Girl Waits with Gun (8 page)

“Hush,” I told her.

“I can't go anywhere else,” Lucy said. “All the mills keep blacklists. I'm to stay quiet if I want any job in town. And I keep hoping I'll hear something about Bobby. When you walked in last week, I thought you might know of a similar situation. I thought we could help each other. I've been looking for you.”

All at once it came to me that if this girl was in so much trouble with Henry Kaufman, Fleurette and I shouldn't be seen on the streets with her. “I'm sorry, Miss Blake, but our situation is quite different. I hope you . . . I mean . . . just look after yourself.” I took Fleurette's arm and turned to walk away.

“Watch out for him,” she called after us. “He won't stop. Once you cross him, he doesn't forget.”

Something about her story was bothering me. I halted in the middle of the sidewalk and turned around. She was standing all alone in front of the library, watching us go.

“Lucy, what about the people in New York who were keeping your baby? What do they say?”

“That's just it,” Lucy said. “They're gone, too.”

FLEURETTE GOT TO DRIVE HOME
. She nosed the runabout along Paterson's crowded streets while I stared straight ahead, trying to shake off the peculiar feeling that had taken hold of me since we broke free of Lucy Blake.

Something had shifted, in some subtle way I couldn't put a name to. The everyday rush of shoppers and carriages and motor cars and shopkeepers and delivery boys, once so familiar to me, now seemed foreign and vaguely threatening. I watched three men push a wagon with an enormous wooden crate perched atop it. They had to hold it on all sides to keep it from crashing over as it rolled by. What it contained I couldn't see, but all at once I was suspicious of it. What were they hiding: Ammunition? A bank vault? A missing person? Across the street, a woman walked out of her shop with a bucket that she discharged into the gutter. I shuddered and wondered what foul mess she was trying to scrub away. A girl about Fleurette's age stepped in front of our horse with a baby-shaped bundle pressed against her chest, and all I could think was:
Whose child is that? Where are you taking it?

Fleurette pushed Dolley onward, keeping quiet until we reached the edge of town. Then she said, “Did Mr. Kaufman really do all those things?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think she was lying?”

“It doesn't seem that way.”

“Shouldn't she go to the police?”

“Fleurette! Please.” I was exhausted and irritated. I wanted nothing more than to lie down in a cool dark room and close my eyes. Fleurette was holding Dolley back, making her plod along, dragging out our journey. A milk truck passed us, then a wagon overloaded with traveling trunks and furniture.

“Are we ever going to get home?” I asked her.

“Not until you tell me what this is all about.”

“I don't know anything more than you do.”

“Why would she take up with a man like that?”

I sighed and shook my head. “All the usual reasons.”

“Because she was in love?”

“Maybe.”

“And she thought he would marry her?”

“Quite possibly.”

“I don't see how anyone could marry a man like that.”

I thought about that for a minute. “Maybe he wasn't always that bad. Maybe he used to be different.”

“Did you used to be different?” Fleurette asked.

I didn't answer that.

WE RETURNED HOME
to find Bessie in the sitting room with Norma. She had dropped by, she declared, to deliver a strawberry cake she'd won in an auction to benefit the library, but I suspected that Francis wanted a woman's opinion on how we were managing. Norma appeared to have passed the inspection because Bessie was getting ready to leave when we arrived. She rose from her chair when she saw me and pulled me affectionately to her. She was a cheerful, plump woman with a wide, generous smile and the kind of brown hair that turned red in the summer. As she leaned toward me, she murmured, “Your brother worries about you. He just doesn't know how to show it.”

“Sending over a strawberry cake is a fine start,” I said, giving her shoulder a squeeze.

“You know that was my idea.” Turning to Fleurette, she said, “Have you really been watching a picture get made all day?”

