by Amy Stewart
Helen watched her from the little embroidered stool where she sat. “I don’t know how you persuaded them to let you join the troupe. My father would never agree to it. I had to promise him that I was only going through the pretense of auditioning because you wanted to put on a duet.”
Fleurette pushed aside a dress-maker’s dummy that blocked her view of the mirror. She kept it angled a bit in its stand, which had the effect of making her appear taller.
“Oh, I haven’t persuaded them, exactly,” she said, and turned around to admire her backside. “I told them I’m only auditioning because you are.”
Her reverie was interrupted by the rattle of an engine in the drive. She smoothed her skirts and whirled around to Helen. “Hand me that jacket,” she said, waving at a pile of gray wool behind her friend’s stool. “You can help me with the fitting.” Helen took up the garment and they burst out of the room and into the foyer, where Constance was just hanging up her coat.
“Who brought you home?” Fleurette asked.
“Deputy Morris.”
“Oh, and he’s gone already?” Fleurette ran to look out the window. Deputy Morris and his wife lived in Paterson near Mrs. Hansen’s Academy and had taken on the role of adopted grandparents to Helen and Fleurette. After their lessons, they could often be found at Mrs. Morris’s kitchen table or at her sewing machine, making last-minute changes to costumes.
When she turned back to Constance, she spotted the badge.
“Isn’t there to be a ceremony?” she cried, slipping the badge off Constance’s coat and holding it up to the light. “I thought we’d all be going down to the courthouse to watch you make a vow.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” Constance said. “I’ve been doing the job in some capacity or another since July. The badge is only the final formality.”
“But I like formalities. We never have any sort of occasion around here.”
Constance hardly had a chance to reply before Fleurette snatched the jacket away from Helen and held it up with a flourish.
“And look at what we have for you to pin it on! Helen helped me with the epaulettes.”
Constance took it from her gingerly and turned it around. It was a smart new Norfolk jacket, styled like a man’s, but with just enough darts where it counted. There were deep pockets in the front, a wide belt, commanding epaulettes on the shoulders, and a heavy silk lining inside.
The sheriff’s department had no provision for a woman’s uniform. After the newspapers photographed her in a hastily assembled ensemble of borrowed clothes the previous year, Fleurette insisted on outfitting Constance with a proper uniform. The jacket was the final piece.
Constance slipped it on and immediately felt more authoritative. Fleurette had been making her clothes since she was old enough to work a sewing machine, it being nearly impossible to find anything in Constance’s size from the catalogs and shops. Fleurette hadn’t taken a measurement in years and seemed to know innately where to place a button or a dart so that no seam was ever stretched, no collar too tight, and no sleeve too short. Her clothing was solid and wonderfully made.
“You should always wear a jacket,” Helen said, going in a circle around her and tugging at the sleeves. “You look so smart.”
“I do feel smarter, and I feel about six inches taller,” Constance said.
Fleurette reached up to brush a thread away from her collar. “Well. We don’t need you any taller. There’s a pocket inside for your revolver, and one for your handcuffs.”
Constance slid her hand inside and found them stitched into the lining at exactly the spot she might naturally reach for them. “It’s just perfect.”
“Only I might have run up the account at Schoonmaker’s,” Fleurette said lightly, as she checked the buttons and clasps.
“Don’t worry about it,” Constance said. Before she could add another word, Norma came in from her pigeon loft and all talk of paying on accounts ceased.
Norma wore a grubby barn coat adorned here and there with gray and white feathers, a leather bill-cap with flaps on the side, and a split skirt that Fleurette had cobbled together from a pair of old tweed suits on the condition that Norma would never wear it farther than the barn.
The three of them stood staring at her. Fleurette tried very hard not to laugh. Norma looked like a tramp in those old clothes, but it must be admitted that the sort of outdoor work an old farmhouse required had to be met with suitably sturdy clothing. As neither Constance nor Fleurette volunteered to do the more difficult chores, it seemed only fair that Norma should outfit herself as she pleased.
