Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions

by Amy Stewart

  Around the time Minnie turned sixteen, she realized that there would be no end to it unless she got married. But she knew that if she married a Catskill boy from one of the factories—and who else would she marry, but one of them?—nothing much would change. She would stay at the knitting mill until she had a baby, and then she would keep house in another small and dingy set of rooms just like the ones she’d always lived in.

  When Goldie put it like that, Constance couldn’t blame Minnie for running away. Anyone might run away from a life like that.

  “What about you?” Constance asked. “Weren’t you tempted to go off to the city the way she did?”

  “I might’ve gone with Minnie, if she’d asked. But she wasn’t just tired of this old life. She was tired of me, too. Anyway, there’s a foreman at the brick factory. We’re to be married in the spring.”

  “Congratulations,” she said, and Goldie gave her that bright smile again. Then a door slammed and she said, “Daddy’s home.”

  “Wouldn’t he like to have Minnie back?”

  “Go and ask him yourself.”

  EUGENE DAVIS DID not like to hear any news of his daughter. In fact, he didn’t hear much at all, which explained, at last, why his wife was in the habit of shouting the way she did.

  He was a decrepit man in late middle age with a pot belly and wobbly knees. He sank into a chair, still in his dust-covered dungarees, and put his hands out to rest on top of his legs very gingerly, as if they required special handling. Constance couldn’t help but stare at them, as she’d never seen hands so scarred and mangled. One index finger had been sheared off at the top knuckle, and a pinky finger on the other hand looked like it had been worn down to a useless stub. They trembled helplessly and seemed, just as Mrs. Davis had claimed, entirely unsuited to any kind of work.

  Constance explained the purpose of her visit and said, “We have your daughter at the Hackensack jail, but please understand that she hasn’t been charged with a crime. She’s being held as a witness. That’s why I’ve come to see you. If you can speak to the judge, it would go a long way in helping to get her released and brought back home. I’m sure you’d all like to put this behind you.”

  Eugene Davis spoke in a hoarse voice, worn down from years of shouting over the noise of a factory floor. His lips moved a little before any words came out. “That girl’s not coming back here, if that’s what you mean to say.”

  Constance hadn’t come prepared for such heartlessness. “It would take nothing more than a word with the judge . . .”

  “I’ve had a word with the judge.” Mr. Davis jerked his arm up and pointed a finger heavenward. “She needs to speak to my judge if she wants to get right.”

  Goldie kept her eyes on her lap. Edith Davis was leaning forward and nodding encouragingly at her husband as he spoke.

  “County jail might be the best thing for her,” he said. “Any Bibles in that jail?”

  “Of course,” Constance said. “And services on Sunday.”

  “That’ll do just fine.”

  “But you must understand that the judge won’t release a sixteen-year-old girl on her own. Someone would have to take her in.”

  Mr. Davis acted as though he couldn’t hear, although she’d shouted at him just as his wife did. He leaned forward, and Mrs. Davis rushed over to help him up. “We’re going to get on with our supper,” he said by way of dismissing her.

  “It’s nice that you can,” Constance snapped. “Your girl has nothing but a jailhouse supper waiting for her tonight.”

  Mr. Davis huffed and turned away.

  “Take an address, at least, so that you might write when you have a change of heart.”

  But the Davises were unmoved. Mrs. Davis pointed her in the direction of the train station and sent her on her way. Before she went, she pressed her hand into Goldie’s and left the jail’s address in her palm. Goldie made no expression as she pocketed it.

  Once outside, Constance picked her way down the dark and pitted street. Here and there, a faint yellow light fell out of kitchen windows. Even in the thin February air, a few boys ran up and down the street with a leather ball. At the bottom of the hill, a tattered newspaper was caught in a bare tree, snapping in the wind like a flag.

