Kopp Sisters on the March

by Amy Stewart

  In this way, a young girl could make a friend. She might never be permitted inside a saloon or a hall for dancing, but in a park she could catch a man’s eye, deliver a clever retort, and take a surreptitious sip of whatever was offered to her from a vest pocket. Claudia showed Beulah how to take a drink, and how to stop herself from shuddering when the fiery spirit took hold of her.

  When they did meet a man, it wasn’t much of a walk, after that, over to Mayo Street, where the police would leave them alone. That one narrow street was Richmond’s own little pocket of lawlessness, a sanctioned red-light district, a place where a man didn’t have to give his name and a girl wasn’t asked her age. There were rooms for rent, and bowls of punch and jugs of ale right out on the sidewalk, and little player pianos that would grind out tunes for a penny.

  Mayo Street was near the train station, close enough to draw men arriving from all over the country. It was an attractive place for girls, too, especially girls who were expecting a baby and wished to hide themselves away until it was born. There were houses where a girl in a certain kind of predicament could rent a room, and birth her baby in peace, and even keep it with her, if she wanted to, as long as she was willing to stay on and earn her keep afterward by entertaining the men invited in by her landlady. In this way, formerly respectable girls learned how to earn their living through the attentions of men, and Mayo Street flourished.

  But for Claudia, it started over in Monroe Square, in the bright sunshine, right under the watchful eyes of the town constables who once patrolled with her grandfather. And it was there that Claudia took Beulah on the night of the funeral, and for many nights after.

  Beulah didn’t much care for the other girls in Claudia’s circle. There was Henrietta Pittman, a fat-cheeked, curly-haired, gossipy girl who laughed too loud and told jokes Beulah never understood. There was another one named Geraldine, too tall and too skinny, all elbows and knees and a tendency to stutter. When Claudia introduced her to a third girl called Josephine, Beulah couldn’t help but wonder why all the girls hanging around Monroe Square bore a feminine version of a man’s name. Had they all been disappointments to their fathers?

  The girls—and the men, for that matter—made for unpleasant company, as far as Beulah was concerned, but she had to admit that Claudia had spirited her away at just the right moment. There was nothing for her at home. Her grandmother stayed in bed most days, and told Beulah not to bother her. “I’ve buried two husbands and six children, and I don’t know how many other relations,” Meemaw said. “Just let me be for a while. You go on and take care of yourself now.”

  In fact, Beulah could’ve taken care of herself and Meemaw, too. She could’ve put a meal on the table three times a day, and done the washing and mending, and swept out the house, and aired the bedding on Saturdays. But Claudia wanted Beulah to come with her, and Beulah was irresistibly drawn to anyone who wanted her.

  She and Claudia still came and went from Meemaw’s house as they pleased, taking their baths there and eating their supper when nobody else would buy it for them, but that wasn’t often. Someone always had a dollar in his pocket. Mayo Street was their home now.

  Beulah was thirteen before she looked up one morning and recognized the flat her mother had rented, all those years ago.

  It was only then that she understood that she and Claudia had been born on Mayo Street.

  10

  OF ALL THE courses on offer at the National Service School, Constance thought she might find Mr. Turner’s class on telephone, wireless operation, and map-making the most useful. None of the other occupations suggested by the camp’s curriculum held much interest for her. She hadn’t the patience for sewing, she was a terrible cook, she hated vegetable gardening, and while nursing was a noble calling, she wasn’t sure she had the temperament. Wasn’t there anything for which she might be particularly suited—any job that called specifically for a woman of her talents?

  She was convinced that her days in law enforcement were over. Just before the Kopps left for camp, two notices appeared in the newspaper advertising new positions for policewomen, one in Newark and one in Morristown. It would be impossible to travel back and forth from their farm in Wyckoff for a job in either of those cities. If she wasn’t allowed to sleep at the jail, as she had in Hackensack, she’d be forced to rent a room nearby and become an infrequent visitor to her own home. The extra rent would consume enough of her salary to make the enterprise unprofitable. Norma and Fleurette both urged her to put in an application anyway, although their reasons were quite different.

