A Violet Season (26 page)

She read the entire book in her week at Mrs. Schreiber’s, for it was difficult to fall asleep. Between about nine o’clock and midnight, there were steady footsteps, and the indoor plumbing whistled intermittently, until finally the house settled and hushed. An hour or two after that, Alice would set aside the book and try to sleep. She got up frequently to watch out the window for unwelcome visitors in the yard below. Wouldn’t her father have the sense to figure out she was staying here? If not here, she would have to be at the Shepherd’s Crossing or the Post Road Hotel or at Mrs. Bryant’s boardinghouse on the other side of town. But her father did not come.

Nor did Joe. All day long, Alice heard the doors of the house opening and closing and watched the boarders and visitors pass through the front gate. Each time the doorbell rang, it struck at the center of her chest. Could it be that after risking so much to find her and bring her home, he was walking away from all he had promised? She had believed him to be different. But was it possible that any man, even a man who’d once loved her—she knew he had—could overlook all that had happened to her? As the days at Mrs. Schreiber’s passed, Alice began to feel she had learned the answer.

These thoughts made it difficult to sleep. She noticed, as she lay in the dark, how different were the night sounds of the village. In the city, traffic passing under the windows and the rumble of the elevated trains never ceased. Here, close to the Schreibers’ barn, she heard the occasional snorting of the horses. The spring insects quivered. A foraging raccoon or skunk tipped over a bucket in the garden. Downstairs, a bedstead creaked. Alice thought of all the quiet nights in Underwood, when her mother had slept soundly beside her father while Alice had endured strangers touching her skirts and her hair, leering at her, and that one man . . . The men
often hadn’t stopped coming until two or even three o’clock in the morning. That was the time, before the sky began to lighten, when Alice had sat at the dining table and drunk a shot or two of liquor or taken her dose of laudanum. There would be no more laudanum and no more drink to help her sleep—not here, nor in her mother’s house. She would have to learn to calm her mind herself. She would have to learn how to sleep again. Until that time, if it ever came, she imagined her nights would be this way, she lying prostrate, waiting for daylight.

*   *   *   

Aside from her mother, Alice had only one visitor that week, an accidental one. Claudie came to the back door one evening after supper to pick up some tea for Avery and spied Alice through the kitchen window. Alice was washing the dishes—boardinghouse whiteware, just like the dishes at Mrs. Hargrave’s—and when she heard Claudie’s voice, her first instinct was not to duck out of sight but to look up.

“Alice?” Claudie called out in surprise, and Mrs. Schreiber stepped between them in a futile effort to hide her. “May I come in? Please?” Claudie asked Mrs. Schreiber, and Alice nodded her assent.

“What are you doing here?” Claudie asked, her arms stretched out for a hug, but Alice leaned away. She twisted the dishrag around her hand and sorted through all the possible lies she might tell her friend.

“You mustn’t tell anyone I’m here,” she finally managed to say.

“What? Why not?”

Alice shook her head and returned to the dishes. Claudie touched her shoulder, but when Alice refused to look at her, Claudie stepped back and dropped her hands.

“You can dry for me,” Alice said, handing her a plate.

Claudie retrieved a towel from a drawer pull, and Mrs. Schreiber disappeared through the swinging door.

After a minute, seeing that Alice was not going to speak, Claudie began to talk herself, filling Alice in on all that had happened since she’d been gone.

Avery wasn’t much better, she said. He had been out to church once or twice and sometimes sat on the sun porch if the weather was warm. He had tried walking with a cane down the drive and up to the house a couple of times, but it was too much for him, and a headache would crack through his skull afterward, sending him to bed for hours or even an entire day. Everyone else’s lives had moved forward, and as Claudie chatted on about the girls they had known at school and some of the folks from church, Alice dwelt on that picture of Avery, left behind, dragging his way down and up the drive. She wished she could visit him and sit at the foot of his bed and read to him again. It wasn’t that his company was so pleasant, but Alice felt she would understand him now. His suffering, the product of a supposedly heroic war, had become part of his everyday life, and as such, it was lived mostly in the privacy of his bedroom. If spoken of, it would be preceded or followed by the cheerful news of others with no regard for the fact that Avery must continue to live with it every moment of every day, for it appeared he would not make a full recovery. Alice’s suffering was more private still, for no one outside her mother and Joe could ever know of it, though she, too, would carry the load throughout her life.

