“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.
I followed her and placed a kiss on her cheek. “Stay dry.”
She shook her head. “You won’t break open the mysterious suitcase sitting on your own kitchen table. You won’t go to bed with that adorable doctor sleeping on your sofa.”
I opened the door for her and stood back.
Aunt Julie thrust her hat pin just so and swept into the vomit-stained hallway. She called, over her shoulder: “Youth is wasted on the young.”
? ? ?
EONS PASSED before the scent of Aunt Julie’s Max Factor faded from the air. I spent them tidying up the apartment—as far as feeble human ability could achieve, at any rate—and generally hiding all evidence of sin.
I did this not to favorably impress Doctor Paul when he woke (at least, not exclusively) nor out of a general desire for cleanliness (of which I had little) but because I liked to keep my hands busy while my brain wrestled with a problem.
And my new aunt Violet was a doozy of a problem.
A woman scientist: now, that was interesting, something I could understand. Not that I liked the sciences particularly, but I could see her struggle as vividly as I saw mine, for all the half century of so-called progress between us. Not only was this Violet a female scientist, poor dear. She was also a scientific female. She would have sat at the lonely table, wherever she made her home. I couldn’t blame her for marrying her professor.
The question was why she killed him afterward.
My housemaidenly urgings flickered and died. I sank into the chair at the table, feather duster in hand, and touched my finger, as Aunt Julie had, to the sturdy leather. That’s where you’ll find Violet, Aunt Julie had said, but it seemed to me that she existed elsewhere. That the marks and stains of her life’s work lay scattered out there, in the wide world, and that the contents of this particular valise were instead private, the detritus of her soul. I had no right to them. What if someone opened up my suitcase?
In the wake of the earlier fracas, the courtyard had gone unnaturally still. The clock ticked mechanically in my ear, and for some reason the sound reminded me that I hadn’t had lunch, that I had packed an entire week’s worth of excitement into a single Saturday afternoon, and for all I knew it might be dinnertime already.