Mortal Friends

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “I can tell. I’m an Otanni witch,” she said with a wink. “So even though I knew you’d regretted, I told him, well, yes, she might come.”

  “You didn’t!” Violet said, obviously thrilled with the mischief of it.

  “I did. I wanted to see his reaction. Well, my dear, he stood off in a corner by himself the whole night, just staring at the door. I’m sure he was waiting for you to come in. Really. He hardly spoke to anyone.”

  “He never speaks to anyone,” Violet said.

  “Well, darlings, I must go. But I am telling you that woman will never set foot in my house again! Never, ever, ever, ever! Oh, and you’re both invited to my party for the new head of the World Bank next month!”

  “We love your chocolate fountain!” Violet cried as Nouria ran off. Then Violet turned to me and said in a plaintive little voice, “Maybe there’s hope.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure if she was referring to Grant or the fact that Nouria was still inviting her to the embassy.

  Chapter 38

  In September, the Wheelock twenty-fifth reunion was finally upon us. Like all the milestone—or millstone—reunions, as I called them, this one was marked by a big get-together on campus, plus an excursion to another city to see the sights. The twenty-fifth is the one where even the most determined flower child realizes that she is now old enough to be her own mother. There are those who go to reunions, and those who don’t. I don’t. At least, I never had. I’d missed the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, even the twentieth, for which Violet flew to Boston to the home of Madeleine Pine, our most brilliant classmate, who was a curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  I’d happily managed to avoid all contact with my classmates except Violet for the past twenty-five years. Not that I didn’t want to see them. I just didn’t want them to see me. I wanted them to remember me for my potential, not for my failed promise. But Violet held me to my word that I would come and help her get through it. Truth be told, I was kind of curious to see what some of my old classmates looked like after all this time.

  Nouria’s comment that Grant seemed to be pining after Violet haunted my friend the entire week. As we were stringing together the school motto in big gold cardboard letters, Violet said to me, “Do you really think Grant misses me, Rev? Do you think he’ll come back?”

  It was the zillionth time she’d asked me that question, and I gave her my stock answer. “Of course he misses you. And can you imagine how he feels about Cynthia and this whole scandal? He’s probably ruing the day he ever left you.”

  “Yes, but do you think he’ll come back to me? Do you?”

  Sometimes Violet reminded me of a child who asks the same question over and over, paying no attention to the response. She was driving me nuts.

  We completed the gold-lettered school motto—AD VITAM PARAMUS—and hung it up over the entrance to the living room. It meant, “We are preparing for life.” I stared at it thinking that a better school motto would have been: FUCK ALL PREPARES YOU FOR LIFE, AND YOU MIGHT AS WELL KNOW IT NOW. But that would have been too long in Latin.

  I took more time getting ready for that reunion than I ever had for any date. I wanted to make sure I looked my very, very best and that I was in just the right outfit, so that when the girls saw me, I wouldn’t be a disappointment. I put on a chic, form-fitting little black dress and pearls—demure and yet revealing that I’d kept my figure. Just the ticket, I thought.

  Against my advice, Violet decided to give a tea party instead of a cocktail party. I knew that was because she wanted to show off the Tiffany tea service that had belonged to Grant’s grandmother. But I told her to have plenty of booze on hand. I said, “Believe me, at a twenty-fifth reunion, people don’t want tea. They want drugs and alcohol.”

  I arrived at Violet’s house half an hour early to see if I could help with any last-minute details. A bunch of white and purple balloons were tied to the front gate, white and purple being the school colors. Inside, Maureen and a small staff hired for the occasion seemed to have matters well in hand. Lush bouquets of roses and tulips had been strategically placed around the house by Sue Bluford, one of the best floral designers in Washington. I’d insisted that Violet use Sue, fearing she might resort to supermarket carnations just to save a buck. Her impending divorce had made her question little luxuries she’d always taken for granted.

  “You want to impress them. Now is not the time to economize,” I told her.

