by Amy Stewart
“I should do something for Lucy,” I said, keeping my eyes on the horse.
“No, you shouldn’t.”
“I think I will. I’ll just go into New York and see what I can find out. There’s no harm in asking a few questions.”
“No harm? After those men came to our house? And called out Fleurette’s name like she’s a common—”
“I know what they did,” I interrupted. “But someone has to go looking for that child.”
“I don’t see why it has to be you,” Norma said.
“Because—” I turned at last to face her. It took everything I had to look her in the eyes. “Because what if no one had gone looking for me?”
16
AT MRS. FLORENCE’S HOME I never spoke of my family. Most of the girls didn’t. A few had run away like I had, and the rest had been deposited there by a tight-lipped, terrified mother or sister, to whom they would return some months later, having agreed upon a story about a semester in boarding school or a visit to an aunt in the distant countryside. One time an infant was left on the doorstep with no mother at all, just an envelope stuffed with money and a note promising that an aunt or uncle would come and claim it as soon as one could be persuaded to do so. No one ever did.
I tried not to think of my own mother. She’d become such an authority on the fates of wayward and vanished girls. Now I was a girl ruined by a traveling salesman and then taken away to a home in New Jersey without a word to her family. Surely that headline had already been written.
Sometimes at night I would dream of my mother at the bottom of a well, darkness all around her, the stars too distant to see. No sound but the rippling of water and the echo of her own voice against the walls. She waited for help, but none came. Week after week I returned to her in my dreams, and she was still there, so far down the well that even the sun never found her.
Did she go to the police? Did she write to our father? Did she walk the streets and ask every grocer and fruit peddler if they’d seen me? I wondered about it every night while I was away. She never spoke to me about that time, and Francis has always been too embarrassed to say much of anything about it, but eventually I got the truth from Norma. It came in scraps of whispered conversation over the years, in those rare moments when we were alone and Norma was in the mood for confidences.
I know that when they woke up and found me gone, they told themselves that I must have had a good reason to go out early in the morning, and that I would return later in the day with an explanation that, although difficult to imagine, would make sense. That night they sat up well past dark around the dim flame of a single gas lamp, knowing, I suppose, that going to bed would be an admission that there was no ordinary, everyday explanation for my disappearance, and that when they awoke in the morning, they would have passed into some new era in their lives—the era that began with the unexplained loss of one of their own, and whatever that might mean next for them. They slept in their chairs to forestall the arrival of that new day, but one by one they stole off to bed in the middle of the night, and then I was well and truly gone.
I can picture Mother in her old stuffed chair in the corner the next morning, stabbing at a piece of embroidery, her lips moving but no sound coming out. She had a way of stopping all conversation with her own grim silence. Poor Francis must’ve been stunned to realize that it would fall to him, as the man of the house, to bring up the delicate subject of his sister’s sudden departure. (And they always thought of it as a departure, seeing no way that I could have been snatched from my bed and carried off against my will.)
Francis offered to make the usual inquiries—to the police, to the shopkeepers in the neighborhood, to the agents at the train station, and to our uncles and their wives, in case I had confided in one of them. But Mother wouldn’t allow it. Her refusal told him that she had already passed judgment and decided that whatever the reason for my disappearance, it had to be something shameful, something not to be spoken of, even with the rest of the family. (She always kept my disappearance a secret from her brothers, and later they would refer to the time I enrolled in a secretarial college in Philadelphia. I learned to smile and agree that it had been an interesting course but that secretarial work was not for me.)
Norma agreed with Francis that they should go to the police and speak to anyone in the neighborhood and do whatever else was in their power to bring about my return. Mother was absolute in her opposition, and it was this, I believe, that caused something to break between the two of them. Norma realized, with a sudden cold shock, that if she herself disappeared, Mother would not go looking for her, either. And Norma was bold enough to say this out loud.
“You would do nothing? You would just let me go?”
This was the only part of the story Norma ever told me in any detail. She was still hurt by it years later. Mother had taken Norma’s chin forcefully in her hand and said, “You would never disappear. You would never treat me like that.”
That’s when Norma understood what Mother had really intended with her newspaper stories of disgraced girls. They were a warning of not just what could happen to us out in the wide and unruly world, but also of what would happen if we tried to come home again.
Then my brother heard about another girl who had been visited by a sewing machine salesman. She had vanished, too, but had come home on her own before the baby was born and confessed it all.
Francis whispered his suspicion to Norma, thinking she would deny that her sister would do any such thing. But she turned pale and reached into her sewing basket to show him an unfamiliar bobbin she’d found just a few days earlier under the china cabinet, one that didn’t fit Mother’s machine. They both realized at once what it meant.
Still they weren’t ready to tell Mother until they could be certain. Francis had been unable to learn the name of the home to which the other girl had been sent, so it fell to Norma to write letters to every girls’ home in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and that is what she did, night after night, writing out a new copy of the letter with a description of me and the date of my disappearance and posting it every morning to a different address.
By the time her letter reached Wyckoff, the baby had been born.
