Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit

by Amy Stewart

  “It’s a shame we couldn’t bring the pigeons along,” Norma said.

  I ignored that. Fleurette and I considered it our great fortune that Norma’s plans to drive us to Plattsburg by pigeon cart had been thwarted when our mare picked up a nail on the road and required rest. She couldn’t find another horse on short notice, which meant, to everyone’s relief, that we traveled by train like civilized people. Instead of the cart, Norma had to content herself with a trunk filled with her wooden models.

  “Keep those toy carts packed away” had been Fleurette’s admonition to me.

  “I’m not sure it’s within my power,” I told her.

  “Aren’t you a deputy sheriff? Arrest her!”

  I didn’t agree to do that, but I did agree to keep an eye on Norma and to make sure that we didn’t embarrass ourselves.

  A train trip of eight to ten hours—perhaps twelve, depending on what sort of mess the tracks were in at Albany—to the wilds of upstate New York was not at all appealing to Norma, as there was nothing to do but to sit and wait for it to be over, and Norma could not bear to lose a day to idleness. She would’ve labored in the engine room, had they allowed it, or run the train herself, which had never seemed to her a terribly difficult task. After all, she liked to say, the tracks only went in one direction, making it impossible to get lost. There seemed to be nothing to do but to operate a brake handle and a whistle, both of which she insisted she could manage.

  But to stay in her seat and look out the window was intolerable. “Trains are a waste of time,” she announced, to no one in particular, just as I became engrossed in my novel.

  Having failed to win my attention, she tried again. “It seems an awful shame to spend an entire day trekking up to Plattsburg for a concert that won’t last more than an hour. You’d think that someone around Lake Champlain would know how to sing, but instead they import a rail-car full of girls from New Jersey. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it if I hadn’t the need to speak to an Army man on urgent business.”

  The train was rolling merrily through Poughkeepsie just then. The tracks ran right along the Hudson and made for a pretty sight: the beeches were ablaze in orange and gold, and the dogwoods and maples had just gone scarlet. They cast their long reflections over the water like so many streaks of paint. Across the river were the fine old mansions that served as summer camps for New York’s well-to-do. They represented altogether a different way of life from the one I lived at the Hackensack Jail, and I found the idea diverting. I might’ve liked a week at a summer house on the Hudson, if one were ever offered to me.

  But Norma couldn’t be bothered to look at any of it, much less to imagine a different sort of life for herself, even if it only lasted for a week in a borrowed house. She made a great show of consulting her watch and declaring that it wasn’t quite time for lunch, but that we ought to eat before the train rolled into Albany and a whole new crowd stepped aboard. Norma liked her meals planned, and she liked to map out those plans well in advance and make announcements about them.

  “Of course, there will be a paper in Albany,” Norma added, more to reassure herself than anyone else. She had already read all the papers we picked up in the train station before we left.

  I possessed only a single weapon against Norma’s restlessness, so naturally I hoped not to deploy it so soon. But Norma was leaving me little choice. I reached into my bag.

  “By the way, I found your magazine,” I said casually, and passed it across to her without ever once looking up from my book.

  Norma snatched it from me. “I thought it hadn’t come,” she grumbled.

  The arrival of Popular Science was a major event in the Kopp household every month. Norma pored over the articles, which increasingly concerned themselves with the machinery of war (“Torpedoing a Submarine from an Aeroplane” was a recent feature that interested her greatly, although she’d never been near a submarine or an aeroplane), and she undertook many of the more practical experiments and projects described. “Making Artificial Eyes for Blinded Soldiers” was something she thought she might like to attempt, but she couldn’t justify the cost of a glass-blowing tube. She did experiment with a coiled-wire alarm meant to stop a thief from taking a milk bottle, although our milk had never been stolen. The boy from the dairy couldn’t remember to set the bottle firmly on the coil, which was how the alarm would be triggered, so it was rarely tested.

