by Amy Stewart
I didn’t make a move up the stairs. I wasn’t sure what to do. “Is he your landlord?”
She looked surprised. “Well, yes. Of course. He owns this building and the two next door. Or his family does. He manages them now, if you call this managing.”
I stood for a moment and considered that.
Lucy continued. “Mrs. Garfinkel said we could stay, even after she found out—” She looked down the stairs nervously as if she thought someone might hear.
“All right,” I said. “Lucy, may I come up and talk to you? I’m sure he’s gone, and if he does return, I’ll take care of it. I can handle him.”
She looked me over. “I suppose you could. You’re bigger than he is, aren’t you?”
Once again that sound came to me, the sharp crack when his head hit the plaster. I wasn’t sorry I’d shoved him, and I thought I might like to do it again, after the way he treated this poor girl.
Lucy seemed to have calmed down, so I kept climbing and followed her to the door.
Her room was larger than that of the absent lodger downstairs, but it held two of the same type of narrow iron bed and a wardrobe as well as a dresser. The wallpaper depicted silhouettes of children rolling hoops across a lawn. There was a gold filigree border around each scene, but the gold had mostly cracked and flaked away, revealing the once-white underlay of the paper. There was no kitchen, just a wood stove topped by a hot plate and a chafing dish. The only chair was piled high with mending. Seeing nowhere to sit, I put my handbag on the edge of the nearest bed.
“That’s my mother’s bed,” she said. “She cleans for a lady across the river. You can sit there. I’m sorry, I—” She looked around nervously, then scooped up the mending and sat in the chair, holding the bundle in her lap. She looked at me expectantly.
“I take it Mr. Kaufman saw me talking to you,” I said at last.
She nodded. “I stopped for groceries on the way home, and when I got here, he was waiting. He has a passkey to the rooms.”
I wondered how many other young girls lived in rooms he had passkeys to. “Well,” I said, “I only came to tell you that I think something ought to be done about your son.”
“I know,” she said, and lapsed into tears again. “I should never have let him go with the strike mothers. I didn’t know what else to do. We hadn’t been paid in months, and the relief tents were always running out of food. I couldn’t let him starve, could I? But you don’t know what it was like, having to let him go.”
I let her cry and clutch her bundle of clothes and rock back and forth as if she were soothing a baby. At that moment I could picture her pulling away from the strike mothers, not wanting to let go of her boy.
After a few minutes, she sniffed and wiped her eyes and looked at me. “I’ve tried to find him but it’s hopeless. Everyone is gone. Everyone who had anything to do with the evacuation just disappeared.”
“And you never went to the police?” I asked.
Her eyes flew open. “Oh, no! Henry would kill me if I sent the police after him.”
“Well, he wouldn’t—”
“No, I mean it. He would send his men after me in the middle of the night. He would burn this building right down, and me in it. You send the police after those men, and you’re as good as dead.”
She said it so matter-of-factly. I’m sure my heart stopped cold for two or three beats. What had I done?
“Are you sure? I know someone who would be willing to help, if only—”
She looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “Miss Kopp! If Henry has my boy—if he’s put him somewhere—what do you think he will do to him when he finds out I’ve called in the police?”
My face must have been frozen, because she leaned over and peered at me. “Did you hear me?”
I nodded numbly.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” she said, “but if all you have to offer is a call to the police, then I’m afraid you don’t do me much good.”
I coughed and tried to find my voice. “Well. I don’t know what else I could do.”
“I don’t, either,” she said, blinking back furious tears.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I stood to leave. She made a sad sight, with her head down and her arms still wrapped around her heap of clothes to be mended.
“Before I go,” I said, “why don’t you just tell me what you know? Just in case I do think of something.”
She raised her eyes to me and sniffed. She wasn’t finished being angry at me, but in a flat voice she told me what I wanted to know. I took down the address of Regina Doyle, in whose care little Bobby had been placed. She told me that two women had taken responsibility for evacuating the children during the strike. They’d been in the papers every day last year, and I recognized their names, Sanger and Flynn. She also furnished me with a description of the baby, although it had been over a year since she’d seen him. He would be almost two years old by now. I asked her if she remembered anything from her trips to the city to try to fetch him, but she shook her head and her tears started again.
“It’s no use,” Lucy said. “Regina Doyle is gone. I walked up and down the street asking after her, but no one even remembers seeing her.”
“She didn’t leave an address with the landlord?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing. One day she was just gone, along with everyone who knew her. The strike leaders who lived in that building disappeared all at once.”
I heard a noise on the stairs and we both froze. The footsteps went past her door and up to the next floor. I took a long and shaky breath and told Lucy, somewhat dispiritedly, that there had to be a way to get some help for her. She shook her head and made me promise once again not to go to the police.
Having nothing else to offer, I said my goodbyes and stumbled down the narrow stairs into the glare of the setting sun. The street was strangely empty and silent but for the snap of laundry on the lines and the call of a man selling fish scraps from a wagon. It was the end of his route, so he had nothing left but porgie and the severed heads of sea bass that the housewives in the better neighborhoods hadn’t wanted.
