winter was always the costliest time of the year for us: trees crashed down in storms and crushed fences, shingles blew off roofs (both house and barn), and the gravel road running past our property heaved and calved during the cycle of freezes and thaws, with each neighbor having to contribute toward its repair. We were burning firewood, heating oil, and coal at an alarming clip.
Fleurette, it must be credited, took seriously the responsibility to bring in wages to carry us through. Had it been spring or summer, she might’ve been tempted to fritter away her earnings on little luxuries and amusements, but as we were trapped within the frozen confines of winter, there seemed to be no choice but to soldier through the short, gray days. She tacked up signs around Paterson and Hackensack advertising her willingness to make alterations and tailor to suit, and carried on a reasonable trade that way. The movie studios down in Fort Lee kept working through the winter, and she took on as much of their costuming as she could.
It meant a great deal of going back and forth by train in snow and slush. She and Norma finally ended their dispute over meeting the train at Ridgewood: Norma took her to the station faithfully, never complaining about it, and Fleurette returned home on schedule, to be met by a once-again uncomplaining Norma. When Fleurette did miss the train—it was inevitable, people do miss trains—Norma waited stoically for the next one. There was nothing else to be done, so they pushed ahead with gloomy fortitude.
By February I’d found a bit of work for myself in helping Fleurette, who was by then running quite a little business with all her tailoring and costume work. I set up a ledger-book, with a system of accounts and orders, and a weekly tally of income and expenses, to ensure that she spent just as much as she needed on materials and still had enough for the household coffers.
One day, Fleurette came home with a copy of a New York paper she’d picked up in Fort Lee. There was a long story about a policewoman in Los Angeles who traveled the country lecturing on the subject of women in the law.
“Look at this.” Fleurette pointed with a dramatic flourish to a caption below a photograph of the woman. “It says here that she doesn’t carry a gun or a club, and hasn’t the power to arrest anyone. She says she wouldn’t want to do a policeman’s job, and why should she, when there are men enough to do it?”
I squinted down at it and grimaced, having nothing polite to say, but not wanting to cause offense, as Fleurette obviously had an argument to make and was eager to do so.
“All I’m saying,” Fleurette persisted, unwisely, “is that maybe it was too soon. Maybe Hackensack wasn’t ready for a lady deputy yet. You might’ve been twenty years too early to do a man’s job.”
Twenty years! In twenty years, I’d be sixty. That was a cold consolation. I put myself to bed a little earlier that night.
Norma, all the while, had been busy with her war-work. The new pigeon cart was complete. With help from Carolyn Borus, she’d created a flawless set of diagrams meant to show any Army man how to build the cart. The drawings were dead accurate and cunningly put together to demonstrate each step with no captions required at all, only sets of arrows and numbers to indicate how the various components fit together. Norma and Carolyn had studied every military manual and engineering journal they could get their hands on to understand what was expected by way of a diagram, and followed them faithfully.
Then they copied out the plans, over and over, and mailed them off with lengthy letters putting forth their scheme, to every Army man whose name appeared in the papers in connection to the war effort. It was Norma’s idea that they could wheel their cart to a Plattsburg camp in the spring, and on the basis of that success the plans would be distributed to all the camps, and then taken overseas as soon as President Wilson gave the order. Everyone thought we’d be in the war by summer. The United States couldn’t wait much longer.
No replies ever came to those letters. I knew better than to think that any would, but it pained me, nonetheless. Norma was experiencing her own defeat in another sort of election, one carried out one man at a time, but with results just as definitive. What would Norma do, when she ran out of letters to write, and it became clear that the Army had no interest in sending pigeons to war? The war would proceed without her and her birds, of course. But what would she do next? What would any of us do?
An announcement came from Norma, who heard it in Hackensack one day, that Mr. Heath had accepted a place as an accounts-clerk in some manufacturing enterprise—exactly the sort of thing he didn’t want to do—and it occurred to me that the baby would be born soon. Fleurette thought we should send a gift and embroidered a little gown, but beyond the short note we enclosed with the package, I never once tried to correspond with him. I suspected that we both felt that we’d put our years in law enforcement behind us, and that we’d not only been kicked out of the jail, but out of our old lives, and our old selves. I understood why I hadn’t heard from him. He probably understood why he hadn’t heard from me.
