Kopp Sisters on the March

by Amy Stewart

  It was a boy, just like Meemaw said it ought to be. Claudia wanted to name him Luther after his daddy, but Meemaw wouldn’t allow it. “He can’t have his daddy’s name until his daddy marries his mama,” she pronounced. “You’ll call him Temple after your grand-daddy.”

  Claudia didn’t like that one bit, and countered, through her sweat and panting, that she would at least like to call him Crenshaw after her own daddy, but that, too, was unacceptable to Meemaw.

  “That Crenshaw has been no father to you. He never had a dime for your keep and you’ve hardly ever even seen him. He don’t deserve it. This baby was born in Temple’s bed and he will take his name.”

  That was all there was to it. The baby had a name, and Claudia was a mother now. Meemaw tried just once to take the baby over to the Catholic home, but Claudia wouldn’t let go of him and, if truth be told, Meemaw never tried very hard. She still loved the feel of a baby against her chest and carried little Temple with her every time Claudia would relinquish him. He was a sickly baby, yellow and prone to colic, and for that reason Meemaw insisted on waiting before he was presented to his father’s family. “Just let him pink up a little first,” she would say whenever Claudia asked about it.

  That suited Claudia fine. She was in no hurry to marry the man, or to join his family. Luther Powers was nothing but a farm boy, raised in the cotton fields and unschooled to the point of being unable to write his own name. He was a brute, Claudia said. An animal. Beulah tried to ask her sister why she’d gone around with him if she didn’t like him, and Claudia only sighed and said that she hoped Beulah would never understand the appeal of a man like that.

  As long as they were keeping the baby a little longer, Claudia said she wanted to show him to their mother. Jessie Binford hadn’t been seen nor heard from since before their grandfather died, but surely she could be found and brought back to set her eyes upon the infant.

  Meemaw was reluctant to summon Jessie Binford back to her house, but she understood Claudia’s reasoning. A woman should know her grandchild. If Luther agreed to marry Claudia, Jessie would never be a suitable visitor to Luther’s family’s home. If he didn’t marry her, the baby was to be deposited with the Catholics and none of them would see the child again. This might be the only opportunity for four generations of Binfords to be together.

  Meemaw was too old to go out looking for Jessie, and Claudia wouldn’t leave the baby, so Beulah was sent out to search for her mother, beginning with a series of old addresses that Meemaw had saved from envelopes and postcards over the years. Jessie had long ago abandoned each of those places, but from various landladies, roommates, and neighbors, Beulah picked up a theme: Jessie was described by her old acquaintances as a woman increasingly ill, desperate, and dependent upon her medicine. She heard that Jessie had gone to a hospital, to an asylum, and that she disappeared down to Mexico for some kind of exotic treatment. Jessie Binford had been everywhere, apparently, but where Beulah went looking.

  Finally it occurred to Beulah that if Jessie’s medicine was all that mattered to her, she ought to ask at the druggists. In Richmond, there were druggists, and then there were the druggists a woman like Jessie Binford might frequent. Beulah, even at her tender age, knew the difference.

  Several of the white-coated men behind the counters seemed like they knew her mother, but wouldn’t say. Finally, on her way out of a tiny druggist run out of the back of a barber’s shop, a delivery boy stopped her. He claimed that he had been running packages over to a woman named Jessie Binford, and for a dollar, he’d take her there.

  Beulah didn’t have a dollar and told him so. The boy, who was sixteen to Beulah’s thirteen, looked her up and down and said that she could keep him company, and that would be payment enough.

  Beulah had, by then, spent enough time on Mayo Street to know exactly what he meant. She told him that there was a family emergency and she had to hurry. If she found her mother, she’d return to him that night.

  What did he have to lose? He led her to an old abandoned brick building, once a tobacco warehouse, with the roof half caved in and the front door missing. Beulah couldn’t believe he delivered to a place like that.

  “What kind of druggist would make a delivery over here?” she asked.

  “He don’t,” the boy said. “I take whatever he won’t miss and bring it over myself. If any of them have a dime, they pay me.”

