Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit

by Amy Stewart

  She decided to carry out her duties by horse and buggy, as it would’ve taken half the day to work out train and trolley schedules. Besides, Norma liked her solitude and told us that she found the prospect of a day-long buggy journey, with only the hollow clap of Dolley’s hooves for conversation, to be immensely diverting. She packed a hamper full of potato and pickle sandwiches and set out every morning for a different quadrant of the county, her route having been carefully mapped out the night before. She carried with her every town directory, atlas, and map in the Kopp family’s possession to aid her if she got lost.

  Naturally, she took a basket of pigeons along. Why wouldn’t she? It was the perfect opportunity to travel a good distance, carry out a mission, and report back to headquarters on the outcome. For once, she had no reason to cut out a newspaper headline or to write a coded message that no one at home would bother to puzzle out. She could instead tell the truth about her whereabouts and what she was accomplishing, using the military-style language she’d adopted since our return from Plattsburg.

  “No difficulty with the Swedes” read the message about Katie Carlson, lodging with her aunt in Hawthorne.

  “All secure on Seventeenth Street” came the report about Mary White, arrested for soliciting men while dressed in a crepe mourning gown, with a Bible under her arm.

  “Message delivered in Teaneck” was the best she could do when confronted by an aggrieved mother of five who had been arrested for drunkenness at a train station, but persuaded to return home to a life of sobriety and a resumption of her maternal duties.

  It took her ten days to reach every address. The business clearly gave her a fine feeling of accomplishment, although she grumbled every night about all the chores that were being neglected in her absence, and the half-hearted efforts at meals Fleurette was turning out on her own.

  “But I heated up Bessie’s good soup!” Fleurette said in her defense, and I agreed, pointing out that Bessie had also left an entire coffee can filled with gingersnaps to see us through after the coconut cake was gone. We were more than adequately provided for.

  My head cold did recede, eventually, and my other aches and pains loosened their grip a little at a time, but nothing could be done about the multiple sorrows that dogged my every waking minute. It reminded me of the weeks after my mother died: every morning I’d wake up, and for just an instant I wouldn’t remember what had gone so terribly wrong, what had been lost. Then it would all rush back.

  I slept late, went to bed early, and spent long hours during the day in my bedroom, reading novels. I did look at a newspaper now and then, but I couldn’t bear to see a word in print about the sheriff’s office, or to read about the cases that should’ve been mine.

  A woman might, under such circumstances, throw herself into domestic work, but I declined to do so. I left Norma in charge of the kitchen and most other household affairs, and Fleurette handled the laundry. I was occasionally seen washing out a cup in the sink, but beyond that, I confess that I made little in the way of contributions to our household.

  Weeks passed in this manner. Christmas went by unnoticed. Bessie persuaded us to come for dinner once during those bleak months, but it was a colorless affair save for the always excellent roast duck. Everyone had been warned not to say a word to me about my work, past or future, and as such they found little to say to me at all. I sat in the corner, let the conversation drift around me, and buttered one roll after another as they came out of the oven. There is nothing like a hot buttered roll to soothe a troubled spirit. Bessie put out a second batch just for me.

  Fleurette was miserable, too, in light of our looming penury. It fell to her to bring home some of her own wages and to contribute to the running of the household. She was shocked at how much everything cost, and complained constantly about her own deprivation. She missed all the holiday parties down in Fort Lee because she couldn’t afford a new dress, and she moaned endlessly over the extra work she’d taken on, and the difficulties of traveling back and forth to keep up with May Ward’s wardrobe.

  There was some talk of her opening a seamstress shop in Ridgewood, or taking a position in one of the better dress shops in Paterson. Norma and I raised no objections to those plans, if they’d bring in a reasonable salary. But we were deep into the winter by then, and Fleurette found it too cold and gloomy to make any sort of change in her own circumstances. It was all she could do to cling to her old routine, and to stick to the work that was, for her, familiar and reliable. Perhaps in the spring, she said, she would look for something new, after the ice thawed. But not now.

