“They put them on the fuse line,” he said. “It’s textile work, really. No different from the mills.”
They stopped first at Edna Heustis’s boarding-house, which was neat and freshly painted and bore a hand-lettered sign advertising no vacancies. The landlady who answered their ring was exactly the sort of character Constance expected: a stout, gray-haired woman who wore a striped house dress and answered the door with a rag duster in hand.
“Which one are you after?” she asked wearily, when she saw their uniforms.
Constance started to explain their business, but the landlady interrupted. “Edna Heustis does fine. She pays her rent on time and she don’t cause no trouble. I keep a curfew and I turn a girl out if she comes in late even once. I won’t have it. But Edna never goes out in the evenings. I keep an electrical lamp in the sitting room and she’s down here almost every night with some old book. Go and find a bank robber to arrest, that’s what I told the policeman. There’s no trouble with my girls.”
It seemed to Constance as though she’d delivered that lecture before. “Thank you, Mrs.?—”
“Or you can come inside and help with the dusting, if you intend to be here all day. It’s Turnbull.”
“We don’t intend to be here all day, Mrs. Turnbull,” Constance said quickly. “If I may just take a peek into her room, I’ll file my report and we’ll have Miss Heustis back to you right away.”
She sighed and waved her duster at Deputy Morris. “He stays outside. No gentlemen. Rules of the house.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Deputy Morris said, and sank down on a wooden bench on the porch with evident relief. It was colder in Pompton Lakes than it had been back in Hackensack, but he seemed to prefer the weather to another scolding from Mrs. Turnbull.
She handed Constance a passkey and sent her up the carpeted stairs to Edna’s room, which was one of four on the second floor. Constance inspected everything closely, but saw only the trappings of an ordinary, well-run boarding-house: a handwritten bathing schedule posted on the bathroom door (Edna had Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights), a coat-rack with an oval mirror, and a mop hanging out of an open window at the end of the hall to dry.
Edna occupied a tiny room under the eaves. Constance found it to be neatly kept and entirely unremarkable. She felt under the girl’s pillow, reached into the pockets of the dress hanging on a peg, and paged through the books on the shelf. Seeing nothing of a suspicious nature, she went downstairs and thanked Mrs. Turnbull.
“I’ll hold the room until the end of the week,” the landlady said.
“Please do.”
Deputy Morris’s chin had dropped into his collar. Constance closed the door a bit too loudly and he jumped.
“This arrest was nonsense. We’ll stop at the factory, and then Edna Heustis is going home,” Constance said.
“And I can go home,” Morris said. “Sheriff’s had me on guard duty three nights in a row. We have a weeper on the third floor. Kept all of us awake.”
“He’ll settle down.” It was well known to all the deputies that only the men sobbed loudly enough to be heard all over the jail. Women inmates tended to be practiced in the art of crying themselves silently to sleep. But a man on his first night behind bars, overcome by shame and remorse, was guaranteed to keep everyone awake.
They arrived at the powder works plant in the middle of the afternoon shift. The factory itself was surrounded by several long brick buildings, each one newer and larger than the last. One was under construction at that very moment, and men were running back and forth with wheelbarrows full of cement and lumber. Smoke stacks discharged black billows into the sky. From every building came the rattle and clank of machinery. There were hundreds of workers in their broadcloth uniforms, running push-carts along tracks from one building to the next. It was like a miniature city, entirely devoted to the manufacture of ammunition for the war.
Constance found Mrs. Schaefer, the girls’ superintendent, in a low-slung office building on the other side of the dining hall. She was a tall, wiry woman of about fifty, with a beaky nose and a thin mouth that was naturally inclined to turn down. She nodded briskly when she saw Constance and seemed to guess at the purpose of her visit. “Edna Heustis? She’s a good worker, but we can’t have our girls getting hauled away by the police.”
“I wasn’t sure if you knew,” Constance said. “She asked the officer to be allowed to send a note, but there wasn’t time.”
“Oh, I knew. The girls in the fuse room were gossiping about it all day. What’s she done?”
“Nothing, as far as I can tell. I believe it to have been a simple misunderstanding with her mother. The police never should have been involved. I intend to speak to the judge myself. Please just hold a place for her. She seems to me to be of good character and a hard worker.”
“She is,” Mrs. Schaefer said, “but the machines don’t run themselves and her place is sitting empty.”
“She’ll be back,” Constance promised, and very much hoped that she was right.
5
“PRETTY, VIVACIOUS, & VERSATILE” read the bills posted all over Paterson. “May Ward and Her Eight Dresden Dolls—The Most Elaborate Girl Act in Vaudeville, Employing Beautiful Costumes and Special Scenery—Open Auditions February 15. Public Invited.”
Fleurette pasted a copy of the hand-bill on the front door so that Constance wouldn’t miss it when she walked in. She believed it would bolster her cause to create a sense of occasion, and for that reason had chosen a blue nautical dress with a clever sailor’s collar that she hoped would inspire in Constance the idea of a voyage—one that neither Constance nor her other sister, Norma, would be invited to join.
The possibility that an actress of May Ward’s caliber would come to Paterson personally to hold auditions was so precisely the sort of thing Fleurette dreamed of that she could not, at first, believe that it had actually happened. The news had been delivered by Mrs. Ward’s husband and stage manager, Freeman Bernstein, who presented himself at her dancing class the previous Wednesday to make the announcement.
“Girls, I bet you’ve always wanted to go on the stage!” he called out, smacking his hands together as he took long strides across the dance studio. “Will your mothers agree to it? If you’re under eighteen, we’ll have to have their permission. Mrs. Ward intends to give every last one of you her most thoughtful consideration, and we don’t want her to waste her efforts on girls whose mothers aren’t prepared to say their good-byes the very next week.”