Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions

by Amy Stewart

  “I should’ve known there was a Mr. Ward behind this,” Norma said.

  “His name is Freeman Bernstein,” Fleurette said, sounding terribly modern. “He and Mrs. Ward live right here in Bergen County, down in Leonia near the moving picture studios.”

  “Freeman Bernstein.” Norma said the name as if she was auditioning it. “He sounds like one of those Broadway theater hucksters. When he’s not running this scheme for his wife, he’s probably down at the Grand Central Station selling tickets to Central Park to the out-of-towners. Mrs. Hansen ought not to have let him through the door. I’ll write her a note and tell her so.”

  “She doesn’t read your notes,” Fleurette said.

  Constance, already weary of this talk, sank onto the creaking old divan, whose stuffing had long ago surrendered to her form. Norma took up her spot in a leather armchair to which the years had similarly not been kind. Fleurette rushed into the kitchen and returned with the apple jumbles and a pot of tea that she’d been keeping warm on the stove.

  Constance was being worked over, and she knew it. The truth—the hushed-up, never-mentioned truth—was that in Fleurette she had not a pretty and spoiled younger sister, but a pretty and spoiled daughter, the result of a long-ago liaison with a salesman. By unanimous family concurrence, Fleurette would never be told. As far as anyone knew, she hadn’t ever suspected. The three of them lived together easily enough as sisters despite the difference in their ages. As often happened in such families, Constance and Norma had settled—sometimes awkwardly—into the roles of older sisters rather than mother and aunt, and had grown practiced at playing them.

  “Did you arrest anyone today?” Fleurette asked kindly, while she poured the tea.

  “No, but I tried to set a girl free,” Constance said. “All she wanted was to go to work, but her mother filed a charge of waywardness and the police took her to jail. Can you imagine that?”

  Fleurette shook her head. She wore her hair in dark, loose curls that floated around when she moved. “Do you suppose that if our mother were alive, she would report me to the police for going to work?”

  Constance reached over to smooth a lock of hair away from Fleurette’s forehead and said, “I doubt it, but only because she was terrified of the police. But she would’ve found some other way to put a stop to it. She always did.”

  “Now you’re the police, and you’re the one to tell mothers that their daughters have a right to go to work,” Fleurette said happily. She thought it extraordinarily supportive of her cause to have such a statement spoken aloud and agreed to before the audition.

  “I know what else Mother wouldn’t have approved of,” Norma said, returning to the subject of the audition.

  “Mr. Bernstein apologized for the fee,” Fleurette said. Constance couldn’t help but notice that she’d dressed herself up in the most charming manner, and worn a little cameo of the deceased Mrs. Kopp’s that looked endearing on her. “He wishes he didn’t have to charge it at all, only the expenses involved in renting the theater and arranging for the lights and accompanists are just too high. And we must perform in front of a full house in order for him to see how we’ll really do. He was very kind about it, and humble.”

  “So he’s a trained actor, too,” Norma put in.

  “Helen’s father doesn’t seem to mind,” Fleurette said. She was speaking directly to Constance, knowing her to be the easy mark. She picked up her collection of sheet music and sat nestled alongside Constance, paging through all the songs May Ward had made popular. “My Little Red Carnation” and “The Bird on Nellie’s Hat” were all too well known in the Kopp household, as Fleurette sang them incessantly.

  May Ward’s picture adorned the covers. Constance thought that she must have been an English girl, or perhaps Irish. She wore her frizzy, dusty-colored hair down around her shoulders in a style that Constance regarded as unbecoming, but what did she know about the theater, or hairstyles?

  There were other pictures of May Ward tacked to the wall of Fleurette’s sewing room, alongside her other idols. This was a woman Fleurette had admired for years. She and her troupe traveled all over the country performing what was referred to as “polite vaudeville,” which was meant to suggest a light comedic performance that any respectable person might attend without fear of embarrassment. What harm, Constance reasoned, could come from letting Fleurette sing a song for her?

