by Amy Stewart
“Mr. Thorne! Look what you’ve done.” She didn’t dare crawl around on the floor to retrieve the pins: he’d be on her in a second.
Where was Mr. Ward?
“It’s better like that,” Mr. Thorne said, looking greedily at her hair, which now, Fleurette realized in a panic, made her look even more like a woman ready for bed. He rocked back and forth in a manner that suggested that he was about to launch himself off the settee and back at her.
Fleurette put a hand out. “Stay where you are.” The authority in her voice surprised her: it sounded like something Constance would say.
Through some miracle he obeyed. It was perhaps the miracle of drink: Fleurette could see his eyelids drooping, the soporific effects going to work on him.
“But if I’m over here,” he mumbled, “and you’re over there . . .”
Fleurette was by now looking around the room, gathering her things. She could do without the twenty dollars this time. She wasn’t about to go near the man again, even if Mr. Ward walked in with his camera at that instant.
She would’ve slipped quietly away and brought the evening to a discreet close, except that Mr. Thorne roused himself and staggered to his feet just as she lifted her coat from the coat-rack.
“Now, Gloria, don’t run off.” He had the most enormous mouth, thick lips, wet with spittle, and he pursed them appallingly as he leaned toward her.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, but he was past hearing. He leaned in for his kiss and put a hand at the back of her neck.
She didn’t have a minute to think, but she didn’t need it. Constance had shown her what to do. She’d shown a whole group of girls, back at a training camp before the war.
“If you’re shorter than him, it means you’re underneath him,” Constance had said. “And if he’s pulling you toward him, then he’s already supplying the force. Go straight up and in with the heel of your hand”—and here she pantomimed it, pushing the heel of her hand up into the underside of an attacker’s nose.
“It’s the most delicate part of the nose,” she said. “Go in with everything you’ve got. Even if you don’t break it, he’ll step back. That’s when you hook his leg with one of yours. He’ll fall, and you might go with him. Go ahead. Once you’ve landed on top of him, you can stomp on a hand or an elbow or a knee. You’ll be able to break something.”
Fleurette didn’t recall Constance’s instructions so much as she felt them. She let Mr. Thorne pull her close, and she brought her hand up as he did, slamming her palm into his nose as if she was aiming for the back of his head—as if she was aiming for the other side of the room.
That was all it took. He yelped and stumbled back, losing his footing.
He fell like a tree. Fleurette did not, in fact, go down with him.
Instead she ran out the door, down the back stairs, through the hotel kitchen, and directly home.
14
IT WAS A SHAME about the carpet at the Metropolitan. If the floors had been tile, or even an unforgiving oak, Mr. Thorne’s skull might’ve cracked in two.
As it was he suffered only the mildest bump on the head and a dizzy spell that dissipated when Mr. Ward burst into the room, camera in hand, to find his client in disarray and his employee vanished.
Mr. Ward didn’t need Mr. Thorne to explain what had happened. The hairpins scattered around the carpet, the ostrich-plumed hat still resting on the hat-rack, and the bloodied nose of Mr. Thorne himself told all.
What sort of apology was a woman due, after an ordeal like that? What sort of explanation was in order?
Whatever it was, Mr. Ward did not go personally to deliver it. He sent Petey.
This posed any number of difficulties for Petey. There was no easy way for him to approach the Kopp household without the risk of exposing the entire scheme to Norma and Constance (whose wrath Petey quite rightfully feared). If Fleurette had managed to keep her association with the firm of Ward & McGinnis a secret, Petey would only make things worse for her by turning up on her doorstep.
But every lawyer has his tricks. Petey waited until Constance left for work (Constance, with her law-and-order tendencies, being a greater threat than Norma, or so he believed) and tipped a delivery boy, making his rounds for a nearby druggist, to slip a note in the letter slot at the Kopps’ front door.
The note was sealed in a business-like envelope. The sender, carefully typed in Petey’s most professional manner, was Van Pelt’s Fabric & Notions.
