A Violet Season (25 page)

“I’m afraid I can’t pay you for her room and board, but I was hoping she might help you in the kitchen, or with the housekeeping or the laundry. It wouldn’t be a long-term arrangement.” Ida could see Mrs. Schreiber was trying to work out the reasoning behind this unusual request without being so bold as to ask.

“Alice has had quite a scare in New York,” Ida said. “Involving something her father has done. I don’t wish to say more than that. Except that it would be best if it weren’t known that she’s here.”

“And then what?” Mrs. Schreiber asked.

Ida hesitated. To say it aloud would make it certain. “Then we shall go to my family home in Albany.” There. That didn’t sound so final. Merely an extended visit until things cleared up, though there was no family left in Albany, and no home.

Mrs. Schreiber regarded Alice not unkindly but with curiosity. “There is plenty of work here. I haven’t taken down the drapes for a spring washing, and with some help, I could clean up the garden beds this week. I think we have an arrangement.” She smiled and extended her hand, and Ida took it.

“Perhaps . . .” Ida said, floundering, and Mrs. Schreiber seemed suddenly uncomfortable. Ida let go of her hand. “I was just going to say that perhaps it would be best if Alice were to stay indoors. I wish I could say more.”

“All right,” Mrs. Schreiber said. “She’ll help me in the house, then. Let me show you to your room, Alice. Have you any things with you?”

“I’ll bring her things later,” Ida said.

By the light of a single lamp, the three women climbed the stairs, two flights to the rooms in the garret. “It gets too hot up here midsummer, but the weather is still cool,” Mrs. Schreiber said before she handed the lamp to Ida and turned the key in the lock. “I should think you’ll get along well up here if it’s only for a week.”

The room had been shut up for some time, but Mrs. Schreiber wrested the single window open, and the cold night air hovered. “First we’ll take care of these,” she said, shaking dust off the curtains. Ida watched Alice’s face, trying to meet her glance, but her daughter kept her eyes downcast. Finally she took both of Alice’s hands and bent into her line of sight. She would have knelt before her if Mrs. Schreiber hadn’t been there. She would have knelt in penance and bowed her head to the floor.

“I’ll bring your things later,” Ida said. “You’ll be all right.” Alice’s nod was a better response than none. “I’ll see myself out,” Ida told their hostess.

On the street, Joe and his horse and wagon were waiting patiently. Ida gripped the brake handle and pulled herself up to the seat beside him. The night air stank of skunk.

“Thank you, Mr. Jacobs,” she said, looking straight ahead. The village street was dark, save for the light glowing from a single house, where Ida knew an acquaintance to be up with her ailing mother. A raccoon rustled from under the quince in Mrs. Schreiber’s yard and cast its luminous eyes up at them, then wobbled back under the shrub. Somewhere a cow lowed. Ida’s job—the only job that mattered—had been to protect her children, and she had failed.

“I’ll take you home,” Joe said.

Ida was surprised all over again by his boyish appearance. In the absence of his mustache, his skin glowed white in the moonlight; his unfamiliar face must have bothered Alice as well. Ida shivered as a breeze spirited between them. She was thoroughly soaked and needed to collect Anabel as soon as possible.

“Would you take me to Mrs. Morton’s? I need the baby.”

Joe nodded and flicked the reins. As they pulled away, Ida looked up at Mrs. Schreiber’s garret, but the window was dark.

*   *   *   

After walking home from the Mortons’ with the baby on her shoulder, Ida found Frank asleep. When she awoke in the morning, he was already out at the barn, and he didn’t come in for breakfast. She stood in the yard, where a bank of daffodils buttered the grass, and she saw him up the hill, standing in the bed of a wagon, spreading old soil as other men shoveled it out a gap in the side of the greenhouse. Oliver and Reuben were up there with him. Late in the morning they moved over the ridge, and they didn’t come to the house for lunch. Ida ignored the three burlap sacks of new cuttings Frank had left for her at the door.

When they came in for supper, Frank behaved as if Ida had never been gone, but she knew his fury was just beneath the surface. As she served his meat, he asked her, “How was your day in the city?”

Ida imagined he was trying to work out how much she knew. She wondered whether she was safe. Then she answered him, “Fine,” and moved on to Reuben’s plate.