14
I COULD HAVE TOLD THE SINGER MAN to stop coming around. Our door had a lock. He couldn’t get in unless I let him.
And I kept letting him in.
Within a few weeks it became apparent that the Singer man’s long, fine fingers could handle buttons and clasps as well as a needle and thread. No man was more familiar with the ways that fabric could be bound up and taken apart than a sewing machine salesman. The first time he reached out to my neck and separated my collar from my dress I held perfectly still, surprised by how nimble and quick he could be. In the perpetual dusk of my mother’s parlor, he worked at my dress like a tailor at a fitting, insisting that I stand in the middle of the room while he moved in a circle around me, releasing hooks and pushing pearl buttons through the loops my mother had stitched to hold them. He touched them lightly, as if he were merely testing their strength or checking for flaws in their design. On every visit he released another of the countless ties and latches with which we girls bound ourselves according to the fashions of 1897. It was a few weeks before he made it past the last one, but the Singer man was patient, smiling down on me as he released them. He closed his eyes like a man at prayer when he kissed me.
My mother had impressed upon me the idea that a girl should never sit alone on a divan with a man. And so we never sat on the divan. The Singer man made sure I always stood.
My knees gave out just once, but he pulled me up again.
THE SINGER MAN KNEW BEFORE I DID. He was precisely attuned to the fit of my dresses, having opened and closed them so many times that winter, even adding his own darts and pleats to make them fit better. When he saw my waist straining against his own stitches, he knew.
There was a place in New Jersey for girls like me, he said. One of the other Singer men told him about it.
Other Singer men? All at once I underst
ood that there must have been other girls in Brooklyn taking sewing lessons from Singer men. Whatever bank of fog had been clouding my mind for the last few months cleared at the mention of other salesmen giving sewing lessons to other girls. The room came into very sharp and cold focus when he said it, and my situation was suddenly apparent to me in a way that it hadn’t been before. The words describing my predicament dropped into place like type in a newspaper column.
Still I let him slip his fingers under my skirt to judge whether there was enough fabric to take it out a few inches.
I never once considered telling my mother. There was the fact of the child, and there was the fact that I’d let that man into her house again. A Jew going door-to-door, peddling the machinery of the coming century, taking her daughter apart stitch by stitch, right inside the creaky and cloistered preserve she’d built to hold us.
I didn’t know what else to do but let the Singer man take me to Wyckoff and deposit me at Mrs. Florence’s Country Home for Friendless and Erring Women. There was never any discussion of seeing a doctor or drinking a syrup or tossing myself down the stairs. I didn’t know about any of that. I wouldn’t know about it until I got to Wyckoff and the other girls told me.
So without a word, I disappeared. One summer morning I awoke in my own bed in Brooklyn as I always had, with Norma sleeping fitfully beside me, and the next morning I awoke on a wool mattress in Wyckoff, having registered under a false name the night before, presented as the unfortunate cousin of the Singer man.
I left no note behind. I took nothing with me, not even a change of clothes. In Wyckoff I would make myself a new wardrobe. As a parting gift the Singer man left me his sample machine.
15
THE POTATOES were heaving out of the soil. The leafy tops had already bloomed and wilted. They’d have to be scrubbed and packed in straw for the cellar before they turned green. I kicked at a few of them and they lifted right out of the earth, scattering the colonies of sow bugs hidden underneath.
Norma was brushing Dolley as I walked into the barn. When she saw me she gave the horse a pat on the rump, nudging her back into the stall.
“Why don’t you time the pigeons today,” she said, “as long as you’re out here and have so little to do.”
I did have something to do, but I hadn’t yet told Norma about it. Instead I helped her saddle Dolley and led the horse around front while she took the pigeon basket and went to get some birds. She’d installed a pigeon clock in the loft recently, a box containing a special timer that could be stopped when a pigeon’s leg band was dropped into it. At competitions the judges would open each box, start the clocks as the birds were released, and then lock them shut. Each competitor would carry the box home and wait for their pigeons to arrive. When they flew into the loft, the band would be removed and pushed through a slot in the box to mark the time. The boxes would have to be returned to the judges to be opened, the flight times recorded, and the velocities calculated.
Norma didn’t race her birds, as it would have required her to join a pigeon club and she didn’t believe in associating with people on any organized basis, but she liked to keep track of their flying speeds regardless. It had become my responsibility to stand at the loft and mark the time of their return.
She gave me a starting time and I agreed to wait in her dusty and feather-lined loft with a pocket watch in my hand, while she rode to town with a watch of her own. When the hour struck, I was to start the clock and lock the box, knowing that somewhere, a few miles away, she was releasing the birds.
“I’ll just go as far as Ridgewood and get my papers,” Norma said. She hoisted her pigeon basket and strapped it to Dolley’s saddle. From inside the basket came the shuffling of feathers and claws in what I took to be an expression of excitement on the part of the birds.
