“I was smitten, I admit.”
“Charlotte was such a charming baby. And then she grew up!” Violet laughed, and Henry laughed with her. He was sitting next to her, on the arm of the decidedly English wing chair in which his wife was arranged, all alert poise and tip-turned Schuyler eyes. Her hair had turned white, like spun snow, but her skin was singularly smooth, radiant as a girl’s. I hoped this was down to Schuyler genes, and that I was next in line to inherit, but I had a notion that the glow within her bones had something more to do with the feeling that existed between her and the man who sat protectively beside her, with the ions that frizzed happily in the atmosphere of the armchair. Violet went on, oblivious to her own good fortune: “Do you remember when she ran off with that package from Rutherford? The radium he gave us? A hundred thousand francs worth, and she takes it to play post office with her baby brother.”
“We had the police here, crawling about everywhere.” Henry shook his head. His hair was shot through with long bullet-trails of gray, but I recognized its darkness from the photograph. “Jane found it eventually, thank God, when she visited the nursery for tea. Luckily Rutherford’s boys had lined the package properly.”
“Jane?”
Violet’s eyes turned quiet, and she nodded to the portrait above the mantel, a somewhat abstract interwar rendering with an enormous red-tinted left eye and a Dalí-eqsue alarm clock running around madly in the background. “She died five years ago. She deeded us the house as a wedding present.”
“You must have all been very happy here.”
“We were a family.” Violet’s eyes climbed to mine, Schuyler to Schuyler, communicating a fact that could not possibly be articulated, but instead lay along some section of a shared chromosome, some ancestral memory, and the recognition of it shocked me. “After Berlin, after everything that happened. You do know what happened, don’t you?”
“In broad brushstrokes. That you left Berlin together, you and Jane and Henry . . . and Lionel.” Well. I stopped there, because I couldn’t exactly pose vulgar questions to my own great-aunt Violet, could I? Not even I, Vivian Schuyler, could do that. Especially not while Henry Mortimer’s left hand curled and uncurled quietly on his quadriceps like that. I had to content myself with a questioning eyebrow, an air of longing curiosity.
“Henry, my dear,” said Violet, “would you mind telling Madame Marone we will be adding another for dinner?”
Ah, the knowing chuckle between the fond spouses. Henry rose and made a little bow. “With pleasure, my dear.”
“Now,” said Violet, when his footsteps had faded down the hall, “let us sit together on the sofa. So much nicer for intimate chats, don’t you agree?”
I agreed. I nestled next to her on the broad damask cushion, and she took my hand between hers, which were quite elderly. A life of useful work, had my aunt Violet. She began: “Now tell me, Vivian. Is this a story for your magazine?”
Mouth open. Closed. “Yes.”
“I thought so.” She tapped her forehead. “Deductive skills, you see. Honed over the years. Well, I suppose it does no harm, after all these years. What do you need to know?”
My stunned throat made some noise or another. Then: “Details, I suppose. I have a draft already, if you don’t mind looking that over and filling in the gaps. Up to the point you left Berlin, of course. I don’t really know what happened after that. You sent a postcard to Aunt Christina from a border town.”
“I did. We reached the border, the four of us, and we were about to go through when the police found us. About the murder, you see. That was when . . . when Lionel confessed that he was the one who killed my husband—”
“Lionel killed him!”
“No.” She smiled. “Lionel didn’t kill him. But he wanted to throw suspicion on himself, so the guards would let the rest of us go.”
“So you and the Mortimers would deliver the suitcase to Zurich—”
“Yes. So we would make it through the border. That was the deal, Lionel told them. He would make a detailed confession, cooperate fully, if they would let the three of us go through without any further delay.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened? We went through the border and made it to Zurich, but it was all for nothing because the valise was lost.” She looked in the corner, where it sat unopened. Neither she nor Henry had suggested I open it. “I can’t believe it’s there, after all these years. A miracle.”
“Would you like to see it?”
She looked down at our hands, linked together in my lap, gnarled old and ink-stained young.
I squeezed. “You don’t have to, if you’d rather not.”
“No. No, let’s look inside. I can hardly remember what’s there.”
I rose and fetched the valise and rested it on the cushion between us. “Shall I?”