A Violet Season (9 page)

Oliver breathed in as if to speak, then let out a labored sigh.

“I can’t guess his reaction,” Ida said. “He thinks he’s working the farm for you, and you know . . .” She didn’t need to say more. Oliver still had a splinter in his neck from the night Frank had beaten him in the barnyard. “Tell him when you’re ready to go.”

Oliver nodded and guided the team up the driveway. He made it into the barn and Ida reached the house before the dark-lidded sky dropped its next load of rain. It rained all night, and in the morning, when Ida stepped into her garden, the ground was cold.

So, tell me more about growing up on a violet farm. I didn’t realize anyone grew violets for sale.

Oh, they were extremely popular when I was a girl, more popular than roses are now. Whenever a woman went out on the town, she would wear a big bunch of violets pinned to her waist or her shoulder.

What made them so popular?

People used to say they stood for love and loyalty. They were seen as modest, innocent flowers. You find them everywhere in literature. Keats called the violet “that queen of secrecy.” I’m not sure which poem that’s from.

That seems contradictory, doesn’t it? Innocence and secrecy?

Life is contradictory.

I suppose. I always thought violet—purple—was supposed to be a color of royalty. . . . What do you think of it?

The color violet? I don’t know. I never really thought about it. I suppose it seems a little bit dark to me. Shadowy. I don’t really care for it.

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

T
he book that Anna Brinckerhoff had loaned Ida lay wrapped and unread in her cedar chest for two weeks. In that time, she found no steady work for Alice. Frank had said nothing more, but Ida began to watch the young men of Underwood, considering which of them might make an appropriate match if things came to that. She thought the clandestine book might give her some other ideas about Alice’s future. So one Wednesday afternoon, while her dough was rising and the children were napping and a misty rain kept her from the garden, she began to read.

She was put off at first by Mrs. Stetson’s comparison of working women to horses. Both, the author claimed, were used by men, their masters, to earn more money, though neither had the independence to choose that work. Ida had to admit that was true. It might even be humorous if it weren’t so pointed an observation. Mrs. Stetson argued quite logically and convincingly that society had assigned women a single wage-earning occupation: getting a husband. For the good of society, Mrs. Stetson said, women should participate in the economic world of work—work of their own choosing. Ida’s experience had already proven this argument idealistic and impractical.

The world was changing, about that there was no question. In the city young women were indeed becoming secretaries and shop
clerks, jobs they would hold until they married later on. Was it possible that her daughter would live in a world in which women could easily make the choice not to marry?

“What are you reading, Ma?” Alice asked after seeing Ida with the book over the course of several afternoons.

“Just something Mrs. Brinckerhoff gave me. About women.”

This seemed to satisfy Alice, who returned to her own romantic novel without further question.

In the passage Ida read that afternoon, Mrs. Stetson chastised the economic system for pressuring mothers to withhold from their daughters the truths about marriage and motherhood, including the fact that they would be absolutely dependent upon their husbands, with no freedom to control their own futures. Instead, Mrs. Stetson argued, society spoke of the “sanctity” of motherhood and home because the young woman must be prepared for marriage—her only means of financial support—and prospective husbands preferred their wives to enter marriage innocent of its realities. Ida felt this reproach like a slap to the face. She knew there were many things she should tell Alice, but how to say them delicately, so as not to frighten her? And how to convince her, in the face of society’s claims to the contrary, that they were true at all? These were precisely the problems to which Mrs. Stetson alluded. There was no way to say them delicately and convincingly, so they were left unsaid, as they had been for Ida.

She had lost her own mother at fourteen, and her professorial father had been ill prepared to raise two daughters on his own. He could talk at length about medicine and politics, and he could sing hundreds of hymns from memory, but he had not had the words to tell a daughter what she should know about men and marriage, and he had surely known little himself about childbearing and raising small children. Ida had often wondered what her mother’s judgment of Frank would have been, and whether her mother, had she been alive at the time of their courtship, might have changed the course of Ida’s life.

There was no point in speculation. What mattered now was that Ida had a daughter whom she did not wish to send naive into the world. She resolved that they should talk. Laundry day, when they worked side by side, would be the best opportunity.

The laundry always began with a good Sunday-evening soaking. Ida filled galvanized tubs with soapy water and sank the week’s clothing in them, hoping to loosen the dirt and grime overnight and make Monday’s task easier. In the morning, before breakfast, she set a large pot of water on the back of the range. By the time breakfast was done and Frank and the boys had left, the water had come to a boil. Ida transferred the soaked laundry into a basket and, with Alice’s help, carried the tubs outside to dump. Then the boiling water, tempered with some cold from the pump, went into the first tub along with some shavings of laundry soap, and they started in on the most delicate clothing and the whites: collars and undergarments, as well as Frank’s and the boys’ good shirts. The baby’s diapers were washed separately each night.

Alice stood and churned the wash with the dolly while Ida refilled the large pot to boil for the rinse and then worked on the stained clothing, left out of the first wash. She used lemon juice to lighten stains and sometimes kerosene to remove them, if they were serious, like the grass stains Reuben was infamous for bringing home on the knees of his overalls. The delicate items were merely stirred in the washtub, but the heavier items and those that were soiled were scrubbed on the washboard. For this job, Ida and Alice each pulled a low stool up to the tub and scrubbed together, each on her own board.

Sitting across the tub from each other, they sometimes spoke of ordinary plans or of the local and national news. Sometimes they were quiet. This was the moment Ida chose to bring up her sensitive subject.

