The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  “You might want to read those lock-and-key files, if you haven’t already.”

  • • •

  WELL, of course I read them. You don’t think I’d let a little thing like lipstick get in the way of my curiosity, do you? I read in front of the mirror, I read as I was fastening my stockings, I read as I was pulling the fat curlers from my hair and fluffing everything in place. I read mostly about the breathless diplomatic maneuvering into war, about the hourly frissons of schadenfreude as the American correspondent watched Europe teeter above the chasm. And then, on July 30, sandwiched between Russian mobilization and frantic British attempts to intercede:

  In response to your cable about the Grant affair, I haven’t the foggiest, that is to say, it’s pretty clear what happened but they’ll never be able to catch the perpetrators or prove anything at all. They say all the scientists are mute about it. Einstein himself was with them in Wittenberg a week ago, and won’t say a thing. Clearly the wife has run off with the lover, but they’re being protected somehow, no one will let slip an unofficial word about it, let alone an official one, there’s hardly anything in the papers with all the war talk. It’s the quietest scandal I ever heard, which means it must be something very delicious indeed, especially since our old friend the Comtesse de S.H. is an interested party, by which I mean she was intimate with Dr. Grant and making no attempt to disguise the affair. I would ask her about it, but she’s left town as well. Soon I shall be utterly on my own, with only Germans to speak to, and they’re all war and no play at the moment.

  I glanced at the clock. Half an hour until I was expected uptown, and I still had to retrieve Violet’s letter from Lily.

  I put the letter back in its folder, and it occurred to me, as I retrieved my coat and hat and pocketbook from the careless dump by the entry, that it might be a good thing I had a strong stomach.

  • • •

  THE STOMACH in question wasn’t holding up well as I traveled from the Greenwalds’ elegant ten-room apartment in Gramercy Park to the Lightfoot mansion on East Seventieth Street, but it wasn’t the fault of Aunt Violet’s letter to her sister. Fate had given me the lurchiest of lurchy cab drivers, a hunched-over monosyllabic stick of a man who evidently thought I was auditioning him for the Daytona 500.

  I, of all people, should have know better. Never, ever climb into a New York City taxi and tell the cabbie to step on it.

  Well, I was late! I hadn’t counted on Five-O wanting to tell me all about the fifth-grade Thanksgiving feast at Nightingale-Bamford (for the record, she had been an Indian), or on Nick Junior turning up at a quarter to seven and scolding me for my performance at the Schuyler drinkies a month ago: They’re still wiping the lipstick off my cheek, Vivs. Six of them asked for your number! I’m never living it down.

  So by the time Lily had shooed everyone off and called down for the doorman to find me a taxi, I had only five minutes to travel fifty city blocks on a Thursday evening. So: Step on it, I told the driver, and the next instant I found myself pinned to the seat by the gravitational force of the resulting acceleration, clutching my pocketbook to my stomach like a life belt on the Titanic. By the time we reached Thirty-fourth Street, we’d driven up on the sidewalk twice and possibly taken out a parking meter.

  It wasn’t until a red light forced us to a growling stop near Grand Central Terminal that I could unclench my hand from the door handle and open up Violet’s letter. (What? Me, wait until I got home? You know better.) By now I was accustomed to her handwriting; I knew it like my own. I held the paper next to the window, where the glow of a streetlamp illuminated the words just enough, and read:

  My dear Christina, I am leaving Walter . . .

  Lurch went the taxi, and thump went Vivian against the seat. I righted myself and strained to hold the letter back up against the window, but the flashes of passing light weren’t quite enough to reveal the page.

  . . . leaving Walter . . .

  What was the date? What was the date? I hadn’t even checked. The date might make all the difference. If she’d left him first, and he’d come after her and threatened her—I knew Walter by now, I knew he had his pride, I knew he wasn’t just going to let his wife depart his control without a fight—and then the murder had taken place. Or if she’d murdered him and left him, all in the same bold stroke.

  And where was Lionel Richardson in all this? Who was Lionel Richardson?

