A Violet Season (19 page)

“That all you have to wear?” Ivy asked, and Alice fingered her Sunday dress, which she’d worn to the horse show. Now her only nice clothing was going to be ruined by housework.

“Yes,” Alice said. “I didn’t know I was coming.” This comment seemed to puzzle Ivy. It puzzled Alice, too, for as she said it, she thought again how strange it was that her father had deposited her here at the end of what was to have been a special day in the city. The desperation of this situation dizzied her.

“I’ll get you an apron,” Ivy said. “Maybe one of the girls has an old dress you can wear.” Alice didn’t want their old dresses. She wanted nothing to do with any of them, or their sheets, or this place, for her suspicions had been confirmed. But when she descended the back stairs to the kitchen, a warm bowl of oatmeal was waiting for her on the dining table with a cup of coffee, and she was grateful for something to eat. The cook even gave her seconds.

*   *   *   

By supper that night, Alice had met most of the girls. There was no avoiding them, though she had tried. As she’d been cleaning the third-floor parlor and hallway, two of them had awakened, and she’d hurried down to the second floor, then to the first as more of them had come out. She’d stayed in the piano parlor as long as she could, though it was the most offensive part of the house, with a scuffed wood floor that reeked of beer, six sticky tables, many feet of mirrors to clean, a player piano, a narrow bar, and everywhere underfoot a gravel of nuts and dried mud and even broken glass. The sitting room in front, where she had waited the day before, looked more like the parlor of an upper-class home. A huge mirror in a gilded frame loomed over a fireplace, and pairs of easy chairs
were arranged in the corners. Over a velvet-covered sofa hung a large chromolithograph with a plaque announcing its title:
The Abduction of Persephone
. Alice was alarmed to see spilled behind the goddess’s figure a basket of violets. Heavy drapes on the room’s two windows kept out the light and the gaze of onlookers from the street. Alice was disgusted by the thought of who had been in these rooms. She hated to touch anything.

And upstairs, the beds. Some of the girls had nice quilts or coverlets, which she folded and set aside. But many of the sheets had damp circles at the edges, as if someone had sat on the edge and wet them. The rooms smelled musty, and after the first two, Alice began cracking the windows to let in some fresh air. She tried to think of herself as a nurse, stripping hospital beds, which made the job bearable, and for a good part of the morning she managed almost to believe the masquerade, until on the third floor she was caught off guard by a girl who walked into the room while she was pulling off the top sheet.

“Hello, there,” the girl said, stopping in the doorway with her hands on her hips. She was wearing a short nightgown with no robe, and she held a cigarette loosely between two fingers of her right hand. “I’m Jessie.” She pressed the cigarette in her mouth so she could hold out her right hand, like a man, to shake Alice’s. Alice held the sheets tight against her stomach and nodded.

“Shy? That’s all right,” Jessie said. “See you later,” and she turned in a swirl of chiffon and left.

Soon after, when Alice had carried the dirty sheets to the laundry chute on the second floor and was coming up for clean sheets, she discovered too late that several girls were congregated in the hallway parlor, eating their breakfast—though it was noon or later—from trays the cook had sent up on the dumbwaiter.

“Oh, look here,” said Jessie. “This is the new housemaid. What’s your name?” and Alice, to be polite, was forced to respond.

“Alice, very pretty,” Jessie said. “You know me, and this is Bridie, and Glory, and Rose. There’s two other girls, too. Katerina is
new, but she doesn’t speak English. And Lena just sleeps late.” The other girls laughed at this, all but the one named Glory, whose blank expression didn’t change. The girl named Bridie sat with one ankle crossed over the other knee, making a hammock of her skirts in which a newborn baby slept.

“Pleased to meet you,” Alice said, though she was not at all pleased.

“Are you from New York?” Jessie asked, but Alice lowered her eyes and rounded the corner toward the linen closet. No need for conversation. She must keep her own counsel and wait for her father to return.

