Already, Violet respected her silences.
THEY CROSSED A low-slung bridge spanning a large channel: “Eggleston Bridge, death trap when it rains,” Violet said. “Aquaplane right into the water.” A covey of startled geese lifted, flapping and honking, into the air. Violet lurched onto a causeway bordered on both sides by blue-green bay and dotted with broken clamshells—“The clever gulls drop clams from the sky to crack them open.” Maddy blinked in the white light that seemed to boil down from a cataract in the sky.
Violet parked the car at the Point and they carried the wicker basket and a blanket down rickety wooden stairs to the beach.
“Mind the splinters and poison ivy,” Violet called over her shoulder. “Muthuh considers it vulgar to add modern improvements. Well! here we are, my favorite place in the world. I want my ashes scattered here.”
Violet seemed much taken up with death, but Maddy was too wonder-struck to hang on to the thought. She’d never seen a lovelier place: part New England, part Greek island . . . a place she recognized. Over to the right, a sand spit extended out into the bay, curving a sheltering shoulder around the water to form a jade lagoon. A sandy islet rose in the water a short way out. On the shore beyond, a stand for an osprey nest tilted at a rakish angle. All around stretched flats of lime eelgrass threaded by channels streaming molten silver in the sunlight. And farthest off lay a green island with dark stands of oak, receding in a lavender haze.
She’d been here before. The scene strangely called up a memory from childhood, of a painting on a biscuit tin of a watery, sun-struck Eden. She’d sit in the mean kitchen on Butler Street at the table covered in oilcloth and stare trancelike at the landscape on the tin, a golden land that seemed a signpost to a mysterious elsewhere that she longed to reach.
“This is all ours,” came Violet’s voice. She made a sweeping gesture at the land all around. Snapping her back. She herself owned nothing but talent, and planned to ride it far. What could Violet know about it? What did rich kids know about anything? She’d noticed something about the moneyed sorts who hung about the music world: they could do civility, but at stray moments out popped arrogance and entitlement, like a trained jaguar reverting to its natural savagery.
Violet was anxiously trying to decipher Maddy’s frown. “Here, let’s spread the blanket in front of this dune and break out the wine.” Violet opened the wicker basket and expertly applied corkscrew to bottle. “Gewürztraminer—bet you’ve never tasted any of this quality.”
She’d never heard the name. Violet freed the bottle from the cork, breasts bobbling through her gauzy flowered Hungarian blouse. Her penny-colored nipples peeked from among the green, blue, and red embroidered flowers. She lofted her glass, a figure from a pagan frieze.
“Welcome to Conscience Point, the first of many visits!”
The taste of the wine ambrosial. Violet set out a baguette, wedge of cheese, bone-handled knife on the orange, black, and green wool blanket. “Foie gras from Fauchon,” Violet announced, brandishing a jar. “You let it melt in your mouth.”
Afterward they lit Winstons and Violet sat knees clasped, head back, cigarette jutting from her mouth. Maddy cut secret looks at her grey eyes slanting down at the corners; spiky lashes, flared nostrils, hectic flush—created, she noticed, by tiny broken veins; the down above her fleshy upper lip. Her chopped Dutch-girl hair was fastened with a blue plastic barrette with a floral design.
“Here, your weed’s out.” Violet shifted to give Maddy a light off her cigarette. She held Maddy’s cigarette hand, then seized the other. “You must be very, very careful of these hands. I am in awe of talent. It’s the only thing I envy.”
Maddy was amazed to feel a tingling along her skin.
Violet released her hands, and sat cross-legged, staring out at the bay. “Oh, look, a cormorant.” Touching Maddy’s wrist, she pointed out the dark erectile head of a bird bobbing in the water before it dove for food.
The wine, the beauty of the Point, Violet’s admiration had lifted Maddy to a near-ecstatic state. The wheeling sun drizzled gold across the lagoon, the surrounding channels took fire. She wanted to wade into the blaze and dissolve in light.
“I see a mah-velous future,” Violet said. “You’ll be a concert pianist and play in the world’s capitals. And I’ll paint my little pictures. Of course I don’t have half your talent and don’t even try to disagree—I loathe false modesty.”
A moment. “You make it sound so simple,” Maddy said. “I see obstacles and sacrifice.”
“Oh, there’s always someone ordering you about. But when you come right down to it, who can really stop us?”
“Men. Husbands. If I place in the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium—big ‘if’—I’d play concert dates all over the world, I’d rarely be home. To make it as a pianist you need a ‘smoother’ to arrange tiresome details. How many men would do that for a woman?” She thought of her steady and, to date, only beau, an intern at Einstein. Leonard of Pelham Parkway. Kind, earnest, banal. His very name struck a dissonant chord in this place. “A husband wants dinner on the table at night—not an artist on the touring circuit. And once there are children—”
“Well, what are nannies for?” Violet said impatiently. “Those are just excuses.” She refilled their glasses.
Maddy gulped her wine, she whose acquaintance with drink was limited to the odd postconcert sherry. “We would invent our own way,” she said, catching Violet’s elation. “I mean, think of Edward Hopper. Who before Hopper saw the world like that?” Slurring the words. “The world of people who missed their lives.” Like her father, the onetime “keyboard lion” who ended up teaching “Für Elise” to grimy-kneed kids on Butler Street. Like her mother, who never forgave him, her sense of betrayal echoing off the walls.
“Missing your life—what could be worse?” Violet said. The wine had heightened her flush. “We do have precedents, pioneers in living—like Bloomsbury, a group of kindred souls living for art and love. Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West. And Violet Trefusis—my distant cousin and namesake. The Happy Few have a way of f-f-finding each other.” Violet squinted at Maddy. “We could start our community with us. Today. This very moment.”
Maddy lofted her wine glass. “To art and love and the Happy Few.”
“To us. We’ll call it the Republic of Art. We’ll build it here at the Point, my swinish family be damned. This place was meant for artists, musicians. Look”—she gestured toward a meadow beyond the eelgrass—“we’ll build a little stage for outdoor concerts. I can hear the fiddles tuning up. . . .” Sudden grimace. “Y’know, I can’t picture Christian there.”
Maddy had forgotten all about Violet’s suitor at the fountain in front of Atkins Hall.
“After we’re married, Christian will want to live in Bedminster and do the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable—Oscar Wilde’s definition of fox-hunting. He’ll go to tailgate picnics at his Princeton reunions. With old classmates with straw boaters and red pants and redder noses. Summers among the stiffs at the Edgartown—Ed-guhtown—Yacht Club. And of course he considers my painting just a charming hobby. Sets me apart from the debs doing charity work for Islesford General . . . But the upside of marriage to the Generic Groom is the freedom. Christian would just go on selling bonds and hounding foxes and saying ‘Good-o,’ without noticing a thing.”
So: despite her high-flying talk, Violet would marry Christian, keep one foot safely anchored in the life she claimed to scorn. Maddy felt herself deflate. Violet was a bit of a fraud. Violet scrambled to her feet and stretched her hands to the sky. “Oh, why think about the old booby today? Let’s go for a swim before the green flies descend. It’ll be glacial but mah-velous.”
“I