  A tape of songs from our high-school era was playing softly in the background—classics like “Every Breath You Take,” “Ghostbusters,” “The Glamorous Life,” and what I facetiously dubbed Violet’s personal theme song, “Like a Virgin.”

  Violet hadn’t come down yet. I went upstairs to see how she was doing. She was sitting on the bed half dressed, talking on the phone. The second I came into the room, she cupped her hand over the receiver and waved me away, saying, “Not now! Please close the door!”

  I knew something big was up, because usually Violet never minded if I listened in on her phone conversations. On the contrary, she liked to have me there so she could make funny faces to me while being treacly sweet to the poor unsuspecting soul on the other end of the line. I can’t count the number of times Violet had chatted up someone on the phone as though she were their long lost friend, then hung up and turned to me without missing a beat, saying, “God, what a bore that woman is!”

  I walked back downstairs to the living room, where I found Gunner sitting on the couch, reading. I was surprised to see him there. He was wearing a pair of thin tortoiseshell reading glasses, which struck me as an incongruous and rather touching sight set against his dreadlocks.

  “Well, well, well, I don’t remember you at Wheelock,” I said to him, teasingly.

  He looked up. “I was a few classes behind you.”

  “Chivalry is so dead…. What are you reading?”

  He held up a little purple and white booklet I recognized all too well. It was an issue of Passages, the school alumnae bulletin.

  A few more issues were stacked up on the coffee table in front of him, and there were several others scattered around on tables throughout the room. Violet had saved every single one of those semi-annual time bombs. She’d even had a set of purple archival boxes made for them, with the word Passages embossed in gold on the spines. For someone who had endured near Dickensian humiliation at Wheelock, Violet’s devotion to these glossy little odes to school spirit was touching, if not perverse. I plunked myself down beside Gunner on the couch and read over his shoulder. He was engrossed in the section called “Class Notes.”

  I have to admit that I always glanced at the “Class Notes” before chucking Passages in the garbage. I did so out of curiosity just to see what my old schoolmates were up to. In the early days, right after we graduated, a lot of girls wrote in to the magazine, telling of their college careers, job choices, travels, and marriages. After a while, the correspondence tapered off as careers heated up and families “thrived”—the adjective du jour. Then there was that period when contributors wrote about “stopping to smell the roses.” It was my impression that people only stopped to smell the roses when they hit a great big rock in the garden. There were far fewer contributors now. The women who wrote in often had sadder, smaller tales to tell.

  I pictured our class as a bunch of swimmers battling the tides of life. Some had surged ahead, while others had barely kept their heads above water. A few had drowned—or at least they were never heard from again.

  Violet and I were the Class of ’84. Our class correspondent was the officious Jenny Tilbert, who took the job no one else wanted and started out all our “Class Notes” with the same bossy exhortation: “Come on, Ladies, let’s hear what you’re up to! Now! Write!”

  Over the years, “Ladies” changed to “Sisters,” and “Write!” changed to “Write/Fax/E-mail/Text!”

  I was one of the “Ladies/Sisters” who never wrote,
faxed, e-mailed, or texted any information whatsoever. Let people imagine what had become of me. I sure wasn’t going to tell them. But Jenny could always depend on Violet, who wrote in faithfully twice a year with snapshot accounts of her achievements woven into Jenny’s breathy prose. In fact, it was through those alumnae magazines that I’d followed Violet’s progress through life way before she arrived in Washington—the schools, the travels, the honors, the months she devoted to working pro bono for various causes. Her brief but informative entries had the cool detachment of real success.

  Gunner chuckled as he read aloud from the issue in his hand: “‘Violet McCloud writes : Graduated with honors from DePaul University for the second straight year. Off to London for my Junior Year Abroad. Wish me luck! We do, Violet! Good luck!’” He paused and peered at me over the tops of his glasses. “Perky stuff. This how you gals manage to keep tabs on each other?”

