by Amy Stewart
This is why we were so astonished to come home from the dance academy one day and find a Singer salesman in our mother’s parlor, demonstrating a new electric motor. Mother looked at us like one of the terrified kidnapping victims she read about in the newspaper. The Singer man just rose to his feet and smiled.
Having only just turned eighteen, I was too old for dancing lessons, but Norma, at the age of fourteen, was finishing her last year and had convinced me to go along and help with the younger children so that she wouldn’t have to face it alone. She was embarrassed to be seen in her pleated skirt and bloomers, so she ran past the Singer man and slammed the door to our bedroom. That left me face-to-face with him.
“Sholem aleykhem,” he said quietly, as if my mother weren’t in the room. “I am here on behalf of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. How do you do?”
He was a Jew. I had heard Yiddish spoken on the street, but never under our own roof. I stared past him at my mother, who sat frozen on the divan. How had she allowed this to happen?
He spoke to me again in that soft voice. “And you must be one of Mrs. Kopp’s lovely daughters.”
From his accent, I could tell he’d only been in the country a short while, but already he’d learned good English.
When I didn’t say anything, he added, “I met your mother just as she was stepping out the door to hang her washing. I’d been next door showing Mrs. Fritz the benefits of our newest model. Your mother was kind enough to let me demonstrate it again here in your parlor.”
My mother? Kind? He must have put a spell on her.
“I am Constance Kopp,” I said at last. “Please excuse my sister. I’m afraid she’s overly tired from her exertions at dancing class.”
The Singer man was half a head taller than I was, which was already a rarity for me at that age. He had chocolate-brown eyes and a head of thick black hair that parted in the middle and flopped across his forehead. He looked down at me through gold-rimmed spectacles that gave him the appearance of a scholar.
“You are not tired from dancing class?”
“I don’t take the class anymore. I’m too old for it.”
“A girl is never too old to dance.”
He was one of those men who perpetually smiled and whose face had become agreeably lined because of it. I knew I shouldn’t smile back at him, but I did.
At last my mother found her voice. “My daughter does not like to dance.”
Without turning away from me, he said, “But she took the lessons.”
“Dancing lessons are good for girls.” Mother rose and marched between us to the door and held it open. Seeing that he hadn’t moved, she added, “She does not like to sew, either.”
At last he turned around to retrieve his sample bag and the model of the electric motor. He gave me a polite nod and something more—a wink?—as he walked to the door.
“Perhaps she would like a lesson,” the Singer man said, deploying one of his warm and generous grins on my mother from the hallway. “I offer instruction on all of our machines.”
My mother closed the door on him and I turned so she couldn’t see the rush of blood to my face. At that moment I wondered if she had been right all along. Maybe young girls really did face threats to their virtue every day in America, even in their own homes, even from traveling salesmen carrying nothing but order books and sample cases.
THE NEXT TIME the Singer man knocked on our door, I was the one who let him in.
I’d refused to take Norma to dancing lessons any longer. Mother wouldn’t let her go alone, so every Wednesday and Saturday the two of them rode the trolley to the dance academy, leaving me at home to start supper. Francis was working as a stock clerk for a hardware store, which meant that I found myself with the unexpected luxury of an empty apartment twice a week.
That afternoon I’d been very lazy, reading a book on the divan and neglecting the roast I was supposed to cook for dinner. It was an unusually mild day for November, and I had opened all the windows, pushing aside the heavy tapestry curtains to let in the high, clear breeze.
I had adopted Mother’s habit of never answering a knock at the door—all of us had—but this one came so softly that it seemed harmless. I was at the door before I had time to think about what I was doing.
The Singer man’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. “I hoped I’d find you at home, Miss Kopp.”
Something happened to my limbs. They were frozen in place but also fully charged, as if a great river were rushing through them. He was inside with the door closed behind him before I could move. Now I knew how he’d gotten past my mother on his first visit. He had a way of gliding through a door as if every home were his own and he’d been expected for hours.
The Singer man put his case on the table and released its latches. The sides fell open to reveal a polished black machine.
“It’s our newest model. I wanted you to see it first. I thought it might persuade you to take more of an interest in your sewing.”
Nothing could make me take an interest in sewing, but for reasons I didn’t understand, I nodded anyway and sat next to him and watched as he unrolled his fabric samples and bobbins. Each length of cloth had been stitched before, hemmed and pleated and taken apart again, exhibiting the traces of every sewing lesson he’d ever given.
I have a vivid memory of a piece of gingham rolling under the machine, and of a feeling just below my heart like a bird had hatched and was struggling to get out. It rose up into my throat and I swallowed to keep it down. Some part of me was aware that time was passing and that Mother and Norma were due home, but I could hardly breathe, much less rouse myself to look at the clock.
The Singer man possessed the long, thin fingers of a musician. He could handle the slimmest grade of thread and make the most minute adjustments to his machine the way one tunes an instrument. Those fingers brushed across mine to guide a piece of fresh silk under the needle, leaving a row of fine blue stitches more perfect and precise than anything my mother had ever attempted.
