by Amy Stewart
For years Norma had been entranced with the idea of carrier pigeons and their utility in transmitting messages between people living in the countryside, or soldiers at war, or doctors wishing to monitor the progress of far-flung patients (the idea being that a doctor would leave several pigeons with his patient, to be dispatched at intervals with reports of the patient’s progress). Telegraph and telephone wires would never stretch far enough to reach everyone who needed to send a message, she reasoned, and could not be trusted for the transmission of private information anyway, because the operator was privy to every word. But a properly trained and equipped pigeon, released hundreds of miles away, would fly a direct course at great speed, through storms or enemy fire, to bring a message home.
To prove this point, Norma was in the habit of taking her pigeons as far away from home as she could and sending them back with tiny missives strapped to their legs. Having no news of any importance to relate to us so soon after leaving the house, she sent us newspaper clippings instead. Norma read half a dozen papers every day and took it as her moral obligation to have an opinion on all the doings in northern New Jersey, not to mention New York and the rest of the world. She spent the better part of every evening with her newspapers, stashing clippings in drawers all over the house for future use. It was not unusual for one of us to go looking for the sugar or a pincushion and instead find an announcement titled “Diplomat’s Wife Impaled on Fence.”
She rigged up a tripwire in the pigeon loft so that a bell would ring near our front door when a bird arrived carrying the news of the day, as selected by Norma for its dramatic nature or the instruction it might offer. Variations on “Girl Fined for Disorderly Housekeeping” arrived any time I failed to do my part of the washing up. “Large Percentage of Women Recklessly Follow Prevailing Fashions Without Knowing Why” was delivered after Norma objected to Fleurette’s silk tunic embroidered with birds of paradise, her attempt to copy the fashions of Paris. “The Morals of a Woman Are Read in Her Gowns” came the next ominous message.
Fleurette devised a way to get revenge by replacing each objectionable headline with one of her own and leaving it for Norma to find. Norma would discover “Piles Quickly Cured at Home” tied to her pigeon’s leg band, or “Imbecile Sister Reported Missing.”
Although Mother hated the birds and wouldn’t go near the pigeon loft, she had encouraged Norma’s interest in them, believing that girls should have hobbies that kept them entertained and close to home. She made no secret of the fact that she hoped raising baby birds would encourage a mothering instinct in Norma that would lead her to marriage and children. Exactly how Norma would find a husband, living out in the countryside as we did, was never explained. And Mother seemed oblivious to the fact that Norma was so opinionated, so argumentative, and so set in her ways that no man would ever dare take up with her. It didn’t help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder and had never shown the slightest interest in romantic love or child rearing. Mother had been right that pigeons made a good pastime, but Norma was in no danger of becoming engaged as a result.
At least Norma had some satisfactory means of occupying herself. I found the demands of farm life to be dull and unnecessarily difficult. When Francis married and moved into town several years ago, Norma happily took charge of the barn and its occupants. Fleurette kept up with the sewing and the washing, and the three of us took turns at cooking. I was left with the disagreeable task of weeding and watering the vegetable garden. I hated spending all that time bent over in the dirt for a basket of wormy cabbages. All I ever wished for was a good clean job in an office and a salary that would allow me to purchase a cabbage if I wanted one, which I didn’t think I would.
There was a time when I tried to find a life for myself away from the farm. First I sent away for a course to study to be a nurse, but Mother, with her dread of filth and disease, was so horrified by the idea that I had to put it aside. Then I took up a course in law, having heard that there was a woman lawyer in New Brunswick and thinking I could petition to join her firm. Believing this line of work would force me into close quarters with criminals and drunks, Mother was even less pleased. I completed my coursework nonetheless, but when the time came to send it back to New York and request the next lesson, my papers were gone. Mother would not admit to it, but I knew she took them.
Now I was starting to wonder if I would live my whole life out here. I worried that I was destined to die in the same bed my mother had died in, leaving behind nothing but a cellar full of parsnips and uneven rows of stitches along cuffs and collars that nobody even remembered me making.
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.
5
“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 pl
um 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.”