“Did you see Alice?” Frank asked, picking up his knife and fork, and he smiled smugly. She felt she could slit his throat with the carving knife and never regret it. But his confidence meant he had decided she wasn’t clever enough to have found Alice. Let him believe she was still at Mrs. Hargrave’s.

“I wasn’t able to see her. But I would like to try again sometime soon.”

“Sometime,” Frank said through a mouthful of food. “The chicken is delicious.”

After supper, Ida washed the dishes and nursed Anabel, who was fussing in her old way. The day with Jennie Morton seemed to have set her off again. It took Ida a long time to calm her, but when she
had and the baby and Jasper were both asleep, she made the excuse of going out to bring the new cuttings to Nora Hoskins’s house, where they would trim them together. She hauled the sacks into the wagon, along with her paring knife knotted in a handkerchief, and left Oliver and Reuben in charge of the little ones. It was very unusual for her to go out in the evening, but she was no longer concerned about appearances. In a few days, she would be ready to go.

*   *   *   

Mrs. Schreiber escorted Ida up to the garret, where Alice sat in a solitary captain’s chair, wearing her nightgown and holding a book on her lap—the same book, Ida was surprised to note, that Anna Brinckerhoff had loaned her. Alice appeared more composed and peaceful than she’d been the day before. She had bathed and done her hair up in a neat topknot, and her clothing, which Oliver had delivered to the house earlier without knowing what was in the brown paper package, was hung from a hook on the wall. There were gray circles beneath her eyes that Ida was sure were not a trick of the lamplight, and as she held her place in the book with her thumb, Ida noted her wrists were as thin as saplings.

“I’ve read that as well,” Ida said. “What do you think of Mrs. Stetson?”

“I’ve only just started it,” Alice said, and set the book on the floor. “Mrs. Schreiber recommended it.”

Ida sat on the edge of the bed. She took her time removing her wrap, which she folded in her lap.

“I’m not going with you, Mother,” Alice said. She looked ridiculous in the nightgown she had worn as a girl when she was clearly a young woman now.

“What else can you do?” Ida asked.

Alice made no answer.

“You can’t stay here.”

“I know.”

“Then you must come with me to Albany. We’ll start again.”

“Doing what?” It was not so much a question as an indictment of their inability as women to earn their own living. Ida felt her heart constrict just as her stomach did when it was hungry. She feared Alice was holding out hope of staying close to Joe.

“Alice,” she said, but her throat tightened, too, and she was unable to speak another word. She stepped to her daughter and knelt before her, placing her hands on Alice’s knees. Alice tucked her own hands under the folds of her nightgown.

“You can’t stay here, my love,” Ida whispered. “Don’t you understand?” And she saw, looking into her daughter’s cold eyes, that she understood too much. She knew things she would never tell Ida, and there was no protecting her any longer.

Ida let go of Alice’s knees and rocked to rest on her heels. She lifted her face to the ceiling, where the light above the lamp faded to dark in the corners. She braced herself to look at Alice again. Something had changed in her for the worse, but possibly also for the better. No one would be permitted to tell her what to do ever again.

“I’m waiting for Joe to call,” Alice said.

Ida shook her head. “Alice . . .” she began. “What other reasonable options do you have?”

“Maybe going back to the city.”

“You’ve lost your senses!” She was sorry the moment she said it, though it was true. Alice turned her profile to Ida and gazed out the window with an expression that could have been mistaken for serenity. Her daughter seemed to be calculating her life as if it weren’t her own but someone else’s.

“Has he been in touch with you today?” Ida asked.

“He knows he has to keep it quiet that I’m here,” Alice said. This was true enough. “He asked me to marry him.”

“When?”

“In a letter, after he knew already what had become of me. Or
at least he had an idea. He asked me to marry him.” She stood and pushed past Ida to the bed, then scooted across it to lean against the wall, knees pulled up under the nightgown to her chin.

Ida sat on the edge of the bed near her. It hadn’t been long at all since she had sat at her little girl’s bedside to talk for a minute about her day at school and kiss her good night. The memory of that unspoiled child was too painful, and Ida pushed it aside.

“He doesn’t know me anymore,” Alice said, her face twisting around the ugly words. When she opened her mouth to cry, she made no sound.