Eventually Claudie gave up on getting a response from Alice, and she bustled around the kitchen, opening drawers and cabinets to find where the clean dishes belonged. Frustrated in her search for the proper place to store a large ceramic mixing bowl, she stood at the center of the linoleum floor, clutching the bowl to her small bosom, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Where were you?” she asked Alice. “I wrote to you five times before Christmas, with no reply. And then your mother said the address was wrong, but she never gave me a new one.”

“I didn’t know you wrote me,” Alice said.

“I was so worried about you!”

Alice dried her hands on her apron and took the bowl from Claudie, afraid that her friend would drop it. She reached to the shelf above the sink and set it there. Then she turned and folded her arms and shook her head. “I never got your letters.”

“Then didn’t you wonder that something was wrong? Did you think I wouldn’t write to you?”

“No. I thought you would.”

“You had my address, so why didn’t you write to me?”

Alice couldn’t answer this. Why was it that she had written only to Joe and to her mother, once, after she found out Gert would deliver her letters? She had foolishly imagined that everyone else had abandoned her. She supposed her fear of being discovered had also kept her from writing, though Claudie had been her closest, most trusted friend.

“You aren’t the same, Alice,” Claudie said. “What happened to you?” Alice didn’t move. She felt impenetrable. “You can tell me,” Claudie continued. “Maybe I can help.”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said.

“Why aren’t you at home?”

Evading this question, Alice told her, “My mother and I are moving to Albany,” though she hadn’t yet made up her mind whether she would go.

“When?”

“Later this week.”

“Oh, no! Alice.” Claudie stepped forward and put her arms around Alice, but Alice did not embrace her. She allowed Claudie to hold her, to rub her back and kiss her cheek, but when Claudie stepped away, Alice still held her arms folded over her chest.

“I don’t understand,” Claudie said. “I wish you would tell me.”

“I can’t.” Alice turned to the steel sink, where soap bubbles
were popping their way toward the gritty bottom. “There’s nothing to tell,” she added.

“There is,” Claudie said. “I’m not a fool. But I can’t make you tell . . . I’m engaged to be married.”

This news was a surprise. For an instant Alice felt her old self lurch out, a girl who wanted to leap forward and hug her friend and dance around the room. “Congratulations,” she said, and she held out her hands. As Claudie took them, Alice noticed for the first time the flat gold engagement band on Claudie’s right hand. She feared Claudie would say it was Norris she was marrying, but she told Alice about the young man, a Poughkeepsie accountant named Richard Adams, whom she’d met at a Sunday school picnic. He was the second cousin of a girl they knew, a handsome young man except for his ears, which stuck out like headlamps. At this description, Claudie laughed in such a way that Alice could tell she loved even his silly ears.

“We’re waiting a few years to be married,” Claudie said. “He wants to be better established. And my parents want me to be twenty.” She blushed at this last remark, and Alice missed the Claudie who, before, might have rolled her eyes and made a wry comment about becoming a woman. “I want to be married in the winter, so we can have violets everywhere,” Claudie said, spreading her arms, as if this proclamation would impress Alice. “You probably stopped noticing them long ago, but they smell so beautiful, and I like that they stand for love and devotion. That’s what I want from my husband. Can you believe I’m going to have a husband?”

Alice could not believe. As she listened to Claudie twitter on about her wedding plans, she tried to think of something she could believe. The violets as symbols of love and devotion? Alice nearly laughed aloud. Claudie was wrong; she hadn’t stopped noticing the violets. They were at the root of all her father’s troubles and, by extension, her own.

“You’ll come back from Albany to visit, won’t you? And you
must come back for the wedding when the time comes. You must,” Claudie said. Then, more shyly, “I was hoping you would stand up with me.”

“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” Alice said. Claudie seemed hurt, and Alice added, “But I’ll try to visit, if I can.” Unless everyone learned what had become of her.

