by Amy Stewart
Should she do the same now, for poor Mr. Finley?
No. She couldn’t stomach the thought. After all, she was the one being paid to do a job. If that job involved bestowing any gestures of affection upon the client . . . well, she didn’t like to think what that sort of job might be called.
There wasn’t time anyway. Petey stood in the doorway between the parlor and the kitchen, took one last look around, made a few more adjustments to picture-frames and cushions, then dashed away to retrieve his camera.
“Remember,” he called, “you’re to take her in your arms, look over her right shoulder, and give me a little shock and fright. Don’t overdo it.”
Fleurette was close enough to Mr. Finley now to smell the wintergreen hair tonic she’d seen in the bathroom. He was a thin-featured man, with a sallow complexion and eyes flattened into their sockets.
He wet his lips. Fleurette feared she was in for a kiss.
She turned her head just slightly—making it easy for him to offer his expression of shock and fright over her shoulder—and leaned toward him just a bit so that he could get his arms around her. He hesitated at first, but when he heard Petey’s footsteps, he put a hand on her shoulder and then—
Mr. Finley burst into tears.
He didn’t just get a little damp along the eyelashes. He issued forth a sob, his chest heaving, a most pitiable moan gurgling up from his throat.
To make matters worse, he clutched at Fleurette and pressed his face into her shoulder. She was at once sticky from his tears. Mr. Finley was the sort of man who rocked back and forth when he cried, and he rocked Fleurette along with him, as a child would a doll.
This wouldn’t stand. She wasn’t paid to console a man through the end of his marriage; she was paid merely to help usher the proceedings along.
And she knew already that Mr. Finley wouldn’t be pressing an envelope containing another twenty dollars into her palm as she left. There were limits to how far Fleurette was willing to go for her wages, and Mr. Finley had exhausted them.
“I beg your pardon!” Fleurette said, quietly but firmly. She glanced over her shoulder at Petey, who’d come in from the kitchen with his lens trained on them, but now stood with the camera dangling resignedly from its strap.
“Yes, let me help you up, Mr. Finley,” said Petey, grasping the man’s arm and pulling him to his feet. “Why don’t you take a minute to compose yourself ?”
Mr. Finley looked back and forth at the two of them as if he’d almost forgotten they were there. “I hope you’ll excuse me. It just came over me.” He’d managed to find a handkerchief by now, and dabbed at his eyes.
“Go and take a minute to yourself,” Petey said, ushering him toward the powder room. “Straighten your tie and run a comb through your hair. You’ll feel better.”
As Mr. Finley disappeared down the hall, Petey dropped into a chair across from Fleurette and rolled his eyes. “Some of them just aren’t ready,” he said. “They go marching into our office with a head full of steam, but by the time we get here, they’ve gone soft.”
Fleurette wondered just then how many times Petey had done this before, with any number of her predecessors. “How did the other girls handle it?” she asked.
Petey said, “Some of them took pity on the fellows and tried to sweeten them up. But some girls just couldn’t watch a man cry. They called the job off.”
“Did they collect their pay anyway?”
“You’ve heard Mr. Ward. No picture, no paycheck. We can’t guarantee that the pictures will win the day in court, but we do promise to get them done. For that we get paid.”
Fleurette tallied up what remained of the funeral expenses and the doctor’s bill. She might not make a career out of coaxing weeping men out of powder rooms, but she decided that the least she could do for Francis was to see his final account settled.
With that in mind, she went on down the hall to have a word with Mr. Finley.
* * *
IT WAS ACCOMPLISHED more easily than she would’ve imagined. Mr. Finley wanted to be persuaded. He was in fact eager to be rescued and resuscitated. Mostly, Fleurette suspected, he wanted a sympathetic feminine ear of the sort Mrs. Finley had, until recently, always provided.
“It’s just terrible what you’ve been through,” murmured Fleurette through the bathroom door—Fleurette, who at that moment had little sympathy for someone whose beloved had only run off on an adventure and not been lowered into the ground in a casket.
