“People don’t buy tickets to watch a seamstress,” he said. “If you’re not on stage, you’re not paying your way.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Fleurette told him, still animated and half out of her mind after the audition. “I will pay my way. You won’t owe me a thing until the end of the first week. If you like what I can do—if Mrs. Ward is pleased (for Fleurette knew that it was Mrs. Ward who had to be persuaded, and she would persuade her husband), then you’ll put me into the company. If not, you’ll send me home.”
Fleurette and May Ward proved to be a formidable opposition to Mr. Bernstein’s objections. After a hushed conference, he agreed and gave Fleurette the date and time of departure.
“You’ll buy your own train ticket,” Mr. Bernstein said. “I’m holding you to it.”
“I expect you to,” she answered, feeling terribly bold and brash.
Of course, there was the problem of putting her hands on the money. She could sell a few things—there was always something in her wardrobe she could part with—and she was owed for dresses she’d made for her fellow students. But that wouldn’t be enough. She needed twenty dollars, at least. She didn’t dare come right out and ask Constance for such a large sum.
But that didn’t mean that Constance wouldn’t have been willing to give it to her, if she’d understood the situation properly, did it? Besides, it would all be repaid. Fleurette imagined herself, after she’d made a success on the stage, stopping in at banks to have money sent to her spinster sisters in the countryside. When the papers wrote about her, they would all say that she was generous to her family, and that she never forgot that first twenty-dollar loan that gave her the start she needed. She would laugh with the reporter over the circumstances under which she’d “borrowed” the money, and how easily her sisters forgave her, once it had been returned many times over.
With that in mind, Fleurette had behaved, on the night of the audition, exactly as Norma and Constance would’ve expected her to. She didn’t want to give any hint of what had actually happened backstage, or of what was to come.
“May Ward said we stole the show,” she told them, with the easy confidence of someone who had, in fact, triumphed on stage that very night. “Mr. Bernstein said it was the best performance he’d ever seen at one of their auditions, and they’ve done them all over the country.”
“Of course they have,” Norma said. “The only easier way to make money would be to print it oneself, and I suppose he’s tried that, too.”
Constance gave her praise, measured and steady as always, for the clear and beautiful singing, the cleverness of the choreography, and the sheer perfection of the costumes. “May Ward couldn’t help but think you were the best,” she said. “We all did.”
But it was dull to hear the same old praise from Constance. Being held in Constance’s high regard did nothing for her. She wanted the admiration of theater critics, and show managers, and tasteful people sitting in boxes.
When the talk turned away from Fleurette’s theatrical accomplishments, she allowed it to drift. It wouldn’t do to make too much of a fuss about the evening. Over the coming days, she’d have any number of secretive preparations to make, and it would be better for her if the events of the evening were allowed to recede slightly, and for Norma and Constance to return to whatever usually occupied their minds.
Fortunately, a packet of letters had arrived earlier in the day, and Norma took them up as soon as they returned from the theater.
“I regret to inform Deputy Kopp that she has caught the attention of an attorney in St. Louis who wishes to interest her in a legal matter.” Norma held up a sheet of creamy rag paper. Constance squinted at the three immaculately typed paragraphs and the elaborate flourish of a signature underneath.
“Does he want me for his wife or his secretary?” Constance asked.
“Both,” Norma said, and read it aloud.
My Dear Miss Kopp,
I feel as though we are already acquainted through the many charming portraits of you that I have seen displayed in our Sunday papers. I would enclose a copy so that you could see how celebrated you are in our city, but I have pasted mine into frames and could not bear to part with them. They hang in my office where I may gaze upon them in the morning and whisper good-night to them in the evening.
After a long and careful consideration, I feel that I must give voice to what lives in my heart and tell you of the decision that I have, at last, come to know as the right one for both you and I: We must be wed in the fall, and you are to take up residence in St. Louis and carry on with all the duties of an attorney’s wife, a legal secretary, and mother to my four children, left bereft after the unexplained disappearance and presumed death of my wife several weeks ago.
You will find that I live, breathe, and sleep by the law. Its principles guide my every step and even the stirrings within my soul. Now that we have found that our hearts beat, practically speaking, as one, I take it that we may safely assume that we are engaged to be married. Under such blissful circumstances as these, I think it wiser for you (and incidentally even for me) that we should place our happy matrimonial contract upon a firm and rigid footing, so that in the future there may be no unseemly wrangling in case we should fall out (as all true lovers will) in the interval which must elapse between now and our nuptials.
Therefore, this letter, my own dear bride-to-be, according to law, is a business contract. I have copied it into my office letter book. Please send your affirmative reply, or indicate your consent by signature below, for which I enclose a stamp and my affectionate regard.
Please believe me to be—
Yours in perpetuity subject to the above—
Edwin G. Bagott, Esq.
“‘Subject to the above’!” Fleurette shrieked. “What kind of man sends a woman a contract and a demand for a signature?”
“Are we obligated to reply,” asked Constance, “or is the lack of an acceptance considered a refusal?”
Norma scrutinized the page again. “With no terms given, I feel that we must refuse in all good speed, and preserve a copy for our office letter book, too, before you find yourself legally bound to Mr. Bagott.”
“Mrs. Constance Bagott!” said Fleurette. “Mother of four.”
“I do wonder about the mysteriously vanished former Mrs. Bagott, who apparently saw no other way out of her contract,” Norma muttered, and took up her pencil to compose the first draft of what was to be a carefully considered and legally binding reply.