by Amy Stewart
“I only know what Mrs. Martin told us. Do you mean to say that vocal instructors don’t have affairs with their students? What an odd profession.”
“Well, this one doesn’t,” said Fleurette, “or if he does, I saw no evidence of it. But here’s the strange part. When I went back to ask Mrs. Martin—”
“Why’d you go to see her?” said Mr. Ward. “The client’s my business.”
“I thought there’d been some mistake,” said Fleurette. “I just wanted to get the pictures. That’s what Mrs. Martin paid us to do.”
“That’s a fine impulse,” said Mr. Ward, “but you’ve already been paid. If she sent us on a wild-goose chase, that’s for her to come and straighten out with me.”
“Well, if you can straighten it out, good luck to you,” said Fleurette. “She was furious with me for failing to take a picture of something that didn’t exist. She seemed to have had the idea that we’d take it upon ourselves to put a girl in the picture if we had to.”
“We might have, but that’s another conversation entirely,” Mr. Ward said.
“I wanted to tell her that, but I wasn’t sure just how to put it,” Fleurette said. “I also didn’t want to explain to her that the gentleman is usually in on the entire operation.”
“Don’t bother,” Mr. Ward said. “If she wants something along those lines from us, she’s going to have to put it into words. Or if she wants to pay us to follow her husband around day and night until we catch him with this particular girl, we can do that too. But I don’t think she knows what she wants, except to waste our time. Do you mind going over to Hoboken on Thursday? The fellow owns a steakhouse. I’d put on a dress myself, for one of his steaks.”
Fleurette was still thinking about Alice Martin. “There’s something odd about her. I had the impression that she was holding something back. What do you suppose it could be?”
Mr. Ward shrugged. “I’m not going to wonder about Mrs. Martin until she starts paying me to wonder about her.”
“But couldn’t we—” Before she could finish, she heard a familiar set of heavy footsteps in the hall. For one irrational moment she looked around for a place to hide. Could she dive under Mr. Ward’s desk?
But there was no time for that. The doorknob rattled. With a stone in her heart, she turned around to face her sister.
Even in the more ladylike attire they made her wear at Schoonmaker’s, Constance was formidable. She was also sweating and red-faced. Fleurette could just picture her racing downtown, mowing down everyone else on the sidewalk.
“Are you working for him?” she shouted.
Mr. Ward scrambled to his feet, his freshly lit pipe dropping into his chair and sending sparks and burnt tobacco across the leather. He glanced down at it but evidently decided that such a small fire posed less of a hazard than the woman standing before him.
“What a pleasure, Miss Kopp. My condolences about your brother.”
“Stop that nonsense. Of all the girls you could’ve involved in your little schemes, you picked this one?” Constance pointed at Fleurette but did not look at her. Mr. Ward raised an eyebrow in Fleurette’s direction and then turned his attention to his chair, swatting at the embers with a handkerchief.
Fleurette had been shrinking back into the corner of the room but thought she ought to do something to defend herself. She made a half-hearted attempt to rally some indignation and said, “You have no idea what I’ve—”
Constance put up a hand to stop her. “Gloria Blossom? Don’t patronize me. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“Seems to me you’d like to have a sister in the legal profession,” Mr. Ward said. “It’s sort of the family business. Can I offer anyone a drink?” He swept a hand toward a cabinet under the window. Fleurette looked at the cabinet with just a drop of longing, but Constance ignored him.
“Submitting fraudulent evidence to the courts is not the family business,” Constance said. “It’s illegal and it’s dangerous. Look at her. Have you really been putting a girl like this alone in a room with a strange man?”
Mr. Ward loosened his tie a little. It had grown uncommonly hot. “Exactly what sort of firm do you think we run here, Miss Kopp? As for your sister—”
“I know exactly what sort of firm you run,” said Constance. “Either you’ve roped my sister into one of your phony divorce schemes—”
“Oh, there’s nothing phony about these divorces, I can assure you of that,” said Mr. Ward.
“Or you’ve somehow learned a name that she’s used only once before, in connection with a case that had nothing to do with you, and you’re throwing it around town without her consent. Which is it?”
Fleurette had, by now, had enough of Constance’s haranguing and Mr. Ward’s banter. How often, over the years, had she been expected to sit still while someone else argued over her? She stepped in between the two of them, her back against the edge of Mr. Ward’s desk.
“You’ve no right to come in here and scold him. I don’t go into your place of employment and shout at your boss over what he has you do all day.”
Constance looked down at her in a cold fury. “Then you have been working for him.”
“What if I have?” shouted Fleurette. “What business is it of yours? You wanted me to go out and find work and I did.”
Constance looked around the room, sputtering. Fleurette couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her sister so angry. “But not this kind of work! If you can even call it work! What do you do, put on a pretty dress and . . .”
She couldn’t go on, the idea was so repulsive to her.
Fleurette made herself as tall as she could. “You don’t get to decide what I do! I’m bringing in more money than you are, and I’ve been going all over town paying down Francis’s debts, which is more than you’ve done.”
Constance took a step back. “What do you mean, all over town?”
