A Violet Season (24 page)

As Alice climbed the back stairs to fetch the dustpan minutes later, she nearly met them in the hall—Bridie and an outrageously mustached man—and she ducked onto the rear landing so as not to be seen.

While she made a cursory pass through the second-floor hallway with the broom and dustpan, she could hear the footsteps in Bridie’s room above and the creak of the bedstead when Froggie was finished. She hid behind a door as he passed coming down, then stepped out to finish her work before any other men arrived. A few minutes later, she heard the girls congregating in the third-floor parlor, and she climbed the stairs to join them. For the first time, Katerina was there, sitting in one of the armchairs and sewing a button onto her spare nightgown, with Bridie’s sewing kit on the ottoman in front of her. Alice watched her thread the needle the same way she did herself and wondered at the fact that they came from opposite ends of the earth yet accomplished this woman’s task in exactly the same way.

Jessie’s birthday cake sat on the coffee table, and she cut a generous slice for each of them. When they finished, Lena traced her finger around the edge of everyone’s plate, licking the leftover frosting. Bridie came out to join the others, and after she’d eaten her dessert, she shared a cigarette with Jessie, who sat sideways on a chair with her slippered feet dangling over the arm. Rose twirled her hair around one finger and stared at the ceiling. Alice pushed her broom dully up and down the hall. Once the evening had begun, the girls tucked themselves away.

The creak of footsteps warned them of Ivy’s approach again. “Guess we’ll have to head down there soon,” Jessie said, not moving. But it was Mrs. Hargrave’s glossy, high-piled hair that came up the stairs, followed by her painted face and her heavy plum-colored dress.

“Alice Fletcher,” Mrs. Hargrave said, and Alice’s mind snagged on the sound of her old name. “Come with me.”

Alice glanced at the girls, but they shook their heads, not knowing what was happening. Mrs. Hargrave led Alice down the stairs, and Alice expected she would be taken to the study. Was her father here again? Or had she done something wrong? She’d done everything Ivy asked of her, she hadn’t broken a glass in weeks, she’d been polite and accommodating. Mrs. Hargrave opened the door to Katerina’s second-floor room, and Alice stepped inside, thinking she was going to be shown some cleaning task she had overlooked or something that needed to be mended. But Mrs. Hargrave turned without a word and shut Alice in. Then a key rattled in the lock and the footsteps of the madam retreated.

“What?” Alice asked, her voice wobbling, though no one would hear it. She stood in the center of Katerina’s room with nothing to hold on to except the thought that all her patience was about to end in defeat. It seemed Mrs. Hargrave had decided it was time for her to begin taking clients. Perhaps her father had ordered it. Alice ran to the door and banged on it, though the girls were already on the other side.

“Millie!” came Jessie’s voice. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said, and she watched the doorknob jiggle.

“She’s locked you in! What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said again. She couldn’t speak aloud what she feared.

“Dammit!” cried Jessie, and she kicked the door.

“Don’t,” said Bridie. “You’ll draw attention.”

“I’d like to bloody draw attention! She has no right to lock her in!”

“She has a right to do whatever she wants,” said Bridie. “What are you going to do, call the police?”

“Shut up,” Jessie said. Three of the neighborhood police officers, including the chief, were her regular clients.

“I’m afraid,” Alice said.

“Why would she lock her in Kat’s room?” Bridie asked. Alice couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation; they must be standing farther away. Alice checked the window to see if she could get out. It was only the second floor, but Katerina’s window looked out on the air shaft rather than the street. Alice was trapped.

“We’re going to find out what’s happening,” came Bridie’s voice at the door. “Call up to me through the pipes if you need help. You can hear everything in my room from there.” Alice found the pair of pipes running floor to ceiling at the far corner of the room.

“Miss Bridie,” came Ivy’s voice again. “Another gentleman to see you.” It had struck Alice funny at first to hear these men referred to as gentlemen, but that was before she had realized how many conventional gentlemen visited Mrs. Hargrave’s. She wondered who would be brought to Katerina’s door. She would send him away, whoever he was. But she couldn’t keep standing there in the middle of the room. She was tired of standing, tired of holding out. In the corner by the pipes, she sat against the wall and closed her eyes. If anything happened, she would be right there to call to Bridie.

She must have drifted off, because she thought she heard Joe’s voice then. She couldn’t hear the words, only the urgent tone. She strained to listen to what it was saying. Bridie was conversing with it. Then she knew she was awake. She shifted closer to the pipes, and finding them cool, she leaned her head against them. She could hear the conversation clearly.

“My God!” Bridie was saying. “Is she all right? What does she look like?” She sounded funny, as if she were crying.

The man’s words were more difficult to make out, but the range of his voice sounded just like Joe’s. Whoever he was, he was not carrying on the usual transaction.

“I can’t,” Bridie cried. “I want to so badly, but I can’t.”

Then, amid the words of the man, Alice heard her own name.
She rapped on the pipes and called out to Bridie, whose voice came back clearly: “Not so loud! The pipes go downstairs, too!”

Alice ran to the door and jiggled the knob, but it was locked tight. She had once seen her father pick the lock on the barn with a knife. She searched Katerina’s nightstand drawer and found a pen, but the shaft was too wide. She had a few hairpins, but they bent and twisted and didn’t budge the lock.

“Alice,” came Joe’s voice from the other side of the door, and she pressed her hands and face to it.

“I’m here,” she said.

“I’m going to get you out. Collect your things.”

Alice wondered where he was going to take her.

“Alice?” he said, and she heard the edge of desperation in his voice.

“Where will we go?”

“Home! I’m taking you home.”

“I can’t go home,” she said, perhaps too quietly for him to hear, for he said again, more insistently, “Collect your things.”

“I don’t have anything,” she said.

