There had been such high spirits among the boys when they left home. Her father hardly noticed the gloom that settled into the empty rooms her brothers had vacated. He was out every day but Sunday, conducting his business, making the rounds of factories and shops that kept their money at his bank, and he found reasons to call upon his sons’ places of employment often enough that he felt satisfied with their progress and secure in their success. But Edna and her mother were alone, quite suddenly, and Edna found the solitude unbearable.
Her brothers’ patriotic talk had stirred her. Wasn’t there something she could do? A few of her school chums had taken up with the Red Cross, rolling bandages and knitting socks. But she found that sitting in a church basement with a knitting bag in her lap was as stifling as sitting at home. Anyone could knit. Surely there was more to war service than that.
Another group was putting together little comfort bags for the soldiers—playing cards and handkerchiefs, and short notes meant to cheer them in the hospital—and she made fifty of those to help fill a barrel, but that wasn’t enough, either.
It was her father who’d given her the idea to go to work in a munitions factory. One night, as she paged listlessly through a pattern-book, he glanced up from his newspaper and said, “Would you look at this? They’re hiring girls on the fuse line. Says here those tiny fingers are just the thing. Let me see your tiny fingers, Miss Edna.”
Edna did, in fact, have narrow, delicate fingers. They also happened to be steady and strong. She raised them up between her face and her father’s. He looked right past them and into her eyes. “You see there? Even the ladies can serve.”
Her mother, who’d been sitting across from them with a box of buttons in her lap at the time this exchange took place, cried out at the suggestion and went into a sort of nervous chatter about all the ways in which women serve their country already from the kitchen and the wash-room. She rattled the buttons for emphasis as she spoke, but it was too late. Her father’s suggestion was all the encouragement Edna needed. Over the following weeks, she inquired at every factory within a train ride from Edgewater until she found a place for herself and left home.
Until her arrest, factory work had satisfied her. What could be more heroic, and more useful, than to put her shoulder to the wheel at the powder works, where the very instruments of war rolled out of the factories and onto ships, to supply the British and Canadian soldiers rushing to fight? Soon enough the Americans would join, and a fuse that left her fingers would go into the hands of her own countrymen. Every strand she wove would, she hoped, shield them from harm.
The factories were filled with women giving their all for France. It should’ve been enough for Edna. And for a time, it was.
But during the final few hours of her one and only night in the Hackensack jail, while Edna waited for Deputy Kopp to return with the results of her investigation into the unimpeachable life she’d been taken from, and to release her back to it, Edna began to wonder if she wasn’t meant to do more. As she sat in the very picture of deprivation—what could be more cruel and cold than the bars of a jail cell?—the shape of this new thing came to her.
Europe. If her brothers could go, why couldn’t she?
It was nearly morning as the idea crept in, and with it the realization that she had survived a night in jail. If she could endure that, couldn’t she endure a hundred times worse?
It must be said that Constance Kopp was, in part, to blame for this idea. In arresting Edna, Officer Randolph had put her under the care of a tall woman in a uniform, with a gun strapped to her side. Deputy Kopp hardly even seemed real to Edna at first. She seemed like a vision of an entirely different kind of woman, one who would be capable of doing far more for the war than rolling bandages. Not every woman had the temperament for war, but some did, surely.
When Deputy Kopp came for her in the morning, Edna looked up at her and just nodded, calmly, and thought to herself, Yes, certainly. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
The little pretense of a trial that morning—her mother’s quiet protests, the words of the judge—none of it made much of an impression on her. In her mind, she was already venturing across the Atlantic.
When that pamphlet slipped out of someone’s coat pocket and fluttered to the ground at the train station, Edna wasn’t at all surprised to see it. Something about the call to serve—the need to answer the cries coming daily from France as the Germans advanced—something in that call went directly inside of Edna and fit like a key in a lock.
Women were going to France, and so could she. Here was her ticket.
15
WITH CONSTANCE SO THOROUGHLY OCCUPIED, Fleurette found herself free to do as she pleased. Norma did keep something of a watch on her, grumbling if she came in too late or made too many demands to be run down to the train station in their buggy, but in general, Fleurette enjoyed her liberty and devoted every minute to her preparations for the audition.
She had, of late, come to see the frivolity in the little shows put on by Mrs. Hansen’s Academy—the Christmas concert, the spring chorus, the fall drama—in a way that had not been apparent to her only a few months before. While she’d once been delighted to play the part of a farmer’s daughter in a musical about a giant pumpkin, she now saw such roles as childish and knew that they did nothing to prepare her for an audition in front of a woman of May Ward’s caliber. Those performances were, she suspected, merely a showcase to demonstrate to parents that their tuition payments weren’t being wasted. As long as each student could be paraded before an audience of mothers and neighbors at regular intervals, and showered with applause, enrollment at Mrs. Hansen’s would look like money well spent.
She was, furthermore, coming to understand that she hadn’t been properly prepared for the career on stage she’d envisioned for herself. Most of the other girls saw dancing and singing as a diversion from an otherwise stultifying life and had, from a young age, enrolled in classes at girls’ academies merely to amuse themselves. Drawing, dancing, flower-pressing, elocution, and embroidery were all equally suited to that purpose: they kept the girls busy but not harried, entertained but not exhausted, and instilled in them a few social graces and decorative impulses that never threatened to go so far as to foster anything in the way of ambition or independence.
On the other hand, the dancers who toured with May Ward—her Eight Dresden Dolls—couldn’t possibly have come out of academies like Mrs. Hansen’s. Fleurette had been twice to watch May Ward’s act, in the company of her teacher and classmates, and had glimpsed a species of performer unlike anything she’d come across before. May Ward and her chorus girls moved as if they’d done nothing but dance all their lives. They sang out in powerful, clear voices over which they had perfect mastery. Never once was there a misstep or a mistake. They seemed to have been born backstage, to have danced before they could walk, and to have spent their formative years in rehearsals, not nodding over a history book.