  This was the excuse Norma and Fleurette applied to me, as well, although I never said anything of the sort aloud.

  “There’s a foot-long column of positions for women,” Norma would declare in the evenings as she read over the women’s employment advertisements in the paper. “You’ll have no trouble finding something.”

  “In the spring,” Fleurette would add.

  To her credit, Norma never argued with that. It seemed that they had agreed, between the two of them, to allow me a mourning period that was set to expire when the snow thawed. I had no opinion about that one way or another. I couldn’t imagine going around and telling employers why I’d been so very publicly humiliated, dismissed, and defeated. How would I explain myself to a sheriff or a police chief in some other city? Where would I begin? And how would I excuse the trail of press clippings that would surely follow me even if I went far away: the inmate I’d allowed to escape, the medal denied me by the Board of Freeholders, the stinging criticism during the election, and my final, failed effort to keep my job at a jail where I wasn’t wanted?

  I couldn’t imagine it, so I didn’t try.

  On one of my better days, when I was up a little earlier than usual and managed to get my own toast and coffee together, Fleurette did venture another suggestion. “Why don’t you and Sheriff Heath go together to one of the police departments and put in your applications? They might hire the two of you.”

  I jerked around at the sound of his name. “He’s not Sheriff Heath anymore.”

  Fleurette rolled her eyes. “Mr. Heath, then. What is Mr. Heath doing, anyway? He must’ve found an occupation for himself by now. He’d have to. He has a family to support.”

  She said it rather pointedly, hoping I would notice that I, too, had a family to support. But I wasn’t taking any hints, and I wasn’t allowing myself to think at all about what occupation Mr. Heath might have found for himself. I knew, with some shame, that he wasn’t lounging in bed all day reading novels. Beyond that, I preferred not to guess.

  There was one bit of cheering news, delivered in the form of a letter from Geraldine: Anna Kayser’s divorce case had proceeded along speedily, more or less as Geraldine said it would. Both divorce suits—Anna Kayser’s against her husband, and Mr. Townley’s against Virginia—were won with a minimum of fuss. Neither Charles Kayser nor Virginia Townley put up any kind of fight owing to the incriminating photographs. Geraldine impressed upon Anna Kayser’s physician, Dr. Lipsky, the certainty of her cause and the unpleasantness of a scandal in the papers. She even brought our reporter friend Carrie along for good measure, so the doctor could see whom he was up against.

  He agreed not to fight the appeal of Anna Kayser’s commitment. Instead he went before the judge and swore that he’d been misled by Charles Kayser, as had everyone else. It was good enough for the judge. Anna Kayser was released without fuss and sent home to live in the little house in Rutherford with her daughter, and was awarded a comfortable alimony.

  “Another victory for Deputy Kopp,” sang Fleurette as she read the letter over my shoulder. She might’ve been hoping to inspire in me some of my old verve, and to rally me to go out and find another such title for myself, but it had the opposite effect. I only sighed and put the letter down, and shrugged on my coat to go outside and watch Norma pounding nails into boards.

  She was still making refinements to her pigeon cart. She mounted sturdie
r hinges to the wire cage on top from which the pigeons were to be released, and turned the rear doors on their side, so they could serve as a sort of swinging lift-gate, making it easier to step in and out. There were more windows around the side for ventilation, and a set of brackets had been added to hold the ladder, which would be needed to make repairs on the roof, or to reach pigeons who, for reasons of their own, refused to go inside. In a surprising act of deference to the coming automobile age, a separate hitch had been mounted on the front to allow the cart to be towed either by horse or machine.

  “It looks battle-ready to me,” I said.

  Norma looked up in surprise and nearly swallowed the three nails clenched between her teeth. “Are you sure it’s such a good idea to go out-of-doors?” she said, spitting the nails into her palm. “You might get your wind back, and then what would you do?”

  “I’m only saying that the cart’s coming along. When is it going to France?”

