“Trust me, Vivian. In the annals of my mother’s crimes, this is nothing.”
“Alrighty, then. Why did one Christina Schuyler Dane write to one S. Barnard Lightfoot, Junior, in the fall of 1914 and ask him to purge any mention of Violet Grant in the magazine’s records?”
An extensive pause. “That, I don’t know. Did he?”
“Not exactly. It all just went under lock and key. But what were you thinking about?” In the background behind her, I heard a faint drawn-out Maa-maa from Baby Number Five. (No longer a baby, I need hardly add, but a somewhat imperious young lady on the verge of adolescence.) In the foreground, there was hemming and hawing.
“Lily,” I said darkly.
“I might have another letter for you.”
“Might? Or have?”
Maa-maa! Like a singsong goat. Closer now. Would Doctor Paul want five children? I hoped not. On the other hand, he’d look as adorable as Nick Greenwald did, holding the little cherubs against his shoulder.
“In a moment, honey. Have a letter. You see, you finally got me looking through Mother’s old letters, which, being Mother, she kept strictly organized by sender. I thought you had all of them, and then . . . well, I don’t know if she misfiled it on purpose or by accident. Probably on purpose, knowing her.”
“And?”
“Weellll.” The word stretched doubtfully. “I think you’d better see for yourself.”
“You read it?”
“Of course I read it, Vivian. I do have some curiosity left. Can I bring it by your office tomorrow?”
“Better yet. I’m heading uptown in half an hour. I’ll stop by your apartment on the way.”
“That’s perfect. Vivian?”
I was already standing, telephone cord stretched to the limit. The cells of my skin were fairly popping with eagerness. “What, Cousin Lily?”
“You might want to read those lock-and-key files, if you haven’t already.”
? ? ?
WELL, of course I read them. You don’t think I’d let a little thing like lipstick get in the way of my curiosity, do you? I read in front of the mirror, I read as I was fastening my stockings, I read as I was pulling the fat curlers from my hair and fluffing everything in place. I read mostly about the breathless diplomatic maneuvering into war, about the hourly frissons of schadenfreude as the American correspondent watched Europe teeter above the chasm. And then, on July 30, sandwiched between Russian mobilization and frantic British attempts to intercede:
In response to your cable about the Grant affair, I haven’t the foggiest, that is to say, it’s pretty clear what happened but they’ll never be able to catch the perpetrators or prove anything at all. They say all the scientists are mute about it. Einstein himself was with them in Wittenberg a week ago, and won’t say a thing. Clearly the wife has run off with the lover, but they’re being protected somehow, no one will let slip an unofficial word about it, let alone an official one, there’s hardly anything in the papers with all the war talk. It’s the quietest scandal I ever heard, which means it must be something very delicious indeed, especially since our old friend the Comtesse de S.H. is an interested party, by which I mean she was intimate with Dr. Grant and making no attempt to disguise the affair. I would ask her about it, but she’s left town as well. Soon I shall be utterly on my own, with only Germans to speak to, and they’re all war and no play at the moment.
I glanced at the clock. Half an hour until I was expected uptown, and I still had to retrieve Violet’s letter from Lily.
I put the letter back in its folder, and it occurred to me, as I retrieved my coat and hat and pocketbook from the careless dump by the entry, that it might be a good thing I had a strong stomach.
? ? ?
THE STOMACH in question wasn’t holding up well as I traveled from the Greenwalds’ elegant ten-room apartment in Gramercy Park to the Lightfoot mansion on East Seventieth Street, but it wasn’t the fault of Aunt Violet’s letter to her sister. Fate had given me the lurchiest of lurchy cab drivers, a hunched-over monosyllabic stick of a man who evidently thought I was auditioning him for the Daytona 500.
I, of all people, should have know better. Never, ever climb into a New York City taxi and tell the cabbie to step on it.