Fleurette wasn’t about to explain it in front of Mr. Ward. “You see? You don’t even know. He left a mess behind, and who’s cleaning it up? I am, and you don’t get to say a word about it.” She was walking toward the door now.
“Oh, I’ll say more than a word about it,” Constance shouted, chasing after her. “As long as we’re living under the same roof—”
There it was. That was the truth of the matter.
Constance would never stop criticizing her. Anything Fleurette wanted to do required Constance’s approval, or it had to be hidden and lied about. Was she expected to live like that forever?
She spun around and faced Constance. “Then we won’t live under one roof. I’ll be gone tonight.”
She looked back at Mr. Ward, who was leaning against his desk with the air of a man watching a train derailment out of a window. “And I’ll see you on Tuesday,” she told him.
Constance turned around, too. “Don’t you dare see my sister on Tuesday, or any other day, for that matter.”
Some sort of response seemed to be required, so Mr. Ward offered a half-hearted wave. “If you insist. Good day, ladies.”
22
CONSTANCE FOLLOWED HER down to the street, still shouting. “Tell me you have not gone into a room with a man and had your picture taken, so that picture could be—”
“Will you stop?” Fleurette hissed. Already they were attracting attention on the sidewalk.
“If it’s too scandalous to mention on the street, then why were you doing it?”
“You’ve done secretive work, too,” Fleurette said.
Constance snorted. “I was fighting the Germans. You’re helping John Ward’s playboys to get out of their marriage vows. And I never kept anything a secret from you.”
“But why would you ever need to? I don’t have a say in what you do. You’re free to run your life as you see fit, and I’m only a spectator. But if you don’t like what I’m doing, you come tearing after me like I’m a runaway child.”
Fleurette was storming down the sidewalk now, but she couldn’t outrun Constance.
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br /> “You’re ashamed of what you’re doing, or you would’ve told us about it,” Constance said.
“Aren’t you late to work?” Fleurette snapped. “You’ll never make inventory manager if you don’t show up on time.”
Constance slowed and took a breath. “We’ll talk about this tonight.”
Fleurette stopped, mid-stride, and turned to look at her sister, all six feet of her, broad-shouldered and indefatigable. How it exhausted her to fight with Constance!
But it would never end. Constance would never stop interfering. They could keep arguing tonight, and the next night, and every night after that. It would carry on as long as Fleurette did anything at all that gave Constance reason to disapprove.
And Constance wasn’t just a sister. She was a cop. She would always be a cop. She would track Fleurette down. She would barge in where she wasn’t invited. She would give orders and make demands.
And it would go on for years. Fleurette could just see herself at forty, and Constance nearly sixty, still judging her and scolding her.
The only way to live with Constance was to live on Constance’s terms—always and forever.
Fleurette was still staring at her sister. Constance had a look about her like she’d brought the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. It was just like her to be so infuriatingly certain of herself.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Fleurette said. “Whatever arrangement I had with Mr. Ward is over, thanks to you. He obviously wants nothing more to do with either of us.”
* * *
FLEURETTE THOUGHT BACK to Francis’s funeral. What a catastrophe it had seemed at the time—her brother gone, Bessie and the children devastated, a shadow cast over their lives.
But she’d had such hope then! The key to that little room at Mrs. Doyle’s boarding-house was still in her pocket. The contract with Freeman Bernstein had only to be revived with a single clear note from Fleurette’s lips, and then she and Laura could take to the stage. All of her old dreams, all of her wild notions of a free and independent life, all of her ambitions—so confidently held, so sure she had been of herself!—all of that still lived and breathed within her back then.
That had only been two months ago, but already her world had fallen apart. And everything she’d done to keep it together—the pleas to Freeman Bernstein for any kind of work, the failed efforts to resurrect her voice, her secretive employment with John Ward, her stealth payments of Francis’s debts—what difference had any of it made?
They were sunk. Bessie might well lose the house. Whether Norma could sell the farm remained an open question. (Would they all be forced to decamp for the farmhouse after all, to dig turnips and raise chickens? It was starting to seem a likely prospect.)
And Fleurette’s role in all of this would be to do whatever Constance approved of, and nothing more.
There was quite a bit Fleurette was willing to do, and would do, to keep body and soul together, and to help Bessie. But she wouldn’t do it with Constance standing over her. Not any longer.
She hastened over to the train station and rode down to Rutherford, not with a feeling of independence or jubilance, but with the odd, dizzying sensation that the ground had been ripped out from under her feet and she no longer knew how to keep herself upright.
Her only plan, formulated in an instant on the sidewalk, was to return to Mrs. Doyle, from whom she had intended to rent a room all along. Mrs. Doyle, who wouldn’t mind her singing and offered the use of the piano in the parlor. Mrs. Doyle, who thought she might like the company of a parrot.
Of course, Mrs. Doyle had only two rooms to rent. What were the chances that one of them might still be available, now that Fleurette had returned the key and expressed her regrets?
She practically ran over from the train station, down Rutherford’s quiet main avenue, with its three or four blocks of small shops, and hastened into the quiet leafy neighborhood beyond, all the while under the influence of the strange idea that another girl might be only steps ahead of her, about to take the last room Mrs. Doyle had available.
