Once I was accustomed to the archaic shape of the letters, the near-illegibility of the hurried italic lines, it didn’t take me long to figure out who had authored them. I read on in horrified fascination, wanting to stop, unable to stop.
I had once happened upon a gruesome street corner on Park Avenue one shiny spring day, where a taxi had so thoroughly obliterated a pedestrian that you couldn’t see if this former human being had been male or female, young or old, except for the graceful high-heeled shoe tossed into the center median, in the middle of a bed of orange and yellow tulips, with a foot still stuffed inside. I had tried to look away from that shoe, just as I did from this journal, and yet my eyes kept going back, as if they needed to know every detail, to normalize this abnormality into insignificance.
By the time I reached the end of May, I felt physically sick. I gathered the shards of my moral composure and shut the book with a leathery snap.
“Great guns,” I whispered to the ceiling. “Dr. Walter Grant. You filthy beast.”
INTERLUDE
Violet, 1912
Violet cannot recall the exact moment she realized Walter was sleeping with other women. Sleeping: that’s the wrong word. He was fucking other women, and then returning home to their marital bedroom, to bathe and change and sometimes to fuck her, too, and then fall asleep snoring in their iron-framed bed in the luxurious flat on Kronenstrasse.
There was no sudden epiphany. The suspicion crept up on her, inch by inch, nudged along by minute clues and conjectures. A woman’s eyes, laughing knowingly at her at some dinner party, before turning away. A hint of perfume on Walter’s linens, before the maid had a chance to launder. Lise’s sympathetic face. The memory of Walter’s smooth acceptance of her suspicions of pregnancy, and his practiced solution to the dilemma, his prior acquaintance with Dr. Winslow. All the evidence supported her hypothesis, that Walter was unfaithful, habitually and casually unfaithful. She began, with a curious dispassion, to imagine him with other women: what they would look like, where he would meet them. This other world of his, in which she played no part.
So the immediate encounter with Walter’s infidelity came more as a shock than a surprise.
When they first moved to Berlin, and after Violet had recovered—physically, at least—from the miscarriage, she went to parties with her husband. She considered it part of her duty, since she was so unwifely in other regards: endless troglodyte hours spent in the basement of the institute, rumpled unfashionable clothes, housekeeping left entirely to the housekeeper, equations scrawled on napkins, conversation dominated by the technical, face screwed all too often in unreachable concentration. That summer and autumn, as a kind of restitution, she forced herself to depart her cramped office by six o’clock to accompany Walter to dinner parties, music parties, opera and ballet, soirées and balls, enduring them chiefly by sitting quietly near a window and contemplating the progress, or lack of it, she had made in her laboratory or her notebooks.
At one such evening, held at the Baroness von Schrager’s magnificent flat near the Reichstag, knotted up and frustrated by a particularly inconclusive experiment that day, she had allowed herself to drink a glass or two of champagne and to be led into dancing. The results astonished her. Gentleman after unaccountable gentleman had walked up and asked her for the next waltz, and she had complied, even laughing a little, enjoying the new sensation of being sought after and admired.
After the fifth or sixth dance, she recalled the hour and went looking for Walter. She had found him easily, in a small sitting room at the back of the flat, his tailcoat flung over a chair, his formal black trousers about his knees, his white buttocks clenching steadily as he immersed himself in the backside of a small dark-haired matron dressed in emerald green. The woman was bent over a French escritoire: Directoire, Violet noted, though not a particularly fine example. Her ring-crusted knuckles curled about the opposite edge; her breasts and her pearls dangled together heavily from her unfastened bodice. At each thrust, she called out Mein Gott! in a voice so feral, she did not detect the sound of Violet’s entry into the room.
Walter did, however. He turned his red and passion-bloated face in his wife’s direction, registering surprise; but instead of desisting, he merely offered Violet an apologetic shrug and continued his work. Through the open door, the Baroness von Schrager’s orchestra played heedless Schubert.
Violet, frozen, misted with champagne, pictured herself lifting the statue of a curving bronze Aphrodite from the shelf nearby and dropping it over Walter’s head.