Girl Waits with Gun (15 page)

“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 recalling 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.”

“That's all right, Miss Kopp,” Sheriff Heath said, ushering his deputy out the door before he could say another word. “We've met the youngest Miss Kopp already.”

“What? When was that?”

He opened the door and turned to smile at me. “We attended a matinee here in your living room recently. I believe it was the day you went to New York.” He closed the door very gently in my face.

DINNER THAT NIGHT
consisted of my mother's
ragoût de grenouilles,
the one dish Fleurette ever bothered to learn how to make, and only because she so loved to eat her prey. It was accompanied by a watercress salad and a lengthy scolding from me about the dangers of letting strange men into the house.

“They weren't strange men,” Fleurette said between loud slurps of the sauce. “They weren't strange at all. They sat very quietly in the third row and applauded at all the right moments. I only wish they hadn't left before my encore.”

I looked to Norma for reinforcement, but she'd been silent all evening. “What goes on around here when I'm away?” I said at last. “Do you just leave the front door open and let anyone walk in?”

“They aren't just anyone,” said Fleurette. She pushed a strand of hair under a hat of blackish-green ravens' feathers she'd taken from Mother's closet and fixed in place with her old amber pins. I tried not to imagine what the frogs must have thought when they saw her coming in that hat. “They are sworn public officers. And apparently they are friends of yours. If you can invite them in, I don't see why I can't. Besides, they spend so much time sitting out there along the road in that stuffy automobile. They deserve to be entertained.”

“You don't mean to say you saw them on our road?” Norma said, breaking her silence at last. “Right outside our house?”

Fleurette shrugged. “I thought Constance invited them,” she said.

Norma stood up and dropped her bowl into the sink. “One doesn't
invite
the sheriff to sit outside with a man and a gun. If he's here, it can only mean that we are in more danger than we realized, and it's all because Constance persists in bothering Henry Kaufman.”

“I haven't bothered him in some time,” I said.

“You've sent the sheriff over to bother him, and that's the same thing.”

“The sheriff seems to feel the danger has passed,” I said. “Mr. Kaufman will be made to pay a fine and that should settle him down. We haven't seen him once since the sheriff took up the case, isn't that true?”

“You're very trusting of him,” Norma said, putting on water for coffee, which she always drank after dinner. “I've said that I take a dim view of the police, and I think I'll extend that line of thinking to the sheriff, who seems not to know the most rudimentary fact about a carrier pigeon, suggesting an incurious mind. I don't think he has much to offer us, do you?”

Without waiting for an answer, she brushed her hands briskly on her skirt and went out the kitchen door to lock up the chickens. I scraped my spoon around the bottom of the bowl. Fleurette stood up, adjusting her ridiculous hat. “I've been working on a new dancing frock,” she said. “Would you help me pin up the hem?”

I looked up at her, this little girl who started twirling as soon as she could walk. “Yes, of course. Go and try it on.”

I DIDN'T KNOW
I'd had a girl at first. All I saw was a head of black hair and the white apron of the nurse carrying her away. I had agreed to give up the child, but at that moment the wildest craving came over me. In my delirium I dreamt of mother cats biting and licking their kittens, and I imagine I would have nearly devoured that infant if only they would have given her back to me.

The doctor attending to me suspected a hemorrhage and was about to go after me with a curette. The ether cone descended but I kicked and fought it. There was a clatter of metal across the floor and a man shouting and then nothing but whiteness all around me.

I awoke hours later in the most fantastic purple darkness. It could have been the effects of the ether, but I felt weightless and clear-headed, and rose from my bed in the recovery room as lightly as steam lifting out of water. Somewhere under that roof was a child who belonged to me. The only thing in the world for me to do was to go and get it.

