A Violet Season (21 page)

That night the house was full, with men waiting in the piano parlor over glasses of beer. One regular, a Mr. Johanssen, whom the girls called Johnny, sat playing the piano as if he didn’t care whether he ever made it upstairs. Two other men stood near him, singing bawdy ballads and laughing and drinking while the girls in their low-necked, high-skirted costumes circulated among the other customers, teasing and laughing, sometimes dancing with them for
a few turns, but all the while moving them along as quickly as possible. Jessie was an expert at this. She would disappear up the stairs with one man, and in the time it took Alice to collect a tray of dirty glasses, deliver it to the kitchen, fill another tray, and deliver drinks to the tables, Jessie could be downstairs again, picking up another john. She charged the most of all the girls and had told Alice she aspired to run her own sporting club someday. Not even Mrs. Hargrave owned her own establishment; she merely managed it for a man they’d never met. But Alice could see that if anyone was likely to succeed at this business, it was Jessie.

Because the piano parlor was so crowded and because the girls couldn’t keep up with the demand, this evening the men were left to drink more than usual. Mrs. Hargrave had set a two-beer limit. If the men got drunk, there might be trouble, and it took them longer upstairs as well. But it was hard to keep track of who had drunk how much, and the room appeared smaller and noisier each time Alice reentered. Saturdays were sometimes this way; on the other nights Alice was often spared the ordeal of working in the piano parlor, for traffic was light. Tonight she felt hands on her bottom and her hips as she passed, and she kept her arms close to protect her breasts as she carried the trays. Men called out to her, but she paid them no mind. If the girls were there, they would correct the men: “She’s only the housemaid,” though sometimes they’d say her name and then the men would call out, “Alice! I love you! Come here, darlin’! She’s the sweetest girl here!” and other comments that were hard to ignore, for they were insistent and the room was close. “Aw, leave her alone,” Rose or Bridie or Lena would say if they were there.

This Saturday night at times none of them was there. Ivy was busy shuttling men up to Katerina and Glory, who weren’t allowed downstairs when the men were present, while Mrs. Hargrave greeted customers at the door and collected cash in a velvet pouch at her belt. So no one noticed the nondescript man who
often came on Saturday and kept to himself in the corner until one of the girls approached him. He was average in every way, of an ordinary height with a moderate mustache and professional but inexpensive clothing. He sat with his hat on the table and didn’t make a ruckus, and whichever girl approached him first was the one he would go with. No one noticed him wander out of the sitting room and down the hall to the back of the house, where he surprised Alice as she came around the corner with an empty tray. She caught her breath as she saw him against the wall where he didn’t belong, but she walked on past him, keeping her pace. Then a tug pulled her up short. The tug wasn’t hard enough to cause her to fall or drop her tray, but it was enough to stop her, for he had her braid in his hand, and with it he reeled her in close.

“Put that tray right here on the floor, miss,” he said in her ear, and she smelled the gin on his breath and knew he’d been drinking before he arrived, for no hard liquor was served in the piano parlor.

“Let me go, sir,” Alice said, pressing the empty tray like armor against her chest. The man flipped his wrist and wrapped her braid tighter around his hand. “I must ask you again to let me go,” Alice said, raising her voice to be clearly heard over the racket from the parlor on the other side of the wall. “I’m just the housemaid. You must wait for one of the girls.”

“You look fine to me,” he said.

Her hands were shaking, and as the man took the tray from her and dropped it on the floor, she breathed in to scream. His hand clapped over her mouth. After that, it happened quickly. She tried not to think about it later, to let it be just a thud, a rip, a cry without definition or detail, but snatches of it kept coming at her, so she lived them over and over and over—the pinch of his whole hand on the inside of her thigh, the sound her head made against the plaster wall, the slip of her boot heel on the waxed floor and the way her feet lost contact, the awful burning and pounding, the ease with which a clump of his hair gave way in her grip, the kick
he left her with when she collapsed against the wall, more a nudge like her father might have given the cat to move her away from the stove.

