A Violet Season (18 page)

It was Joe Jacobs, glancing over his shoulder up the hill. “Mrs. Fletcher,” he said, “may I come in?”

“Certainly,” Ida said, stepping aside. Joe had never been in her home, and it was an odd time for him to come, while the others were up at the greenhouses, collecting the cuttings.

Joe pressed the door closed, and something in the way his jaw twitched frightened her. She bounced the baby, who let out a burp.

“Mr. Fletcher—Mr. Harold—said I could come down here for just a minute,” Joe said, and she could hear him working to control his voice. “I told him you’d sent a message up to me.” Ida nodded, trying to follow his words. “Mrs. Fletcher, Alice is in trouble.”

The word “trouble” was spoken not as a fear but as a fact, and Ida was almost grateful to know she had not been crazy or suspicious. She had not merely imagined that something was wrong. But barreling over that relief was the sickening certainty that she had waited too long. What did Joe Jacobs know that she did not? And how did he know it?

The questions would wait. She took out the blue envelope and showed him the letter from the woman named Bridie Douglass.

“That’s the same address I use to correspond with Alice,” he said, pointing to the address at the end of the letter. “It’s not where she’s staying. But this Mrs. Gilhooley mails letters for her.”

“So you’ve heard from her! Where is she?”

“She’s written me a few times,” Joe said.

Ida felt a flush of jealousy and then shame. She had failed Alice, and somehow Joe had not. “What kind of trouble is she in?”

Joe bowed his head and said quietly, “I’m not sure, Mrs. Fletcher, but I have my suspicions.”

Ida’s arms went weak, and she laid Anabel in her cradle, afraid she might drop her. When she stood again, her hands were quivering, and she hid them under her apron.

“I’m going to the city tomorrow,” he said.

“Do you know where to find her?” Ida asked. “I was writing to her in care of a Miss Sligh, but the address was wrong.”

“I don’t know about Miss Sligh,” Joe said. “And I don’t know where Alice is, but I’m going to see Mrs. Gilhooley. I thought you’d want to come with me.”

He issued this invitation uncertainly. Could he possibly imagine she wouldn’t want to go? “Yes,” she said firmly. “We should go together. But I’ve already made arrangements for the children for Friday. Can you wait just two more days?”

Joe took a breath as if to speak, then looked at her, his eyes dark. Ida felt she was facing the final judgment of her life’s work. “All right,” he said finally. “Two more days.”

On Thursday evening Ida packed a bundle for Jasper and another for Anabel. It was possible she might not return in a single day. She said nothing of this to Jennie Morton when she dropped off the baby early in the morning. To Harriet, who took Jasper, she said little more. There would be time for apologies and explanations later. Let Frank worry if he came home for supper and she was gone. He and the boys would have to fend for themselves, and he would know exactly where Ida was.

W
hen Alice and Claudie were twelve years old, they surprised Norris and Oliver once in the hayloft. The girls had been searching for Prissy’s new kittens, and from the far dark corner of the loft, they heard the boys at the top of the ladder. Alice thought it was a game of hide-and-seek: she pushed Claudie into the hay, and they giggled into their hands as they heard the boys moving closer. Then Norris stumbled over Claudie’s foot, and after recovering from the surprise and the girls’ delighted shrieks, he cornered them, and Alice suddenly tasted the sour remains of her lunch in her throat.

“You girls want to see something?” Norris said, and before they could respond, he had unbuttoned his trousers and exposed his penis, sticking straight at them like a divining rod.

“Bully for you,” Claudie said. “Every boy’s got one of those.”

Norris knelt and spat on his hand and began stroking himself, at first slowly, with his eyes on Claudie, who had quieted and was kneeling between the disheveled bales of hay. Alice knelt behind her, and she caught Oliver’s eye before he turned his head away. Norris stroked faster and faster, and then, to the girls’ amazement, a gush of creamy, white fluid spurted from the tip of his penis
onto the hay-strewn floor. Norris fell to one hand, then studied Claudie through his dark bangs and smiled.

“Come on,” Oliver said, tugging at his shoulder, but Norris took his time sitting back and buttoning his fly. Then he tossed some loose hay on the puddle he’d left.

“What do you think of that?” he said to Claudie.

“Come on,” Oliver said again, and Alice noticed the tendons in his neck standing tight under his skin.

