A Violet Season (23 page)

Joe pointed up Canal, and they walked some more, Ida’s feet swelling in her Sunday shoes, her skirts dusting up grime from the sidewalks. Two young men pushed by, each with a load of half-finished garments on his back. At the corner of Elizabeth Street, a woman sold flowers from two large baskets hung around her neck. In the alleys, as they passed, Ida saw piles of rags and paper trash, and on the streets ash cans, some of them heaped full.

At the Bowery, they crossed through the speckled shade of the elevated train tracks and waited for a pause in horsecar traffic to scurry across the busy thoroughfare. The road sloped down from the Bowery, and at the bottom of the hill, another row of fruit stands drew Ida’s hungry attention. Her stomach grumbled at the sight of the polished apples, and though they were left over from
last fall’s harvest and their provenance was questionable at best, she was too hungry to care. She had to eat something, for it was midafternoon and they’d gone without lunch. Joe bought an apple for her and an orange for himself, and up the street they purchased a stale loaf of bread from a woman carrying her wares in a sack sewn of old mattress ticking. Ida and Joe stood in the shade of a doorway, stepping aside twice for women entering the building, and ate their poor meal without speaking a word.

A large clock somewhere rang four. Joe took Ida’s core and his orange peels and tossed them into the next alley, then held out the heel of bread to two boys running past, who snatched it without slowing their pace.

“Just a few blocks more,” he said, and as he pushed down the street, Ida fell a step behind him. She knew she should be grateful to him, but at the same time, she hated him for being witness to their downfall. Even more, she hated herself.

They found Eldridge Street, and as they turned in to its narrow, shady confines, Ida felt she was walking to her own grave. Number 68 was a block up from Canal. The building was a five-story brick—an ordinary building like any other on the block, with a small gold plaque at the front door that said simply K. H
ARGRAVE.
Joe pressed the bell.

“Oh, Joe,” Ida whispered.

The door was opened by an elderly housemaid who stepped aside to let Joe in. Then, seeing a woman with him, her eyes widened. They all stood just inside with the door open to the street.

“We’re here to see Mrs. Hargrave,” Joe said. Ida stepped away from a tarnished, sour-smelling spittoon in the corner of the vestibule, so she was nearly touching Joe.

The old woman glanced from Joe to Ida several times before deciding to close the door. “May I tell her who’s calling?”

“Mr. Joseph Jacobs and Mrs. Frank Fletcher,” Joe said, and upon hearing Frank’s name, the woman drew her head back and
stared at Ida. Over the woman’s shoulder, Ida could see a dark sitting room. The housemaid led them instead into a modest side parlor that seemed to serve as a study. “Wait here,” she said, leaving the door ajar.

They sat together on a hard mohair sofa and waited. A coffee table before the sofa held a scattered copy of the
New York Journal
. Across from them was a large mahogany desk with a blotter, an inkpot, a gold cigarette lighter, and a lamp with a fancy silk shade. A telephone was mounted on another wall next to a large framed certificate that Ida couldn’t read from this distance. The mantel over the fireplace to the left of the desk was bare, save a clock that ticked irregularly. The fireplace itself was covered with a convex tin plate and looked as if it hadn’t been lit for some time.

“I’m afraid,” Ida said.

“I am, too,” said Joe.

A stereoscope sat on an end table next to the sofa, and Ida picked it up, thinking to distract herself with a scene of some faraway destination. Instead, when she placed the viewfinder to her eyes, she was assaulted by the three-dimensional image of a woman, naked to the waist, holding her own bare breasts in her hands to present them to the viewer and gazing directly in the camera with a sly smile. Ida hurriedly set down the stereoscope and said nothing to Joe.

The clock tottered, and they waited. Presently the front bell rang again, and the housemaid hobbled down the stairs to answer it. The man who entered appeared to be known to her. His extraordinarily long mustache was waxed into concentric curls that stood out stiffly from his cheeks, and he wore an ill-fitting tan suit. Ida shuddered at the sight of him, but the mention of the name Bridie caught her ear, and both she and Joe leaned forward to watch him jog up the staircase.

The housemaid stuck her head into the room and said, “Mrs. Hargrave will not see you and asks that you be on your way.”