Something warm seeped from inside her, and Alice wondered whether it was her own blood or whether it had come from him. She was hot and hollow, and she feared everything inside her would fall out. She crawled on hands and knees to the back landing and stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen, where Bella stood washing the dishes.

“What?” she said when she saw Alice, but she seemed to understand almost instantly what had happened. She took Alice to bed, and Alice allowed her to wash her private parts with a warm washcloth and help her into a chemise and cover her with an extra blanket. “Who did this?” Bella demanded, but Alice didn’t know the man’s name, and when she tried to describe him, he sounded just like all the others.

*   *   *   

There was little reason to resist now. Alice could see no route but the one that led further into this life.

She took to singing aloud in her room, hymns and children’s songs. Rose commented once how cheerful she seemed, but really, it was the only way to keep other thoughts from her head. It was worst at night, in the dark, for sleep no longer came easily, even at the end of a hard day of work. Bridie taught her to take a shot of gin and gave her a bottle. Alice didn’t want to do it, but it helped. She imagined its searing heat was burning her clean inside, and afterward she slept heavily and remembered no dreams in the morning. The idea that she might become a drunk frightened her almost as much as the things that had already happened, so she took care never to drink except at bedtime. Later, Rose brought her a bottle of laudanum, and she found that a small quantity provided more soothing release than the gin. She steadfastly refused
Jessie’s offers of morphine, however, not just because she’d heard terrible stories about it but because she couldn’t bring herself to use the hypodermic needle.

January’s payday passed; Alice saw neither her father nor her money. Only when she received letters from Joe did she momentarily become herself again. But then she watched the girls climb the front stairs and wondered if anything separated her from them any longer. She habitually averted her face from the mirrors, and she did one thing all the girls had done when they’d first taken to the life: she changed her name.

“Pick something sweet the johns will like,” they told her at the dinner table. She didn’t bother protesting that it wasn’t about pleasing the men. “Marie Louise,” she said, naming the double-petaled purple violet, the variety her family grew the most, and before long the girls had shortened it to the more modern-sounding Millie. From then on, she no longer heard her own name. She no longer had to think about what had become of Alice; she was hidden someplace where they couldn’t touch her, the girls or Mrs. Hargrave or the men who pawed at her as she passed with their drinks. Only Joe used that name now. She loved the way he wrote it, the A like a huge, lopsided heart whose tail crossed the start of the looping L so she could see he had written the A separately and lifted the pen before continuing, as if the A were important and special.

*   *   *   

Sometimes she imagined something could happen to crack her out of this situation. Sometimes, after Glory had finished the paper and left it neatly folded on a chair, Alice would pick it up and read the advertisements for clerks and secretaries and shopgirls. “Might as well stay here,” Bella said to her once, but she didn’t explain what she meant, and anyway, Alice had no means of answering the ads. She had no work experience, no money for carfare or rent, no hope of finding her way around the city.

Finally, one afternoon, she agreed to let the girls show her what to do. She imagined she could make her own money for a week or two, then go someplace where no one knew her. What if she stepped off the train in Philadelphia or Washington or Baltimore and said she was a farm girl looking for honest work? She broke her long silence with a brief reply to Joe’s last letter: though she loved him still, he must stop thinking of her. She could never be with him now. It would be best for her to stop mooning over his letters and resign herself to her true circumstances.

In Bridie’s darkened bedroom, with the brocade drapes pulled shut for privacy, the girls instructed Alice how to wash a man first with a washcloth and some soap, and while she was doing that, to check his wick for open sores or a rash and squeeze it to find whether it had any hard lumps or oozing that indicated the clap. If so, she was to send him away. They’d all had it. The treatment was unpleasant, and sometimes it kept them from working, so they lost income besides. There were worse things she could catch as well; they knew one girl who’d gotten dark purple sores on her palms and face, and she’d been ruined, so Millie mustn’t be afraid to send a man away if he had the signs.

They taught her to wash the men again when they were finished, and herself, too. They showed her how to use a rubber syringe to douche with a baking soda solution over the chamber pot if she had time between tricks, and at the very least, at the end of the night. They gave her a sponge with a ribbon on it and showed her how to soak it in vinegar and position it deep inside her to protect herself from a pregnancy.

