by Amy Stewart
“My stars, it’s Miss Kopp!” he shouted when he saw her, putting the receiver down in mid-sentence. “And where is your fine feathered friend?”
“In rehearsals,” Fleurette answered gaily. Here was a taste of the world she loved! She was back in it already.
“I hope you’ve brought me a song list,” Mr. Bernstein said. “And where are those publicity pictures?”
“I’ll have it all to you next week,” Fleurette said. “I have just—”
But then she dissolved into a coughing fit and was obliged to grope around in her pockets for a lozenge. She turned away so that Mr. Bernstein wouldn’t see the tears running down her face, tears brought on by the coughing but also from the maddening frustration of a voice she couldn’t control.
“You might need more than a week,” Mr. Bernstein said quietly, once she’d settled down. “Do you suppose you can sing me a line?”
What choice did she have but to try? She stood tall, gathered her breath, and reached for a familiar line.
There’s a little bit of bad in every good little girl . . .
But her voice wouldn’t come. She choked on the exhale. Freeman put his cigar down with the air of a man admitting defeat.
“I have just a little trouble controlling my breath,” Fleurette said, coughing discreetly into her handkerchief again. “It’s getting better, truly. It’s just those high notes . . .”
When she saw the look on Mr. Bernstein’s face—the resignation of a doctor delivering bad news—she dropped into a chair across from him and waited, already defeated. Here was yet another person pronouncing her fate.
“Look, sweetheart. I’ve seen girls bounce back from a thing like this. You can, too. But don’t sing. In fact, don’t even think about singing. Go do something else. Keep yourself busy. Give it a few more months. Wait for better weather. It’s too cold and dry right now. Let’s see how you do in the spring.”
In the spring? She hadn’t been on the stage since September. She’d already waited an eternity. Now she had to wait for the snow to melt?
But what could she do? She’d failed the audition. Mr. Bern-stein wasn’t about to put a girl on salary who couldn’t find the notes.
It occurred to her then that Mr. Bernstein might have a line on a better class of seamstressing work. A costuming job at the movie studios in Fort Lee would be profitable and infinitely more interesting than the more mundane business of alterations. Besides, the actresses would bring her their own dresses for tailoring, and even the cameramen and the directors would come to her if they needed a cuff repaired or a pair of trousers let out.
Last time she’d worked at the studios, she’d had more business than she could handle. Why not pick that back up again, until her voice came around? And was it too much to hope that one of those directors might offer her a part in the pictures?
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “All I need is a little more rest, and something to keep body and soul together for a while. What do you have for me at the studios right now? Not on the stage, but in the costume department?”
He sat back in his chair and blew out a long, discouraged breath. “Listen, sweetheart, the moving pictures are moving. They’re going out to California.”
“California? All the way out there? But the actresses are here,” Fleurette said.
“The actresses are going, too. Looks like 1918 was the last good year for Fort Lee and the movie business. We had a coal shortage like everybody else, and we couldn’t keep those studios heated. Everybody’s been out with that damned Spanish ’flu. Who wouldn’t want to go to California? Get some sunshine, make a picture on the beach.”
“On the beach?” Fleurette tried to imagine it. Didn’t actresses perform on a stage?
Freeman shrugged. “I don’t know what they’re doing out there. All I know is, they’re not doing it here. Not right now.”
“I wonder what Mr. Edison thinks of that,” Fleurette said.
“Ask him yourself, sweetheart,” said Mr. Bernstein. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got nothing for you. Come back to me when you can sing.”
* * *
Come back to me when you can sing.
She made a dejected figure as she slunk out of Mr. Bernstein’s office and waited again for the street-car, counting her tokens. Her aspirations had been so small that she almost pitied them. A fledgling stage act, opening in third-rate theaters. If not that, then a sewing table in the corner of a cavernous studio, where she’d work furiously at turning a nursing costume into a dress meant for a shepherdess and back again.
What modest ambitions they were, yet she’d pinned so much on them.
All she wanted was her own future, the one she’d dreamed of all along, not the one dictated to her by tragedy and loss.
She wanted the Francis-shaped hole in her life to get smaller, not to grow so large that she couldn’t see the edge of it.
But that was selfish, wasn’t it? No one in her family could get away from their grief. Why should she?
The street-car rolled up eventually and took her back to Paterson, where she lingered dispiritedly along the city’s main streets, taking an appraising look at the dress shops and tailors, wondering if she might get hired into a shop for a month or two. There was no profit to be made in taking in mending: that was work any woman could do for herself and her family and would, now that men were back from the war and women returning home. A shop would put her on salary, at least, and she wouldn’t have to bring in her own materials.
Just as she was considering that, she turned a corner onto Hamilton and nearly walked right into John Ward.
“Miss Kopp!” he cried, as if meeting an old friend. He took a deep bow and tipped his hat. There was something so jolly about Mr. Ward: she couldn’t help but be cheered by him. “What brings you out this afternoon?”
“Work,” said Fleurette, “or the lack of it.”
“Isn’t there always work on the stage for a pretty girl?”