*   *   *   

At the barbershop on the corner, Ida sat rigid in a cracked leather chair against the plate-glass window and watched the barber tie a limp smock at Joe’s neck. He had been about to close shop when they’d arrived and had agreed to remain open only when Joe had offered him twenty-five cents, more than double the usual price, to have his mustache shaved. The barber had frowned at Ida following Joe in the door, and Joe had quickly introduced her as his mother. “Aaaa, let her stay,” said a stooped man who was crouched beside one of the empty chairs with a whisk broom and dustpan, and the barber had nodded Ida to the chair against the window.

Joe lay tilted back as the barber set to work. The cloying perfume of the shave soap made Ida’s stomach ache again. The place had seemed clean enough at first, but now that the barber was stropping a straight razor along a leather strap with a shhh-whip, shhh-whip, she feared it wasn’t so clean after all. What if they cut Joe with a dirty razor? She was afraid, too, of the stooped man, who had winked at her as he passed with a dustpan full of gray hair. As she sat watching the barber, milk continued to soak through her corset pads, and she felt desperate for a place to relieve the pressure in her breasts.

The barber held the sharpened razor at the tender spot where Joe’s underchin met his thin neck, and Ida closed her eyes. The two barbers had forgotten she was there, or they didn’t care, for they began calling across the shop. “Smitty wasn’t in.” “No, the bastard!” “You stop an’ have him pony up before you go home.” “No, not tonight. I gotta catch the car.” “Tonight!” and the barber stopped his short, labored strokes through Joe’s thick mustache and shook the razor above his head. He was answered with the metallic clatter of the dustpan on the floor of the back room. The stooped man didn’t come back, and the barber returned to his job with a grunt.

After he had removed Joe’s mustache, he began again with a
fresh razor and a fresh lather of shaving soap. Joe lay patiently with his eyes closed as the barber pinched each section of skin tight and shucked the razor this way and that, with a quick flick between each stroke to wipe the razor on a cloth draped over his wrist. He moved swiftly—pinch, cut, wipe—from the left side of Joe’s face and neck, around his chin, and to the right, finishing off the job with a few slaps of tonic and a shake of the smock as he pulled it away.

Joe stood uncertainly, and Ida watched him watch himself in the mirror as he wiped both his palms along the sides of his face. Then he placed two dimes and a nickel on the workstand. The barber had already stalked away.

Without his mustache, Joe looked a mere boy, white-faced and frightened. He looked so unlike himself that Ida had to fight to maintain her confidence in him. She stood and handed him his hat, and he cleared his throat.

“I think I’ll put on my glasses, too,” he said.

From a street vendor, Joe purchased a
New York Evening Post
for Ida to read while she waited. A lunchroom stood catercorner to Mrs. Hargrave’s, and it was here that Joe seated Ida at a table in the window with her newspaper. She ordered a pot of tea and attempted to ignore the raucous Friday conversation of young ladies and men alike—factory workers, she guessed. She watched as, across the street, Joe removed his overcoat, draping it over his arm, and gained entrance from the housemaid. As soon as Ida was assured he would not be sent out, she left her table to visit the toilet room. She wrung out her soaking pads in the porcelain sink and attempted to express some milk, but her hands were trembling.

At her table, a china pot of tea awaited her with some sandwiches. This sign of civilization brought her to tears, and she picked up the napkin and covered her face, telling herself she must remain composed. There would be time for tears later. She laid the napkin across her lap and swallowed hard. Then she glanced out the window again at Mrs. Hargrave’s.

There was no sign of Joe, nor of the business being conducted within. The building was four windows wide, each with a severe eyebrow of granite. Every window was covered by shades or drapes, so Ida could see no movement behind them. She wondered which window was Alice’s, or whether she even had a window. Cloistered month after month—what would she do when she finally emerged?

Ida and Joe had agreed that he should not request her directly, so as not to arouse suspicion. He would ask for Bridie Douglass instead, and he would invite her to leave with them as well. Beyond that plan, they had no idea how things worked inside the house. Now that he was in, Joe would have to improvise, and Ida would have to wait.

O
n a warm April afternoon, after forcing their windows open to the spring air and playing a game of euchre, the girls went down to supper. Bella had cooked the usual Friday meal: smelly fish and overboiled potatoes with a cup of coffee or a mug of beer, depending on each girl’s preference. But the girls were in good spirits, because there was to be chocolate cake for Jessie’s birthday.

