by Amy Stewart
She spun around and marched off before Constance could gather her wits about her. She and the porter stepped into the waiting elevator. Constance wriggled out of the booth and ran after her. “If I could only ask you a question —”
Mr. Impediment put up his hand. “Come any closer and I’ll call the police.”
“But I am —”
The elevator door closed and they were gone.
Norma dropped her newspaper and rushed over. “What on earth did you do to get yourself spotted?”
“Nothing! I sat as still as I could, and my face was mostly hidden underneath my hat. You were the one calling attention to yourself, with that newspaper held up like a signal flag.”
“I was behind a column.”
They stood, glaring at each other, both of them with high color in their cheeks and a kind of frantic agitation that kept them looking over each other’s shoulders.
“It’s time to go to the police,” Norma said.
There was something about the way she said it that hit Constance in the soft spot right under her sternum. The finality of it slammed into her.
Carrie emerged from the elevator and met them with a shrug. “I have their room numbers. They’re around the corner from us. I couldn’t get a look inside the rooms, but I didn’t hear anyone else in there.”
Norma told Carrie what had happened. They both stood staring at Constance. By some unspoken accord, it was up to her to decide how to handle this. “Go on upstairs,” Constance said. “We probably should go to the police, and ask a few questions of Mrs. Ward, but I just want to sit here for a minute and think about it.”
Carrie said, “I’m going back to the theater. I might see if the ushers know anything.”
Constance thanked her for that. Norma stood with her arms crossed for a minute, her jaw working back and forth but no words coming out.
“Go on upstairs,” Constance said. “For once, just go.”
Norma, miraculously, did as she was told.
Constance sank into an armchair by the fireplace, overcome with discouragement, but she was not to be left alone with her thoughts, because a woman sitting by herself in a hotel lobby with nothing along the lines of a magazine or a bag of knitting to occupy her is quickly taken care of. A man in a red uniform with gold braid on the shoulders rushed over and offered to bring her any sort of delicacy from the hotel’s restaurant. He suggested a pot of tea or a Turkish coffee. He thought she might like a bread pudding in wine sauce or a slice of Boston cream pie. There was something called a Biscuit Tortoni whose virtues exceeded his powers of description, but she understood it to involve eggs, cream, cherries, and coconut.
He believed she would find it restorative. Constance hesitated for a minute, as she was too miserable to take a bite of anything, but then decided that she should defer to his expertise.
Soon there was a dainty table alongside her, and a cup of good coffee, and not one but two desserts, neither of them diminutive. The pastry chef, he explained, insisted that she try them both.
At that very moment, Fleurette stepped off the elevator. If it hadn’t been for the waiter half blocking the view, Fleurette would have seen Constance reaching for the coffee, then wiping a spot of heavy cream off her wrist.
But Fleurette didn’t see her. Constance lifted a hand to the waiter, which he understood to mean that he should stay right where he was. People who work in hotels have that kind of intelligence about them.
Fleurette took no notice of the two of them, or of anyone else in their corner of the lobby. She was headed straight for the front desk. Under one arm she carried something bulky and heavy that became visible only when she hoisted it onto the counter.
It was a portable sewing machine.
Fleurette spoke to the man behind the desk for only a minute, and then took a claim ticket and left the machine with him. She was back on the elevator and out of sight so quickly that Constance thought she might have dreamed it. She sent the waiter away, and took a bite of the Tortoni.
Fleurette was safe. There was nothing the matter with her that Constance could see. She hadn’t been kidnapped, she hadn’t run off, and she wasn’t out having a wild time late at night with the fashionable theater crowd. In every way she looked like an ordinary working girl.
And now Constance understood why Fleurette hadn’t been listed with the cast. She wasn’t on the stage at all.
She finished her dessert—there seemed no reason not to, in light of the foregoing events—and crossed the lobby to speak to the man behind the front desk. He had a long, narrow face and the tiniest round spectacles.
“I saw a young lady come through here with a sewing machine a minute ago,” she said. “Is she the hotel seamstress?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “That’s May Ward’s seamstress. She needs her machine fixed before morning, so a fellow’s coming to look at it tonight. That’s how these theater types are. Get a man out of bed in the middle of the night over an electrical cord.”
He offered to ring the housekeeper if she needed something mended, but Constance waved him away.
“I’ll take care of it myself,” she said.
50
“IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE she’s having any kind of life. As far as we know, she didn’t even go to the theater last night. Do they have her locked in a room sewing every night?”
Norma was trying to put on a show of protest, but she knew she’d been defeated and only wished to argue with Constance over it for the next several hours while they were stuck on a train together.
Constance tried to summon up some pity for Norma. The world must have been a very frustrating place for her, on account of the way it refused to yield to her ideas. Constance tried to speak more gently. “Fleurette went of her own accord. This is the life she’s chosen. We must consider the matter closed.”
Norma said, “I don’t know why she would lead us to believe that she’s on the stage when they’d only hired her on as a seamstress.”