  “Well, you delivered me, so go on, now,” Beulah said. The boy reminded her, half-heartedly, that she’d promised to return to him that night, but Beulah just spat and waved him off.

  She stepped inside alone. She’d been in enough disreputable houses by then that she wasn’t too surprised by what she saw. The warehouse had been made into a series of small rooms without walls, only rugs and sheets hanging from rope, and from within those makeshift chambers came the moans and sighs of Richmond’s opium addicts. Beulah crossed her arms and stepped carefully among the broken brown glass and the empty tobacco tins, crossing from one side of the cavernous space to another until she found her.

  She hardly recognized her mother. Jessie Binford was nothing but a skeleton. Her hair hung down in oily strands, and she wore a dress that was plastered to her skin, she’d been wearing it so long. Her mother didn’t recognize her either, and couldn’t understand what she was saying about Claudia. The place smelled of the sewer, and up close, her mother smelled, horribly, of sex. It was the very end of summer, still steamy in Richmond, and there were flies everywhere, and enormous beetles and roaches scampering across the floor.

  Beulah did try to pull her up, not knowing what she would do with her after that. Meemaw wouldn’t take Jessie back in this condition, but how could she leave her own mother in a place like this?

  In spite of Jessie’s emaciated state, she was as limp and heavy as a sack of coal. Beulah couldn’t heave her to her feet. Jessie screamed and spit and fought when Beulah touched her—she said her skin hurt and to leave her alone—and soon others came running, women who looked just as bad as her mother, and men with long crusty beards and filthy trousers. “Leave her be,” they said. “She don’t want you. She knows where to find you if she does.”

  She don’t want you. Those words sliced through Beulah like a razor. She didn’t stay to hear any more. She rushed out with a hand to her face so she wouldn’t take another breath of that poisonous air, fled through town, and ran back home to Meemaw and Claudia.

  She refused to say anything about what she’d seen. She claimed that she couldn’t find Jessie, and only repeated a few of the more promising rumors. She’d probably gone out West, Beulah said to a skeptical Meemaw. She might’ve married and moved on.

  After that, Claudia, Meemaw, and Beulah settled back down, just the three of them, tending to a baby who cooed and smiled and occupied their hearts and minds. As for her mother, Beulah tried not to think about what she’d seen. Your mother’s sick, she told herself, when the image of that broken-down woman rose before her, like a specter, late at night. She can’t live here and you can’t go there. It was as if Jessie Binford had entered some netherworld, and resided not quite on this Earth but not in heaven or hell, either. She was in between, living in a room of locked doors. Beulah could not guess what door might someday open and offer her an exit.

  It was just before Christmas when Meemaw decided that the baby was ready to be seen by his father. She and Claudia rode out to Luther’s family farm with the baby in a basket between them. Beulah wasn’t allowed to go.

  “They won’t take her if they think she’s got family obligations,” Meemaw said.

  But didn’t Claudia have an obligation to her sister? Beulah didn’t dare ask for fear of what the answer might be. She stayed behind, but she learned the story later from Meemaw, and from Claudia’s infrequent letters.

  Under Meemaw’s instructions, Claudia wore a plain dress suited for farmhouse work, and kept her hair—all the more luxurious since baby Temple came into the world—in a tight knot at the base of her neck. She c
omplained that she looked like a scullery maid. Meemaw told her that was all she’d ever be, and if she didn’t like it, she could stay behind and Meemaw would deliver the baby to Luther’s family by herself. But Claudia wasn’t about to wait at home. She was unable to resist the high drama of showing Luther Powers the baby he’d made.

  Meemaw knew her business and made sure they turned up in the middle of the afternoon, when the men would be out in the fields and Luther’s mother would be in the kitchen making supper. She went around to knock at the kitchen door and held up little Temple by way of greeting. Claudia hung behind her, looking guilty. Mrs. Powers didn’t have to ask who the baby belonged to.

  “God damn that Luther,” she said, and pushed the door open so they could step inside.

