4

July 16, 1914

 

Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp

Sicomac Road

Wyckoff, New Jersey

 

Dear Mr. Kaufman,

 

I write to supply you with an accounting of the damages inflicted upon our buggy by you and your automobile on the afternoon of July 14. The damages visited upon my sisters and I are considerable as well. Dear Fleurette is but fifteen years of age and now suffers from a badly broken foot and a dread of motor carriages which will no doubt impede her advancement into the coming engine-powered age. But I confine myself at present to the harm done to our buggy.

• 4 (four) hickory spokes @ $1 each, cracked: $4

• 1 (one) carriage lamp, smashed: $3

• 1 (one) whip socket, dislodged and lost in the commotion: $1

• 1 (one) oak panel, splintered to bits: $8

• 1 (one) complete hood assembly, bent beyond repair: $10

• Assembly and re-attachment of disparate pieces: $24

• Total (due in full promptly upon receipt, as we are at present without a buggy): $50

We appreciate your prompt payment by return post. We remain,

 

Yours in a state of caution along our town’s ever more crowded avenues,

Misses Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp

 

“I am not afraid of automobiles,” said Fleurette from the divan.

“Of course you are,” I said. “Now, be quiet and rest your foot.”

“I can rest my foot without being quiet.”

“Those figures are too high,” said Norma. “He won’t take it seriously and he’ll throw it in the trash.”

“I’m including the time for a hired man to work on it,” I said.

“I don’t recall anything about a hired man. Read it again,” said Norma.

“Don’t,” said Fleurette. “I’m tired of Mr. Kaufman.”

“Then I’ll post it.”

“I’m not fifteen, either,” said Fleurette.

I thought it should’ve been obvious to her that fifteen was a more tender age than sixteen and the violation therefore more grievous.

Fleurette grumbled and shifted in the silk peignoir she’d chosen for her convalescence. A pattern of peacock feathers ran along the collar, which she thought made her look glamorous. We’d been overindulging her since Mother’s death, and I realized I would have to put a stop to that. Her taste for luxurious fabrics alone was going to ruin us.

I rose with some difficulty to get a stamp. My shoulder had calmed considerably since the collision, but every morning brought a fresh insult: an ankle that couldn’t take my weight, a rib that cried out when I took a breath. Fleurette couldn’t get her foot into a shoe, which made her something of an invalid. It fell to Norma to look after both of us and go out for whatever supplies we needed. Without our buggy, she had the choice of taking a long walk in hot weather to the trolley in Wyckoff, or saddling Dolley and riding her in. Naturally, she chose the latter. She’d already been as far as Paterson and back twice in the last few days, balancing a basket of pigeons on Dolley’s rump and releasing them along the way.

For years Norma had been entranced with the idea of carrier pigeons and their utility in transmitting messages between people living in the countryside, or soldiers at war, or doctors wishing to monitor the progress of far-flung patients (the idea being that a doctor would leave several pigeons with his patient, to be dispatched at intervals with reports of the patient’s progress). Telegraph and telephone wires would never stretch far enough to reach everyone who needed to send a message, she reasoned, and could not be trusted for the transmission of private information anyway, because the operator was privy to every word. But a properly trained and equipped pigeon, released hundreds of miles away, would fly a direct course at great speed, through storms or enemy fire, to bring a message home.

To prove this point, Norma was in the habit of taking her pigeons as far away from home as she could and sending them back with tiny missives strapped to their legs. Having no news of any importance to relate to us so soon after leaving the house, she sent us newspaper clippings instead. Norma read half a dozen papers every day and took it as her moral obligation to have an opinion on all the doings in northern New Jersey, not to mention New York and the rest of the world. She spent the better part of every evening with her newspapers, stashing clippings in drawers all over the house for future use. It was not unusual for one of us to go looking for the sugar or a pincushion and instead find an announcement titled “Diplomat’s Wife Impaled on Fence.”

She rigged up a tripwire in the pigeon loft so that a bell would ring near our front door when a bird arrived carrying the news of the day, as selected by Norma for its dramatic nature or the instruction it might offer. Variations on “Girl Fined for Disorderly Housekeeping” arrived any time I failed to do my part of the washing up. “Large Percentage of Women Recklessly Follow Prevailing Fashions Without Knowing Why” was delivered after Norma objected to Fleurette’s silk tunic embroidered with birds of paradise, her attempt to copy the fashions of Paris. “The Morals of a Woman Are Read in Her Gowns” came the next ominous message.

Fleurette devised a way to get revenge by replacing each objectionable headline with one of her own and leaving it for Norma to find. Norma would discover “Piles Quickly Cured at Home” tied to her pigeon’s leg band, or “Imbecile Sister Reported Missing.”