“Someday your husband will put his cock inside you and squirt you just like that,” Norris said, locked in a stare with Claudie. “Don’t you think you’d like that?”

Claudie stood swiftly and kicked a footful of hay into Norris’s face. He reeled against Oliver, and the girls made a run for the ladder, reaching the ground and the safe range of the grown-ups before the boys could reach the top.

*   *   *   

On her first night in the city, Alice sat up in her new bed and thought of that day in the hayloft. She wasn’t sure at first why the memory had come to her, but as she listened to the footsteps above her head—the light click of women’s heels and the heavier thump of men’s—and the piano music and the loud voices, she began to suspect the worst of this place to which her father had brought her.

Claudie had told her about “white slavery,” about innocent girls visiting the city who were stolen from the street when no one was looking and taken to women’s boardinghouses, where they were courted by men for money. The two of them had had several conversations about what this courting could possibly entail—why would a man pay for it? Then they had remembered that afternoon in the hayloft. Putting together some things their mothers had said, and things they had seen in the barnyard, they’d worked it out themselves. Could it be that Alice’s father had brought her to that kind of place?

After the horse show, there had been some sort of dispute between
her father and his friend Mr. Sligh, a spindly man with a dirty gray mustache, who had met them there. The show itself had been thrilling. Alice had never seen so many people—thousands of them—in one place, and she could hardly believe they were indoors, under a ceiling so high and vast that its electric lights seemed like stars. The men wore frock coats and silky top hats, and the women were dressed as elegantly as those in the fashion plates in Aunt Frances’s magazines. A brass band played under the din of voices, and a trumpet announced the entry of each horse, every one of them a beautiful creature. The horses pulled coaches or trotted or jumped, their oddly docked tails and braided manes making them seem as fashionable as the humans who watched them. It had been an overwhelming, enchanting day. But when it was time to go home, Mr. Sligh pulled her father aside. She saw him glance her way as they talked in low voices. Something about the man frightened her; she heard him say forcefully to her father, “What do you
want,
Fletcher?” as if aggravated by something her father couldn’t decide. Then Mr. Sligh left, and her father took her on a horsecar separate from the others and brought her here, to this strange house in a crowded neighborhood. Her father spoke with a haughty, well-dressed woman while Alice waited in a dark parlor, and then he left, and Alice sat terrified, waiting and wondering what was to happen to her. No one came for a long while, and finally Alice went to the window and opened the drapes just a crack, and she saw her father standing in front of a lunchroom across the street, hat pulled low, hands in his pockets, watching the house.

Finally an old housemaid named Ivy took her to a dark bedroom the size of a large closet off the kitchen in the basement level of the building. The large, low-ceilinged kitchen featured three high windows near the dining table with a view at street level. Alice’s cramped room had no window at all. The plaster was crumbling off the lath in some places, and the whitewash was dingy gray. The single iron bed stood beside a roughly constructed nightstand with one drawer and an oil lamp on top. Across from the bed were a
small, empty wardrobe and a washstand holding a mismatched tin ewer and porcelain basin. A square of oilcloth protected the floor below. Perhaps because it was next to the kitchen, the room had no stove, and Alice imagined she would have to keep the door open if she wanted the room to take in any warmth.

In the morning Alice was awakened by the raining of coal into a hod, followed by the slamming of pots on a metal surface. She had no idea of the time, for the room was completely dark. She huddled farther under the covers, trying to collect the warmth of her body around her, wondering what she would be asked to do once she rose and whether she would see her father today.

There was singing in the kitchen in some language she didn’t recognize. The song was slow and quiet, almost tuneless, and it broke off suddenly with the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Someone else had entered the kitchen, but no one spoke. In another moment, there was a rap on Alice’s door, and Ivy opened it just wide enough to announce to her, “You’re late. Chores to do,” as if they had been following a routine for years. Then she shut the door.

Alice sat up. She had slept in her chemise, leaving her dress at the foot of the bed along with her stockings and shoes and wrap. She had kept her grandmother’s locket around her neck, thinking it might protect her in this unknown place. Her father hadn’t even warned her to pack, and she wondered what she would do when it was time to launder her clothing. She considered getting dressed and simply walking out onto the street and finding her way home, but she had no idea where she was, and she had no money. She should do as she was told and hope her father would return. Maybe the work would be all right; maybe she could make some money to send home and save some for herself.