Alice had received no more letters from Joe in the two weeks since she’d told him what she could. This must be the end of their correspondence, and she would have to find another way out. Still, each time Gert came to pick up the laundry, Alice hoped against reason for some word from him. Sometimes the mail took a week to travel, though mostly it was quicker. She should have heard from him, if he planned to write at all.

When Alice arrived in the dining room for supper, Jessie was talking about the fat, dyspeptic businessman who came to see her every Tuesday night. How she could make a joke of the most awful situations was beyond Alice, but she had learned to join in the laughter. It did help to think of the men as funny—if you didn’t, you would want to die. There were girls who had. Bridie had told her that was the reason Glory never spoke; at her last place of employment, a friend had overdosed on morphine.

The conversation moved on to the merits of this work over the jobs they’d had before. Rose and Bridie and Jessie and Lena had all chosen to come to Mrs. Hargrave’s. All four had worked other jobs—at factories that made shoes and artificial flowers and cigars and buttons and boxes, and at laundries, which they agreed was the worst work of all. Lena described at length a box factory, where the noise of the machinery kept everyone from talking and the girls turned their skirts inside out so the glue stains wouldn’t show later. They’d worked from eight in the morning until six at night and half a day on Saturday for four dollars a week. As one of the more experienced girls here, Lena could make that much in half a night, Alice calculated, with room and board besides. The worst thing about the factory, Lena said, was that she’d been followed everywhere by the manager, a pale-skinned man with rotten teeth who’d threatened her daily and at last had his way with her in his office, repeatedly, until she left without her last two weeks’ pay. “Might as well get paid to do it,” Lena said, and Alice’s heart tightened. She had thought any one of the jobs they described could be a way out.

“What do you say, Millie?” Jessie said. “Things could be worse.”

Alice tipped her head noncommittally and laid her fork on her empty plate.

Rose sipped her coffee and grimaced. “I’d like to know if Bella’s using yesterday’s grounds,” she said.

“No, Tuesday’s,” Jessie said, and they all laughed. “I was out shopping today,” she continued, and though Alice feigned disinterest, she listened keenly. Jessie often left the house in the afternoon, sometimes in the company of one of her regular customers.

“You devil!” Bridie cried. “What did you get?”

“Mr. Dylan took me out,” Jessie went on with a wicked smile, which prompted teasing from the others. Mr. Dylan was a student at Columbia College with a great deal of money. Every few weeks he would pay Jessie to dress up in some clothing he brought
her and go out to dinner and the theater with him. This time he had taken her shopping for a new hat and three pairs of gloves and then bought her violets and some French creams and taken her driving to Brooklyn, where they had fornicated in his friend’s parents’ empty apartment. Jessie passed around the candies so each girl could try one, and Rose picked up the nosegay of violets and pressed it to her face. “Oh, I adore that smell!” she exclaimed. “Such sweet, innocent little flowers.” She passed them to Alice, whose stomach soured at the smell of home. Swanley Whites. She wondered which Underwood farm they had come from.

“Look—they’re mine to keep,” Jessie said, and Alice saw she was wearing a pair of beautiful ivory-colored kid gloves with a row of four pearl buttons up the wrist.

“You’re too lucky,” Bridie said, and meant it. Even Alice felt envious, though it was humiliating to imagine a man treating her like a doll to be dressed and petted and then returned to the shelf.

“So, it’s Friday,” Jessie said, glancing up at the clock on the false mantel. “Will Farmer Boy be here? Let’s take bets.” Farmer Boy was a favorite butt of the girls’ jokes, an inexperienced young man with a bowl haircut and sunburned cheeks who had tried each of them in turn. He tended to come early in the evening.

“He’d like you, Millie,” Lena said.

“Yes, it’s Millie’s turn,” Jessie agreed, and she and Lena laughed. They had made it their personal quest to bring her over to their side of the business. But since the doctor’s visit, Alice had remained resolute.

“Miss Bridie, a gentleman to see you,” said Ivy from the kitchen doorway.

“Dammit all,” Bridie complained, hurrying to pick the slender bones out of her piece of fish. “Who is it?” she shouted after Ivy, but there was no response. “Probably that disgusting Froggie.” Jessie wrinkled her nose as if Bridie had offended her. Bridie tipped
down the rest of her beer. “Save me a piece of cake,” she said, and hurried up the stairs to entertain her client.