A Violet Season (12 page)

Mr. Morton came late in the afternoon to take care of the essential chores—Frank had done the same for him the day his wife had delivered her baby—and Ida gathered the eggs and fed the chickens. A bold squirrel sat near the coop, late-afternoon sunlight casting a halo at the edges of its tail. Ida paused to admire the peculiar light before stamping her foot in the dirt, attempting to scare the squirrel away. The chicken feed was surprisingly cold when she thrust her hand into it, and the squirrel watched her scatter it across the yard before he darted under the fence and was gone.

Ida and the children had a quiet supper. Then, when Jasper and Mary were in bed and Ida had finished her evening chores, she
sat at Harriet’s machine a few minutes more and gathered up the jacket sleeves and sewed and pressed the collar, leaving only the fitting of the front panels, the hems, and the buttons for another day.

As expected, Frank and the children were home late. Ida had nodded off in the rocker awaiting their return. She heard the wagon on the driveway and rose to light the lamp for them. She expected Reuben, at least, to be full of stories of the day, but the boys came in looking tired. Behind them, Frank was awake enough but quiet, as always. And where was Alice? Ida stood clutching the matchbox and watched Frank. Surely Alice wasn’t stabling the horse herself in the dark. Had she stopped at the outhouse? The boys solemnly walked past Ida and up the stairs without a word.

“Where is Alice?” she asked in as steady a voice as she could manage.

“She’s in the city.”

Ida’s heart surged, and she heard the rush of blood through her ears. “What is she doing in the city?”

“Going to work.”

Ida threw the box of matches on the table, wishing she’d held something that would make more sound as it hit, a sound loud enough to rouse Frank out of his infuriating calm. “Look at me,” she said fiercely, and he stepped up to the table opposite her and looked her right in the eye. “How could you do such a thing, Frank Fletcher, without consulting me first? How could you do such a thing?”

“The money is my concern,” Frank said, the corners of his mouth turned down as if speaking were sour to him.

“And Alice’s future is my concern.”

Frank nodded slightly at this and hung up his hat.

“What kind of work?” she asked.

“Factory work.”

“Oh, no, Frank!” she said, slapping her palms on the table.

“Five dollars a week,” he said, “and no charge for a room.”

“Where is she living?”

“The sister of a man I know, a flower wholesaler.”

“A stranger! Frank, how could you?”

“She’s not a stranger, Ida. I’ve worked with the man for years.”

“And have you met her? Have you seen her home? Where is it?”

He took a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket and handed her the address. The woman’s name was Miss Sligh. There was no telling whether this was a private home or one of those terrible boardinghouses where girls were subjected to coarse living among lower-class workers with no morals or scruples.

“She didn’t even pack a bag,” Ida said. “How could you do such a thing?”

Frank walked over to the counter, lifted the tea towel covering the day’s leftover bread, tore off a piece, and chewed it, ignoring her.

Ida grabbed the lantern, opened the door, and slammed it behind her. She thought she heard Jasper cry out, but she resolved to keep going all the way up the drive to William and Frances’s front porch steps, where she stood in the sudden quiet.

Only the beech trees clung stubbornly to their leaves as if winter might be avoided. Everything else was stiff and bare—the trees, the house, even the smoke plowing straight up from the chimney in the windless night. William and Frances had been there, too. They had allowed Frank to leave his daughter alone in the city. They must have questioned his judgment. But what was there to demand, to say, to do now? No one would do anything.

Ida had heard the stories of factory girls whose hair and skirts and fingers got caught up in the machinery, and of the kind of people who worked beside them, the kind of life Alice would be exposed to. Their daughter faced all sorts of dangers about which Frank was either unaware or unconcerned.

Ida backed away from William’s porch. She could rely on no one. She would write to Alice tonight, in care of Miss Sligh. If only Alice would tell her what was happening, she would think what she could do about it.

