“Well, that’s not much use, is it? She died eons ago.”
“Vivian, really,” said Mums.
But Dad turned to me with a touch of smile. “Twenty-five years may seem like eons to you, my dear, but I can remember that hurricane like it was yesterday.”
“And she was close to Aunt Christina?”
“I don’t know if they were close.” He found the ashtray on the drinks table. “But they wrote to each other. Kept in touch. I remember she said that Violet was an odd bird, a lonely girl. I don’t think she was happy.”
“Did Aunt Christina know what happened? The murder? The lover? Did she know his name?”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Mums rolled her head back to face the ceiling.
“Hardly the kind of thing she would tell me,” said my father.
“Anything, Dad.”
He didn’t look surprised at my curiosity. The sacks beneath his eyes hoisted thoughtfully upward, and he folded his arms and leaned against the window frame. “I don’t know. There might have been a baby.”
“Charles, must you be vulgar?”
“Or not.” He shook his head. The fumes wafted. “You’d have to ask Aunt Christina.”
“Many thanks.”
“I have a Ouija board somewhere,” said Pepper helpfully.
At which point the housekeeper saved us, announcing lunch, and we shifted ground to the dining room and a tasteful selection of sliced meats and cooked eggs and salads with mayonnaise. It was not until the end of the meal that the shadow of Aunt Violet cast itself once more upon our protruding eggy bellies. Naturally, Pepper was to blame. She stirred cauldrons like a witch in a Scottish play.
“Here’s what I think.” She helped herself to Mums’s cigarette case. “Vivian should do a story on Aunt Violet for the Metropolitan.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Pepper,” said the pot to the kettle.
“I’m not being sarcastic. The whole thing screams Metropolitan feature. Compromising photographs, the works. Don’t you think, Vivian?”
I tossed back a final trickle of straw-colored Burgundy. “Already thunk.”
“Thought,” said Dad.
“Vivian!” said Mums.
“Why not? It could be my breakthrough.”
“Because it’s vulgar. Because it’s … it’s … it’s family.”
Mums, caught in a stammer! Now I knew I was onto something big.
“Why not? The Schuylers haven’t given a damn about Violet in half a century. There’s no need to start now.”
Pepper spoke up. “That’s where you’re wrong, Vivs. We’ve obviously done our Schuyler best to ignore Violet out of existence for half a century. It’s a completely opposite thing, ignoring versus indifference. Justice for Violet, that’s what I say! Down with Schuyler oppression!” She shook her fist.
“You will not write this story, Vivian,” said Mums. “I forbid it.”
“You can’t forbid me; I’m twenty-two years old. Besides, it’s freedom of speech. Journalistic integrity. All those darling little Constitutional rights that separate us from the communists.” I put my fist down on the mayonnaise-stained tablecloth, right next to Pepper’s wineglass. “Violet must have a voice.”
“Oh, not your damned women’s lib again,” said Dad. “I fought the Nazis for this?”
“It’s not my damned women’s lib, Dadums. It’s all-American freedom of the press.”
Mums threw up her hands. “You see, Charles? This is what comes of letting your daughter become a career girl.” As she might say call girl.
“I didn’t let her become a career girl.”
“I certainly didn’t.”
Agreement at last! I gazed lovingly back and forth between the pair of them.
“I hate to interrupt another petty squabble, dear ones, but I’m afraid you can’t have the satisfaction of laying blame at each other’s doorsteps this time. It just so happens I gave myself permission to start a career. The two of you had nothing to do with it, except to prod me on with all your lovely objections.” I dabbed the corners of my mouth with an ancient linen napkin and rose to my feet, orator-style, John Paul Jones in a sleek little red wool number that would have sizzled off the powder from the Founding Fathers’ wigs. “And I am damned well going to use said hard-won career to find out what happened to Violet Schuyler.”
“Bravo.” Pepper clapped her hands. “Count me in.”
Dad pulled out his cigarette case. “Here’s what I’d like to know, Vivian, my sweet. Whose damned idiot idea was it to send girls off to college?”
Violet has always supposed that her liaison with Dr. Grant, and the eventual announcement of their marriage, came as a shock to their colleagues at the Devonshire Institute.
And yet how could they not have known what was taking place throughout that long winter of the affair? She was so naive and unguarded, so fearfully young and trustful. She shivers to think of it now, and yet how can she blame herself? If she were that Violet now, and Walter were that Dr. Grant, she would do it again.
The day after Dr. Grant took her virginity with tea and cake in his sitting room, Violet sat alone in the institute’s cramped dining hall, eating a typically overboiled and lukewarm lunch, when a young laboratory assistant approached her with a folded note. Miss Violet Schuyler, it was labeled, in the brusque black slashes she had come to associate with a concurrent jolt of energy inside her belly. She opened the paper to read that her presence was required in Dr. Grant’s office on a matter of immediate urgency. Five minutes later, she lay on the edge of a broad desk with her skirts raised obediently about her hips, while the head of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry conducted a rigorously invasive experiment between her legs.
That night, he walked her back to her rooms and went upstairs with her, though he was not particularly pleased by the extreme narrowness of her bed and the spartan illumination of the single lamp. He remained only half an hour, including drink and cigarette. That was a Thursday. The next evening, they met at his house and shared an intimate dinner of pheasant and a pair of 1894 Margaux in the sitting room, and afterward Violet followed Dr. Grant upstairs to his wide and well-dressed bed. “Remember, child,” he said, as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist, “nothing is unnatural that gives man and woman pleasure together. The sexual instinct is Nature itself.”
In the morning, she found three new dresses hanging in the wardrobe, next to Dr. Grant’s suits. They were for her, he said, so she would have something to wear when she stopped the night; there were also underthings in the drawer, each of them a perfect fit, and a new toothbrush in the bathroom. The housekeeper brought a tray loaded with breakfast, and Violet found she was terribly hungry.