A Violet Season (7 page)

To the south, the Rondout Lighthouse would soon be lit. Behind it lay the hills and farms and villages of Ulster County, and behind them the curved backbone of the Catskills, with the distinctive chin of Overlook Mountain turned to the evening sky. Frank stepped to the edge of the slope and smoothed some of the tall grass with his foot, then sat and raised his arm for Ida to sit beside him. She leaned against him and pressed her hand into the coarse, moist grass.

“I’d marry you again,” she said after a time, and she felt a piercing tenderness for him. She brushed her nose in his hair. He smelled of a long day of work.

He stripped the seeds off a stalk of grass and threw them with some force over the hill. She waited, hoping he would say something in return, but he glared out at the landscape, as if it were to blame for something.

“Now that Norris is of age . . .” she started, but she dropped the rest of her sentence, unsure how to go on without provoking him.

“That boy is a fool,” Frank said.

“All boys that age have a fool in them,” Ida said. “They all need to learn the hard way, but they do learn, most of them.”

“He’s more of a fool than most.”

“He’s been indulged,” Ida said.

Frank threw another pinch of grass seed. The steamboat on the river whistled in response to some danger they couldn’t see.

“Perhaps it’s time to talk about leaving the farm,” she ventured. “I’ve had word from Ashley’s mother that she wants him home again. She’s planning to hand-feed him.” This worried Ida—she knew what happened to babies whose mothers unwittingly fed them spoiled cows’ milk—but his mother must make those choices herself. “I’d like to stop nursing,” Ida continued. “It’s tiring, with
all the housework, and I could help you more without a baby to feed. We could find a place of our own and build our own greenhouses. Or you could go back to carpentry—”

“I want Oliver to have more,” Frank interrupted, pitching another handful of seeds. “He has just as much right to this farm as Norris. Reuben, too, when he’s old enough.”

“Do you think that’s going to happen?”

Frank rocked to his feet and staggered straight down the hill, though it was too steep for Ida to follow. He stopped about twenty feet below and scrutinized the river again, his hands pulling at the brim of his hat. Then he veered to the left and made his way across the slope of the hill toward the path. She saw that she was meant to go with him, and she stood quickly to retrace their steps and meet him.

They walked down in silence, and for a few minutes he allowed her to take his hand, patterned with crosshatches pressed from the grass. When they reached the high ridge, he veered off the path and followed the spine of the hill. The way was rough; Ida’s ankles began to chafe, but she hurried to keep pace with him. Eventually he slowed for her, and they walked on together as the light paled and the katydids sang and the church bell in the village tolled eight o’clock. Ida’s milk was coming in heavily, and she longed to get home to Ashley and Jasper, but she and Frank plowed on together, cutting across the rear of the farm until they stood looking down on the south greenhouses looming in the near-dark like long, narrow warships lined up at dock in strict formation, ten feet apart. They wove around them, Frank pausing to check a few of the door latches.

“Alice needs to earn her keep,” he said finally.

Ida took heart that he hadn’t said she must marry. “I know a few women who need help with their fall sewing,” she fibbed. “I’ll get her some work as a seamstress soon.”

“Very soon,” Frank said.

As they descended to the house, Ida heard Ashley’s hungry wail. A familiar stiffness rose in her breasts, a sharp tingling, climbing up hard, and then her milk let down.

*   *   *   

Two days after Ashley’s departure, Frank came home from the train station with a basket on the wagon floor. It was dusk, and Ida and the boys were helping unload a shipment of new cardboard flats when she heard a coo and looked behind her for Ashley. She knew he was gone, but perhaps in her longing for him, her ears were playing tricks. Another coo, and with recognition thickening in her gut, Ida walked around the wagon.

The basket was old and dirty, as if it had been used for years to pick vegetables and then forgotten in the corner of a shed until being unearthed that very afternoon. The baby inside was wrapped to its chin in a clean blanket from which it was struggling to free itself. It opened its mouth and uttered a hungry exclamation, and Ida raised her eyes to Frank, who stood on the other side of the wagon, watching for her response.

“It’s your new baby,” he said.

*   *   *   

The baby’s blackened umbilical cord was still sticking out from her belly like a tiny water snake when Dr. Van de Klerk came to call. When Ida unwrapped her, he raised his eyebrows but examined the baby in silence. Then he leaned back, hands clasped behind him, and gave Ida a long stare.