The lesson went on for an hour, ending just ten minutes before Norma and Mother returned. He left as silently as he came and our flat showed no sign that he’d been there. When he was gone, I stood in the middle of the empty room, wondering if I’d only imagined him.
I can’t say that I learned anything. I was in no position to purchase one of his machines and he must have known it. That night, as we waited for the roast to finish, I said nothing about how I’d spent the afternoon. It was the first secret I’d ever kept from my family.
11
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Norma and I did not speak of Henry Kaufman or Lucy Blake. But Fleurette could think of little else, and she took any opportunity to pull me aside and tell her outlandish ideas to me.
“What if the boy is to be the heir to the Kaufman fortune, and he has been smuggled off to Russia, where he will never know his true heritage?” she asked one day in the languid hours of late afternoon, when Norma was out with her pigeons and we had retreated to our cool, dim sitting room to read. “He could be another dauphin perdu.”
“We don’t have princes in America,” I said. “And why would he be taken to Russia?”
She put a finger purposefully on her pointed little chin as she thought about it. “The Bolsheviks. They took him to New York in the evacuation, and then they found out he was a silk man’s son, and they put him on a ship to Russia to be raised as a revolutionary.”
I put my book down, as Fleurette’s story was vastly more interesting. “And will he return someday?”
“Yes,” she said, stretching her arms above her head and yawning. “At eighteen, when he becomes a man, he’ll claim his fortune from his father, who will be very old by then—”
“Not so terribly old,” I corrected her.
“Oh yes, very old, fifty or so, and the dauphin will return to Paterson—”
“I’d like to think Mr. Kaufman will have been run out of Paterson by then.”
She cleared her throat theat
rically to discourage further interruptions. “He’ll return and find his father, wherever he may be, and claim his fortune, and then hand his money out to all the workers in the factory, and Mr. Kaufman will scream and shout, but he’ll be penniless and his workers will all go home in the middle of the day with their pockets full.”
“But what about Lucy? Shouldn’t she get something?”
“He’ll have a palace built in Russia for her, and they’ll return together so she can be queen of the Bolsheviks.” Fleurette slapped her own book shut to signal the end of the story.
“I’m fairly certain the Bolsheviks don’t want a queen.”
“Well, she should get to be queen of something in the end.”
ALL OF FLEURETTE’S STORIES about Lucy Blake involved hidden treasures, dramatic rescues, and glorious escapes to exotic locales, which were always populated with peacocks and black swans, those being, in her mind, the accoutrements of the royal class.
But Lucy Blake wasn’t a character in a fairy tale. And her baby was not a dauphin perdu, but the illegitimate child of a factory girl, lost in a city of millions.
Although I worried over her predicament and wondered about the mess Henry Kaufman had made of her life and his own, those matters were, in some ways, still an abstraction to me. To my way of thinking, I’d had an accidental encounter with a man who was certainly not a fine citizen and possibly a criminal—but the entire affair was on its way to becoming a memory, a bizarre story that Fleurette would embroider and Norma would file away as a cautionary tale, but that would have no bearing on our lives henceforth. I didn’t even think of Henry Kaufman as a man who went out and did things every day—who combed his hair and ate his lunch and drank in saloons with his friends and quarreled with his sister. In my mind, Henry Kaufman existed only in those moments when I had seen him, and the rest of the time he was still and quiet, like a marionette hung backstage by his strings, motionless until someone took him up and sent him skittering back to life.
What I couldn’t fathom—what I hadn’t considered, really—was that we continued to exist in his mind. He wasn’t a marionette on a post, and he hadn’t forgotten about us. He was always out there, doing whatever it was that Henry Kaufman did, and I had failed to appreciate the fact that sometimes what Henry Kaufman did was think about us.
This was at last made clear to me late one Tuesday night, when I found myself inexplicably awake, jolted out of a bizarre dream about Lucy and a bright green swan swimming in the dye tubs at Mr. Kaufman’s factory. The sound that had awoken me was an engine rattling outside my bedroom window.
I sat up and clutched a pillow to me, having nothing else to protect me from whatever was coming. There was a flash of light through the window and then the glass shattered, sending shards flying around me. Something heavy hit the bed and I screamed.
From outside the window came the sound of tires spinning in the gravel and a motor car roaring away.
I had the shaky, nauseated feeling that comes from being thrown so suddenly from sleep. I gathered my blankets around me as protection against whatever had hit my bed. My fingers skipped around, past the broken glass, and there it was.
A brick. There was a piece of string around it, and paper tucked underneath.
Then Fleurette was in the room, and Norma’s footsteps were close behind. The window with its mouth of jagged glass gaped at us.
“Get down on the floor,” I whispered. I rolled out of bed and risked a step across the shattered remains of my window, which clinked and glittered across the floor. I peeked outside, but the road was dark and vacant, as if nothing had happened.
Norma and Fleurette were crouched down in their nightgowns, staring up at me, their arms wrapped across their knees.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” Fleurette said. “He’s back.”