  Nevertheless, Popular Science kept Norma entertained and for that I was grateful. Knowing that a long rail journey was imminent, I had slipped the magazine out of the day’s post a few days earlier and hidden it away for this very occasion. Norma spent the rest of the trip engrossed in a lengthy pictorial of precariously balanced boulders found in nature, a history of petroleum, and a set of plans for a portable chicken-house, which excited her tremendously until she realized that it moved on skids, not wheels.

  “It’s only to push it around the pasture,” she said in disgust. “You can’t actually drive it down the road.”

  “To the great relief of the chickens, I’m sure,” I said.

  Our arrival into Plattsburg was predictably late, but the hotel sat on a bluff directly above the train station, so the porters could anticipate its arrival and roll up with their carts just as the train did. I herded the girls, all ten of them sleepy and shivering in the night air, into an open coach brought down from the hotel for that purpose. Norma and I walked up the bluff with the hotel manager, who was charged with greeting all of the camp visitors and seeing to their needs.

  We were to be housed in the summer cottages behind the town’s grand hotel—cottages that would normally be shuttered in the fall, but stayed open this year on account of the camp and its many visitors. In addition to singing and dancing troupes, I was told, the cottages were offered to generals stopping for the night to give a speech to the men, doctors brought in to tend to the campers’ scratches and sprains, and politicians who felt the need to turn up with a reporter for an afternoon and have their picture made shoveling a trench alongside the men.

  “What else do they learn, besides trench-digging?” muttered Norma as we trudged along.

  I was so accustomed to ignoring Norma’s utterances that I was surprised to hear the manager bother to give an answer. “Oh, it’s every kind of military drill you could imagine, miss. Marching in formation, rifle-work, and combat exercises. They consider it quite an adventure to march twenty miles up to Canada and back the next day. We invade Canada once a week or so, but we follow the catch-and-release policy here, so they get to have it back when we’re through with it.” The manager was a portly, red-cheeked man with the air of a showman about him. Asked about any of the goings-on in Plattsburg, he was likely to wave his arms about theatrically and make the most of it.

  “Is that all? Isn’t there any signaling?” Norma asked.

  “Signaling?” the manager inquired merrily, not having any idea what he was in for.

  “They must do semaphores, at least.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “It’s when they wave their flags around,” I offered. We had almost reached the hotel, and I didn’t want to continue the conversation in the lobby, where I feared Norma would corner the man and lecture him on military communications for the rest of the night.

  “There’s probably some of that,” he said, in the manner of a man who had perfected the art of never directly denying a guest anything they might want.

  “And I suppose there would be telegraph and Morse code . . .”

  “Oh, that sounds awfully high-tailed for a four-week camp! You know, they call it a businessman’s camp because it gets the office boys out of the city. I think they’d rather splash around in the streams than sit in a classroom and read through a code-book.”

  “There’s no code-book for messenger pigeons,” Norma said, entirely to herself, as we reached the hotel’s wide entrance and a doorman rushed over to usher us inside.

  There was such confusion in the lobby, with all
ten girls wide awake and chattering away, and the poor desk clerk trying to make sense of the registry. I watched the idea of a pigeon code-book settle around Norma like a shawl coming to rest on her shoulders.

  “A pigeon manual . . .” she said again, a bit dreamily. Her voice would’ve been lost entirely to anyone except the manager, trained in the art of attentiveness, who answered back:

  “Pigeons?”

  the sheer scale of the Plattsburg camp exceeded anything I’d imagined. On a spit of land between the river and Lake Champlain stretched row upon row of khaki-colored tents, presided over at one end by brick barracks. The camp ran as a small city would, with clapboard buildings knocked together for dining, washing, evening meetings, and games. Those communal buildings were arrayed along a wide avenue, like a miniature Main Street. There was an infirmary, a garage for the automobiles, and a supply hut on the fringe of the camp.

  Just beyond that, right outside the gate, sat a row of wagons set up by the more inventive townspeople, to sell whatever the camp might not provide: sour pickles, sausage rolls, leather boots, pocket knives, and notions. I was told that in the evenings, when the breeze picked up and blew across the camp, a boy stood over a kettle drum and roasted nuts, allowing the smoke to travel naturally on the wind and advertise his goods.