The door opened at once. A pink-cheeked Mr. Finley looked all too eager to hear more along those lines. “My dear,” he whispered, “you have no idea.”
“Oh, but I do,” said Fleurette. “Someone you thought would be with you forever has simply vanished. Your whole life is upended. To go on living without her is intolerable.”
“It is, it is!” said Mr. Finley. “I just can’t—” He waved his arm around at the house. “I can’t just go on as I was before. Everything I did was for her. Everything I said, every . . .”
He fumbled for a handkerchief. Fleurette feared he was going to break down again.
“Which is why you must win her back,” she said.
This startled him so that he forgot entirely about his tears. That had been Fleurette’s aim exactly.
“However could I?” asked Mr. Finley. “She’s made her choice. She knows exactly what she’s left behind, and as for what the other fellow has to offer . . .”
Fleurette sighed. There was no hope, in other words, of Mr. Finley making any adjustments to himself. Dear Agatha could take what he had to give or look elsewhere. Clearly Agatha had chosen.
Nonetheless she plunged on, fishing not for an answer to Mr. Finley’s woes, but for her twenty dollars. “She’s only gone off with another man because she knows you’re right here waiting. But what if you weren’t? What if she had reason to believe that another woman was threatening to take her place?”
“But I would never . . .” Mr. Finley said, and then he took her meaning. “The photographs!”
“That’s exactly right,” Fleurette said. “Once you have the pictures, don’t they have to be sent on to Mrs. Finley’s attorney, so that she might file for divorce? You won’t be turning them over to the judge yourself, will you? Isn’t the idea to pretend that Mrs. Finley is the wronged party?”
In fact, Fleurette wasn’t sure what, exactly, happened to the photographs after they were printed, but she seemed to have more or less guessed correctly, because Mr. Finley embraced her idea immediately.
“Of course! The photographs are for her to put into evidence! But we don’t have to send them to her attorney.”
“That’s right. You could send them to her,” Fleurette said, “and tell her that your friendship with a certain girl in the office has blossomed into something more, and that the lady was eager to pose for a picture and move the matter along, provided her name is left out of it.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t want Agatha to think I’d found someone else and forgotten all about her!” Mr. Finley said.
By now Fleurette was leading her client down the hall, back to the sofa.
“She won’t think that,” Fleurette assured him, “but if the pictures are convincing enough, she’ll wonder about it, and she’ll have to come back and see for herself.”
12
“WHAT A TRIUMPH!” shouted Mr. Ward. “I should be tossing roses at your feet and demanding an autograph!”
“I collected my pay,” said Fleurette coolly, “and that was all the reward I expected.”
“Still,” said Mr. Ward, settling behind his desk and tapping his pipe, “you saved that job. Petey couldn’t have talked him into it, but you did.”
“I shouldn’t have needed to,” said Fleurette. “He wasn’t prepared.”
She allowed the implication to hang in the air: Mr. Ward was the one who should’ve prepared him.
He pretended to squirm under the pressure, but it was only a game to him. “Men are fickle and weak, haven’t y
ou learned that by now? Why don’t you let me make it up to you with a”—here he fumbled with some papers on his desk until he fished one out with a flourish—“a Mr. Theodore Packard, of Park Avenue. Would you mind a little trip into Manhattan?”
Fleurette would not mind at all. Mr. Ward explained that Mr. Packard was an older man, of a prominent family, too well-known among the New York lawyers to hire any one of them for a bit of clandestine work. For her time and trouble, Fleurette was promised an extra five dollars, a good supper, and a pleasant evening.
She looked forward to it inordinately. Since Norma had delivered her grim news about the difficulty selling the farm, Fleurette had done her best to stay out of the house. There was nothing but downcast faces and hushed conversations over columns of figures. Even the children sensed it, and stayed in their rooms. A few weeks had passed since Francis’s funeral. When they should have been climbing out of their grief, just an inch at a time, they were instead sinking.