  At that moment, neither Norma nor Constance felt any alarm over the possibility that Fleurette might actually be chosen to join a vaudeville troupe. The two elder sisters were in perfect, unspoken agreement that the auditions were a sham. The only difference between the two of them was that Norma wanted nothing to do with it and was particularly reluctant to part with the five dollars, whereas Constance didn’t see a reason to deny Fleurette that which she had fixed her heart upon.

  “Are you sure Helen’s going?” Constance asked.

  Norma tried to kick Constance, but she was just too far away. Instead she said, “I only wish you weren’t quite so predictable.”

  “Of course Helen’s auditioning,” Fleurette hastened to answer, “and so are all the other girls in my class.”

  There! Constance took that as further evidence that these so-called auditions were harmless. Not a single mother had objected, so why should they?

  Fleurette pressed on. “I’m the only one in my class who hasn’t paid the fee.”

  “You’re the only one who hasn’t any money,” Norma said.

  Fleurette rolled her pretty, pleading eyes over to Constance but didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.

  6

  THAT NIGHT EDNA HEUSTIS found herself under the care of the night guard, who didn’t offer anything in the way of care but did walk past her cell four times before dawn, rattling his keys to announce himself in case any of the female inmates happened to be in a state of immodesty. On his first time through he told her that he’d be by every two hours. Edna took some comfort in that, as it helped to mark the passage of time. She did not sleep, but when he passed she pretended to. He only stopped long enough to make out her shape on the bunk, and then moved on.

  The cell in which she found herself was even smaller than her room at Mrs. Turnbull’s, with a concrete floor and white steel bars that looked out onto nothing but the wall opposite. What passed for a bed was merely canvas webbing stretched across a frame, and in the corner sat a toilet, uncovered and lacking any sort of curtain for privacy. Deputy Kopp had lent her a few things from her own cell, which she took to be a privilege not ordinarily accorded to inmates: an old flannel quilt, an embroidered pillow, a magazine, and a comb.

  “How can you bear to spend the night here?” Edna had asked, before the deputy left for Pompton Lakes.

  “I don’t mind at all.” Constance sounded terribly forthright and self-possessed. “I live in the countryside and it’s too far to go every night. Besides, I want all the inmates to know that I’m just like them, and that they can trust me.”

  “But . . . you mustn’t be just like . . . all of them,” Edna said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Aren’t some of them thieves, or murderers?”

  Constance smiled at that. “They are. But I try to think about the circumstances that brought them here. One of our inmates put a gun on her husband after he gave her reason to fear for her life. I won’t say that excuses it, but doesn’t it say something that she feels safer in here than back in her own home? She didn’t even try to put up a defense.”

  Edna found this line of talk fascinating, as she had never met a murderess, and wondered if she would be allowed to. She tried to think of her night in jail as a sort of social experiment that might prove enriching in some way. But after Deputy Kopp left, she saw no one but the night guard, and had only the noise of the jail for company: unseen voices, coughs, grunts, the clanging of metal bars opening and closing, the sweep of footsteps, and the clattering of steam-pipes.

  In the darkness her courage deserted her, and she sank into the very despair t
hat a jail cell is designed to instill in its inhabitant. Her liberty had meant nothing to her until it was taken away. The ability to wander down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, or to open a window, or rummage through a closet for another blanket—these were the smallest of privileges, but to have them taken away was an enormous loss. The confines of her cell pressed in on her and she feared she might choke. She was obliged to sit up and force herself to breathe. At that moment an oddly comforting thought occurred to her: It’s worse at the front.

  Edna had come to rely on this idea anytime her work on the fuse line started to seem too oppressive. It was tedious to stand for long hours on a hard wooden floor, elbow to elbow with the other girls, the machines all humming and clattering, the spools of thread spinning on the rack above her head. It was impossibly dusty work owing to the fibers that flew about, but there was no time to stop and dab at one’s eyes or nose, as a single dropped thread could throw the machine out of joint and she’d have to unravel and start again. There was nothing to do but to let one’s eyes and nose drip. Sometimes she’d look up at the girl across, and see that they were both crying for no reason other than the lack of a free arm with which to wield a handkerchief, and they would both start to laugh at once, which only made the tears worse.

