Girl Waits with Gun (4 page)

WE WAITED A WEEK
for a response to our letter. There was enough nursing to keep me occupied, and to make me wish I'd taken that medical course. Twice a day I washed and bandaged Fleurette's foot, hardly daring to press too hard against it to feel for broken bones. She insisted that we not send for Dr. Winter, a musty old man with watery eyes and hands that shook as they reached for his patients' unclothed limbs. I didn't blame her for wanting to keep him away. But all I could do was clean her scrapes and scratches and require her to rest. This meant that I also had to bring her meals on a tray and answer a little bell she'd found in our sewing basket and kept on hand to ring whenever she was thirsty or tired or bored, which was most of the time.

The only place I could go to escape the sound of that bell was Mother's old room, which stood exactly as it had on the day she died, with her robe still hanging on the closet door and her hairbrush still on the dresser, a few wiry white hairs rising from it.

For months I couldn't go into her room at all. But lately I'd taken to slipping in when I wouldn't be noticed, and sitting on the edge of her bed the way I did when she was sick. During the last few days of her life her eyes would often flutter open, seeing nothing, and remain locked in a gaze that never shifted. I had to put a mirror to her mouth to make sure she was still breathing. I spent hours on the edge of that bed, watching her drift close to death and rise away from it, over and over.

The bed, which had belonged to her mother, was an old-fashioned heavy antique brought over from Austria, with rosettes of carved walnut along the headboard that served no purpose other than to gather dust. As I sat gingerly on the edge, the sheets crackling with starch, I realized that no one had been in to clean in months. It was Fleurette's job to dust, which explains why it accumulated in our house the way it did.

The walls were papered in a pale green and white pattern of chrysanthemums that had faded terribly and started to lift away, revealing cracked plaster and horsehair. Something would have to be done about this room. Even Mother—with her dread of change and her attachment to tradition and the heavy dark rituals of grief—would surely not object to me dismantling this shrine to her final years and making something useful of it. But I couldn't bring myself to do it yet. For years I just wanted to be free of her, and now I found myself clinging to the only traces of her that remained.

Fleurette always addressed Mother in French, but I knew that Mother preferred the German of her girlhood in Austria. I would never hear the language spoken in this house again if I didn't continue to whisper it to her.

“Mama, wär es nicht endlich Zeit, dass wir was mit Deinem Zimmer machen?”

I received no answer. Perhaps Mother didn't care what happened to her room. I took a deep breath. Her violet-scented powder still hung in the air. From somewhere downstairs a door slammed, and Fleurette, having given up on her bell, hollered my name.

It had always been Mother's responsibility to answer to Fleurette's demands.
“Geh amal nachschaun, was sie will?”
I asked her.

But Mother didn't volunteer to go. I rose and closed the door quietly behind me.

“TRY THE PLUMS,”
Fleurette said at breakfast a few days later.

Norma ignored her and kept her eyes on her newspaper.

“Just one. Just a bite.” Fleurette took her butter knife and cut out a perfect triangle of toast and plum preserves. She slid it onto Norma's plate.

“Look,” she whispered.
“C'est tout violet.”

Norma rattled her newspaper and put it between herself and the offending toast.

“That's more red than purple,” I said, sitting down across from them. “You'll never win at this.”

Fleurette giggled and took her toast back.

The long-standing and largely one-sided feud between Norma and Fleurette over the regal hue of their breakfast condiments began years ago, when Norma absentmindedly reached for a jar of pickled red cabbage and spooned it onto her toast. After the initial shock, she found that she liked it a great deal and continued to eat it, every morning, for the rest of her life thus far. Fleurette was only seven or eight when this began and couldn't understand how anyone could eat such a disagreeable food for breakfast. She asked Norma about it so often that one day Norma finally said, “Because it's purple, of course. Didn't you know that eating purple food at breakfast increases one's height by two inches over a lifetime? It's why we're all so much taller than you.”