I took walks around the outer boundaries of our property on fine days, something I hadn’t bothered to do in years. Norma kept up the fences and handled the leasing of grazing land to the dairy, so there was no need for me to survey the fifty or so acres that remained of our land. But I found that I liked to walk it, always alone, crunching over the brittle and frozen stubble of our meadows and taking a turn through the scraggly woods at the far end of our holdings. I appreciated the silence, and the silver landscape against a gray sky, and the bare tree branches from which a solitary bird might alight when it heard me coming.
It was on one of those walks that I saw Anna Kayser.
At first I believed her to be an apparition. The snow had draped itself over our farm, obliterating every scrap of meadow grass and hedgerow bramble with its blessed whiteness. The sky was white, too, and when Anna Kayser appeared, she wore a long white coat with her head wrapped in a knitted white scarf. From a distance I could make out only two chips of color for her eyes. She didn’t seem to walk toward me so much as float.
I stood and waited for her. She had followed what we called the back lane, an old farm road that traversed our land. When we were almost nose to nose, I said, “Did you come all this way on your own?”
I suspect she took my question to mean something else, because she said, “No. I had some help.”
“You’re free,” I said, “and you look . . . wonderful.” She did. Her eyes were bright and her tendency to frown had reversed itself, so the corners of her mouth lifted up even when she didn’t mean to smile. Her hair had gone completely white, but it suited her. Strands of it poked out from under her scarf and shone like spun sugar. Even under the weight of her winter coat, she seemed buoyant.
“You can’t know what it’s like to have your liberty taken away, and then to have it restored,” she said.
“I believe I can,” I said. “When I was made a deputy, it was just like that. My liberty had been restored. Or . . . granted, I suppose, for the first time.”
“And now?”
I shrugged. “Look at me.”
“You look the same.”
I don’t know what compelled me to speak to her so forthrightly. The strangeness of coming across her in the snow, so like a dream, made it seem entirely natural for me to say, “I’m back where I was. Three years ago, I was a spinster living on a farm with her two sisters and no prospects. I’m that woman again, only now I’m forty.”
Anna laughed at that. “Forty! What I wouldn’t give to go back to forty and live it again! But I’m free now, and that’s enough. I have my little house and my daughter. The older ones come to visit and soon one of them will be bringing a grandchild. I do as I please. No one ever asks why I’m taking so long in the bath. Charlotte and I can eat nothing but hothouse cucumbers for dinner and no one complains.”
“That’s a fine life,” I said. I meant it. I envied her such contentment.
“You gave me that life,” she said. “But—what are you doing with yours? I read the papers every day and don’t see a word about what New Jersey’s lady deputy is getting up to next.”
All that dazzling whiteness turned to gray around me. “If they print something about it, please tell me. I’d like to know, too.”
Anna slipped one gloved hand into mine. Her touch recalled the day, not too long ago, when I’d put her wrists in handcuffs.
“You’re free, too,” she said. “That’s what I came to tell you, because I suspect you don’t know it. You’re as free as I am.”
“But—”
“That new sheriff didn’t want you at his jail, did he? But he doesn’t decide what you do next. He has nothing to do with the rest of your life. If he did—what a mess you’d have on your hands!”
I had to laugh at that. Imagine: John Courter in charge of my life! He’d ruin everything.
“Don’t sit around and suffer on his account,” she said. “He won’t appreciate it. He won’t even know you’re doing it. You might as well go off and find something grand to do next.”
I felt lighter, all at once, but still I said, “I haven’t any idea what that might be.”
“You will, once you start to look,” she said, and turned to go.
I should’ve invited her back to the house, or offered her a buggy ride to the train station, but as the whole meeting had seemed a mirage, I just watched her drift away, disappearing into the snowy landscape, treading in the same footprints she’d laid down before.