  When the breeze hit her, she took an enormous breath, relieved to be out of the Davises’ stifling sitting room. There was no point in staying longer anyway: she couldn’t have put those two before a judge and trusted them to say anything that would cast Minnie in a favorable light. Even Goldie couldn’t help, as she was possessed of knowledge of her sisters’ dalliances with out-of-town men and might—if questioned sharply and compelled by a judge to speak truthfully—see no choice but to confess what she knew.

  Constance reached the edge of town and walked along the boardwalk, where she could perfectly imagine Minnie going to wait for the boats. Even with the operation shut down for the winter, it wasn’t difficult to picture the carnival atmosphere that would have prevailed in the warmer months. There were wooden booths, shuttered and locked, that advertised pretzels and beer. A wide shingled shed offered three shots at a target for a chance to win a set of ruby glass. At one end stood a bandstand, with benches in a half-circle around it.

  The wind came up off the gray river. Constance gathered her collar around her neck and turned her back on the place. It held the promise of merriment, even though there was none to be found.

  14

  UP IN POMPTON LAKES, installed once again in her little room under the eaves at Mrs. Turnbull’s boarding-house, Edna Heustis turned over a pamphlet that someone had dropped in the train station a few days earlier.

  On one side was a picture of a woman in a smart gray uniform, standing on a hill. Behind her lay a ruined, smoking battlefield. It read:

  Are you going to help us win this war?

  Answer not with words and cheers, but with shells, ships, food, and bandages.

  Is the work heavy, you ask?

  Not so heavy as the soldiers’ work.

  Are the hours long?

  Six days and nights in the trenches are longer.

  On the other side was the announcement of the Women’s Preparedness Committee’s weekly meeting at the church, with this call to join:

  Just as our young men are not waiting for their nation’s orders to go to France, so can women take up the call and follow them. In hospitals and ship-yards, in aeroplane sheds and railways, in homes and workshops, there is work overseas right now for American women who are willing to do it.

  Edna turned the paper over again and looked at the woman sketched in pencil, with just a few lines to suggest dark hair tucked under her cap, and a single mark along her jawline to show a strength of purpose. She wondered how she would look in a uniform like that. She’d never met a woman who professed an interest in boarding a ship for Europe and serving alongside the men, but she’d read about it in the papers. Women were volunteering for the Red Cross and the Ambulance Service. They were serving as nurses, cooks, and secretaries.

  She wondered if her brothers would meet women like that when they went to France. All four of the Heustis boys were ready to depart as soon as President Wilson gave the order. Early last year, they’d each gone out to join in some sort of war-work to prepare themselves, which their father heartily encouraged. Charlie had taken an orderly position in a hospital with the hope of joining an ambulance service in France; the twins worked at the munitions depot on Black Tom Island; and Davie, the youngest, apprenticed himself to an automobile mechanic, thinking that he might drive his brother’s ambulance, even though he grew dizzy at the sight of blood.

  There had been such high spirits among the boys when they left home. Her father hardly noticed the gloom that settled into the empty rooms her brothers had vacated. He was out every day but Sunday, conducting his business, making the rounds of factories and shops that kept their money at his bank, and he found reasons to call upon his sons’ places of employment often enough that he felt satisfied with their
progress and secure in their success. But Edna and her mother were alone, quite suddenly, and Edna found the solitude unbearable.

  Her brothers’ patriotic talk had stirred her. Wasn’t there something she could do? A few of her school chums had taken up with the Red Cross, rolling bandages and knitting socks. But she found that sitting in a church basement with a knitting bag in her lap was as stifling as sitting at home. Anyone could knit. Surely there was more to war service than that.

  Another group was putting together little comfort bags for the soldiers—playing cards and handkerchiefs, and short notes meant to cheer them in the hospital—and she made fifty of those to help fill a barrel, but that wasn’t enough, either.

  It was her father who’d given her the idea to go to work in a munitions factory. One night, as she paged listlessly through a pattern-book, he glanced up from his newspaper and said, “Would you look at this? They’re hiring girls on the fuse line. Says here those tiny fingers are just the thing. Let me see your tiny fingers, Miss Edna.”