“She’s a young one,” Ida said, heading him off.

“Just a couple of days old,” the doctor agreed. “Where did she come from?”

“She came in on the train. Someone brought her up from the city,” Ida said. “That’s all Frank told me. And that her mother died in childbirth.”

The doctor nodded gravely, watching the baby. “She wasn’t delivered by a doctor,” he said. “Nor an experienced midwife. Nobody who knew a darned thing about it would cut a cord that way.”

It was true, even Ida could see that. The shriveled cord was at least twice as long as the cords on any of her babies had been, screwed around itself, and sticking up sharply at the end so she had trouble changing the baby’s diaper around it.

“Have you been paid in advance?” Dr. Van de Klerk asked.

Payment was none of the doctor’s business, but Ida had to admit she hadn’t considered it. Thus far she had nursed babies whose mothers missed them and were eager to pay promptly and well for their care. Both Susie and Ashley had arrived with the first month’s pay, and their mothers had corresponded with Ida; this baby had arrived only with a blanket.

“What do you suggest I do?” she asked coolly.

The doctor shrugged. “Nurse her.” He clipped his bag shut. “The cord should fall off within a few days. Keep it clean. Does she have a name?”

“I’m certain she does,” Ida said. He cocked his head and scrutinized her, and she knew he was wondering what kind of a nurse wouldn’t know a baby’s name. She had never seen him fix his eyes on a person the way he was watching her this afternoon. She willed herself to meet his stare with her own, counting in her head with each breath: one, two, three, four . . . What did he want her to do? Send the baby back? Five, six . . . He nodded and turned to the door.

That evening as Ida sat in her rocker by the cold chimney nursing the baby, she asked Frank for the baby’s name. He was pouring kerosene into the lamp and didn’t look up, concentrating so as not to spill. Ida waited, watching the foul-smelling oil run into the chamber. Finally Frank set down the kerosene can and gave her a forced smile. “Her name is Mary,” he said.

“May I have her father’s address?” Ida asked. “I’d like to write to him, as I did to the mothers before.”

“Fathers aren’t so good at correspondence,” Frank said.

“He’ll have to correspond in order to pay us.”

Frank nodded. “He will. But don’t expect any of those chatty letters the ladies send.”

“Whether he writes a reply or not, I’d like him to know how his Mary is getting on.”

“Then I’ll mail the letters for you,” Frank said. “Just give them to me.”

Ida wanted to object. Frank was busy and sometimes careless with his own correspondence. No doubt he was uncomfortable having her write to a man. Perhaps he wanted to read the letters over himself before they were mailed. Why was she feeling so suspicious? Simply because they hadn’t placed an advertisement in the newspaper this time? Obviously Frank had come across this baby through his contacts in the city. He should have asked her; he should have honored her wish to stop nursing. But he was worried about money. He was determined to keep up with his brothers, and she must stand with him. She could nurse one more baby. She ran her palm over the baby’s fuzzy, wrinkled head and whispered her name. Mary.

S
ummer was a long, humid crawl. It was difficult to keep the greenhouses cool this time of year. The violets couldn’t stand the wilting heat, so the ventilation panels were cranked wide open, with a coat of slaked lime on the rest of the glass roof for shade. In addition, the plants were dampened frequently, so moisture clung to the air. The men often labored in and around the greenhouses in their shirtsleeves, and Ida would sometimes glance out her kitchen window to find them at the pump, their heads under a stream of water.

The men were most anxious during the summer, for the new plants were vulnerable to insects and black spot and other natural hazards. Until a good number were firmly established, the men kept a close watch. Though it wasn’t yet time for picking, the boys and the men were up on the boards to weed in the heat, pulling out the unwanted sprouts of plants that had come in with the soil and the manure and snapping off early runners that shot out from the crowns and sapped the strength of the plants. They removed the faltering violets as well, to make space for the hardier plants to succeed.