“You must try very hard,” Claudie said. She gave Alice the firm sort of look a mother gives her headstrong child, and Alice imagined Claudie as the mother of a pack of tumbling children. She and her husband would have a lovely home in Poughkeepsie and raise a beautiful family and live their whole happy lives together. Alice allowed herself the daydream of being the beloved spinster auntie who comes to visit and stays in the guest room all summer, playing with the children and drinking lemonade with the mother on the porch when all the children are in bed. But she couldn’t imagine a time would ever come when she would be able to tell Claudie what had happened during her months in New York.

Claudie seemed to understand that their conversation was over. She took up the dish towel and finished drying the soapy dishes Alice set on the drainboard. They worked in tandem without speaking until the job was complete and they could see from the window the last light shuttling around the trunks of Mrs. Schreiber’s fruit trees and sinking into the earth. Then Claudie kissed Alice and saw herself out.

I
t took Ida a full week to make her preparations. She baked extra bread and collected provisions in two boxes taken unnoticed from the packing room. She gathered household goods she imagined they would need: her best pots and pans, utensils and knives, a set of four dishes and cups, a pitcher and washbasin, her sewing kit, a lantern, an axe, the Bible and some other favorite books, extra linens, and blankets. In one of the washtubs she stowed an iron, a washboard, clothespins and some line, her smallest broom, and some rags. She took a few cuttings from the rosebush that had been a wedding gift from her father, and a few canes from the raspberries, her favorites, bundled in a scrap of burlap. She might not have a place to plant them on the other end, but she could try. Hopeful of a garden, she added a shovel and a hoe. All these supplies she stashed in the root cellar, where Frank was unlikely to see them.

She removed from her bedroom chest all those things they wouldn’t need—fancy linens, clothing the children had outgrown, scraps of fabric she had hoped to use one day—and packed in it all the clothing for herself, Jasper, Reuben, Alice, and the baby. She would have to bring Anabel—or Ana, as she had begun calling her, since it served as a nickname for Anastasia, the name Bridie Douglass had intended.

Ida checked the envelope behind the woodbox where Frank had always kept his savings, but it contained only the usual amount of his pay. There was no extra money, either from what Alice presumably had made over the past several months or from Ida’s nursing. Whatever they had earned, Frank apparently had saved elsewhere or spent outright. Perhaps he had paid some of it to his brothers, as Harriet had suggested. Ida would take what she needed at the last moment, so as not to arouse Frank’s suspicion.

Their method of travel was tricky as well. The wagon that belonged to Frank was large enough for them all, but taking both the wagon and the horses was inviting trouble. Ida thought of leaving in the middle of the night. As long as no one heard them, they might get far enough to escape pursuit. She could dose Frank’s evening beer with laudanum to help him sleep more heavily. But she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life afraid that he would catch up with them. She would tell him when it was time, and she would go in the light of day.

It had occurred to her, of course, that they didn’t have to go at all. They could stay as if nothing had happened, all except Alice, who would marry quickly, whoever would have her, and move away, as some girls did. If they lost their house to Norris, they would find another, and Frank would continue to work on this farm or the next. She had married him for better, for worse. Staying was not only possible, it was the quietest, least risky choice. But in confronting Ida, Alice had made clear what must be done.

During the day, Ida’s attention to these plans kept her busy and sane, but at night she was haunted by the body lying next to her, softly raising the blanket with each even breath. She alternately wished to heal him and to take the axe from the woodbox and slice him through. Over and over, Ida combed through the past, trying to find those nits that had been hiding, waiting to hatch. When had he turned against her and against his own daughter?
She began with their meeting and worked her way forward. In the beginning, she had mistaken his quiet nature as being like her father’s—thoughtful, distracted, but genuinely kind. It had taken her a long time, over a year after their marriage, to realize Frank’s quiet came more from holding back, from suppressing his anger and resentment. Still, she had imagined herself to be on his side. She had thought he’d seen her as his ally, that the meanness about him was directed only at others, and justifiably. At what point had the difficulties they’d faced together become solvable in his mind by turning against her and against Alice?