The note inside read: “Meet me at our usual spot. I’ll wait until eleven.”
Fleurette did, in fact, make him wait until eleven: he deserved that. When she arrived at their meeting spot around the corner, next to a little park where Petey often collected Fleurette or dropped her off when they did a job together, she refused to get into his automobile. She simply stood next to it, arms folded, as somber and forbidding a creature as she could be, in a dull gray coat and the same black hat she’d worn to Francis’s funeral.
Petey didn’t like the idea of having this discussion in public, as there were people out and about, and neighbors sitting just behind curtained windows. But when he stayed at the wheel a second too long, Fleurette shrugged and walked off, leaving him no choice.
Next to him on the front seat was the bag Fleurette had left in Mr. Ward’s auto the previous night. He grabbed it and chased after her. Fleurette snatched it away from him and kept walking.
“Mr. Ward sent me,” he began, but Fleurette shot him such a look of ferocity that he stopped.
When she turned to face him, Petey saw her as she was, stripped of paint and artifice, without a costume, with no role to play. Her lips were pale, her cheeks colorless, her hair not even pinned, but merely tied in a knot with a hat slapped on top.
“I know what Mr. Ward did,” she said, “but what did you do? Where were you last night?”
“He didn’t tell me anything about it, miss, I swear. I wouldn’t have left you alone with a fellow like that. We could’ve found another way.”
“Another way to do what? He could’ve killed me!”
Petey ventured a smile. “Or you could’ve killed him. That was quite a punch you landed, knocking down a fellow that size.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure if I’d killed a man, we’d all be doing just fine this morning.” Fleurette said that a little too loudly, and looked around to make sure no one had heard. She turned and marched into the park, which was empty save an old man tossing bread crumbs at birds.
“And what do you mean, we would’ve found another way? Another way for Mr. Thorne to get what he was after? Because it wasn’t pictures he wanted last night.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Petey said, “and Mr. Ward should’ve told you the truth about that. Our client is Mrs. Thorne.”
Fleurette had been storming along at a furious pace, but she skidded to a stop at that. “Mrs. Thorne,” she said, turning it over in her mind. “Do you mean to say that she wanted pictures of her husband with another woman, but he—”
“He didn’t know about it,” said Petey. “You see, Mrs. Thorne knows exactly what sort of man her husband is. What he tried with you last night—”
“He’s tried with others,” Fleurette muttered.
“And Mrs. Thorne never had the nerve to sock him in the nose like you did. But she did want a divorce. She needed a picture of him with a girl—any girl, you see, so long as a judge was convinced—but she didn’t want Mr. Thorne to know that she hired the photographer. She wanted us to set him up. I guess she was afraid of him.”
“I guess she was,” Fleurette said tartly. “Wouldn’t Mr. Thorne suspect, when Mr. Ward barged in with the camera?”
“That’s why she chose Mr. Ward,” Petey said. “He and Mr. Thorne know each other. She thought Mr. Ward could make it seem like a joke—them having a drink downstairs, then he goes upstairs to meet a girl Mr. Ward told him about, and after a few minutes Mr. Ward jumps in with the camera, treats it like a prank . . . That was the idea anyway.”
&n
bsp; “Do you mean to say that Mr. Ward told him that I was a—” Fleurette could hardly summon a word to describe it.
Petey sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck. “He told Mr. Thorne that you were a girl they both knew, from some wild night they’d had together. He said that you’d taken a liking to him—to Mr. Thorne, that is. And that you were waiting upstairs, hoping to meet him.”
“Well, that’s despicable. And now Mr. Ward sends you as his messenger.”
“To be honest, miss, he was afraid to come himself. Those sisters of yours give him the jitters.”
“They ought to.” Fleurette wondered what Constance would say if she knew what Mr. Thorne had done. But there was no way to tell her without explaining why she’d been going into hotel rooms with men for money.