“You’ve had another letter,” Norma said as she peeled off the most disagreeable of her outer garments.
“I wish they didn’t know where we lived,” Constance said.
“They don’t. They write nothing on the envelope but ‘Girl Sheriff, Hackensack,’ and it makes its way to us.”
“Do they really propose marriage?” Helen asked.
“Always,” Fleurette said. “They don’t know what to do with her other than to marry her.” It irked Fleurette that her sister—she of the pontoon-sized feet and the figure of a telephone booth—enjoyed the romantic attentions of men she’d never met. The men who laid their hearts down in front of Constance got nothing but a curt reply from Norma, which seemed to Fleurette like a wasted opportunity.
This was why Fleurette was so eager for her tour on the stage, and her own notices in the paper. Then the letters would come to her. She would never reject them out of hand: she would invite her suitors to audition for her affections, and she’d let them bring her gifts.
Norma went over to the writing desk and sliced open the envelope.
“Oh, you’ll like this. A fellow wants you to run his ranch in Wyoming.” She made a surprisingly convincing imitation of a bachelor rancher as she read his letter aloud.
Dear Miss Constance,
I can’t offer much to a lady who likes her hair washed at a parlor and gets bothered over a little dirt under her fingernails, but an energetic woman who is accustomed to hard work and quick with a rifle can make a success of herself in Wyoming. I am unmarried, as are most of the other men around this place. It is an uncommon woman who can put her shoulder to the wheel alongside one of us. Out here a rancher’s wife knows how to stretch a potato and butcher a hog, and doesn’t mind sleeping for a night in the barn alongside the cows when they’re calving.
Strong as a horse and pretty as one, that’s all I ask. If I don’t suit you, there are a dozen other fellows who will. You might as well come out and have a look at us. Write to me with your answer and I will send a train ticket, but don’t wait too long. There’s fields to plow in March.
Expectantly,
Old Jack Dobbs
“Old Jack!” Fleurette shrieked. “Did he really write that?”
“He’s been called it so long that he’s forgotten it wasn’t his given name,” Norma said.
“We haven’t seen him yet,” Fleurette said. “His mother could have named him Old Jack when she first laid eyes on him.”
“What do you intend to tell him?” Constance asked.
Norma looked over the letter again and pushed at the spectacles slipping off her nose. “I’ll say that it pains me to admit that you look nothing like a horse, and that you do like your hair washed on Saturday, which renders you unfit for service.”
“Old Jack’s going to be disappointed,” Fleurette said.
“Everyone in Wyoming is disappointed,” Norma returned.
Constance pulled out a handkerchief and took a swipe at Fleurette’s mouth. She looked like a porcelain doll, with cheeks and lips painted on.
“I hope you’re not going anywhere looking like that,” she said.
“Helen and I have a run-through at the theater tonight. It’s for the audition.”
“But I don’t see why you have to put it on before you leave the house. You’ll only call attention to yourself on the train.”
Fleurette raised an
eyebrow to let it be known that calling attention to herself on the train was precisely her aim. A horn sounded in the drive and she ran to look.
“It’s only Mrs. Borus,” she said, “come with some urgent business pertaining to birds flying about in the sky. You’re all due at my show on Tuesday, so don’t forget about it. Invite Mrs. Borus if you want, and anyone else who hasn’t defected from your pigeon club.”
“No one’s defected,” Norma called as Fleurette went to gather her things. “We’re on winter hiatus.”
Norma ran a pigeon club, which she insisted upon calling the New Jersey Society for the Deployment of Messenger Pigeons to Aid in Civic Affairs. It had dwindled from a membership of a dozen or so pigeon-keepers to just a few civic-minded women eager for a worthwhile project. This wasn’t seen as much of a surprise by Constance and Fleurette, after Norma installed herself as the club’s entire slate of officers and ran its affairs in her ruthless and autocratic style. Not a single man remained. Norma ignored Fleurette’s suggestion that perhaps they didn’t like to take their orders from her, insisting instead that the men never intended to join in club activities, and had only been hoping to pick up new breeding stock with the aim of selling more birds for a higher profit. But the trade in messenger pigeons had never been brisk, and the men found other things to do.
