“A wreck! Anyway, I gave him back the ring. I made him take it. He told me he’d go through with it if I wanted, but I set him straight. I set him straight as a metal ruler.” The transatlantic static was no match for Gogo’s determination, not even close.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my ashen face under my golden-yellow pillbox hat. “What did your father say?”
“What’s that, Vivs? Speak up!”
“Your father! What did he say?”
“Oh, Daddy? He swore at me, of course.” Laugh laugh. “And he said he damned well better get his money back from David. But David will give it back, obviously, and then . . . well.”
“Well what?”
“Well. I just want you to know, Vivs, it’s the reason I called, really, that the two of you . . . Well. You’re free. Don’t worry about little old me. I’m a big girl now.”
“Yes, you are. You are the biggest girl I know.” I pressed my fingertip into the mirror until it shone white and free of blood, and a ring of fog circled it on the glass.
Gogo, the only one of us who comes out of this smelling good.
“Well, good-bye, Vivs. Have a lovely time in Paris. I want postcards.”
“You’ve got them.”
The line clicked. I replaced the receiver and gazed at my pale mug in the mirror, my cat eyes reduced to roundness. My pink lipstick, garish now.
He was a wreck. Well. Good. He deserved to be. We both deserved it. Wrecks, the two of us. Wreckers. We had our just deserts, our poires au Grand Marnier stuck with bitter cloves. I only hoped Paul really had been lying about the Vegas racket. I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Lightfoot’s ledger. Not for a million dollars.
The telephone, still in my hands, startled me with a harum-scarum ringringring. I let it go until my heart steadied.
“Vivian Schuyler.”
“Mademoiselle Schuyler! This is Pierre-Auguste speaking. I regret I cannot find any record of an institute Maxwell in Paris, or the suburbs. I have tried the telephone directory, the maps. I have asked the manager.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“I can keep looking, mademoiselle, but . . .” He hung his silence expressively.
“No, that’s all right. Thank you anyway.”
“I am always happy to be of service, mademoiselle.”
I turned away from the mirror. “Thank you, Pierre-Auguste. Oh! Wait a moment. Perhaps you could send a cable for me.”
“But of course.”
“It’s for a Mrs. Julie . . . Oh, damn . . . Hadley, that’s it. Mrs. Julie Hadley, the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.”
? ? ?
HER REPLY arrived two hours later, at four in the afternoon:
NOT MAXWELL INSTITUTE STOP MORTIMER STOP GOD DAMN MORPHINE STOP LOVE JULIE
Violet
The telephone rings at four-forty-five in the afternoon, just as Violet is about to rise from her desk to retire for the day. She doesn’t last as long as she used to, but she can forgive herself for that. One does not reach an age when one’s joints rattle in their sockets without having earned the privilege of coming and going at will.
She picks up the receiver. “Oui, j’écoute.”
“Madame, there is a young lady to see you. A Mademoiselle Vivian Schuyler.”
Violet’s body stills at the news. She hasn’t heard that name in many years, and yet, like a scent from childhood, it awakens an instant chemical reaction inside her. The blood quickens, the ears sharpen. Her eyes fall upon the photograph on her desk, in its molten silver frame, and she studies it for a moment, counting the strikes of her heart, while Mademoiselle Bernard waits knowingly on the other end. Seventy-two beats per minute. “Vivian Schuyler, did you say?”
“Oui, madame.”
Vivian Schuyler. That would be Charles’s daughter, the one who went to Bryn Mawr and now works for some sort of fashionable New York magazine. Violet saw her photograph in the paper a few years ago, when she and her parents had been traveling through Europe. An exclusive party of some kind. She was quite lovely, Vivian. In the photograph, she was smiling, smiling with her black-and-white mouth just parted, as if she were about to say something unfathomably daring.
Violet rises from her chair with the telephone receiver still at her ear. “Make her comfortable, Mademoiselle Bernard, and tell her I shall be downstairs instantly. And could you discover my husband’s whereabouts and tell him to join us?”