Girl Waits with Gun (12 page)

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 understood 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.

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 any 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.

“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?”

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.)