The floor was cold and damp as stone on her bare feet, and she hurried to pull on her stockings and shoes. The water in the ewer was as cold as the pump water at home, and there was no mirror at which to brush her hair and pin it up. She did the best she could
to dress neatly, then stepped into the kitchen and closed her door behind her. Later in the day, before bedtime, she would open it again to let in some heat.

The cook at the range had her back to Alice, and Ivy was nowhere to be seen. “Excuse me,” Alice said, and the woman looked over her shoulder. She was a young black woman with a red kerchief tied around her head to cover her hair. She raised her eyebrows, then turned back to the range.

Alice stood for some time, debating what to do: sit down at the table? Go upstairs? Ask how she could help in the kitchen? Except for the occasional tap of the cook’s spoon against the pot, the house was still. Finally Alice went back in her room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands were cold, and she tucked them under her skirts to warm them. She thought of a poem she and her classmates had memorized at school the year before, “Hiawatha’s Childhood.” It had a soothing, singsong rhythm, and she began to recite it under her breath, but when she got to the part about the things Nokomis taught the child Hiawatha, she was stuck. She tried again, but all she could think of was the joking way Claudie had said it—“Showed him Ishkadish, the comet, Ishkadish, kabish, ka-boodle”—and not the way it was really supposed to go.

“What are you doing, girl?” Ivy said at the door, and Alice jumped. “We’ve work to do.” Alice stood. “Won’t last long,” Ivy muttered as Alice followed her through the kitchen and up the back stairs to the main level of the house, where she and her father had entered the night before through the heavy front door with the brass knob. This floor had higher ceilings and fancy wallpaper and carpeting like Aunt Frances’s, which ran all the way up the wide front staircase. Alice followed Ivy up the stairs to the second floor, down an uncarpeted hallway with several closed doors, and up a bare stairway to a third floor. There was a small parlor on the third-floor landing with a Chinese rug, a coffee table, a couch, and two armchairs. An ashtray and some ladies’ magazines and a half-f tumbler of water made a
jumbled still life on the table. Someone’s knitting had been left on the couch, and an embroidered pillow had been tossed on the floor. On this level, too, there were several closed doors. Alice followed Ivy around the upper landing to a slim door—a linen closet five shelves high, each stacked with clean white sheets. “Once the girls is up, you make all the beds. You know how to make a bed?”

“Yes,” Alice said.

“There’s six of them. It takes a while. Yours and mine gets changed once a week. I do Mrs. Hargrave’s. You don’t go into her suite.”

Alice had no idea where Mrs. Hargrave’s suite was, but she nodded.

“You change them at night, too,” Ivy said. “About halfway through. Mrs. Hargrave likes to keep a clean establishment.” Alice felt her chest tighten and took a furtive breath, the kind she sometimes took if she was crying and couldn’t control it. Ivy looked skeptical. She seemed to think Alice might be gone tomorrow, and Alice herself hoped this was true. She hoped her father would come today.

“They won’t be up for a while, but you can tidy up here,” Ivy said, leading Alice down the hall to the open parlor. “Sweep the carpet and the floors. The men track in a lot of dirt. Both floors you do, and the stairs. The carpet on the first floor hall, the sitting room, the piano parlor. But stay out of Mrs. Hargrave’s study. I do that.” It was clearly a point of pride for Ivy that she cleaned Mrs. Hargrave’s private spaces. Alice was just as happy to stay away from Mrs. Hargrave, the haughty woman who had been syrupy-sweet with her father but extremely curt with Alice, regarding her through thick spectacles that made her eyes look as big as a cat’s.

“Broom closet is here,” Ivy said, gesturing to another slim door on the other side of the third-floor parlor. “You can go have your breakfast first. I’ve eaten.” She closed the closet door and looked directly at Alice for the first time. Alice was surprised to see that she wasn’t as old as she had first appeared. Her hands were old, and she walked with a slow limp, but the skin on her face was hardly wrinkled. Alice wondered whether in the past she’d been one of
the girls who slept late into the morning. They were behind those closed doors, all of them. Alice was afraid of them. She hoped she wouldn’t have to talk to any of them. Perhaps if she worked quickly enough, she would miss them altogether.