A nice evening in New York, in the company of a wealthy and well-behaved man, would do a great deal to buoy Fleurette’s spirits. This job was coming to mean more to her than she liked to admit. The money was a tremendous help (she continued to slip everything she earned into Bessie’s pocket, having decided not to turn a dime over to Norma until she demanded it), but what mattered more was the theatricality of it—the costumes, the hairstyles, the false identities. What a relief it was to be someone else for a night! To be out among people, and involved in their affairs, took her mind off her worries in a way that hours spent in front of a sewing machine never did.
At the sewing machine, she could brood and worry all day long. In Petey’s automobile, on the way to New York, she kept her chin up and her mind on the job ahead.
“I hope it isn’t too much of an inconvenience to go all this way,” Petey said on the drive into the city.
“An inconvenience? I’d live in Manhattan if I could,” said Fleurette. “Does Mr. Packard really live on Park Avenue? I hope it’s the nice part.”
She didn’t know, particularly, if there was a part of Park Avenue that wasn’t nice, but she’d spent a little time with some New York society girls before the war and she knew how New Yorkers liked to draw their fine distinctions. If there was a fashionable block on Park Avenue, there would have to be an unfashionable block, too.
“I believe Mr. Packard will live up to your expectations,” Petey said.
He did indeed. The Park Avenue apartment was a penthouse, the fireplace marble, the hot and cold taps in the bathtub (which Fleurette inspected thoroughly but did not presume to touch) made of gleaming brass or perhaps gold, for all she knew, and the windows—well, the windows were marvelous, because they looked out over Central Park, to the flickering lights of the city beyond.
There simply wasn’t a better view in the world.
It was in front of this view that she did, in fact, enjoy a nice supper with Mr. Packard, a silver-haired gentleman of perhaps sixty, who dressed immaculately in the sort of suit that men of his generation wore in the evenings. The clam cocktail was the best she’d had, the guinea hen done to perfection, the cheese soufflé almost enough to make her want to learn to cook. (Petey, waiting downstairs in the butler’s pantry, was sent Virginia ham with pickles and rolls, and insisted that he preferred it.)
There were frail goblets of Champagne, a tray of cakes that rivaled Bessie’s, and, at the end of the evening, a tiny wooden box that set Fleurette to quivering when she imagined its contents.
“They say the smaller the box . . .” Fleurette began, but Mr. Packard waved away her speculations.
“It’s just something Mrs. Packard left behind,” he said. “If she misses it, her next husband can buy her one just like it in Pennsylvania.”
“I wouldn’t leave all this for Pennsylvania,” Fleurette said dreamily, looking around the enormous room where they’d dined together and posed for their pictures.
Mr. Packard laughed and said, “The difficulty with this place is that you’d have to live with me, too. I come with the furniture.”
Fleurette was so embarrassed that she dropped the box. “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest that it was only the apartment that mattered.”
“It’s always the apartment,” Mr. Packard said, bending over to retrieve the box. “Here, don’t forget your emerald.”
* * *
SHE DIDN’T LOOK inside that box until she was home, well away from Petey and any possibility that Ward & McGinnis might lay claim to a percentage. She waited until she was back in her cramped bedroom, and even pushed a trunk against the door for extra protection against her intrusive sisters.
Then she pressed her palms against the box, as if squeezing a magic charm, and opened it.
Inside was a sharply cut emerald, a perfect little rectangle set into a gold pin, gleaming and elegant.
“Look at this, Laura,” she whispered, holding it up to the bird’s cage but not (she knew better by now) putting it so close that Laura could reach it with her beak.
Laura slid across her perch and cocked one mandarin-orange eye at it. “Pretty,” she said.
“It is pretty,” said Fleurette.
Laura was acquiring new words every day, now that she and Fleurette sat talking to one another for hours at a time in Bessie’s sewing room.