  “This is only the model,” Norma said. “Once it’s perfected, I’ll make up a set of plans. The Army will build them over there.”

  I walked around and looked it over. “Do you know how to make up a set of plans? Of the type the military might need, I mean.”

  Never in her life had it occurred to Norma that she couldn’t find out how to do a thing if she put her mind to it. “Other people make them. It can’t be very difficult.”

  “I suppose not.” I turned to leave. I’d grown pasty over the winter, without the daily rigor of a deputy’s work. I thought briefly that I ought to take a walk, just to put a little color in my cheeks, but when I looked up the road, I saw automobiles passing by and didn’t want to face them.

  Instead I wandered back into the house and up to bed. I’d read the same novel three times in a row, because I knew that if I asked Norma or Fleurette to go to the library, they’d tell me to go myself, and I wasn’t about to do that. It didn’t matter: I wasn’t really reading the novel so much as I was passing my eyes over the pages in an effort to advance the day by another hour.

  As I kicked off my boots and put myself back into bed—how gorgeous were those white sheets, how comforting the smell of a recently slept-in bed, beckoning me back—I couldn’t help but marvel at the way Norma simply battled on, having never received any encouragement from anyone, nor a dollar of pay, nor any hint—not even the slightest hint—that any of her plans would come to fruition.

  What kept her going? What woman, in her right mind, would spend a year putting together a pigeon cart for an Army that had no need of it? Didn’t Norma know that it wouldn’t matter—that it would never matter? Ten years hence, the cart would still be there, moldering behind the barn, having failed at its mission and been put to no other use.

  I felt a certain sympathy for the cart when I thought of it that way.

  But Norma had never been deterred from an idea. Once she settled on a course for herself, she simply marched along in that direction, head down, shoulder to the wheel. She was utterly convinced that she was right, and once she had taken up a position, it never occurred to her to entertain any sort of doubt. She was a plodder. She moved on.

  There was something admirable in it, but then again, she’d had no success of any kind, and rarely ventured out past our barn herself. Maybe Norma’s ruthless determination was not such a fine example, after all. Perhaps it made more sense, in light of a defeat, to stop and take stock. Maybe it was better, I told myself, to know when to quit.

  With that in mind, I let my book drop to my chest and surrendered to the encroaching fog of a late morning nap.

  The next day, on January 23, I turned forty and no one dared mention it.

  40

  winter was always the costliest time of the year for us: trees crashed down in storms and crushed fences, shingles blew off roofs (both house and barn), and the gravel road running past our property heaved and calved during the cycle of freezes and thaws, with each neighbor having to contribute toward its repair. We were burning firewood, heating oil, and coal at an alarming clip.

  Fleurette, it must be credited, took seriously the responsibility to bring in wages to carry us through. Had it been spring or summer, she might’ve been tempted to fritter away her earnings on little luxuries and amusements, but as we were trapped within the frozen confines of winter, there seemed to be no choice but to soldier through the short, gray days. She tacked up signs around Paterson and Hackensack advertising her willingness to make alterations and tailor to suit, and carried on a reasonable trade that way. The movie studios down in Fort Lee kept working through the winter, and she took on as much of their costuming as she could.

  It meant a great deal of going back and forth by train in snow and slush. She and Norma finally ended their dispute over meeting the train at Ridgewood: Norma took her to the station faithfully, never complaining about it, and Fleurette returned home on schedule, to be met by a once-again uncomplaining Norma. When Fleurette did miss the train—it was inevitable, people do miss trains—Norma waited stoically for the next one. There was nothing else to be done, so they pushed ahead with gloomy fortitude.

  By February I’d found a bit of work for myself in helping Fleurette, who was by then running quite a little business with all her tailoring and costume work. I set up a ledger-book, with a system of accounts and orders, and a weekly tally of income and expenses, to ensure that she spent just as much as she needed on materials and still had enough for the household coffers.

