by Amy Stewart
She ushered me through the door and closed it quickly behind us, which seemed to have more to do with keeping the malicious odor out than an eagerness to invite me in.
“Your name?” She spoke with a brisk efficiency. She wore a smartly tailored navy suit with a long plain skirt and a trim jacket, and her hair was tied in a tight bun. After resuming her post behind the desk, she looked at me over the top of delicate gold spectacles and waited for me to explain myself.
I said my name and told her that I had come to deliver an invoice for damages to our buggy. She held her hand out as if she was in the habit of receiving such invoices daily. I gave it to her and she laid it across her blotter, smoothed the folds, and read it slowly. Then she looked up at me with an expression that I could not read. It might have been sorrow or shock or deep skepticism.
“Henry did this,” she said, mostly to herself.
“He claimed that our horse ran in front of him, but everyone along Market saw the accident, and he is most certainly the one who ran into us.”
She waved her hand to silence me. “I don’t doubt your story. Are you sure this took place on the fourteenth?”
She glanced up at me and I nodded.
With a sigh she handed the letter back to me. “He was supposed to meet with our banker. He told me a tire burst.”
She dropped her head into her hands and muttered something I couldn’t hear.
“Forgive me for saying—”
“Oh,” she interrupted, “you’re forgiven. What is it?”
“With the company he was keeping, I don’t believe he was on his way to visit a banker.”
She gave another long, aggrieved exhalation and pushed herself to her feet. “Have you any brothers, Miss Kopp?”
“Just one,” I said.
“Is yours as much trouble as mine?”
“Henry Kaufman is your brother?” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were the secretary.”
“I am, according to the letterhead. Marion Garfinkel. My husband’s Ed Garfinkel. We’re in town from Pittsburgh to try to sort out the mess Henry’s made of our factory.” Before I could say another word, she turned and yelled in the direction of a closed door across the room.
“Henry!”
In addition to her desk, there were three others, all occupied by young women working at typewriters and ledger books. The girls ducked down when she shouted. The door didn’t open.
Through gritted teeth she muttered, “If he ignores me one more time—” and marched over to his office. Without turning around to look at me again, she called, “Stay there.”
She rapped at the door and rattled the knob. When it didn’t open, she fumbled around for a ring of keys at her waist and let herself in. “Henry, there’s a girl out here who says—” Then the door slammed behind her, and I heard nothing but muffled shouting.
I fidgeted with my handbag and tried to ignore the curious glances of the other girls. Dolley had been waiting unattended long enough, and I just wanted to hand him my invoice and leave. The shouting had ceased from inside Henry Kaufman’s office. I picked up my letter from Mrs. Garfinkel’s desk and crossed the room, giving the door a quiet knock.
It swung open. Marion appeared to be on her way out, but she stepped aside and swept her arm into the room, inviting me to enter, her lips pinched together in a kind of forced smile.
“My brother doesn’t recall the incident,” she said crisply.
“But I—”
“Tell him yourself, then.”
I had the uneasy feeling that I was being sent in to prove a point, although I couldn’t imagine what that point might be. I took one hesitant step inside and Marion slammed the door behind me. I could hear her shoes clicking across the floor as she hurried to her station.
Behind an enormous oak desk sat Henry Kaufman in yet another elegant suit, his hair slicked back the way men wore it if they were going out for the evening. But with that round, soft face, he looked more like a child trying to dress like his father. He couldn’t have been much younger than me—thirty, perhaps—but he had the pampered manner of a boy who had been too long at boarding school. He would’ve seemed entirely harmless if there hadn’t been a cold distance in his eyes and an angry set to his mouth. Here in this factory, he seemed like a man who didn’t want what he had, but also didn’t have exactly what he wanted.
