Girl Waits with Gun (11 page)

Before I could answer he was gone, trotting down the courthouse steps with his deputy. They spoke excitedly as they walked away from me, already caught up in some far more important matter. I watched them disappear into the side entrance to the jail, and the most inexplicable sorrow and longing settled in around me.

A train rattled in the distance and its whistle announced the next stop. It was leaving for Paterson, where Lucy Blake was working her morning shift at the factory.

I should have gone home. It was nearly time for lunch, and Norma didn't like it when one of us was not present at a meal. I hesitated for just a minute, then I picked up my skirts and ran for the train.

I ARRIVED IN PATERSON
an hour before the noon whistle. Along Broadway a group of boys were taking down bunting left over from a parade to honor the mayor's birthday. In their wake came a troupe of girls selling buttons to raise money to aid victims of the fire in Salem. Three of the girls took hold of me at once, spotting an easy mark. I couldn't imagine what Fleurette would do with a set of white buttons that had been stamped with the words “
SALEM SUFFERERS, 1914
” in red, but I handed over fifty cents anyway and put a few in my pocketbook. The girls wandered on and I lingered outside a druggist, accepting a sample of a digestive tonic that tasted suspiciously like sugar syrup and wine. I passed the rest of the time staring into shop windows, a little queasy over what I was about to do.

Henry Kaufman's factory was just a short walk away. I paced up and down Putnam, getting close to the address and then turning back again. I was standing across the street from the ramshackle brick building as every dyer in his employment emerged for lunch, all dressed in their gray smocks.

The break was nearly over by the time Lucy Blake walked out and stood in the sun, her face turned upward and her eyes closed.

“Lucy?” I called, as quietly as possible. Still, three or four men turned around and watched me approach her. Lucy took a step back and shook her head very slightly to warn me away, but it was too late. I'd made up my mind.

“Lucy, I think I can help,” I said when I got closer. “About the matter we discussed.”

She looked up at a row of windows at the opposite end of the building where the offices were housed. “Over here,” she said, leading me around the corner.

Once we were out of sight, she said, “You shouldn't be here. What is it?”

The whistle blew and she jumped. “I've found someone who wants to talk to you,” I said quickly. “About your baby. I'll go with you.”

The whistle blew again. “I have to go before they lock us out,” she said. “Don't come back here. You can meet me at home tonight.” She gave me her address, and then she was gone.

IF I'D RETURNED HOME,
Norma would have tried to talk me out of visiting Lucy, and Fleurette would have insisted on coming with me. Being unable to face either possibility, I spent the afternoon in the library and left a little after six o'clock to go see her.

Lucy lived in a neighborhood of narrow clapboard-covered row houses a few blocks off Broadway. I'd ridden past it but never had reason to stop there, as it was inhabited entirely by people who worked in the mills. Paterson was not a company town, but the factory owners had been buying boarding houses and corner markets around here for years. The people who lived there paid rent to their boss, bought groceries from their boss, and went into debt to their boss if their money ran short.

I could find no house numbers along her street, so I started at the corner and counted until I found hers, an old flat-fronted two-story house whose front porch had recently gone missing. Either it had fallen off or burned, and no one had bothered to build another one. I lifted my skirt and climbed atop a pair of concrete blocks that had been placed there to allow entrance. A directory next to the door had been painted the same dull maroon as the rest of the building, as if the painter could not be bothered to stop long enough to paint around the list of people who lived inside. But someone had glued a card to the metal plate and written out the names of the occupants and their room numbers.

Lucy lived on the second floor. Finding no bell to ring and the door unlocked, I entered the dim hall and started up the stairs.

There was a crash overhead and the sound of glass breaking, then a girl's cry. I backed down and into the hall. Upstairs a door slammed and then opened again.

“Where is she?” came a man's voice.

“I don't know,” a girl said. “I told you I don't know.” There was another thud and I could hear her crying.

“She had no business talking to you!”

