Girl Waits with Gun (21 page)

He looked at me in surprise. “My mother always said things like that.”

“I don't suppose I know your mother.”

“She passed away last year.”

He opened the door and I took my seat. “I'm sorry,” I said. “Mine did too. I didn't know we had that in common.”

He started the engine again and drove us a ways down the road, then said, “She had very definite ideas about a sheriff's duties, as did my father, although he didn't live long enough to see me in office.”

“What was he like?”

“Oh, just ask any old-timer about Doc Heath. Twenty or thirty years ago, he ran Hackensack. He was the fire chief and the town druggist and the dentist.”

“All at once?”

“My mother always wanted him to pick one and quit the others, but he never would. She's a Gamewell—the fire alarm company.”

“That's her family's business?”

“Oh, yes. And every man who marries a Gamewell girl becomes a fire chief in some city or another so he can go around having fire alarms installed. But my father learned a little dentistry in the War between the States and couldn't help but do that, too. Then he became a justice of the peace—”

“A fourth profession!”

The sheriff nodded. “He used to brag about how he sent more people to jail, married more couples, and pulled more teeth than any man in New Jersey.”

“You take after him, then,” I said. “And are there more sheriffs and fire chiefs in the family?”

“Oh, no. My brothers are company men.”

“I suspect you have sisters, too.”

He nodded. “There were ten of us.”

“Ten!”

“Only five lived. I was the first one to live.”

I turned to the window and watched the trunks of the trees and the fence posts roll past us and disappear from view. “Your poor mother.”

“She was . . .” He faltered, and then said, “Yes, she had a trying time.”

“Well, I suspect your father would have liked to have seen you in office.”

He shook his head and said, “I don't know what he would have thought. He was a lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key man. He didn't like any of my ideas about reforming the jails. If he were alive, he'd be down at the Board of Freeholders meeting every Tuesday night, complaining about my expenses like the rest of them do.”

“Then you're still arguing with him, aren't you?” I said.

“I suppose I'm still arguing with his ideas.” After a pause he added, “I know one thing he would've liked.”

“What's that?”

“To see Henry Kaufman arrested. Doc Heath despised drunkenness and laziness, and he couldn't tolerate anyone harassing a lady.”

“Well. Neither can I.”

WHEN I PROMISED FLEURETTE
I'd take her anywhere for her birthday, I meant that I would take her to her choice of shops in some nearby city. But she wanted to go to the seashore. “We didn't go at all this summer,” she said. “Everyone says it's going to be the coldest winter in years. We should go just once before it gets too dreadful.”

On the morning of her birthday, the sun streamed into our windows and got us all out of bed early. Even though there was a chill in the air, it was the sort of day meant to be spent outdoors. Norma rushed outside to get the buggy ready. Fleurette packed a blanket and three Chinese parasols, along with a bundle of silk scarves whose purpose I could not determine. I made chopped liver sandwiches and potato salad, and packed an apple for each of us and six hard-boiled eggs. We drank our coffee and ate our toast standing around the kitchen table. It seemed a waste of time to sit when we had somewhere to go.

We left Dolley at the stables next to the train station. We'd decided to go to the bathing beach at New Rochelle, where our uncle Frederick used to run a beer garden in the summer. It was nothing more than a tent in a gravel lot, but that was all the beach-going crowd wanted anyway. He'd set out benches and folding chairs and serve Austrian beer and sausages. The beer was his own recipe. “I make one kind,” he used to tell his customers. “Cold.”

When Francis, Norma, and I were children, we weren't allowed inside the beer garden. Mother would sit at a table nearest the beach with her knitting bag or a piece of embroidery and talk with her brother's wife and a few of our other female relations. We would run back and forth in the sand, collecting bits of driftwood and broken shells and arranging them around her feet like some kind of offering.

