“Ooh, and how are our darling Jewish cousins doing these days? Has Kiki had her baby yet?” I watched her consternation with delight. Poor old Mums never could quite accustom herself to what she was pleased to call the Hebrew stain in the Schuyler blood. Of which, more later.
Mums made a triumphant little cluck of her tongue. “Not yet. I hear she’s as big as a house.”
“Oh, maybe it’s twins! Wouldn’t that be lovely!” I pitched that one over my shoulder on the way to the living room, where my father wallowed on a sofa with my sister to his left and a fresh pair of trickling gimlets lined up to his right. (The vodka gimlet was one of the few points of agreement between my parents.) He staggered to his feet at the sight of me.
“Dadums! Handsome as ever, I see.” I kissed his cheek, right between two converging red capillaries.
“You look like a tramp in that dress.” He returned the kiss and crashed back down.
“That’s the point, Dad. Two guesses whether it did the trick.”
“Don’t listen to him, Vivs. You look gorgeous.” Pepper pulled me down next to her for a cuddle. “A little creased, though,” she added in a whisper.
“Imagine that,” I whispered back. We linked arms. Pepper was my favorite sister by a ladies’ mile. Neither of us could politely stand Tiny, who had by the grace of God married her Harvard mark last June and now lived in a respectably shabby house in the Back Bay with a little Boston bean in her righteous oven. God only knew how it got there.
“I want details,” said Pepper.
“Take a number, sister.”
Mums appeared in the doorway with her cigarette poised in its holder. She marched straight to the drinks tray. “Charles, tell your daughter what a man thinks of a girl who jumps into bed with him right away.”
He watched her clink away with ice and glass. “Obviously, I have no idea,” he drawled.
Pepper jumped to her feet and slapped her hands over her ears. “Not another word. Really. Stop.”
Mums turned. The stopper dangled from one hand, the cigarette holder from the other. So very Mumsy. “What are you suggesting, Charles?”
“Dad was only celebrating your renowned virtue, Mums. As do we all.”
She turned back to her mixology. “Fine. Do as you like. I’d just like to point out that among the three of you, only Tiny’s found a husband.”
“Mums, I’d rather die a virgin than marry Franklin Hardcastle,” said I.
“No chance of that,” muttered Pepper.
“Pot, meet kettle,” I muttered back.
Mums was crying. “I miss her.”
“Now, now,” I said. “No use weeping over spilled milk. Especially when the milk took so excruciatingly long to get spilled.”
“At least one of my daughters has a sense of female decorum.” Sniff, sip, cigarette.
“I can’t imagine where she got it from,” said Pepper. God, I loved Pepper. We were simpatico, Pepper and me, perhaps because we’d arrived an unseemly twelve months apart. As a teenager, I’d once spent an entire morning smuggling through Mums’s old letters to discover whether we were half sisters or full. I’d have to concede full, given the genetic evidence. Tiny, I’m not so sure.
“Apparently not from our great-aunt Violet.” I piped the words cheerfully.
Next to me, Dad exploded into a fit of coughing.
Mums’s red eyes peeped over her poisons. “Are you all right, Charles?”
“Who’s Aunt Violet?” asked Pepper.
“Oh, this isn’t about that package, is it?” said Mums.
I pounded Dad’s broad back. The hacking was beginning to break up, thank goodness, just as his face shifted from red to purple. “Deep breaths,” I said.
“What package?” asked Pepper.
“Yesterday I picked up a package from the post office. Mums had forwarded it to me.” I kept up the pounding as I spoke. “It was a suitcase belonging to a Violet Schuyler. Aunt Julie said she was our aunt, and—this is the best part, Pepper, so listen up—she murdered her husband in 1914 and ran off with her lover. Isn’t it delicious?”
Dad renewed his spasm of choking. I turned back to him. “Glass of water, Daddy, dear?”
He shook his head.
“As you see,” I told Pepper, “Dad’s heard of her. But the point is, we have a precedent in this family for independent women. It’s in our blood.”
“But Mums isn’t an independent woman,” said Pepper. “She just has a weakness for parties and married men.”
“I’m standing right here, you ungrateful child.”
“True, but she’s not a real Schuyler, is she?” I turned to Mums. “Not by blood.”
“Thank God,” said Mums. She found her favorite armchair and angled herself into it like a movie star, drink and smoke balanced exquisitely in each hand. “I have my faults, but I haven’t murdered your father. Yet.”
“Small mercies.” Dad had finally recovered. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his battered gold cigarette case, which had been to Eagle’s Nest and back, comforting him in every trial.
“That bad, is it?” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean.” He lit his cigarette with a shaky hand.
“Now, Dad. It’s been fifty years since the alleged crimes. Do spill.”
“There’s nothing to spill.”
“Are you saying she didn’t exist?”
“She existed, of course.” He exhaled a good-sized therapeutic cloud and inhaled his drink. “But you’ve just about summed up all I know. Your grandparents never talked about it.”
“But you must have heard something else. Names, rumors, something.”
A rare sharp look from old Dadums. “Why do you want to know?”
“Curiosity.”
My father heaved himself up from the sofa and walked to one of the stately sash windows perched above the park. A magnificent thirty-foot living room, the old Schuyler apartment had, thrown open to guests in 1925 by my grandfather and not much redecorated since. We took our drinks from the same crystal decanters, we wobbled across the same Oriental rugs, we sank our backsides into the same mahogany-framed furniture under the gazes of the same disapproving portraits. Possibly Mums had reupholstered at one point, but the sagging cushions were all Schuyler. Dad jiggled his empty ice. “Well, she was a scientist. Left for Cambridge or Oxford, I forget which, a few years before the war.”
“Oxford,” I said.
“She married a professor, and then they moved to Berlin at some point. He was at some sort of institute there.”
“The Kaiser Wilhelm.”
Mums did the daggering thing with her eyebrows. “How do you know all this?”
“It’s called a li-brar-y, Mums.” I dragged out the word. “You go there to read about things. They have encyclopedias, periodicals, Peyton Place. You’d be amazed. Proceed, Dad.”
“No, you go ahead. Obviously, you know more than I do.”
“Just a few facts. Nothing about her. What she was like.”
“I didn’t know her. I was born during