Fleurette began a lively and elaborate report in which she not only managed to keep our meeting with Lucy Blake a secret, but invented an afternoon's worth of activities to explain the length of our absence, including an actual derailed streetcar that forced a lengthy detour, an impromptu turn through the piano shop to hear a demonstration of new sheet music, and an encounter with a street vendor selling green African parrots from an enormous brass cage. The parrots spoke French, she said, and a little Dutch, but when asked their nationality would reply in a chorus, “We're Spanish!” The man selling them could offer no explanation for that. He merely laughed and shrugged and offered Fleurette a good price if she would take two.

The ease with which these small, meaningless lies unraveled from her tongue astonished me. Who taught her to fabricate such stories? I could hardly look at Norma while Fleurette spun those outlandish tales. For once Norma seemed not at all suspicious of the story being told to her, and Bessie was completely taken in by it, leaving us with a wave of her hand and shaking her head over the idea of parrots with French accents. It made me wonder how often I, too, had let Fleurette fool me.

ALL EVENING
I tried to push Lucy out of my mind, but her predicament tugged at me. I couldn't stop thinking about the possibility that somewhere, at the center of this mess, that girl's child was missing.

Norma knocked at my bedroom door that night just as I was getting into bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress, one leg tucked under her and the other stretched out alongside me. She smelled of milk soap from her bath, and rice powder, and her hair was all wet curls, each one lifting individually as it dried in the warm night air.

She had a way of pursing her lips when she had something serious to say. I knew better than to ask directly and just waited to hear what it was.

“Green African parrots?” she asked.

“What about them?”

“Where did Fleurette get the story about the man selling green parrots on the street? You didn't expect me to believe that, did you?”

I had to smile. “No. I was surprised that you did.”

“Well, I didn't.” Norma looked down and smoothed the wrinkles out of the bedspread. “This has to do with Henry Kaufman, doesn't it?”

“Well—in a way, yes. It does.”

“I can't believe you would take Fleurette to see that man. We hardly let her out of the house for years, and now you're parading her in front of a criminal. Why would you—”

“But it wasn't Mr. Kaufman. It was a girl from the factory.”

“We don't know any girls from factories.”

“I saw her when I went to Mr. Kaufman's office, and we ran into her on the sidewalk today. She . . . she thought I was in a different sort of trouble with him.”

“Different sort of trouble?” she said, looking up and fixing those sharp eyes on me. “How many different sorts of trouble does Mr. Kaufman have to offer?”

“The girl, whose name is Lucy—”

“Don't tell me her name.”

“I don't have to tell you any of this.”

“No, tell me. What about her?”

“She had a baby.”

“Oh. And she asked for your expertise?” Norma raised an eyebrow at me.

“Norma! The baby's gone missing. Lucy thinks Mr. Kaufman had something to do with it.”

“Why would he care about a factory girl and her baby?”

“It's his child.”

Norma ran her fingers through her wet hair. “Mr. Kaufman's morals sink lower with every passing day. By Wednesday, he'll be a murderer.”

“Lucy thinks he's kidnapped the boy, so I suppose—”

“Do you not agree with me,” Norma said, stretching out on my coverlet and putting her (blessedly clean) feet against my pillow, “that a man who carries on with factory girls and then kidnaps their children is the sort of man with whom the Kopp sisters would rather not become better acquainted?”

“I do,” I said, “but don't you think it's terrible what happened to that girl?”

Norma propped herself up on an elbow to get a better look at me. “I do think it's terrible what happens to girls who get themselves into trouble. But we've had enough trouble already.”

“I just feel that someone should try to help her.”

“That feeling will pass.” She rolled off my bed and stood over me, her arms crossed. “Francis and Bessie are having us over for a roast. I told her you'd do the peas.”

“Nobody likes my peas,” I said.

“But we like having you
do
them,” she said. “Now, go to sleep and don't think about that girl anymore and I won't either.” This seemed to be a satisfactory conclusion to her, so she slipped out and closed the door gently, leaving me alone in the dark, willing myself not to think about Lucy Blake.