The very sight of the woman’s wide, generous front porch cheered her. There were geraniums out already, which struck Fleurette as overly optimistic for a March day, but she could use a dose of optimism. Mrs. Doyle’s was a comfortable old house, one in which daughters had grown up and moved on, one in which a husband had been looked after until the day he died, a house that still needed (in the words of Mrs. Doyle) girls and laughter under its roof.
Fleurette could have a good life here. She’d thought so before, and she knew so now.
It was her misfortune that Mrs. Doyle didn’t have a room to offer her. “You poor dear, I would’ve held a place for you if I had any reason to think you’d be back,” she said, once she’d brought Fleurette inside and settled her down in the boarders’ parlor. “But when you told me it was a family emergency calling you back home . . . well, I know all about those, and they don’t sort themselves out so easily.”
“No, they don’t,” said Fleurette. “Only I’m just . . .” She turned to the window and blinked. She intended to say that there wasn’t room for her at her sisters’ house, but as the words came out, she found herself suddenly on the verge of tears. “I’m just in the way at home.”
Now she turned away entirely from Mrs. Doyle, before her face crumpled. She was crushed all at once by the weight of everything that had gone wrong.
Where else could she go? Her friend Helen would take her for a night or two, but she didn’t have a spare room. She could go to Freeman Bernstein and ask if he knew any actresses looking for a roommate. She could throw herself on Mr. Ward’s mercy—but why would he want anything to do with her, after the way Constance had threatened him?
Mrs. Doyle must’ve recognized a girl with nowhere to go when she saw one. “I know what let’s do,” she said, brightly, which caused Fleurette to sniff and look up with some hope. “Let’s put you in the attic. My girls used to love to sleep up there, but we’d only allow it once in a while, as a special treat. We had a pair of camping beds under the eaves at one time. I’m sure they’re full of dust now, but—”
“But I can shake them out in the back garden, if you’ll let me,” Fleurette said. She found the idea of a cleaning project unexpectedly cheering. Here was a mess she could put right. “I’ll have it all straightened up by supper-time. Is there room for a parrot up there?”
There was room for a parrot, and for all of Fleurette’s things, once an old wardrobe was cleared out and its contents (old play-clothes belonging to girls who were now grown women, and Mr. Doyle’s long wool coats, brittle and moth-eaten) carefully packed away. Mrs. Doyle fretted over the lack of modern conveniences—there was no heating nor electrical lighting, and the bathroom, shared with the other girls, was on the second floor—but in compensation she reduced the rent and offered weekly, rather than monthly, terms.
Fleurette accepted without hesitation. For an absurdly modest sum, she had landed in a place where her sisters could not harangue her, and where she would not be obliged to pretend to run a seamstressing business if she didn’t wish to. (Although Mrs. Doyle did offer the use of her sewing room in the basement, and a further reduction in rent if Fleurette could make herself useful along those lines.) With great relief she spent the afternoon dusting, sorting, and straightening, while Mrs. Doyle huffed up and down the stairs with what contributions she could gather from the rest of the house: a lace curtain for the attic window, a pile of mismatched linens, an old gas parlor-lamp with a soot-stained glass globe, and a collection of dusty pictures in frames of the sort Fleurette might’ve once had in her own room as a girl. Fleurette blew the dust off the glass and saw magazine illustrations that Mrs. Doyle’s own daughters had cut out and hung on their walls to admire: ladies in fancy dresses and scenes of Paris at night.
Fleurette smiled down at those pictures. Neither Constance nor Norma would’ve ever thought to give her something pretty and frivolous to decorate her walls.
“They’re just perfect,” Fleurette said. “I’ll put them next to my bed and see them every morning when I wake up.”
Now there was nothing left to do but to return home to collect her things—and to say good-bye to her sisters.
23
A TAXICAB BROUGHT her back to Hawthorne. The man agreed to return shortly to collect her and her possessions. She would only need a few minutes, she explained, to gather her things and have a word with her family. The driver gave an uninterested nod. It was surely not the first time he’d idled around the block while a woman packed her bags and left.
It was by then early evening. Fleurette expected to find Constance and Norma at Bessie’s house, around the table, having dinner with Bessie and the children. But as the taxi drew near, she saw no light on at Bessie’s and an automobile in front of the Wilkinsons’.
It wasn’t until she stepped out and made her arrangements with the driver that she noticed the insignia. It was a Paterson Police Department vehicle.
Constance had brought Officer Heath into this.
Sure enough, she opened the door to a room filled with solemn faces: Norma in her customary armchair; Bessie sprawled in the other chair, a hand over her belly; and Constance and Officer Heath sitting stiffly on the divan.
All but Bessie leapt to their feet when she walked in.
“You’ve obviously all been told,” said Fleurette. “I’m in no mood for an inquest. I’ve only come to collect my things.”
“Collect your things?” said Bessie. “But where would you go?”
“You’re not leaving this house,” said Constance. “I said we’d talk about this tonight. Officer Heath and I—”