A Violet Season (22 page)

The doctor had left a recipe the girls already knew—a mixture of some medicines in a half pint of table claret. Before supper they showed Katerina how to measure this concentrate into a pitcher of tepid water. She was to use a rubber syringe to treat herself twice every day, as the doctor had ordered. To be sure she understood their instructions, Bridie dropped her drawers and squatted over the chamber pot to demonstrate.

“Don’t worry,” Jessie said. “It usually works just great. In a few weeks, you’ll be back to normal.” Katerina attempted a smile, for she apparently understood Jessie’s tone to be friendly, even if the words were lost on her. But she was allowed to rest for only a few nights. Then she was ordered to work again. Alice changed her sheets and the others’ and washed beer glasses and swept and dusted and counseled herself: patience, patience. Something else would come to her if she could only be very patient. When she received Joe’s reply to her letter, she boldly wrote to him. He wrote again, proposing marriage, but to a woman who no longer existed. Alice waited and considered her reply. When she was ready to risk what little she had left, as winter crawled from the city and the sun stretched high enough to clear the buildings across the street and hit the low dining room windows again, she told him as delicately as she could where she was. Then she waited.

I
da and Joe hardly spoke on the three-and-a-half-hour train trip down the river. Riding the train was almost like riding the river, for at many points the tracks hugged the river so closely, one could see only water below, and the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on the far shore. Ida watched the landscape bolt past her window through drifting smoke and soot. She felt as if she were sailing on an iceboat at breakneck speed, the hills billowing beside her. The morning sun stroked them orange and pink, every hummock and hollow drawn into focus by the light.

When they entered Manhattan, the train descended into a dark tunnel, and Ida and Joe collected their things. “Do you know how to get there?” she asked him.

“We’ll hire a cab,” he said. Ida had no money to spare and wondered how they would manage for the day, but Joe added, “I’ve been saving up to see her.”

Outside Grand Central Depot, however, he changed his mind as he noted the superior dress of those stepping into the polished cabs parked on Vanderbilt Avenue. He left Ida to ask a policeman for directions, then led her on a long walk over to the Broadway cable car.

The farther they traveled downtown, the more crowded and
frightening the streets became. Horses and wagons competed with the cable car and pedestrians in a shouting, clopping, ringing maelstrom. Several times Ida feared that a horse or a man would be overrun by the car, which jerked on its cable like an unruly mule. As the conductor called out stops she couldn’t tell apart, she stiffened her back and held her breath and resisted the compulsion to grab Joe, who stood before her. Finally he bent down and said, “This one.”

They stepped off on the corner of Broadway and White, and Ida took Joe’s arm and walked with him briskly away from the avenue. Here the street was narrower, crowded with vendors of food and dry goods, and men shouting their business, and women carrying baskets and babies and loads of firewood. Children darted across the traffic. Ida put her handkerchief to her face to cut the stench of rotting garbage. Joe scanned the addresses at each stoop. They passed a pack of boys who should have been in school but were throwing dice against a building instead. A fruit vendor shouted out his wares with a rising call at the end of every word: “Oran-
ges
! Bana-
nas
!” A gang of men, some of them smoking clay pipes, others chewing tobacco, paused their antagonistic conversation long enough to stare at the odd, well-dressed couple making their way so tentatively along the street.

Ida looked down at the sidewalk and waited until she and Joe had passed the men before mumbling, “It makes me appreciate the farm.”

“Yes, ma’am, it makes one appreciate a lot,” Joe agreed.

Number 157 was near the corner of Baxter Street. As they climbed the bluestone steps, Ida’s milk let down; embarrassed, she dropped her hand from Joe’s arm. Joe looked for a bell, and finding none, he straightened his collar as if straightening his courage and knocked.

“Y’ let yourself in!” called a woman’s voice from an open window above, and Joe recoiled from the door.

Ida took a deep breath. The street stank of horse urine. “Where may we find Mrs. Gilhooley?” she called out, ashamed at the volume of her own voice.

“Third floor, top o’ the stairs,” shouted the woman.

Joe shoved the door, and it opened onto a hallway so dark they had to stand for several seconds, letting their eyes adjust, before they could see the stairs. Even with her gloves on, Ida declined to touch either the wooden banister or the pocked plaster wall, staying to the center of the bowed stairs up one flight, rounding an airtight hallway, and up another flight to the third floor. There were two doors at the top of the stairs. Joe chose one and knocked. Then he took off his hat and held it before his chest.

