Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

How on earth did she get here, in this English building, filled with a race of people to whom she did not belong? Why had she fled her family, her life, her country, her comfortable future? What was she doing?

You’re greedy, her mother had said to her quietly, that last night in New York, as she had packed her things. Greedy and selfish. It’s not the knowledge you want, you can have that from your journals. You want to be in the newspapers, you want to be Marie Curie, you want to think you’re different from all of us. That all other women are silly and complacent and conventional, except you, brilliant you.

Isn’t that right, Violet?

“I beg your pardon,” Dr. Grant said, raising his head a quarter hour later to part the curtain of silence between them. “I believe a mistake has been made. You are quite the most qualified applicant to this institute in four years.”

Despite his heroic vanquishing of the secretary, Violet had somehow been expecting resistance. Resistance was all she knew: from her parents, filling the musty Fifth Avenue air with argument and expostulation; from her brothers, jeering over the silver and crystal. The opposition of the entire world against one embattled island of Violet.

She opened her mouth to return this volley that did not arrive. Instead, on the end of a wary breath, she offered: “I was informed at the outset that it’s too late to enter the university for the current term.”

He waved that aside in a flash of starched white cuff. “I shall see to it personally. You will have to join one of the women’s colleges, of course. Somerville, I think, will be best. I know the principal well; there should be no trouble at all. Have you lodgings?”

“I am at the Crown,” she said numbly.

He made a small black note on the paper before him. “I will see to it at once. A quiet, discreet pair of rooms. You have no companion, I take it?”

“No. I am independent.”

“Very good.”

Very good. Violet absorbed the note of rich satisfaction in his voice, above the glacial white of his collar, the symmetrical dark knot of his necktie. He was wearing a tweed jacket and matching waistcoat, and when he rose to bid her a tidy good afternoon, he unfastened the top button in an absent gesture to let the sides fall apart across his flat stomach.

Violet looked directly into his eyes, at that unsettlingly clear blue in his polished face, but her attention remained at his periphery, at that unfastened horn button, from which the tiny end of a thread dangled perhaps a quarter inch.

Now, as she pauses once more outside her husband’s office door, she remembers longing, quite irrationally and against her finest principles, to mend it for him.

By the time we reached Twenty-first Street, we were holding hands. I know, I know. I don’t consider myself the hand-holding kind of girl, either, but Doctor Paul reached for me when a checker cab screamed illegally around the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth, against the light, and what would you have me do? Shrug the sweet man off?

So I let it stay.

Doctor Paul had suggested walking instead of the subway, once he emerged from the hospital locker room, shiny and soapy and shaven, hair damp, body encased in a light suit of sober gray wool with a dark blue sweater-vest underneath. I would have said yes to anything at that particular instant, so here we were, trudging up Fifth Avenue, linked hands swinging between us, sun fighting to emerge above our heads.

“You’re unexpectedly quiet,” he said.

“Just taking it all in. I suppose you’re used to bringing home blondes from the post office, but I’m all thumbs.”

He laughed. “I’ve never brought home a blonde from the post office, and I never will.”

“Promises, promises.”

“I happen to prefer brunettes.”

“Since when?”

“Since noon today.”

“And what did you prefer before that?”

“ Hmm. The details are strangely hazy now.”

I gave his hand a thankful squeeze. “Stunned you with my cosmic ray gun, did I?”

He peered up at the sun. “I said to myself, Paul Salisbury, any girl who can say Holy Dick in the middle of a crowded post office in Greenwich Village, that girl is for keeps.”

“Nothing to do with my irresistible face, then? My tempting figure?”

“The thought never crossed my mind.”

I couldn’t see for the galloping unicorns. The Empire State Building lay somewhere ahead, over the rainbow. “The blue scrubs did it for me. I’ve had a doctor complex since I was thirteen. Just ask my shrink.”

“And to think my pops didn’t want me to go to medical school.”

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to him. “You’re having me on, aren’t you?”

He shook his head.

“But everyone wants his son to be a doctor. No one brags about his son the banker, his son the lawyer.”

“Not mine.”

I squinted suspiciously. “Are you from earth?”

“I’m from California.”

I nodded with understanding and turned us back up the sidewalk. “Aha. That explains everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. The golden glow, the naive willingness to follow a strange girl upstairs to her squalid Village apartment. I knew you couldn’t be a native New Yorker.”

“As you are.”

“As I eminently am. Tell me about California. I’ve never been there.”

He told me about cliffs and beaches and the cold Pacific current, about his family’s house in the East Bay, about the fog that rolled in during the summer afternoons, you could almost set your watch by it, and the bright red-orange of the Golden Gate Bridge against the scrubbed blue sky. Did I know that they never stopped painting that bridge? By the time they had finished the last stroke, they had to start all over again from the beginning. We were just escaping from Alcatraz when the stone lions of the New York Public Library clawed up before us.

“After you,” said Doctor Paul.

“SO. I suppose we should start with Violet Schuyler,” said Doctor Paul, in his best hushed library whisper.

“How you joke.”

“No?”

“My dear boy, don’t you know? It’s much easier to find out about men. Even if my aunt Violet were the most talented scientist in the Western world, she would probably only rate a small paragraph in the E.B. Either no one would have paid her any attention, or some man would have jumped in to take credit for her work.”

“Really?” The old lifting eyebrow.

“Really.”

“What about Marie Curie?’

“The exception that proves the rule. And she worked with her husband.”

“All right, then. So what was Violet’s husband’s name?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Shh,” said the librarian.

The New York Times came to our rescue. “She’s a Schuyler,” I told Doctor Paul. “Even if the family disowned her, they’d still have put a wedding announcement in the paper.”

He shook his head. “And they say Californians are the loonies.”

“Oh, you’ll learn to love us. And our Labrador retrievers, too.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t love you. I don’t suppose you know the wedding date?”

“I do not. But it would have taken at least a few months from meeting to marriage, don’t you think?”

He winked. “Would it?”

“You’re a shameless flirt, Doctor Paul.”

“Shh,” said the librarian.

We started with January of 1912, and in half an hour had found our mark. I whistled low, earning myself a sharp look of hatred from the librarian, or perhaps it was jealousy. “April. What, eight months? For a confirmed old bachelor? That was quick work.”