Born on August 7, 1862, the only surviving child of a Manchester solicitor and the daughter of a music teacher, Grant attended first Uppingham School in Rutland, where he excelled in mathematics and Greek and won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge.
The circumstances of his death have never been established conclusively, due in part to the state of civic confusion as Germany hovered on the brink of the First World War. According to press reports, his body was found in his flat in Kronenstrasse with a single gunshot wound to the chest in the early morning hours of July 26, 1914. Police attempted to apprehend his wife, Violet Grant, but she escaped Berlin with a man widely rumored to have been her lover, and was not seen again. No other suspect was subsequently apprehended, and the case remained open.
“Look how handsome he is.” I tapped the tiny gray photograph of a bearded Dr. Walter Grant, right between his smug scientific eyeballs. “A crying shame.”
“If she killed him,” said Doctor Paul. “The case remains open, it says.”
“Who else would have done it?”
“The lover, for one.”
A shadow fell over the life, work, and beard of GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. An exasperated shadow, judging by the acute angle of the elbows as hands met hips.
“That was your last warning,” the shadow whispered bitterly. “I must ask you to leave.”
? ? ?
“I WONDER who he was, this lover of Violet’s,” I said. “The encyclopedia didn’t even give his name.”
Doctor Paul stretched out his long legs and fingered the rim of his cup. We were sitting in a booth at an overheated coffee shop on Forty-second Street, a hat toss from Grand Central Terminal, and I, watching the good doctor’s lugubrious hand circle its way into infinity, found myself in the absurd position of envying a hunk of white ceramic. “Some good-looking young fellow, I guess. Closer to her own age. She’d probably examined her future, decades of marriage to a man old enough to be her father, and realized it wasn’t worth it.”
“What wasn’t worth it?”
“Whatever she got from it. Money or security.” He shrugged and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, thank God.” I snatched a cigarette from the pack. “I was hoping you’d ask.”
He laughed and lit me up like a gentleman. I might have lingered overmuch near his outstretched fist, though he didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve told myself I’ll quit when this damned residency is over with,” he said, pulling out one for himself.
“I’ve told myself I’ll quit when I’m good and ready.” I took a sweet long drag, just to drive home my point, and drank my coffee in a reckless gulp. And why not? I couldn’t fault the coffee, hot hot hot; the same went for Doctor Paul’s cigarettes, Winstons, luxurious and masculine. Coffee and tobacco, that fusion of divine creation. I’d ordered a raisin bun some time ago and presumed the kitchen was now sending out to Madagascar for more cinnamon. I didn’t care. “I don’t think she wanted money from him. She wasn’t the type. If she wanted to marry for money, she’d have stayed in New York and done a much better day’s work of it.”
“Fair enough. Security? She was alone in England. She’d left her family behind.”
“Possibly. Or maybe she was in love with him.”
“Really?” His voice was so saturated with doubt, I could have stretched out my two hands, wrung it from the air, and mopped it back up with a napkin.
“Really. It’s a known phenomenon, after all. A rite of passage. Falling in love with your professor.”
“Are you serious? An old man like that?”
“You’re sure you want to hear this, golden boy?”
Just before he answered, he checked himself. His blue eyes did that thing again, that darkening, as if the weight of realization brought about some chemical change in him. He picked through his words more carefully and said: “Is this about Violet, or about you?”
Well, now.
I am not a girl who evades a man’s gaze without good reason, but I dropped mine then, right through the gentle haze of smoke drifting from my fingers and into the hot black pool of coffee, kerplop.