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.
“How did she do it?” Minnie wanted to know. “Was it a church that offered to take her?”
The girl in possession of this story, who everyone called Red although it was not her name, shook her head. “It was a lady policeman just like the one who brought you. She knew a group doing good work out West and arranged to have a few girls sent there. But they all ran away, and that put an end to it.”
Minnie couldn’t imagine Deputy Kopp sending her out West to be a missionary, but there was a nugget of an idea in there. In the days that followed, as Minnie scoured pots and ran bed-linens through the wringer and waited in line for her soup, she worked over the possibility, rubbing it down and polishing it smooth, like a stone between her fingers.