She waved her newspaper around as if to suggest that she'd read it from a place of authority, adding, “If only there was anything more purple than pickled cabbage, I'd eat that instead.”

Fleurette didn't know how to tell when Norma was making a joke—none of us did, really, even all these years later—and took the challenge seriously, presenting Norma with any purple food she could find in the morning: jams and preserves, violet pastilles, blueberries and grapes. Every now and then, she resumed the old feud again out of habit. But so far, she'd failed. Not even plum preserves could match the brilliance of Norma's cabbage.

That's just how it was with Norma: once she approved of a thing, she adopted it to the exclusion of everything else. If she believed pickled cabbage and toast to be the best breakfast, it would be a betrayal of her principles to eat jam and porridge. If a pair of boots suited her, they became the only style she wore. I'd only ever seen one book on her nightstand (
The Practical Pigeon: A Complete Treatise on Training, Breeding, Flying and Uses of Winged Messengers
) and suspected that she had read it hundreds of times, having found none better.

At breakfast I read aloud my second letter to Henry Kaufman. Before I got past the salutation, Norma interrupted.

“I don't like this Kaufman,” she said.

“Well, of course you don't like him,” Fleurette said. “None of us do.”

“What I mean to say is that I don't like us writing letters to him,” Norma said. “We shouldn't be carrying on a correspondence with a man like that.”

“It's an invoice, not a correspondence,” I said. “And this will be the last one. I'll go and collect from him myself if he doesn't reply.”

“But do you not agree with me that we shouldn't . . .”

“Norma! He owes us the money.” Fifty dollars was no small sum to us. We lived on about six hundred a year, and because we were relying mostly on savings, that fifty dollars took one month of independence away from our dwindling funds. I rattled the paper and began again.

July 23, 1914

Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp

Sicomac Road

Wyckoff, New Jersey

Dear Mr. Kaufman,

I trust you have received our invoice for the damages inflicted upon our buggy as a result of the collision with your automobile on July 14. The amount owed remains the same. The buggy remains in a state of disrepair. Anticipating that you are a busy man whose bookkeeper undoubtedly falls behind in his work when business is brisk, I will present myself at your place of business next Tuesday to collect in full if we have not yet received the fifty dollars owed. Until then, I remain,

Yours in a state of cautious expectation,

Miss Constance Kopp

“It's best not to criticize a man's bookkeeper,” Norma said without looking up from her newspaper.

“I was only offering an explanation for his failure to respond.”

“You wouldn't like that, if you were his bookkeeper.” She noticed a strand of pickled cabbage on the back of her hand and flicked it onto her plate.

“I wouldn't like much of anything if I were Mr. Kaufman's bookkeeper,” I said, signing my name to the letter.

I MAILED THE LETTER
on a Thursday. When no reply arrived by the morning post on Tuesday, I readied myself for a visit to Paterson.

“Are we going to town?” Fleurette said when she saw me in my hat.

“I am,” I said. “I have business to do. You're not well enough yet.”

“But I haven't left the house in ages.” She flopped into a stuffed chair in our sitting room. She'd wrapped herself in a Japanese shawl and pinned her hair into a complex arrangement of cascading glossy curls, held together somehow by an enormous red silk poppy. The bandage had just come off her foot, and to celebrate her newly liberated appendage, she was wearing ballet slippers.

“Read a book,” I said. “Help Norma in the kitchen if you're feeling so much better.”

More moaning. More flopping about on the chair. I wished for the hundredth time that we had treated Fleurette less like a curiosity, an exotic bird nesting in our chimney, and more like a child in need of instruction.

I left her to issue her protests to an empty room and went outside to saddle Dolley for the trip into town. Dolley was not happy to see me coming. I was built like a farmer, even taller and broader than my brother. I looked ridiculous on a horse. But there would be no other way to get around until our buggy was repaired.