“Alice, is there anything you would like to know about?” She realized the question was a lame one; she should be more direct if
she intended to succeed. Alice’s head was bent over the tub as she scrubbed the seat of Oliver’s work pants.

“About what?”

“About . . . becoming a woman,” Ida said.

Alice glanced suspiciously at her. “Do you mean about my time of the month?”

Here Ida faltered. She had taught Alice the practical aspects of dealing with her menses—how to sew her own belted pads, how to remove the bloodstains, how to be discreet—but that was not at all what she meant.

“I mean about becoming a wife and a mother.”

“Mother!” Alice said, both echoing the word and censuring Ida. She sat up and flicked the soapy water from her hands.

“Yes,” Ida said, gaining courage. “Someday I imagine you, too, will become a mother.” She felt as if she were standing in a canoe in the middle of the river, where it would be impossible to keep her balance. The only question was whether she would fall into the cold current to port or to starboard.

“Has Pa picked out a husband for me? I’m not getting married!”

“No, no,” Ida said, seeing she’d begun the wrong way.

Alice struck her hands into the water and pulled out Oliver’s trousers, then tossed them into the empty rinse tub. “I have no intention of becoming a mother anytime soon, I assure you,” she said in a haughty voice belying her lack of experience.

“We should talk about these things before it’s necessary,” Ida said.

“Is it that book you’re reading? The one with the brown paper wrapper?” Alice’s eyes sparked and narrowed, and a blush spread across her forehead. Was she angry that Ida was bringing this up when she had promised to help her find work instead? Or had something changed since their last conversation? Alice had once mentioned Claudie’s brother. Ida wondered whether Alice had been to see him in his sickroom on her visits to Claudie’s house. Had something
begun to develop between them? Ida doubted it, but she could see that Alice had secrets of her own, and true to her nature, she would keep them. Even as a little girl, she had squirreled her treasures in an old biscuit box under her bed, and if Ida happened to pull out that box in the process of dusting, it was an offense punishable by extended silence and sulking. Alice had matured and learned to be more gracious about her secrets, but they were secrets nonetheless.

Still, another opening for this conversation might not come for a while. So Ida tried once more. “Is there a young man on your mind?”

“Mother,” Alice said firmly. Then she bowed her head to the tub.

“When there is a young man,” Ida said, faltering, “I hope you will tell me. There are some important things we need to discuss.”

“All right,” Alice said, her cloth-covered fingers rasping along the washboard.

Seeing she was to make no further headway, Ida worked in silence. When she was satisfied that the clothes were clean enough and the water in the pot on the stove was hot enough, she and Alice poured rinse water over the clothing and left it to soak, then started on another tub of wash: their skirts and dresses and other heavier clothing that wasn’t soiled from work on the farm. Ida prepared a cold rinse with bluing to brighten the whites in a third tub, and the first load of laundry made its final stop there. By this time, with three loads at three stages of wash, conversation would have been difficult anyway. In the midst of it all, Jasper and Mary needed attention.

When the first load had been rinsed twice, Alice helped Ida feed it through the wringer and into a basket that Alice carried to the line. It was not yet time for lunch, and both of them were too tired to speak. Washday, Ida thought as she worked, was one thing that had to improve in the new century. Mrs. Harris’s friend in Poughkeepsie had bought a self-working washer a few years back from a company in Binghamton. The washer had a flywheel that hooked up
to the faucet in her kitchen sink, and the water pressure drove a set of paddles in the washtub. But the bolts in the mechanism had left rust stains on her clothing, and once, the paddles had torn one of her husband’s good shirts. That was the end of the so-called modern convenience, and the woman was back to doing laundry like the rest of them. Someone someday would make a fortune on laundry machines, Ida thought, if they could only figure out how to make them work without ruining the clothing. It would be the very first modern piece of equipment every housewife would desire.

Laundry was work that Alice could do to earn the income Frank seemed more and more desperate to have. Families more financially secure than theirs—Frances’s and Harriet’s included—sent their laundry out, and the women who washed and ironed for them earned two dollars for each family’s load, a day’s labor. But laundry was terrible work. The soap reddened one’s hands, and hot-water burns were common. Lifting baskets of wet garments and pots of hot water broke down the back and shoulders. The laundresses Ida knew looked like old women, though they might not yet be forty. Ida prayed she would have better luck finding Alice work as a seamstress so that the thought of laundering would never cross Frank’s mind. Marrying young and fairly, if not happily, would be a better fate.

Ida and Alice paused for lunch when the last load was soaking in its first rinse tub. Alice cleaned out the washtub and set it in the sun to dry while Ida sliced some bread and tomatoes and poured three glasses of milk. Then she sat to nurse Mary while she ate her own meal, the smell of soap on her hands.

It was always difficult to start again after lunch. The day had settled thickly around them, and after their rest, the women’s arms and backs groaned heavy and stiff. But they rallied as they must, rinsing and wringing and ending their task outside at the clotheslines, where a breeze blew the damp sheets and shirts against their bare arms with a cool slap.

The clotheslines ran parallel from the corner of the house to two large elm trees, with enough space between for Ida and Alice to pass back to back. The first line was already full, so Ida began at the tree with one basket and Alice at the house with another, and they worked their way toward each other. They saved the effort of bending by slinging several wet garments over their shoulders and standing to hang them with clothespins plucked from pouches at their waists. It was midafternoon when they met the end of laundry day at the middle of the clothesline—the end until evening, when everything must come down. Tomorrow much of it would need to be ironed in the hot kitchen.