I jumped. How could I have failed to recognize that voice? I had no time to gather my thoughts before I heard his footsteps on the landing.

“You tell that Kopp girl to leave you alone,” he shouted, his voice booming in the stairwell. “If I see you with her again, you'll be out on the street.”

I had to move. Behind me was a door to what I hoped was a kitchen or a storeroom. It was unlocked so I opened it and backed in. Henry Kaufman pounded down the stairs just as I closed the door behind me. I looked around and realized I wasn't in a kitchen, but a lodger's room. Fortunately for me it was empty. There was an iron bed topped with a thin mattress and a ratty blanket, an oil lamp on a low table, and dingy striped wallpaper peeling off in long strips. A man's Sunday shoes sat in the corner. A yellowing newspaper wilted on a chair. My own reflection in a mirror on the wall opposite startled me—in my gray felt hat with the veil across it and my navy traveling suit, I looked like a society matron at an afternoon recital. I wished I'd worn a plainer suit of clothes. My size made me conspicuous enough.

A clock ticked somewhere nearby. There was an odor in the room, something foul and unwashed. I wanted out desperately. I waited until the footsteps passed and the front door opened and closed again, then I turned the knob quietly and I was free.

At the top of the stairs she stood like she'd been waiting for me.

“Lucy,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“You shouldn't be here,” she whispered. She looked tiny in her percale housedress, covered by an apron that was much too large for her and nearly wrapped around her twice. She held one corner of it in her fist and twisted the fabric around her fingers. Her cheek bore the mark of Henry Kaufman's hand, and her nose was swollen from crying.

I didn't make a move up the stairs. I wasn't sure what to do. “Is he your landlord?”

She looked surprised. “Well, yes. Of course. He owns this building and the two next door. Or his family does. He manages them now, if you call this managing.”

I stood for a moment and considered that.

Lucy continued. “Mrs. Garfinkel said we could stay, even after she found out—” She looked down the stairs nervously as if she thought someone might hear.

“All right,” I said. “Lucy, may I come up and talk to you? I'm sure he's gone, and if he does return, I'll take care of it. I can handle him.”

She looked me over. “I suppose you could. You're bigger than he is, aren't you?”

Once again that sound came to me, the sharp crack when his head hit the plaster. I wasn't sorry I'd shoved him, and I thought I might like to do it again, after the way he treated this poor girl.

Lucy seemed to have calmed down, so I kept climbing and followed her to the door.

Her room was larger than that of the absent lodger downstairs, but it held two of the same type of narrow iron bed and a wardrobe as well as a dresser. The wallpaper depicted silhouettes of children rolling hoops across a lawn. There was a gold filigree border around each scene, but the gold had mostly cracked and flaked away, revealing the once-white underlay of the paper. There was no kitchen, just a wood stove topped by a hot plate and a chafing dish. The only chair was piled high with mending. Seeing nowhere to sit, I put my handbag on the edge of the nearest bed.

“That's my mother's bed,” she said. “She cleans for a lady across the river. You can sit there. I'm sorry, I—” She looked around nervously, then scooped up the mending and sat in the chair, holding the bundle in her lap. She looked at me expectantly.

“I take it Mr. Kaufman saw me talking to you,” I said at last.

She nodded. “I stopped for groceries on the way home, and when I got here, he was waiting. He has a passkey to the rooms.”

I wondered how many other young girls lived in rooms he had passkeys to. “Well,” I said, “I only came to tell you that I think something ought to be done about your son.”

“I know,” she said, and lapsed into tears again. “I should never have let him go with the strike mothers. I didn't know what else to do. We hadn't been paid in months, and the relief tents were always running out of food. I couldn't let him starve, could I? But you don't know what it was like, having to let him go.”

I let her cry and clutch her bundle of clothes and rock back and forth as if she were soothing a baby. At that moment I could picture her pulling away from the strike mothers, not wanting to let go of her boy.

