by Amy Stewart
My hands went nervously to my shirtfront. I patted myself down, smoothing my skirt and checking a button. “Haven’t I been appointed already? Haven’t I been doing the job since the middle of June?”
He took a step back and walked in a little circle, nodding. “You have. But it isn’t official until the county clerk draws up the papers, and of course we don’t yet have the badge itself. The trouble is that Mr.—our attorney friend . . .”
“Didn’t the state pass a law allowing for the appointment of women police officers? Isn’t that why you offered me the job?” There was a vibrato in my voice that I couldn’t control. Even as I said it, I was beginning to understand what had happened.
“Yes. But that’s the difficulty. The statute addresses police officers only. The sheriff is elected and governed under a different chapter of the law entirely. No mention was made of women deputies. In fact, the sheriff in New York City tried just such a scheme a few years ago, and had to abandon it because the law there requires that deputies be eligible voters in the county in which they serve, which means that women—”
I cut him off irritably. “Couldn’t possibly qualify.”
He was standing right in front of me again but I wouldn’t look at him. Then he said, “We’ve no such troubles about voting in New Jersey. It isn’t written into our laws that way. But if the lawmakers in Trenton had wanted women to serve as deputies, we can be sure they would have said so, and they didn’t.”
He had a higher opinion of lawmakers in Trenton than I did. “Couldn’t it have been an oversight?” I was practically yelling.
“Yes. And I’ve been advised to write to all the other sheriffs in New Jersey and ask if any of them have appointed a lady deputy under the new law. It would give us precedence.”
“And?”
“So far, no one has.”
“And you don’t want to be the first.”
He lifted his hat, pushed his hair back, and set it down again. “Miss Kopp. I can fight the Freeholders over my budget and how I discharge my duties, but I cannot willfully break the law.”
I turned away from him and tried to compose myself. I thought about the day, when I was about ten years of age, when I copied down a list printed in the newspaper under the title “What a Woman Can Do.” I wrote down each item in a neat and careful hand, and then crossed most of them out after considered them. The Profession of Music was thus eliminated, as was Coloring Photographs and Women as Wood Engravers. Housekeeper was blotted out so thoroughly that the paper tore. Dressmaking met the same fate, as did Gardening. In fact, the paper was nearly in tatters under the force of my emphatic little hand.
Only The Profession of Law remained, along with A Lady Government Official, Women of Journalism, and Nursing. Each of those wore faint checks beside them.
I hid that list inside a white glove that needed mending and never showed it to anyone. On it were all the possibilities in the world.
No one, back in 1887, had dared to suggest Woman Deputy.
Now my profession was being taken away from me as quickly as it had been given. Already I’d grown accustomed to thinking of myself as one of the first to prove that a woman could do the job. I wasn’t like Mrs. Headison. I wasn’t just a chaperone for wayward girls. I carried a gun and handcuffs. I could make an arrest, just like any deputy. I earned a man’s salary. People did find it shocking and I didn’t mind that one bit.
A blue rectangle of sky lay beyond the garage’s wide door. As soon as I walked out, I’d be ordinary again. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how much I hated being ordinary.
I still had my back to Sheriff Heath. I thought it best to leave without letting him see my face again. “Well. I suppose I’ll go home.”
“There’s no need for that,” the sheriff said quickly. “I’ve something else for you, if you’ll take it.”
That was enough to make me turn around.
“I won’t be your stenographer.” I wasn’t about to sit in a room and take notes about what the other deputies had done.
Now he did smile a little. “It’s not as bad as that. And it won’t last long. Give me a month and I’ll find a way.”
I looked him in the eyes at last. They were sunken and soulful, and often carried dark circles around them. The man had a trustworthy face.
“A month?”
“That’s all. One month.”
2
“IT WON’T BE A MONTH,” Norma said later that night.
I was sprawled across our divan, listening to my sister mutter at the newspaper. All I could see of her were her feet, crossed at the ankle on a tufted leather ottoman, and the tips of her stubby, chapped fingers gripping the paper by its edges. She kept at her side a portable gas lamp that made the room smell of Limburger cheese.
“Of course it will,” I said. “This is only a legal difficulty and he’s looking for a way.”
“He should be looking for his own backbone.” She rattled her paper again for emphasis. Norma was theatrical in her own way, a master of props, equipped with an impressive vocabulary of snorts, grumbles, and hisses, and always ready to bang a pot or slam a book shut to get her point across. In any disagreement, she could be counted upon to have a pencil and paper at the ready and to write down whatever outlandish and overheated claim the other party might be making, so that it could be entered into evidence and read back at a later date when it might favor her side.
When I didn’t answer, she made another run at it. “If he hasn’t any confidence in you, he should just say so. It may be true that most women lack the temperament, grit, and strength to enforce the law, but you have all three in abundance, and Sheriff Heath has no reason to doubt it.”
“He doesn’t doubt it,” I said. “He’s seen what I can do.” He had, hadn’t he? Norma had a way of speaking with such grim certainty that I could never truly dismiss those pronouncements of hers.
“Then why is he waiting for another sheriff to go first? Is he afraid of having his name in the paper? How the voters of Bergen County elected such a lily-livered man . . .”
