by Amy Stewart
“Have you any idea where Mrs. Doyle might be?”
He shook his head. “Run off by the Black Hand men. That’s all I know.”
I thanked him and he darted back upstairs.
Was Henry Kaufman a Black Hander? The papers had been filled with stories of Black Hand crime for the last few years, most of it conducted by Italians who engaged in a trade that consisted primarily of making threats against anyone who might be in a position to pay to make the threats stop. The demands were simple and crudely worded. The usual method was to send a note promising a fire or a kidnapping unless a sum of money was paid, customarily a thousand dollars.
If the threat was kidnapping, it was usually aimed at a pretty young girl, the inference being that the girl would be sold into white slavery. A notion like that always made a father open his checkbook, no matter how much the police advised against paying them off. Any man would gladly pay a thousand dollars just to rid his mind of the idea of his child forced into prostitution.
Norma read these stories aloud to us, just like Mother used to. She was fond of shuffling between the crime page and the society page to point out that many girls, shortly after being the subject of such a threat, found themselves suddenly engaged to be married, often to an associate of the fathers who had been pressed into service. Let her husband keep her from harm, the poor father must have thought. A man can only take so much.
A wind had come up along Sixth Avenue and I had to lean into it and fight my way back to the train station. Having spent a day in the crowds and confusion of New York City, I could see the futility of this sort of search. Finding one small boy in a city of five million seemed impossible. It wasn’t hard to disappear. I’d done it myself.
18
FLEURETTE HAD A KNACK for overhearing everything. She was small and crafty, able to slide behind a door or duck under a window without anyone noticing. She was possessed of especially fine hearing and had a musical ear that could follow the cadences of two hushed voices and pick out their meanings. There was no way to keep a secret from her in our house: she would peer through keyholes, run outside and lean against doorjambs, or climb into the attic and press her ear against the gaps in the floorboards. Even the chicken coop was not safe, as she would steal into the pigeon loft and listen through the wide planks. In fact, the only way for Norma and I to have a private conversation was to walk out to the middle of our meadow, where we could speak quietly to one another while looking in all directions to be assured that Fleurette was not creeping up on us—though as soon as she realized what we were doing, she would come running at us, and we’d have to finish our conversation in rapid-fire monosyllables to get it over with before she flopped, panting, at our feet.
When I returned home from the city, it was dark and windy and I didn’t feel like walking through the meadow, so I allowed Fleurette to hear my account of the day. Norma insisted that I keep it brief, seeking only reassurance that I hadn’t gotten us into any more trouble. Once she was satisfied that I had learned nothing of value and met no one who knew anything about Lucy Blake’s child, she refused to allow another word to be spoken about it in her presence. Fleurette listened, wide-eyed, but didn’t say anything until Norma went upstairs to bed.
“I think the flautist knows more than he let on,” she said darkly. “He hears everything that goes on in that building. He seems so innocent with his music and that little blue parrot that goes everywhere with him . . .”
“He doesn’t have a parrot,” I said.
She cocked her head and looked at me thoughtfully. “You just didn’t see it,” she said. “You should’ve had me along. I could have snuck into his room while you were talking to him on the street. He might even have the baby. It could’ve been right there, under your nose, and you missed it.”
“Don’t imagine things,” I said. “This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a real baby and his mother wants him back.”
Fleurette nodded. “But does Lucy really think she can keep a baby all by herself?”
“What do you mean?” I said, although I knew exactly what she meant and there was a pounding in my head as I tried to come up with an answer.
“She doesn’t have a husband. She can’t keep a baby. People will know.”
She was stretched out on the divan and I was in the armchair next to her. Her feet were perched atop my knees, her black-stockinged toes wiggling in the air. This was nothing but a diversion to her.
I took one of those squirming feet in my hand. “I don’t know how she thought she’d manage,” I said, “but that is not our concern. If she won’t speak to the sheriff, there’s nothing more I can do for her.”
“You’re not going to see her again?” Fleurette sounded crushed.
“I don’t know why I would,” I said.
“Do you mean it’s over?”
“I hope so.”
“Well, what will we do now?”
ONE OF THE STRANGER EFFECTS of this business with Henry Kaufman was the way it dislodged us from our daily routines. It was as if the brick had shattered not just a window, but the carefully structured order we’d once had in our lives. Over the next few weeks Norma and Fleurette devoted themselves entirely to their own amusements, turning our household into a sort of half carnival, half menagerie. Fleurette converted the parlor into a theater, complete with a stage concealed behind a curtain of scandalous vermilion, three rows of plush seats, and an ingenious but dangerous arrangement of footlights cobbled together from all the old oil lamps placed in dark corners about the house. She put on performances nightly, most of which were attended by no one at all, but once I was horrified to walk in and find the young man from the dairy seated in the audience as if he had purchased a ticket. Fleurette was performing an Oriental dance of her own invention, accompanied by a fan of ostrich feathers she’d purchased from a street vendor in Paterson and colored a dull, vegetal pink using some sort of berry that fruited around our property. I sent the boy running out the kitchen door, warning him to make his exit quietly lest Norma hear him. I truly believe she would have gone after him with a fire iron.
