“Can’t you even walk home?” asked a voice that belonged to Tony.
She couldn’t see him. She tried to turn and look, but his face was somewhere else, floating up high near the ceiling or drifting around behind her where she couldn’t get a fix on it. Next they were in the ruined parlor, where the card table was turned over on its side amid a swarm of brown bottles, and then they were on the stairs, which were dark and terribly cold. The shock of it threatened to make Minnie sick. She lurched and put a hand over her mouth.
Someone was behind them on the stairs, calling down to Tony. It was a man’s voice, and he was making some sort of rhyme about liquor that she couldn’t follow. Tony gave an equally insensible answer, they both laughed, and then the man said the only thing capable of working its way into Minnie’s befuddled mind and staying there.
“A girl in every port!” he hollered.
Tony laughed and took them out into the hard and unrelenting cold. Minnie gasped and choked on the air, and thought she might be sick right there, on the darkened street. Then she was.
Somehow she made it home, walking on her own now, following Tony’s murky shape down the wooden sidewalks along Main Street. The shops were all shuttered—it was well past midnight—and there wasn’t a sound, save for a bird making some lonely call from a branch overhead, and the low rumble of a train at the other end of town.
Minnie knew better than to say what she was thinking. The idea was packed in cotton anyway, buried in some part of her brain that she couldn’t quite reach, but she knew it was there, she could feel the shape of it, and she knew she wouldn’t forget it come morning. It was this: You’ve been doing the same thing I did. You’re no better than me.
Those words were still with her in the morning, when the police came and pounded at her door. She felt around in the bed for Tony, but he was gone, and the room was flooded with light because they’d forgotten to close the curtain when they went (unspeaking, unsmiling) to bed a few hours before.
Another splintering knock, and a man shouted to open the door. Minnie was still wearing her polka-dotted dress, but it was too terrible to show to anyone. She wrapped a blanket around her and stumbled across the room, tripping over her shoes and cursing at them. The lock was temperamental and she had to rattle it a few times to open it. When she did, a blue-suited constable pushed into the room and looked around.
“What’s your name?” he bellowed.
His voice knocked around inside her head. She thought she might be sick again.
“Minnie Davis.”
The constable looked at his note-pad. “Davis? Says here this place is rented to a Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Leo.”
11
“WHO’S THE GIRL?” Constance shouted over the whipping of the wind.
They were riding in the sheriff’s motor car, one of those soft-topped machines that offered very little in the way of warmth, even when the fabric was pulled overhead. Unless it was raining, the deputies didn’t bother with the top and just suffered in the open air. In the back were kept two ancient raccoon coats that they all shared, along with a pile of lap rugs. Constance kept one of the rugs over her legs as Sheriff Heath drove them south toward Fort Lee.
He fumbled for a paper in his coat pocket and said, “Minnie Davis. She turned up by accident during another investigation. The police down there were following a report of shots fired in an alley. In the course of asking questions, they found a couple living in a furnished room above a bakery, posing as man and wife. The police chief ordered them arrested on a charge of illegal cohabitation. He’d like us to come and take the girl away while he works on the shooting.”
“Then it’s another waste of our time,” Constance said. She disliked everything about an illegal cohabitation case: the woman’s crushing shame, the man’s blustery defense, the inevitable newspaper headlines. Nothing was ever a scandal until a third party found out about it and told a fourth party, and that’s exactly what the papers liked to do.
“There might not be a case against the girl at all,” Sheriff Heath said. “She’s from Catskill.”
The engine gave a loud report and they both jumped, but it settled back down again. They were in the countryside outside of Hackensack now, rolling past bare fields and frozen ponds still fringed in black cattails.
“What does Catskill have to do with it?” Constance asked.
The sheriff gave her the mildly tragic expression he deployed when he delivered bad news. “It means he took her from New York to New Jersey. The idea is to jail him for transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. We’ll only be holding her as a witness.”
Constance groaned. Everyone in law enforcement had an opinion about the Mann Act, which made it a crime to do exactly what the sheriff had just described. Some were of the opinion that any man and woman who drove, took a train, rode a bicycle, or walked across a state border together must surely be acting with immoral intent and deserved the most severe (and public) prosecution. Others—and Constance counted herself among this group—believed that the Mann Act was only meant to put a stop to kidnapping and forced prostitution. Two consenting parties out to break their marriage vows—or to dodge the institution of marriage entirely—might be punished by shame and guilt, but didn’t deserve to go to jail.
The sheriff was entirely familiar with Constance’s views on the subject, but she nonetheless said, “Is it truly a case of white slavery, or have we merely uncovered two na?ve young people pretending to be married?”
“The girl’s only sixteen. Do you suppose she went of her own free will?”
Constance shuddered at that but said, “Well, she’s old enough to be married.”
“Then she should have. They wouldn’t be on their way to jail if they were married.”
“They shouldn’t be on their way to jail regardless.”
They stopped at a train crossing, and he turned to her with a look of exasperation that suggested he was out of his depth. There was always something askew about him: either his bow tie or the brim of his hat was usually out of kilter. He grimaced in a way that made his wide mustache lift up at one end. “This isn’t another strong-willed girl off to work in a factory and her mother doesn’t approve. These two were . . . living as man and wife.”
He couldn’t bring himself to delve further into the unspeakable act, but she understood it well enough. She also knew why the police had to do something about it. The mothers and fathers of Bergen County expected someone to go to jail when immorality was discovered, and they would hold the prosecutors to account.