“This is Carrie Hart’s fault,” Constance said. “That story of hers must be going all over the country.”
As Norma wrote and crossed out and muttered to herself, Fleurette imagined boarding a train. She often imagined boarding a train when Norma spoke, but now that the idea was to be made manifest, it gave her an extra thrill. She wondered what the Eight Dresden Dolls were doing at that very moment, and marveled at the fact that none of them were sitting in a parlor with two stiff older sisters, dreaming up clever ways to reject whatever proposal of marriage, job prospect, or other chance at a new life came their way.
It occurred to her, for the hundredth time, that other people didn’t pass their evenings this way. Other people—May Ward, in particular, and probably her Dolls, as well—would be intrigued by a letter from a stranger, and might hazard a friendly reply, and thereby find a new world—or at least an interesting correspondence—unfolding before them.
Norma’s lips worked furiously over her composition. From time to time a word escaped: presumptuous, unconscionable, iniquitous, abhorrent.
She took a breath and continued: indecorous, opportunistic, unprincipled, opprobrious.
Fleurette had been right not to breathe a word of her plans to her sisters. Nothing—not a tour with a theater troupe, and certainly not an offer of marriage—stood a chance against Norma’s formidable vocabulary of refusal.
24
NOW SHE HAD HER ticket in hand. There were three benches on the platform, one of them empty. Fleurette lowered herself gingerly, not certain at first that she could even make contact with the wooden slats. Nothing seemed real at that moment. Either she was intangible or the bench was, but it didn’t seem possible that they were both still solidly of this Earth.
Even the air had changed. It was thin mountaintop air, too insubstantial to keep a person alive. She felt a little dizzy, as if she were looking down upon her life from a great height.
Perhaps this was how everyone felt the first time they left home: insubstantial, transitory, adrift. Fleurette remembered that when her mother died, she was made to wait in the hall, having been banished from the room when her mother started to make a sound like she was drowning. After a long and horror-filled gasp, there came the most restful silence, and Fleurette knew that she was gone. She took a long, deep breath in the hallway, and the air was just like this: cold and alien. It was the air of another world, the one that she would have to live in without her mother.
And now this—this was the world she would live in without her home, and without her sisters.
A tall man in the most ridiculous purple suit came whistling down the platform and dropped onto the bench next to her. “You made it,” he said. “Are these your trunks?”
She had Freeman Bernstein to thank for breaking the spell. No longer was she walking in a dream, through her sisters’ parlor, past her mother’s sick-room. Freeman Bernstein might have been far-fetched, but he was undoubtedly real. He smelled of brandy and cigarettes and faintly of cloves, from the red carnation in his button-hole.
“I hardly brought anything for myself,” Fleurette said. “That’s my sewing machine, and some buttons and ribbons and things.”
Mr. Bernstein grinned and rubbed the stubble on his chin. He wore a massive gold ring with a nest of diamonds in the middle. “I expect they’ll have buttons and ribbons and things in Pittsburgh, Florabelle.”
“It’s Fleurette. But you’re supposed to call me Miss Kopp.”
His eyebrows popped up for just a second and he said, “I’m going to call you Florabelle, and you’re going to like it.”
“I never will. Although if you put me on the stage, I might change my mind.”
Fleurette had never felt so bold. If only someone were around to hear the way she traded barbs with May Ward’s husband! What would her sisters think?
The thought made her turn around suddenly and sweep her eyes across the station. She hadn’t yet left her old world behind. It wouldn’t be that unusual to come across Constance in a train station. She shuddered at the thought of it: her formidable older sister, with that gold star on her coat, and that chunk of blue steel on her belt. What would Constance do if she could see Freeman Bernstein now, jumping to his feet and holding out his hand to Fleurette as the train rocked into the station?
It didn’t matter what Constance thought, because it was time for them to go. He ushered her on board and tipped a porter to follow them. Fleurette felt quite grand as she led the way to the rear of the train, where Mrs. Ward and all eight of her Dresden Dolls occupied half of a rail-car.
Fleurette walked breathlessly up to May Ward and made ready with some witty remark about reporting for duty, but before the actress could even look up from her magazine, Freeman Bernstein whisked her past and deposited her among the chorus girls.
“Ladies, Miss Florabelle here is our company seamstress! Don’t teach her your wicked ways.”
An outburst of laughter was his reward. He scampered away, leaving her to make her own introductions and to correct, once again, the pronunciation of her name.
The Dresden Dolls were accompanied by a stern-looking older woman who had something to do with helping the actresses with their hair and costumes (although Fleurette couldn’t imagine what that might be, as the woman seemed to have no sense of style herself), and an absolute brick of a man who acted as a sort of company porter, taking charge of the various trunks and hat-boxes. He was also appointed to stand guard against unwanted male attention as the troupe went in and out of theaters and hotels.
Fleurette was introduced to those two by Charlotte, the youngest and friendliest of the Dolls, as Mrs. Ironsides and Mr. Impediment. They seemed to answer to those names and not to mind them terribly.
“If you so much as take a scrap of paper from a man, I’m to wrestle it away from you, miss,” said Mr. Impediment, in a merry voice that suggested he took great pleasure in his work.
“I enforce the curfew,” said Mrs. Ironsides in a decidedly less pleasant tone. “There’s a train ticket with your name on it if you skip out in the middle of the night.”
“She means it,” said Charlotte. “I took the place of the last girl who missed curfew.”
The others snickered at that but didn’t contradict her story.
With the exception of Charlotte, who couldn’t have been a day past eighteen, the rest of them were at least five years older than Fleurette, some ten. They looked girlish, almost childlike, on stage, but in person, without their costumes, they seemed to Fleurette like world-weary sophisticates.
Two or three of them glanced up from their magazines and card games long enough to offer their names to Fleurette and to suggest the three or four costumes most in need of repair.