“Only?” Constance said. “That’s exactly why. She probably wanted us to think that this was something—well, quite a bit more than what it actually was. She could’ve been trying to make us proud of her. Did that ever occur to you?”
“I don’t like the idea that she’s lying to us.”
“Well, we lied to her, too, by sneaking out here to follow her around. I’m not sure which is worse. And I want to remind both of you that we won’t ever tell Fleurette what we did. She’d be furious if she found out we followed her.”
“Then we’re to listen to her stories of her splendid stage life, and pretend to believe it?”
“Let her have her little fiction. It’s harmless. She’s always lived half in a fantasy world anyway. Don’t pretend to be shocked by Fleurette telling made-up stories. And, Carrie, I want you to promise me that this stays out of the papers.”
“Oh, there’s no danger of me getting a story out of this,” Carrie said dispiritedly. “Good girls doing what they’re supposed to don’t make the paper. And you’re not giving me much of a story in Minnie Davis, either.”
Constance wanted very much to keep Carrie out of the courtroom when Minnie was brought back for Tony’s trial. “She might testify that she was shown a forged marriage license, but you’re right. It doesn’t amount to much.”
“And nothing ever came of the male visitors she was to have entertained in the evenings?”
“The landlord was the only one to ever say anything about that, and when he was asked again, he couldn’t recall anyone but Mr. Leo’s brother.”
“So there was nothing to those claims?” Carrie said. “They sounded about right to me.”
“Not at all,” Constance said, not trusting herself to say more.
“Then I don’t have much of a story.”
Norma rattled her newspaper and cleared her throat loudly. “I wonder about people who can’t find anything decent to discuss when in close proximity to others on a rail-car.”
Carrie picked up a
magazine and Constance stared out the window. At least she could return to work secure in the knowledge that Fleurette was safe. She was so relieved that she was entirely willing to forgive her for lying over what, exactly, her role was in May Ward’s troupe. She wasn’t even bothered about the money Fleurette had taken from her bureau. If anything, Constance wanted her to have funds of her own while she was away from home.
Norma, on the other hand, worried her more than ever. Constance had no reason to doubt that her concern for Fleurette was genuine. Her mistrust of Mr. Bernstein was the sort of thing that, Norma being Norma, she really couldn’t help. But late the previous night, after she’d given Norma and Carrie the news that Fleurette had been found, and they’d finally gone to sleep, the most discouraging idea came over her. Was Norma overreacting, or was she simply so bored that she cooked this up to give herself something new to do?
Until last year, Norma had always been the busiest of the three of them. She looked after the barn and the animals, she climbed up on ladders to attach window sashes and pound on roof shingles, and she chased after Constance and Fleurette if they didn’t do anything about spring cleaning or summer canning. She was in charge of the household and, truth be told, took on much more than her fair share.
Constance didn’t know how she had any time at all left for her pigeon hobby (hobby being a word that Norma loathed and would never allow to be employed in reference to her pigeons), but somehow she managed to keep herself occupied on a full-time basis with those birds as well. It didn’t seem like much of a life, but Constance wasn’t the one who had to live it.
She had long ago figured out that Norma kept pigeons because she had to have command of something. She’d always been like that, even as a small child. She used to follow Francis, Mother, and Constance around, telling them to do all the things they were already doing. “Scrub the lamps,” she would say as Constance went through their rooms and took the glass globes off to wash the smoke out of them. “Put the rags out the window,” she’d tell Mother, as she was already waving them around to shake off the dust. She always said those things with a grisly determination unbecoming of a five-year-old, as if it were her dreaded duty to inform her family as to their tasks.
For that reason it was a relief when she took up pigeons, and they became the recipients of her endless orders and drills. Better a flock of birds than the other members of her family, everyone reasoned.
But things had changed lately. Constance was away from the house almost every day and most nights. When she was home, she couldn’t be counted upon to do much of anything in the way of chores. Fleurette couldn’t either, as she’d been spending all of her time at the theater. Constance hadn’t considered it before, but Norma now ran the household by herself and passed most of her waking hours alone, with only the burbling of those birds for company.
With her pigeon society diminished, she and Mrs. Borus had taken up with this group that was arranging long-distance pigeon races, but that wasn’t much to occupy her time in the winter. Her world was getting smaller. Constance wondered if she even understood how small it was. She seemed to be allowing the most petty worries and complaints to overtake her. Increasingly, she latched on to illogical and far-fetched threats and waged useless battles for the purpose of proving some obscure point. It seemed absurd, as Constance thought about it, that she’d managed to bring about this ill-advised trip to Harrisburg to spy on Fleurette.
Constance sat across from her on the train and watched her work her way through a stack of newspapers and magazines, noisily and boisterously. She snorted at the paper, quarreled with it under her breath, wrote notes in the margins, crossed out the things she disagreed with, and even smacked it once or twice.
This is the woman I’m tethered to for the rest of my life, Constance thought as she watched her. She wished all the more that Fleurette would come home, even as she contemplated yet another reason why she might not want to.