It had seemed like a game, when she began, but now she could see that it was someone else’s game entirely. She was just one of the pieces, to be moved around on the board for points.
Just as she was thinking of points and score-keeping, Petey pulled an envelope from his coat-pocket. “Mr. Ward sent this,” he said, sheepishly, handing it over but looking down at his feet as he did so. “He said you deserved it.”
“You mean I earned it,” Fleurette said, tearing open the envelope. There was fifty dollars inside. She crumpled it and slammed it against his chest. “Is this the going rate for getting groped by a man twice your size in a hotel room? Well, I didn’t agree to that job, so I won’t take the money.” She stomped on. The park was so small that they were only making circles around it, but Fleurette felt she had to keep moving.
“I told him you wouldn’t accept it,” Petey said, huffing along beside her.
“Did you also tell him that if he can afford to pay me fifty dollars now, he could’ve afforded it a month ago?” Fleurette was shouting now. “I’m not doing this for my own entertainment.” She stopped and pointed down the street, in the direction of Bessie’s house. “My brother’s dead. His widow has another child on the way. Last week she didn’t have any money for food. Food, Petey! Food that you put on the table and eat so that you can live.”
Fleurette glared at him as if she expected an answer. Petey opened his mouth to say that he understood what food was, but thought better of it.
It didn’t matter. She spat the words out. “We are four women and three children. There is no father looking after us. There is no husband. I’m not doing this for pin money.”
“No, ma’am,” muttered Petey.
Fleurette was thoroughly spent by now. She also felt lighter, having gotten it all out.
“You tell Mr. Ward that I’m the wrong girl for this job. But if I ever hear of him setting up another girl like that, I won’t tell Constance. I’ll come after him myself.”
15
NORMA AND CONSTANCE were accustomed to Fleurette’s moods and didn’t find it out of the ordinary that she sulked and hung about the house and contributed none of her usual chatter at meal-times. It was the belief of all three Kopps that a good sulk had restorative qualities: it was a way of shutting down the engines, blowing out the accumulated grime, and allowing hot metal to cool.
In fact, Constance, observing Fleurette’s mood, remarked to Norma that she wouldn’t mind a nice long sulk herself. Norma told her to wait until Fleurette’s was over, because the Wilkinsons’ foundation might collapse under the leaden weight of two Kopps giving in to their darker tendencies at once.
Fleurette was not immobilized: she remained at her sewing machine, making over her professional co-respondent costumes, one last time, into everyday dresses that she could wear herself. (She gave no thought to returning them to Mr. Ward. Most of them were half-disassembled anyway and of no use to him.)
Once she had her own wardrobe in order, she enlisted Lorraine’s help in hand-lettering a set of cards advertising her seamstressing services, to be posted in shops around town.
“The first notices I put up were on ordinary letter-writing paper and they simply fell apart in the shop windows,” she told Lorraine, although she hadn’t, of course, posted any notices at all and merely said it to perpetuate the fiction that she’d been running a legitimate seamstressing operation all this time.
Regardless, the new batch was made on heavy cardstock, carefully lettered in a modern script that Lorraine copied from a magazine, and the two of them had a fine Saturday afternoon together in Paterson, going door-to-door and posting their notices.
It was good to get out with Lorraine. There had been such a flurry of activity since the funeral that no one had thought to take the children on any sort of outing, or to try to relieve their cares in any way beyond the everyday, practical matters that consumed the adults’ every waking hour but mattered little to the children.
“Mother keeps telling us how glad she is to see everything go back to normal,” Lorraine said, when they stopped for egg creams after they’d posted their notices, “but nothing’s normal anymore.”
“No, it won’t be, not without your father,” Fleurette said. “Do you know that I was about your age when my mother died?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Lorraine.