  “You could rent a room in Newark,” Fleurette said, “and I’ll stay there when you come home for the week-ends.”

  “But I’d be coming home to see you,” Constance said, a notion dismissed by Fleurette as implausible and overly sentimental.

  “It’s impractical for you to go all the way to Morristown, when there are criminals just up the road in Ridgewood you could catch all day long,” Norma said, “but you ought to go and have them offer you the job anyway, so you can retire this ridiculous notion that you’re unemployable.”

  “I’d like to retire this argument with you,” Constance said, “and it would be worth writing a letter for that reason alone. But there’s no time for that, if we’re about to leave for camp.”

  They were due to depart on Wednesday, and the notices had appeared in the Sunday paper.

  “A letter isn’t the way to go about it,” said Norma, who had never once applied for employment or responded to any sort of notice in the newspaper. “Go tomorrow, and present yourself in person. They’re going to want to have a look at you anyway. You can reach both by train in a single day if you start out early enough. Stay the night in Newark if you have to.”

  Constance felt that her sisters were a little too eager to put her out of the house, but she went regardless, setting off before dawn dressed in her old deputy uniform, which she’d avoided wearing or even looking at since her dismissal from the sheriff’s department. Fleurette had patched it, pressed it, and let out the waist just slightly to account for a lazy winter spent indoors. She did feel smart in the long tweed skirt and Norfolk jacket, even though the badge was missing from her chest. Her pockets were uncommonly light without the revolver and handcuffs.

  She appeared in person, newspaper notice in hand, just as Norma advised her to do, starting first in Newark and then proceeding on to Morristown. In both cases, the results were as dispiriting as they were humiliating. Word of her firing had reached both offices—of course they had. She had only to give her name, and to answer a question about her previous experience, for the police chief in each city to know exactly with whom he was dealing.

  “Terrible mess back in Hackensack,” said Newark’s chief, looking embarrassed about it. He was a jowly man who reddened easily. “How’s Johnny Courter getting along in the sheriff’s office over there? I never thought he’d want to run a jail, but who would?”

  “I wouldn’t mind it myself,” Constance said, ignoring the police chief’s inquiry regarding the man who’d fired her. “It was my pleasure to look after the female section, and I had reason to help with the other inmates, too, from time to time. I could serve as a translator, or go and interview female relations who had some knowledge about the case, or—”

  “Yes, well, what I’m expected to do is to hire a lady to go around to the dance halls and keep the girls in line,” the chief put in. “Put a watchful eye on the train stations, that sort of thing. I don’t much see the need for it, but the ladies in this town got up a committee, and before I could say a word about it, I’d been given three hundred dollars a year to hire a policewoman.”

  Three hundred? Sheriff Heath had paid her a thousand dollars a year, the same as the male deputies.

  The chief must’ve seen her hesitation, because he said, “It isn’t a salaried job so much as a . . . a sort of charitable endeavor. Something for a widow, maybe.”

  “Three hundred doesn’t put a roof over anyone’s hea
d, but I can see that’s not your aim,” Constance said. “I can do the very same policing your other officers can do, for the same salary. Would you consider a thing like that?”

  The chief looked genuinely puzzled by the idea. “What’s the point in hiring a lady, if you’re just going to do all the same things the fellows do? We have plenty of them already.”

  She saw no reason to argue the point and made her excuses to leave. The position for which she’d worn a badge before—one in which she had all the duties and responsibilities of any other officer (although admittedly with more attention paid to the female criminals and inmates)—was not necessarily on offer elsewhere. It was all too plain that her position in Hackensack had been a rarity, and that to take up police work in any other city would require her to step back in time by a decade or two, and to serve as a kind of public chaperone, watching out for hemlines and lip-stick, not thieves and murderers.

