Carrie picked up a magazine and Constance stared out the window. At least she could return to work secure in the knowledge that Fleurette was safe. She was so relieved that she was entirely willing to forgive her for lying over what, exactly, her role was in May Ward’s troupe. She wasn’t even bothered about the money Fleurette had taken from her bureau. If anything, Constance wanted her to have funds of her own while she was away from home.
Norma, on the other hand, worried her more than ever. Constance had no reason to doubt that her concern for Fleurette was genuine. Her mistrust of Mr. Bernstein was the sort of thing that, Norma being Norma, she really couldn’t help. But late the previous night, after she’d given Norma and Carrie the news that Fleurette had been found, and they’d finally gone to sleep, the most discouraging idea came over her. Was Norma overreacting, or was she simply so bored that she cooked this up to give herself something new to do?
Until last year, Norma had always been the busiest of the three of them. She looked after the barn and the animals, she climbed up on ladders to attach window sashes and pound on roof shingles, and she chased after Constance and Fleurette if they didn’t do anything about spring cleaning or summer canning. She was in charge of the household and, truth be told, took on much more than her fair share.
Constance didn’t know how she had any time at all left for her pigeon hobby (hobby being a word that Norma loathed and would never allow to be employed in reference to her pigeons), but somehow she managed to keep herself occupied on a full-time basis with those birds as well. It didn’t seem like much of a life, but Constance wasn’t the one who had to live it.
She had long ago figured out that Norma kept pigeons because she had to have command of something. She’d always been like that, even as a small child. She used to follow Francis, Mother, and Constance around, telling them to do all the things they were already doing. “Scrub the lamps,” she would say as Constance went through their rooms and took the glass globes off to wash the smoke out of them. “Put the rags out the window,” she’d tell Mother, as she was already waving them around to shake off the dust. She always said those things with a grisly determination unbecoming of a five-year-old, as if it were her dreaded duty to inform her family as to their tasks.
For that reason it was a relief when she took up pigeons, and they became the recipients of her endless orders and drills. Better a flock of birds than the other members of her family, everyone reasoned.
But things had changed lately. Constance was away from the house almost every day and most nights. When she was home, she couldn’t be counted upon to do much of anything in the way of chores. Fleurette couldn’t either, as she’d been spending all of her time at the theater. Constance hadn’t considered it before, but Norma now ran the household by herself and passed most of her waking hours alone, with only the burbling of those birds for company.
With her pigeon society diminished, she and Mrs. Borus had taken up with this group that was arranging long-distance pigeon races, but that wasn’t much to occupy her time in the winter. Her world was getting smaller. Constance wondered if she even understood how small it was. She seemed to be allowing the most petty worries and complaints to overtake her. Increasingly, she latched on to illogical and far-fetched threats and waged useless battles for the purpose of proving some obscure point. It seemed absurd, as Constance thought about it, that she’d managed to bring about this ill-advised trip to Harrisburg to spy on Fleurette.
Constance sat across from her on the train and watched her work her way through a stack of newspapers and magazines, noisily and boisterously. She snorted at the paper, quarreled with it under her breath, wrote notes in the margins, crossed out the things she disagreed with, and even smacked it once or twice.
This is the woman I’m tethered to for the rest of my life, Constance thought as she watched her. She wished all the more that Fleurette would come home, even as she contemplated yet another reason why she might not want to.
51
MINNIE DAVIS HAD NOT BEEN IDLE. The reformatory’s program of kitchen work, floor-scrubbing, and laundry kept her hands busy (Miss Pittman did not approve of idleness, gossip, or novel-reading, so their days were filled with chores), but her waking thoughts were consumed with the far more pressing matter of her own liberty. The prospect of enduring five years in confinement was unbearable. Hadn’t she left Catskill to shake off the strictures of home life and factory work? At least in those days, she could wander down to the boardwalk; at least she could dance and flirt and play games. But to be deprived of any small pleasure or privilege in life was intolerable. And who would she be, at twenty-one, released from the reformatory and kept under the supervision of the courts?
She’d be a failed woman. A criminal, a ward of the state. She’d be someone who didn’t matter at all, to anyone.
At first, she thought only of escape. The reformatory’s buildings were clustered together in the center of an open expanse of lawn, fringed in woodlands. According to Esther, the forbidding metal gate at the front didn’t extend all the way around. She’d find nothing but split-log farmers’ fences if she ran out the back way.
“But you won’t like your chances against the farmers,” Esther whispered. They were on their knees together, scrubbing the dormitory floor. “The reformatory pays a reward if they catch a girl trying to escape. And they all keep dogs. You can hear them in the woods.”
Esther was right. Minnie heard them howling in the middle of the night, most likely over a possum. What would they do if they caught a whiff of a girl on the run?
The punishment was worse for runaways, if Esther was to be believed. “They send you to the state prison,” she told Minnie, “and you don’t get out when you’re twenty-one. You’d be in a real jail, for as long as they want to put you there.”
Still, Minnie was tortured by an urge to run. She was always looking for an escape route, watching the staff’s routine, staring off into the brittle winter woods in hopes of divining some way through. She hadn’t a dime of her own, but already she’d started squirreling away anything that might be of use to her if she saw a chance to flee: a dull but possibly useful butter knife, a tin of potted meat, a bar of soap.
She was storing up something else, too: any account she heard of a girl who’d been set free. Such stories circulated like underground currency. They had to be traded for something else of value. Minnie would recount a wild night in the city with Tony (which never happened), or tell about the vindictive wife she’d met in the Hackensack jail who’d put her husband’s eye out with a fire poker because of the way he kept looking at her sister (entirely invented, but effective), and in exchange, she’d hear tell of a girl who fooled a judge, bribed a neighbor to pose as her aunt, or volunteered for missionary work, only to escape on her very first night away from the reformatory.
The missionary work interested Minnie the most, as she felt herself incapable of fooling a judge and hadn’t any money with which to pay a bribe.