Girl Waits with Gun (3 page)

“You know Bessie and I would love to have you girls come live with us,” Francis said once he'd gotten his tobacco to smolder.

I groaned and kicked my feet up on the porch rail. “That was very unconvincing. Besides, you don't have room for the brood you've already got.”

“Well, the uncles don't have room for you back in Brooklyn, either. I don't know where else you'd go.”

There had been a sudden shower after the burial, but the sky had cleared while we were eating our supper. Against the gathering dark the first few stars appeared. I looked up at them and realized that on that night, and forever after, my mother would be sleeping outdoors, under the stars, under her blanket of earth. She despised dirt and rarely went outdoors, and would have been horrified by her new circumstances if she'd given any thought to it at all before buying that burial plot.

“Why do we have to go anywhere?” I said.

“You can't stay on the farm by yourselves. Three girls, all alone out there?”

“How is that so different from when Mother was alive? Are four girls any better than three?”

If Francis understood that I was teasing him, he didn't show it. He tapped his pipe and thought seriously about it for a minute. “Well, the only reason you were out there in the first place—”

I leaned over and shushed him when I heard Fleurette in the kitchen. We waited with our heads inclined toward the window, but we couldn't tell where she'd gone.

Francis lowered his voice. “All I mean to say is that she's nearly grown now. What are you going to do when she's ready to go off and get married? Live out there like a couple of old spinsters?”

The idea of Fleurette as a bride sent a jolt through my rib cage. “Marriage? She's only fourteen! Besides—” Before I could finish, Fleurette's voice sailed through the window screen.

“I'm fifteen!”

Francis rubbed his eyes and shifted around in his chair to face me. “You girls are my responsibility now, and you should be with us. You could help Bessie around the house, and you could . . .” He trailed off, having exhausted the list of things he thought the three of us could do.

I rose to my feet, shaking out the gray-and-black tweed Fleurette had chosen as my mourning costume, and bent over Francis's chair.

“We can manage on our own,” I whispered. “And if Bessie needs as much help as you say, we'll hire out Fleurette for the summer. She needs something to occupy her time.”

“I'm not for hire!” Fleurette shouted.

AFTER THAT
, Francis turned up every few months with another well-intentioned scheme to guarantee some sort of future for the three of us. The fact that we were unmarried and lacking an income that would keep us for life had not bothered him as much while Mother was alive. But he seemed to feel that he had inherited us when she died. He had grown into the sort of man who worried constantly over his small responsibilities: his snug little house in Hawthorne, his generous and resourceful wife, his secure employment, and his two healthy and well-behaved children. It did not seem to me that he should have any worries at all, but Francis was a man who brooded. Lacking any troubles of a more serious nature, he took to brooding over us.

Most men of his age had an unencumbered female relative or two tucked in an attic bedroom, so he must have seen it as inevitable that he would eventually take on a few as well. He did understand that we would have to be kept occupied, so his schemes always included tedious domestic employment for the three of us.

The house next door to his was put up for sale, and he suggested buying it and having us run it as a boarding house—on his behalf, of course, with the rents going to pay the mortgage. We refused, as we had no interest in becoming boarders in our own boarding house.

He then offered to hire me and Norma to tutor his children, even though they were learning their letters and numbers in school and didn't require the services of two grown women. Fleurette, he suggested, could take in work as a seamstress. When Francis talked about bringing in other people's torn and rotten clothing for repair, I just looked at him as if I'd never seen him before and wondered aloud if he remembered anything about the woman who raised him.

That's not to say that I didn't worry about what would become of us. We'd tried to find a few tenant farmers, but there was enough land for sale that no one particularly needed to rent from us. We had been forced to sell off a lot every few years just to keep going and were left with an oddly shaped thirty-acre parcel not accessible by any road but Sicomac, where the house was situated. It would be difficult to sell any more of it without building a new road right through our land, and, besides, I thought it best to keep what little land we still owned, as property seemed to be the best insurance against penury in old age.

Norma was terribly attached to the farm and refused to consider going anywhere else. She found rustic living more agreeable and, like many people who prefer the countryside, possessed a disposition that lent itself to living quite a distance from the nearest neighbor. She was distrustful of strangers, impatient of polite talk and frivolous society, indifferent to shops, theaters, and other diversions of city life, and unreasonably devoted to the few things that did interest her: her pigeons, her newspapers, and her family. She wouldn't leave the farm unless we carried her off. But Francis was right—if Fleurette was to have a future, it surely wouldn't be out in the countryside, stitching buttonholes and tossing corn to the chickens.

Something would have to be done about the three of us. I was tired of hearing my brother's ideas, but I hadn't any of my own. I did know this: a run-in with an automobile was not to be taken as evidence of our inability to look after ourselves. It was nothing but a mundane business matter and I would manage it without any assistance from Francis.

July 16, 1914

Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp

Sicomac Road

Wyckoff, New Jersey

Dear Mr. Kaufman,

I write to supply you with an accounting of the damages inflicted upon our buggy by you and your automobile on the afternoon of July 14. The damages visited upon my sisters and I are considerable as well. Dear Fleurette is but fifteen years of age and now suffers from a badly broken foot and a dread of motor carriages which will no doubt impede her advancement into the coming engine-powered age. But I confine myself at present to the harm done to our buggy.

• 4 (four) hickory spokes @ $1 each, cracked: $4
  

• 1 (one) carriage lamp, smashed: $3
  

• 1 (one) whip socket, dislodged and lost in the commotion: $1
  

• 1 (one) oak panel, splintered to bits: $8
  

• 1 (one) complete hood assembly, bent beyond repair: $10
  

• Assembly and re-attachment of disparate pieces: $24
  

• Total (due in full promptly upon receipt, as we are at present without a buggy): $50
  

We appreciate your prompt payment by return post. We remain,

Yours in a state of caution along our town's ever more crowded avenues,

Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp

“I am not afraid of automobiles,” said Fleurette from the divan.

