fleurette liked to make her announcements at breakfast, when she was sure I’d be in a rush to leave for work. Norma, by that time, had already been up and outdoors for an hour or two. She came inside for coffee but couldn’t be bothered to linger at the table, which was just as well, as she’d been mucking out the chicken coop and was still shedding bits of rotten straw.
“I took to heart your advice,” Fleurette began, directing those gratifying words to me in her warmest tones, “about finding some way to help with the war effort.”
I was very much involved with digging the last of Bessie’s lemon preserves out of a jar at that moment, so Norma answered for me.
“It’s about time you put your mind to something.”
A remark like this would’ve usually set Norma and Fleurette to bickering until the dishes were cleared, but she’d obviously rehearsed her lines ahead of time and was determined to deliver them according to her design, because she said, “Yes, well, as you’ve both been saying, there’s so much to be done, and we must all put our talents to use.”
“That’s a fine idea,” said Norma. “I see no reason why you couldn’t be turning out uniforms by the dozen.”
This threw Fleurette off-track momentarily—when had anyone ever said anything about making uniforms?—but she pushed on. “Freeman Bernstein is organizing a troupe of entertainers to perform at the Plattsburg camps. He’d like me and Helen to put together a group of girls from Mrs. Hansen’s Academy.”
Now she had my attention. “What kind of performance? Do you mean to say that he’s putting together another vaudeville act?”
“Well, he—”
“I don’t think any good can come of an association with Mr. Bernstein,” Norma said.
Norma’s dislike of May Ward’s husband and manager was well-established in our household, but not particularly well-founded. When Fleurette left unexpectedly to tour with May Ward in the spring (I preferred the term “left unexpectedly” to “ran away”), Norma was certain that Fleurette had been somehow misled or subjected to mistreatment. In fact, Fleurette had been hired on as the company seamstress, but didn’t like to admit it. She preferred for us to think that she enjoyed a successful turn on the stage.
Norma and I went along with that little fiction. It was one of many such falsehoods that allowed the three of us to live together in whatever harmony we could manage.
“You needn’t worry about Mr. Bernstein,” Fleurette countered, still calm, still logical, quite clearly sticking to the lines she’d rehearsed. “He’s doing good work for the troops. We are to put on a show of wholesome patriotic music. That’s all there is to it.”
“I don’t think we can call them troops quite yet,” I put in gently.
“Of course we can,” Fleurette said. “They’re training for Army duty.”
It was a mistake to bring up the Army in Norma’s presence, as she believed herself to be an expert in all wartime matters. I settled in for the lecture I had no means of preventing.
“The Army has no official orders to prepare for war, and that’s just the problem,” Norma said, as I expected she would. “They’ve been dragged into these volunteer camps because it looks bad if they don’t at least show up and offer something in the way of a training exercise. But these are hardly troops preparing for war. The Plattsburg camp is nothing but an excuse for salaried men who are weary of their offices to escape to the countryside for a few weeks. They’re having the time of their lives up there, camping and fishing and shooting off rifles.”
“Mr. Bernstein says they’re serving the nation, and that we are to lift up their spirits, and to remind them why they fight.” Fleurette finished weakly, having failed to prepare herself for a debate on the merits of the volunteer camps.
“There’s nothing wrong with their spirits,” Norma said. “These are Harvard and Yale men who pay a handsome fee for the pleasure of traipsing around a lake in a khaki uniform. It’ll be another matter entirely when our boys go into service.”
Fleurette’s ploy had succeeded in one way: I was eager to get off to work and wanted the matter settled. “I see no reason why you shouldn’t go with the rest of the girls, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said as I pushed myself away from the table.
But of course that wasn’t what she was asking. She intended to go whether we wanted her to or not. She reached out to catch my sleeve as I took my dishes to the sink.
“I thought you might like to come along,” she said to me, in as sincere and inviting a tone as she could muster. Her hair was pinned into two low coils, one behind each ear, according to a new style she’d seen in a magazine. She looked like a grown woman now, not a little girl who could beg for favors.
“You’re nineteen. You don’t need me to chaperone you,” I said lightly. I did very much like the idea of keeping an eye on her, but I couldn’t possibly leave work.
“Oh . . . well . . . of course I don’t need a chaperone, but the other girls do. You know how it is at Mrs. Hansen’s. The parents are very strict.” She buttered a corner of toast and dipped it into the sugar bowl.
I didn’t say a word, because I knew Norma would declare what a waste of time the whole enterprise would be. To my utter astonishment, she stood up abruptly and said, “That’s a fine idea. We’ll all go.”
Fleurette obviously hadn’t prepared for that. “You will?”
“Of course,” Norma said. “I’d like to have a look at one of these camps.”
“You would?” I said.
“Yes. The Army’s sending someone to run the place, and it’s about time I spoke to them.”
“Spoke to . . . the Army?” Fleurette looked up helplessly, having been snared in her own trap.
“Yes, the Army! Our pigeon transport cart is nearly finished. Carolyn and I have been working on it all week. We should have something to show the generals any day now.”
I shot a warning glance at Fleurette to keep her quiet, but I didn’t have to: she and I both knew perfectly well that it was pointless to argue over something that wouldn’t happen anyway. Norma hadn’t managed to get her pigeon messaging station built behind the drugstore, so why should this ridiculous cart be any different? It was just another project to occupy her time.