  Edna did, in fact, have narrow, delicate fingers. They also happened to be steady and strong. She raised them up between her face and her father’s. He looked right past them and into her eyes. “You see there? Even the ladies can serve.”

  Her mother, who’d been sitting across from them with a box of buttons in her lap at the time this exchange took place, cried out at the suggestion and went into a sort of nervous chatter about all the ways in which women serve their country already from the kitchen and the wash-room. She rattled the buttons for emphasis as she spoke, but it was too late. Her father’s suggestion was all the encouragement Edna needed. Over the following weeks, she inquired at every factory within a train ride from Edgewater until she found a place for herself and left home.

  Until her arrest, factory work had satisfied her. What could be more heroic, and more useful, than to put her shoulder to the wheel at the powder works, where the very instruments of war rolled out of the factories and onto ships, to supply the British and Canadian soldiers rushing to fight? Soon enough the Americans would join, and a fuse that left her fingers would go into the hands of her own countrymen. Every strand she wove would, she hoped, shield them from harm.

  The factories were filled with women giving their all for France. It should’ve been enough for Edna. And for a time, it was.

  But during the final few hours of her one and only night in the Hackensack jail, while Edna waited for Deputy Kopp to return with the results of her investigation into the unimpeachable life she’d been taken from, and to release her back to it, Edna began to wonder if she wasn’t meant to do more. As she sat in the very picture of deprivation—what could be more cruel and cold than the bars of a jail cell?—the shape of this new thing came to her.

  Europe. If her brothers could go, why couldn’t she?

  It was nearly morning as the idea crept in, and with it the realization that she had survived a night in jail. If she could endure that, couldn’t she endure a hundred times worse?

  It must be said that Constance Kopp was, in part, to blame for this idea. In arresting Edna, Officer Randolph had put her under the care of a tall woman in a uniform, with a gun strapped to her side. Deputy Kopp hardly even seemed real to Edna at first. She seemed like a vision of an entirely different kind of woman, one who would be capable of doing far more for the war than rolling bandages. Not every woman had the temperament for war, but some did, surely.

  When Deputy Kopp came for her in the morning, Edna looked up at her and just nodded, calmly, and thought to herself, Yes, certainly. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  The little pretense of a trial that morning—her mother’s quiet protests, the words of the judge—none of it made much of an impression on her. In her mind, she was already venturing across the Atlantic.

  When that pamphlet slipped out of someone’s coat pocket and fluttered to the ground at the train station, Edna wasn’t at all surprised to see it. Something about the call to serve—the need to answer the cries coming daily from France as the Germans advanced—something in that call went directly inside of Edna and fit like a key in a lock.

  Women were going to France, and so could she. Here was her ticket.

  15

  WITH CONSTANCE SO THOROUGHLY OCCUPIED, Fleurette found herself free to do as she pleased. Norma did keep something of a watch on her, grumbling if she came in too late or made too many demands to be run down to the train station in their buggy, but in general, Fleurette enjoyed her liberty and devoted every minute to her preparations for the audition.

  She had, of late, come to see the frivolity in the little shows put on by Mrs. Hansen’s Academy—the Christmas concert, the spring chorus, the fall drama—in a way that had not been apparent to her only a few months before. While she’d once been delighted to play the part of a farmer’s daughter in a musical about a giant pumpkin, she now saw such roles as childish and knew that they did nothing to prepare her for an audition in front of a woman of May Ward’s caliber. Those performances were, she suspected, merely a showcase to demonstrate to parents that their tuition payments weren’t being wasted. As long as each student could be paraded before an audience of mothers and neighbors at regular intervals, and showered with applause, enrollment at Mrs. Hansen’s would look like money well spent.