“Mrs. Gilhooley?” he asked the woman who came to the door. She had opened it just wide enough to peek through.

“Yes,” she said.

“My name is Joseph Jacobs, ma’am—”

“I’m not interested,” she said, but before she could shut the door, Joe’s hand flew out to hold it. Then he leaned aside, thinking, no doubt, that another woman might make a better impression.

“Mrs. Gilhooley,” Ida said quickly. “My daughter’s name is Alice Fletcher, and I’m hoping you can help me find her.”

The woman’s face relaxed into its wrinkles, but still she held the door nearly shut.

“I’m afraid for her safety,” Ida said, her voice catching. “Please tell me if you know where she is.”

The woman glanced again at Joe, and she said, “Joseph Jacobs . . . She writes to you, does she?”

“She does,” Joe said.

Mrs. Gilhooley eased the door open and stepped aside. “Come in, then,” she said.

The first room of the flat was a kitchen, though a child’s bed was tucked between the wall and the cookstove. An open doorway led to a brighter room with a small fireplace and two windows
overlooking a rear courtyard. A web of drab laundry hung from one building to the next and back. Pigeons roosted on an iron railing outside, and after she seated them at the parlor table, Mrs. Gilhooley tapped on the window to shoo them away. “Rats with wings,” she said. “Can I brew you a cup of tea?”

Ida had no desire to drink the water from this home, but it would be impolite to decline, so she nodded. She removed her gloves and laid them in her lap while she waited.

“You want to know where Alice is,” said Mrs. Gilhooley from the kitchen, which was separated from the parlor by a partial wall with a large window cut into it. “She’s not far from here.” Ida was struck by the informality with which she spoke of Alice. The woman reached behind a short clothesline of socks hung over the stove to get three teacups and saucers from a built-in shelf. Then she set a kettle to boil on the stove and joined them again in the parlor, wiping her hands on her apron before pulling out a chair. She studied Ida a good long while. Ida prepared herself for the news to come.

“I’m sorry to tell you, ma’am. It seems you don’t know,” said Mrs. Gilhooley. “Your daughter—” Here she broke off to look at Joe, as if assessing to whom the news should be delivered. “Your daughter’s in a house of ill repute on Eldridge Street, north of Canal. Mrs. Hargrave’s. It’s not the worst establishment . . .” Ida held her breath, or rather it held her, for it was trapped in her ribs and choking her around the middle. She was afraid to release it—she might vomit. Mrs. Gilhooley leaned over with familiarity and patted her back. Joe sat still and calm and far away.

“It’s not so bad as you’d imagine,” said Mrs. Gilhooley, holding Ida’s arm so she wished she’d let go. “So far as I’m aware, she’s only the housemaid, though it’s true that girls often cross over. You’ll have to ask her about that yourself.” She let go of Ida and sat back in her chair. There was something self-righteous in the way she regarded Ida, and Ida felt the fool.

“Mr. Fletcher took her there,” Joe added.

“Frank set her up with factory work,” Ida said, her resolve crumbling.

“No,” Joe said. Ida bunched her skirts in her hands. If he had known all this, why hadn’t he told her on the long ride to the city? How much else had Alice shared with him that she had withheld from her own mother?

“The money is good at Mrs. Hargrave’s,” said Mrs. Gilhooley, shaking her head as if she thought it were a shame. “I don’t know what they pay her for cleaning, but the girls make a dollar a client, sometimes more.” Joe looked away.

“God help us,” Ida said. She stood and walked to the window and looked down at the courtyard. Several women mingled around a large washtub, while a pack of children chased one another in the dirt. The doors of four wooden outhouses mere steps from the water pump were all ajar to varying degrees. The voice of a child inside the flat startled Ida, and Mrs. Gilhooley excused herself to go into a dark bedroom off the kitchen, which Ida hadn’t noticed earlier.

“The others will be home from school soon,” Mrs. Gilhooley said when she returned to take the kettle off. “We insist they stay in school until they’re twelve.” She announced this fact with some degree of pride, and judging by the number of children she’d seen in the street, Ida imagined the pride was merited. “My oldest is out to work with his father.”

Ida saw Joe check his pocket watch; they were both calculating to be out before the children came home. She thought of the letter she carried in her reticule, and seeing that time was short, she took it out and laid it on the table in front of Mrs. Gilhooley, who had set a teapot to steep on a trivet. “I received this letter some time ago,” Ida said. “I’m sorry to say I never answered it. At the time, it made no sense. But I think you may know this young woman as well.”