Norma had been in the barn all morning, mucking out the chicken coop and spreading fresh straw in the horse stall. It smelled of sweet, dry grass. She'd given Dolley a good brushing and was checking her hooves when I walked in. She ran a hand down the mare's leg until the hoof lifted off the ground for inspection. Animals instinctively trusted Norma. She'd held every sort of claw or hoof or paw.

“I spoke to that boy at the dairy who fixes their wagons,” Norma said when she saw me. “He says it can be put back together. He'll come over in the evenings and do the job.”

I didn't say anything. I pulled the saddle off the wall and Norma helped me cinch it into place.

“Mr. Kaufman isn't going to pay, and we'll still have to get our buggy repaired,” Norma said. “That boy has all the tools, and he's just down the road.”

There was no point in arguing over it. Living this far out of town was dull enough without a means of escape. We couldn't all ride Dolley. “All right. Have him keep a record of his expenses,” I said, “and make sure it comes to fifty dollars.”

Norma finished her inspection of Dolley's hooves and walked her out of the barn. “We don't go around demanding money from strange men,” she said, as she watched me hoist myself up.

“This is an exception,” I said.

“Well, then we shouldn't make exceptions,” Norma replied, and trudged off to pump water for the chickens.

THE KAUFMAN SILK DYEING COMPANY
sat along the railroad tracks among a string of other dyers, warpers, and winders, bleach works, jacquard card cutters, and suppliers of dyestuffs and intermediates—all housed in low brick buildings that turned their backs to the street. The windows sat high enough off the ground to prevent anyone from looking in, but I could hear the sounds of industry from within: the clattering of machines, the sloshing of dye in tubs, and voices calling to one another in German, Italian, French, Polish—every language but English.

Delivery wagons had worn deep ruts in the street. Dolley picked her way around them, and I watched the small signs stenciled across the metal doors at each factory until we came to Henry Kaufman's. I heaved myself out of the saddle without any finesse and lashed Dolley to a post. She tossed her head and snorted to let me know she was happy to see me go.

Inside, the coppery sulfuric stench of the dyes hit me with such force that I had to close my eyes and grope blindly for a handkerchief. I coughed and choked and fought the urge to take a deep breath, not wanting to draw any more of it into my lungs. I couldn't swallow and my vision was so clouded with tears that I could hardly make out the dim figures around me. I almost backed out the door and went home.

Finally I composed myself and saw that I was standing at the edge of a factory floor, looking down a row of enormous troughs, with two or three men attending to each of them. Steam rose up from the troughs and floated to the broad wooden beams overhead. The dye lay in bright pools at the workers' feet, and to protect their feet they wore wooden clogs stained in shades of deep midnight blue and a bright pink the color of peppermint candy. Everywhere the dye met another color it turned a blackish gray. It took two men to hoist the skeins of silk out of the troughs on their metal poles, and when they did, the dye ran down their arms and into their shirtsleeves. A troupe of girls and young boys pushed brooms around the edges of the room, sloshing the runoff into drains, and a few of them wheeled carts piled high with raw silk. Off to one side, a row of wringers were in constant motion, clattering and groaning as the workers fed the wet skeins through them.

A few men looked up at me through the steam but no one said anything. To my right was a long, windowed wall dividing the office from the factory floor. I lifted my skirt and walked over to try the door but it was locked. Through one of the windows, a secretary looked up from her desk and seemed to be considering what to do with me. Finally she rose and led me in.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” I said. “I'm here to see Mr. Henry Kaufman.”

She ushered me through the door and closed it quickly behind us, which seemed to have more to do with keeping the malicious odor out than an eagerness to invite me in.

“Your name?” She spoke with a brisk efficiency. She wore a smartly tailored navy suit with a long plain skirt and a trim jacket, and her hair was tied in a tight bun. After resuming her post behind the desk, she looked at me over the top of delicate gold spectacles and waited for me to explain myself.