*   *   *   

Her father did not return. Nor was there word from anyone. It was as if Alice Fletcher had fallen down the rabbit hole, and the girl who picked violets and hung laundry and played with her baby brother had never existed. Now she was Alice the housemaid, who swept the floors and washed the mirrors and changed the sheets and tried to keep away from the men who pounded through the house in the dark, their clouds of cigar smoke hanging in the halls, their presence musky and close. There was something unleashed about them, and Alice never felt safe after dark, for she was there among them, wiping the tables, fetching a bottle, changing the sheets halfway through the night, as Ivy had instructed. Always she feared being mistaken for one of the girls. She wore a simple borrowed work dress—something Bella the cook had brought from home—and a white apron, and kept her hair in a girlish braid down her back, which she hoped made her appear unsophisticated.

Toward the end of that first month, as Alice began to resign herself to the work, a heavy snowfall gave the girls an unexpected holiday. The first airy flakes floated through with nonchalance in midafternoon as Alice shook the dust mop out the back door. Within the hour, the snow was weighted with ice, tapping like uncooked grains of rice against the windows, and by four o’clock the slick sidewalks were white. Alice watched a pack of children run from the corner and slide
through the shallow snow in their thin-soled shoes. She thought of her brothers and wondered whether she would ever see them again.

When she heard the girls congregating upstairs, she felt her usual loneliness more keenly, for it was the kind of evening on which her family would sit close together at the stove and she or her mother might read aloud. She imagined some harm could come from fraternizing with the girls, but she also imagined she’d go mad if confined to her own stifling room with nothing to read, nothing to do but think and cry. She’d had her fill of that.

The conversation upstairs seemed inexplicably merry—were they drinking? “Alice!” someone called out, seeing the top of her head as she came up the stairs.

Jessie lay on the Turkish couch, wearing a silk kimono and blowing wobbly doughnuts of smoke toward the ceiling. Alice had never seen such a trick, and she gawked at the novelty of it before she realized what she was doing and feigned disinterest again.

“Look at that glorious snow!” Lena called out from her doorway, where she stood in a pink ruffled nightgown, stretching her arms overhead. She was just waking up from her daytime nap.

“Let’s get a game of cards going,” Jessie suggested. “If we’re lucky, no one will get here tonight. What do you think, Lena? Is it piling up?”

“Not just piling up, but blowing dervishes! How about a game of euchre? Come on, Alice. Sit down.”

“Do you reckon we could get Bella to make us some popcorn?” They laughed as if they were cousins on a summer visit. Rose and Lena brought the counterpanes from their beds, and Alice found herself seated on a pillow on the floor beside the silent Glory. Jessie passed around some cigarettes, courtesy of one of her regulars, and Bridie, her baby on a blanket on the floor beside her, shuffled the deck of cards. Alice was tutored throughout the game by Bridie, who shared her hand. When the baby began to fuss, Bridie handed the cards to Alice and bared her breast in front of them all to nurse it. The girls took no notice until the baby’s whimpers
became screams and Bridie left with it to pace the second-floor hallway, as she often did late in the day. Alice wondered what she did with the baby when the men were visiting.

After several hands, a bell mounted on the wall rang, signaling their dinner was ready, and the girls threw in their cards and stood and stretched their legs. When Jessie saw Alice hesitating, she motioned for her to follow. “You eat with us now,” she said, taking charge.

In the kitchen, Bella was slopping pieces of mutton and globs of overcooked carrots onto whiteware dishes. Alice normally ate later, with Bella and Ivy, but Bella didn’t seem to care when Alice sat with the others; she simply pulled another plate from the shelf. The girls sat around the mottled pine dining table on chairs with caned seats and ate their dinner and drank their mineral water or beer and laughed and argued like a rowdy family. Glory, who never spoke a word, retreated to a rocking chair in the corner as soon as she was finished to read the newspaper by gaslight, and Jessie lit another cigarette and tipped back on her chair. Alice looked out the shallow windows at the top of the wall and wondered again how she could get out of here.

“Mrs. Hargrave is out,” Bella said when she came to collect their dishes. She handed Rose a letter, adding, “So I’ve brought you this now.” The girls teased as Rose turned away to read her letter in private. Jessie raised her glass and toasted to a Mr. Wetherby, a regular of Rose’s who was secretly courting her, and Rose looked up from her reading to shove Jessie’s shoulder. Alice couldn’t imagine why a man would consider marrying a woman whom he had paid for sexual relations, but through the course of the conversation, she learned that Rose’s aspiration was to become his permanent mistress rather than his wife, an outcome the other girls seemed to think was desirable. A good hour was spent ruminating on Mr. Wetherby’s intentions. The conversation would have been a waste to Alice but for one fact she learned: Mrs. Hargrave forbade anyone to receive mail, but a woman named Gert delivered and mailed letters for the girls.