The night nurse dozed in her chair and didn't stir as I glided past. Not a single lamp had been left burning in the hall, but I knew the way to the nursery as if I'd walked it all my life. No squeak of the floorboard, no shuffle across the rug, no groan of the hinges alerted the nurses to my presence. I was inside the nursery with the door closed behind me, and the black-haired baby was in my arms, and the other babies—there were three more of them—wriggled and sighed and chortled up at me as if they knew exactly what I was doing.

And what did I do? I walked right out the front door with her. I took her down the long drive, which was dense with the overgrowth of climbing roses, and down the road into the cool October night, wearing only my nightgown and a pair of knitted slippers. The baby was wrapped in flannel and didn't seem to mind at all. She had a tiny pinched face like a flower that hadn't yet bloomed and lips that worked back and forth even though her eyes weren't open. Along that road I gave her a name. Fleurette Eugenie Kopp.

Eugenie for her father, Eugene. The Singer man.

In the months of my confinement, I had felt only shame when I thought of him and of what I'd allowed him to do to me. But now I was walking under a velvet-dark sky so filled with stars that I couldn't pick them apart, and the air was alive with the scent of grass and wood smoke and the sweet yeasty baby. Adding his name to hers seemed at that moment like putting a period at the end of a sentence. It was where he ended and she began.

The nurses found us in a hay barn the next morning. Of course they did. I was not the first girl to disappear in the night, and none of us, in our condition, could get far. Perhaps that's why they didn't take better precautions against us running away.

Fleurette was well and fed. She was a hungry girl, and although I'd had no instruction, there were enough natural forces at work on both of us to bring it about. The nurses sent for the wagon and brought us back to Mrs. Florence's, where Fleurette surely would have been taken from me again were it not for a letter that had arrived from Brooklyn that very morning.

October 9, 1897

Miss Norma Kopp

92 South 8th Street

Brooklyn, New York

Dear Mrs. Florence,

I write to inquire after the whereabouts of my sister, whose name is Constance Amélie Kopp, although she may not have given that name to you, who left a loving family on the 17 of July to seek the care of a home such as yours. Her mother wishes every day for her safe return and is prepared to adopt the child, if there is one, and raise it as the youngest member of a respectable family. Any expenses incurred by her care will be gladly repaid. She is a tall girl of nearly six feet in height and eighteen years, with hair more auburn than brown, eyes a light hazel, a firm and decisive mouth and a tongue that speaks French and German as well as her native English.

With a word from you that such a girl is under your care, we will come promptly to collect her and express to you our endless and abiding gratitude for offering refuge to someone who must have been rendered so insensible with fright over her condition that she forgot that the most suitable home for a child of hers was the one in which she already lived.

Hoping for a joyful outcome to this most difficult trial, I am

Yours very truly,

Norma Charlotte Kopp

September 15, 1914

BY MY OATH I, Constance Amélie Kopp of Wyckoff, New Jersey, swear that one Henry Kaufman, of Paterson, New Jersey, was the owner and driver of a certain automobile which negligently collided with a buggy in which I was seated along with my sisters Norma Charlotte Kopp and Fleurette Eugenie Kopp, resulting in damages to said buggy in the amount of fifty dollars, which Mr. Henry Kaufman has refused to pay in spite of numerous attempts to collect the amount owed.

Sworn before the Honorable Court of

Passaic County, New Jersey,

Constance Amélie Kopp

IT HAD RAINED
that morning and there were steaming brown puddles on the sidewalk. I lifted my skirt, which left me without a hand to put over my nose. Paterson had never smelled so foul after a rain. I didn't want to imagine what must have overflowed and leaked out into the gutters.

If I hadn't looked up before we began climbing the courthouse steps, I would have run right into Henry Kaufman. He had his feet planted on the top step, and he stood with his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed back on his forehead, with all the lazy confidence of the idle rich. With him were two of his men: the one with the glass eye, and the enormous one with shoulders as broad as snowplows. A third man stood nearby, puffing desperately on a pipe. He was tall and thin, with curly hair that tended toward red, and gold spectacles.