by Amy Stewart
“Hmph,” Norma would say. “The judge doesn’t know a thing about it.”
But Norma did. Norma knew precisely what was best for everyone in her immediate circle—and for any number of complete strangers, too.
So it came as no surprise when Norma announced that Constance would abandon her plans to return to the Bureau of Investigation and instead find something suitable in Paterson, just down the road from the little village of Hawthorne, where they would be living. Constance had suppressed a shudder, swallowed hard, and agreed.
What else could she do? Of course the job in Washington was gone—jettisoned like any other excess weight tossed off a lifeboat. It was unthinkable that she could leave now, with Bessie expecting a baby.
But it had been unthinkable before that, if Constance wanted to admit it. Even before she knew about the third child, there were the other two to consider. How had she ever imagined that this would work? Would she just return to Washington, begin her new job, and send a few dollars home now and again to keep the children in shoes? How much could she spare, after paying her own room and board in the nation’s capital? How had she ever expected Bessie to survive?
The fact was that it had taken some time to adjust to the reality of Bessie’s situation. Before Francis died, Constance had, quite naturally, never given much thought to the prospect of her brother suffering an untimely death.
Even if she had considered the possibility, she would’ve assumed that Francis had made provisions for his family in case something happened to him.
But here they were, on the other side of the unimaginable, and there was no life insurance policy and surprisingly little in the bank.
There was no explanation, either. Why hadn’t Francis been able to put anything extra aside, in all these years? He’d always been the one to lecture Constance on responsibility. How to explain the position he’d left his wife and children in?
It was unfair, of course, and pointless to quarrel with the dead, but it seemed that her relationship with Francis in death was going to carry on as it had in life. What had he been thinking? How could he have been so careless?
He’d always treated Constance, Norma, and Fleurette as if they were barely able to look after themselves. Had he really expected that the three of them could look after his family if he was gone?
It didn’t matter anymore what Francis expected. It was too late to second-guess him. All that mattered now was what was in front of them.
So the job in Washington had to go. Although she would never dare complain, it did pain Constance considerably to write to Mr. Allen at the Bureau of Investigation and tell him that she wouldn’t be coming to Washington after all.
“If I could conduct Bureau business from here in Paterson,” she wrote, “I would happily do so, but with the death of my brother, circumstances require that I remain near my family.”
Mr. Allen replied at once with condolences and expressions of regret. While the Bureau did in fact employ a number of agents in other cities—someone had to keep an eye on Chicago, after all—any training program for new recruits, especially one as novel as a school for women, must be carried out in Washington, under his direct supervision.
“As I am only the Acting Chief,” he wrote, “I don’t expect to be here for more than six months myself, one of them already gone. But if you are able to return to Washington before my departure, I would endeavor to find a place for you.”
In this way, he closed the door to Constance’s career at the Bureau as softly and kindly as he could. It was a punch in the gut to Constance, but she bore it. After Francis’s death, every subsequent blow was just more of the same. What’s one more wound to the already wounded?
Norma, of course, knew nothing of the toll this took on Constance, because Norma only looked to conquering the next task and the one after that. There was no room for regret in Norma’s view of the world, only what was ahead.
So it was Norma who took it upon herself to find suitable work for Constance close to home. She read to Constance daily from the papers.
“The Hotel Hamilton wants a lady bookkeeper,” Norma would say from behind her paper as soon as Constance appeared in the kitchen in the morning.
One day she called, “Here’s one for a lady. Must be good with figures for general office work and stenography, and must have experience at silk concern.”
Norma put the paper down. “Would putting a silk man in jail count as experience at a silk concern?”
“Isn’t there anything besides book-keeping?” asked Constance.
“Saleslady for fancy goods and toiletries,” Norma offered. “Other than that it’s all factory work. Winders and starchers, mostly. Unless you want to be a housekeeper, but you’ve never kept your own house, so I don’t know why you would keep anyone else’s.”
On it went, day after day, with little in the way of interesting prospects for Constance.
It was Mr. Heath—now Officer Heath, patrolling the streets of Paterson in his uniform—who suggested that she apply for a position as store detective at Schoonmaker & Company. Constance snorted at the idea.
“I tried that line of work before,” she said. “Years ago, before you hired me. If I recall, I was told I was too tall and too conspicuous. If I applied today, I’d probably be told that I’m also too well-qualified.”
“I know Mr. Schoonmaker,” Officer Heath said. “He said he’d interview you himself at my recommendation. He’s a businessman. He only wants people to stop walking out the door with his goods in their pockets.”
“Well, I suppose someone has to guard the gloves,” she said dispiritedly.
If anyone knew what it meant to take such an enormous step down in prestige and pay, it was Officer Heath.
“It’ll get you through,” he said.
“And that’s all I’m after,” she said.
She presented herself the very next day and had no difficulty in talking her way into the position. Mr. Schoonmaker, she discovered, had been a supporter of Officer Heath’s during his tenure as sheriff. “I liked the way he ran that jail,” he said. “Put it on more of a business-like footing. Had the inmates doing the cooking so they might learn a trade. Sent the able-bodied men out to my brother’s farm in the summer and had them raise a crop. Kept the jail in potatoes and onions all winter long, did you know that?”
