A Violet Season (29 page)

As they passed each building, she exclaimed at the changes or the things that were the same. “That beautiful ash tree has been there forever . . . Here’s Mrs. Potter’s place, but she’s gone now . . . My best friend, Liza, lived here. I wonder what became of her . . . Dr. Maria Hull? A lady doctor. Imagine that . . . Oh, here’s Mr. K.’s grocery. He has a long Dutch name. We could never pronounce it, so we called him Mr. K. . . . And Mrs. Van de Bogart still offers piano lessons. She needs to repaint her sign . . .”

They stopped in front of her girlhood home, and Alice leaned on the edge of the seat to study it. After Alice’s grandfather’s death, it had been sold, and now it looked unkempt. Chunks of mortar had fallen from between the bricks, and the window frames sorely needed painting. Mismatched curtains that might have been old sheets were hung inside the windows, protecting the inhabitants from the prying eyes of passersby on the sidewalk just outside. The driver of a carriage behind them called out to them to move along, for they were blocking traffic. Alice’s mother commanded
the horses, and they picked up their hooves and trotted forward, away from the sad old house. After that, her mother was silent for some time.

“Where shall we stop, then?” she asked finally. They pulled up beside a grocery, and she went in to purchase some bread and to ask directions. When she returned, she told Alice, “The grocer’s cousin owns an inn up Broadway toward the canal. It’s not as fine a neighborhood.” She smiled as if this were cheerful news. A boardinghouse, a poor neighborhood. Alice drew her wrap more tightly over her chest.

Jasper banged his heels against the wagon seat and uttered a low whine. “We’re almost home, my boy,” Ida said, turning to touch his cheek.

“No!”

“Our new home. You’ll see.” To Alice, the absence of Joe and of Claudie, of Oliver and Reuben and even Norris and her other cousins, made the idea of “home” seem impossible in this place. The wagon lurched forward, and she feared for the future.

The Goldenrod Inn was not so terrible. Though there was a great deal of noisy traffic just outside its door, inside was a large dining room where Alice was relieved to see respectable women eating with men who appeared to be their husbands, and some children playing marbles in the corner. The innkeeper, Mr. Vreeland, greeted them politely. Before the week was out, Ida had been hired to assist the cook in the kitchen. While she worked, Alice tended the children and ran errands on occasion for the guests.

Mr. Vreeland was a widower with one son, a gregarious young man named Pieter who entertained the children by carrying the supper trays on his head and doing circus jumps over the banister. Mr. Vreeland was quieter, but kind and always on time with Ida’s pay. Alice was never bothered by the rougher guests coming through—the canal workers and the peddlers and the single traveling men—for they weren’t her responsibility, and anyway, she
had learned that they were no worse than the men whose public good manners belied their private transgressions.

Though she and her mother shared tasks during the day and a bed at night, Alice kept her own counsel. They never spoke again of what had happened, or how it had happened, and both were left to quietly draw their own conclusions. It was impossible for Alice to fully absolve her mother of responsibility for her months in New York; what was possible was to simply live one day following another in a chain leading away from that time.

Alice kept their shared room tidy, and she kept the children busy. She helped her mother in the kitchen when there was a rush, and listened to Pieter sing silly, made-up lyrics to the tune of sea chanteys while he washed the bar glasses, a job that had been Alice’s in another life. Eventually those lyrics began to address her: “I know a brown-eyed lass named Alice, / ’n’ if I could, I’d build her a palace.”

In the evenings, Alice sat in the rocker in the corner of the kitchen or, if the inn was quiet, at a table in a front window, doing the mending or reading the newspaper or a book borrowed from the library, and in time, she began to feel she was living a life.

*   *   *   

A few nights after their arrival in Albany, Ida first had the dream that would return relentlessly throughout her life in one form or another.