Ida reached out to touch Alice’s shoulder, but Alice pulled away and crouched against the plaster wall like a cornered rabbit. Ida drew back in shock, and for lack of a place to put her rejected hand, she gripped the brass knob of the bedpost.

“You may as well have killed me,” Alice said in a low, measured voice. She spoke from that place where she’d tried to hide while she was Millie. Her mother’s eyes were wide and frightened, and she shook her head. Alice fought the urge to reach out and scratch her face.

“Alice,” her mother said, shaking her head slowly, never taking her eyes from her.

Alice pressed her palms against the wall behind her to steady herself and stood up, looming high over her mother. “You do whatever Pa tells you to. You let him send me off to the city, you never wrote to me or visited me, you profited from my situation. Why did you even come to get me? Did you think after all that time, there would be anything left of me?”

“But I did write to you!” Ida cried. “Alice, I didn’t know where you were! He told me you were working in a factory, living with a lady he knew. I tried and tried to find you, but he stopped me at every turn, and then I got sick!”

“You were nursing the babies of
whores,
” Alice said, and it felt good to say that word, for if she could say it, it might have less
power when others said it, as eventually they were bound to do. Now that she’d left the brothel, she could see plainly enough that any distinction between her and the girls would not exist outside. She had served them and their clients. She had been broken by a man whose name she didn’t even know. She had lived for five months among them. Anyone here who knew that would see her as one of them.

Her mother was still gripping the bedpost, still shaking her head, and Alice watched her for a sign of dishonesty, a tic or an action belying her words.

“That’s what I am now, Mother,” Alice continued. “I—am—a—whore. And it’s because of you.”

“No,” Ida choked. “I’ve been sick over you since you left. I had no way of knowing what was happening!”

“Then you must have been
blind
.”

Ida knew this accusation held some truth. She had not seen, and what she had seen, she had not understood.

Alice saw that her words had cut as she’d intended. But Millie must be exposed for who she was. Alice dropped to her knees on the mattress. Her mother took another step away and watched, transfixed, as Alice crawled to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over it. As she fell backward into the position she had seen the girls in, hips just over the lip of the mattress, she spread her legs and pulled her nightgown high over her face. Ida saw the flash of white and turned away, but Alice did not move, so Ida did what her daughter wanted. She looked.

She saw the reddish wool of curly hair and the vulnerable pink nestled within, saw her daughter not as she had seen other women, in childbirth, the mouths of their birth canals bulging and resistant. Instead she saw the hidden furrow, the precious cleft of flesh that had become her daughter’s heart, the site of her brokenness.

Ida saw the white surface of Alice’s belly, the hollow of her navel, where once they had been joined, the undulations of her upper ribs,
and above them the shroud of her nightgown over the contours of her breasts, her chin, and her face, covered like the face of the dead. She felt their two lives shatter like a block of ice dropped on the frozen surface of the river, fragments sliding in every direction, impossible to retrieve, melting even as they skimmed away. Ida lifted the nightgown off Alice’s face and shook it out over her bare lap. Then she took her daughter’s hand and helped her sit up. They sat together on the stiff mattress and spoke no more.

On her way home from Mrs. Schreiber’s, Ida stopped the wagon at the edge of Mr. Aiken’s farm. Working by moonlight, she hauled the three bags of new cuttings across his field and pushed them into the pond.

A
t Mrs. Schreiber’s, Alice worked hard to avoid conversation, ate her supper silently with her hostess and the boarding guests, then retired to her room with Mrs. Schreiber’s copy of
Women and Economics
. She sat up reading most of the night, even knowing that she would have to rise early. Though the book placed Alice outside its argument—she saw herself now as what Mrs. Stetson called “the other kind of woman”—she couldn’t put it down, for it also claimed Alice was not so unlike young married women; Mrs. Stetson saw marriage itself as a form of prostitution in which women married men because it was their sole means of financial support. In fact, much of what the book had to say about marriage took Alice by surprise, and wishing above all never to be taken advantage of again, she read it with great care. This writer, whoever she was, did seem to understand the behavior of those young unmarried men whom Alice had met in New York. The author understood, too, the desire of women to do meaningful work, and the desire of young people in love to be together. But her optimistic view that marriage could change—that things were already changing—was beyond Alice. In the end, the book left her despairing even more deeply, for if she were to have a choice, it would be
between prostituting herself as a married woman or living her life alone as a working woman.