I
n the wild, the violets were spring flowers, surprising one with their shy, folded blooms in unexpected places: the base of a stone wall, the corner of a water trough, the edge of a wooded hill. In the beginning Frances had lamented the men’s plan to grow them over the winter. Despite her coolheaded, businesslike demeanor, she was actually quite sentimental, as Ida had discovered one day early in their violet-growing experiment, when only the first three greenhouses banked the hill and talk had begun of building more in the spring. The two of them had been sitting on the veranda, and Frances had spotted a clump of November violets in the browning grass. She had hurried into her shed, returning with a trowel, and Ida had watched in disbelief as she attacked the plant, clawing it out of the earth and carrying it like a pile of dung to the waste heap at the rear of her garden.

“It’s bad luck if they bloom in the fall,” Frances had said when she sat down again. She’d picked the wedges of dirt from under her fingernails and tossed them at her feet. At the time Ida had believed this display to be about the loss of Frances’s baby a few months before, born just five months into her pregnancy. It would be the last baby she would have. However, since then Ida had heard the same superstition from Mrs. Tenney, whose husband also grew violets.

Shortly after Alice’s disappearance to the city, Ida came across just such a row of November violets tufted at the base of her garden wall like the ruffle on a skirt. Her senses were suddenly keen as a cat’s; she heard every clank and call from the greenhouses and felt the suggestion of the sun’s warmth on her bare head. She smelled the bacon from breakfast on her hands and the heavy coal smoke from the first stokehouses lighting up over the hill. In her mouth was the taste of distress. Taking no chances, she fetched a shovel and worked quickly, slicing it under the base of the wall with a firm press of her foot and working it like a lever to uproot and destroy the intruders. At a penny apiece, they were worth nearly a day’s wages for any of the pickers who toiled this moment in the greenhouses. But Ida wanted them gone.

“Ma!” Jasper called out from the back door, his little voice striking the same commanding tone as Reuben’s and Oliver’s when they called her.

“Be right there, love!” she called out, and assailed the wild violets again, tossing the uprooted plants in a mound that she would carry off to the weed pile later, so they couldn’t take root again. There had been no reply from Alice in the nearly three weeks since Ida had sent her letter. As she stabbed the shovel under the last renegade flowers, she resolved it was time to make a trip to New York herself.

But that same week Frank came home with a letter. He tossed it, like ordinary mail from her sister, on the counter where Ida was chopping vegetables for supper. The single sheet of paper was folded in thirds and had already been removed from its envelope. The letter was addressed directly to Ida, and she was irritated that Frank had opened it, though of course he had the right to open her mail. He was probably concerned about Alice as well and glad to hear from her. Ida wiped her hands on her apron and read with greed the few short sentences penned in Alice’s petite and precise hand. The letter didn’t say much, but it said enough: Alice was
working hard. She had a clean bed of her own and three meals a day. She missed Ida and the boys, and she wished to send Jasper especially a kiss.

Frank opened the door of the range to poke at the fire, which always annoyed Ida when she was cooking. “I’d like to go to the city and check on Alice,” she said to his back. “I could travel with Frances the next time she goes.”

“She’s fine,” Frank said. “Read the letter.”

“I want to see that she’s fine for myself. Harriet will take Jasper, and I can ask Mrs. Morton to take the baby for the day. She’s nursing her own, and I think she’d be willing. I’ve thought it all through.” Ida worried that she sounded too eager. If Frank heard a weakness in her, he would thwart her plans.

“If you’re so concerned, I’ll go down and check on her myself,” he said, slamming the door of the range and scattering ash on the floor.

“When?” she pressed.

“Soon.”

Ida held the letter up before her like a mirror, wishing she could see more than ink on the page. She read it again, lingering on each word, but it said no more to her than it had the first time. Alice had a bed and three meals. She had paper and pen and a stamp and an envelope. She would be all right.

*   *   *   

A week or so later, Frank did take another trip to the city. Ida sent Alice’s new winter skirt and jacket and a few other things with him, along with a newsy letter.

The lantern was lit, the children were in bed, the boys were in their attic room, and Ida was writing to her sister when she heard Frank’s wagon return. She expected he would take Trip and Trudy in first, but he came directly in the house. She tossed him a cursory greeting, trying not to appear too eager for news of Alice.

