Constance looked her over appraisingly. “You’d do well. You’re sturdy enough.”
You’re sturdy enough. After Constance left, Edna sat alone in her room, fingering the Red Cross’s list of nursing courses. She was exhausted from the longer shifts, and so far, the rewards had been so meager as to hardly be worth it. She might manage to save fifty cents here, and a dollar there, but it would never put a hundred dollars in her pocket for the voyage over, much less the monthly sum required for her room and board.
To make matters worse, Ruby and her friends on the Preparedness Committee seemed to be faltering in their desire to rush off to France. They were fretting over family obligations and social affairs they couldn’t miss. Their mothers disapproved, a few of them said, and their fathers weren’t so sure they’d put up the money after all.
It was such a game to them. They made an entertainment of holding teas to solicit donations, and of fashioning wool flowers into corsages that their friends might buy to fund their wild plans. Meanwhile, Edna, having no friends with money to spare, worked every shift she could, taking time off only when the Preparedness Committee held its meetings. The Red Cross courses were about to begin, and when they started, she’d have to choose between the extra earnings and the coursework required of every volunteer. It was an impossible choice—she couldn’t do without either.
But to give up would be worse. Her job at the factory, her room at the boarding-house—it had seemed so exciting at first, so liberating, but now she saw how it might go on forever, if she couldn’t find another course for herself. Any girl her age would be thinking of marriage. She couldn’t bear the idea of marrying a man who stayed home from the war, and she wasn’t particularly interested in marrying one if he was only going to run off to fight and might never return.
The drumbeat of war was growing louder. What else was there for her, if she didn’t go to France?
40
CONSTANCE RETURNED FROM a walk to the druggist, having gone in search of a mustard plaster for Providencia Monafo’s cough, and found Norma waiting at the prisoners’ entrance. Constance thought wearily that this was the second time in a week that she’d turned up at the jail.
What, she wondered, was stirring Norma into such unexpected and uncharacteristic action? It stood to reason that Fleurette’s sudden departure (she refused to call it a disappearance) would cause Constance no end of worry—she, having borne the child for nine months and run away in secret to bring her into the world, had more than a sisterly interest in her well-being. She worried about Fleurette—she would never stop worrying about her, naturally—but her occupation demanded that she look at the matter from the perspective of a woman of the law. Through the eyes of her profession, Fleurette had done nothing wrong. Constance believed it only right to adopt that view.
Norma, on the other hand, had seized upon Fleurette’s situation and worried the life out of it, like a dog with its prey. She was often like that when she got hold of something she considered unjust or improper, but never before had she taken one of her causes so far. Constance had grown to count on Norma to be that domestic presence who sat in the parlor and disapproved of things. She did not, however, like to find Norma disapproving of things at her place of employment and wished she knew how to discourage the habit.
“I don’t know why you wait around out here,” Constance called to her from the end of the drive. “The guards would’ve let you wait inside.”
“I worry for anyone who finds the inside of a jail comfortable.”
“I worry for you, coming into Hackensack the way you do. I don’t recognize you off the farm. It’s like seeing a goat in town.”
“Goats have more business in Hackensack than you might believe.” Norma said things like that because she had to have the last word on any subject, but particularly on the subject of farm animals.
Constance looked over her sister with a feeling of discouragement. Norma had pinned on an old green felt hat of their mother’s and wrapped around her neck a red and white knitted scarf that their brother, Francis, had worn when he was a boy. Below that was a tweed riding suit bearing multiple patches, and the boots she wore to muck out the barn. It had the overall effect of a disguise rather than a suit of clothes, and Constance told her so. Norma ignored that and reached into her pocket.
“We’ve had another postcard from Fleurette, but that’s not why I’m here.”
“Let me see it.” As Norma didn’t seem to want to go inside, Constance led her to the garage, where they could be out of the wind and ensured of some sort of privacy. The mechanic had just left, and the wood stove still had a few sticks burning.
The postcard showed a hotel in Allentown with a theater next door. On the reverse she’d written:
I hadn’t any idea the Dresden Dolls were so thoroughly adored! Last night an admirer of May Ward’s took us all out for lobster bordelaise—if you can imagine it—but you can’t because we’ve never had lobster for dinner—nor have you ever tasted Roman punch, but I have—only a sip! Frau Ironsides had it taken away and ginger ale brought in its place, but in Champagne glasses so we could pretend.
F.
“She’s torturing us with that talk of Roman punch, but I’m not going to let myself be bothered by it.” Constance handed the card back to Norma.
“I’m not here over the postcard,” Norma said impatiently.
“Then what is it?”
She thrust out a rolled-up headline. It was exactly the sort of thing she liked to tie to the leg of a pigeon and send home, except that Constance wasn’t at home. Pigeons couldn’t be trained to deliver messages to the jail unless they’d been raised there, a possibility that Constance very much hoped would never occur to her.
KIDNAPPED GIRL FORCED TO WRITE LETTERS
As it was only the headline, cut out with pinking shears, Constance had no choice but to say, “Aren’t you going to show me the rest?”
Norma pulled it from her pocket. “It concerns a girl who was drugged with chloroform at a train station.” Here she paused and lifted an eyebrow in anticipation of Constance’s response.
“Yes, I heard you. You needn’t make a dramatic recitation out of this.” (Only one year earlier, Fleurette had been threatened with just such a kidnapping. It was not an incident that Constance was ever likely to forget, but Norma thought it her grim duty to remind her of it at any opportunity.)
Norma lifted the clipping to better see it through her spectacles and continued. “She was taken away to Chicago, but made to write to her parents as if she’d only run off to visit an aunt in Rochester. The kidnappers contrived to have the letters smuggled by train to Rochester to be posted.”
“Very clever, those white slavers.”
“She was gone for a year. After she escaped, she said that she’d tried to conceal secret messages in the letters, but no one in her family noticed them.”