Lena demonstrated how to shave her legs because the johns liked that. They told her which johns to avoid if possible and how to secure those who were better for regular visits. They advised her to find a safe place to hide any cash she could collect for extra services. They were somewhat vague about these—let the men tell you what they want, they said—but one of them involved putting
things in her mouth. She covered her mouth with her hands, and they laughed as if it were nothing, as if they had been teaching her a game, and teased her, “Millie, Millie, don’t be silly.” They gave her an old silk dress with a neckline that fell open and had to be pinned at the seams, and a sheer fichu to tie over it, which did nothing to increase the modesty of the costume.

That night, however, when Jessie called her over to meet a Mr. Gill, Alice told him she was “just the housemaid,” then ran off with his lone empty glass on her tray. She stood at the top of the back stair landing, her spine pressed against the cold wall, her heart beating so hard it lifted her bodice. She couldn’t do it. Not yet. She delivered Mr. Gill’s glass to the sink and climbed the back stairs to change the linens.

In her second-floor room, Katerina was wailing. The door was ajar, and Katerina was alone, sitting on the floor against the bed, breasts uncovered, stockinged legs splayed wide, clawing at her most private parts, her ridged throat exposed as she lifted her chin and keened like a crow.

At the alarming sound, Rose came running. Her door banged against the wall where she’d flung it. Alice, who had stopped outside Katerina’s door, had no idea what to do. Rose nudged her aside, and Alice saw Rose’s last customer hopping on one foot toward the stairs as he struggled to replace his shoe. Rose knelt at Katerina’s side and caught her hands and tried to get her to say what was wrong, though she knew not a word of Russian, and Katerina spoke only a few words of English she had learned from the girls. Wanting to be of use, Alice entered the room to strip the bed as she had planned, and as she threw back the top sheet, a putrid stench rose just after the sight of yellow pus streaked across the sheets.

“Dammit!” Rose cried, rising up on her knees to see the sheets for herself, and Alice knew without being told that it was the clap. “Change the sheets for her, Millie, would you?” Rose asked, and Alice hurried to oblige, wrapping the stained sheets in a tight ball
that would warn Gert they were soiled and replacing them with fresh sheets from the closet while Rose helped Katerina to the basin, where she motioned she should bathe herself.

“No more tricks for you tonight,” Rose said, helping Katerina into the bed with a pillow under her head and covers over her. The frightened look in Katerina’s eyes softened a shade. Then Rose turned down the gas lamp, and Alice left the room behind her.

The following day, the doctor was called in, a handsome young man about Joe’s age whom all the girls were sweet on. They were put out when Mrs. Hargrave ordered Alice to assist him, leaving them out in their parlor. Alice sat at Katerina’s side and held up her knees, draped with a sheet, while the doctor painted her inside with what the girls later said was silver. Katerina’s hand grabbed at Alice’s arm, and Alice rubbed her knees and hummed a soothing tune, looking back and forth between the doctor and Katerina’s twisted face.

The doctor returned twice the next day to see Katerina. He laid out a rubber pad on the bed and instructed Alice to roll a cotton sheet to elevate Katerina’s hips over the chamber pot. Then he injected a hot solution into her, which spilled over her thighs and her bottom into the pot. He stanched the rest with gauze and left her lying there awhile, tears streaming into her ears, while Alice sang and rubbed her legs again. The smell was terrible, but Alice closed her eyes and tried to imagine she was singing Jasper to sleep. The doctor touched Katerina’s arm kindly before he left the room, and Alice saw plainly: he pitied them all.

“What a doll,” Lena said when he was barely out of earshot down the stairs. He had used the visit as an opportunity to perform exams on the rest of them.

“I wonder what it’d take to catch the interest of that one!” Rose agreed.

Alice wondered whether they were serious. If they had seen what he truly thought of them in that moment at Katerina’s bedside,
all their bravado would be shattered like so much china on the pantry floor.

And then: I’ll never be one of them. The thought was followed by a cascade of relief. She would not be one of them.