The very next week! Fleurette suddenly considered her age—a few months past her eighteenth birthday—to be a sort of golden ticket that would win her admittance to a realm that she’d only ever inhabited in her feverish imagination: one centered around the theater, carpeted hotel rooms, high-ceilinged restaurants, rumbling black automobiles, and fancy shops, all so far away from the New Jersey countryside that the lowing of the dairy cows and the stench of the chicken coop would never again find her.
If permission had been required, Fleurette would’ve had no alternative but to forge a signature and hope for the best, a scheme already underway for more than half of her class-mates. It had taken a good deal of wheedling and pleading to simply persuade her (staid, antediluvian) sisters to allow her to attend Mrs. Hansen’s Academy in the first place, and another delicate negotiation, a few months later, to win the freedom to take employment as the school seamstress, thus allowing her to earn her own tuition and buy the odd bit of ribbon and silk. That much her sisters could tolerate. But leaving home to join a vaudeville troupe was, as Norma would have said, not at all on the Kopp family program.
It was fortunate, then, that Fleurette didn’t need their permission. She required only their money, and this was much simpler to come by, as Constance was the one who earned it, and was favorably disposed toward slipping it to her if she presented her case properly. There was a small fee to enter the audition, and, once that was secured, something extra for the expense of costumes and stage decorations. She knew better than to ask for all of it at once. Today her ambition was fixed, modestly and singularly, on the price of admission.
Thus the hand-bill posted to the door, and the pretty blue dress, and the apple jumbles timed to come out of the oven as soon as Constance walked in. Her plan went off perfectly: she was in the kitchen letting fly a dusting of cinnamon sugar across the top just as the front door opened and her sister called hello.
Constance was still standing in the doorway, reading the notice, when Fleurette skittered across the room and helped her off with her coat.
“Can’t you just see me as a Dresden Doll?” She put an arm around Constance’s waist as she said it, and looked up at her with an expression that she hoped Constance found beguiling.
“I generally try not to,” Constance said quite truthfully, “and I’ve never heard of a Broadway actress coming all the way to Paterson to hold auditions. Has New York run out of singers and dancers?”
Norma—who had until that moment been ignoring Fleurette’s preparations for Constance’s arrival by pretending to be fixed on the household ledger-book (which she had recently seized control of, after Constance neglected it too long)—came up behind them and supplied the answer before Fleurette could.
“It’s not a legitimate audition. It’s a con, and Fleurette would’ve been lured right in. May Ward proposes to charge these girls five dollars apiece for the privilege of standing on the stage and singing a song in her presence. In return, none of them are chosen and all they take home is an autographed picture that can’t cost more than fifty cents to print. The public is invited, just as the bill says, as long as they buy tickets, which the bill fails to mention. It’s a way to make money in the theater without actually going up on stage and doing anything. Close that door before the fire goes out.”
There was a rather frigid northeastern wind blowing into the foyer, bringing with it a few spiny burrs from the sweet gum tree that overhung the barn. Constance shut the door against the onslaught and unpinned her hat. Fleurette tried to take it from her. “Let me do something with this old thing,” she said. “I could at least have it blocked and put on a new ribbon.”
“Don’t.” Constance liked her hat exactly the way it was and always resisted Fleurette’s efforts to improve it. She hung it on the very top of the hat-rack, where Fleurette couldn’t reach it. “I’ve never heard of having to pay a fee to audition. Does Mrs. Hansen know about this?”
“Of course she does,” Fleurette said. “May Ward’s husband came to class himself to invite us. He’s her manager.”
“I should’ve known there was a Mr. Ward behind this,” Norma said.
“His name is Freeman Bernstein,” Fleurette said, sounding terribly modern. “He and Mrs. Ward live right here in Bergen County, down in Leonia near the moving picture studios.”
“Freeman Bernstein.” Norma said the name as if she was auditioning it. “He sounds like one of those Broadway theater hucksters. When he’s not running this scheme for his wife, he’s probably down at the Grand Central Station selling tickets to Central Park to the out-of-towners. Mrs. Hansen ought not to have let him through the door. I’ll write her a note and tell her so.”
“She doesn’t read your notes,” Fleurette said.
Constance, already weary of this talk, sank onto the creaking old divan, whose stuffing had long ago surrendered to her form. Norma took up her spot in a leather armchair to which the years had similarly not been kind. Fleurette rushed into the kitchen and returned with the apple jumbles and a pot of tea that she’d been keeping warm on the stove.
Constance was being worked over, and she knew it. The truth—the hushed-up, never-mentioned truth—was that in Fleurette she had not a pretty and spoiled younger sister, but a pretty and spoiled daughter, the result of a long-ago liaison with a salesman. By unanimous family concurrence, Fleurette would never be told. As far as anyone knew, she hadn’t ever suspected. The three of them lived together easily enough as sisters despite the difference in their ages. As often happened in such families, Constance and Norma had settled—sometimes awkwardly—into the roles of older sisters rather than mother and aunt, and had grown practiced at playing them.
“Did you arrest anyone today?” Fleurette asked kindly, while she poured the tea.
“No, but I tried to set a girl free,” Constance said. “All she wanted was to go to work, but her mother filed a charge of waywardness and the police took her to jail. Can you imagine that?”
Fleurette shook her head. She wore her hair in dark, loose curls that floated around when she moved. “Do you suppose that if our mother were alive, she would report me to the police for going to work?”
Constance reached over to smooth a lock of hair away from Fleurette’s forehead and said, “I doubt it, but only because she was terrified of the police. But she would’ve found some other way to put a stop to it. She always did.”
“Now you’re the police, and you’re the one to tell mothers that their daughters have a right to go to work,” Fleurette said happily. She thought it extraordinarily supportive of her cause to have such a statement spoken aloud and agreed to before the audition.