Violet captivated Erica with her own stories, too, most of them kept secret from me and only hinted at, but I gathered that Violet had been in and out of many beds in her young life, and that not every bed had had a man in it. For Erica, who had slept with exactly three men in the course of her thirty-nine years, Violet's erotic adventures were more than intriguing anecdotes. They were tales of enviable daring and freedom. For Violet, Erica embodied feminine reason, an idea that most of history has relegated to an oxymoron. Erica had a patience of mind that Violet lacked, a dogged willingness to tease a thought to fruition, and there were days when Violet would come to our door with a question for Erica, usually about German philosophy—Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger. Violet became Erica's student then. She would lie on our sofa, her eyes fixed on her teacher's face, and while she listened she squinted, frowned, and pulled at strands of her hair, as though these gestures could help her puzzle out the tortuous mysteries of being.
I doubt that either Erica or I would have taken to Violet so quickly had she not been with Bill. It wasn't only that we knew him and were well-disposed to the woman he had fallen for so hard, it was that we liked Bill and Violet together. They were beautiful, those two, and my mind is still crammed with memories of their bodies from the early days of their love affair: Violet with her hand in Bill's hair or on his thigh or Bill leaning over her, his mouth grazing her ear. Every time I saw them, I had the impression that they had just made love or were about to make love, that their eyes never left each other. Infatuated people often look ridiculous to others; their nonstop cooing, touching, and kissing can be intolerable to friends who have left that stage behind them. But Bill and Violet didn't embarrass me. Despite their obvious passion for each other, they played at restraint, holding back when Erica or I were in the room, and I think the tension they created together was what I liked best. I always felt that there was an invisible wire between them, stretched nearly to its breaking point.
Violet had grown up on a farm near Dundas, Minnesota, a town with a population of 623. I knew almost nothing about her corner of the Midwest, with its alfalfa fields, Holstein cows, and stolid characters with names like Harold Lundberg, Gladys Hrbek, and Lovey Munkemeyer, but I imagined it nevertheless, stealing images from movies and books of a flat landscape under a large sky. She had graduated from high school in the neighboring town of Northfield and attended St Olaf College in that same town before she fled east to graduate school at NYU. Her great-grandparents on both sides had emigrated from Norway and made their way across the country to start their farms and fight the earth and weather. Violet's rural childhood still clung to her. It appeared not only in her long midwestern vowels and in her references to milking machines and feedbags, but in the earnestness and weight of her spirit. Violet had charm, but it was not cultivated charm. When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.
One afternoon in July I found myself alone with Violet. Erica had taken Matt and Mark back to Greene Street, along with the first chapter of Violet's dissertation, which she had promised to read. Bill had gone off to Pearl Paint for supplies. The light shone on Violet's brown hair as she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of a window and told me the story of Augustine, which turned into a story about herself.
In Paris, Violet had rummaged through documents, files, and case studies called observations from the Salpêtrière hospital. From these accounts, she had cobbled together a few sketchy personal histories. "Both her parents were servants," Violet told me. "Not long after she was born, they sent her away to live with relatives. She stayed with them for six years but then was sent away again to a convent school. She was an angry girl—unruly and difficult The nuns thought she was possessed by the devil, and they threw holy water in her face to calm her. When she was thirteen, the nuns expelled her, and she went back to her mother, who was working in a house in Paris as a chambermaid. The case study doesn't mention what happened to her father. He must have disappeared. It does say that Augustine was hired 'on the pretext' that she teach the children of the house to sing and sew. For her efforts she was allowed to sleep in a little closet. It turned out that her mother was having an affair with the master of the house. In the records, they just call him 'Monsieur C.' Not long after Augustine moved in, Monsieur C. began making sexual advances toward her, but she refused him. Finally he threatened her with a razor and then raped her. She started having convulsive fits and bouts of paralysis. She hallucinated rats and dogs and big eyes staring at her. It got so bad that her mother took her to the Salpêtrière, where she was diagnosed as a hysteric. She was fifteen."
"A lot of people would go crazy after that kind of treatment," I said.
"She didn't have a chance. You'd be surprised how many of the girls and women I've been reading about came from similar backgrounds. Most of them were dirt-poor. A lot of them were shuttled back and forth between one parent or relative and another. They were always being uprooted as children. Several of them had been molested, too, by a relative or employer or somebody." Violet stopped talking for several seconds. "There are still psychoanalysts who talk about 'hysterical personality,' but most pyschiatrists don't even consider hysteria a mental illness anymore. The one thing that's left on the books is 'hysterical conversion' or 'conversion disorder.' That's when you wake up one day and can't move your arms or legs and there's no physical reason for it."
"You're saying that hysteria was a medical creation," I said.
"No," Violet said. "That's too simple. The medical establishment was certainly part of it, but the fact that so many women had hysterical attacks, not just women who were hospitalized for them, goes beyond doctors. Swooning, thrashing, and foaming at the mouth were a lot more common in the nineteenth century. It hardly happens anymore. Don't you find that strange? I mean, the only explanation is that hysteria really was a broad cultural phenomenon—a permissible way out."
"Out of what?"
"Out of Monsieur C.'s house, for one thing."
"You think that Augustine was pretending?"
"No. I think she was really suffering. If she had been admitted to a hospital today, they would have said she was schizophrenic or bipolar, but let's face it, those names are pretty vague, too. I think her illness took the form it did because it was in the air, floating around like a virus—the way anorexia nervosa floats around today."
While I thought about her comment, Violet continued. "Whin we were kids, my little sister, Alice, and I used to spend a lot of time in the barn. The summer after I turned nine and Alice turned six, we were playing with our dolls up in the hayloft. We were sitting across from each other making our dolls talk when suddenly Alice got this strange look on her face and pointed at the little window. 'Look Violet,' she said, 'there's an angel.' I didn't see anything except the little square of sunshine, but I was spooked, and then for a second I thought that there might be a figure there—a pale, weightless thing. Alice fell over and started kicking and choking. I grabbed her and tried to shake her. At first, I thought she was fooling, and then I saw her eyes roll up into her head and I knew she wasn't. I started screaming for my mother, and then I was gagging on my own spit. I was kicking and rolling around in the hay. My mother came running out of the house and climbed up the ladder to us. I was all crazy, Leo. I was yelling so loud I got hoarse. It took my mother a couple of minutes to figure out which one of us was in trouble. When she did, she had to push me out of the way, really hard, because I was holding on to Alice's knees and I wouldn't let go. My mother carried Alice out of there and down the ladder and drove her to the hospital." Violet took a big, shuddering breath and continued. "I stayed home with my father. I was sick with shame. I had panicked. I did everything wrong. I wasn't brave at all, but worse than that, a part of me knew that I had been acting flipped out, and that it was only partly real." Violet's eyes filled with tears. "I went into my room and started counting. I counted way up to four thousand and something, and then my father came into my room and told me Alice was going to be all right. He had talked to my mother at the hospital, and I cried all over him for a long time." Violet turned her head away from me. "Alice had had a grand mal seizure. She's an epileptic."