I nodded. “I think so.”
We waited a second and then Norma rose and lit a lamp. She lifted the paper away from the brick and unfolded it gingerly, as if something might fly out of it.
Madam:
Stay away from H. Kaufman and his place of business. This time we warn you. Soon we shoot. We use gun on you, we use more bullets, we get you.
H. K. friend
She passed it to me and then to Fleurette. The note was written in childish block letters, like a right-handed man writing with his left hand.
“Shoot?” Fleurette said. “Does he really mean to shoot at us?”
I looked out the window again. The trees whispered in the dark and an owl made a muffled cry. I was still half inside that dream of the factory and the swan, and I had the strangest feeling that Mr. Kaufman had come after me because I had dared to dream about him. “Surely not,” I said. “He hardly knows us.”
A breeze rose and lifted the curtain away from the broken window. All three of us jumped.
“I thought it was a man climbing in,” Fleurette said, her hand over her throat.
“You can’t sleep in here,” Norma said to me. “Not with the window like that.”
I took the brick and knocked the rest of the glass out of the pane. Outside was nothing but the dark barn and the empty lane. “I’ll be fine,” I said, although I wasn’t at all sure I would be. “It’s only a prank, meant to frighten us and nothing more.”
“Let me read the note again,” Fleurette said, reaching for it.
“I don’t want you brooding over it all night long and having nightmares.”
“Just let me see it.”
I held it above my head. “No! We should all go back to our beds, and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
She leaned against me. “What would Mother make of all this?”
I smoothed Fleurette’s hair, not daring to look at Norma over the top of her head. “I don’t know what she would have done,” I said. “Nothing like this ever happened to her. But I know what she would say to you.”
“Really? What?”
“Geh ins Bett.”
“All right! I’m going.”
Norma leaned against the door frame and watched Fleurette return to her bedroom. Then she slipped back into my room and closed the door behind her.
“How can you be so certain that Mr. Kaufman does not intend to shoot us,” she began, “when he wrote a letter stating exactly the opposite and went to the trouble to break a window to deliver it?”
“I’m not certain of anything,” I said. “I just didn’t want Fleurette to work herself into a pitch in the middle of the night.”
Norma sat down next to me on the bed and picked up bits of broken glass, dropping them into her cupped hand. “I suppose this is how we’ll live now, behind boarded windows with strange men throwing bricks at us. If only we had a basement, we could move into it and never go out at all.”
“It was only a prank, and I don’t think they’ll do it again,” I said. “We’ve given them no cause to.” Next to my pillow I found a chip of window glass the size of a penny with a little white paint on it.
“Well, of course we haven’t given them cause,” Norma said, “but you have. Men don’t like to admit when they’ve done something wrong, and they particularly don’t like strange ladies coming around demanding payment in compensation for their wrongdoing.”
“That’s not a reason to shoot at us.”
“It’s not a reason for a sensible person to shoot at us,” she said. “If Mr. Kaufman were sensible, he wouldn’t have run us down in the first place. In fact, he never would have bought one of those machines.” The auto industry had a formidable foe in Norma, who believed self-propelled vehicles to be a path to lawlessness and social chaos. Mr. Kaufman was only strengthening her argument.
“Well, it’s a matter for the police now. I’ll go and see them in the morning.”
“You won’t find the police to be any help at all. They won’t arrest him, and if they go and ask him questions, he’ll only get more agitated, and I don’t want to know what he’ll do then.”
There was a footstep in the hall. Fleurette
pushed open the door and flopped down on my bed. Norma leapt up so as not to spill her handful of glass. “Go back to sleep,” I said.
“But, Constance. I just realized.”
“What?”
“Lucy was telling the truth. He goes after anyone who crosses him and he doesn’t stop.”
“I would hardly say that we’re the ones who crossed him.” But I remembered the way I’d pushed him against the wall. He’d looked like a trapped animal. And what do animals do when they’re cornered?
“If this is how he treats us, what has he done to Lucy?” She put her head on my pillow and looked at me pleadingly.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine.”
“What are you going to do about that girl and her baby?”
“Well, there’s nothing at all I can do, especially now that we’re having bricks thrown at us.”
“But if you don’t, who will?”
I leaned over and put my chin on Fleurette’s head. Norma looked down at the two of us and drew in her breath as if in preparation for another speech on the inadvisability of having anything to do with the matter, but the words wouldn’t come or she decided not to say them. She opened her hand above my waste bin and the slivers of glass fell down like rain.
12
A LATE SUMMER STORM blew through Hackensack the next morning and washed the dust off the buildings. By the time I got to town, the sun had pushed away the clouds and the city smelled of clean hay and wet stone. The sour, ripe heat of summer had lifted. I climbed the courthouse steps under the heady influence of this shift in the season, and stood just inside the door to let the perspiration dry behind my collar before I approached the girl at the receptionist’s desk.
“I am here to file charges against a man,” I said. “It’s a criminal matter.”