“I ate many a bowl of potato soup from the jail kitchen,” Constance said. “I usually stayed overnight, in a jail cell alongside my inmates, and ate what they ate.”
Mr. Schoonmaker nearly jumped out of his chair at that. “Now, you see, that’s just the sort of idea I’m talking about! Let the inmates know they’re not so different from the rest of us. How are they ever to join society again if they’re treated as outcasts?”
“There’s something to that,” Constance said, “but first, we do have to show them the error in their ways, particularly if they’re pocketing bottles off the perfume counter.”
“When my father opened this store,” Mr. Schoonmaker said, leaning comfortably back in his chair, having already made up his mind about Constance, “everything was kept in a case or behind the counter. You’d walk in and ask to see a pair of gloves or a box of handkerchiefs. There was no thought of just spreading the merchandise out where it could be fingered by anyone passing by. The old man would be shocked to see how we have it today, with dresses hanging on racks and shoes set out like apples at a market.”
“I remember how it was in your father’s day,” Constance said, “but you’re right to change with the times.”
She let those words hang in the air, the implication clear. Changing with the times might include hiring a rather formidable-looking lady detective.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Schoonmaker. “You’d be assigned primarily to hosiery and ladies’ smalls. We’re closed Sundays, of course, but Fridays and Saturdays are our busiest days. Expect to work late, because we need you here when the crowds are.”
With that, she was hired on at the rate of
eighteen dollars per week, only a few pennies less than she’d been earning before the war.
She resigned herself to guarding beaded purses and hosiery. What choice did she have?
6
NORMA, FOR HER part, took charge of the household as if she were running a small battalion. It was her firm belief that a pregnant woman should not under any circumstances manage the heavy chores, like laundry and mopping and rug-beating. Norma took on all of that, along with any small repairs that needed doing. Bessie allowed her to cook breakfast but would not otherwise relinquish control of the kitchen, to everyone’s relief.
Apart from her indifferent cooking, Norma was in every way qualified to run a household. She stuck to a schedule and she kept everything in order. She did not, however, have an eye for decorating. She never bothered to put out the kitchen towels that matched the curtains, each of them sporting identical trim sewed on by Bessie herself, nor could she remember to put the worn checkered rug at the back door, where no one would see it, and to put the nice new striped runner at the front door, to please the guests. Once an item was clean, Norma put it back into use, regardless of color scheme or symmetry or the preferences of others.
Nonetheless, with six Kopps traipsing in and out and a seventh on the way, there was an inordinate amount of scrubbing, washing, rinsing, and hanging out to dry that had to happen every day. Norma simply stepped in and did it, and no one complained about mismatched towels.
She also took responsibility for the farm—the selling of it, in this case, rather than the operation of it. Since the funeral, she had been running around to appointments with builders, surveyors, and anyone else who might have an opinion about the most expedient and profitable way to offer the place for sale. The house, she believed, would be in good condition after a little sprucing up, and the barn was perfectly serviceable. The dairy down the road continued to rent parcels of land, which could bring in a little profit for any buyer who didn’t mind having the neighbor’s cows roaming around. There was a great deal to do: agreements to be signed, arrangements to be made, repairs to be undertaken or hired out, and a full-scale cleaning, top to bottom, inside and out.
She handled most of the work at the farm herself. Nothing suited Norma more than solitary drudgery. She didn’t like helpers: she knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and couldn’t be bothered to explain it to anyone else. Other people tended to leave things half-done, while she knew how to stay on a job until it was finished, and then move on to the next, and to do it all in such an orderly fashion that one task never interfered with the next.
She would never, for instance, undertake a painting project if there were windows to be caulked: better to do all the caulking and trimming and then to paint, and then to repair the shutters while they were down for painting, and hang them last. Others she had worked alongside—including her very own sisters—would go about such a project entirely backwards and set them back a month.
Her afternoons at the farm, then, were absorbing if not contented. It was difficult not to think of France, and the countryside there, and the villagers and farmers who were undoubtedly out themselves right then, undertaking the very same tasks, only with older and better tools and materials. Norma thought fondly of the slate roof-tiles, some of them dating back centuries and held together with lichen and coal-dust, so vastly superior to her own wood shingles. In France one could outfit a barn entirely with metal fittings hand-forged by someone’s grand-père: hinges, handles, nails, bolts, all of it. One could, for that matter, have any sort of metal pounded back into place the next time the farrier came around to shoe the horses.
It was all so sensible, the way country life was organized in France. They’d had centuries to work out their particular ways, and they stuck with them, even under the threat of war or modernity.
As Norma went around the farmhouse, adjusting doors that no longer closed properly, banging floor boards back into place, and scouring windows glazed in dust and mildew, she couldn’t help but wish for a centuries-old homestead, built by great-grandparents who laid each stone with the certainty that the walls would shelter successive generations, who would live on past anything they could imagine.