“He’s afraid of having Constance’s name in the paper,” Fleurette put in. She was coming downstairs in her stockinged feet, bouncing down the last few steps and spinning so the hem of her dress sailed around her knees.
Judging from her blue-and-white gingham and the milk pail on her arm, I took it that she was playing a farmer’s daughter. She wore her hair in two braids, with fat pink bows tied around the tail of each, and carried white satin dancing shoes embellished with the kind of dainty beadwork that wouldn’t last an hour on a farm.
“I’m auditioning for the fall play tomorrow,” she said, hopping over to offer me a better look at her handiwork. “Helen wants to play my twin sister. We aren’t supposed to come in costume, but it’s no trouble to put a dress together and I think they’ll have to cast us, don’t you?”
I took the hem between my fingers and admired the stitching. Norma stared pointedly at her newspaper.
“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting the part,” I said.
Having Fleurette perform for others—and not just for the two of us in our parlor—was a novelty in our household. When the sheriff first offered me a job two months ago, I knew better than to go to work without finding some way to keep Fleurette occupied as well. She thought she should go to New York, but Norma and I managed to convince her that eighteen-year-old girls didn’t go to New York by themselves unless they were orphans working in factories, or society girls under the interference of a chaperone. We told her that Paterson would have to suffice and enrolled her at Mrs. Hansen’s Academy of Music and Dance. Right away she made a friend in Helen Stewart, a red-headed Scottish girl who was as fine and fair as Fleurette was dark and dramatic. They both had ambitions for the stage that I hoped could be contained within the walls of Mrs. Hansen’s school.
It pained me that Fleurette had never had a friend her own age before, a consequence of schooling her at home and our quiet
life in the countryside. The isolation didn’t bother me and Norma, but we were past the age when girls needed a friend with whom to share secrets. Our mother hadn’t any friends either, but she never wanted any. She disliked strangers, the natural result of which was that she associated with very few people who weren’t either known to her from birth or born to her.
We fled Brooklyn for New Jersey precisely to get away from the few people who did know us and might question how a baby had come to be added to our family. If Mother was forced to reveal anything about us at all to our neighbors out in Wyckoff, she gave only the general impression that her husband had died. This was explanation enough for anyone who might question why a woman in her forties was living alone on a farm with two nearly grown daughters, an adult son (our brother, Francis, now married and living in Hawthorne), and a baby girl.
Fleurette grew up believing me to be her sister. The only two people who knew the truth were Norma and Francis. It was a secret that held a terrible power over me when I was younger, but in the last few years, we’d survived my mother’s death, the kidnapping threats that first brought Sheriff Heath to us, and, most recently, Fleurette’s eighteenth birthday. For the first time, we were finding our way out into the world.
Even Norma had put herself on a new path. She ran an advertisement in the Paterson Evening News soliciting members for the New Jersey Society for the Deployment of Messenger Pigeons to Aid in Civic Affairs, an organization of her own creation whose name sprang wholly formed from her staid and stodgy imagination. Fleurette tried to suggest something more spirited, such as the Paterson Pigeon Fanciers, which was rejected on the grounds that we lived in Wyckoff, not Paterson. She then put forth Winged Messengers, which Norma thought sounded too mystical, and then she proposed my favorite, the Association of Intelligent Birds, on which Norma refused to pass comment.
“The name need only explain our undertaking,” Norma argued, “and I don’t want anything that attracts show breeders and fanciers. We’ve far more important work to do.”
She had almost two dozen answers to her advertisement. The newspaper misprinted her name, calling her Norman Kopp rather than Norma, the result being that a few men dropped out when they understood a woman would be running the show. And there was never any question that Norma would have full charge of club affairs: she appointed herself both president and recording secretary and saw no need for any other officers or voting members.
“It isn’t really a society, is it?” Fleurette said when she saw the circular Norma had neatly typed with her name in every leadership position. “It’s more of a battalion, with you as the colonel.”
Every Saturday fourteen people arrived at our house at dawn with their pigeons packed in baskets and ready to fly. There were half a dozen women in the group. (I hadn’t any idea that there were so many other women raising pigeons in the barns of Bergen County.) A few of them brought a brother or father along. The rest of the group was made up of farmers who raised pigeons along with chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl, turkeys, and any other manner of bird that could be raised economically and sold at a profit.
None had any real experience in training pigeons to do what came naturally, which was to fly directly home after being transported a great distance. While all pigeons were possessed of this innate ability, Norma had lately come to believe that a methodical training program, begun at birth, would result in pigeons that flew at greater speeds and higher altitudes, making them of better use to doctors, police, and anyone else in need of a way of getting messages to far-flung places where telephone wires didn’t reach.
It was a relief to see Norma and Fleurette both engaged in their own affairs. Francis used to fret over our ability to run our own lives, but he seemed resigned to the fact that we weren’t about to let him take over. He still stopped by to deliver a pie from his wife, Bessie—for which we were endlessly grateful—and he would inspect the eaves or look around the barn with a proprietary air. Sometimes he made inquiries about our grazing land, which we leased to neighbors rather than keep our own livestock. We weren’t bothered by his questions. We were taking care of ourselves, and my wages were just enough to keep Norma in pigeon feed and Fleurette in ribbons and buttons.
