The telephone rings at four-forty-five in the afternoon, just as Violet is about to rise from her desk to retire for the day. She doesn’t last as long as she used to, but she can forgive herself for that. One does not reach an age when one’s joints rattle in their sockets without having earned the privilege of coming and going at will.
She picks up the receiver. “Oui, j’écoute.”
“Madame, there is a young lady to see you. A Mademoiselle Vivian Schuyler.”
Violet’s body stills at the news. She hasn’t heard that name in many years, and yet, like a scent from childhood, it awakens an instant chemical reaction inside her. The blood quickens, the ears sharpen. Her eyes fall upon the photograph on her desk, in its molten silver frame, and she studies it for a moment, counting the strikes of her heart, while Mademoiselle Bernard waits knowingly on the other end. Seventy-two beats per minute. “Vivian Schuyler, did you say?”
“Oui, madame.”
Vivian Schuyler. That would be Charles’s daughter, the one who went to Bryn Mawr and now works for some sort of fashionable New York magazine. Violet saw her photograph in the paper a few years ago, when she and her parents had been traveling through Europe. An exclusive party of some kind. She was quite lovely, Vivian. In the photograph, she was smiling, smiling with her black-and-white mouth just parted, as if she were about to say something unfathomably daring.
Violet rises from her chair with the telephone receiver still at her ear. “Make her comfortable, Mademoiselle Bernard, and tell her I shall be downstairs instantly. And could you discover my husband’s whereabouts and tell him to join us?”
Well, not instantly. But Violet can still move about with briskness. She credits her active life for that, her years spent on her feet inside the laboratory and chasing her children around outside it. Her husband, who keeps her brain busy, who makes her laugh, who still, when the wind is north by northwest, makes eager love to her in their high four-posted bed on the second floor of what had once, in another age, been the Hôtel de Saint-Honoré, the Paris residence of the aristocratic family of that name.
She smoothes down her dress and looks in the tiny mirror on the wall, next to the door. Her heart beats in great smacks against the wall of her chest. She pinches her cheeks and adds a little lipstick from her pocketbook. This is a grand occasion, after all. She’s been expecting it for years, decades, and now that it’s here . . . well, she can’t quite comprehend why the air still hangs about the furniture in the ordinary way.
Violet opens the door and makes her way down the expansive staircase to the salon on the ground floor.
A young woman in a fashionable golden-yellow tweed suit stands staring at the portrait above the mantel. She turns, and Violet catches her breath in recognition at her eyes, large and Schuyler blue, tilting upward at the corners in a catlike way that she’s enhanced with artful black kohl and a thick lashing of mascara. Her wide mouth, slicked with velvet pink. Her brave cheekbones holding it all up. Her chestnut hair beneath her pillbox hat, flipping playfully at the ends to expose her dainty ears. Vivian is iridescent.
“Violet?” Her voice is rich and comes from her chest. Her eyes are shining, brimming over. “Aunt Violet?”
Violet whispers: “Yes. Yes, dear. It’s me.”
Vivian makes a movement with her torso, as if she wants to step forward but can’t. She gestures to her feet, and for the first time Violet sees the leather valise on the floor next to her. “I’ve brought your suitcase.”
“My suitcase.”
“The one you left behind . . .” Vivian’s voice falters at last. “Left behind in Zurich.”
Violet wavers. “Oh. Oh, my dear girl.”
And then Vivian is holding her up, crying and laughing, and Violet’s nose is full of the cosmetic patchouli scent of her, the whiff of cigarettes and life, the soft scratchiness of her golden-yellow tweed shoulder.
“You’re taller than I thought,” says Vivian. “You’re almost as tall as I am.”
The door creaks, and Violet turns with pride to the salt-and-pepper man who stands with his hand upon the knob, watching the two of them with an expression of well-deserved bemusement.
“Darling,” she says, “this is my great-niece, Vivian Schuyler. Vivian, my dear, I want you to meet my beloved husband. Henry Mortimer.”