Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

“Aren’t you just too much,” I whispered.

AUNT JULIE blew into the apartment half an hour later, smelling of cigarettes and Max Factor pancake foundation. She flung her hat on the stand but kept her coat in place. When you maintained a figure like hers so far past its biblically ordained two score and ten, you lived in a perpetual state of Pleistocene chill.

“Where is this suitcase of yours?” she demanded, lighting a cigarette.

“It’s not mine. That’s the point. Drink?” I didn’t wait for an answer. The liquor filled a cabinet of honor in the kitchen—such as it was—and while Aunt Julie might not admire the quality of the refreshment provided, she had to approve of its quantity.

She whipped off her gloves just in time to accept her Bloody Mary, no celery. “Haven’t you opened it yet?”

“Of course not. It’s not mine.”

“For God’s sake, my dear. Did your mother raise you with no standards at all?” She drained down half a glass, set the tumbler on the table, and put her hand on the valise’s tarnished brass clasp. “Well, well.”

“Now, wait just a minute.” I darted over and snatched her hand away.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t think we have any right to look inside.”

“Darling, she’ll never know.”

“How do we know that?”

“Nobody’s heard from her for fifty years. I’d say that was a pretty decent indication, wouldn’t you?”

“We should make some sort of effort to track her down first.”

Aunt Julie rolled her eyes and picked up her pick-me-up. “Ah, that’s good. You’re the only one of my nieces and nephews to mix a decent drink.”

“I had the finest instruction available.”

She wagged a finger. “Teach a girl to fish—”

“Look, Aunt Julie, about this Violet of yours …”

But Aunt Julie had already turned, aiming for the kitchen and a refill, and stopped with a rattle of dying ice. “Vivian, my dear,” she said slowly, “there’s a man on your sofa.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Oh, I approve wholeheartedly. But I do feel compelled to ask, for form’s sake, where the hell you picked him up on such short notice, and why he isn’t dressed more suitably.”

I came up behind her and slipped my arm about her waist. “Isn’t he a dream? I found him at the post office.”

“Delivered and signed for?”

“ Mmm. Poor thing, he works such long shifts at the hospital. He carried up the package for me with his last dying surge of energy, and then he just”—I waved my hand helplessly—“collapsed.”

“Imagine that. What do you plan to do with him?”

“What do you suggest?”

She resumed her journey to the liquor cabinet. “Just don’t sleep with him right away. It scares them off.”

“Funny, Mums already warned me. Tell me about Violet.”

“There isn’t much to tell. Not much that I know, anyway. I was the baby of the family. I was only nine years old when she left for England. That was 1911, I believe.” Aunt Julie wandered back from the kitchen and leaned against the table, drink in hand, staring lovingly at Doctor Paul.

“Why did she leave for England? Was she sent away?”

“No, the opposite. She wanted to be a scientist, and naturally that didn’t go down well in Schuylerville. I remember the most awful rows. They let her go eventually, I suppose—there’s not much you can do with a girl if she’s got her heart set on something—and washed their hands of it.” Aunt Julie cocked her head. “What color are his eyes?”

“Blue. Exactly the same shade as his scrubs. And stop trying to distract me.”

“I’ve changed my mind. Get him in bed pronto.”

“You know, I’ll bet he can hear you in his subconscious.”

“I hope he does. You could use a good love affair, Vivian. It’s the one thing you’re missing.”

I wagged my finger. “You’re the most miserable excuse for a chaperone in the history of maiden aunts.”

“I am not a maiden aunt. I’ve been married several times.”

“Regardless, I’m not going to sleep with him. Look at the poor darling. He’s exhausted.”

“I find,” said Aunt Julie, swishing her gin, “they can generally summon the energy.”

I crossed the floor to my bedroom—it didn’t take long—and took the extra blanket from the shelf. I called back: “Now talk. What did Violet do in England?”

“Got married to her professor, like the sane girl she was. She was very pretty, Violet, I’ll say that, though she didn’t care about anything except her damned atoms and molecules.”

I returned and spread the blanket over Doctor Paul, taking extra care with his doughty shoulders. “But then she murdered him.”

“Well, I don’t know the details of all that. The family hasn’t spoken of it since, never even uttered her name. I don’t think there was a trial or anything like that. But yes, the fellow was murdered, and Violet ran off with her lover. From a suite at the Adlon, of course. She did have taste.” She snapped her fingers. “And poof! That was that.”

“There must be more to it.”

“Of course there’s more.”

“And you were never curious?”

“I was young, Vivian. I hardly knew her, really. She was at school, and then she was in England.” Aunt Julie set her glass on the table and crossed her arms. “I wondered, of course. Once or twice, when I was in Europe, I asked a few questions. But nothing ever turned up.”

She was staring at the valise now, her lips turned down in a crimson crescent moon. She stretched out one claw and touched the lonely leather.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Of course you don’t. You’re young and suspicious.”

“And I know you, Aunt Julie.” I pointed at her duplicitous chest. “Out with it.”

She spread her hands. “I’ve told you all I know.”

She played her part well. Round eyes, innocent eyebrows. Mouth set irrevocably shut. I crossed my arms and tapped an arpeggio into my left elbow. “I can’t believe I had another great-aunt, all these years, and nobody ever mentioned it.”

Aunt offered me with a pitiful smile. “We’re the Schuylers, darling. Nobody ever would.”

From the window over the back courtyard came the sound of crockery smashing. A baby wailed. My first night in the apartment, with the roommate I’d met only that morning, I hadn’t slept a wink: the cramped squalor was so foreign to Fifth Avenue, to Bryn Mawr, to the rarefied quiet of a Long Island summer. I adored every piece of makeshift purloined furniture, every broken cabinet door held together with twine, every sound that shrieked through the window glass and told me I was alive, alive.

“Let’s open the valise,” said Aunt Julie. “I want to see what’s inside.”

“God, no. What if it’s a skeleton? Her dead husband?”

“All the better.”

I shook my head. “I can’t open it. Not until I know if she’s still alive.”

“You sound like a melodrama. If you really want the truth, it’s inside that bag.” She stabbed it with her finger. “ That’s where you’ll find Violet.”

“Well, it’s locked,” I said. “And there’s no key.”

Doctor Paul stirred on the sofa. “Clamp, not screw,” he muttered, and turned his face into the cushion.

I dropped my voice to a whisper. “See what you’ve done! Now, be quiet. He needs his sleep.”

Nobody could invest a standard-issue eye roll with as much withering contempt as Aunt Julie. She did it now, right before she marched to the hat stand and lifted her hat—a droll little orange felt number, perfectly matching her orange wool coat—from its hook. Crimson lips, orange hat: only Aunt Julie could pull that one off.