“He’ll be along. He works down at the brick factory. Goldie’s at the knitting mill. You’ll hear the whistle shortly.”
Constance wasn’t sure how to keep a conversation going with Mrs. Davis, but she soon discovered that she didn’t have to. While they waited, Mrs. Davis delivered a monologue about the job prospects available at the various factories in town and which ones were best suited to Mr. Davis’s failing knees and trembling hands. The brick factory was the worst place for him, she explained, but there wasn’t anything left. His fingers shook so that he couldn’t do the fine work required of textile labor, nor was he fit anymore to be a machinist.
“That’s why we need the girls to work,” Mrs. Davis pronounced. “Because he can’t no more. But Minnie spent every penny she made down at that boardwalk, and still expected me to keep a bed for her and food on the table. I told her I could rent that bed to the girl sitting next to her at the mill and collect more money in rent than Minnie brought home. She told me to go right ahead and try. Have you ever heard of a girl talking to her mother like that?”
From the little Constance knew of Minnie, it sounded exactly like her. But before Mrs. Davis’s line of questioning could run on much longer, the door flew open and Goldie ran inside. She was the mirror image of her sister: tall and broad-shouldered, with a firm chin, a strong nose, and hair a shade too dark to be considered gold, although it might’ve had more shine to it in the summer.
“They told me on the corner the police were here. Are you police? Is it Minnie?”
“You already know what happened to Minnie,” Edith Davis snapped.
Goldie didn’t even glance at her stepmother. She took Constance by the hand and led her through the kitchen and into a little room behind it that was not much more than a sleeping porch.
“Go on and tell her your lies!” Mrs. Davis shouted from her chair.
Goldie pulled a curtain closed and Constance found herself in a room so small that she stumbled over the bed. There were heavy blankets over the windows, giving the place a gloomy, greenish cast. Having nowhere else to sit, Goldie dropped onto the bed, and Constance did, too. In this way they found themselves settled on a ratty chenille bedspread like two sisters sharing confidences. Goldie and Minnie must have done exactly that, Constance thought, before she disappeared.
“Did you share this room with your sister?” she asked.
Goldie nodded and jutted her chin at the wall. “That’s her side.”
The wall above the bed was covered in magazine pictures, some of which they had colored themselves. Goldie had a liking for etchings of scenes from antiquity: Roman palaces, Egyptian queens along the Nile, and statues of Diana with her dog. Minnie preferred the Manhattan skyline and elaborate interiors of theaters, with curtained balconies and gilded ceilings. She had also pinned up a picture of last year’s spring dresses from Paris. It gave Constance a ragged little pain to see that Minnie and Fleurette longed for the same life.
She thought it better to start by letting Goldie talk about herself, so she said, “You’ve taken an interest in the classics.”
“I used to have a teacher who read mythology to us, and Virgil. It seemed like another world. I couldn’t believe any of those things really happened right here on this Earth.” She flashed a wide and winning smile, and just as quickly took it away again. Here was a girl who was too pretty to work in a factory, and too poor to study the classics. Constance could imagine her and her sister, sleeping side-by-side, each wondering how she’d ever get out of that room.
Then one of them did.
“Minnie must’ve thought New York was another world,” Constance said.
“She’s more practical. And brave. She just went.”
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
Goldie laughed and shook her head, tossing her hair around. “She didn’t have to tell me. Everybody goes down to that boardwalk. I was there, too. I saw her with Tony.”
“What happens at the boardwalk?” Constance asked, even though she had a fairly good idea about it.
“Why, the pleasure boats come up the river! Who do you suppose steps off those boats?”
“People from the city,” Constance offered. She could just imagine how romantic that must be to girls in a small town. An image came to mind of Fleurette at the age of nine or ten, when she kept an album of pictures of fashionable people in pretty places. There was a newspaper drawing she particularly liked of debutantes strolling down the Catskill boardwalk under their parasols. She had a little paint set and she colored in all the dresses, making them as bright as peacocks while the world around them stayed newsprint gray and drab.
“Yes, people from the city,” Goldie said. “Rich people. Young men handing out cigarettes and offering to buy the town girls a drink. We all go down and wait for them. If we spend our own money in the arcades and shops, there won’t be anything left over. But a man from the city has plenty to spend.”
“And what does a man like that expect in return?”
She smiled again, and a little color came up in her cheeks. “Plenty.”
The rest of it came out easily enough. Minnie hated her job at the knitting mill. For two years she’d been sitting alongside a few dozen other girls, running a hosiery machine all day long. It was a better place to work than one of the silk factories in Paterson: it was cleaner, the wages were higher, and the girls could sit at their stations, rather than stand over a loom all day. But it was monotonous work that gave Minnie little reward, as every dime she earned was supposed to go home to her parents.
There was no thought of Minnie finishing her schooling. Mrs. Davis told the teacher she was needed at home, and that was the end of her education. She was locked into a life of factory work and house-work.
Around the time Minnie turned sixteen, she realized that there would be no end to it unless she got married. But she knew that if she married a Catskill boy from one of the factories—and who else would she marry, but one of them?—nothing much would change. She would stay at the knitting mill until she had a baby, and then she would keep house in another small and dingy set of rooms just like the ones she’d always lived in.
When Goldie put it like that, Constance couldn’t blame Minnie for running away. Anyone might run away from a life like that.
“What about you?” Constance asked. “Weren’t you tempted to go off to the city the way she did?”
“I might’ve gone with Minnie, if she’d asked. But she wasn’t just tired of this old life. She was tired of me, too. Anyway, there’s a foreman at the brick factory. We’re to be married in the spring.”
“Congratulations,” she said, and Goldie gave her that bright smile again. Then a door slammed and she said, “Daddy’s home.”
“Wouldn’t he like to have Minnie back?”
“Go and ask him yourself.”