Although Mother hated the birds and wouldn’t go near the pigeon loft, she had encouraged Norma’s interest in them, believing that girls should have hobbies that kept them entertained and close to home. She made no secret of the fact that she hoped raising baby birds would encourage a mothering instinct in Norma that would lead her to marriage and children. Exactly how Norma would find a husband, living out in the countryside as we did, was never explained. And Mother seemed oblivious to the fact that Norma was so opinionated, so argumentative, and so set in her ways that no man would ever dare take up with her. It didn’t help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder and had never shown the slightest interest in romantic love or child rearing. Mother had been right that pigeons made a good pastime, but Norma was in no danger of becoming engaged as a result.

At least Norma had some satisfactory means of occupying herself. I found the demands of farm life to be dull and unnecessarily difficult. When Francis married and moved into town several years ago, Norma happily took charge of the barn and its occupants. Fleurette kept up with the sewing and the washing, and the three of us took turns at cooking. I was left with the disagreeable task of weeding and watering the vegetable garden. I hated spending all that time bent over in the dirt for a basket of wormy cabbages. All I ever wished for was a good clean job in an office and a salary that would allow me to purchase a cabbage if I wanted one, which I didn’t think I would.

There was a time when I tried to find a life for myself away from the farm. First I sent away for a course to study to be a nurse, but Mother, with her dread of filth and disease, was so horrified by the idea that I had to put it aside. Then I took up a course in law, having heard that there was a woman lawyer in New Brunswick and thinking I could petition to join her firm. Believing this line of work would force me into close quarters with criminals and drunks, Mother was even less pleased. I completed my coursework nonetheless, but when the time came to send it back to New York and request the next lesson, my papers were gone. Mother would not admit to it, but I knew she took them.

Now I was starting to wonder if I would live my whole life out here. I worried that I was destined to die in the same bed my mother had died in, leaving behind nothing but a cellar full of parsnips and uneven rows of stitches along cuffs and collars that nobody even remembered me making.

 

WE WAITED A WEEK for a response to our letter. There was enough nursing to keep me occupied, and to make me wish I’d taken that medical course. Twice a day I washed and bandaged Fleurette’s foot, hardly daring to press too hard against it to feel for broken bones. She insisted that we not send for Dr. Winter, a musty old man with watery eyes and hands that shook as they reached for his patients’ unclothed limbs. I didn’t blame her for wanting to keep him away. But all I could do was clean her scrapes and scratches and require her to rest. This meant that I also had to bring her meals on a tray and answer a little bell she’d found in our sewing basket and kept on hand to ring whenever she was thirsty or tired or bored, which was most of the time.

The only place I could go to escape the sound of that bell was Mother’s old room, which stood exactly as it had on the day she died, with her robe still hanging on the closet door and her hairbrush still on the dresser, a few wiry white hairs rising from it.

For months I couldn’t go into her room at all. But lately I’d taken to slipping in when I wouldn’t be noticed, and sitting on the edge of her bed the way I did when she was sick. During the last few days of her life her eyes would often flutter open, seeing nothing, and remain locked in a gaze that never shifted. I had to put a mirror to her mouth to make sure she was still breathing. I spent hours on the edge of that bed, watching her drift close to death and rise away from it, over and over.

The bed, which had belonged to her mother, was an old-fashioned heavy antique brought over from Austria, with rosettes of carved walnut along the headboard that served no purpose other than to gather dust. As I sat gingerly on the edge, the sheets crackling with starch, I realized that no one had been in to clean in months. It was Fleurette’s job to dust, which explains why it accumulated in our house the way it did.

The walls were papered in a pale green and white pattern of chrysanthemums that had faded terribly and started to lift away, revealing cracked plaster and horsehair. Something would have to be done about this room. Even Mother—with her dread of change and her attachment to tradition and the heavy dark rituals of grief—would surely not object to me dismantling this shrine to her final years and making something useful of it. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it yet. For years I just wanted to be free of her, and now I found myself clinging to the only traces of her that remained.

Fleurette always addressed Mother in French, but I knew that Mother preferred the German of her girlhood in Austria. I would never hear the language spoken in this house again if I didn’t continue to whisper it to her.

“Mama, wär es nicht endlich Zeit, dass wir was mit Deinem Zimmer machen?”

I received no answer. Perhaps Mother didn’t care what happened to her room. I took a deep breath. Her violet-scented powder still hung in the air. From somewhere downstairs a door slammed, and Fleurette, having given up on her bell, hollered my name.

It had always been Mother’s responsibility to answer to Fleurette’s demands. “Geh amal nachschaun, was sie will?” I asked her.

But Mother didn’t volunteer to go. I rose and closed the door quietly behind me.