Apparently the women who stayed around felt that they had enough to run in their own lives and didn’t mind Norma taking charge. It was really the only way to get along with Norma, and wasn’t too different from how Fleurette and Constance had managed all along.
Carolyn Borus was the most steadfast of the women who remained. She was a widow of some means and quite the sportswoman. Before her interest turned to pigeons, she had hunted with a pair of dogs, and she once raced a horse. She ran an auto with perfect ease, but was just as likely to show up on a saddle-horse if the weather was fine.
Norma went to greet Mrs. Borus and brought her back to the kitchen, which was the warmest room in the house in winter, thanks to an enormous old cast-iron stove. Constance followed and was relieved to find a pot of potato soup with bits of sausage submerged within it. She built a fire under the burner. Carolyn went right over to warm her hands.
“I love a country home,” she said cheerfully, looking around at the old kitchen, which hadn’t changed since Mrs. Kopp bought the place eighteen years ago. The floors were made of broad planks covered in a painted floor-cloth whose fleur-de-lis pattern was nearly worn away. The wall was spattered with grease for three feet around the stove, and Constance wondered, as she considered it from the perspective of a guest, why none of them had ever thought to wash it down and paint it.
“You’re smart not to bother with a refrigerator,” Mrs. Borus continued. “My sister just bought one of those new ammonia-cooled models, and the whole house stinks of it. No one can stand it except the bugs, who come from miles around to take up residence behind the milk bottles.”
“How do the bugs get in?” Constance asked.
She dropped into a chair beside Norma and sighed. “Would you believe they insulate these refrigerators with cattle hair? The bugs adore it. They chew right through it, and the next thing you know, you reach in for the eggs and butter, and come away with a handful of beetles instead.”
“I object to the idea of a motor inside the home, even without the beetles.” Norma turned her attention to the neatly typed list Carolyn had set before her. “Twelve volunteers? Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. They were all quite eager when I told them we were taking their birds on long-distance flights for the war effort.”
Norma and Mrs. Borus had, of late, affiliated their pigeon society with the American Pigeon Racing Association, which had announced its plans to set new world records in speed and distance flying, in an effort to convince the War Department of the necessity of deploying pigeons overseas when the Americans went (inevitably, as Norma regarded it) to France. They intended to help in this endeavor by sending their own pigeons on increasingly longer train trips—five hundred miles, seven hundred miles, even a thousand miles—so that they could select and breed the most competitive flyers.
“I thought this was just a demonstration,” Constance said. “How does it help with the war?”
Both Norma and Carolyn looked at her pityingly.
“It’s a national effort on the part of pigeon-keepers to supply the War Department with the training and equipment they will so desperately need,” Carolyn said, in the manner of a woman accustomed to making a speech. “They don’t yet know how badly they need pigeons, because they haven’t yet seen what they can do. We aim to change that.”
“That sounds just fine,” Constance said quickly, not wanting to seem unfriendly to the first person she’d ever met who enjoyed Norma’s company.
Norma went back to studying the list. “I have my doubts as to whether these birds have been properly conditioned.”
Constance was trying to keep quiet, but she couldn’t help herself. “How do you condition a bird to fly? Isn’t that what comes naturally to them?”
“Oh, not at all,” Carolyn said brightly. “Your sister has the very best method for acclimating them to long flights, one that has been enthusiastically adopted by our club. It begins with a short course of flights from the east, of increasing lengths from one mile to ten. Then the same course is attempted from the west, and then the south. Then they must be taken for a flight of twenty miles, followed by a day’s rest and a diet of mealworms, and then fifty miles. After their first one-hundred-mile flight, they take a week of rest, and then they are shipped to a two-hundred-mile station. It proceeds along those lines until —”
“What a fascinating program you two have put together,” Constance said, rising quickly before she had to hear the rest of it. “The War Department will be delighted.”