“It’s dress-making I’m after,” Fleurette said, “at the moment.”
“Not my line,” said Mr. Ward, “but could you do something about the elbows on this jacket?”
He whipped off his suit jacket and presented it to her like a gift. It wasn’t just the elbows that were frayed: the cuffs were an embarrassment as well.
“Yes, it’s terrible,” Mr. Ward said, before Fleurette could make a pronouncement. “Take it, please, before it destroys my reputation.”
How strange, to see a man in his shirtsleeves, right there on the street! But that was the sort of man Mr. Ward was: unembarrassed and unencumbered by convention.
“I can patch the elbows and replace the cuffs,” Fleurette said, “but isn’t there a Mrs. Ward to look after your things?”
“Yes, let’s not tell her about this little dalliance with my cuffs,” Mr. Ward said. “Say, if you could use some extra work, we’ve lost our girl.”
“Your girl? I’m not a secretary.”
He shrugged and gave her a half-smile. “We can always find a secretary. It’s just that most of the girls who apply aren’t suited for the other part of the job. And if they are, they have the damned annoying habit of marrying the client, and then we lose them.”
“But you don’t think I’m at any risk of getting married,” Fleurette said. She was a little offended by the insinuation, although the last thing she wanted at that moment was a husband telling her what to do.
“You Kopp girls don’t seem like the marrying types,” he said, “but I’ve been wrong before.”
“There’s no such thing as a Kopp girl,” Fleurette said. “There’s Constance, and you know what she’s like.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“There’s Norma, and you’d rather not find out what she’s like.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“And then there’s me, and I don’t take after either one of them.”
“Who do you take after? Was there a saucy aunt or a granny with a notewort
hy past?”
Now Fleurette was smiling. He brought it out in her. She said, “I can only hope so. Are you going to tell me what the rest of the job entails?”
“Well, Miss Kopp, in the divorce game, the only thing that matters is the collection of evidence. That and the fee, of course.”
“Yes, I take it the fee matters a great deal to you.”
“That’s why it’s called work,” he said cheerfully. “They have to pay you to do it. Anyway, we’re looking to hire a girl to help with the evidence. Sometimes, you understand, the couple wishes to part ways, but there’s nothing to put before a judge. No one’s run off with the milkman, or taken up with the stenographer. The poor wretches simply don’t want to be married anymore. Can you see the difficulty that poses?”
“Judges are awfully particular about finding fault and placing blame,” she said.
“Exactly. Sometimes, neither party’s at fault. But one of them can pretend to be! Do you follow?”
“I’m beginning to,” Fleurette said warily.
“Of course you do, you’re a bright girl. Now, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the husband will sacrifice his reputation, if it means putting the unpleasantness of an ill-conceived marriage behind him. All that’s required is a pretty girl and a man with a camera.”
Fleurette took a step back. What was he proposing? “If you think I’m going to jump in a man’s bed for money—”
“No, no, Miss Kopp! It’s nothing like that. The whole business could happen in your mother’s parlor, it’s that cordial. All we need is a girl in the arms of the man. Why, we don’t even need to see her face! It’s nothing but a bit of play-acting, don’t you see? You only have to pretend to be the other girl, so the wife can act shocked and sue her husband for divorce.”
“Do you mean that you want me to be . . .”
Fleurette wasn’t sure what to call it, but Mr. Ward supplied the term.
“A professional co-respondent. A lady”—he nodded at her and emphasized the word lady—“who is hired to serve as the second respondent in a divorce lawsuit filed by the wronged wife. The first respondent being the husband, of course.”
“That’s a fancy title, but it sounds like the sort of thing Constance’s jailbirds would’ve been mixed up in,” Fleurette said.
He shrugged at that. “One or two of them might have,” he said, “but that wouldn’t land them in jail. I wouldn’t ask you to break the law. I’m a lawyer myself, remember?”
“I’m not sure what that has to do with it,” she said, “but this isn’t exactly the sort of play-acting I do.”
He was still grinning down at her, flashing that winsome smile of his. “Take the jacket anyway. Think about it while you stitch me up.”
8
MR. WARD’S OFFER stayed on her mind.
It was tawdry, Fleurette knew that. It was illicit. It might’ve even been illegal, despite his assurances to the contrary. (Did he actually tell her that what he was proposing was legal, or had he merely said, in response to her question, that he was a lawyer? That was just the sort of verbal sleight of hand that a lawyer would get up to.)
There was also the question of the soon-to-be-divorced men themselves. Was she to be left alone for hours and hours with a strange man, waiting for the photographer to pop in, trying to steer the conversation in a direction that would keep his mind off the very thing that they were pretending to do?
And what of those photographs? What happened to them? Wouldn’t they go before a judge? How could she be sure she wouldn’t be recognized? Even with her back to the camera, wouldn’t the judge start to notice a sameness to the pictures in the divorce cases that came before him? If all the girls in the pictures presented as evidence by the firm of Ward & McGinnis showed a woman of the same height, with the same general hairstyle, the same slope of the shoulders—wouldn’t that start to look suspicious?