  Thousands passed through the camps, and most of them were salary-men with money in their pockets. It cost twenty-two dollars to enroll, and the men were obliged to pay for their own uniforms and equipment, so only the well-heeled could attend. They had money to spend on whatever the townspeople could offer.

  The girls who made up Fleurette’s singing troupe were at their liberty during the day, while the men were off in the hills, conducting their combat exercises. They seemed determined to sample every pleasure the hotel had on offer: a life-sized chessboard on the lawn, where they put on a lively performance of rooks and pawns jousting for position; a row of deck chairs for sun-bathing over the lake; and a beauty parlor where the more enterprising of the group had their hair styled and set.

  We arrived at camp in the evening, where we were met at the gate by the camp matron, Miss Miner. She must’ve recognized a kindred soul in me, because she went directly to me and said, “I see you have these girls well in hand and there won’t be a thing for me to do.”

  I was rather taken aback by the idea that a military training camp for men would require a matron, and told her so.

  Miss Miner took me by the arm and walked me through the gate. “I’ll tell you a little secret.” She had to crane her neck to make herself heard. I leaned over in an effort to accommodate her, and in that way we walked together as old friends.

  “I was brought in to make sure the girls from town weren’t bothered. It is a rather large influx of unattached men all at once. Some of these people remember their parents and grandparents talking about Civil War training camps and the kinds of trouble those soldiers could make on their first time away from home. Naturally there were concerns.”

  “Naturally,” I said. Miss Miner had a crafty look about her and a rather light-hearted way of explaining herself that appealed to me right away. She didn’t seem to take her work too seriously, which I thought a refreshing change.

  “Well,” Miss Miner continued, “would you believe that it wasn’t the men I had to worry about? They absolutely love coming up here and being told what to do, and they take their orders very seriously. When they were told to stay away from the girls in town, and to strictly avoid late nights in the saloons and the sort of loutish behavior that small towns have come to expect from Army camps, do you know what they did? They followed orders precisely. Honestly, I think they like nothing better than to get away from the girls for a few weeks and come up here to live out-of-doors and traipse around in the woods all day.”

  “That doesn’t leave much for you to do,” I said.

  Miss Miner gave what may only be described as a hoot and said, “Oh, no! You’re forgetting the other half of the equation.”

  Now I saw the trouble perfectly. “The girls.”

  I turned around to make sure I was still being followed by ten exuberant young women, plus Norma. I was. Norma lugged her case of pigeon cart models and refused to let anyone help her with it, nor would she entertain any questions about it.

  “Yes!” Miss Miner exclaimed. “The girls! Every one of them came down with a case of khaki fever the minute these men rolled into town. They can’t resist a uniform, even if the men are only pretending at being soldiers. You saw those wagons around the edge of camp. These girls have never been so eager to help their families earn a few dollars. They’re out here every day, selling their goods and hoping to make a new friend. It’s one thing to ask the men to stay away from town, but it’s another entirely to expect them to resist the charms of a pretty girl selling lemonade on a hot afternoon.”

  “I suppose. Does that mean you’re out on patrol every night?”

  “I am, but there’s more to it than that. I try to find something else for the girls to do. Sometimes that means sitting down with the parents to talk about more suitable ways to occupy their daughters’ time. They should be in school or working, not daydreaming about soldiers. And of course, I’m forced to play nurse as well, whether I like it or not. Most of these girls haven’t had anything explained to them at all, and they won’t go to see their family doctor if there’s anything in the way of a . . . a worry of a private nature. I’ve sent more than a few girls down to an understanding doctor in Albany.”

  “It isn’t just happening at the Plattsburg camps,” I said. “I work in the jail down in Hackensack—”

  “I thought you might do something like that!” Miss Miner put in gleefully.

  “Well, yes, and I see all kinds of trouble between girls and their parents. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind our country going into the war, if only to send the men off and give girls the opportunity to think about something else for a few years.”

