The Secret Life of Violet Grant

“Did you love him?”

 

 

“Love him. Yes. Oh, yes, I loved him with all my heart.” She looked down again at the words before her. “But I will say this. The love I have for Henry, the love we share, it’s so much deeper and dearer and finer. Wrought by a thousand fires. The flight to Paris, on foot for the most part, since all the trains were taken up for mobilization. All that awful uncertainty, knowing we’d failed with the valise, realizing I was pregnant with Lionel’s child. And it was a difficult birth, hair-raising really, and he was so good, so loving to us both. He just worshipped Charlotte, right from the start. Then the war, my God, the war. We worked together in the hospital, side by side, until America declared, that was 1917, and his commission came through that very afternoon. The children—we had four, in the end. And then our work, of course. As Violet Mortimer I was able to continue on after the war, to publish our work under Henry’s name with the help of the others.”

 

“The others?”

 

“Lise and Otto. Max and Albert always encouraged us. They never breathed a word of what happened, though of course . . . well, they were all there in Wittenberg, except Max.”

 

Her voice fell away, and I had the feeling she was seeing it all again, that summer. Across the room, an ormolu clock ticked softly beneath the piecemeal portrait of the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré. Dusk was dropping bleakly behind the tall windows, and I watched the glow of someone’s headlamps grow and grow on the street outside, until the car itself flashed by, a taxi.

 

“Do you think . . .” I read the lines again, and again I wondered how a man could write such words and not mean them. He could make you believe anything, James Merriwether had said in awe. “Do you think he loved you? Lionel?”

 

She placed the petals on the paper and folded it up again. She took her time. When she spoke, it was as if she had hand-selected each word from a dictionary of mercy.

 

“I think he loved me as much as it was possible for him to love another person.”

 

? ? ?

 

IT WAS nearly eleven o’clock by the time I stepped through the revolving doors and into the golden-lit lobby of the Georges Cinq. I was almost too exhausted to breathe. I stumbled for the elevators, and I hardly noticed the tall figure who rose from the red velvet bench near the bell station.

 

“Vivian,” he called softly. If the lobby weren’t empty, I might not have heard him.

 

I stopped. Turned. “You again.”

 

Doctor Paul took off his hat, and the damned light gleamed on his too-long sunshine hair, making my ribs ache. He kept a respectful distance. As well he might. “I called your mother. She told me where to find you.”

 

“And you just jumped on an airplane?”

 

“Found a taxi, straight to Idlewild.” He shrugged.

 

“What about your job? Children are dying back home, Doctor Paul.”

 

“I’m not the only surgeon in the world.”

 

“No, you’re not. Not by a long shot over the bow.”

 

He rotated his hat in his hands. “Can we talk, Vivian?”

 

“You don’t think we went over things pretty thoroughly already?”

 

“I spoke to Margaux the very next day. Thursday, whatever it was. I told her everything, and she said—”

 

“I know. She told me.”

 

A startling of the old Doctor Paul shoulders. Oh, God! Those sturdy shoulders, holding up my parcel, holding up the world. “How is she?”

 

“Quite impressively well, I think. So you don’t have that on your conscience, at least. Your ego, now, that’s another story.” I turned and pressed the call button. Remarkably, my finger did not betray a single tremor.

 

“Wait, Vivian.” He stepped forward.

 

“Wait for what?”

 

“I just . . . I came all this way. Just to talk to you. Apologize, throw myself at your feet. Look at you, you look beautiful. I . . .”

 

“I look tired, Paul. Let’s be frank. Very, very tired, and I’d like to go up to my room right now and fix that very problem. Alone.”

 

The doors opened.

 

“Wait, Vivian!” Doctor Paul stuck his desperate gloved hand against the door.

 

“Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle Schuyler!”

 

I turned, because one doesn’t ignore a frantic French voice sounding one’s name in the plush money-scented lobby of the Georges Cinq in Paris, and well, well! Who had we here but Pierre-Auguste, I wouldn’t say running toward me, no, but striding aggressively, that was the term, in his navy-blue concierge suit and neat red Hermès tie.

 

“Pierre-Auguste! What are you doing here, at this hour? You should be home in bed with your wife,” I said. Instead of meddling in affaires de coucher that don’t voulez-vous.

 

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