We checked our watches and conferred on the time I’d start the clock. Then she was gone, down the drive and out of sight, leaving me alone with a half-empty pigeon loft and a plot of potatoes.
I HAD JUST GONE INSIDE when Norma’s pigeon bell rang.
“Ach. I’ve got to go get that bird.”
“Go ahead,” Fleurette said. She was making her favorite lunch, buttered bread with sugar, and was eager to get me out of the kitchen before I told her she shouldn’t waste sugar like that. I’d been threatening to send our sugar to the Belgian soldiers if she kept spooning it onto everything she ate.
But I left her alone with the sugar bowl and ran out to stop the clock. The first pigeon to arrive had disappeared into the farthest corner of the loft, where he picked at his leg band but wouldn’t let me remove it. He sat up very straight on his perch, a little opalescent feathered man, eyeing me with an expression of affront and suspicion that was uncannily similar to Norma’s. I couldn’t stand up straight in the loft, so after I flailed around and got my hair caught in the chicken wire and cursed the bird for its stubbornness, I backed out and stood next to the door as the next ones arrived.
Two more pigeons landed. This time I managed to wrestle the bands off their skinny legs and push them into their slots on the clock. The rest of the flock descended a few minutes later. I was back inside, trying to get the sugar bowl away from Fleurette, when Norma returned.
“How’d they do?” she said.
“The first one wouldn’t come to me. He landed about a minute ahead of the others.”
Norma dropped a newspaper on the table. “Your friend’s in the paper,” she said.
Fleurette read the headline: “Chicken Thief Goes to Bergen for Trial?”
“Let me see it.” I read just enough to see that it involved Sheriff Heath. This was Norma’s way of letting me know that we didn’t need a chicken enforcement man involved in our affairs.
“What’s the sheriff doing for us?” Fleurette asked.
“He’s just going to talk a little sense into Henry Kaufman,” I said.
“But Norma doesn’t like him?”
“Norma doesn’t know him,” I said.
“Oh, but I know who he is,” Norma said. “He’s the one who’s always begging the Board of Freeholders for more money for the prisoners.”
“What do you mean, money for the prisoners?” Fleurette asked.
“The Freeholders are elected to see to it that the county is run in a businesslike manner, but Sheriff Heath is extravagant with the taxpayers’ money,” Norma said. “He wants to buy each of his inmates a new suit of clothes and offer them a library of books to read and give them a nice shave and a haircut, too. I’m glad the board won’t let him. If he got his way, the criminals in this town would get better treatment than guests at a hotel.”
“Can’t you find a single polite thing to say about the man who has offered to come to our rescue?” I said.
“He hasn’t rescued us yet,” Norma said.
MY POTATOES had been slightly damp when I pulled them out and they were drying in the sun. As I was turning them over and brushing the dirt off them, I felt Norma come up behind me.
“You’re still thinking about that girl,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I kept my eyes on the ground.
“We mustn’t have anything more to do with Mr. Kaufman,” she said. “I’ve told you so, and Francis agrees.”
“When did you talk to Francis?”
“He stopped in yesterday when you were gone.”
I stood up and brushed my hands against each other. “And you told him? About the brick? About—”
She shrugged. “Fleurette did. She couldn’t resist. And I wasn’t going to lie to him. He, of course, feels the whole situation is further proof that we cannot manage on our own.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” I said. “We’ve been managing just fine.”
Norma folded her arms and squinted at the vegetable garden and the giant stands of dandelions casting their shadows. She’d threatened many times to take over the management of the garden if I couldn’t keep it tidy. I always told her she was welcome to it and that I would take an
y chore of hers in exchange. She hadn’t accepted the offer yet, but I could tell the weeds were offending her sense of order.
“Some people eat dandelions,” I said.
She sniffed. “You didn’t tell me what happened with the girl.”
“I thought you didn’t want anything to do with it,” I said.
“I don’t, and you shouldn’t have gone. But what did she say?”
I tried not to smile. Norma had an endless curiosity about other people’s misfortunes. It was why she read so many newspapers. Something terrible was always happening to someone, somewhere, and Norma made it her business to know about it.
“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “Mr. Kaufman is a brute, but we already knew that. He rents his boarding houses out to young girls, and he goes around to collect rent personally every month. Which is to say—”
“Oh, please don’t say it,” Norma put in. “I know what that means.”
“Lucy sent her boy off in the children’s evacuation last year. He never returned, and the lady who was keeping him is gone. She really doesn’t know anything more than that.”
“She knows not to get the police involved.”
“Only because she’s afraid for her life,” I said.
“As are we all, with Mr. Kaufman making plain his intention to shoot at us.”
Dolley knocked over her bucket of oats and Norma retreated to the barn to set it upright. I trailed inside behind her. Dolley blinked calmly at us both. I put a hand on the warm flat patch between her eyes, then thumped her on the rib cage the way Norma always did. It calmed me to put my hands on her. She had a powerful heartbeat and a deep, steadfast breath like something from another time, some calmer era. I leaned against her, this enormous vanilla-colored creature who was so much sturdier than I was.