“You can give out Gert’s address,” Rose explained. “She lives down in the Sixth Ward, and she comes up here to take the laundry.” Alice had already met Gert, who came with her large gray sacks and collected the laundry three times weekly. Each time she came, she brought the clean sheets, wrapped in brown paper parcels, and collected the next load of dirty laundry. Alice had been grateful to discover she wouldn’t have to do that tremendous laundry herself, but she’d felt a sorry guilt the first time she watched Gert hunch over and pull her cart up the sidewalk.

“She used to be one of the girls here,” Lena said.

“She brings our mail to Bella, and next morning Bella sneaks it to us with our breakfast, while Mrs. Hargrave is still asleep. Do you have anybody to write to?” Jessie teased Alice.

“How do you send a letter out?” Alice asked.

“Same way, under your breakfast plate,” Jessie said. “I can loan you some stationery and some stamps until you get your pay.”

“Do you need a pen and ink?” Rose asked, and Alice thanked them both.

Later that evening, when it was clear no men would be visiting in the storm and Bella had gone home for the night, Alice sat alone at the dining table with the borrowed paper and pen and considered to whom she should write first. She wasn’t sure about her mother—had she known of the plan to leave Alice here? She should write first to Joe. But had she any right to imagine he could love her still? Even by association, she would be guilty in the eyes of many. The gravity of her situation settled over her, and she turned down the light and watched the snow fall in the halo of the streetlamps. She fell asleep with her head in her arms on the table. In the morning when she awoke, the blank paper lay beside her, and some unrecalled dream of seconds earlier made her bold. She hurried through a simple note to Joe—what had she to lose?—and a similar note to her mother, and when she left the breakfast table, the two small envelopes were tucked beneath her dirty plate.

O
n a piece of brown paper wrapping, Alice had written a calendar. She had missed the first couple of weeks, but the days of the week were easy to tell here. Saturday nights were the busiest, and on Sunday morning she could hear the church bells in the neighborhood. Gert came on Saturdays, Mondays, and Thursdays. And from Mrs. Hargrave’s newspaper, which made it to the dining table a day late, Alice could check the date. So she knew it was a Monday, December fifth, when her father came to call.

She heard his voice from the piano parlor, where she was dusting, but by the time she reached the front hall, Mrs. Hargrave’s study door had clicked shut. Alice pressed her ear to the door. She could hear Mrs. Hargrave and her father speaking but couldn’t make out the words. At one point her father laughed, and she stepped back with a start. She’d never heard him laugh as if he were actually amused. Or she had, but not since she was a little girl. For a moment she wondered whether the man in Mrs. Hargrave’s study was not her father at all but a caller whose voice merely resembled his.

Footsteps approached the study door. Alice quickly applied her dusting cloth to the newel post and started up the stairs, dusting the banister. She was on the third step when she heard Mrs. Hargrave’s voice behind her: “Alice, there you are. Please come in here.”

Alice folded the dusting cloth in the pocket of her apron and followed Mrs. Hargrave into the study, a room she had never seen. She felt her heartbeat in her temples and worried that her knees might buckle under her. Yes, there he was, her father. Sitting on Mrs. Hargrave’s sofa, legs crossed, hat in his lap. When he saw Alice, he hesitated as if he didn’t recognize her. Then he hurried to stand, and she saw the confidence drain from him as he stiffened his arms and crossed them over his chest.

“Pa,” she said, her voice catching, for she knew as she said it that all her hopes of being taken home were futile. He was not here to greet her or embrace her or rescue her. The girls had told her that Mrs. Hargrave settled up with them on a Monday twice a month, and that she and Bella and Ivy would be paid on one of those same Mondays. It was payday.

“Alice,” he said. Her throat went lumpy and she knew she was about to cry. She knew, too, that doing so would only irritate him. “Mrs. Hargrave says you’re doing a satisfactory job.” He nodded toward Mrs. Hargrave, who stood behind her desk like a chess queen, draped in a purple dress with bishop sleeves and beaded trim, a gaudy watch pinned to her bosom.