17
THE TRAIN TO NEW YORK was so crowded that I could find no seat except one next to an old woman carrying a bag of rabbit pelts. It quickly became evident why no one else was seated next to her. A cloud of ammonia hung around the bag, as did a colony of something tiny and dreadful: gnats or, worse, lice. She didn’t get off in Rutherford or any of the other stops just outside Paterson. She was bound for the city, probably aiming to deliver her rancid bundle to one of those dingy furriers at the edge of the garment district that dealt in snakeskin and small game. As soon as the train stopped for a minute, I moved to another car. Finally a boy saw me looking for a seat and gave me his.
It was a relief to get off that train and out of the station. I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to New York alone. My uncles still lived in Brooklyn with their wives and children, and sometimes they’d have us to dinner on a Sunday. Once or twice we’d taken Fleurette to a play. But it never occurred to me that I could come on my own, and I had never once been confronted by the entirety of the city, by the enormity of it, by the possibility that I could go anywhere and do anything.
I knew what I had to do at that moment. I set out for the building on East Thirtieth where Regina Doyle was believed to have lived with Lucy’s baby. I rushed past the shops selling buttons and shoe leather, past the lunch counters and the grocers with their cartons of soft apples in the street, past the office buildings with gold lettering across their windows.
In a short while I arrived at the address I’d been given. It was just an ordinary brownstone in the middle of a row of similarly ordinary four-story buildings. The third-floor windows had been outfitted with flower boxes that held the russet stubs of neglected geraniums.
A woman passed me on the sidewalk and climbe
d the stairs. “Pardon me,” I said, running up behind her. “I’m looking for someone who used to live here.”
“I don’t know him,” she said, never turning back to look at me.
“No, I was wondering—” and then she was gone, the door slamming shut behind her before I could get hold of it.
I tried the door and found it locked. There was a row of door-bells, but I didn’t recognize any of the names on the plate.
From around the corner came a delivery boy carrying packages from the butcher. I asked him if he remembered a woman named Regina Doyle living in the building and he shook his head. “Don’t recall, miss,” he said, never slowing down.
“But you must make deliveries here,” I called, addressing his back as he walked away.
Nothing.
It hadn’t occurred to me that people would refuse to answer a question put to them directly. It must have been apparent to everyone I approached that I had no real authority. I had no card, no credential, no letter of introduction. And so I stood on the street and waited for something to come to me—a witness, a clue, a better idea. Nothing did.
For lack of another plan, I took a walk around the block and stopped in a corner market, then a shoe shop, and then a bookstore, to ask after Regina Doyle and the baby. No one had heard of her. It didn’t help that I had so little by way of a description of the two of them. I stopped a man peddling flowers and a girl carrying her baby brother. They didn’t have a single word for me.
Down the street I located a photographer’s studio, situated in a basement apartment and identified by a brass plaque on the railing. “LAMOTTE STUDIOS,” it read. “PHOTOGRAPHY. ALL SUBJECTS.” There was no bell to ring. I pushed the door open and found myself not in a portrait studio, as I had expected, but in a cramped office littered with paperwork and stacks upon stacks of the same kind of large brown envelope. Affixed to each one was a clasp with a red string. The strings seemed to be alive, as if they were crawling over the mess and not merely dangling from it.
If there was a lamp anywhere in the room, I couldn’t find it. The only light came from the front window, which was half covered with the sort of greenish-brown moss that grew on the steps of all basement apartments out of reach of the sun.
From behind a low door a man’s voice called, “Two more minutes!” I replied that I’d wait, although I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. There came the sound of water sloshing around and a switch clicking on and off again. I guessed that he was developing photographs and I was proven right when he emerged from a room with an entirely black interior. He wore the sort of rubber apron that a butcher would wear, and he smelled of a mixture of sulfur and gas. He was a short, pudgy man with thick spectacles and a badly made wig of brown hair that failed to cover his silver sideburns.
“Oh!” he said, looking up at me in surprise. “I was expecting the boy.”
“What boy?”
He pushed his spectacles up his nose and leaned forward on his toes to give me a better look. “An errand boy,” he said. “You are not—no, never mind. Forgive me. I am Henri LaMotte. How do you do?”
“Constance Kopp,” I said. “I know the name LaMotte. Votre famille vient-elle des Côtes-d’Armor?”
He laughed. “Oh, no, no. I forgot my French as fast as my mother tried to teach it to me. Girls listen to their mothers. Boys don’t.”
“You may be right about that,” I said. “My brother never spoke a word that wasn’t good Brooklyn English. My mother was heartbroken that her grandchildren sounded like New Yorkers.” I surprised myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken about my family to a stranger. But there was something so jovial and relaxed about Mr. LaMotte. He seemed to invite confidences.
“Well,” he said. “Miss Kopp, who, judging from her name, speaks German as well as she does French—”
“Die Familie meiner Mutter stammt aus Österreich.”
“Oui. Or ja. Are we here for language lessons, or do I have an envelope for you?”