“Of course you are,” I said. “Now, be quiet and rest your foot.”

“I can rest my foot without being quiet.”

“Those figures are too high,” said Norma. “He won't take it seriously and he'll throw it in the trash.”

“I'm including the time for a hired man to work on it,” I said.

“I don't recall anything about a hired man. Read it again,” said Norma.

“Don't,” said Fleurette. “I'm tired of Mr. Kaufman.”

“Then I'll post it.”

“I'm not fifteen, either,” said Fleurette.

I thought it should've been obvious to her that fifteen was a more tender age than sixteen and the violation therefore more grievous.

Fleurette grumbled and shifted in the silk peignoir she'd chosen for her convalescence. A pattern of peacock feathers ran along the collar, which she thought made her look glamorous. We'd been overindulging her since Mother's death, and I realized I would have to put a stop to that. Her taste for luxurious fabrics alone was going to ruin us.

I rose with some difficulty to get a stamp. My shoulder had calmed considerably since the collision, but every morning brought a fresh insult: an ankle that couldn't take my weight, a rib that cried out when I took a breath. Fleurette couldn't get her foot into a shoe, which made her something of an invalid. It fell to Norma to look after both of us and go out for whatever supplies we needed. Without our buggy, she had the choice of taking a long walk in hot weather to the trolley in Wyckoff, or saddling Dolley and riding her in. Naturally, she chose the latter. She'd already been as far as Paterson and back twice in the last few days, balancing a basket of pigeons on Dolley's rump and releasing them along the way.

For years Norma had been entranced with the idea of carrier pigeons and their utility in transmitting messages between people living in the countryside, or soldiers at war, or doctors wishing to monitor the progress of far-flung patients (the idea being that a doctor would leave several pigeons with his patient, to be dispatched at intervals with reports of the patient's progress). Telegraph and telephone wires would never stretch far enough to reach everyone who needed to send a message, she reasoned, and could not be trusted for the transmission of private information anyway, because the operator was privy to every word. But a properly trained and equipped pigeon, released hundreds of miles away, would fly a direct course at great speed, through storms or enemy fire, to bring a message home.

To prove this point, Norma was in the habit of taking her pigeons as far away from home as she could and sending them back with tiny missives strapped to their legs. Having no news of any importance to relate to us so soon after leaving the house, she sent us newspaper clippings instead. Norma read half a dozen papers every day and took it as her moral obligation to have an opinion on all the doings in northern New Jersey, not to mention New York and the rest of the world. She spent the better part of every evening with her newspapers, stashing clippings in drawers all over the house for future use. It was not unusual for one of us to go looking for the sugar or a pincushion and instead find an announcement titled “Diplomat's Wife Impaled on Fence.”

She rigged up a tripwire in the pigeon loft so that a bell would ring near our front door when a bird arrived carrying the news of the day, as selected by Norma for its dramatic nature or the instruction it might offer. Variations on “Girl Fined for Disorderly Housekeeping” arrived any time I failed to do my part of the washing up. “Large Percentage of Women Recklessly Follow Prevailing Fashions Without Knowing Why” was delivered after Norma objected to Fleurette's silk tunic embroidered with birds of paradise, her attempt to copy the fashions of Paris. “The Morals of a Woman Are Read in Her Gowns” came the next ominous message.

Fleurette devised a way to get revenge by replacing each objectionable headline with one of her own and leaving it for Norma to find. Norma would discover “Piles Quickly Cured at Home” tied to her pigeon's leg band, or “Imbecile Sister Reported Missing.”

Although Mother hated the birds and wouldn't go near the pigeon loft, she had encouraged Norma's interest in them, believing that girls should have hobbies that kept them entertained and close to home. She made no secret of the fact that she hoped raising baby birds would encourage a mothering instinct in Norma that would lead her to marriage and children. Exactly how Norma would find a husband, living out in the countryside as we did, was never explained. And Mother seemed oblivious to the fact that Norma was so opinionated, so argumentative, and so set in her ways that no man would ever dare take up with her. It didn't help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder and had never shown the slightest interest in romantic love or child rearing. Mother had been right that pigeons made a good pastime, but Norma was in no danger of becoming engaged as a result.

At least Norma had some satisfactory means of occupying herself. I found the demands of farm life to be dull and unnecessarily difficult. When Francis married and moved into town several years ago, Norma happily took charge of the barn and its occupants. Fleurette kept up with the sewing and the washing, and the three of us took turns at cooking. I was left with the disagreeable task of weeding and watering the vegetable garden. I hated spending all that time bent over in the dirt for a basket of wormy cabbages. All I ever wished for was a good clean job in an office and a salary that would allow me to purchase a cabbage if I wanted one, which I didn't think I would.

There was a time when I tried to find a life for myself away from the farm. First I sent away for a course to study to be a nurse, but Mother, with her dread of filth and disease, was so horrified by the idea that I had to put it aside. Then I took up a course in law, having heard that there was a woman lawyer in New Brunswick and thinking I could petition to join her firm. Believing this line of work would force me into close quarters with criminals and drunks, Mother was even less pleased. I completed my coursework nonetheless, but when the time came to send it back to New York and request the next lesson, my papers were gone. Mother would not admit to it, but I knew she took them.

Now I was starting to wonder if I would live my whole life out here. I worried that I was destined to die in the same bed my mother had died in, leaving behind nothing but a cellar full of parsnips and uneven rows of stitches along cuffs and collars that nobody even remembered me making.