“All right. Then listen. Mrs. Hargrave has gone out. I’m going downstairs in a minute to distract the housemaid. You come down a minute behind me and go straight out the front door and across the street to the lunchroom.”

“I can’t go home,” she said, her voice stronger, but there was no response, and she wondered if he had already left. She untied her apron, thinking to leave it behind, then noticed how worn the knees of her skirt were from kneeling on the floor to clean. She tied the apron again and touched her hair.

“Alice,” came a whisper at the door. “It’s Jessie. I’ve got some clothing for you. Courtesy of Mr. Dylan.”

“How am I to get out of this room?” Alice asked.

“Are you ready?” came Joe’s voice again. Alice wasn’t sure she was ready for anything. “Remember,” he said, “give me a minute
with the housemaid, then walk straight out the door and cross the street to the lunchroom.”

They worked on the lock first from the outside with several different implements. Then they slid something thin between the doorframe and the lock and tried to budge it that way, but again without success.

“This is going to make a racket,” Joe said to the girls outside. “When I hit the door, you laugh as loudly as you can. Make it sound like nothing is wrong.”

As he counted to three, Alice stepped clear. With a loud thud, the door bulged in place, and with his second hit, the bolt cracked through the frame and the door swung open. She didn’t even recognize the man who stumbled into the room. He wore glasses and was clean-shaven, and she stood confused as he clasped her hands and kissed them quickly and said to her, “Hurry now.” Then he was gone.

Jessie pulled at Alice’s apron string. “Take that off!” she said, and Alice complied, then fumbled with Jessie to get her old work dress off and the new one on over her chemise. Bridie hastily pinned a hat on her head, and then Jessie slipped off her new kid gloves and handed them to Alice. They kissed her and pushed her out the bedroom door. Glory and Rose and Lena and Katerina stood together in the hallway and watched as she hurried down the stairs, holding the loosely pinned hat in place on her head, feeling odd and frightened.

As Joe had promised, neither he nor Ivy was in the front hall or sitting room, and Alice did as he had said. She turned the front doorknob and stepped out.

The setting sun blinded her, and she ducked her head to shield her eyes with the brim of the hat. She could see only the stone stoop at her feet and the base of the iron railing, which she fumbled to grasp. She was supposed to cross the street, but the glare and the movement and the noise paralyzed her. It was one thing to
run a brief errand up the block and quite another to live out in the world. She considered turning back but knew she should not. Still, she couldn’t move forward. She squinted from under the broad brim of Bridie’s hat, down one step at a time to the sidewalk, then lifted her head to the street.

Her eyes were adjusting to the light, though she saw things in a blur: a vendor with a red push wagon; a scrawny, leafless tree; a policeman on horseback who didn’t even notice the strange girl standing on Mrs. Hargrave’s steps. A woman, waving her arms, dropped a blue cape behind her and ran into the street with no regard for the traffic. A harnessed horse veered sharply to the right to avoid her, and still the woman ran forward. Her striped shirtwaist had some kind of large wet stain across the front, and her hair was unpinned and falling lopsided off her head. She seemed to be waving at Alice. A second wagon coming the other way missed her by a wheel’s width, and she stumbled up the curb as Alice realized: the woman was her mother.

Here’s a photograph of my mother. This is probably the oldest photo I have of her. Oh, no—there’s one other, it may be a tintype, from right before she married my father. It was taken in a portrait studio in Albany. I don’t know where it is right now.

But in this snapshot here is my mother, holding my baby sister, and my brother Jasper is next to her. He was so cute, wasn’t he? He grew up to be a handsome man, too. And this is me, on her other side, and my husband behind me. We weren’t married yet. I think my aunt Grace must have taken this. She came to visit a few months after we arrived in Albany. We’re on the footbridge at Washington Park Lake. This would have been autumn of 1899. It must have been a Sunday afternoon, since that was the only time my mother had off.

Where was your father?

He didn’t come with us.

Oh! So, what made you move to Albany? Did your mother have family here?

Originally she did.

Were there better opportunities for work?

Better opportunities, yes.

It looks like you’ve saved some letters in here, too.

You can’t read the letters.

—excerpt from an interview with Mrs. Alice Vreeland for
The Women of Albany County,
July 6, 1972

I
n the dark of morning, Ida rang Mrs. Schreiber’s bell. Alice stood one step below while Joe waited in the wagon. Alice had hardly spoken on their long journey by foot and horsecar and train and wagon to this doorstep, damp from an earlier rain that had missed the city. Droplets splashed soundlessly from a weak point in the gutter above, regular as Ida’s heartbeat.

Mr. Schreiber opened the door a crack to see who was standing there at such an hour. “One moment,” he said, and closed the door, leaving them on the porch. A minute later, Mrs. Schreiber opened the door wide and welcomed Ida as if she were making an afternoon call, though Mrs. Schreiber was dressed in her nightgown and robe. She led Ida and Alice into the parlor, stopping to light a lamp on her way, and they sat side by side on her sofa. Ida wanted to reach out and take Alice’s hand, but she did not, mostly because she imagined that Alice might swat her hand away.

“How nice to see you, Alice,” said Mrs. Schreiber, sitting across from them in a blue brocade armchair that was worn at the base where a cat had repeatedly sharpened its claws. Alice looked at her gloved hands and made no reply.

“And Ida. You’re feeling better?”

“Much better than last you saw me,” Ida said. “Thank you.”

Mrs. Schreiber waited. What else should one say to visitors who came in the pit of the night?

“I have a large favor to ask of you,” Ida said, and Mrs. Schreiber nodded. “I wonder if Alice could stay here for a few days, a week at most.”

Mrs. Schreiber had surely been asked other favors relating to young ladies, and no doubt it was one of those she had anticipated.