  One day, Fleurette came home with a copy of a New York paper she’d picked up in Fort Lee. There was a long story about a policewoman in Los Angeles who traveled the country lecturing on the subject of women in the law.

  “Look at this.” Fleurette pointed with a dramatic flourish to a caption below a photograph of the woman. “It says here that she doesn’t carry a gun or a club, and hasn’t the power to arrest anyone. She says she wouldn’t want to do a policeman’s job, and why should she, when there are men enough to do it?”

  I squinted down at it and grimaced, having nothing polite to say, but not wanting to cause offense, as Fleurette obviously had an argument to make and was eager to do so.

  “All I’m saying,” Fleurette persisted, unwisely, “is that maybe it was too soon. Maybe Hackensack wasn’t ready for a lady deputy yet. You might’ve been twenty years too early to do a man’s job.”

  Twenty years! In twenty years, I’d be sixty. That was a cold consolation. I put myself to bed a little earlier that night.

  Norma, all the while, had been busy with her war-work. The new pigeon cart was complete. With help from Carolyn Borus, she’d created a flawless set of diagrams meant to show any Army man how to build the cart. The drawings were dead accurate and cunningly put together to demonstrate each step with no captions required at all, only sets of arrows and numbers to indicate how the various components fit together. Norma and Carolyn had studied every military manual and engineering journal they could get their hands on to understand what was expected by way of a diagram, and followed them faithfully.

  Then they copied out the plans, over and over, and mailed them off with lengthy letters putting forth their scheme, to every Army man whose name appeared in the papers in connection to the war effort. It was Norma’s idea that they could wheel their cart to a Plattsburg camp in the spring, and on the basis of that success the plans would be distributed to all the camps, and then taken overseas as soon as President Wilson gave the order. Everyone thought we’d be in the war by summer. The United States couldn’t wait much longer.

  No replies ever came to those letters. I knew better than to think that any would, but it pained me, nonetheless. Norma was experiencing her own defeat in another sort of election, one carried out one man at a time, but with results just as definitive. What would Norma do, when she ran out of letters to write, and it became clear that the Army had no interest in sending pigeons to war? The war would proceed without her and her birds, of course. But what would she do next? What would any of us do?

&nbs
p; An announcement came from Norma, who heard it in Hackensack one day, that Mr. Heath had accepted a place as an accounts-clerk in some manufacturing enterprise—exactly the sort of thing he didn’t want to do—and it occurred to me that the baby would be born soon. Fleurette thought we should send a gift and embroidered a little gown, but beyond the short note we enclosed with the package, I never once tried to correspond with him. I suspected that we both felt that we’d put our years in law enforcement behind us, and that we’d not only been kicked out of the jail, but out of our old lives, and our old selves. I understood why I hadn’t heard from him. He probably understood why he hadn’t heard from me.

  I took walks around the outer boundaries of our property on fine days, something I hadn’t bothered to do in years. Norma kept up the fences and handled the leasing of grazing land to the dairy, so there was no need for me to survey the fifty or so acres that remained of our land. But I found that I liked to walk it, always alone, crunching over the brittle and frozen stubble of our meadows and taking a turn through the scraggly woods at the far end of our holdings. I appreciated the silence, and the silver landscape against a gray sky, and the bare tree branches from which a solitary bird might alight when it heard me coming.

  It was on one of those walks that I saw Anna Kayser.

  At first I believed her to be an apparition. The snow had draped itself over our farm, obliterating every scrap of meadow grass and hedgerow bramble with its blessed whiteness. The sky was white, too, and when Anna Kayser appeared, she wore a long white coat with her head wrapped in a knitted white scarf. From a distance I could make out only two chips of color for her eyes. She didn’t seem to walk toward me so much as float.

  I stood and waited for her. She had followed what we called the back lane, an old farm road that traversed our land. When we were almost nose to nose, I said, “Did you come all this way on your own?”

  I suspect she took my question to mean something else, because she said, “No. I had some help.”