  Morristown was, if it were possible, only worse. The chief of police in that town looked Constance over once, heard her all-too-brief description of her previous employment, and then made the astonishing pronouncement that he was looking for someone less experienced.

  “We’d like a new girl to come in and . . . well, to make the position her own,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to have a lady barge through the door with a head full of ideas put there by some fellow in another county.”

  He clearly meant to say that Constance was that lady. She had by then braced herself for all sorts of objections, but hadn’t conceived of the possibility that having professional experience would be considered a hindrance. Still, she managed to corral her thoughts in time to answer, “But surely Morristown hires officers from other cities. In fact, one of Paterson’s policemen moved over here just last fall. He must’ve brought some ideas with him from his previous job.”

  “Oh, the policemen, sure. They move around all the time. But we’ve heard about some of the experiments that have gone on with lady officers, and we’d just like to try our own ideas, owing to some of the difficulties that have . . . ah . . .”

  He allowed his voice to trail off, hoping, Constance thought, to be interrupted before he had to say another word about the difficulties. She didn’t give him the pleasure. After allowing his unfinished thought to hang in the air just a moment too long, she said, “You run a police department. It’s your business to handle difficulties. I wish you luck with it.”

  A packet of Norma’s ham-and-butter sandwiches kept her company on the train ride home. Constance silently thanked Norma for having the good sense to pack three of them. When she arrived home, defeated, in the dark hours long after suppertime had passed, she said only this to her sisters: “Today I met two police chiefs who didn’t want to hire me. I expect there are others.”

  Norma and Fleurette made no argument to that. There was nothing to do but to pack her things for Chevy Chase.

  What, then, was left for her? In Mr. Turner’s class she thought she might find out.

  FORTUNATELY, SHE DIDN’T have to share the class with Norma, who considered herself an expert in all Army communications and liked to lecture anyone who dared venture an opinion on the subject, even if he was the instructor and she the student. The course was offered four times a week, and it just so happened that Constance landed in the Monday morning class and Norma attended on Tuesday afternoons.

  Mr. Turner was a man who believed in getting on with business. When the class began, at the stroke of ten, he launched right into a discussion of conventional telephone signals with no preliminaries whatsoever.

  “It being easy to confuse letters with others that sound similar, the Army has devised a list of words to be used in their place for the sake of clarity. This is of particular importance when transmitting cipher.”

  He paused and looked out at his students with the air of a man who had just made an especially good point and wished to be recognized for it. A few girls were taking notes. Their pencils could be heard scratching.

  “We begin with these because they are the very simplest sort of code, and necessary for the operation of any switchboard. It will give you each a taste of the work involved. We’ll see at once who among you has the aptitude for it. I’ve written out the alphabet here,” and he turned a blackboard around, revealing each letter with its corresponding word alongside. “I’d like a volunteer to help me demonstrate.”

  Margaret Day, the woman who’d insisted on setting up her own tent, accepted the offer.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Day,” Mr. Turner said. “Now, have you any experience in the use of a telephone?”

  “Would you believe it,” Mrs. Day said, “those wires run all the way out west. We just had one put in.”

  “Then you know the difficulties with making oneself understood over the wires.”

  “ ’Deed I do,” she said.

  “That’s fine. I’ll write the word so the others can’t see it, and you’ll spell it using the Army codes. We’ll see who can guess the word.”

  It wasn’t a particularly exhilarating start to the class, but he seemed pleased with himself for having made a game of it, so the students shifted in their seats while Mr. Turner scribbled the word and showed it to her.

  Margaret studied the board for a minute, then said, “Boy item easy love able sail king item.” She looked down at the note Mr. Turner had handed her again, mouthed the words one more time to be certain, and nodded satisfactorily.

  “There!” Mr. Turner beamed. “Who has it?”