  On we raced, up Park Avenue, into a ribbon of green lights. The engine was cranking now, grinding out speed in a triumphant roar. We hit a bump, and the wheels left the pavement for a weightless instant. My stomach remained suspended for considerably longer. I was going to die, and Violet’s letter with me.

  I peeked over the top of the seat and saw the light turn red. The engine screamed, the taxi leapt ahead, and before I could ask God for mercy on my sin-scorched soul, we whipped around the corner of Seventieth Street and banged to a stop in front of the cool limestone face of the Lightfoot mansion.

  I climbed out the door and onto the sidewalk. I maybe might have been a teensy bit shaky. Violet’s letter was clenched in my hand, my pocketbook tucked under my arm. I opened it and found a few crisp dollar bills somewhere inside. I looked at my watch, and saw it was seven-oh-three. If I’d climbed into a helicopter at Gramercy Park, we couldn’t have made it any faster.

  I shoved the dollar bills through the window. “Thanks for the thrill, buddy. You might want to check those tires.”

  I rang the Lightfoot doorbell. Just as the butler arrived—yes, the Lightfoots had goddamned Jeeves answering the door—I remembered Violet’s letter.

  “Good evening, Miss Schuyler,” said Jeeves. (No, I didn’t know his real name.)

  “Just a moment, please.” I straightened out the paper in my hands. There was no date at the top. I hunted back in my pocketbook and found the envelope.

  Jeeves cleared his tactful throat. “They’re expecting you in the drawing room, Miss Schuyler.”

  “One moment.” I found the postmark and stepped into the radiant entry hall. Berlin, it said. 25 JULI 1914. So had Violet written the letter on July 25, or had she written it earlier and only posted it on the twenty-fifth?

  Jeeves was handing me skillfully out of my coat. “The drawing room, Miss Schuyler,” he said, with a little more vim. “Up the stairs and to the left.”

  “Yes, I know. Thank you.” I folded the paper back into the envelope and stuffed it into my pocketbook. The hall smelled of orchids. As I raced up the curving stairs to the drawing room, a new and entirely different thought reared its curious head among my snapping synapses.

  That hat on the hat stand. Where had I seen it before?

  I reached the top of the stairs and turned left, and just as I passed through the open doorway into the monumental Lightfoot drawing room, my snapping synapses shot back an answer.

  But by that time the owner of the hat was already standing white-faced before me, with his hand surrounding that of the gleaming Gogo. And lo! S. Barnard Lightfoot himself, fully recovered from the afternoon’s festivities in the Metropolitan conference room, was rising from his armchair and holding out his triumphant hand to me while his polished face smiled and smiled.

  “Why, there you are, Miss Schuyler,” he said. “You’re just in time to raise a glass to the happy couple.”

  Violet

  At breakfast, there’s no sign of Lionel Richardson. The coffee is brought in, the sweet rolls and fruit, Walter’s very English eggs and kidneys, and at every swing of the door behind her, Violet clenches the muscles of her abdomen and stops her head from turning.

  “Lionel?” Jane covers a yawn with her long-fingered hand. “I saw him go off in his motor last night, just before I went to bed.”

  “What a shame,” says Lise Meitner. “I had wanted to share some good results with him.”

  Violet speaks in German. “What sort of results?”


  “He and I had the most interesting discussion about alpha radiation before you left Berlin.” Lise leans forward over her plate. The coffee steams untouched by her elbow. “The problem of the heterogeneous patterns. Herr Hahn and I have managed to isolate a very pure sample of thorium that . . .”

  Jane clinks her fork against her plate. “No secrets!”

  “There’s no secret, Mama,” says Henry. “They’re only speaking about work.”

  Violet says, “I’m sorry, Jane. It’s just easier in German, that’s all.”

  “Hmm.” Jane’s gaze meets hers. Her eyes are bright and well-rested, her skin petal-of-rose, making Violet conscious of her own hollow strain, the listless knot with which she bound her hair this morning, before Walter had stirred. How she covered her alien limbs in an old dress and went outside, hoping to meet with fresh air and perhaps Lionel, but the morning air was already sticky and Lionel had not appeared.

