The Secret Life of Violet Grant. Beatriz Williams

stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to him. “You’re having me on, aren’t you?”

      He shook his head.

      “But everyone wants his son to be a doctor. No one brags about his son the banker, his son the lawyer.”

      “Not mine.”

      I squinted suspiciously. “Are you from earth?”

      “I’m from California.”

      I nodded with understanding and turned us back up the sidewalk. “Aha. That explains everything.”

      “Everything?”

      “Everything. The golden glow, the naive willingness to follow a strange girl upstairs to her squalid Village apartment. I knew you couldn’t be a native New Yorker.”

      “As you are.”

      “As I eminently am. Tell me about California. I’ve never been there.”

      He told me about cliffs and beaches and the cold Pacific current, about his family’s house in the East Bay, about the fog that rolled in during the summer afternoons, you could almost set your watch by it, and the bright red-orange of the Golden Gate Bridge against the scrubbed blue sky. Did I know that they never stopped painting that bridge? By the time they had finished the last stroke, they had to start all over again from the beginning. We were just escaping from Alcatraz when the stone lions of the New York Public Library clawed up before us.

      “After you,” said Doctor Paul.

      “SO. I suppose we should start with Violet Schuyler,” said Doctor Paul, in his best hushed library whisper.

      “How you joke.”

      “No?”

      “My dear boy, don’t you know? It’s much easier to find out about men. Even if my aunt Violet were the most talented scientist in the Western world, she would probably only rate a small paragraph in the E.B. Either no one would have paid her any attention, or some man would have jumped in to take credit for her work.”

      “Really?” The old lifting eyebrow.

      “Really.”

      “What about Marie Curie?’

      “The exception that proves the rule. And she worked with her husband.”

      “All right, then. So what was Violet’s husband’s name?”

      “That I don’t know.”

      “Shh,” said the librarian.

      The New York Times came to our rescue. “She’s a Schuyler,” I told Doctor Paul. “Even if the family disowned her, they’d still have put a wedding announcement in the paper.”

      He shook his head. “And they say Californians are the loonies.”

      “Oh, you’ll learn to love us. And our Labrador retrievers, too.”

      “I didn’t say I didn’t love you. I don’t suppose you know the wedding date?”

      “I do not. But it would have taken at least a few months from meeting to marriage, don’t you think?”

      He winked. “Would it?”

      “You’re a shameless flirt, Doctor Paul.”

      “Shh,” said the librarian.

      We started with January of 1912, and in half an hour had found our mark. I whistled low, earning myself a sharp look of hatred from the librarian, or perhaps it was jealousy. “April. What, eight months? For a confirmed old bachelor? That was quick work.”

      “Even for a daughter of the Schuylers. She must have been irresistible. A shame there’s no photograph.”

      “I suppose it’s a good thing they didn’t have the bright idea to sail home to New York and meet her parents afterward,” I said.

      He looked at me quizzically.

      “The Titanic.”

      “Oh, right.” He turned back to the frail yellow page before us and frowned. “It’s awfully concise, isn’t it?”

      I followed him. The statement was a short one, a compact jewel box of status markers, conveying only and precisely what readers of the Times needed to know about the happy bride and groom to place them in the only world that counted.

      Miss Violet Schuyler weds Dr. Walter Grant. Miss Violet Schuyler, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Schuyler of Fifth Avenue, New York City, and Oyster Bay, Long Island, was married last Monday to Dr. Walter Grant of Oxford, England, at the Oxford town hall. A short reception followed the ceremony. The couple will reside in Oxford, where Dr. Grant is chairman of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry.

      “You’re right. There should be a photo,” I said. “My aunt Julie said she was very pretty. A genuine redhead.”

      “Funny, the announcement says nothing about Violet’s being a scientist, too.”

      “Well, it wouldn’t, would it? The horror.”

      Doctor Paul straightened from the table. “We have a name now, anyway. Violet Grant, Dr. Walter Grant. The encyclopedia should have a listing, shouldn’t it?”

      We tackled the E.B. shoulder-to-shoulder, oxen in yoke. Did I mention I was enjoying myself immensely? Working with Doctor Paul gave me the most exhilarating sense of equality, the thrill of collaborative discovery. Exactly the way I had pictured my job at the magazine, before I actually entered the office two weeks ago and knocked on my editor’s door for that first journalistic assignment. Just imagine me, fresh of face, shiny of pelt, poised of pencil, doing my best Rosalind Russell before the legendary desk of my legendary editor.

      Me (humbly): What’ll it be, Mr. Tibbs? Murder trial? Corruption investigation? Fashion shoot?

      Tibby (cheerfully): No cream, extra sugar, and make it hot.

      But this. Doctor Paul’s older and wiser fingers flipping through the wispy new pages of the latest Encyclopaedia Britannica, his voice muttering Gramophone, Graves, too far, here it is, Grant. All on my behalf. All as if I belonged by his side, reading the one-column entry for Dr. Walter Grant in tandem with his own adept brain.

      Then, the coup de be-still-my-beating-heart. Doctor Paul turned, knit his devastating brows to an inquisitive point, and said the magic words: “What do you think, Vivian?”

      I think we should marry and breed.

      “I think it was a shame she killed him.”

      GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. (1862–1914) Physical chemist, an earlier colleague of Ernest Rutherford before a professional dispute caused a rift between the two, chair of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry (Oxford), and finally a fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie in Berlin, Germany, in the years before his death. His early experimentation in the discovery of the atomic nucleus paved the way for numerous advances, though by the time of his death in July 1914, his theories had reached a dead end and he had failed to produce any major original research in several years.

      Born on August 7, 1862, the only surviving child of a Manchester solicitor and the daughter of a music teacher, Grant attended first Uppingham School in Rutland, where he excelled in mathematics and Greek and won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge.

      The circumstances of his death have never been established conclusively, due in part to the state of civic confusion as Germany hovered on the brink of the First World War. According to press reports, his body was found in his flat in Kronenstrasse with a single gunshot wound to the chest in the early morning hours of July 26, 1914. Police attempted to apprehend his wife, Violet Grant, but she escaped Berlin with a man widely rumored to have been her lover, and was not seen again. No other suspect was subsequently apprehended, and the case remained open.