  On her first day at the powder works, she asked the girl sitting next to her how one stopped the machine to go to the lavatory. She didn’t know it at the time, but in asking the question, she’d entered into a rite of initiation that every new hire suffered.

  “Oh, just ask Mrs. Schaefer,” the girl said, never once looking up from her work.

  Edna waited until the superintendent passed by, and turned briefly to make the inquiry. In the second she looked away, her foot pedal slowed and the fine fuse she’d been weaving collapsed into a tangled mess.

  The other girls knew better than to laugh under the watchful eye of their supervisor. Edna asked her question and was pointed sternly in the direction of the privies. The need to go left her suddenly, but there was nothing to do but to run out, red-faced, already terrified that she’d broken some unspoken rule and lost her place, and would have no choice but to return home that night, defeated after only one day at work.

  When she found the women’s privies, she understood the trick that had been played on her. The toilets were nothing but boards with holes them in, placed atop a trench, all housed in a slapdash wooden shack through which flies buzzed in and out. There was no paper—she was meant to bring her own, but how could she have known that?—and no one inside except two arthritic old women who, Edna would later learn, stole into the bathroom at intervals throughout the day and perched on the edge of the wooden boards to get some relief for their aching feet.

  A woman of advanced years might be excused for taking a lavatory break in the middle of her shift, but Edna would never take one again. None of the girls used the factory toilets if they could help it. The rush to get out the gate at six o’clock, she soon learned, was a rush home to use a clean facility. The men knew it and liked to congregate around the gate, walking slowly with their arms locked, to impede them on their way home. (The men, apparently, had no qualms about their facilities and found them suited to their needs.)

  By the time Edna returned to the boarding-house that night, the other girls knew all about what had happened and commiserated with her over dinner.

  “You had to find out for yourself,” Delia said. “You wouldn’t have believed it otherwise.”

  “If you’re nice to Mrs. Schaefer, she’ll take you to the one in the office building. But only if you’re sick,” Pearl added.

  “At least it isn’t a trench,” Fannie said.

  “A trench? Why, there’s a trench underneath! I saw it,” Edna said.

  Delia laughed. “No, silly, she means a trench in France. Where the soldiers live. Their living quarters are nothing but a muddy old dugout in the ground. Think about that when you finish off your fuses. They’ll be sent to some boy in France who hasn’t seen anything as nice as a factory privy in months.”

  That proved to be a useful thought to Edna, and a heartening one. Whatever discomforts she might endure, they couldn’t compare to the hardships of a trench in the Argonne. The idea stayed with her, as she grew more accustomed to the tedium of a factory job, the long hours on her feet, her red and swollen fingers, and the dull ache behind her eyes from staring at those spinning threads all day. Her brothers were eager to go overseas and endure far worse. Surely she could bear it for their sake.

  And while there was nothing patriotic about a night in the county jail, she could bear that, too, if she thought of the boys in France. Still, she couldn’t comfort herself enough to ever once close her eyes. All night long she stared through the bars. She kept Deputy Kopp’s comb pressed tightly into her fist until morning.

  7

  “WE NEVER USED to see young ladies on trial,” Judge Seufert told Constance when she brought Edna into his chambers the next day. “It’s unseemly.”

  The judge was a man of advanced age with a ridge of bluish veins across his forehead and hands that trembled when he shuffled through the papers on his desk. He sat rigidly upright, in a trim striped suit and a crisp bow tie, and looked down kindly on Edna from his high desk.

  “She looks respectable enough to me,” he pronounced, squinting down at her from underneath the rims of his spectacles.

  Constance found this enormously promising. Judge Seufert tended to be friendly toward the sheriff’s office, and moved by the sight of a girl in distress.