  Jane takes in the history of Violet’s morning with her purple-bright eyes. She lifts her eyebrows and looks around the rest of the table. At the other end, Walter mutely sips his tea, shielded by a week-old English newspaper. Herr Einstein sits between the Hahns, drinking milky coffee and eating black bread, mournful and preoccupied, his dark pomaded hair absorbing the morning light.

  Jane steeples her fingers and says, “I have a terrific idea. Let’s go on a picnic.”

  • • •

  “MOTHER LOVES PICNICS,” says Henry Mortimer, in an apologetic tone, and as Violet finishes her fourth deviled egg, washed down with ice-cold champagne, she’s hardly in a position to disagree. She hasn’t begun to plumb the depth of cured meats and pickled vegetables, delicate sandwiches and exotic fruits, fragrant cheeses and chiffon desserts laid out upon the picnic cloth before her.

  Picnic cloth. In fact, there are three picnic cloths, spread beneath the lindens on the hillside to accommodate them all without crowding. Violet reclines her long legs along the side of one; Henry sits to her right and Lise Meitner to her left. They’ve been discussing thorium, and possible explanations for why the measurements of alpha radiation in Lise and Otto’s latest experiments continue stubbornly to present themselves in a heterogeneous pattern, when everyone knows—everyone has accepted, anyway; certainty isn’t a commodity in which the chemists of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut regularly trade—that each radioactive isotope emits particles with its own precise signature. Henry’s remark comes a propos of nothing, during a pause in the discussion; Violet’s brain, which she has concentrated fiercely on the subject of thorium radiation, has begun to wander, and Lise has slipped into a familiar meditative trance.

  “It was a good idea, this picnic,” Violet says. Both she and Henry speak in German, in courtesy to Lise, whose English is good but not quite fluent. “I’m glad we have someone here capable of organizing these things so well. I’m hopeless.”

  “The perfect day for it.” Lise shakes off her reverie and stretches her arms high above her head. The sun, finding the holes between the leaves, strikes her dark hair in tiny dapples. “I find it’s always useful to think outside the laboratory from time to time. There’s nothing like fresh air when one has an intractable problem.”

  Violet glances at Lise. She’s gazing into the distance, her feet with their sensible half boots crossed at the ankles, her skirt draped correctly over her legs. A ladylike woman, Lise Meitner, raised in an orderly intellectual household in Vienna. Has she ever been in love? Working all day in her laboratory with Herr Hahn: did she ever wish for something more than professional friendship between them? If she did, it’s too late now. Otto and his wife sit side by side on the second picnic cloth, his head bent solicitously next to her smiling face, perhaps sharing a joke, perhaps asking her what picnic delicacy he can select for her. Herr Einstein reclines on his back next to them with his hands knit across his stomach, staring through the leaves at the hazy sky.

  “If you don’t mind,” Lise says, “I think I’ll go for a walk. The countryside is so beautiful here.”

  “Not at all.”

  Lise stands and shakes the crumbs from her skirts. She is strong and fit and sturdy, silhouetted by the white July sun. She pins her hat atop her neat waves of hair and says gravely, “Herr Mortimer, would you care to accompany me? Perhaps you help tease me out of this dilemma of mine.”

  Henry’s eyes widen into moons, as if he’s found a ten-mark note in some forgotten pocket. He scrambles to his feet. “I’d be delighted.”

  Violet leans back on her elbows and watches Lise and Henry stride out of the shade and into the heavy sunshine. At her back, she feels the presence of the third picnic cloth, occupied by Walter and Jane in a tête-à-tête even more tangibly intimate than that of the Hahns.

  She has worked perseveringly to banish the thought of Walter from her head. She hasn’t looked in his direction all morning, not during the walk through the grass to Jane’s chosen picnic spot, not during the unloading of the baskets and the spreading of the cloths, not during the picnic itself. One or twice the sight of his uncovered gray head, his light summer suit, crossed her vision, and her belly went sick, her clear head felt dizzy. She hears him now, his voice lifting into laughter, and her throat clots with rage.