Fleurette must’ve agreed with me, because she smiled to herself and dipped into the sugar bowl again without a word.
“Plattsburg is the perfect place to take it,” Norma said. “We can put on a demonstration for the Army men.”
“No!” Fleurette shrieked. “Don’t you dare.”
“You haven’t even seen it yet,” Norma said.
“I’ve been trying not to,” Fleurette said.
“I don’t believe it exists,” I said. I’d heard her hammering away at something, but as Norma liked to pound on things as a general matter, I hadn’t thought anything of it and never bothered to go see what she was up to.
But now we had no choice but to follow Norma out the kitchen door to have a look. There wasn’t enough room in our barn to build the cart, as it was already occupied by our buggy and harness mare, along with a flock of chickens and the more sheltered portion of the pigeon loft. For that reason, Norma and Carolyn had been obliged to build it behind the barn and to keep it covered with an enormous canvas tarp to protect it from the elements while construction was under way (and, I suspected, because Norma believed herself to be building wartime equipment that had to be concealed from German spies).
I hadn’t so much as glanced at the barn lately, much less walked around behind it to see what Norma was up to. I had noticed the accumulation of little pasteboard and wooden models of the cart, as cunning as children’s toys, lined up along our mantle, but I wasn’t prepared to have revealed before me a full-sized working vehicle. Norma pulled off the canvas with a theatrical flourish, and I must admit that I gasped.
“It’s finished! It’s fully built.” I walked around it in amazement.
“Of course it’s built,” Norma said. “What do you think I do around here all day?”
“It’s . . . well, it’s so beautifully put together.” I had no idea that my sister knew how to do anything in the way of finish carpentry. Of course, she did the rough work around the farm all the time: replacing fence posts, shingling the roof, shoring up a sagging porch step, and so on. But this went well beyond any of that.
Norma had built a fully functioning wheeled cart, longer than it was wide, with a coachman’s seat up front and a rather luxurious pigeon loft behind. From the rear, a pair of wooden doors swung open to reveal two rows of nesting boxes, three sets of perches for the birds to roost, and a miniature ladder that led to a wire cage on top. Inside, on the floor, was a sliding wood panel that, when opened, revealed its purpose: the bottom of the cart was made of sturdy wire mesh so that the interior could be more easily cleaned and drained.
Every bit of it was perfectly done. The doors aligned just so, the hinges and locks moved silently, and there was not a bit of light between any board. I’d ridden in any number of buggies more cheaply made than Norma’s pigeon cart.
“If I’d known you could do a thing like this,” I said, “I would’ve had you repair our buggy when it was smashed a couple of years ago. Think of all the trouble it would’ve saved us.”
“I didn’t know how to do any of it until our buggy was smashed,” Norma said, a bit impatiently. “Didn’t you notice that I worked alongside the man from the dairy every day and helped him to do the job?”
I had to admit that I hadn’t. I was guilty of not paying a great deal of attention to what Norma did, as I found so many of her activities and interests to be perplexing or even distasteful.
“Well then, you aren’t very observant, for a lady detective,” Norma said. “But now you can see for yourself how the cart is meant to work and how it will be of such use to the Army. We’ll take it to the Plattsburg camp, along with a few pigeons, just to show them how it runs. They’ll probably want to keep this one, but I won’t let them. I’m drawing up the plans, and they can put a dozen of them together themselves if they like. It will give them something to do besides marching the Harvard men up and down in straight lines.”
“Have you taken it out on the road yet?” Fleurette asked.
“We’ve only just finished it,” Norma said. “Carolyn was supposed to come for lunch, and we were going to have our first trial with her horse. Dolley needs to be reshod so I don’t like to make her do it.”
We walked around the cart a bit more, climbed aboard, and even helped Norma to bring a few pigeons over. She showed us, a little boastfully, the cleverest bits of her design. The wire cage atop the cart detached from the rest of it and could be used to ferry pigeons back and forth from their home loft. There was even a ladder clipped to the side of the cart to make it easier to take the cage on and off.
By the time we finished loading three dozen pigeons into the cart, Carolyn turned up in her automobile.
“I thought you were to bring your horse,” Norma said crossly, by way of a greeting. I never understood how Norma had managed to make a friend, but Carolyn seemed impervious to her most abrasive qualities.
“If you had a telephone I wouldn’t have to come all the way out every time there’s a change in plans,” Carolyn returned, far more cheerfully.
“There won’t ever be telephone wires in the countryside, and I’m glad of it,” Norma said.
“Why don’t you two exchange pigeons,” Fleurette said, “and then you can send notes back and forth when you need to tell each other something?”
“We do, of course, but I sent the last one yesterday,” Carolyn said, “so I’m out of stock.”
Norma and Carolyn turned their attention to the cart, and I followed Fleurette inside.
“You have to convince her to leave her cart behind,” Fleurette said. “We can’t show up at the Plattsburg camp with that thing.”
“They’d never forget you,” I said.
She could still pout and toss her hair around, even at the age of nineteen. “It’s not the sort of thing I wish to be remembered for.”