The solution presented itself even as she was trying not to consider the problem too closely: a disguise. That’s how she’d handle it.
She would wear a wig, and a different hat every time, and perhaps a cut of dress that made her shoulders broader, her figure a little more generous. Sometimes she might stand on a footstool, if it could be left out of the picture, to appear taller.
And of course, she’d have to tailor her manner of dress to the man in question. A wealthy man wouldn’t leave his wife for a dowdy matron in a poplin house dress, nor would a railroad worker have the luck or fortitude to land a glamorous young woman in silk and furs. And each of her characters (already she was thinking of herself as playing a part) would require a false name. She couldn’t very well go around answering to a name like Fleurette Kopp in Paterson. Everyone would know that she was Constance’s sister, and that would only invite trouble.
By the time the elbows on Mr. Ward’s jacket had been patched, his cuffs replaced, and the buttons re-stitched for good measure, Fleurette had allowed herself to be carried away by the idea. Once she’d taken up the practicalities, she had a hard time shaking it. Could she justify a new pair of shoes, for instance, to give her a little more height? And how would she come by the wigs? Might Freeman Bernstein have a line on a collection of them, perhaps in an abandoned closet in Fort Lee, discarded by actresses who’d left their old war-time styles behind for a sleek new Californian bob?
Then she landed, of course, on the question of money. Nothing in the way of compensation had been discussed. But for a job like this, her expenses would be considerable and her risk high.
What guarantees could Mr. Ward provide that the police would never break into the room where she was posing as a disreputable woman with a married man? What assurances would she have that the men would never be drunk or brutish?
It didn’t occur to her, at that moment, to name a price that she felt would be fair for such a job. She was hardly accustomed to working at all—she’d only been at it a few years—and when an employer such as Freeman Bernstein named a sum, she simply took it. It was quite an achievement to land any sort of work at all. Demanding more money than the amount offered wasn’t, as yet, in her repertoire.
Even her seamstressing work didn’t require her to do much in the way of fixing a price for her services. Before the war, everyone knew, more or less, what the going rate was for an alteration, an adjustment to a hemline, or a new collar. She’d charge a quarter here and fifty cents there, just as everyone else did, and in that manner might hope to earn as much as ten dollars per week.
The war had changed that, of course. Everything was upended now. Prices had flown sky-high for certain goods owing to shortages, but at the same time no one had any money in their pockets and simply went without such niceties as a hired seamstress. It just wasn’t a lucrative occupation at the moment.
For that reason, the idea of working for Mr. Ward had its appeal. She enjoyed turning over in her mind exactly how she’d go about it. Her version of events sounded quite adventurous: late-night assignations, disguises, false identities, and dashing divorcés.
But she might still have returned Mr. Ward’s jacket to him, collected her dollar, and gone on her way, had she not found Bessie at the kitchen table late at night, shuffling through the bills.
Bessie looked a little better, now that her secret was out and her plans settled. The children had been told that they were to expect a new brother or sister, and took the news with grace if not with a bit of confusion. “How can we have a baby without a daddy?” Frankie Jr. had asked, and Bessie had just slicked his hair down and told him that Francis would always be his father, and he would be the baby’s father, too.
Her color had improved and the morning sickness had abated somewhat. Still she looked tired and drained of her old good cheer, as she pushed papers around on the kitchen table and tallied sums in a green ledger still filled with Francis’s handwriting.
“Is everything all right?” Fleurette said, sliding into a chair next to her.
“It will be,” Bessie said, trying to turn a reassuring
face to her. “Only . . .”
But that was as far as she could get before she crumpled again. The tears took over, and she put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, her head down. “I’m so tired of crying.”
Fleurette pushed the bills and the ledger out of the way. “Why don’t you let Constance manage all this? She’ll handle it perfectly and you won’t ever hear a word about it.”
Bessie laughed a little at that. It was enough to let her raise her head again and wipe her eyes. “It isn’t the numbers I mind,” she said. “It’s what they add up to. Look at this. A hundred and sixty dollars for the funeral. Forty dollars for the doctor. Heating oil. Lorraine needs shoes. Frankie barely fits into his coat.”
“I’ll have a look at that coat,” Fleurette muttered, but she saw the difficulty.
“I had no idea we’d been living so close to the bone,” Bessie said. “Francis never mentioned it. Whatever we needed, it was always there.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Fleurette said, although she had no idea how they would.
The question hung in the air, so clearly stated that neither of them needed to say it aloud.
How many women would it take to replace one man’s salary?
9
THAT SETTLED IT. Two nights later, Fleurette went out of the house wearing a very good dress concealed under her plain coat.
Mr. Ward, she had discovered, kept a closet of ladies’ coats, dresses, hats, and wigs for the women in his employ to wear on their jobs. The garments had been purchased, over the years, by the women themselves and reflected the styles of the moment. They would’ve been lovely dresses two or three years ago, but tastes had changed since the war and everything had to be done over. Waists had to be let out to accommodate bodies newly liberated from corsets, hemlines raised to show not just ankles but a glimpse of calves, and bits of lace and dowdy wooden buttons removed from necklines and wrists.