by Amy Stewart
Walking was nearly impossible. My hip felt like it had been pushed out of joint. I couldn’t quite hold myself upright, and every time I put weight on my left leg, my knee cried out in pain.
This was not the soreness of a hard day’s work. It felt more like the aftermath of a beating. I made my way to the hall and kept one hand on the rail as I shuffled downstairs.
I found Fleurette in the kitchen, eating a boiled egg with a spoon.
“Bonjour,” she said. After Mother died last year, Fleurette took to imitating her speech mannerisms. Mother, having grown up in Vienna with a French father and an Austrian mother, spoke French and two distinct styles of German. Fleurette preferred the French for its romantic flourishes. Norma and I found the affectation tiresome, but we had conferred on it and decided to ignore it.
“Let me see your foot.”
She lifted her skirt and presented a badly bandaged ankle. The cloth was stained a rusted brown. I am sorry to admit that it was a stagnation of dried blood, and not our poorly situated pins, that held the bandage in place.
“Ach. We did not take very good care of you last night.”
“Je pense que c’est cassé.”
“Surely not. Can’t you move it? Stand up.”
Fleurette didn’t move. She picked at her egg cup and kept her eyes down. “Norma said to tell you that Francis—” But before she could finish, there was a rattle at the kitchen door and my brother let himself in.
“Which one of you was driving?” he said. With Mother gone, Francis had taken on the proprietary air of the man of the house, even though he’d been married and living in Hawthorne for years.
Fleurette—who looks people square in the face when she lies to them—turned to Francis and said, “Constance, of course. I’m too young to drive, and Norma was reading the paper.”
“It doesn’t matter who was driving,” I said. “That man aimed his machine directly at us. Dolley could have been killed.”
“I could have been killed,” Fleurette said with a dramatic roll of her eyes. She shifted around in her chair to give Francis a look at the purple bruise emerging just above her knee. He turned away, embarrassed.
“She’ll be fine, won’t she?” he asked, and I nodded. He held the door open and gestured for me to come along for a private scolding and an examination of the wreckage he’d just delivered.
Outside was a wide and airy barn that housed Dolley, an occasional goat or pig, and a dozen or so chickens. The eaves had been extended on one side to accommodate Norma’s pigeon loft. The imbalance between the two sides of the building made it seem in constant danger of losing its footing. Next to it, facing the drive, was the entrance to our root cellar. A few summers ago, Francis had laid the stone walk that led us there.
He spoke in a low voice so Fleurette couldn’t listen in from the kitchen door. “Who is this man, this Harry—what was it?”
“Henry Kaufman,” I said, “of Kaufman Silk Dyeing Company.”
That brought him to a stop as surely as if he’d walked into a wall. He planted his feet and looked down at them with a long and loud exhale. This was a mannerism of our father’s, one I had almost forgotten until Francis reached the age at which exasperation became an everyday emotion. Francis had our father’s light brown hair and his pale Czech features, but where our father had managed to take a high forehead and light, intelligent eyes and make himself into something of a ruffian, Francis took the same features and composed them into those of a serious gentleman, with perfectly slicked and combed hair and a mustache that turned up neatly at the ends.
“He’s a silk man? Are you sure?”
“One can hardly picture him running a factory, but that’s the address he gave. He’s on Putnam with all the others.”
He shook his head and squinted at Norma, who had heard us coming and backed out of her pigeon loft. She took her time locking it behind her. Norma had cut her hair short this spring, insisting on doing it herself and chopping at it until her brown curls framed her face unevenly. In the last few years, she’d taken to wearing riding boots and a split skirt that fell to just above her ankles. In this costume she would climb ladders to repair a gutter or traipse down to the creek to trap a rabbit. Fleurette used to sing a little song to her that went, “Pants are made for men and not for women. Women are made for men and not for pants.” Norma took offense at the song but nonetheless insisted that what she wore could not be considered pants in the least.
“You aren’t hurt,” I said, as she walked up. At least one of us could still move.
“My head aches terribly,” she said, “from listening to Fleurette go on about how she was nearly killed yesterday. She talks too much for a girl who is almost dead.”
“I wondered why she was up so early. She’s been rehearsing her story for Francis.”
“Listen to me, both of you,” Francis said. He put a hand on each of us and led us down the drive to his wagon. “This man Kaufman. What exactly did he say?”
“As little as he could before roaring off in that machine with all his hoodlum friends,” I said, as I reached up with my good arm to help Francis pull the tarpaulin off the back of his wagon. “But I let him know that he should expect—Oh.”
The buggy was a horror of splintered wood and twisted metal. Until now I hadn’t thought about exactly how it had looked when we left it in Paterson, but here it was, this fragile veneer of wood panels and leather and brass fittings that had done so little to shelter us from the force of Henry Kaufman’s automobile.
Norma and I stared at it. It was a wonder we’d survived.
Francis removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t be out here all the time looking after you girls.”
