Free Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart Page B

it.”
    â€œWhy would he care about a factory girl and her baby?”
    â€œIt’s his child.”
    Norma ran her fingers through her wet hair. “Mr. Kaufman’s morals sink lower with every passing day. By Wednesday, he’ll be a murderer.”
    â€œLucy thinks he’s kidnapped the boy, so I suppose—”
    â€œDo you not agree with me,” Norma said, stretching out on my coverlet and putting her (blessedly clean) feet against my pillow, “that a man who carries on with factory girls and then kidnaps their children is the sort of man with whom the Kopp sisters would rather not become better acquainted?”
    â€œI do,” I said, “but don’t you think it’s terrible what happened to that girl?”
    Norma propped herself up on an elbow to get a better look at me. “I do think it’s terrible what happens to girls who get themselves into trouble. But we’ve had enough trouble already.”
    â€œI just feel that someone should try to help her.”
    â€œThat feeling will pass.” She rolled off my bed and stood over me, her arms crossed. “Francis and Bessie are having us over for a roast. I told her you’d do the peas.”
    â€œNobody likes my peas,” I said.
    â€œBut we like having you
do
them,” she said. “Now, go to sleep and don’t think about that girl anymore and I won’t either.” This seemed to be a satisfactory conclusion to her, so she slipped out and closed the door gently, leaving me alone in the dark, willing myself not to think about Lucy Blake.

10
    IN BROOKLYN our only excursions out of the house, apart from school, were to dancing lessons at the Rivers’ Academy, where our uncle Charles worked as an accompanist. Because he was willing to keep an eye on us, Norma, Francis, and I were made to spend most of our afternoons there, enduring minuets and fancy dress tableaux, lumbering through polkas and tarantellas, memorizing marches, and sitting in the corner folding crepe flowers for headdresses while the younger children had their turn in front of the mirrors.
    Francis also took lessons on the zither from our uncle. On recital days he would stand, shaking, on the stage, and pick out a solo while Norma and I danced a wooden duet next to him. Being the tallest girl in the class, I was once dressed as Uncle Sam and placed in the center of the stage while forty-five girls, each portraying a different state, danced around me. Norma refused to choose a state. Wyoming was forced upon her. She wore a linen dress the color of sand and spread her arms wide to convey the vastness and futility of a place she could not imagine and did not wish to.
    It was after one of those dancing lessons that I met the Singer man for the first time. In those days we lived on the top floor of a building with a rear entrance for delivery men and a front entrance for everyone else. Salesmen used to ring the bell in spite of the signs telling them not to. They sold silver polish and washing powder, pencils and notions, books by subscription and even fruit tree saplings. I used to watch the man with the bundle of twigs over his shoulder going up and down our street, finding no takers for his black cherries and Cox’s apples. Only the most unlucky fruit tree peddler would be assigned Brooklyn as a territory. But a sewing machine salesman had an easier time of it.
    The salesmen would ring the bell until someone let them in. Eventually their footsteps would approach our door, and then the knock would come, and my mother’s hands would descend upon the heads of her daughters, a signal to remain quiet and perfectly still until the threat had passed.
    Salesmen were dirty, she told us. They sold inferior goods that no store would offer. They preyed on lonely shut-ins and the feeble-minded. They only wanted in so they could come back and burgle our home while we were away. And they carried fleas.
    I knew that couldn’t