If only I could hold on to those wages.
Fleurette was admiring herself in the little oval mirror above the mantel. “If I’m cast in the play, I expect you both to come and see me every night of the run. We’ve two months of rehearsals and we open in late October. Plan accordingly.”
Norma looked over the top of her paper with real dread in her eyes. “I’ll send a representative.”
“If you don’t come, I’ll have Constance arrest you.”
Norma snorted. “Constance hasn’t the authority to arrest a runaway dog.”
Fleurette spun around and looked down at me, her hands on her hips. “If you’re not allowed to arrest people, what are you going to do, exactly?”
3
“I’VE NEVER HAD a lady guard before,” Mary Lisco said.
“They didn’t have one in Newark?” Martha Hicks asked. Martha had been arrested for stealing hosiery from the department store where she worked.
“No, and they didn’t have one in New Brunswick either, or in Yonkers.”
“Gee, you’ve been in a lot of jails,” Martha said.
“They don’t keep me long. If they do, I find a way out.”
Mary Lisco had escaped from the city jail in Newark and made her way to Hackensack, where she was caught putting her hand in the purse of the mayor’s wife. She had glossy hair the color of honey and the figure of a chorus girl. I had an idea about how she slipped out of jail so easily, and it didn’t involve a lady guard.
Mary might not have had the name for my job exactly right, but it was close enough. I was the jail matron, a perfectly legal job for a woman and the only position, other than stenographer, that Sheriff Heath could offer me after he stripped me of my duties as deputy. I had charge of the female section on the jail’s fifth floor, which usually held only three or four inmates. The women tended to be better behaved than the men and rarely gave me trouble. I devised ways to keep them busy, oversaw their chores, and read to them if they didn’t know how. It was simple work that any capable woman could have done—and I’d been doing it for longer than I should have.
I never liked to admit this, but Norma had been absolutely right. One month had stretched into two. It was late October and I was still without a badge. I had the authority to decide whether or not to let these two girl thieves out of their cells for a little fresh air, but I hadn’t the authority to arrest them in the first place and I felt diminished because of it.
I swung open Mary’s door and Martha’s. Mary had only just been arrested the night before and this was her first time out of her cell. “You can walk around your cell block during the day and stretch your legs,” I told her. “Did they let you do that in Newark?”
Mary raised an eyebrow but didn’t answer. She and Martha stepped out of their cells at the same time and looked each other over, having only been acquainted through the sound of their voices thus far. Martha had thin lips and a narrow nose that had been broken, and the long, loosely jointed fingers of a piano player. I saw Mary look her up and down and decide if she could be put to use.
The jail was equipped with casement windows that could be cranked open by anyone who possessed a key. I gave the handle a half-turn, which was as far as the bars would allow it to go, and the noise from the street below rushed in: the rattle of motor cars, the ringing of trolley bells, and a man shouting something unintelligible at a horse.
The girls leaned against the window like two housewives meeting over the back fence. A brisk autumn breeze sailed in and Martha took a long, deep breath. “Oh, I like that.”
“It’s the smell of civilization,” Mary said.
Inmates loved to get a whiff of downtown Hackensack: the wet green wood from a cabinet shop, the long squat bakery behind Main Street that churned out loaves for
the restaurants, and even the coal stacks and coughing, sputtering automobiles.
That smell had become part of my daily life as well. I’d always had charge of the female section, ever since Sheriff Heath first hired me, and it was customary for me to look after the women inmates when I wasn’t out on a call. I never minded it and believed a jail matron to be necessary if the women were to be properly cared for. But now it was all I did, and with so few women in our custody, the days tended to drag.
I was beginning to suspect that Sheriff Heath was reluctant to mount a legal defense if he was challenged over appointing me deputy. Every day he faced some new criticism from the papers or the Board of Freeholders and he didn’t need another. He also likely feared his wife’s wrath if the papers got hold of a story about Bergen County’s new female officer arresting a man or getting into some unfeminine scrape with a criminal. Mrs. Heath didn’t care for her husband’s progressive ideas, nor did she like the way they invited the ridicule of reporters. There would be a price to pay—at home and in the public eye—for giving me a badge and turning me loose on the streets of Hackensack.
Or did he harbor doubts as to whether I could do the job? He’d never said as much, but he might not have wanted to admit that he’d made a mistake. I thought over and over about the cases we’d worked together, and wondered where I might have gone wrong. I had strength enough—I was of a more substantial size than some of the other deputies—and he’d seen me handle a suspect. Surely he knew I wasn’t prone to fright or hysteria. It was true that I was inexperienced, but where was my experience to come from if I didn’t have the job?
Worries like these had a way of infecting my mind, especially with so much idle time on my hands. Had I enjoyed knitting, I would have kept the Red Cross in scarves all winter. Instead I watched Martha and Mary plant their elbows on the window-sill and press their foreheads against the glass, two conspirators planning mischief in low voices, and wondered what morally instructive activity I might contrive for them.