“We haven’t asked you to look after us,” I said. “We only needed our buggy brought here, and that wasn’t too much of a bother, was it?”
“No, but without a man around the place—”
“We haven’t had a man around the place since you married!” I interrupted. “And what difference would it have made? He hit us broadside with his automobile. There was nothing you could have done.”
“It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be out here by yourselves,” Francis said, “especially now that you’ve lost your buggy. Wouldn’t you rather stay in town with us?”
“I prefer not to live in a town,” Norma said. “Going to town nearly got us killed yesterday, in case you’ve forgotten. We’re much safer here.”
Francis looked down at his feet again—this had been our father’s way of stopping himself from saying something he didn’t want to say—and worked his jaw back and forth for a minute before giving in. “All right. I’ll take care of the repairs. I know a man in Hackensack who can do it. It looks bad, but I think it can be rebuilt. The gears are fine, and most of the panels came apart at their seams.”
“We can arrange for the repairs,” I said, “and Henry Kaufman will pay for it.”
“You can’t make him pay, and you shouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Francis said. “You know what these men are like. Didn’t you see what they did to the strikers last year?”
Francis didn’t have to remind me. Everyone had seen what happened to the strikers. The mill owners got it into their heads that a worker could operate four looms at a time, instead of two, and do it for ten hours a day instead of eight. Three hundred mills shut down. Factory workers in New York City walked off the job in solidarity. The streets in Paterson were choked with outraged strikers. Even the children who worked as pickers and twisters in the mills took up their placards and marched.
The mill owners used their considerable influence to have the police turn up at rallies and arrest as many people as the jails would hold. When the police were overwhelmed, the silk men hired their own private force. That’s when houses started burning down. That’s when speeches were interrupted by gunshots. That’s when bakeries and butchers were warned not to sell food to the strikers. Eventually the workers were too starved and defeated to
do anything but return to their looms.
The silk men behaved as if they owned Paterson. But none of them had the right to run us down in the street and get away with it.
“Mr. Kaufman doesn’t frighten me,” I said. “He will pay what he owes.”
3
THAT BUSINESS about us moving in with Francis began on the evening of our mother’s funeral, after a supper of ham sandwiches and pickles and Bessie’s lemon cake. While Norma and Fleurette washed the dishes, I sat with Francis on his back porch and watched him fill his pipe. From the lane behind the house came the sound of his children playing some game whose rules were known only to them, but which seemed to involve tossing a stick through a large metal hoop. I settled into a reed chair next to him and breathed my first calm breath of the day. It did not last.
“You know Bessie and I would love to have you girls come live with us,” Francis said once he’d gotten his tobacco to smolder.
I groaned and kicked my feet up on the porch rail. “That was very unconvincing. Besides, you don’t have room for the brood you’ve already got.”
“Well, the uncles don’t have room for you back in Brooklyn, either. I don’t know where else you’d go.”
There had been a sudden shower after the burial, but the sky had cleared while we were eating our supper. Against the gathering dark the first few stars appeared. I looked up at them and realized that on that night, and forever after, my mother would be sleeping outdoors, under the stars, under her blanket of earth. She despised dirt and rarely went outdoors, and would have been horrified by her new circumstances if she’d given any thought to it at all before buying that burial plot.
“Why do we have to go anywhere?” I said.
“You can’t stay on the farm by yourselves. Three girls, all alone out there?”
“How is that so different from when Mother was alive? Are four girls any better than three?”
If Francis understood that I was teasing him, he didn’t show it. He tapped his pipe and thought seriously about it for a minute. “Well, the only reason you were out there in the first place—”
I leaned over and shushed him when I heard Fleurette in the kitchen. We waited with our heads inclined toward the window, but we couldn’t tell where she’d gone.
Francis lowered his voice. “All I mean to say is that she’s nearly grown now. What are you going to do when she’s ready to go off and get married? Live out there like a couple of old spinsters?”
The idea of Fleurette as a bride sent a jolt through my rib cage. “Marriage? She’s only fourteen! Besides—” Before I could finish, Fleurette’s voice sailed through the window screen.
“I’m fifteen!”
Francis rubbed his eyes and shifted around in his chair to face me. “You girls are my responsibility now, and you should be with us. You could help Bessie around the house, and you could . . .” He trailed off, having exhausted the list of things he thought the three of us could do.
I rose to my feet, shaking out the gray-and-black tweed Fleurette had chosen as my mourning costume, and bent over Francis’s chair.
“We can manage on our own,” I whispered. “And if Bessie needs as much help as you say, we’ll hire out Fleurette for the summer. She needs something to occupy her time.”
“I’m not for hire!” Fleurette shouted.
AFTER THAT, Francis turned up every few months with another well-intentioned scheme to guarantee some sort of future for the three of us. The fact that we were unmarried and lacking an income that would keep us for life had not bothered him as much while Mother was alive. But he seemed to feel that he had inherited us when she died. He had grown into the sort of man who worried constantly over his small responsibilities: his snug little house in Hawthorne, his generous and resourceful wife, his secure employment, and his two healthy and well-behaved children. It did not seem to me that he should have any worries at all, but Francis was a man who brooded. Lacking any troubles of a more serious nature, he took to brooding over us.
