NOW. I don’t know if you could exactly call me and Nicholson Greenwald Jr. kissing cousins. I mean, we’d only kissed once. Well, twice. But we had a zing, he and I, if you know what I mean, and my poor wounded little heart revived just a smidgen at the way his handsome old scoundrelly face lit to blazes at the sight of me.
“Nick Junior, you handsome old scoundrel.” I bussed him soundly on the cheek, right there in front of his friends, and slapped a little mustard on the Junior. “How many hearts have you broken this week?”
“Aw, Vivian. Always busting my chops.” He slipped his hand down my back to give the old derrière a friendly warning squeeze. “Boys, this is my cousin Vivian Schuyler. Proceed at your own risk.”
I extended my hand to the handsomest and tilted my cat eyes to a welcoming angle. “Enchanted.”
“Damn it, Vivian. Will you go easy on the poor fellas?” said Nick Junior.
Oh, Cousin Nick. Bless you. Not tonight.
Well, I was human, wasn’t I? I’d taken a blow, a nasty witch of a blow to the solar plexus, and nothing soothes the battered solar plexus like a nice reassuring Epsom salt bath of male admiration. I had them fetching my drinks. I had them laughing at my jokes. I had them on the beaches, I had them on the landing grounds, I had them in the fields and in the streets. And great God almighty, it felt good. It felt reckless and self-indulgent, the old Vivian, the one who didn’t care. Triumphant Vivian, back on top.
Somewhere in the middle of my fourth glass of champagne, Pepper found me. She fluttered her fingers. “Hello, boys.”
“Boys, this is my sister Pepper,” I said.
Chorus of approval.
“Tell me why they call you Pepper,” said one strapping lad, a little quicker on the wit than his mates.
“Because I’m that bad.”
“Aw, Pepper,” said poor Nick Junior. “That’s not true. Tell them why.”
She shrugged. “Not on your life.”
“Vivian?”
I zipped my lips. “Code of sisterly honor.”
“You two.” He threw up his hands. “And they wonder why I don’t go to more of these nice little family get-togethers.”
Pepper leaned into me. “This is perfect. They’re eating out of your hand.”
“Perfect for what?”
“Never you mind. Here.”
She nudged me. I looked down. A small packet of envelopes lay in her hand.
“The letters from Cousin Lily?”
“You betcha, dollface. Don’t read them all in one place.” She unfastened my pocketbook and slipped the envelopes in between the lipstick tubes.
“Counselors! Sidebar’s concluded,” said the handsomest, snapping his fingers.
Pepper turned her chin over her luminous bare shoulder and gave him the old up-and-down. “Permission to approach the bench?”
Before the lucky young man could reply, Mums butted in between our conspiratorial shoulders.
“Excuse me,” she said.
And that, my dears, is the point at which I should have known. I should have recognized that tone of voice, that note of almost weepy triumph.
But what could I have done?
She had planned all this with the skill of a master strategist. Ludendorff had nothing on Mums. She had probably invited the Greenwalds, had probably encouraged Nick Junior to bring his attentive friends, had forged an alliance with Pepper, had filled me with champagne. She had placed every pawn in its proper square before introducing the knight to the board, armor shining.
You had to hand it to Mums.
She spoke near my ear, in her butteriest voice. “Vivian, dearest. We have a special guest I’d like you to entertain for me tonight.”
I turned.
Mums’s eyes glittered as fearlessly as the Schuyler crystal. In one hand she held a drink and cigarette, and in the other she held a smiling Doctor Paul. She withdrew her arm and patted the back of his shoulder in a proprietary mother-of-the-bride way. “I think you’ve met already, isn’t that right, Vivian?”
I turned to my sister. “Bad girl, Pepper. Very. Bad. Girl.”
Violet
By the time the lift clangs to a stop at the ninth floor, Violet’s face is hot with shame. The attendant stares directly ahead, not meeting her eyes, and she wants to scream, He’s not my lover! Who brings a lover home to her own married flat? But it’s her own fault. If Lionel were some innocent acquaintance, she would be talking and laughing with him as they walked across the foyer and went up the lift. There would not be this guilty silence, this tense expectancy, this flush on Violet’s cheeks.
The attendant opens the grille. “Danke,” says Violet clearly.
The lift opens up directly to their apartment, which covers the entire floor. Walter’s family made a fortune in pottery a hundred years ago, and the evidence of that wealth lies everywhere: the elegant rented address in Kronenstrasse, the marble entry, the black-and-white housekeeper who takes their coats and hats and asks Violet if she and her guest will be taking refreshment.
“Thank you, Hilda, but we’ll only be a few minutes,” says Violet in German.
She leads Lionel past the grand drawing room and into a smaller sitting room off the study, where Walter keeps a liquor cabinet. Lionel’s cane clicks rhythmically behind her on the polished parquet floor.
“Cozy little place you’ve got here.”