Free A Violet Season by Kathy Leonard Czepiel Page B

at both of them,” he said.
    “Take care, Oliver. Know your place.”
    “My place ought to be the same as Norris’s!”
    “It ought to, but it’s not. You’ve known that all along.”
    “And now I know why! I wish I could march right up there and set a match to that fancy old house.”
    “I used to feel that, too,” Ida said. “But your best revenge is to refuse to play the part they’ve given you. Go to Boston.”
    Her son, her young man, held her gaze then. For the first time, they were adults in league, and she had reached the moment when she would willingly send him away.
    “I’ll finish this season,” Oliver said. “Do you think that’s all right, to wait until spring?”
    “That will give you plenty of time to save up and make your plans,” Ida said. She placed her hand firmly on his and added, “Don’t tell your father.”
    Oliver breathed in as if to speak, then let out a labored sigh.
    “I can’t guess his reaction,” Ida said. “He thinks he’s working the farm for you, and you know . . .” She didn’t need to say more. Oliver still had a splinter in his neck from the night Frank had beaten him in the barnyard. “Tell him when you’re ready to go.”
    Oliver nodded and guided the team up the driveway. He made it into the barn and Ida reached the house before the dark-lidded sky dropped its next load of rain. It rained all night, and in the morning, when Ida stepped into her garden, the ground was cold.

 
    So, tell me more about growing up on a violet farm. I didn’t realize anyone grew violets for sale.
    Oh, they were extremely popular when I was a girl, more popular than roses are now. Whenever a woman went out on the town, she would wear a big bunch of violets pinned to her waist or her shoulder.
    What made them so popular?
    People used to say they stood for love and loyalty. They were seen as modest, innocent flowers. You find them everywhere in literature. Keats called the violet “that queen of secrecy.” I’m not sure which poem that’s from.
    That seems contradictory, doesn’t it? Innocence and secrecy?
    Life is contradictory.
    I suppose. I always thought violet—purple—was supposed to be a color of royalty. . . . What do you think of it?
    The color violet? I don’t know. I never really thought about it. I suppose it seems a little bit dark to me. Shadowy. I don’t really care for it.
    —excerpt from an interview with Mrs. Alice Vreeland for The Women of Albany County, July 6, 1972

7
    T he book that Anna Brinckerhoff had loaned Ida lay wrapped and unread in her cedar chest for two weeks. In that time, she found no steady work for Alice. Frank had said nothing more, but Ida began to watch the young men of Underwood, considering which of them might make an appropriate match if things came to that. She thought the clandestine book might give her some other ideas about Alice’s future. So one Wednesday afternoon, while her dough was rising and the children were napping and a misty rain kept her from the garden, she began to read.
    She was put off at first by Mrs. Stetson’s comparison of working women to horses. Both, the author claimed, were used by men, their masters, to earn more money, though neither had the independence to choose that work. Ida had to admit that was true. It might even be humorous if it weren’t so pointed an observation. Mrs. Stetson argued quite logically and convincingly that society had assigned women a single wage-earning occupation: getting a husband. For the good of society, Mrs. Stetson said, women should participate in the economic world of work—work of their own choosing. Ida’s experience had already proven this argument idealistic and impractical.
    The world was changing, about that there was no question. In the city young women were indeed becoming secretaries and shopclerks, jobs they would hold until they married later on. Was it possible that her daughter would live in a world in which women could easily make the choice