  Meemaw made the introductions and handed the baby to Mrs. Powers. She unwrapped him and looked him over, checking his fingers and toes and running a finger inside his mouth.

  “He’s a Powers, all right” was all she said. She left him on the kitchen table, writhing around bare, and turned back to Meemaw with the air of a woman brokering a business transaction.

  “Do you intend to leave him here?” she said.

  “And her, if you’ll have her,” Meemaw said.

  They both looked over at Claudia dubiously. “She don’t look like she’s done a day of work,” Mrs. Powers said.

  “No, but she will now,” Meemaw said. “And she’ll give you another boy if you want one.”

  “She better hurry,” Mrs. Powers said. “Harrison don’t have more than ten years left in him, and we got forty acres out there. Never had but one boy myself. You can see what good he done me.”

  “Then you’d best take her,” Meemaw said. “Get your trunk, Claudia.”

  Just like that, it was done. Claudia’s trunk was put into Luther’s bedroom, and when Luther came in from the fields to wash up for supper, he learned that he was a father and a husband-to-be.

  Claudia had forgotten what a flat face he had, and how one eye never quite looked at her.

  “Where will she sleep until the wedding?” was all he had to say, when the situation was made plain to him.

  “It don’t matter about that,” Mrs. Temple said. “You all get started on another boy, and we’ll call the preacher over here after Christmas.”

  That suited Luther just fine. He was too shy to take Claudia’s hand in front of his mother, or to smile at her or give her an idea of whether he had any affection for her at all.

  Luther’s father had even less to say. He was already old—not as old as Meemaw, but old enough so that he didn’t have to bother with polite conversation anymore. He put another peg on the wall for Claudia to hang up her coat alongside theirs, and that was all there was to it.

  Claudia had a new family now, and a new life.

  16

  IT WAS RIGHT around that time that Henry Clay Beattie turned up on Mayo Street. He was just like any man looking for a good time with a girl, but it was obvious to Beulah that he came from a different world. He wore smart suits and crisp collars, and his hat was always blocked and brushed. Under that hat was a fine head covered in thick dark hair that never would stay slicked in place. He smelled of a barber’s tonic and that sweet, smoky fragrance of wet tobacco and burnt orange peel.

  Most of all, though, Henry Clay was devastatingly handsome, with mischievous eyes and wide, full lips that looked like they might devour you and enjoy doing it. From the minute she laid eyes on him, Beulah wanted to know what it might be like to have those enormous hands—smooth, clean hands that hadn’t done any work—holding on to hers.

  Beulah wasn’t the only one drawn to Henry Clay. Every girl up and down the street had her eyes on him. But Beulah was the youngest and the prettiest—or maybe she was just the youngest, and that made her the prettiest in the eyes of most men. There was something a man couldn’t resist about a girl who was still growing. Beulah knew that already.

  She was living on Mayo Street most of the time now that Claudia was gone. She stopped in to see her grandmother and stay a night or two when it suited her, but mostly it didn’t suit her. After Claudia left, the girls on Mayo Street became sisters to her, trading clothes and secrets, telling her what she needed to know about what men might expect of her, and sharing a bed with her when she didn’t have a way to pay for one of her own. Beulah had been wrong to think that Mayo Street was a lawless place. It ran according to its own set of laws, and Beulah had learned them and found a way to be comfortable there.

  Henry Clay was too good for Mayo Street. He was twenty-two and had discovered plenty of ways to get into trouble, but his version of trouble centered around boating parties and summer trips to vacation cottages. He didn’t have to go down to Mayo Street to find a girl, in other words. He didn’t have to spend his money to have a good time. In the wealthier circles where he traveled, the son of one of Richmond’s most powerful merchants found that his desires were easily met, without him having to expend any effort at all to satisfy himself.

  But one night, in the company of a cousin who’d come in from out of town, he wandered over to Mayo Street on a dare. The cousin didn’t know anything about Richmond except its notorious red-light district and couldn’t believe Henry Clay had never ventured down the lane of disreputable houses and saloons. With a five-dollar bet on the table from the cousin, Henry Clay did his best to make himself unrecognizable and went along.