  The prosecutor’s office was represented by the very same Detective John Courter with whom Sheriff Heath and Constance had feuded in the past. He was a stout man with a head that, when uncovered, most closely resembled a duck’s egg. His mustache formed an upside-down V that gave him the appearance of a perpetual frown. He kept his chin high, as if to lower one’s chin was the first step into moral turpitude. There was a self-righteousness about him that irked Constance, particularly when he took on these morality cases.

  In a chair next to Mr. Courter sat Mrs. Monvilla Heustis, Edna’s mother. Constance wanted very much to be angry with her over the trouble she’d caused, but her irritation dissipated at the sight of a tired-looking woman of about fifty, with a pinched mouth and dull hair fading from watery brown to gray. She wore a wool coat whose cuffs had been replaced recently, and a pair of high leather shoes unsuited for walking in the snow.

  Here is a woman who does not have much, thought Constance, and now she doesn’t have her daughter. Mrs. Heustis’s downcast appearance stabbed at Constance, bringing to mind the way her own mother had once clung so fretfully to her, contriving to push the world away and keep her stiflingly close by denying her an education, a profession, and friends, even. Mrs. Heustis had done much the same thing—only she had involved the police, and brought humiliation and the possibility of a criminal rec­ord down on her daughter.

  As Constance and Edna took their chairs, Mrs. Heustis sat stoically and kept her eyes on Judge Seufert, refusing to even greet her daughter. He looked up at them with great animation, but then gave a little sigh when he saw Mrs. Heustis’s grim eyes fixed upon him.

  “Very well. I suppose the prosecution has something to say.”

  Detective Courter stood and put one hand inside his vest pocket. “Mrs. Heustis filed a charge of waywardness with this office on January 4, 1916. I alerted every police department in five counties, and yesterday the girl was found living in a furnished room and arrested. We ask that she be sentenced to the state reformatory until she’s twenty-one, upon which time she may be released to her mother’s care.”

  Edna nearly jumped out of her chair. Constance reached out to put a hand on her arm.

  Judge Seufert looked down at Mrs. Heustis. “I’d like to hear from the mother. Ma’am, what led you to go to the police?”

  Mrs. Heustis rose to her feet and answered in a wavering voice unaccustomed to speaking in public.

  “She went off withou
t a word and without the permission of her mother and father. We just knew she must’ve gone bad. I was afraid she’d turn up in a furnished room somewhere, and now she has.” She dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief and sat down.

  “Has Miss Heustis anything to say on the matter?”

  “Your Honor, I don’t see —” interjected Detective Courter, but the judged raised a hand to silence him.

  Constance had seen to it that Edna’s dress was pressed and clean, and gave her some time with her comb and mirror to fix her hair. She was as simple and honest-looking a girl as had ever appeared before the judge. She took a little breath and said, “Only that I’ve found a steady place at the powder works and a room in a good Christian house. Miss Kopp says it’s my right to do so and I needn’t stay at home just because my mother wants to keep me there.”

  Judge Seufert raised an eyebrow at that. “I’ve been made to understand that Deputy Kopp undertook her own investigation.”

  Detective Courter slapped a stack of papers on the table. “Your Honor, it’s irregular to have anyone from the sheriff’s department investigate a police matter. The sheriff may hire a jail matron if he wishes, but she hasn’t any involvement in this case other than as a jailer. She has no education in the law and no authority to conduct an investigation, if it can even be called that.”

  “I know more about Miss Heustis than the officer who arrested her,” Constance shot back. The detective snorted.

  Judge Seufert sighed and said, “I believe the sheriff hired a matron—excuse me, a lady deputy—precisely because these cases come before us and no one seems to know what to make of them. Is it the wish of the prosecutor’s office that perfectly respectable girls be locked away at the public’s expense for years at a time?”

  “No, sir. But in this case, we have the mother —”

  “Yes, and who looks into the mother’s claims to decide if there’s anything to them?”

  Detective Courter looked as though he’d swallowed a chicken bone. He coughed and said, “Anyone charged by this office may engage an attorney for his defense.”