By the time Fleurette was a little girl, Norma and I were too old to play at the beach, but we went back occasionally for her sake. She talked about it as if we had a tradition of going every summer, but I couldn't remember the last time we'd taken her there. Our uncle had long ago given up the beer garden, being too old to manage it himself and having no sons to help him.

The train was nearly empty on the way to New Rochelle. From the station it was only a short walk to the beach. Fleurette ran on ahead while Norma and I lagged behind, carrying our lunch and the bag of parasols and scarves.

“It's odd to be here without Mother,” Norma said under her breath.

At the water's edge, Fleurette kicked off her shoes and, before Norma or I could tell her not to, reached under her skirt to roll her stockings down. She stuffed them in her shoes and ran into the waves. We watched her from the edge of the boardwalk, not sure if we should follow or set a more dignified example.

From a distance, she still looked like a little girl. She dashed into the water with her skirt lifted to her knees and shrieked when the waves leapt up at her.

“She's going to ruin that silk,” I said.

“It isn't silk,” Norma said. “It's one of those new fabrics meant to be worn in the water. She's been working on it all week.”

“She has? I didn't notice.”

“She works fast,” Norma said. “She has a natural talent.”

FLEURETTE'S INTEREST IN SEWING
never struck any of us as unusual until the day, when she was about eight years old, that she found the Singer man's sample machine in my closet and carried it down, sitting on the stairs and dragging it in her lap.

“Can't I use this one,
maman?
” she asked, pulling it across the floor like a puppy she wanted to adopt.

Mother looked up from the lace collar she was adding to a pinafore. “Where did you find another—” she said, then her face went blank.

Norma put her newspaper down and stared at the machine. They both very deliberately did not look at me.

She ran to Mother, throwing herself across her lap. “Constance had it,” she said. “But Constance hates to sew. I want to make you an apron.
S'il te plait, laisse-moi essayer.
”

Mother smoothed Fleurette's hair absently and looked over at the machine.

“It's the wrong kind for a little girl,” she said, her voice even and tightly controlled. “We will take it to Paterson and trade it for one that suits you. A Franklin, maybe. Not a Singer.”

Without a glance at me, she pushed Fleurette off her lap, picked up the Singer man's machine, and walked outside with it. The next day, she and Fleurette went to town and returned with a new black Franklin decorated with an Egyptian phoenix and scarab motif and mounted in an oak cabinet. Francis had just married and moved to Hawthorne, so his bedroom became Fleurette's sewing room.

Within a year she was making her own play clothes, copying the styles in the ladies' pages of the newspaper. By the time she was twelve she'd moved on to fancy frocks and nightgowns. And now, it appeared, she was stitching bathing costumes as soon as the idea for a visit to the seashore occurred to her.

NORMA SPREAD OUT THE BLANKET
along the short wall between the sand and the boardwalk and we sat down together. Fleurette yelled for us to come and join her but we waved her on and looked out at the expanse of flat slate-blue water. The waves had subsided and Fleurette took to kicking the ocean to get it moving again. A trio of seagulls circled and landed next to her. Finding herself with an audience, she splashed even more vigorously, which excited the gulls and prompted them to do a dance, shaking out their wings in the droplets of water she made rain down on them.

The sun warmed the little rock wall and we leaned against it. Norma closed her eyes and tilted her face up to the sky. “Isn't it nice to be on our own, without any armed deputies watching over us?” She sat up and looked around. “Or has Sheriff Heath followed us here and concealed himself inside a bathing tent? I thought I saw one of them move a minute ago.”

“We're perfectly safe,” I said, “and I take it as a good sign that we've seen nothing of Henry Kaufman lately.”

Norma frowned. She rarely took anything as a good sign. “Don't you agree,” she said, in the lilting musical voice that she used for her most sweeping proclamations, “that it would be best if the three of us stayed entirely away from that business with the factory girl and made no more secret trips to New York City that we don't tell the others about? Meaning, of course, that you in particular—”

“Yes, I realize that you're speaking of me in particular. I suppose Fleurette told you all about it, which means that I don't need to.” A pinch of sand had worked its way under my collar and I sat up to brush it away.

