Minnie did her best to look a little helpless and love-struck, and perhaps she was. Tony seemed struck dumb by the obligation he found himself under, after what had transpired between them. She expected far more than he was prepared to give, but what was he to do about it?
After some sly suggestions on her part, one or the other of them proposed that they take a furnished room in Fort Lee, posing as husband and wife. She couldn’t remember, later, exactly how it came about, but it was precisely the sort of situation she’d been hoping for. He promised to save every penny toward “something better for us,” which might have meant marriage and might have meant nothing at all, and Minnie didn’t mind either way. He told her that if she could take a job herself, they’d have enough money to go into New York from time to time. There would be dances and cabarets, and new dresses for Minnie, dresses that her sister had never once worn.
What girl wouldn’t want a life like that? She would never see the inside of a knitting mill again, or share a bed with Goldie in that drafty room behind the kitchen. She’d be a woman of the world, with a home in New York—or near it, anyway, almost in sight of it. She would go to work just as Tony had asked her to, but it would be something droll and lighthearted. She would make bouquets at a flower shop. She would sell tickets at a moving picture house. She might even take the ferry across and have a little secretarial job in Manhattan like the girls she’d seen at the lunch counters.
Everything went as she hoped it would—almost. They rented a room above a bakery on Main Street in Fort Lee. Minnie couldn’t find work in a theater or a flower shop, and it cost too much to go by ferry to New York every day, so she took a job as a carder in a jute mill, which was considerably dustier and less pleasant than the knitting mill back in Catskill. It was disagreeable work compared to running a knitting machine, and within a few days her fingers were always red and swollen from handling the rough material.
She found out that living near New York wasn’t at all the same as living in New York, and that their plans to visit the city never quite came together. She only went once in the fall, and that was to mail a letter. Tony had insisted that she send word to her parents—otherwise, he argued, they’d send the police after her, and she could be forcibly taken back home, which would be so much worse for her. After some arguing, she wrote the letter, explaining that she was well and engaged to be married. (There had been no further talk of marriage, but what else could Minnie have said?) She insisted they go to New York to post it so that she couldn’t be found by the postmark.
“I’d rather be the girl who ran away to New York than the one who ran away to Fort Lee,” she told Tony, and he indulged her and took her to the downtown post office in Manhattan. She’d dressed for lunch and an afternoon in the shops, but Tony wouldn’t pay for anything more than a sandwich at the train station. They rode back together in silence, Minnie despondent, Tony distracted.
He spent most nights at his parents’ house so that they wouldn’t suspect him of wrongdoing. Although he wasn’t paying rent at home, he never did seem to have any money. He claimed that he was saving it, that he had to be frugal, that he had expenses of his own. It fell to Minnie to pay most of the rent and to stock the kitchen with the little that she earned. There was nothing left for new dresses and theater tickets. After the initial thrill of playing at husband and wife wore off, Tony didn’t come around as often. Sometimes she didn’t see him for a week, sometimes two. There was no real bond between them—there never had been—and Tony probably wished to be relieved of any further obligations toward her.
Could she be blamed if she got lonely? What was there to do, all alone in her little room at night, but to read a library book or play a game of solitaire? The old emptiness had found her again. It practically roared in her ears. She couldn’t stand her own company anymore and grew to hate the worries that ran in circles in her head: Was anything to become of her and Tony? Would she ever get out of the jute mill and on to another life? Had she only traded one factory and dingy room for another?
Minnie had always hated being poor and thought it unfair that such things as blue fox collars and emeralds and meringues existed if she couldn’t have them. There wasn’t enough money to go to town, much less to buy anything, and sometimes she could hardly afford to eat. She was bored and lonely and already tired of her new life and longing for another one.
One evening, when the rent was a week late, and she’d had a few too many dinners of tea and toast (the toast salvaged from the bakery’s day-old bins downstairs), and she couldn’t stand to be alone in a room with herself for another night, she walked out of the jute mill and nearly ran into a man who was lingering there, fumbling with a cigarette. He backed away and apologized, and looked down at her with a bemused and crinkly smile.
“Say, you look like a girl my sister used to know. What’s your name?”
Minnie wanted nothing more in the world at that moment than to hear him say her name, so she gave it to him.
20
CONSTANCE WENT DOWNSTAIRS to look for Sheriff Heath but found Mrs. Heath in his office instead. She was seated at his desk, going over some papers, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for the sheriff’s wife to occupy his place. Constance was so startled by the sight that she entirely forgot the reason for her visit.
If she could, she would’ve turned around and left. She never knew how to behave in Mrs. Heath’s presence. All her efforts to stay in Cordelia’s good graces left her feeling exhausted and insufficient.
But it was too late; she’d been spotted.
“Miss Kopp!” Cordelia called out, extending to Constance the genteel smile that she always presented to the public. There was an aristocratic fragility in her appearance, like tissue too fine to touch. On this occasion she wore a blue velvet suit with a jacket that flared just below the waist, and a tam-o’-shanter hat to match. It was the uniform of a busy socialite. This, Constance realized, was a woman with an agenda.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Heath.”
“I know you were looking for my husband, but I want a word with you before I run out. I’ve taken charge of Bob’s campaign?—”
“Campaign?”
“Ah, yes. It’s an election year—didn’t you know that?”
“I?—”