She was walking up the farm hill, and it was windy. She was having trouble holding on to her hat, an old-fashioned bonnet. At first the dream was only about the bonnet—one of those dreams in which she must do something that in waking life would be straightforward but that in sleep was impossible for reasons she couldn’t quite obtain. Ida knew that she was dreaming; she was wickedly plagued by that bonnet and wished only to wake up.

Then she saw Frank on the ridge. As she thought about it from her bed minutes later, with Alice asleep beside her and the unfamiliar shadows of furniture in odd places around her, it seemed that when she saw Frank, she lost track of the fact that she was dreaming.

At the sight of her, he waved a wave the whole length of his arm that arced across the sky. It was a wave unlike one he had ever given her, even as a young man, for its enthusiasm. Then he ran down the hill and embraced her. He was crying and begging her to understand that a terrible mistake had been made, another trick of his brothers. He would never do such a thing to Alice. He pressed a huge bouquet of wildflowers at her and swore he loved her so much. Wouldn’t they all please come home? But Ida had tied her bonnet so tightly under her chin that it choked her.

She woke, confused, and sat up in the strange bed, which moaned and wobbled under her. She sat there for a long while, not knowing what time it was, hoping the sky would lighten, but it did not. She worried what they would do without him.

She missed him.

Not the man himself, made of bones and flesh, who was sleeping or walking somewhere on this earth, perhaps dreaming his own tortured dream. Not him.

But she missed desperately the idea of him, the man she’d thought he was. That man was more real to her than the one who had betrayed them all. She had been married to him for twenty-three years. All that time she had worked and slept beside him, washed the dirt from his clothing and cooked food for his sustenance, talked with him and held his hand, rubbed his sore back and cried into his chest, and given birth to five children who variously had his eyes, his hair, his gait, his reticence, his temper, his charm. All that time, had she actually been married to an idea and not understood the real man, not known one true scrap of him?

Yet that idea had such a hold on her that she
missed
it. When
she lay down again, she turned away from Alice, her face to the plaster wall, hoping to guard her from the terrible secret of this longing.

Later, there would be rumors of Frank’s whereabouts. Harriet would report that en route to New York on the train, Harold had met a man who knew Frank and claimed to have bought a horse from him in the city the week before. Ida would keep an intermittent correspondence with Bridie Douglass, sending notes about Ana’s growth and health, and once Bridie would write that she thought she’d seen Mr. Fletcher across the street, standing in front of the lunchroom and watching Mrs. Hargrave’s building, though she couldn’t be certain. Oliver would write that Aunt Frances had forwarded to him in Boston an envelope with a New York City postmark. The envelope contained ten dollars, and Oliver believed the money had come from his father. Nevertheless, Ida would not hear from Frank herself, and with the passage of time, she would be able to release some of the fear she carried always in the stiffness of her shoulders, a fear that one day he would turn up. The rest of that fear would alter itself into worry and eventually, after a great while, into simple regret. She would never again have the luxury of relaxing into her chair and feeling the clean relief of a good day’s work done, for always there would be Frank, though work and rest she would, and Frank be damned.

It looks like there’s a diary in there, too.

Yes, it’s my first diary, from 1900. In fact, I think I started it on New Year’s Eve. My husband had just started courting me, and he gave it to me as a Christmas gift. We were married for sixty-two years.

Would you read something to me? I’m curious what you were thinking about the turn of the century.

Oh, I’d rather not.

Would you like some lemonade? I’ll see if my granddaughter will bring us a glass.

No, thank you. What does the inscription say?

All right. I’ll read just that. “To dearest Alice on the eve of the twentieth century. With each turn of the earth, my heart turns more to you.”

I had forgotten that. How sweet . . . Oh, I do miss my Pieter.

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

14 May 1932

Rensselaer, New York

Dear Alice,

I write this letter directly to you, though you should share as much of it as you would like with Pieter. I have a few personal explanations to make that aren’t appropriate to a formal document such as my will, and I want them to be in writing.