  “Yup. So, Gunner, are you living here now? You never drop by to say hi to me anymore? Is this how you treat all your CIs?”

  He wasn’t listening. “So then she went to law school, eh?”

  “Who, Violet? Yeah. University of Southern California.”

  “What were you doing then?”

  “Me? I was singing my youth away like the idiot grasshopper while army ant Violet marched on single-mindedly.”

  I picked up one of the magazines and fanned it to “Class Notes.”

  “Violet never missed an issue, bless her heart. Look, here she is again…Listen to this…‘Violet McCloud writes : The environment is an increasing concern of mine, as it should be of everyone’s. I am moving to Washington to try and instigate some real changes on Capitol Hill. Go for it, Violet. Show them we Wheelock girls can effectuate real change in the world!’ That’s Jenny Tilbert cheering her on. I think Jenny’s coming today. Stick around, and you’ll meet her.”

  Gunner had his nose in another bulletin. He read the entry aloud to me: “‘Violet McCloud is now Mrs. Grant Bolton Jr. Her husband is a vice president of the Potomac Bank of Washington, a family concern. Violet writes to us: Please come look me up in Washington, classmates. I long to see you. Grant is a wonderful man and we are expecting in August. We wish Violet and her new family all the best! Go look her up, girls! I know I will if I can ever pry myself away from my consulting practice.’”

  Gunner shook his head and said, “Whoa.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking what my ‘Class Notes’ woulda been like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The kids I went to school with…? We had kind of a different career path—more like stepping off a cliff,” he said with a mordant little chuckle.

  “You did okay,” I said.

  “I was one of the lucky ones. For a while, anyhow.”

  A wave of sadness suddenly washed over Gunner. He tried to cover it up with a joke.

  “Here are my ‘Class Notes.’ ‘Jeff’s in jail. Lakisha’s working in a burger joint. Oren got shot. Willie’s driving a truck. Annie’s in rehab. Melvin’s out on bail.’…Like that. Oh, maybe that’s not quite fair. Some of us made it up to a decent pay grade, but not enough.”

  “I’ve told you before. Violet was the biggest loser in school. I mean, nobody ever dreamed she was going to do so well in life. You wanna know the real reason she wanted to give this reunion?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  “So all the girls who wouldn’t spit on her back then could envy her now. You know she gave Wheelock the highest sum ever contributed by an alumna in a single year? Two million dollars.”

  “Impressive,” Gunner said.

  “She did it through the Bolton Foundation, of course. When Grant left her, she wanted to call the whole thing off. That’s why I’m here—breaking a vow to myself I’d never go to one of these things. But, hey, I had to come and support her.”

  “That was nice of you. Tell me something. Why do you think Violet did so well if she was so pathetic in school, like you say?”

  “I’ve thought about that. I think it’s precisely because things weren’t so easy for her. Violet had to work harder than anyone for every little thing, which meant she valued the things she got a lot more than those of us for whom things came so easily in the beginning.”

  “Like you?”

  “Yeah, like me. I didn’t value what I had because I always had it. It was all too easy, too accessible. I never had to fight for things the way Violet did. So I never really appreciated any of the gains I made. I just kinda took them all for granted. I’ll tell you a little secret, Gunner—when you don’t appreciate something, you eventually lose it. I wish to God I’d been a little smarter and less careless about my life. I admire Violet and what she accomplished.”

  Gunner patted my hand, as if he sensed my regret. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve done just fine.”

  “Thanks.” His opinion meant a lot to me.

  Seeing all those bulletins there, pristinely preserved in those custom-made boxes, I realized that contributing to Passages had been Violet’s way of telling a story. The “Class Notes” were her mini autobiography—her résumé, if you will. They left no doubt that the homeliest, weirdest, most unpopular girl in school had bested the lot of us. Her life was a trifecta of revenge, inspiration, and glory. She was like the hundred-to-one shot who comes from behind to win the Kentucky Derby.