  There was some muttering and confusion and more scratching of pencils, but one at a time, the girls sounded it out. “Bielaski?” they asked, hesitantly, each trying a different pronunciation.

  “Precisely!” Mr. Turner said. “Now, imagine if Mrs. Day had simply spelled the name. You might’ve thought it started with a V rather than a B. Or you might’ve thought that the letter S was an F. It’s impossible to hear over the wires. And she couldn’t just give you the name, could she? No one spells Mr. Bielaski’s name right the first time. Just look in the papers.”

  Apparently no one had looked in the papers. “But—who is he?” asked a girl in the front row.

  Mr. Turner, who was already paging through his code manual to launch into the next lesson, looked up, the creases in his forehead rising in confusion. “Who is Mr. Bielaski? Is that what you asked?”

  Constance didn’t like his arrogant tone. “It’s a fair question,” she said. Her voice carried easily from the back. Constance had the sort of intonation that allowed her to make herself heard without seeming to put any wind into it.

  Mr. Turner squinted to the back of the room to find her, then said, “Why, he’s the man who’s going to get us out of this mess.”

  “Which mess specifically?” Margaret inquired, having returned to her seat.

  Did everyone who taught codes enjoy speaking in them as well? Constance wondered. He seemed to relish the idea that he knew more than the rest of them.

  “Why—the war. This mess with the Germans. Haven’t any of you read about him? Surely your brothers and your fathers have. It’s actually quite thrilling, what he’s done. I’m not giving away any military secrets by telling you about it, because the papers have already written it up. Mr. Bielaski has charge of a division at the Department of Justice called the Bureau of Investigation.”

  He paused for a moment, anticipating some reaction. His students watched him curiously. Some held their pencils in mid-air, waiting for more, but no one said a word.

  “Well. Yes. He goes all over the country, searching for German spies and saboteurs. There are those who believe the war could never arrive at our shores, and those who think it already has. Mr. Bielaski is of the latter group. Every time a munitions depot goes up in flames, and every time one of our ships sinks before it can leave the harbor, it is evidence that the Kaiser’s agents are already afoot. They’re not just destroying our factories and our naval yards. They’re listening, and planning.”

  He leaned forward and put a hand
to his ear, to dramatic effect. At last, Constance thought, he was warming to his subject.

  She was warming to it, too. New Jersey had already seen more than its share of explosions at munitions plants. One of John Courter’s first duties as the new sheriff was to investigate an explosion in Kingsland. It had pained Constance greatly that she hadn’t been able to join in. One of her inmates had formerly been employed at that plant, and Constance was certain that she could’ve gathered some useful information from the inmate, if only she’d still been a deputy.

  “Mr. Bielaski has gone about,” Mr. Turner continued, “with very little in the way of taxpayer money, and assembled a network of volunteer agents all over the country who keep a watch out for suspicious activities.”

  “What sort of suspicious activities?” Margaret asked.

  “Anything that might undermine the United States government. If the Germans are allowed to gain a foothold here, and to persuade sympathetic minds to join in their cause, then the Kaiser has only to give the command and turn his army against us, right here at home. Mr. Bielaski’s men look for any sign that such a movement might be forming.”

  Constance stiffened at this. Such ideas were at the root of the distrust of German immigrants, as well as Austrians, Poles, and anyone else toward whom law enforcement took a dislike. It was the reason none of the Kopps dared admit to speaking German anymore. Mr. Courter had even flung such an accusation at her during the election, wondering aloud in his speeches whether a deputy with a name like Kopp could be trusted.

  “That’s why we must have our own network,” Mr. Turner said. “The Department of Justice started with the idea of hiring Pinkertons who spoke French and German. It took them a few years to realize that there is no such man. But Mr. Bielaski . . .”

  No such man? Was the government really unable to find a single detective who spoke French or German (or, as Constance did, both)? She was drumming her fingers on the table now, but it attracted attention, so she stopped.