After a few minutes, she sniffed and wiped her eyes and looked at me. “I've tried to find him but it's hopeless. Everyone is gone. Everyone who had anything to do with the evacuation just disappeared.”

“And you never went to the police?” I asked.

Her eyes flew open. “Oh, no! Henry would kill me if I sent the police after him.”

“Well, he wouldn't—”

“No, I mean it. He would send his men after me in the middle of the night. He would burn this building right down, and me in it. You send the police after those men, and you're as good as dead.”

She said it so matter-of-factly. I'm sure my heart stopped cold for two or three beats. What had I done?

“Are you sure? I know someone who would be willing to help, if only—”

She looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “Miss Kopp! If Henry has my boy—if he's put him somewhere—what do you think he will do to him when he finds out I've called in the police?”

My face must have been frozen, because she leaned over and peered at me. “Did you hear me?”

I nodded numbly.

“I don't know why you're here,” she said, “but if all you have to offer is a call to the police, then I'm afraid you don't do me much good.”

I coughed and tried to find my voice. “Well. I don't know what else I could do.”

“I don't, either,” she said, blinking back furious tears.

There didn't seem to be anything else to say, so I stood to leave. She made a sad sight, with her head down and her arms still wrapped around her heap of clothes to be mended.

“Before I go,” I said, “why don't you just tell me what you know? Just in case I do think of something.”

She raised her eyes to me and sniffed. She wasn't finished being angry at me, but in a flat voice she told me what I wanted to know. I took down the address of Regina Doyle, in whose care little Bobby had been placed. She told me that two women had taken responsibility for evacuating the children during the strike. They'd been in the papers every day last year, and I recognized their names, Sanger and Flynn. She also furnished me with a description of the baby, although it had been over a year since she'd seen him. He would be almost two years old by now. I asked her if she remembered anything from her trips to the city to try to fetch him, but she shook her head and her tears started again.

“It's no use,” Lucy said. “Regina Doyle is gone. I walked up and down the street asking after her, but no one even remembers seeing her.”

“She didn't leave an address with the landlord?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing. One day she was just gone, along with everyone who knew her. The strike leaders who lived in that building disappeared all at once.”

I heard a noise on the stairs and we both froze. The footsteps went past her door and up to the next floor. I took a long and shaky breath and told Lucy, somewhat dispiritedly, that there had to be a way to get some help for her. She shook her head and made me promise once again not to go to the police.

Having nothing else to offer, I said my goodbyes and stumbled down the narrow stairs into the glare of the setting sun. The street was strangely empty and silent but for the snap of laundry on the lines and the call of a man selling fish scraps from a wagon. It was the end of his route, so he had nothing left but porgie and the severed heads of sea bass that the housewives in the better neighborhoods hadn't wanted.

I COULD HAVE TOLD THE SINGER MAN
to stop coming around. Our door had a lock. He couldn't get in unless I let him.

And I kept letting him in.

Within a few weeks it became apparent that the Singer man's long, fine fingers could handle buttons and clasps as well as a needle and thread. No man was more familiar with the ways that fabric could be bound up and taken apart than a sewing machine salesman. The first time he reached out to my neck and separated my collar from my dress I held perfectly still, surprised by how nimble and quick he could be. In the perpetual dusk of my mother's parlor, he worked at my dress like a tailor at a fitting, insisting that I stand in the middle of the room while he moved in a circle around me, releasing hooks and pushing pearl buttons through the loops my mother had stitched to hold them. He touched them lightly, as if he were merely testing their strength or checking for flaws in their design. On every visit he released another of the countless ties and latches with which we girls bound ourselves according to the fashions of 1897. It was a few weeks before he made it past the last one, but the Singer man was patient, smiling down on me as he released them. He closed his eyes like a man at prayer when he kissed me.

My mother had impressed upon me the idea that a girl should never sit alone on a divan with a man. And so we never sat on the divan. The Singer man made sure I always stood.