When she looked up, he stood in the doorway, holding a bundle at his chest, and a gust of grief blew into her as she imagined what it might be: Prissy, run over in the lane or trampled by the horses. Then he stepped toward her and held it out and said, “This one’s name is Anabel.”

“What?” she asked, though she could see well enough now what it was. A sleeping baby. Another baby come up from the city. Frank stood before her, holding out the bundle, expecting her to take it.

“What in blazes do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

“I’m bringing us some more income,” he said.

“Have you gone and lost your senses, Frank Fletcher? I am already nursing a baby!”

He tried again to hand the baby to her, but she dropped her pen and put her hands in her lap. “I said, have you gone and lost your senses?”

“Watch your tongue,” he said quietly. “Watch your tongue and take the baby.”

“I shall not take the baby.”

“Then I guess I’ll just put her out for the night,” he said, turning toward the door as if he would do it.

“And I guess her parents will be after you for murder in the morning,” Ida said, though she was losing her resolve not to touch the bundle.

“You can suckle two at a time. It’s why God gave a woman two,” Frank said, nodding at her bosom.

“God gave me two breasts so one could have a rest each time,” Ida said, though she had nursed two babies before. She had only just weaned Jasper. She stood, scraping her chair on the kitchen floor. “You’re taking advantage,” she said. “It’s too much work. And thanks to you, Alice isn’t here to help.” She would nurse the baby. Of course she would nurse the baby. But Frank must hear her fury.

“You know nothing, Ida,” Frank said. “You don’t know what I put up with day in and day out.”

“I know enough.”

“No, you don’t. There is nothing more important than getting out from under them now. Nothing.”

“What about Alice? Did you see Alice?”

Still holding the baby like a bag of beans in the crook of his arm, Frank reached into his coat pocket and held out his other hand. In it was Ida’s mother’s locket, the one she’d given to Alice. “She asked me to give this to you for safekeeping,” he said. “She broke it and she can’t wear it anymore.”

Ida saw as she took the locket from him that the chain had snapped two or three inches from the clasp. A jeweler would be needed to repair it. She wondered how the break had happened. She opened it to find that the lock of her father’s honey-brown hair it had once held was missing. “Is she all right?” she asked, closing her fingers around the locket.

“She said to tell you she’s well. She’s happy to be earning some money. Take the baby,” he said, holding the bundle toward her.

Ida dropped the locket in her apron pocket and took the baby. Like the others when they’d arrived, this baby weighed next to nothing. The sharp odor of a soiled diaper made Ida wonder how long it had been since someone had attended to her.

“Where is she from, Frank?” she asked, without even peeking into the bundle.

“The city,” he said.

“Where in the city?”

“Someone a friend of mine knows.”

“Her mama die in childbirth, too?” She wasn’t sure why she was doubting him. The baby must have a family to pay him, otherwise why would he bring it home? But what he planned to do with this bit of extra money, how he imagined he would ever “get out from under” his brothers when he had never managed to in over twenty years, was a mystery.

“I don’t know what happened to her mama,” he said flatly.

Ida nodded slowly, her eyes pegged on him, though he wouldn’t return her gaze. Part of her wanted nothing more to do with him.

“I’ll be needing the whole bed, with two to nurse at night,” she said. “You can sleep upstairs in Alice’s bed.”

Frank nodded as if to acknowledge she had won a point against him. Then he said, “For one week I’ll sleep upstairs. I reckon by then you’ll figure something else out.”

*   *   *   

An hour after she arrived, Anabel began to scream. After attempting unsuccessfully to get the baby to latch on and nurse, Ida slung her over her shoulder and began a bouncing walk round and round the kitchen. Upstairs, the boys slammed their door shut, and in the downstairs bedroom Mary picked up the cry, but Anabel’s screaming went on, and Ida continued to walk and bounce, walk and bounce.

Finally Frank wrenched open the upstairs door and called from the top of the stairs, “Quiet that baby down!”

“You brought her home, Frank!” Ida shouted. “Well done!” Never had she spoken to her husband in such a way, but doing so in her anger and frustration gave her an unexpected thrill, and for a few steps she stomped her feet to emphasize that she was through with listening to him.