“What package?” asked Pepper.
“Yesterday I picked up a package from the post office. Mums had forwarded it to me.” I kept up the pounding as I spoke. “It was a suitcase belonging to a Violet Schuyler. Aunt Julie said she was our aunt, and—this is the best part, Pepper, so listen up—she murdered her husband in 1914 and ran off with her lover. Isn’t it delicious?”
Dad renewed his spasm of choking. I turned back to him. “Glass of water, Daddy, dear?”
He shook his head.
“As you see,” I told Pepper, “Dad’s heard of her. But the point is, we have a precedent in this family for independent women. It’s in our blood.”
“But Mums isn’t an independent woman,” said Pepper. “She just has a weakness for parties and married men.”
“I’m standing right here, you ungrateful child.”
“True, but she’s not a real Schuyler, is she?” I turned to Mums. “Not by blood.”
“Thank God,” said Mums. She found her favorite armchair and angled herself into it like a movie star, drink and smoke balanced exquisitely in each hand. “I have my faults, but I haven’t murdered your father. Yet.”
“Small mercies.” Dad had finally recovered. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his battered gold cigarette case, which had been to Eagle’s Nest and back, comforting him in every trial.
“That bad, is it?” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean.” He lit his cigarette with a shaky hand.
“Now, Dad. It’s been fifty years since the alleged crimes. Do spill.”
“There’s nothing to spill.”
“Are you saying she didn’t exist?”
“She existed, of course.” He exhaled a good-sized therapeutic cloud and inhaled his drink. “But you’ve just about summed up all I know. Your grandparents never talked about it.”
“But you must have heard something else. Names, rumors, something.”
A rare sharp look from old Dadums. “Why do you want to know?”
“Curiosity.”
My father heaved himself up from the sofa and walked to one of the stately sash windows perched above the park. A magnificent thirty-foot living room, the old Schuyler apartment had, thrown open to guests in 1925 by my grandfather and not much redecorated since. We took our drinks from the same crystal decanters, we wobbled across the same Oriental rugs, we sank our backsides into the same mahogany-framed furniture under the gazes of the same disapproving portraits. Possibly Mums had reupholstered at one point, but the sagging cushions were all Schuyler. Dad jiggled his empty ice. “Well, she was a scientist. Left for Cambridge or Oxford, I forget which, a few years before the war.”
“Oxford,” I said.
“She married a professor, and then they moved to Berlin at some point. He was at some sort of institute there.”
“The Kaiser Wilhelm.”
Mums did the daggering thing with her eyebrows. “How do you know all this?”
“It’s called a li-brar-y, Mums.” I dragged out the word. “You go there to read about things. They have encyclopedias, periodicals, Peyton Place. You’d be amazed. Proceed, Dad.”
“No, you go ahead. Obviously, you know more than I do.”
“Just a few facts. Nothing about her. What she was like.”
“I didn’t know her. I was born during the war.”
“But Grandfather must have said something about her. You can’t have just pretended she never existed.”
“Oh, yes, they could,” said Pepper.
“She didn’t get along with my father,” said Dad slowly. He was still looking down at the park, as if it contained the secret to his lost youth: the handsome face that had drawn in my mother’s adoration, the mobile spirit that had seen him off to war. I caught glimpses of it sometimes, when we were alone together, just him and me, walking along some quiet path in that self-same Central Park or taking in a rare Yankees game. I could almost see his jowls disappear, his eyelids tighten, his irises regain their storied Schuyler blue. His voice lose its endearing tone of sour-flavored aggression. “Anything I heard about her, I heard from Aunt Christina.”
“Well, that’s not much use, is it? She died eons ago.”
“Vivian, really,” said Mums.
But Dad turned to me with a touch of smile. “Twenty-five years may seem like eons to you, my dear, but I can remember that hurricane like it was yesterday.”
“And she was close to Aunt Christina?”
“I don’t know if they were close.” He found the ashtray on the drinks table. “But they wrote to each other. Kept in touch. I remember she said that Violet was an odd bird, a lonely girl. I don’t think she was happy.”
“Did Aunt Christina know what happened? The murder? The lover? Did she know his name?”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Mums rolled her head back to face the ceiling.
“Hardly the kind of thing she would tell me,” said my father.