Norma herself was no less of a problem. One of her pigeons had been injured on a long flight and she was nursing it back to health in her bedroom. Its foot was crushed and she kept what was left of it (the foot) in a bandage. Although she couldn’t be sure, she thought that one of the toothpick-thin bones in its wing had also snapped during whatever sort of mishap had ensnared it and caused it to lose its message. (“Girl Is Sent to Reformatory” was the lost message, which she recited later to Fleurette, to no effect.) She fashioned a splint for it, but the splint kept the wing from folding back into its place, so the pigeon had a constant lopsided appearance, one wing half extended off the edge of the little tufted pillow it slept on.
She thought it might distress the pigeon to be kept locked in a room all day, far away from its customary perch in the loft, so she installed an old brass birdcage at the foot of her bed and brought in a fresh batch of pigeons every day to keep their injured flock-mate company. It didn’t seem to do much good. The poor fellow slept most of the day and only occasionally opened an eye to peer at his feathered friends through the polished bars. Then, feeling that the other pigeons might be bored, Norma began conducting training exercises in her room, entreating them to fly over to a lampshade and back in exchange for a handful of bread crumbs.
She kept the birds clean—Norma was always ruthlessly sanitary when it came to her birds—so there was no odor, but there was a sound produced by their activities. One would not think that the burbling and rustling of feathers emanating from two or three captive pigeons would amount to much, but I heard it all over the house. There was a distinctly avian character about our place. I would not have been surprised if one came flying at me in the stairwell. I took to walking very carefully past her room, always prepared to duck.
Meals had become irregular events. We still had vegetables coming in from the garden, so some manner of soup was always on the stove,
but Norma and Fleurette had decided to dip into it whenever they walked by rather than sit down together. Francis stopped in from time to time with one of Bessie’s overloaded dinner baskets (“I don’t know how that woman accidentally makes five extra pies, when I’m doing everything I can to put them away,” he said), so in addition to the soup, we survived on twelve o’clock pie, Bessie’s name for a dish made of leftover roast and potatoes, and her fine apple turnovers.
Washing up had also fallen out of favor. A pot got scrubbed when it was needed for something else, books and papers and other such clutter were only put away when the space was about to be used for some other activity, and the silver was never polished. Where once we had a day for airing out the beds and a day for scrubbing the floors and a day for washing clothes, now we weren’t devoting any time at all to cleaning. I wouldn’t have guessed that such a carefully ordered household could come apart so easily.
It had always been my responsibility to look after the money, and I continued those duties, as simple as they were. I paid the bills, watched our dwindling savings, and tried to find a way to carve off another plot of land to sell. I wondered if I could persuade Norma to take an interest in a small dairy operation of her own or to expand our flock of chickens and sell the eggs. But I knew we couldn’t sell enough eggs to see us through.
In the evenings Fleurette sat with her sewing and Norma read her papers while I looked over the ledgers at my desk. There had been no sign of Henry Kaufman. Whatever Sheriff Heath had done must have worked.
ONE TUESDAY AT BREAKFAST, I decided I’d had enough of our slipshod ways and announced that we would spend the morning canning green beans and tomatoes, starting immediately and concluding at lunch, when the heat would make it too unpleasant to continue. Fleurette pouted and protested until I offered her a string of Mother’s old cut-glass beads, meant to look like diamonds and emeralds, and told her that she could wear them one day for each jar of preserves we finished.
Norma disappeared early in the morning, sending a message by pigeon post that she must have been saving for this occasion: “Girl Scalded in Kitchen.” Without her help the work went slowly, and we only managed three dozen jars by lunchtime. I left Fleurette to clean up and ducked out to pick up a few things in Hackensack. On the way home, I stopped in a bakery and bought a box of macaroons.
I was walking back to the trolley just as a dancing class was dismissed for the day. As the children rushed past me, the girls twirling around to hear the rustle of their skirts and the boys picking at their high, stiff collars, I wondered at the futility of teaching children to dance. What did we hope to accomplish by forcing them into those awkward pairings? They would find their way to each other on their own, without any help from their parents and their dancing teachers. And just as easily as they came together, they would come apart again.
As I was distracted by those thoughts, I didn’t notice that an automobile had driven past and circled the block, rolling slowly by and coming to a stop just ahead of me. My whole body went cold at once when I saw it. I couldn’t take a breath.
The passenger door opened and I looked quickly around, hoping to see someone standing nearby who could witness whatever was about to happen. It was a busy afternoon downtown, but no one seemed to be watching me.
“Miss Kopp,” a voice said. “Wouldn’t you like to ride with us?”
Sheriff Heath. At last I could breathe again.
He came toward me, wearing a funny crooked smile. “Were you expecting someone else?” His voice was warm and quiet.
“I do seem to run into him at the oddest times,” I said.
“Maybe it would help if you stayed away from him,” he said.
“I have! I haven’t seen him at all!” I didn’t mention the visit to Lucy’s flat.