51
MINNIE DAVIS HAD NOT BEEN IDLE. The reformatory’s program of kitchen work, floor-scrubbing, and laundry kept her hands busy (Miss Pittman did not approve of idleness, gossip, or novel-reading, so their days were filled with chores), but her waking thoughts were consumed with the far more pressing matter of her own liberty. The prospect of enduring five years in confinement was unbearable. Hadn’t she left Catskill to shake off the strictures of home life and factory work? At least in those days, she could wander down to the boardwalk; at least she could dance and flirt and play games. But to be deprived of any small pleasure or privilege in life was intolerable. And who would she be, at twenty-one, released from the reformatory and kept under the supervision of the courts?
She’d be a failed woman. A criminal, a ward of the state. She’d be someone who didn’t matter at all, to anyone.
At first, she thought only of escape. The reformatory’s buildings were clustered together in the center of an open expanse of lawn, fringed in woodlands. According to Esther, the forbidding metal gate at the front didn’t extend all the way around. She’d find nothing but split-log farmers’ fences if she ran out the back way.
“But you won’t like your chances against the farmers,” Esther whispered. They were on their knees together, scrubbing the dormitory floor. “The reformatory pays a reward if they catch a girl trying to escape. And they all keep dogs. You can hear them in the woods.”
Esther was right. Minnie heard them howling in the middle of the night, most likely over a possum. What would they do if they caught a whiff of a girl on the run?
The punishment was worse for runaways, if Esther was to be believed. “They send you to the state prison,” she told Minnie, “and you don’t get out when you’re twenty-one. You’d be in a real jail, for as long as they want to put you there.”
Still, Minnie was tortured by an urge to run. She was always looking for an escape route, watching the staff’s routine, staring off into the brittle winter woods in hopes of divining some way through. She hadn’t a dime of her own, but already she’d started squirreling away anything that might be of use to her if she saw a chance to flee: a dull but possibly useful butter knife, a tin of potted meat, a bar of soap.
She was storing up something else, too: any account she heard of a girl who’d been set free. Such stories circulated like underground currency. They had to be traded for something else of value. Minnie would recount a wild night in the city with Tony (which never happened), or tell about the vindictive wife she’d met in the Hackensack jail who’d put her husband’s eye out with a fire poker because of the way he kept looking at her sister (entirely invented, but effective), and in exchange, she’d hear tell of a girl who fooled a judge, bribed a neighbor to pose as her aunt, or volunteered for missionary work, only to escape on her very first night away from the reformatory.
The missionary work interested Minnie the most, as she felt herself incapable of fooling a judge and hadn’t any money with which to pay a bribe.
“How did she do it?” Minnie wanted to know. “Was it a church that offered to take her?”
The girl in possession of this story, who everyone called Red although it was not her name, shook her head. “It was a lady policeman just like the one who brought you. She knew a group doing good work out West and arranged to have a few girls sent there. But they all ran away, and that put an end to it.”
Minnie couldn’t imagine Deputy Kopp sending her out West to be a missionary, but there was a nugget of an idea in there. In the days that followed, as Minnie scoured pots and ran bed-linens through the wringer and waited in line for her soup, she worked over the possibility, rubbing it down and polishing it smooth, like a stone between her fingers.
52
EDNA RARELY SAW RUBY and her friends at the Red Cross classes. Several of them already knew how to speak French and didn’t need to learn to count and name the parts of the body: un deux trois quatre cinq, main jambes oeil épaule pied. They dropped in on the cooking classes only sporadically, claiming that anyone could follow
a recipe, although Edna found the lessons on toast water and onion gruel to be a fair reminder that cooking for invalids and soldiers would require inventiveness and practice, and that family dinner recipes might have little to do with it. One night they boiled down a restorative jelly of port wine and cloves meant to warm a soldier drained of blood, and on another night, they baked sea-pies in mess tins, so that they might be carried to the front and eaten later. They learned how to cook without utensils, and how to wrap meat in clean grass and roast it in a clay pot.
The exact circumstances under which those dishes might be served, or those rudimentary French words spoken, were difficult for Edna to imagine, but she did what she could to commit each evening’s lesson to memory. There was something bracing about being in a classroom, even if the church basement was nothing like the school-rooms back in Edgewater. She liked the daily practice of learning something new. It gave her a sense of forward movement, even if she wasn’t yet going anywhere at all.
Most days, she wasn’t sure that she ever would go to France. She never did confide in Ruby the impossibility of raising the funds for her passage, but Ruby guessed at it soon enough. The wealthy young women who organized this endeavor had already secured pledges for more than they needed and persuaded a few of their donors to redirect their contributions to Edna. When Edna protested that she didn’t want to accept charity, they were quick to remind her that the charity was directed at war relief, not at her. For that reason she agreed to the donations, but they weren’t nearly enough—a dollar a month here, three dollars a month there. She persisted only because she couldn’t think of a single other thing to do.
One night, after a course on purifying and storing river water, she was surprised to come home and see Dewey Barnes waiting on Mrs. Turnbull’s porch.
