“Hey!” His bicycle came to an abrupt stop as his long legs fell from the pedals to the pavement. He shook his sandy-brown hair from his eyes and smiled. Two small dimples formed on either side of his cheeks. “Violet, how are you?”
“I’m good,” she lied. She had tried to avoid Hugo’s rowing friends from the moment she’d returned to campus that fall. She didn’t want to have any conversations just like this, where one of his crew buddies would ask her how she was and she’d be forced to say she was just fine.
With now only twelve minutes left to get to her class, she wasn’t going to tell him that every day felt like triage for her. That it was a miracle she was able to get herself out of bed. She didn’t have time to tell him that, and he didn’t have time to listen to it.
“I’ve been looking for you ever since we got back from summer break. But I haven’t seen you around anywhere.” Theo gripped the handlebars tighter, his knuckles whitening. “It’s so hard to believe he isn’t here anymore.”
“It is.” She looked down and hoisted her backpack a little higher on her shoulders. She absolutely didn’t want to have this conversation with him right here in the yard. “I really need to get to class.”
“I get it, but the Owl’s having a party this Saturday. Maybe try and come? It would be good to hang out. I miss him too, you know.”
“Sounds good.” Violet blinked back tears. “I’ll try to make it,” she promised before Theo rode off.
Theo had always been a good guy, someone that Hugo liked to call “solid.” And now a small part of her regretted she’d just been curt with him. He’d been one of the few members on Hugo’s rowing team that Violet enjoyed hanging out with in the past. The summer after their freshman year, she and Hugo had made a road trip to visit him in Delaware. She remembered his family’s stone house with tall pillars and sweeping porch felt like it was straight out of a movie. That weekend, she and Hugo visited the Brandywine Museum of Art with its Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and kissed in front of Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s portrait of a red-haired Lilith. Hugo whispered that had she been born a hundred years before, the artist would have wanted to paint her too.
At night, as the heat from the makeshift campfire warmed them, the three of them sat on Adirondack chairs overlooking the creek, drank bottles of Molson, and played Van Morrison CDs and Grateful Dead bootleg tapes long into the night. It always seemed strange to her that boys like Hugo and Theo, so casual in their worn Henley T-shirts and frayed khaki shorts, preferred to look like they couldn’t afford a fresh pair of clothes. Her mother would never have wanted her to walk around with strings hanging from her cutoff shorts or holes in her shirts. There was no glamor in looking like you were struggling to make ends meet, like her family.
The first time Hugo introduced her to his parents, it was Head of the Charles weekend their sophomore year. His parents had comeup from Connecticut to watch him in the famed regatta, and his varsity lightweight boat was rowing their first race of the year. She knew that his father, who himself had rowed for Harvard thirty years earlier, was immensely proud that Hugo had been selected as one of the boat’s eight rowers.
Violet hadn’t been given advance notice that she was included in their dinner at Grendel’s after the race, as she hadn’t been sure he’d told them that they’d been dating. Violet reacted to the invitation with a mixture of emotions. On the one hand she was happy that Hugo thought their relationship was serious enough to introduce her to his family. But on the other hand, the meeting also gave her a certain amount of dread. Violet was filled with worry that his posh, super-educated parents, whose perfect smiles were often photographed at charity events and appeared in New York society pages, were going to think he was slumming it with a girl from the wrong side of Philly.
Her parents had not attended college. Her father repaired telephone poles for the Pennsylvania Power Authority and her mother was a homemaker. As proud as she was of her parents and as much as she loved them, she was sure of one thing: Chip and Ginny Sayles were not going to be impressed.
That evening, she’d worn the best outfit she owned, eschewing the inexpensive floral cotton dresses she liked to purchase from thrift stores at home, for her one black dress from Banana Republic that she hoped gave her an air of sophistication. Unlike Theo and Hugo, she wasn’t trying to appear like she didn’t have any money. She just didn’t. Through the glint of the silverware and wine glasses, she’d seen his mother look over at her, a tight smile on her lineless face. Hugo’s father, effortlessly charming, with the same dark brown eyes and sandyhair as Hugo, knew how to draw her out. He asked her what classes she was taking and what house she lived in. When she answered “Lowell House,” the elegant brick and white column dorm on Mount Auburn Street, Hugo’s mother softened, as if Violet was finally uttering something worth mentioning.
Violet wasn’t ashamed of her blue-collar background, but there was an obvious outsidership at Harvard that came along with it. Wealth was a given for so many of her peers. Not necessarily the kind of wealth the Wideners had, with their mansions, Lynnewood Hall in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and Miramar in Newport, Rhode Island; sprawling estates created by Horace Trumbauer, the same architect who later created Harry’s memorial library. But it was, without exception, most students at Harvard had far more affluence than her own humbler roots.
Her grandmother Helen, who Violet felt so close to her whole life and had only passed away the year before, didn’t even know her true origins. She had been given up for adoption at birth and the arrangements made through the historic St. Joseph’s Orphan’s Asylum on the corner of Seventh and Spruce Street in Philadelphia.
Grandma Helen had no idea who her family was or why they had chosen to give her up. “Imagine I could be French or even Italian?” she would often joke. But Violet knew her grandmother longed to know more about her background.
Grandma Helen was the only person Violet knew who loved to read as much as she did. When Violet would visit her apartment in North Philly, she would walk into the dimly lit living room, the smell of Lipton tea fragrancing the air, and almost always find her white-haired grandmother sitting in her pink flowered reading chair, a standing brass lamp illuminating her from behind, and a book between her papery hands.
Helen used to tell Violet that sometimes when she was reading a book, she’d search the storyline for something that might explain whyher biological parents had given her up. Novels always offered plenty of possible reasons. Her parents couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. Her mother was a naive woman who had gotten herself in trouble with a married man. Or the other options that Helen shuddered to think about, that someone had taken advantage of her mother and left her in a situation where she was desperate and alone.
One afternoon about a year before Grandma Helen died, Violet was sitting on the ottoman beside her. She’d brought a brown paper shopping bag filled with books she’d gotten from her local library’s fund-raising sale that she thought her grandmother might like. She pulled one from the bag, delight sweeping across her face.
“I bet you’ll love this one,” she offered. “It’s written from the perspective of Gretel from ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ but now she’s an old woman and she’s finally getting the chance to tell her version of the story.” Violet’s free hand reached for her grandmother’s. “I know how you’ve always had a special place in your heart for fairy tales.”
“Yes,” Grandma Helen replied, pulling the crocheted afghan over her lap. “I always have.”
Violet’s earliest memories did not involve sitting on her mother’s lap being read to, but instead being perched on that pink flowered chair with her grandmother.
“Remember that book you used to read to me from?The Happy Fairy’s Storybook?”
Violet could still picture the cover: a fairy dressed in a bright red robe, the letters of the title drawn to look like tree branches.
“How could I forget?” Her grandmother’s expression drifted far away.
“Where is that one now, anyway?” Violet asked as she put down the book she’d brought from the library sale, and scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with hardcovers and paperbacks with worn, yellowed pages that Helen had bought at garage sales over the years.
“It’s on the top shelf, all the way to the right.” Her grandmother didn’t even need to look. She knew exactly where it was.
Helen’s fingers twitched over the edge of her blanket. “Bring it to me please, honey,” she asked softly. “I might as well tell you the story behind it now.”
Violet pushed the ottoman toward the bookcase and stood on her tiptoes, pulling the old book down from the top shelf. The dust jacket was torn in places and several water stains speckled its cover, its picture of the girl’s red dress having faded to coral.
With the book now in her hands, memories of being with her grandmother as a child came flooding back to her.