“That’s good.” Another one of those friendly half-smiles. He was looking at me very intently, the way you might peer into a bird’s nest, hoping to find something fine and miraculous inside. I didn’t know what to make of it.
“Now, won’t you let us drive you home? We can talk about our friend Mr. Kaufman along the way.”
We were attracting attention on the street. A mother was standing on the sidewalk with a baby on her hip, and four or five boys had gathered around the automobile. A deputy, looking rather embarrassed, emerged from the driver’s seat and let the boys have a look inside.
“I suppose I’d better,” I said. “Only I don’t know what my sisters will make of me being driven home by the sheriff.”
“I would like to speak to your sisters,” he said, opening the door for me.
I wondered what performance Fleurette had rehearsed for the evening and what state of mind Norma might possibly be in.
“I’m not at all certain they’re in any condition to receive visitors.”
I SETTLED INTO THE BACK SEAT and started to direct the deputy to my house, but Sheriff Heath waved me away. “We know the way,” he said.
“You’ve been there?”
“I’m keeping an eye out, that’s all.”
We rode along in silence for a minute.
“Whatever happened with that girl?” Sheriff Heath said. “I thought you were going to send her to me.”
“She’s afraid,” I said. “She thinks he’ll come after her if she goes to the police.”
The sheriff and his deputy exchanged glances but said nothing. We were out of Hackensack by this time. The country road that led to our farm was always busy in the late afternoon as people and animals concluded their business for the day. It was not unusual to have to stop for a herd of slow-moving Guernsey cows. We passed a bakery truck headed back to the city after making its deliveries, and I realized quite abruptly that I should have thought to bring home something more substantial for dinner, as we had depleted the last basket from Bessie. We would probably be reduced to eating macaroons and boiled eggs and last summer’s pickles.
“Well, I haven’t forgotten your troubles with Kaufman,” he said, “and I hope this takes care of it. We have a judge who will accept a complaint about the damages to your buggy. We just need you to sign a statement and appear at the courthouse to swear to its accuracy. Then the judge will order the fine and require Mr. Kaufman to stay away from you. We’ll go collect the fine. You don’t even have to see him. I can’t say what effect any of this will have on him, but it’s the best I can do.”
“You . . . you filed charges? Against Henry Kaufman?”
Sheriff Heath looked at me quizzically. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I thought you were just going to talk to him.”
“Well, I did talk to him, Miss Kopp. I told him to stay away from you and your sisters and to pay for the damage he did. Has he stayed away?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. He’s stayed away.”
“And now he’s going to pay for the damages. This is how we prosecute criminals in Bergen County. Is that all right with you?”
I sighed and sat back in my seat. It didn’t seem like I could refuse.
WHEN WE ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE, I led the men inside, realizing that there was a time, not long ago, when riding in a car with the sheriff, much less bringing him home with me, would have been a shocking and outrageous act. But since the collapse of the general order of our household, I thought little of it.
Norma heard me come in and walked down the stairs carrying her injured pigeon on a pillow. Her stockinged feet appeared first, and then the pillow in her arms.
“It’s a good thing you’re home. This requires two sets of hands. If you could just hold him while I—”
At last her face emerged from behind the banister. She stopped upon seeing the men in our front parlor. She must have recognized Sheriff Heath from the papers, because she frowned at him with the kind of deep-seated resolve that could not be summoned upon first impression. As with most people Norma disapproved of, she’d already put a great deal of effort into it and had no trouble in recall
ing her position.
The sheriff must have been accustomed to such treatment, because he simply introduced himself and his deputy.
Silence. Finally I said, “This is Norma. One of her carrier pigeons has been injured, and she has seen fit to move it indoors for its convalescence and to treat it like a member of the household.”
The sheriff lit up at the mention of the pigeons. “One of my deputies has been asking about keeping pigeons,” he said. “He thought it would be a good activity for the inmates, but my superiors don’t want them at the prison. They’re concerned about prisoners sending messages to their criminal associates.”
I could tell that Norma was trying not to speak to the sheriff, but she couldn’t help herself. “They only fly home,” she said. “They’re not postmen. They don’t deliver along a route.”
A wide grin emerged from under Heath’s mustache. “I told them that myself, but . . .” and he shrugged at the pointlessness of arguing with one’s superiors.
I had to admire the way he handled that. I didn’t suspect for a minute that his deputy had been asking about keeping pigeons. But he said the one thing that he knew would draw her into conversation.
Norma snorted and turned to go back upstairs. “If you’re looking for Fleurette,” she called over her shoulder, “she went out to get some frogs.”
The deputy and the sheriff looked at me with bemused astonishment. What sort of sideshow were we running here?
“When my sister was a little girl,” I said, “a lady down the road used to pay her to catch frogs. Fleurette liked having an excuse to splash around in the creek. Frogs didn’t bother her the way they did other girls. She’d catch a dozen in an afternoon and earn herself a little bit of money. The lady moved away a few years ago, but Fleurette still likes to go down there and get those frogs.”
“You don’t eat them, do you?” asked the deputy.
“I’m afraid we do,” I said. “Would you like me to go down to the creek and get her? Maybe she’ll sell you a frog for your dinner.”