And in leather chairs all around the room were his friends, his unsavory, no-good friends. There was the droopy-eyed man with the wooden leg, slumped over in a brown suit that was two sizes too big for him, and a beefy character with arms like stovepipes and the broadest set of chins I’d ever seen. The rest were lean and angular types who each seemed to have lost something in a fight: one lacked a third finger on his left hand, one was missing a patch of hair above his ear, and another wore a milky glass eye. They all held cards in their hands, and a bottle of whiskey sat on the table between them.
I wanted out of that room.
“Oh, you’re the one,” Henry Kaufman said. “She came in here talking about a girl wanting money and I told her it could have been half of New Jersey.”
The other men snickered and drew on their cigarettes.
I stood a little straighter and looked down at him with what I hoped was a calm and dignified air. “Then you remember me. I am Constance Kopp, and—”
“And these are your sisters,” he sneered. “Or haven’t you brought them along? Who is the youngest one? Fleurette?”
I felt a little sick when he said her name. “We haven’t had a reply to our letters,” I said, “so I’ve brought you another one. You owe us fifty dollars for the damages to our buggy, and I will take payment now.”
He didn’t accept the letter I held out for him, so I stepped forward and dropped it on his desk.
“I’ll just speak to your father about this,” he said. “Is his business here in Paterson? Or does he . . .” He picked up the envelope and examined our return address. “Or does he work on your farm in Wyckoff?”
He had our address. I should have asked him to make payment at our bank. In spite of the heat, I went very cold.
“You live on Sicomac Road? Down by the dairy?”
He came around the desk and stood right in front of me, easing his shoulder between me and the doorway, drawing a low whistle from one of the men. Henry Kaufman may have been a head shorter than me, but he was stout and powerfully built. He smelled of whiskey, and again of hair tonic and his own factory.
“I’m sure I can find it,” he said in a low voice. “When I get there, tell me, through which window may I find Miss Fleurette’s bedroom?”
He looked over at his friends and they laughed. There was a roar in my ears and suddenly he was very small and far away. I grabbed his shoulders and threw him against the wall, hard enough that the back of his skull cracked the plaster.
“Don’t you dare,” I said. I’d gathered his lapels up in my fists without realizing I’d done it. From the corner of my eye, I could see the other men rising to their feet.
A thin trickle of blood smeared the wall. There was a shuffle behind me and I could feel someone breathing over my shoulder.
“If you’d like to pick a fight with a man your own size,” he said quietly, “I’ll send one over.”
My hands flew away from him as if they’d touched a hot pan. Before the other men could get hold of me I was out the door and running past the secretaries. Marion rose from her desk and called out to me, but I didn’t answer.
I pushed the door open and fell out onto the factory floor, running straight into a slender red-haired girl carrying a steaming tray of fabric. She dropped the tray and emerald-green dye ran down the front of her apron. We slid around in a puddle of it, and then someone shouted in Polish and the girl grabbed my arm to stay upright, but I shook her off and ran for the door without once looking back.
Outside, I grabbed Dolley’s bridle and dragged her a few blocks away before stopping to catch my breath. My palms were slick with sweat and m
y head floated away from my neck like a balloon tethered by a string. Little pinpricks of light swam in front of me. I swallowed to push down the bile rising up in my throat, and then forced myself to focus on the shop across the street, a place called Gurney’s that sold boilers and ranges. “WE MAKE IT HOT FOR YOU” read the sign in the window, next to another sign announcing that the shop was closed for vacation because Paterson was hot enough already.
An engine rattled around the corner and I pulled Dolley toward me. Would they come after me? I held my breath and waited, but the machine rumbled past and its driver didn’t even turn to look at me.
I tried to imagine how I would tell Norma and Fleurette what had happened.
He said your name, I would say to Fleurette. He asked about your bedroom.
And to Norma: He said he wanted to speak to our father.
I could still feel the men in that room coming up behind me and a hand reaching for my shoulder.