“I hadn’t either, until just now,” said Fleurette. “She’d been ill for a while, so we were prepared . . . although I didn’t feel at all prepared at the time. I think I only believe that now in hindsight. But I do remember Constance and Norma talking about how we’d go on living as we always had, and how good it would be for me that nothing had to change. But of course, everything changed. Every little moment in the day was different without her. The whole household had revolved around her, and then it didn’t. Everything I did was in relation to her—whether she would like it or not, whether she would approve, whether she would find out . . .”
Here Lorraine laughed, a little too knowingly. What had she been hiding from Francis or her mother? Fleurette realized she ought to keep tabs on the girl. They were closer in age: Lorraine might tell Fleurette a secret that she wouldn’t tell her mother or her older, more law-abiding aunts.
“That feeling didn’t stop for a long time,” Fleurette said. “It didn’t seem right to stop taking her into account. I thought that’s what I had to do, if we were to keep everything the same.”
“And did you?” asked Lorraine. She was looking at Fleurette hungrily, desperate for whatever crumbs of insight Fleurette could offer. She had such deep dark eyes, so like Fleurette’s. As Lorraine got older, she came to resemble Fleurette more and more. The two of them could’ve been sisters.
How could she tell Lorraine the truth—that in fact, she had, in some ways, forgotten her mother? That without meaning to, she had lost the sound of her mother’s voice, and could only recall her face as she’d seen it in those last days, when she was so ill?
What had her mother looked like when Fleurette was five, or ten? Those memories were gone.
And did Fleurette still take her mother into account? Did she recall her expectations, her wishes, her demands?
She did not. That was the truth of it. Her mother belonged to another era. She did not live to see what had become of them, and what they’d had to do to survive. She didn’t live to see Constance wear a deputy’s uniform, or Fleurette appear on the stage, or Norma set sail for France. She didn’t live to see Europe torn apart by war.
She did not, thankfully, live to see her son put into a grave. Nor would she see her third grandchild born.
What could Mrs. Kopp possibly have to say about the world they lived in today, or about the predicament that her daughters now found themselves in?
Fleurette couldn’t imagine it, and she had to admit (to herself, she would never say it aloud) that she hadn’t much tried.
The same would happen to Lorraine someday. Five years would pass, or ten. The world would be different in ways that none of them could foresee. And Francis wouldn’t belong to that world. He would belong only to the past.
Fleurette pushed the last of her egg cream over to Lorraine. “You don’t have to wonder how y
ou’re going to feel. It’ll just happen. You’ll be swept along into the rest of your life, and you’ll know where your father fits into it.”
Lorraine spooned the last of Fleurette’s egg cream from the bottom of the glass, and in that way that the young have of turning from weighty matters to more practical ones without breaking stride, she said, “At least I have my room back now that you’ve moved out. Although I wish Mother would tell us what she’s doing in the basement.”
* * *
WHAT BESSIE WAS doing in the basement became clear that very afternoon, when Fleurette and Lorraine returned from Paterson. In the Wilkinsons’ kitchen they found Norma leaning over the sink, peering through the window.
“Who are these men coming to visit your mother?” Norma asked Lorraine when they walked in, without taking her eyes off the house next door. “There’ve been three of them this afternoon. One every hour.”
“Are they tradesmen?” said Lorraine. “She’s been working on something in the basement the last few days.”
“If she needed a tradesman, she should’ve asked me,” said Norma, who was never satisfied unless she had a facility to take charge of. She considered both Bessie’s home and the Wilkinsons’ to be hers, and kept vigilant oversight on all aspects of the houses and grounds. A sticky door, a crack in a window-pane, a missing roof shingle, a wobbly fence—all of it fell under her purview. Norma had always found it reassuring that things could reliably be counted upon to fall apart, and she could just as reliably put them back together.
What, then, were the male visitors for?
“Is this how you’re going to spend the rest of your days, spying on Bessie?” Fleurette asked. “Because if you’re as bored as all that—”
“There he goes!” said Norma, and all three of them crowded around the window to watch.
