crisp manila folders rarely exposed to the horrors of oxidation. I pulled out the first, just for the sake of curiosity. Paris office, 1888. From the Baroness Pauline Marie Plessis de Meaux to Mr. S. Barnard Lightfoot, written in French, deeply apologetic that she had not written since last month, but she had been très, très occupée with the redecoration of her salon, and the races at Deauville had been divine, divine, and please would he remember that these little notices were to be kept strictly confidential? Her dear husband would not be pleased, and perhaps not her friends, either.

  As I said. The splendors of the world.

  Still. Work to be done. I put the baroness back where she belonged and dragged my greedy fingers along the cabinets until I came to the year 1914, which in fact filled two separate filing cabinets, so great was the flood of information pouring into S. Barnard Lightfoot Jr.’s mailbox in that tumultuous year. (Lightfoot père had died happily of asphyxiation between his mistress’s breasts in the summer of 1905, as everyone knew.) I flipped past tantalizing folders for Paris, Rome, London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and finally came upon one marked BERLIN, JAN–MAR.

  I drew it out.

  Now. Here’s the trouble turning a curious animal like me loose in an archive like this, with no clear idea what I was looking for, and no clue where it might be. I picked up the first item—a cablegram, as it happened—and while I meant simply to scan the thing over for the names Violet, Walter, Grant, or Lionel, I was immediately sucked into contemplation of the word fellatio. And my goodness! What a parade of scandal could be contained in a single cablegram! Who was this Lolo, and why would she (or, equally, he) risk all with the photographic evidence the Metropolitan’s Berlin correspondent evidently now had in hand?

  NO SMOKING read a small brass sign above the reading table, where I carried my chosen files. Normally, I enjoyed a good smoke as I browsed through a comfortable stack of scandal of an afternoon, but this time I didn’t notice the absence, because the Berlin of 1914 was my kind of town.

  Spent all night at the Bluebird, spilled out at dawn (and I do mean spilled), wrote the correspondent on March 11. Witnessed at least three acts of adultery between midnight and three, and heard from my dear General X that the Kaiser and Kaiserin are quarreling again. Plus ça change. The cabaret was excellent. Lolo as Dido, or perhaps Dido as Lolo: one can no longer distinguish between history and reality after the absinthe goes in the punch.

  Then in April: The anarchists have taken over my favorite café on Unter den Linden this week, and we are forced to abandon our post for the less hospitable reaches of the Café des Westerns, sweating, sick, and hot as Brooke had it. Oh, damn, I know it!

  By now, the small of my back was aching, and so were my eyes: the Metropolitan’s Berlin correspondent appeared to have written most of his letters while drunk on absinthe or something else, not that I could blame him. I rose from my chair, stretched, and reached for my pocketbook.

  The windows of the archive were concealed by thick yellowing blinds and stuck shut by strata of old paint, but I persevered until a few inches of chilled October air could be coaxed from the bottom sash and into the room, laced with automobile exhaust and the arrhythmic staccato of taxi horns. Pace brass-plated prohibitions, I lit a cigarette and watched the traffic crawl below, the hatted hoards stream along the pavement in their dozens. Lunchtime.

  What was Doctor Paul having for lunch today? Something quick and cheap from the hospital automat? A sandwich from home? Or was he too busy for lunch at all?

  I thought, I could still turn back. I could walk out of this room and lock the door up tight, and I could swish down the elevator and out into the bristling New York sidewalk. I could rattle down the IRT to Saint Vincent’s Hospital and ask for Dr. David Paul Salisbury and tell him I’d made a terrible mistake, I couldn’t live without him, could we start over and forget Gogo, forget
Violet and Lionel, forget the whole damned world, because the problems of two people didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this . . .

  Ah, pardon me. Wrong movie.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and got back to work, and I must have done the right thing, because on the first letter of the next file folder, dated May 21, 1914, the Metropolitan’s intrepid Berlin correspondent sandwiched the following between a military review in the Tiergarten and scandal in the ballet de corps of the Berlin Opera:

  At the Bluebird last night, and only just recovered. First off, saw the Countess de Saint-Honoré (née Jane Johnson of Rapid City, if one’s feeling sufficiently ungenerous to recall that inconvenient fact, which it seems most ladies of her acquaintance are, at least behind her lovely back). In excellent looks, as ever. She arrived in tandem with a young man of perhaps eighteen or twenty: her son, I presume, since word has it she intends him to study amongst the eminent brains at the Kaiser Wilhelm. (Either that, or she hopes to add a German title to her collection. One suspects the latter, but on the other hand, what doting mother could resist the temptation of tossing her young prodigy under the very noses of Herr Einstein and Dr. Grant?)

  Gathump gathump, went my heart.

  Our story begins at the Bluebird café.

  Violet, 1914

  They dine at a café along Unter den Linden, Violet and her husband and Lionel Richardson, amid a high-pitched atmosphere of cigarettes and roasting meat and rattling dishes. Walter calls imperiously for two bottles of Margaux. “The fatted calf,” he says, laying aside the menu, “for the prodigal student.”

  “Hardly prodigal, though I appreciate the gesture.” Lionel lights himself a cigarette and leans back in his chair. The frail wood seems too small for him; the room seems too small for him. His shoulders strain against his jacket, too full of life and muscle to be contained by so fine a sheet of gray wool.

  “You left the virtuous labor of my laboratory for the British Army. Subduing the innocents in South Africa, I believe.” Walter smiles and takes his pipe from the inside pocket of his jacket.