6
HAD MY MOTHER BEEN ALIVE, none of this would have happened. We didn’t go marching into factories to demand payment from strange men. In fact, we hardly ever went anywhere. Mother didn’t even like to go out shopping. When we lived in Brooklyn, she had almost everything delivered, and when we moved to the countryside, it became Francis’s responsibility to ride into town and get things for us.
My mother named me after her, but I was never like her. She was Constance Clementine Kopp and I was Constance Amélie, my middle name being her mother’s name. Francis was her firstborn, but having grown up with four brothers, a boy was unremarkable to her. She was waiting for a girl: a girl she could wrap inside her cloistered world, a girl who would sit next to her and work at needlepoint and keep her secrets and pretend not to hear the door when someone knocked.
She lived most of her life in this country, but she was never an American and she didn’t trust Americans or American ways. Her parents left Vienna when she was sixteen, like so many of the middle class did in the wake of the revolution of 1848. My grandfather—an educated man, a chemist—liked to say that he brought his family here to give them a more stable and certain future, and to keep his boys out of the endless wars with France and Italy, but my grandmother once whispered that they moved to get away from the Jews. “After they got to leave the ghettos they could live anywhere,” she hissed, and glanced out the window as if she suspected they were moving to Brooklyn, too, which of course they were.
My mother married my father, Frank Kopp, at the age of twenty. He was what my grandparents called Bohemian, which meant that he was Czech, but in some convoluted way having to do with the outcomes of wars still being fought in those distant countries, they had decided that he was practically Austrian. They were relieved he wasn’t a Jew, and even though my mother had met him in New York, he wasn’t an American. On the grounds of what he was not, my grandparents allowed him to marry their daughter.
He was a wine merchant when they married, but he failed at that and became a bartender, and when that occupation didn’t agree with him, he was only a drunk. My mother forced him out of the house many times, but he didn’t leave for good until I was about ten. After that we saw him so infrequently that people began to think that Mother was a widow, an idea she encouraged. When we left Brooklyn she didn’t tell him where we’d gone, and as far as I knew, he’d never tried to find out.
Secrets and deception were my mother’s specialty. She invented new birth dates for herself whenever it suited her to lie about her age. She mistrusted authorities and never quite believed she had a right to live here. There must have been some record of her entrance to this country, but she knew nothing about it and claimed not to be a citizen. She possessed no identification, no marriage license, and no birth certificates for any of us, having birthed us at home and breathed not a word of it to any official. She had a dread of doctors, tax collectors, census-takers, inspectors, newspaper reporters, and the police—particularly the police.
She believed that Americans were crude and uncivilized, and tried instead to raise us as good Austrians, insisting that we speak her own peculiar blend of French and German, and engaging us in the tedious practices of lace-making and decorative painting in an effort to keep us indoors and away from the other children in the neighborhood.
As a result, there was not a bread tin or a sewing box in our Brooklyn apartment that hadn’t been painted with a spray of roses and then covered with a doily. Our home was a dark and crowded museum of our mother’s Viennese girlhood. Her faded needlepoint hung on the wall alongside oil portraits of unnamed ancestors and a china doll in a glass case that wore the hair of her long-dead grandmother. A miniature porcelain tea set—each dish edged in gold and hand-painted with delicate toadflax and fern—sat inside a mahogany breakfront alongside a collection of miniature glass animals: elephants and lions, fish and sea monsters. We were forbidden to touch them.
She never opened the door for strangers. She read salacious newspaper stories to me and Norma as we worked at our sewing, hoping, I suppose, that with each stitch her shocking morality tales would teach us the dangers that a knock at the door could bring. I can’t look at our childhood samplers without remembering the disgraceful fate of Laura Smith, age seventeen, who was lured away from her home by the grocer and ruined by him, or that of thirteen-year-old Lena Luefschuetz, found dead for reasons having to do with her “undesirable companions.” A girl named Amelia was arrested for “going into a hallway with an Italian” and was detained as a witness for two weeks, which prevented her from boarding a steamship that would have carried her back to the bosom of her family in Germany and away from the horrors that a city like New York could visit upon a young girl. “Arme Amelia, so weit weg von ihrer Familie,” Mother would say under her breath. Amelia lived constantly in her prayers.