“Fleurette loves secrets because she enjoys telling people things they aren't supposed to know. I prefer to tell people the things they
are
supposed to know,” Norma said.

“You're very good at it,” I answered.

“I have always thought so.”

I felt something on my neck again and sat up to brush it off. When I did, I realized that a colony of tiny black ants resided inside a crevice in the rock wall and had organized themselves to make an advance upon our dinner basket. Norma and I stood up and shook the ants off our blanket, and found a better place for ourselves a few yards away.

“This hasn't been good for Fleurette,” Norma continued when we'd settled back down. “She talks of nothing else. All those mysterious trips and secret letters. She's far too excitable for something like this.”

“We should find something more substantial to occupy her time,” I said. “Then she won't think about it so much. I don't want her working as a common seamstress. Maybe we could find a stenography course, or . . .” I realized I hadn't any ideas about an occupation for Fleurette.

“She'd never do the lessons,” Norma said, “and even if she did, what then? We can't let her go off to an office every day. I can only imagine what she'd get up to.”

I turned to look Norma squarely in the face. There was sand all over us, and some of it had landed on her eyelashes and the fine hair above her lip. “She'll have to go off on her own someday,” I said. “Won't she?”

Norma shook her head. “I'd rather not think about it.”

“But surely she's thinking about it,” I said. “She's seventeen now. She's almost as old as I was when—”

“All the more reason to keep her at home,” Norma said briskly, “if only we can keep strange men from driving by and calling after her. Do you think we can do that?”

I was tired of being lectured about Henry Kaufman. I stood up to get a better look at the ocean. At the end of the beach a group of girls about Fleurette's age sat on their wide striped blankets. They wore the sort of bathing costume we wouldn't let Fleurette have, the kind with divided skirts and a drawstring that lifted the hem up into bloomers for swimming. The idea was that girls would wait until they'd gone in the water to lift their skirts, but these girls hadn't and we knew Fleurette wouldn't either. Instead they drew them up as high as they would go and splayed their legs in the sunshine. Their blankets were arrayed in a starfish pattern so that their heads met in the middle. They were leaning in close, whispering to one another, their legs wiggling like a pale multi-limbed sea creature washed up onshore.

“We've come all this way. We should dip our toes in the water,” I said.

The beach was almost silver, shimmering in the sunlight like a mirror. It had grown unexpectedly warm since our arrival, and all at once it felt more like August than October. I pulled the laces out of my shoes and—after looking around to make sure no one was watching—rolled off my stockings. The pleasure of immersing my bare feet in the warm sand made me shiver. Norma gave a little half-smile of surrender and soon she was barefoot, too. Once Fleurette saw us, she ran up and took us both by the hands, dragging us to the water. For an hour we splashed and kicked at the sand and chased the seagulls like any ordinary family at the beach.

We spread out our picnic and two boys came around selling lemonade and pretzels. Fleurette wanted us to buy something in honor of her birthday, so we did. We ate our pretzels in the sand and then stretched out on our backs to look up at the sky. The little waves barely made a sound at all when they patted the shore. The gulls whooshed down next to us to inspect our empty lemonade bottles and lifted off again. I must have fallen asleep, because the next time I looked around, Fleurette had left us and gone to stand by herself and look across Long Island Sound toward the distant and endless Atlantic.

AT FIRST
, there was no point in pretending that the baby wasn't mine. Fleurette's bassinet stayed in my bedroom for the first year so that I could nurse her and get up with her in the middle of the night. But during the day, Mother took her from me.

“She has to learn to come to me,” she said.

I knew she was right. I knew that, years later, Fleurette couldn't have an inexplicable bond with one sister that she didn't have with the other. The girl needed to grow up with one mother, and it had already been decided who that mother would be. So my mother was the one who held her and fussed over her and decided how to dress her and when to bathe her.