  Miss Miner laughed at that and said, “Oh, that’s a losing battle.”

  By then we’d reached the meeting hall. I helped her roll open a great sliding door. Inside was nothing but a dirt floor, rows of wooden benches, and a small and crudely built plank platform at the front for a stage.

  “What do you say, girls?” Miss Miner called as we strolled in. “Will this do?”

  The girls seemed to think it would. They ran up on the stage and started to work out their numbers. There was nothing so sophisticated as a curtain or a back-stage room to allow for a change of costume or scenery, but these patriotic pageants required little in the way of traditional theater craft. The girls wore white dresses with red and blue sashes, and gold stars pinned up in their hair. There was nothing to it but the singing of a dozen or so songs and the waving of little pocket-sized flags.

  Miss Miner stood off to the side with me and Norma while the girls made ready and the men assembled outside. Norma had been silent so far, but now she saw her opportunity.

  “Are the classes held in here?” she asked Miss Miner.

  “There isn’t much in the way of classes. The men prefer to be out-of-doors and, to be honest, we haven’t enough time to teach them anything of substance nor any idea what might be of the most use. These camps aren’t really intended to prepare a man for military service, but only to toughen him up a bit and to put together a working list of possible recruits when the time comes.”

  “It seems to me the time has come and gone,” Norma said. “How are we to raise an army on short notice if we haven’t thoroughly trained our soldiers?”

  Miss Miner seemed to be accustomed to hearing such arguments: it must’ve been all that anyone talked about at camp. “Speak to a general about it,” she said lightly. “It goes beyond my authority to raise an army.”

  It was never a good idea to encourage Norma to speak to a general. To my relief, there were no generals in town that night, but there was a small group of commanders on hand for the evening’s performance, and Miss Miner saw no reas
on not to introduce us. I merely exchanged a few words and thanked them for their hospitality, but Norma had built up a full head of steam over the idea that the camps weren’t doing nearly enough to prepare for war, and thought nothing of making her opinion known.

  “You’ve taught them to be good campers,” she said to a lieutenant, “but I don’t know how that helps us when we go to France. We’re going to need drivers, and pilots, and signalmen, and artillery men, and tacticians. It isn’t enough to teach them to sleep in a tent and eat beans.”

  The lieutenant found it highly amusing to be lectured by Norma and encouraged her to go on. He even took a seat next to her and propped his elbow on his knee. “If you put a plan together, madam, then I should like to hear it. I’ll take it straight to the generals.”

  “In fact, I will,” Norma said, “but of even greater importance is what I’ve brought in my trunk. It’s just outside, and you’re all going to want to see it.”

  “I think we’re going to want to see the girls put on a show,” a young captain put in hopefully, as the lamps were dimmed and a few notes came from a pianist who had been borrowed from the hotel for the occasion.

  “You’ll never defeat the Germans by watching girls put on a show,” Norma said, so scornfully that they had no choice but to follow her outside just as the audience was coming in. I couldn’t imagine what they’d make of Norma’s little wooden models, but I wasn’t about to interfere. She couldn’t embarrass Fleurette if she wasn’t even in the room.

  The girls stepped out on stage. I moved closer to the front to keep a better eye on the proceedings, having been warned by Miss Miner that it was not unheard of for addresses to be exchanged between the stage and the front row, or vice versa. Miss Miner stayed in the back to watch for the telltale shape of a bottle slipped into a latecomer’s pocket. “Between the two of us, we’ll keep them on the straight and narrow,” Miss Miner said before we separated. “I wish I had you up here with me all the time.”

  With the two of us on duty, there was no trouble with the audience. The men cheered and sang along to almost every tune, and laughed at the little jokes that the girls made in between numbers. Fleurette’s time on the road with May Ward the previous spring had served her well. She handled herself like an experienced vaudevillian, singing with full-throated clarity and winking at just enough of the men in the audience to make them think that she was in love with each one of them. I saw no harm in it: these patriotic pageants always had about them a theatrical air of romance intended to inspire the men to defend freedom and the comforts of home.