  “You ever go visit her when Violet was working out in, let’s see—” Gunner flipped through one of the bulletins and found the entry he was looking for. “Oklahoma. She writes in: ‘I’m tutoring on the Osage Nation reservation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. My work is both sad and inspirational. I love working with these children and helping them find the skills to discover their own rich heritage.’”

  “See? That’s what I mean about her. She just took all of her own sadness and turned it toward helping others. And it paid off.”

  “So you never went to see her out there?”

  “No. I don’t know where the hell I was when she was there. Probably in some sort of boyfriend hell. But she called me up the minute she got to Washington. It was so great to hear from her after all those years.”

  “So you guys didn’t really keep in touch.”

  “No. When she moved here, we hadn’t spoken to each other since graduation. But you know what? It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. We took up right where we left off…. Like with you, Gunner. I mean, here we are all friendly again, even though I hardly ever see you anymore,” I teased him.

  “And you were the one who introduced her to Grant, right?”

  “Yes, indeedy.”

  “But you went out with him first, right? Why didn’t you marry him? Rich, good-looking guy like that?”

  “Puh-leeze. I’d rather die of starvation than of boredom. I was much too much of a handful for Grant. Violet’s perfect for him. He is, like, the most uptight person in the entire world. And totally insecure.”

  “He’s a good-lookin’ guy, he owns a bank, and he’s insecure? Shiiit,” Gunner drawled.

  I explained the whole thing to Gunner again, told him what a tyrant old Mr. Bolton was and how Rainy Bolton was the toughest thing in toe shoes.

  “Look, the Boltons wanted their only son to marry someone very substantial. Rainy Bolton mistrusts women who don’t have certain credentials. That’s why they didn’t like me. Rainy thought I was frivolous. But they adored Violet. Violet was this perfect combination of innocence and worthiness and ambition. She worshipped Grant, and she would let him be the star. If he’d married me, I would have been the star, darling!”

  “Even if you do say so yourself,” Gunner snickered.

  “I’m kidding! But I was way too racy for old Grant. He’s the biggest prig. At least he was up until recently. Back then, the last thing he wanted was a girl with a past, believe me. Violet was like the freaking Virgin Mary. And so worthy—unlike moi.”

  “You’re not worthy?”

  “I’m too chic and cynical
to be worthy.”

  “But Violet’s worthy?”

  “God, yes! Read those ‘Class Notes.’ Violet went to law school. She did pro bono work for the Indians. She lobbied for the environment. She’s one of those pure people. She was absolutely right for Grant, and I knew it the minute I saw her. Of course, now he’s completely derailed with Cynthia. But, frankly, I don’t see how that can last. Not now—not with all this terrible publicity. That woman’s in a world of trouble. And when the going gets tough, trust me, Grant Bolton will get going!”

  “So how come you never wrote in to tell people what you were up to?”

  I really didn’t feel like going into the whole failed-princess thing with Gunner, so I simply said, “I guess I was just too busy living.”

  He closed the booklet. “Any more Bob Poll sightings?”

  “Actually, yes. I ran into him at the Otanni Embassy.”

  “How was that?”

  “I don’t know. He’s weird. He doesn’t seem too happy, though.”

  “No? How come?”

  “I don’t think he likes married life. And I don’t care…. What’s happening with Maxwell? I never hear about him anymore.”

  “He’s going through the process. Enjoying his grisly fame. Playing games.”

  “What kinds of games?”

  “Still not confessing to everything. Kinda hinting someone else was involved in bashing in the skulls of innocent girls and violating them. That’s his power now—his sick, controlling little piece of power in this world.”

  “Oh, my God. So do you think Bob Poll could be involved after all?”

  Gunner hesitated. “Look, Reven, I need to talk to you.”

  “What have we been doing?”

  “In private.”

  “About the crimes?”

  Gunner stood up from the couch. “I’ll call you.”

  “I’ve missed you, Gunner.”

  “By the way, how’s your senator?” he asked as he was leaving.