With the planting done and picking not yet begun, the women had time again to do their household chores properly. When they
could, Ida and Alice brought their work up to Frances’s cool veranda, where they could shell peas or darn socks and Ida could nurse the baby while Jasper napped in the rear bedroom of Frances’s house. Cook often sat out with them, and if Frances wasn’t home, the three of them would enjoy some lively conversation about Cook’s family across the river in Kingston or, more wickedly, the latest outrageous thing William and Frances had done. “Now Mrs. Fletcher wants to paper the parlor again! Says it’s too dark, when she just covered up that pretty stenciling last year” or “They wanted me to give up my Sunday afternoon off again so they could have the Nathans to tea!” Some days Ida and Alice brought Cook the newspaper. They followed closely the news of the war in Cuba; not only Avery Pruitt and Alan Harris had enlisted, but also Cook’s nephew.

On the days when Frances sat out on the veranda with them, reading one of her ladies’ magazines or doing some needlework, there was no newspaper or lively conversation. When they sat quietly, they could hear the men’s voices carrying over the ridge, the tone separated from the words. Ida could sometimes pick out four or five different birdsongs, a sprightly melody against the drone of summer locusts. Once in a while the crunch of a horse’s shoes on the pebbly lane drew the women’s attention, though from the height of the hill, it was hard to see who was passing. In this way, the lesser chores were completed with relative ease, and it almost felt to Ida that she had rested for an hour or two.

In the summer, Ida also tended the vegetables in her garden. She aimed to grow enough to feed her family into the fall, with potatoes and carrots and turnips to overwinter in the cellar. August was the time for canning: tomatoes, pickles, and the pears from a few trees that had survived the men’s failed attempt at building an orchard. These trees stood behind the henhouse, and Ida had claimed them as her own when the men stopped caring for them. No one complained, for after she spent several hot, laborious days
peeling and quartering the fruit and boiling jars eight at a time in the big canning pot, she always delivered several each to Harriet and to Frances.

August was also the time for Ida to plan the sewing she must do for the winter. When she had decided what she would need, she took a trip to Mrs. Brinckerhoff’s fabric shop in town. Frank had just helped dig two new graves in the churchyard, and he’d passed some of the money to Ida to spend as she saw fit.

It was a rare treat for her to leave the little ones with Alice and ride into town with money in her reticule. Oliver dropped her off in front of the pharmacy, and she walked across the street to Anna Brinckerhoff’s shop, where a bell on the door rang invitingly as she entered. Ida loved the smell of this shop, the polished wood floors worn around the edges of the old counter, and the clean, pressed fabric. Bolts of every imaginable pattern and color lined the walls on neat shelves from floor to ceiling, arranged by type—gingham and calico, cotton eyelet, wool, linen, silk, taffeta, chiffon, damask, cretonne, chintz—and within type, by color from dark to light. In the center of the room was the cutting counter and all around it notions: spools of thread stacked on wooden stakes, and buttons of every size and shape in miniature drawers, and glistening, sharp needles in crisp paper packets. There were pretty pincushion dolls with ceramic heads, handy snap-back tape measures, wooden darners, sewing birds, buttonhole scissors and lace scissors and a pair of fancy scissors from England with sterling silver handles.

Ida was quite fond of Anna Brinckerhoff, despite the shop owner’s reputation of being somewhat odd. She had sewn herself two split skirts, the kind worn only by young women for bicycling. To add to the peculiarity, she had pushed the fashion so far that her split skirts looked more like trousers with very wide legs. She was often seen wearing them when she walked her pet dog—a silly, citified thing to do—and when she and her husband
went sailing. The general conclusion of the men was that she caused no harm. They were sure their wives would not adopt her costume or her ways. But Ida and the other women who knew her were aware that she had been to suffragist conventions and had strong ideas about the future for women that went beyond split skirts.

As Ida wandered along the shop’s aisles, she slid out bolts of cloth to finger the fabric for thickness and weave and to imagine what she would make of it. Today she was captivated by a blue flannel the color of the summer sky blown clear of clouds, and she was sorely tempted to spend some of the money to buy it for a shirt for Reuben, with his blue eyes.

But she had come for winter dresses. There was an elegant brown brocade too fancy for every day, though Ida could picture it setting off Alice’s russet hair. Eventually she settled on a brown lightweight wool with a pretty thread of royal blue. She could sew Alice an everyday skirt with a separate jacket to fancy it up, a grown-up fashion that would please her. For herself, the decision was easier. She favored a maroon dress she’d been wearing for years that was too tight now that she was nursing again, and chose a broadcloth in a similar color with a pretty embroidered overlay for the collar. She would modify the pattern to create a flap with a hidden row of buttons behind the waistband so she could wear the dress while nursing.