  A hand falls on her shoulder. Violet leaps to her feet, spilling champagne and deviled egg, but it’s only the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré. Her beautiful face is lit by the sun, and her expression is serious. “Would you walk with me, Violet? We haven’t had a nice chat in ever so long.”

  Not since Berlin.

  “Of course.” Violet finds her hat.

  Even in the shelter of the trees, the air is hot; out in the full throb of sunshine, Violet’s skin scorches under the thin and wilted linen of her dress. Her hair sticks unpleasantly to her neck and temples. Beside her, Jane’s cool composure seems to exist in a separate season altogether.

  Jane’s arm loops through hers. She carries a parasol, as if they’re walking along some graveled path in the Tiergarten. “What heat! It reminds me of the summers back home.”

  “Really? You look as if it doesn’t bother you at all.”

  “Well, I was born to it, I guess. Among other things. Tell me, Violet, how are you and Lionel getting along these days?”

  Violet’s throat closes. She makes a dismissive noise and tries to shrug.

  “Oh, I don’t mean to pry! You see, I have a little problem of my own at the moment, and its name is your husband.”

  “You seem to be getting along very well.”

  “Too well. I’ve held him off as best I can, but . . .” She shrugs. “Well, he isn’t the kind of man who’s used to hearing the word no, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.”

  “I don’t understand. I thought you and he . . . I thought he . . .”

  Jane turned a curious expression toward her. “What, that we were lovers? I wouldn’t do that to you, Violet. He’s still your husband, and I like you. I told you that, didn’t I? I’ve done all I could to keep him going without it, for Henry’s sake, but last night . . . Well, we had a bit of a struggle. Had to take some stern measures, if you follow me, and while I’ve managed to smooth his poor little feathers this morning . . .”

  Violet speaks slowly. “Do you mean to say that all this time—”

  “Why, Violet! I do believe I’m insulted. Did you think I’d go to bed with him under your roof? I do have my code, you know, rickety as it is.”

  Violet’s mind has ceased grasping. Ahead of them, the grass stands motionless, golden-brown tips pointed to the pale sky. The air is full of it, the stifling smell of hot summer grass. His poor little feathers, Jane said, so dismissive, so careless. “Well, you don’t need to bother. I mean, you’re quite free to . . . to indulge him. I don’t mind.”

  “Yes, that’s what I was getting at, just now. Whether it would make things easier for everyone. But you see . . .” Jane gives her parasol a spi
n. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yes.”

  “You see, I brought Henry to Berlin to study with Dr. Walter Grant, but I don’t believe he’s the one. I think you are.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You’re doing all the work, the experiments, in that desperate little basement of yours in Berlin, in the laboratory you’ve set up here. Writing the articles. Don’t think I don’t notice. You’re the one on the cutting edge, you and the others. You’re the ones who give a damn about bringing in Henry. Walter, from what I can see, he’s gotten old. He’s given everything up, except to look in and criticize from time to time. He doesn’t give a damn for anyone anymore, except himself. And frankly”—another swirl of the parasol, another squeeze of the arm—“I don’t particularly like him. Not that I let that stand in my way, everything else being equal, but if there’s no use in it, why give myself the bother?”

  A pair of sparrows wings by, swooping unexpectedly close. Violet hears the flutter of feathers, the slight impact as a wingtip brushes the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s white lace parasol.

  “Or so I asked myself, last night,” Jane adds softly.

  “Jane,” says Violet. “I have a favor to ask you.”

  • • •

  NOT UNTIL after the lunch has been packed away does Violet find an opportunity to approach Herr Einstein. The Hahns have taken a walk with Jane and Walter; Lise and Henry have returned and fallen into an animated discussion, in which the squares of the picnic cloth serve as spaces on the periodic table; and Einstein sits alone under an apple tree, examining a blade of grass.

  “Like Newton,” Violet says, nodding at the tiny green apples above.

  Einstein looks at her and smiles. “I am honored. Please sit, Frau Grant.” He motions to the grass next to him.

  “I’m not disturbing you, I hope.”

  “I only wish you were. I seem unable to concentrate today.”

  Violet kneels into the grass. “I’m sorry to hear that. Did you sleep well?”