“An envelope?” I asked, looking around at the piles of them. “No, I just wanted to ask you something. You see, I’m looking for someone . . .”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I understand. But you don’t start with me.”
“What?”
“The investigator calls me once you’ve made your arrangements.”
“Investigator?”
He took a step closer to me and looked up, bemused, over the tops of his lenses.
“Yes. A detective,” he said. “You wish to find someone? We take the photographs, but we only ride along with the investigators. We don’t go running around on our own. They call us when they are ready for us.”
“You work for detectives?” I said. “I thought this was a portrait studio.”
He laughed. “Oh, I gave that up years ago. Everyone with a camera and a set of draperies runs a portrait studio. Miss Kopp, I am in the business of collecting evidence. My photographers take pictures to be furnished as exhibits at court proceedings. Or, more frequently, they take pictures that persuade people to stay out of the courts. If you’d like a portrait, I could send you—”
“Oh, no,” I said, still trying to follow what he was telling me. “No, my question is about the neighborhood. I’m looking for a boy who lived on the next block.”
“He didn’t work for me,” Mr. LaMotte said.
“No, he was—he is—a baby. A lady who lived around the corner took him in and now we can’t find her.” I gave her name and address.
Mr. LaMotte pursed his lips and drew in a long breath. “Oh, mademoiselle, you’ve found trouble. Did you go looking for it, or did it come to you?”
“I . . . well, I suppose it came to me.”
“Then send it back!” Mr. LaMotte said, turning to pull off his rubber apron and hang it on a hook. He sat down at his desk and nearly disappeared behind the clutter. “Send it back, Miss Kopp, and go back to Brooklyn yourself. That’s my advice.” He picked up a pen to indicate that our conversation was over.
“I don’t live in Brooklyn anymore,” I said. “I live just outside Paterson now. I’m only here for the day to—”
“Paterson?” he said, looking up at me again and pushing that ridiculous hairpiece higher up his forehead so he could see past it. “Does this have something to do with the silk strikes?”
“Yes!” I said, a little too loudly. “It might. The baby was evacuated during the strikes.”
He shook his head. “There were all kinds of Bolsheviks living over there during the strikes. You used to be able to hear them arguing from a block away. The police could stand right out on the sidewalk and learn every one of their plans. But they’ve all moved on now.”
At that moment, the door opened and a boy entered. “There you are!” said Mr. LaMotte, clearly relieved by the interruption. “We have three cases for you, is that right?” The boy nodded and looked at me suspiciously.
“That’s all right. Miss Kopp was just leaving. Veuillez m’excuser, mademoiselle. I have nothing more for you. Good day.” He turned to dig through his empire of envelopes.
There was nothing to do but nod and take my leave. I wrote down my name and address and left it among the papers on his desk in case he remembered anything that might help. Then I was back on the street, puzzling over the slim bit of information the photographer had given me. I walked around the block again and stood facing Regina Doyle’s building, looking up at its windows, every one of them curtained and closed.
Finally the door opened and a little boy ran out. This time I was up the stairs quick enough to catch it. I turned to say something to the child, but he was across the street and out of earshot before I could.
The door closed behind me and I stood facing a row of mailboxes in the vestibule. None of them bore the name Doyle, or any name that looked familiar to me. I could see no alternative but to go from one apartment to the next.
I rapped on the first door and got no answer. At the second apartment a girl of about ten opened the d
oor. She held a baby on her hip. I asked if her mother was home, and the girl shook her head and gently closed the door and locked it.
I heard the music of a flute behind the next door. As I raised my hand to knock, a voice came from the stairs behind me.
“Miss! Didn’t you see the sign?”
I spun around and faced an older, heavyset man in workman’s clothes. He lumbered down the stairs, keeping his eyes on his feet and huffing loudly.
“A sign? No, I—”
He stopped on the bottommost step, panting.
“No solicitation. Take your pamphlets or your samples or what have you, and go on down the street. No one in this building wants to be bothered.”
The flute music stopped. I supposed the flautist was listening.
“I’m not here to sell anything. I’m looking for a lady who used to live here. Regina Doyle. She had a baby with her, but it didn’t belong to her.”
He stopped to consider that, then said, “Didn’t belong to her? Then what was it doing here?”
“Sir, I—”
“Never mind. Don’t know her. Go tell it to someone else.” He waved me toward the door again. Seeing no way to get past the man and up the stairs, I wished him a good day and let myself out.
I was still standing on the steps a few minutes later when the door opened and a young man stepped out. He was so thin that his collarbone protruded through his shirt. He closed the door quietly behind him and said in a near-whisper, “Are you the one looking for Mrs. Doyle?”
“Yes. Was that you I heard playing the flute?”
He nodded and took my arm, leading me down the front steps. “I don’t know where she is,” he said in the same low voice, “but she was in with a whole gang of unionists. They started getting Black Hand threats and they all moved out at once.”
“What kind of threats?”
He turned to look back at the building as if he was afraid someone was listening. “Usual things. Fire. Kidnapping. Then they snuck away in the middle of the night.”