  She was, furthermore, coming to understand that she hadn’t been properly prepared for the career on stage she’d envisioned for herself. Most of the other girls saw dancing and singing as a diversion from an otherwise stultifying life and had, from a young age, enrolled in classes at girls’ academies merely to amuse themselves. Drawing, dancing, flower-pressing, elocution, and embroidery were all equally suited to that purpose: they kept the girls busy but not harried, entertained but not exhausted, and instilled in them a few social graces and decorative impulses that never threatened to go so far as to foster anything in the way of ambition or independence.

  On the other hand, the dancers who toured with May Ward—her Eight Dresden Dolls—couldn’t possibly have come out of academies like Mrs. Hansen’s. Fleurette had been twice to watch May Ward’s act, in the company of her teacher and classmates, and had glimpsed a species of performer unlike anything she’d come across before. May Ward and her chorus girls moved as if they’d done nothing but dance all their lives. They sang out in powerful, clear voices over which they had perfect mastery. Never once was there a misstep or a mistake. They seemed to have been born backstage, to have danced before they could walk, and to have spent their formative years in rehearsals, not nodding over a history book.

  Fleurette came to believe that her childhood had been wasted. She’d been schooled at home and taught such useless subjects as grammar and arithmetic, with music and dance treated as secondary to her education.

  Surely May Ward’s chorus girls hadn’t suffered such a pedestrian upbringing. One could tell by looking at them that they didn’t sleep on horsehair mattresses, or sit down at night to a dismal supper of cabbage and potatoes, or go around in an old duster on Mondays, picking up after themselves. They seemed to have alighted from some remote and exotic island, peopled only by long-limbed girls in satin slippers. Why hadn’t Fleurette been given admittance to their world already? She felt a pang of regret at what she’d missed. She was now desperate to make up for the time lost.

  The audition provided exactly the opportunity she needed. While the other girls chose pretty frocks and songs they’d performed many times on stage already, Fleurette recruited a small ensemble of half a dozen girls, choreographed a clever dance, and chose a song and a way of presenting it that was entirely outside the confines of Mrs. Hansen’s prosaic imagination. She rehearsed it everywhere: in the barn, in the meadow behind the house, in her bedroom when everyone else was away, and in the empty dance studio at Mrs. Hansen’s Academy, anytime it wasn’t in use. Only she and Helen had dance steps to rehearse, as nothing was required of the rest of her cast but walk-on roles. This they had also accomplished in secret, swearing each gir
l to secrecy. Everything about their performance was to be a surprise—and so much more than that.

  Fleurette felt sure that May Ward would see it as a revelation. She wouldn’t be expecting such polish and sophistication on a stage in Paterson. She would demand to know Fleurette’s name. She would write it down and take care to spell it correctly (Fleurette hated to see her name misspelled), and would ask to see her after. She would invite her to the join the chorus without delay. Fleurette would become her protégée. She imagined the two of them spending their afternoons together in empty theaters, where May Ward would teach her everything she’d failed to learn in Paterson.

  “You’re ready for New York,” May Ward would tell her, panting after some particularly vexing dance steps one afternoon. “Get some rest. We leave tomorrow.”

  But she wouldn’t rest. She would be tireless. Some other Dresden Doll would probably lose her place to make room for Fleurette, but that couldn’t be helped. The theater business was ruthless that way. Fleurette already felt a little world-weary as she thought of the constant striving and the endless jostling for position that would characterize her new life. It would never be easy, her stage career, but it would be the only life for her.

  And tonight it would begin.

  CONSTANCE ARRIVED LATE to the audition and rushed to take her seat alongside Norma. She was surprised to see the theater nearly full: usually the families of the students didn’t occupy half the place.

  “Why are there so many people here? Is May Ward expected to perform?” she whispered.

  “If she doesn’t, we’ll have a riot,” Norma said.

  A few piano notes from behind the stage curtains brought the audience to silence, and then to applause. Constance didn’t recognize the melody and the piano cut off abruptly before the song could begin. After some deliberately awkward fumbling with the curtain, a tall man in a smart suit and a high silk hat took the stage.