For weeks we followed the story of a girl arrested for waywardness after her mother called the police and demanded that they take her away. Her own mother! The girl had been out past her curfew, which, we were shocked to learn, was ten o’clock. The girl claimed that the door was locked and her mother would not let her in, so she had no choice but to ride her bicycle all night long. A trial was held in which her cyclometer was presented as evidence. It showed that she had traveled fifty miles. A church pastor testified on her behalf, as did a Sunday school teacher. The magistrate seemed inclined to let the girl go until her mother held up a letter the girl had written to “a young physician in Manhattan.” (Mother read this in a grim tone, suggesting that nothing good could come of correspondence with physicians.) The magistrate read the letter, gave the girl a shocked and stern look, and committed her to the Wayside Home until she turned twenty-one.
If Mother knew what that letter contained, she wouldn’t tell us. All she wanted us to understand was that in America, letters were dangerous, as were hallways, bicycles, doctors, and Italians. We could be locked up for any of it, and ruined.
She would have been terrified by our accident, not just because of our injuries and the damage to the buggy, but because it left us so exposed. The thought of the three of us thrown into a heap on Market Street, a crowd gathered around us, everyone watching, everyone wondering who we were—Mother dedicated her life to avoiding that very thing.
And now I had gotten into a fistfight with a factory owner. If my mother had nightmares, this would have been one of them.
7
FLEURETTE AND NORMA didn’t look up when I walked in. They were engaged in a game of preference, with Fleurette holding two of the three hands.
“Oh, good,” Fleurette said when she saw me. “Come and take Mother’s place.”
“You’re bidding for Mother?” I said, dropping into a chair across from them. Fleurette was on the divan with a pillow propped up next to her in the place of a third player. Norma was seated across from her with her own hand, wearing a look of high skepticism.
“No, she’s bidding for a pillow,” Norma said, “and I have begun to suspect that the pillow is cheating.”
“C
onstance wasn’t here,” Fleurette said. “We’ll never have a threesome if you’re always running off by yourself like that.”
“I’m not always running off,” I said.
“Did Mr. Kaufman pay?” Fleurette asked.
I had decided that Fleurette shouldn’t know what had happened. She was an excitable girl, prone to vivid dreams and wild ideas. If she thought we had an enemy, she’d keep me up half the night with elaborate cloak-and-dagger schemes.
“Mr. Kaufman has received the invoice,” was all I said.
Norma raised an eyebrow at me and put down her cards. “It’s nearly dinnertime. Constance and I will finish the noodles.”
“Don’t cut them into squares!” Fleurette called as we left for the kitchen. “They taste better as triangles.”
On the kitchen table Norma had rolled out the noodles for Krautfleckerl and laid a wet towel across the dough. When we were girls in Brooklyn the entire building knew what the Kopp family was having for dinner when the odor of onions, vinegar, caraway, and cabbage filled the hallway.
“It’s what Fleurette wanted,” Norma said, before I could ask why she was making a hot cabbage dish on a sweltering summer evening. “She was missing Mother all day, and you weren’t here to do anything about it.”
“It was good of you to play cards with her.” I took a knife and began cutting the noodles. Norma watched me warily from the stove.
“What are you doing?” she asked when I made the first cut.
“Triangles.”
“You’re making a mess of them. Just cut them the way we always do and let Fleurette make her own triangles.”
“But she doesn’t want it that way. I thought we were making this for her.”
Norma reached for the knife. “I’ll cut the noodles. You do the cabbage.”
I pushed her away and sliced a row of perfect squares. “Well, you’re right about Henry Kaufman,” I said. “He is the most ill-mannered young man I’ve ever met. And that gang of thugs he runs around with! What’s a businessman doing with a crowd like that?”