Most men of his age had an unencumbered female relative or two tucked in an attic bedroom, so he must have seen it as inevitable that he would eventually take on a few as well. He did understand that we would have to be kept occupied, so his schemes always included tedious domestic employment for the three of us.
The house next door to his was put up for sale, and he suggested buying it and having us run it as a boarding house—on his behalf, of course, with the rents going to pay the mortgage. We refused, as we had no interest in becoming boarders in our own boarding house.
He then offered to hire me and Norma to tutor his children, even though they were learning their letters and numbers in school and didn’t require the services of two grown women. Fleurette, he suggested, could take in work as a seamstress. When Francis talked about bringing in other people’s torn and rotten clothing for repair, I just looked at him as if I’d never seen him before and wondered aloud if he remembered anything about the woman who raised him.
That’s not to say that I didn’t worry about what would become of us. We’d tried to find a few tenant farmers, but there was enough land for sale that no one particularly needed to rent from us. We had been forced to sell off a lot every few years just to keep going and were left with an oddly shaped thirty-acre parcel not accessible by any road but Sicomac, where the house was situated. It would be difficult to sell any more of it without building a new road right through our land, and, besides, I thought it best to keep what little land we still owned, as property seemed to be the best insurance against penury in old age.
Norma was terribly attached to the farm and refused to consider going anywhere else. She found rustic living more agreeable and, like many people who prefer the countryside, possessed a disposition that lent itself to living quite a distance from the nearest neighbor. She was distrustful of strangers, impatient of polite talk and frivolous society, indifferent to shops, theaters, and other diversions of city life, and unreasonably devoted to the few things that did interest her: her pigeons, her newspapers, and her family. She wouldn’t leave the farm unless we carried her off. But Francis was right—if Fleurette was to have a future, it surely wouldn’t be out in the countryside, stitching buttonholes and tossing corn to the chickens.
Something would have to be done about the three of us. I was tired of hearing my brother’s ideas, but I hadn’t any of my own. I did know this: a run-in with an automobile was not to be taken as evidence of our inability to look after ourselves. It was nothing but a mundane business matter and I would manage it without any assistance from Francis.
4
July 16, 1914
Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp
Sicomac Road
Wyckoff, New Jersey
Dear Mr. Kaufman,
I write to supply you with an accounting of the damages inflicted upon our buggy by you and your automobile on the afternoon of July 14. The damages visited upon my sisters and I are considerable as well. Dear Fleurette is but fifteen years of age and now suffers from a badly broken foot and a dread of motor carriages which will no doubt impede her advancement into the coming engine-powered age. But I confine myself at present to the harm done to our buggy.
4 (four) hickory spokes @ $1 each, cracked: $4
1 (one) carriage lamp, smashed: $3
1 (one) whip socket, dislodged and lost in the commotion: $1
1 (one) oak panel, splintered to bits: $8
1 (one) complete hood assembly, bent beyond repair: $10
Assembly and re-attachment of disparate pieces: $24
Total (due in full promptly upon receipt, as we are at present without a buggy): $50
We appreciate your prompt payment by return post. We remain,
Yours in a state of caution along our town’s ever more crowded avenues,
Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp
“I am not afraid of automobiles,” said Fleurette from the divan.
“Of course you are,” I said. “
Now, be quiet and rest your foot.”
“I can rest my foot without being quiet.”
“Those figures are too high,” said Norma. “He won’t take it seriously and he’ll throw it in the trash.”
“I’m including the time for a hired man to work on it,” I said.
“I don’t recall anything about a hired man. Read it again,” said Norma.
“Don’t,” said Fleurette. “I’m tired of Mr. Kaufman.”
“Then I’ll post it.”
“I’m not fifteen, either,” said Fleurette.
I thought it should’ve been obvious to her that fifteen was a more tender age than sixteen and the violation therefore more grievous.
Fleurette grumbled and shifted in the silk peignoir she’d chosen for her convalescence. A pattern of peacock feathers ran along the collar, which she thought made her look glamorous. We’d been overindulging her since Mother’s death, and I realized I would have to put a stop to that. Her taste for luxurious fabrics alone was going to ruin us.
I rose with some difficulty to get a stamp. My shoulder had calmed considerably since the collision, but every morning brought a fresh insult: an ankle that couldn’t take my weight, a rib that cried out when I took a breath. Fleurette couldn’t get her foot into a shoe, which made her something of an invalid. It fell to Norma to look after both of us and go out for whatever supplies we needed. Without our buggy, she had the choice of taking a long walk in hot weather to the trolley in Wyckoff, or saddling Dolley and riding her in. Naturally, she chose the latter. She’d already been as far as Paterson and back twice in the last few days, balancing a basket of pigeons on Dolley’s rump and releasing them along the way.