“There’s nothing delightful about war, but we do our part,” Carolyn said, before Constance could escape the room entirely. “Now I only wish you’d help me convince your sister to come along on the train when we take our pigeons to the five-hundred-mile mark. We’re only going as far as Columbus, and I’d like to make an outing of it.”
Norma hated to travel but didn’t like to admit it. “Why don’t you start with a conditioning program?” Constance said. “Begin by taking her ten miles east and see how she does.”
“You can go on back to jail now,” Norma said.
“I’m home for the night,” Constance said, “but I’ll take my soup in the other room and you can draw up your plans in peace.”
As she left, she heard Carolyn say, “I wish I had a sister.”
“I can’t think why,” Norma told her.
10
THERE WAS ABOUT to be another female inmate admitted to the Hackensack jail over a morality charge, but the girl in question didn’t know it yet. Minnie Davis was sleeping soundly in her own bed, in the early gray hours of the morning, when the police pounded on the door.
The events of the night before came back hazily at first. Tony and Minnie had quarreled—there was nothing new in that—but she’d won a round, for once, and forced Tony to take her somewhere on a Friday night.
There was no denying that Tony and Minnie had grown tired of each other. No love was left between them, if there had ever been any. But they were forced to live under the same roof—forced by circumstances of Minnie’s own making, if she wanted to admit it.
They used to go places together. Minnie didn’t see any reason why that should change, even now that things had soured between them. It was terrible to spend their evenings in a drab furnished room, under the dim light of one electrical bulb, with Tony pretending to be interested in a newspaper and Minnie making a half-hearted offer of a game of cards. Why couldn’t they ride the ferry across to Manhattan and visit one of the glittering dancing palaces she’d seen from the trolley on their first night together, or dine at a high-ceilinged restaurant with yellow light pulsing from the steamy windows? But Tony never had anything like that on
offer.
“You’re always after me about the rent,” he complained, “and then you want to spend a week’s pay on Broadway. Maybe you picked the wrong fellow.”
She most certainly had, but what was she to do about it? If they were stuck together in their dismal room over the bakery, wasn’t he obligated to take her with him when he went out on a Friday night?
So she kept after him until he finally relented and said, “Fine. Get your coat.”
Tony’s idea of an evening’s entertainment turned out to be a card game at a house a few blocks away. Minnie put on a polka-dotted dress anyway, and rubbed her finger around an empty perfume bottle with the hope of finding something to dab behind her ears.
When they reached the house, she knew she needn’t have bothered. These were the men with whom Tony worked on the steamboat in the summertime. The card game was merely a continuation of every game they’d ever played below-decks. They only looked up from their cards long enough to slap him on the back and make room for him around the table. “The girls are in the kitchen,” one of them hollered, jerking his thumb down the hall.
Minnie went dispiritedly, having lost all hope of a fancy party. In the kitchen she found half a dozen women draped around the table or perched on the drain-board, all of them older than her and none of them dressed for any sort of evening out.
She never bothered to learn their names and they didn’t ask hers. “You’re Tony’s girl!” one of them shrieked. The others gave vigorous nods of understanding. One pulled out a chair for her.
“We’re having gin and lemonade,” said the woman nearest the icebox, “unless you’d rather have gin or lemonade.”
Minnie spoke boldly. “I’ll take them both, and I wouldn’t mind a cigarette if you can spare it.”
That was the right way to answer. Both were offered to her, and soon Minnie was at her ease, leaning back in her chair with a practiced air, grateful to have both hands occupied. The drink was sweet but bracingly strong: with the first sip, she told herself to go slow, and with the second, she forgot to. Although she never smoked in front of Tony, she’d had plenty of cigarettes along the boardwalk back in Catskill and knew what to do with one. The talk flowed around her, and she didn’t even have to bother over what to say.
