Violet McKisco
A pretty, disheartening young woman who wants to be in on the story rather than in the gallery — and who walks into the wrong bathroom at the Villa Diana.
To be inside the story instead of watching it. The group has cast itself as the gallery, and Violet is the one who keeps trying to get on stage.
The book
At a glance
- Albert McKisco's wife, in the group at the far end of the beach
- Boise, Idaho
- Twelve years; a daughter who died at seven
- What she saw in the bathroom at the Villa Diana, and never got to say
- The beach, the Villa Diana dinner, the night of the duel, and a transatlantic liner years later
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeViolet is shabby-eyed and pretty, with a disheartening intensity, and she opens her acquaintance with Rosemary by asking whether she is in the plot. The group at their end of the beach has decided that something is going on among the tanned people at the other end, and that they themselves are not in it. Mrs. Abrams, the elderly good sport of the party, puts it plainly: they are the gallery. Violet is the member of the gallery least willing to stay there. She reports her husband's Ulysses criticism, delivers a flat verdict on Abe North's music, and keeps the plot alive as a subject after her husband has begged her to stop.
At a dinner at the Villa Diana, the Divers' house above the sea, her prettiness has been piped to the surface of her, and she has given up the struggle to make her own position tangible — she is the wife of an arriviste who has not arrived. Then she announces she wants to go to the bathroom, and walks toward the house dragging her secret after her. She comes back crop-full of news, unable to say a word, and addressing the whole table as 'my dear'. Tommy Barban stops her before she can get it out, politely and then sharply.
How the book draws them
- The plotHer opening subject and her running joke, maintained against her husband's protests. She warns Rosemary that if she stays all summer she can watch it unfold.
- Audible confidingShe sways toward her friend Mrs. Abrams and breathes 'He's nervous' loudly enough for her husband to deny it. The book calls her, without affection, a frank outspoken woman.
- The verdict on AbeRosemary says Abe North is a good swimmer. Violet's answer comes with surprising violence: well, he's a rotten musician. She then repeats it to her husband for confirmation.
- Crop-full of newsThe book stages her return purely as physical signals — the silence with which she pulls out a chair, her staring eyes, her mouth working a little — so that everyone recognises what she is carrying before she says anything.
- SilencedTold it is inadvisable to comment on what goes on in the house, she breathes loud and hard once and brings another expression into her face with an effort. Her husband's readiness to fight over it is not something she asked for.
- Very grand, laterOn the liner she is decked out by the grand couturières and charmed by the small discoveries well-bred girls make in their teens. She could have learned them from her mother in Boise, except that her soul was born in the small movie houses of Idaho and she had no time.
What she saw was Nicole. Rosemary learns it much later, through a door in a Paris hotel: — a relapse, and the wrongness the whole dazzled first movement has been curtaining. Violet is astonished and resentful and baffled, and in a way comprehending, and the Divers never learn that the duel was about them.
Her reward is the only unambiguous social ascent in the novel besides Mary North's. Success improves her husband and humbles him; it simply promotes her. She belongs now, together with several million other people, and she is happy, though he still shushes her when she grows violently naïve. She never does find out what she almost said.