First, I want to be clear that I do wish you to be my executor. I am well aware that it is usually a man’s job, but I don’t intend it to be Pieter’s, I intend it to be yours. Don’t let him or Oliver or Jasper talk you out of it. They are all too busy with their own work. Show them this letter if you must. Also, the will is clear that your share of the money is to be yours, not Pieter’s. This is not to say that I don’t trust Pieter—you know I love him dearly—but I must treat everyone the same, and I do hope you’ll keep an eye on Ana and Jerry. That is, the money is
hers
and hers alone. If there is any question of her legal standing as my heir, you will find the notarized letter from her mother in my safe deposit box. Of course, I’ve left some money for Aunt Grace, too, as well as my phonograph records and some old photographs.

I’ve listed in the will the few items that I have special attachments to and that should go to particular family members. Other than that, I don’t care in the least who takes what, but do sell the rental property at once. I would do it myself if I had the energy, but it’s already too late for that. I’m sorry to leave you with those details.

Also, don’t be surprised that I’ve left quite a bit—as much as each of your shares—to the League of Women Voters. The church may be put off by this, not to mention your brothers. My attorney assures me it’s all airtight, but if there should be any grumbling, I hope you will reinforce to everyone that it is exactly as I intended.

As you know, I wish to be buried beside Reuben. It is one of my greatest regrets that I allowed him to go off so young, and that I gave Oliver the burden of keeping him out of trouble, though I realize I had little choice. Oliver still blames himself for what happened leading up to the fight, though Reuben was his own man by then and couldn’t have been stopped. You must keep reminding Oliver of that when I am no longer here to do so. It is my one consolation that when I die, I shall be beside Reuben again, and he will have his mama with him as she should have been all along.

This leads me to another thing I feel compelled to write down for you. I have been thinking a great deal about forgiveness these last months. I imagine it is something that many people think about as their lives come to an end, but of course you and I have more to forgive than some others. I need forgiveness, too, not only for allowing Reuben to go off, but of course for what happened to you. As our Lord says, “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” Much as I wish I could say I have found forgiveness for your father, I cannot, and I understand you don’t even wish that, but I do think I have found more compassion for him, or my memory of him, as the years have passed, and that brings me some peace. I pray that you will find some peace as well, in your own time and your own way.

As for all the other things I would like to say to you, I shall save them to say in person, my darling girl. I know you hate for me to talk that way to you, but you are a mother, too (and soon a grandmother!), so you understand how deeply I love you. I don’t expect any sort of deathbed reconciliation or drama. You and Pieter have been very good to me, especially this last year, and I am extremely grateful for that. You are on my heart always.

I look forward to seeing you again on Tuesday. I have been feeling good this week, except for the morning after I took
those sleeping pills you gave me. I don’t see how you can use them, and I wish you wouldn’t. They made me foggy and lethargic all the next day, and if there is one thing I don’t want, it’s to miss the short remainder of life I have coming to me. Don’t forget to return my glasses if you can find them in the car. I am still well enough to read mornings, but the old ones I have here are terrible, the wrong prescription entirely.

Love,
Mother

THE POUGHKEEPSIE EAGLE NEWS

June 22, 1932

BUSINESS CAPSULE

UNDERWOOD—The Hudson Valley’s last major violet grower will close its doors this week. Chas. Tenney & Sons, an Underwood grower for nearly forty years, has shipped its last bouquet and this week is auctioning off its greenhouses and other farming equipment. The land has been purchased by developer Creighton Roth of New York City. The auction will be held on the Tenney property, 22 Hickok Lane, at 10 a.m. Saturday. In the past decade, major growers James DuMont and Norris Fletcher have also left the business as the once-popular bloom has given way to carnations, roses, and orchids. DuMont now owns Riverside Orchards, where he farms apples. Fletcher is the owner and president of Fletcher & Sons, a commercial development and construction company. At the turn of the century, the valley’s 400 violet houses produced six million blooms in a single growing season.

Are there any violet growers left today?

I doubt it. As far as I know, the violets went out with my mother in the early thirties.