  He didn’t meet Beulah on his first night there. He found, to his surprise, that Mayo Street was a comfortable place for a man like him, a man who chafed at the strictures of good family upbringing and resented the pressure to marry well and go into business with his father. On Mayo Street, nobody cared about a thing like that. His whims could be catered to without any guilt or obligation, and without fear of reprisal or second-guessing. If he wanted to play cards and drink whiskey all night, nobody thought anything of it. If he wanted to go upstairs with two or three girls, Mayo Street could accommodate that particular wish, too.

  He met Beulah in May Stuart’s parlor, having been delivered there late one night after he and his friends had been thrown out of another place for being too rowdy.

  “May won’t mind,” one of them pronounced, and off they went, to the shambling three-story boarding-house where Beulah sometimes resided. She happened to be in that night, nursing a sore throat, wondering if she ought to go home to Meemaw but not wanting to have a fuss made over her. So she stayed, and took a cup of May Stuart’s curative tea, which was bitter and required Beulah to pick the twigs out from between her teeth. But the girls said it worked for everything, from fever to monthly pains to stopping a baby before it took hold in the womb, so she drank it.

  She was just about to go upstairs with another cup when Henry Clay Beattie stepped in her way.

  “Hey, girlie,” he said, smiling down at her.

  “Hey” was all she could think to say back.

  “You live here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He looked around, as if he were marveling at the place, although it wasn’t much to marvel at. May Stuart favored floral wallpaper in any pattern she could get her hands on. She put it up herself, and did it badly, so that each layer peeled away and revealed another. Atop this pastiche she nailed gold frames—any kind of frame, with any kind of picture in it, as long as the frame itself was gold—and hung mirrors anyplace she could find the room. It looked glorious to Beulah the first time she saw it, but now she thought it was a mess and wondered why May didn’t bother to fix her place up and try to bring in a higher class of customer—customers like this fine specimen standing before her.

  “How old are you, girlie?” Henry Clay asked.

  “Sixteen,” Beulah said. She was thirteen.

  “Where does your mama think you’re at right now?” For some reason, the men on Mayo Street liked to believe that the girls came from good homes, and had mothers who would be scandalized if they knew what their daughters were up to.

  “My mama knows right
where I’m at,” Beulah said, just to defy him, but she flinched a little as she said the word mama.

  Henry Clay took a step back. Even in his compromised moral state, this seemed too much. “Does she live here too?”

  That made Beulah remember the part she was to play. She laughed and smacked his arm. “No, silly. I’m teasing you. Does your mama know where you’re at?”

  Henry Clay looked shocked, like he didn’t care to hear mention of his mother, that pillar of Richmond society, in a place as low as this. But all he said was “My friends are getting up a little party. Why don’t you come along?”

  Beulah mustered all her boldness, looked him right in the eye, and said, “I haven’t got a thing to wear.”

  “Well, then, you’ll do just fine, girlie,” Henry Clay said, and took her hand.

  17

  CONSTANCE DID NOT, upon discovering Sarah and the others in the woods, take up the challenge and begin immediately to train them for war work, as much as she might secretly have wished to. She ordered them to bed, as any self-respecting matron would do. But she was not immune to their pleas, particularly Sarah’s, for whom this was no escapade, but preparation for a future both imminent and treacherous. She entreated Constance to return the following night, and to teach them whatever she knew, if only for one night.

  “An hour in the woods won’t harm anyone,” Sarah said. “We only want to improve. Come and show us what you can do, and give us a chance to show what we can do.”

  “Yes,” answered Fern, the youngest of them, and so like Fleurette, but without Fleurette’s utter disinterest in military or martial arts. “Give us a chance. Don’t let us go off to France without—well, anything that might be of use.”

  Who could resist a tiny creature like that, begging to be taught? Wanting more than the camp curriculum had to offer? Whether she might ever make it to France or not was another question, but her desire to serve was sincere. Constance agreed, warily, to meet them once more in the woods.