Well, not instantly. But Violet can still move about with briskness. She credits her active life for that, her years spent on her feet inside the laboratory and chasing her children around outside it. Her husband, who keeps her brain busy, who makes her laugh, who still, when the wind is north by northwest, makes eager love to her in their high four-posted bed on the second floor of what had once, in another age, been the H?tel de Saint-Honoré, the Paris residence of the aristocratic family of that name.
She smoothes down her dress and looks in the tiny mirror on the wall, next to the door. Her heart beats in great smacks against the wall of her chest. She pinches her cheeks and adds a little lipstick from her pocketbook. This is a grand occasion, after all. She’s been expecting it for years, decades, and now that it’s here . . . well, she can’t quite comprehend why the air still hangs about the furniture in the ordinary way.
Violet opens the door and makes her way down the expansive staircase to the salon on the ground floor.
A young woman in a fashionable golden-yellow tweed suit stands staring at the portrait above the mantel. She turns, and Violet catches her breath in recognition at her eyes, large and Schuyler blue, tilting upward at the corners in a catlike way that she’s enhanced with artful black kohl and a thick lashing of mascara. Her wide mouth, slicked with velvet pink. Her brave cheekbones holding it all up. Her chestnut hair beneath her pillbox hat, flipping playfully at the ends to expose her dainty ears. Vivian is iridescent.
“Violet?” Her voice is rich and comes from her chest. Her eyes are shining, brimming over. “Aunt Violet?”
Violet whispers: “Yes. Yes, dear. It’s me.”
Vivian makes a movement with her torso, as if she wants to step forward but can’t. She gestures to her feet, and for the first time Violet sees the leather valise on the floor next to her. “I’ve brought your suitcase.”
“My suitcase.”
“The one you left behind . . .” Vivian’s voice falters at last. “Left behind in Zurich.”
Violet wavers. “Oh. Oh, my dear girl.”
And then Vivian is holding her up, crying and laughing, and Violet’s nose is full of the cosmetic patchouli scent of her, the whiff of cigarettes and life, the soft scratchiness of her golden-yellow tweed shoulder.
“You’re taller than I thought,” says Vivian. “You’re almost as tall as I am.”
The door creaks, and Violet turns with pride to the salt-and-pepper man who stands with his hand upon the knob, watching the two of them with an expression of well-deserved bemusement.
“Darling,” she says, “this is my great-niece, Vivian Schuyler. Vivian, my dear, I want you to meet my beloved husband. Henry Mortimer.”
Vivian
The first thing I noticed about Henry Mortimer. He had no right arm.
Naturally, I kept my gaze on his face, which had filled out considerably since the sepia days of 1914 and had become that of a square-jowled and sturdy man, not unhandsome even in his dotage. But the empty sleeve. That. It lured my attention. When had he lost it? The war, obviously. How? A shell? Infection?
He took my hand with his left and kissed it. He exclaimed his delight, his enchantment at meeting one of Violet’s nieces at last. He insisted I stay for dinner—oh, for God’s sake, nobody gave a damn if I was properly dressed—and for that matter I shouldn’t be staying at a hotel, even the Georges Cinq, when I had family right here in Paris. I agreed to dinner but refused to inconvenience them so far as to invade their privacy overnight. The arm, I now perceived, had been lost just above the elbow.
“We were married at the end of the war,” said Violet, accepting a glass of Madeira and a slight caress from her husband. “Henry was wounded in the Meuse-Argonne, as you see, and when he came back to the H?tel de Saint-Honoré to convalesce—Jane and I had turned the house into a private hospital, you know, when we first arrived in Paris in 1914—well, he wore down all my objections.”
“For a scientist, she’s terribly superstitious.” Henry beamed at her. “But I pointed out all the logic of it. In the first place, we both wanted to turn the hospital into our own scientific institute when the war was over, and since we would be living under the same roof for the indeterminate future . . .” He shrugged.
“And in the second place, we were expecting another baby,” Violet said calmly, sipping her Madeira.
I was just lifting my own glass and nearly choked. “Another? Baby?”
“Yes, the first was born in the spring of 1915. The end of April. A little girl. I believe Henry was Papa to her right from the beginning, weren’t you, darling?”