Mrs. Gilhooley picked up the letter and turned it over to see both sides, and Ida realized the woman couldn’t read. “It’s from a young lady named Bridie Douglass,” Ida said.

“Oh, Bridie,” said Mrs. Gilhooley. “She’s at Mrs. Hargrave’s, too. Are you the one who has her baby?” She smiled hopefully.

“I don’t know,” Ida faltered. “When was the baby born?”

Mrs. Gilhooley considered the question. “Early November, I’d say. A hale little girl.”

“Anabel,” Ida said faintly.

“Anastasia was what Bridie intended, I believe. But she never meant to keep the baby. Mr. Fletcher said he had a nursemaid for her, and he had an arrangement with another man, a Mr. Sligh, for adopting them out.”

“Mr. Sligh, yes!” Ida said. Perhaps there had been a misunderstanding after all. “I was under the impression that Alice was staying with his sister.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Gilhooley. “Not since November, anyway, when she came to Mrs. Hargrave’s.”

Alice had been in a brothel since November. Five months she had been there, and Ida had done nothing to help her.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Gilhooley,” Joe said, “but were there other babies from Mrs. Hargrave’s? You said adopting ‘them.’”

“Yes, at least one other he took, a few months before that. Another baby girl.”

Ida sat outside of herself. None of this could be happening.

“That one belonged to a girl who’s no longer at Mrs. Hargrave’s,” Mrs. Gilhooley continued. “She managed to run off shortly after. No one knows what became of her.” She lifted the lid off the teapot to check the color of the tea.

Ida squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hands to her ears. She wanted to cry out to everyone to stop, stop!

What had become of Mary, then? And Frank—he had lied to her about everything. The depths of his deception astounded her,
yet at the same time she had known. She’d known all along that something was wrong. She had known and done nothing.

“Mr. Sligh knew of a couple of wealthy families who wanted children and couldn’t have them, so Mr. Fletcher offered to take the babies off Mrs. Hargrave’s hands in exchange for earning a fee when the babies were placed with a family,” Mrs. Gilhooley said. “I suppose Mr. Sligh and he split the money, I don’t know. The girls didn’t benefit, of course. But they knew their babies would be saved. That was plenty for them.”

Ida looked around for a water closet, but it was just the three rooms, and there was no escape. Her stomach churned like the water in a laundry tub as she watched Mrs. Gilhooley pour the tea.

“Where can we find Mrs. Hargrave’s?” Joe asked.

Mrs. Gilhooley set a teacup in front of Ida, who closed her eyes to avoid the sight of the steaming brown liquid. “If you’re walking, go up Baxter to Canal. Then right on Canal and all the way ’cross the Bowery to Eldridge, where you make a left. It’s number sixty-eight. Mind you, don’t let on I sent you.”

“I give you my word,” Joe said. “If you don’t mind, we’ll take our leave. We’re feeling urgent.”

Ida was grateful not to touch the tea. She placed her hat on her head and stuck the hatpin through it. I must stand up now, she thought. I must stand and go out on that street.

“Good luck to you,” Mrs. Gilhooley said. “I hope you’ll find her well.”

*   *   *   

They walked as Mrs. Gilhooley had instructed, up the block and right onto Canal Street at an odd triangular intersection. Canal was wide and boisterous, teeming with people the likes of whom Ida had never seen: Hebrew men with long beards and diminutive round caps; Chinamen in odd, wide-sleeved jackets; dark-haired Italian men calling to one another in words she
couldn’t understand; newsboys and rag pickers and unaccompanied children eyeing the fruit vendors and the bread vendors. They passed several gangs of indecently attired women, showing their legs beneath shortened skirts and their breasts through flimsy, low-cut bodices and calling out to every man who passed. Ida averted her eyes, terrified that if she looked, she might see Alice.

It was clear the alleys were being used not only as sleeping quarters for filthy children but as outhouses, for the pungent odor of urine stung Ida’s eyes as she passed. Though she had been to the city several times, she had never walked the streets of the Lower East Side, and she had never, in her worst imaginings, pictured Alice in such a place. No one should be in such a place. As a furniture wagon passed them, the horse lifted its tangled tail and dropped a mound of shit on the street. In the country, with plenty of space, the piles of horse manure were a mere nuisance. Here, with so many horses in such a crowded place, it was nearly impossible to step in the street without smearing one’s shoe.