That was not to be the case for their farmhouse. It would go to someone else, and the Kopps would move on. Norma didn’t mind the idea of living at the Wilkinsons’—she never minded the most practical solution to any problem—but she could see now a transience to their way of living that was to be the new order of things: Francis gone, a baby coming, Constance back from Washington but probably not forever, Fleurette with one foot always out the door, Lorraine half-grown and Frankie Jr. not far behind her . . .
Her family looked, to Norma, like the inside of a train station, with everyone rushing off in a different direction on separate timetables. Even with a hammer in hand and a mouthful of nails, she couldn’t fix them into place.
At night she thought of Aggie, and how Aggie said that she’d grown to love the tumult and chaos of war-time service. Nothing was the same from day to day. There was no dinner hour. A fresh influx of faces appeared before her every time the train came through. They’d invented new ways to bandage wounds, learned new treatments for diseases they’d never seen at home, and picked up a smattering of words in a new language.
Aggie came alive in the middle of such pandemonium. She never wanted to give it up.
What would have become of Norma, if she had stayed in Aggie’s whirlwind, and let it go to work on her a little longer?
She couldn’t imagine. As the days passed, she saw no reason to try.
7
“WE’RE GOING OVER to the Wilkinsons’ to measure for furniture,” Norma said. “You ought to come and have a look at the curtains. They’ll need to be done over.”
But Fleurette couldn’t bear to go measuring for curtains. Innumerable projects awaited her: not just curtains but table runners, kitchen towels, upholstery, a spring wardrobe for—well, for all of them, including Bessie, whose dresses needed constant letting out, and the children, who got taller by the week.
And then there would be tiny gowns for a new Kopp baby, the one task Fleurette relished. She was, in her mind, already adorning a layette with rosebuds. This baby deserved a beautiful new beginning.
But measuring for curtains? She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t set foot inside the Wilkinsons’ house and couldn’t bring herself to do so yet. That was her future, boxed inside those walls. She would settle into it eventually—but not today.
“I’ll look at the curtains later,” Fleurette said. “It’s time I went out to pick up some seamstressing.”
That was how Norma put it, as if seamstressing had been left alongside the road and she had merely to go along with a bag and a sharp stick to collect it all.
But what good would seamstressing do them? How much could she expect to earn, at piece rates? And what of her expenses—fabric and thread and notions?
It occurred to her, as she walked along Hawthorne’s little business district, that Norma hadn’t given these questions any consideration. She had merely dropped Fleurette into the slot that belonged to her, that of reliable seamstress and dutiful youngest sister, laboring for pennies.
Fleurette was constitutionally opposed to living her life according to Norma’s dictates and couldn’t help but wonder if there was another way. Why not put together an act, as she’d planned to all along, and convince Mr. Bernstein to start booking her into theaters? Perhaps a slightly better salary could be negotiated, one that would pay more of her touring expenses, leaving her with an entire paycheck that she could send home, as long as she was willing to dine on tea and crackers every night, and she was.
Surely, under such a scheme, she could contribute more to Bessie and the children’s upkeep than she’d earn taking up hems and dropping waistlines in Paterson.
As she hopped on board the street-car, this newly invigorated version of her future came into ever sharper and brighter focus. Wouldn’t her sisters be happy not to have
her underfoot? Wouldn’t Bessie be pleased to see her return to the theater? Bessie—having come from more cheerful and less judgmental stock and therefore able to exude such unencumbered goodwill toward others—always expressed unblemished delight at seeing her female relations pursuing their ambitions. Surely she would approve.
And although Bessie would need an extra pair of hands around the place, would she really need three extra pairs? Lorraine was old enough to help with the baby. Norma would always be around—what else would Norma do, but look after things—and then there was Constance, available for whatever needed doing when she wasn’t on duty at that dull little department store in Paterson.
Fleurette was becoming convinced that such an arrangement would benefit all of them. She would send her remittance home faithfully and, more than that, she’d send little gifts for the baby (booties knitted backstage), and newspaper clippings and programs for Lorraine to paste into a book of keepsakes. She’d be the glamorous aunt in the theater.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to offer comfort and companionship to Bessie and the children. Of course she did. But how much comfort did Fleurette have to give, when she was so miserable herself ?
And what a relief it would be to return to the stage! The theater was a wonderful place to become someone else entirely. At the theater she could put on a disguise. She could wear a costume, paint her face, and play a part. That’s what the audience paid for. They came to see an imaginary girl, singing her pretty songs, throwing out her clever lines, living in a candy-colored painted backdrop.
Fleurette wanted desperately to be that imaginary girl. She wanted anything but the life that her sisters were busy taking measurements for at that very moment.
* * *
SHE FOUND FREEMAN Bernstein at his office in Fort Lee, where he usually spent his afternoons taking calls and answering letters. He chomped habitually at a cigar and shouted into the telephone, which meant that she could both hear him and smell him before she knocked at the door.