IN BROOKLYN
our only excursions out of the house, apart from school, were to dancing lessons at the Rivers' Academy, where our uncle Charles worked as an accompanist. Because he was willing to keep an eye on us, Norma, Francis, and I were made to spend most of our afternoons there, enduring minuets and fancy dress tableaux, lumbering through polkas and tarantellas, memorizing marches, and sitting in the corner folding crepe flowers for headdresses while the younger children had their turn in front of the mirrors.

Francis also took lessons on the zither from our uncle. On recital days he would stand, shaking, on the stage, and pick out a solo while Norma and I danced a wooden duet next to him. Being the tallest girl in the class, I was once dressed as Uncle Sam and placed in the center of the stage while forty-five girls, each portraying a different state, danced around me. Norma refused to choose a state. Wyoming was forced upon her. She wore a linen dress the color of sand and spread her arms wide to convey the vastness and futility of a place she could not imagine and did not wish to.

It was after one of those dancing lessons that I met the Singer man for the first time. In those days we lived on the top floor of a building with a rear entrance for delivery men and a front entrance for everyone else. Salesmen used to ring the bell in spite of the signs telling them not to. They sold silver polish and washing powder, pencils and notions, books by subscription and even fruit tree saplings. I used to watch the man with the bundle of twigs over his shoulder going up and down our street, finding no takers for his black cherries and Cox's apples. Only the most unlucky fruit tree peddler would be assigned Brooklyn as a territory. But a sewing machine salesman had an easier time of it.

The salesmen would ring the bell until someone let them in. Eventually their footsteps would approach our door, and then the knock would come, and my mother's hands would descend upon the heads of her daughters, a signal to remain quiet and perfectly still until the threat had passed.

Salesmen were dirty, she told us. They sold inferior goods that no store would offer. They preyed on lonely shut-ins and the feeble-minded. They only wanted in so they could come back and burgle our home while we were away. And they carried fleas.

I knew that couldn't be right. I went to school with girls who got their hair ribbons from a traveling salesman, and their kid shoes. I'd seen the sheet music man stop in at the dance academy to offer new songs for sale. A man selling tonics and remedies poured me a sample one winter when he heard me coughing on the sidewalk. (I ran away, but only because I was afraid my mother would catch me talking to him.) So I understood that salesmen were not as dangerous as my mother believed, but I didn't dare contradict her, and Norma didn't either.

This is why we were so astonished to come home from the dance academy one day and find a Singer salesman in our mother's parlor, demonstrating a new electric motor. Mother looked at us like one of the terrified kidnapping victims she read about in the newspaper. The Singer man just rose to his feet and smiled.

Having only just turned eighteen, I was too old for dancing lessons, but Norma, at the age of fourteen, was finishing her last year and had convinced me to go along and help with the younger children so that she wouldn't have to face it alone. She was embarrassed to be seen in her pleated skirt and bloomers, so she ran past the Singer man and slammed the door to our bedroom. That left me face-to-face with him.

“Sholem aleykhem,”
he said quietly, as if my mother weren't in the room. “I am here on behalf of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. How do you do?”

He was a Jew.
I had heard Yiddish spoken on the street, but never under our own roof. I stared past him at my mother, who sat frozen on the divan. How had she allowed this to happen?

He spoke to me again in that soft voice. “And you must be one of Mrs. Kopp's lovely daughters.”

From his accent, I could tell he'd only been in the country a short while, but already he'd learned good English.

When I didn't say anything, he added, “I met your mother just as she was stepping out the door to hang her washing. I'd been next door showing Mrs. Fritz the benefits of our newest model. Your mother was kind enough to let me demonstrate it again here in your parlor.”

My mother? Kind? He must have put a spell on her.

“I am Constance Kopp,” I said at last. “Please excuse my sister. I'm afraid she's overly tired from her exertions at dancing class.”

The Singer man was half a head taller than I was, which was already a rarity for me at that age. He had chocolate-brown eyes and a head of thick black hair that parted in the middle and flopped across his forehead. He looked down at me through gold-rimmed spectacles that gave him the appearance of a scholar.