“Laura,” said the bird. “Pretty.”
“Pretty Laura,” said Fleurette absently, her eyes more on the emerald than her parrot.
“Laura. Pretty. Green,” said the bird, and Fleurette understood: the emerald was the same color as Laura’s feathers. If she didn’t put it away now, and stop talking about it, Laura would be describing the pin to Norma by morning.
It was difficult enough, keeping secrets in this house. It was even more perilous with a talkative parrot watching her every move.
* * *
AT LEAST THEY weren’t to be crowded together much longer. The Wilkinsons had moved out, the Kopps would start paying rent, and already Constance and Norma were next door, scrubbing the kitchen sink and pushing rugs around. Fleurette went over, with some reluctance, to have a look at her new home, the setting for what seemed to be an endless, yawning future with her two older sisters.
Three Spinsters, they could name the house, if they were the sort of people who named houses.
The Wilkinsons’ house (this was, in fact, what they called the house, as it didn’t seem like their house at all) was identical to Bessie’s, only reversed, with the front door on the left instead of the right. There was the same sitting-room in the front, and behind that a kitchen and a little hall leading to the bathroom. Upstairs, under the eaves, were three snug bedrooms.
In this house Fleurette would also be expected to do her sewing on the little enclosed porch that served as a sewing room at Bessie’s, but she was relieved to find that the Wilkinsons had expanded theirs, added proper walls, and installed a door leading out to the side yard.
Fleurette thought it would make a fine space for a sewing room. In addition to the outside door, there were windows all around so that Laura could enjoy a view, and room in the corner for an armchair and a footstool. She could practically live in that room, as long as there was a lock to keep her sisters out.
Just as she reached over to test the doorknob, Norma walked in with a yardstick and started taking measurements. “We’ll put Mother’s old curio cabinet in front of that outside door,” she said. “You can put your thread and notions and things in it.”
When Fleurette objected, Norma saw at once her reason for it and said, “You don’t need your own private entrance. You’ll come and go through the front, like the rest of us.”
“It’s for customers coming for fittings,” Fleurette said. “They won’t want to walk in the front door and find you sitting around in your slippers.”
“I’ll hardly have time to sit around,” Norma said.
“Won’t you?” asked Fleurette.
Norma seemed not to hear and went on with her measurements, making notes
and jotting down diagrams.
The question of what, exactly, Norma would be contributing to this venture was one that grated at Fleurette. She was, at that moment, bringing in more money than anyone else, with assignments from Ward & McGinnis coming at the rate of two or three per week. (“We liberated France and now everyone wants to be liberated,” Mr. Ward liked to say of the post-war rush on divorces.)
Constance earned a steady paycheck at the department store, which would satisfy her share of their obligations, and she’d certainly take a better position if one came along. Employment was, of course, out of the question for Bessie with a baby on the way.
Then why, exactly, was Norma exempt from the obligation to find a job? Before the war, Fleurette would’ve considered Norma unemployable, what with her disagreeable nature and unwillingness to follow instructions or consider another person’s point of view—much less the direct orders of an employer.
But hadn’t she gone to France, and served with the Army, and followed orders and done what was expected of her? Had she not in fact served with some distinction, and been awarded a medal by the mayor of the village in which she was stationed?
What, then, prevented Norma from taking employment in a shop or an office like her sisters were expected to do?
To be fair, Norma was, at the moment, entirely occupied with the task of moving their old belongings out of the farmhouse and into the Wilkinsons’ house, and selling or disposing of anything they wouldn’t bring with them. Then there were the repairs to the farmhouse, and the work with the surveyors and the lawyers, and negotiations with the various parties currently leasing pastures from them.
It required a great deal of effort on Norma’s part, Fleurette admitted that—but what was to come after? Why was Norma bustling around Fleurette’s sewing room, arranging her things and deciding how she should run her affairs, but no one had a word to say about Norma’s affairs?
