Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

I couldn’t see for certain, but I’ll bet my best lipstick he blushed. If I closed my eyes, I could feel the warmth on my nearby cheek.

“Aunt Julie concurred,” I added. “At first, anyway. Until she got a good look at you.”

“I’m not saying they’re right,” he said carefully, “but there’s no rush, is there?”

“You tell me.”

“No. There’s no rush.”

We sat there, side by side, legs not quite touching. Doctor Paul rotated the mug in his hands, his competent surgeon’s hands. They looked older and wiser than the rest of him. He kept his nails trimmed short, his cuticles tidy. The tiny crescents at the base were extraordinarily white.

He cleared his throat. “Of course, I didn’t mean to imply that I’m not tempted. Just to be clear. Extremely tempted.”

“Mind over matter?”

“Exactly.”

“I’d hate to lead you astray from the well-worn path of virtue.”

He cleared his throat again. Blushed again, too, the love. If he kept giving off that kind of thermodynamic spondulics, I was going to have to change into something less comfortable. “Yes, of course,” he mumbled.

I lifted my eyes, and the table appeared before me, and my great-aunt Violet’s suitcase atop it. Aunt Violet, who ran away with her lover into the Berlin summer. Had they made it to Switzerland together? She would be in her seventies now, if she were still alive. If she had succeeded.

Doctor Paul rose from the sofa in a sudden heave of dilapidated upholstery. His hand stretched toward me, palm upward, open and strong. “Let’s go somewhere, Vivian.”

“What about your sleep?”

“I’ll catch up eventually. This is more important.”

I took his hand and let him pull me upward. “If you must. Where do we go?”

He stood close as a whisker, solid as a deep-blue tree. “How about the library?”

“The library.”

“Yes, the library.” Doctor Paul reached around my back, untied my frilly apron, and lifted it over my head. “We’re going to find out all about this aunt of yours.”

Your husband told me you wouldn’t mind, Lionel Richardson said. For the life of her, Violet can’t imagine why. In the course of their two and a half years together, Walter has only allowed one other man inside the darkened laboratory with her: namely, himself.

But then, like most illicit affairs, theirs was unequal from the beginning. Violet’s youth, her loneliness, her awe-swollen gratitude were no match for Dr. Grant’s experience. At nineteen—at any age—innocence doesn’t know its own power. To know that power, after all, is to lose it.

In Violet’s downcast moments—now, for example, as she locks the laboratory door and trudges in the direction of Lionel Richardson’s laughter down the hall—she forces herself to recall the instant of their meeting, the instant in which everything changed. When the chains of her attachment were first forged.

She climbs the stairs to her husband’s office, from which Richardson’s laughter originates, but she sees instead the familiar Oxford room of 1911, richly appointed, and the angular man standing in the doorway before it: the legendary Dr. Walter Grant made manifestly physical. She remembers how every aspect exuded masculine eminence, from his thin-lipped mouth surrounded by its salty trim beard to his graying hair gleaming with pomade under the masterful glow of a multitude of electric lamps. He wasn’t a large man, but neither was he small. He was built like a whip, slender and hard, and the expert tailoring of his clothes to his body gave him an additional substance that, in Violet’s eyes, he didn’t require.

At the moment of that first meeting, Violet was somewhat out of breath. She had grown agitated, speaking to his private secretary, whose job it was to protect the great man from unforeseen attacks like hers; she was also hot beneath her drab brown clothes, because it was the end of August and the heat lounged about the yellowed university stones, an old beast exhausted by the long summer and refusing to be moved. Damp with perspiration, her chest moving rapidly, Violet pushed back her loosened hair with firm fingers and announced herself.

Clearly, Dr. Grant was annoyed at the disturbance. He turned his grimace to the secretary.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, sir. The young lady will simply not be moved. Shall I call someone?” The secretary’s clipped gray voice betrayed not the slightest sense of Violet as a fellow female, as a fellow human being, as anything other than an obstacle to be removed from Dr. Grant’s eminent path.

Violet was used to this. She was used to the look of aggravation on Dr. Grant’s face. She was used to rooms like this, the smell of wooden furniture and ancient air, the acrid hint of chemicals in some distant laboratory, the clickety-click of someone’s typewriter interrupting the scholarly quiet. She tilted up her chin and held out her leather portfolio of papers. “With all respect, Dr. Grant, I will not leave until I learn why my application to your institute has once more been sent back, without any sign of its having been read and considered.”

“Application to this institute,” said the secretary scathingly. “The cheek of these American girls. I shall ring for help at once, Dr. Grant.” She lifted the receiver of a dusty black telephone box.

But Dr. Grant held up his hand. He looked at Violet, really looked , and his eyes were so genuinely and intensely blue that Violet felt a leap of childlike hope inside her ribs.

“What is your name, madame?” he asked.

“Violet Schuyler, sir. I have recently graduated with highest honors from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, with bachelor of science degrees conferred in both mathematics and chemistry. My marks are impeccable, I have letters of recommendation from—”

“When did you first make your application to the institute?”

“In March, sir. It was returned in April. I presumed there had been some misdirection, so I sent it again, and—”

He turned to the secretary. “Why have I not seen Miss Schuyler’s application?”

The secretary knit her fingers together on the desk and creased her narrow eyes at Violet. “I assumed, sir, that—”

“That I would not consider an application from a female student?”

“Dr. Grant, the institute … that is, there is not a single scientist who … It’s impossible, sir. Of course it is. Your laboratory is no place …”

Dr. Grant turned back to Violet with eyes now livid. “I apologize, Miss Schuyler. Your application should have been received with exactly the same attention as any other. If you will please do me the honor of attending me in my office, I shall read it now, with the utmost regard for your tenacity in delivering it against all obstacles.” He stood back and motioned with his arm.

And so it began, the awakening of Violet’s gratitude, in that instant of triumph over the pinched and gray-suited secretary. She swept into Dr. Grant’s office and heard the firm click of the door as he closed it behind them, the decisive shutting-out of disapproving secretaries and rigid parents from the territory around them.

“Sit, I beg you,” he said, proffering a venerable old leather chair, and Violet sat. He pulled out his pair of rectangular reading glasses and settled into his own chair, behind the desk, while the clock drummed away in the corner and a robin sang from the tree outside the open window. As he read, he remained absolutely still, as if absorbed whole into the papers before him. Violet clenched her fingers around her knee and observed his purposeful energy, the fighting trim of his whip-thin body. Dr. Grant was three years older than her own father, and yet every detail of him belonged so clearly to a newer age, the modern age. Even his graying hair, the color of burnished steel.