BY THE TIME we filed out of the conference room, I was far too tight to sit down with the precious confidential files upstairs. “I’ve changed my mind,” I said to Gogo. “I’ll go shopping with you after all. Just let me have a word with Tibby.”
I called Doctor Paul first, from the telephone in the library, taking a chance he was between surgeries. He came on the line right away. “Vivian! Where are you?”
“In the library. The Metropolitan library. I miss you, Doctor.”
“I miss you, too.” Bemused, maybe. “Are you all right? You sound a bit—”
“Tipsy? Yes, I am. Champagne and cake in the office today. It’s the receptionist’s forty-year anniversary with the magazine.”
“Must have been some party.”
“That doesn’t begin to cover it. Listen. I’m going shopping with Gogo this afternoon.”
“What? Why?”
“Don’t be so alarmed. I can’t just drop her, you know. She’ll wonder what’s going on.”
He said something under his breath. “Are you going to say anything to her?”
“About us, you mean? Of course not. Not yet. Why?” I doodled with the cord. I was feeling loose and champagney, not particularly worried about anything, even Gogo’s wounded heart, which seemed to be healing nicely anyway. “Do you want me to tell her?”
“I guess not. Not if you don’t want to.”
“All right. I won’t. But I think you’re right. I think she’s bouncing back. Our bouncing baby Gogo.”
“Good. Good for her. I’m glad.”
I kissed the mouthpiece noisily. “I’ll see you tonight?”
“I’ll be late, I’m afraid. No rest for the weary.”
“That’s why I gave you the key.”
We said good-bye. Before I left, I went upstairs with Tibby’s super-secret key and unlocked the super-secret file cabinet, and what I found there made my tipsy jaw swing as low as a sweet chariot.
I packed up the folders and put them in my briefcase. Which was, strictly speaking, forbidden, but when did that ever stop me?
Violet
Violet’s first rebellion occurred at the age of eleven, when, in the natural course of things, she was sent out of the nursery schoolroom on the third floor of the Schuyler town house on Sixty-third Street to attend a proper girls’ academy.
Her mother had expected her to matriculate at Miss Porter’s School, where she herself had learned her copperplate handwriting, her English literature, her ladylike arts, her code of disciplined female conformity, but Violet had studied the course schedule with horror. She had already taught herself the essentials of algebra, startling the family governess, and had read most of the works listed on the curriculum. What she wanted was Latin and Greek, like her brothers, and advanced mathematics. And chemistry, and naturally German. So many of the great scientists were German these days.
But rebellion never did arise easily in Violet. Smiles came her way when she was obedient and good; frowns and disapproval and exclusion came when she was not. For nights she wept in her bed, locked in struggle with herself. She must be bad, thoroughly bad, for wanting these things, and yet when she considered the misery of imprisonment in Miss Porter’s School, pretending to be like all the other girls, while her brothers sent careless letters home from Saint Paul’s describing this athletic triumph or that eminent instructor, she wanted to scream into her pillow. She did scream into her pillow.
A week before Violet’s departure for Farmingham, after Mrs. Schuyler and the housekeeper had already begun to count her linens and line her shiny new trunk with lavender-scented paper, Violet had walked into her father’s study and told him that she wanted to attend the Haddam Young Women’s Academy instead, a new school where young ladies were subject to a rigorous academic schedule in preparation for college, and where the chemistry laboratory in particular was as well-equipped as that at Saint Paul’s.
She would never forget the way her father’s warm smile of welcome had cooled and frozen, the way her ribs had ached at the sight of his hard eyes. But Violet had made her decision, she had crossed her Rubicon, and the pain of standing her ground before her father’s disapproval was now nothing to the pain of going back across the river to strand herself in the desolation of her old life. So she stood her ground, she went to Haddam, but though the ache had faded it had never really gone away; it settled for years around her lungs and heart like a dark hole that could not be filled.
This was the consequence of rebellion, the price that must be paid for crossing the invisible line.
As Violet lies wobbly against Lionel’s chest in the rose-scented summer evening, she can’t decide what terrifies her so: the act of betraying Walter, or the unknown territory that lies beyond.