Kopp Sisters on the March Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  Six Months Later

  Historical Notes

  Read More From the Kopp Sisters Series

  Learn More About the Kopp Sisters

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by the Stewart-Brown Trust

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stewart, Amy, author.

  Title: Kopp sisters on the march / Amy Stewart.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Series: A Kopp sisters novel ; 5.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019002553 (print) | LCCN 2019012330 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328736543 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328736529 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Social life and customs—1865–1918—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Biographical.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.T49343 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.T49343 K67 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002553

  Cover illustration and design by Jim Tierney

  Author photograph © Terrence McNally

  v1.0819

  To Michelle Tessler

  The national service school was organized by the women’s section of the Navy League to train American women for the duties which come to them in wartime and in the great national disasters, which include nursing the sick, feeding the hungry, making bandages and other surgical supplies, and comforting the sorrows and relieving the necessities of those dependent upon the defenders of the nation at the front. . . . There was no intention of producing a modern Amazonian corps.

  —Richmond Times Dispatch, April 1, 1917

  1

  BEULAH KNEW IT was over when she returned from lunch to find her desk cleared and a little box placed on the seat of her chair, like a gift.

  PINKMAN HOSIERY, read the foil stamping. THREE DOZEN ASSORTED. It was the very style of box that Beulah had been hired to paste together when she started at the factory six months earlier, before she was promoted to office girl. She didn’t have to look inside to know that it held the contents of her desk drawer: her comb, her lip-stick, her extra handkerchiefs, and a subway token, along with the silk sheers that Mr. Pinkman bestowed upon every girl he fired as a final, guilty, lily-livered parting gift.

  Beulah lifted the box slowly, as if in a dream, and looked around at the rows of desks surrounding hers. Mr. Pinkman employed a dozen office girls in a high-ceilinged but nevertheless cramped room, so that they were obliged to push their desks together and work elbow to elbow. There were no secrets among the typists and billing clerks.

  Every eye in the room darted briefly up to Beulah and away again. Typewriters clattered, order forms shuffled, and chairs squeaked and groaned as the girls went about their business. Beulah knew that the dignified course of action was to clutch her little box to her chest and to skitter away quietly, blinking back a few repentant tears as she went out the door for the last time.

  That’s how she used to do it, back when she first arrived in New York. She thought it was a requirement of the job to behave politely as she was being put out on the street. But then it occurred to her that once she’d been dismissed, she was free to do as she pleased.

  What pleased her at that moment was to have a word with Mr. Theodore Pinkman, who was peeking out at her from behind the blinds in his office, like the petty and spineless man that he was. He loved to hide away in that wallpapered den of his, and pretend not to watch the girls in the next room.

  He drew away when she caught him staring at her. Of course he did. He could never own up to anything. He was already fumbling to lock the door as she marched over, but he couldn’t manage it. For a man who manufactured ladies’ undergarments, he was utterly inept with handles, knobs, buttons, clasps, and other small fittings. Beulah had found it endearing at first, but lately she’d come to believe that there was something deficient in a man who couldn’t properly undress a woman—or fire one.

  She gave the still-rattling doorknob a hard turn and shouldered her way in. Mr. Pinkman fell back against his desk, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, blushing, sweating, his curly hair resisting his daily efforts to slick it down, those blue eyes, round as a child’s, registering a look of perpetual surprise.

  He stumbled to his feet and tugged at his vest. “Ah—hello. I—”

  “A little box on my chair, Teddy? Like I’m any other girl? I fixed your dinner last night. I made those damn little French potatoes that take an hour to peel because you won’t eat the skins. I ironed your collar—the one you’re wearing right now! And you send me away with a box of stockings?”

  She tossed it down and it fell open. The contents were exactly as she’d expected, except for a folded bill on top. To her parting gift he’d added ten dollars.

  Did Mr. Pinkman honestly think that would satisfy her?

  He did. “There, you see? It’s not only stockings. You . . . you’ve been so much more to me . . . you know that . . . only, it seems that Mrs. Pinkman . . .”

  He trailed off, finding himself unable to make the simplest of explanations for a circumstance that was as old as marriage itself.

  “Mrs. Pinkman need never have found out, if you knew one thing about keeping a secret, which you don’t,” Beulah said. “What’d you do, leave a coat-check tag in your pocket? Come home with perfume on your handkerchief?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was always one or the other, the ticket or the handkerchief.

  Beulah crossed her arms and paced around his office in a circle, as if she owned it, which she did, in that moment. “Well. What are we going to do now? You’ve dismissed me, because she insisted on it, and she’ll know if I’m still working here. She’ll come around and check. But she doesn’t know about our flat, does she? And you signed a lease through December. So I have ten months left on that lease, and I intend to enjoy every minute of it. It’s nice, living by the park, even if it does take half an hour to get down here every day. Although I don’t suppose I’ll have to do that anymore.”

  “But Mrs. Pinkman already—” he injected.

  Beulah ignored him. “And you can keep your ten dollars, Teddy. You’re going to find me a new position at a good firm uptown, so
that I can walk to work on nice days. And if I’m not satisfied with the arrangements you’ve made for me, I will take my services elsewhere. You will write me a letter of commendation so that I may do so.”

  It was a fine speech, and Beulah delivered it with her pointy little chin held high. But she’d underestimated the depth of Mr. Pinkman’s desperation, and the extent to which Mrs. Pinkman had already unraveled the very threads to which Beulah was clinging.

  He went around behind his desk and dropped heavily into his chair. “It’s no good, missy.”

  “Don’t call me missy no more.” The southerner in her always came out when she was angry.

  He pressed a handkerchief to his face. Sweat tended to accumulate just above his eyebrows and across his nose when he found himself under pressure. “All right, I won’t. What I’m trying to tell you is that the flat is gone. Mrs. Pinkman saw to that. She boxed up your things—”

  “My things? Your wife has been through my things?” She was shouting now. Outside his office window, every typewriter stopped clattering at once. She didn’t care. “When did she do that? Today?”

  Mr. Pinkman stared, wide-eyed, at the half-opened blinds, through which every girl in the typing pool was watching him. He lacked the gumption to lean over and tug them closed, so Beulah did it for him. She did everything for him.

  He looked at her with something like gratitude and went on. “She was there this morning. She didn’t touch your things herself. She had her maid do it.”

  “Oh, well, that makes it better,” Beulah snapped. “And where may I collect my possessions, Mr. Pinkman?”

  He looked over at the little box she’d tossed on the floor. “The train station. There’s a key in there.”

  She snatched it up and tucked it under her arm. “And where am I to go tonight?”

  He was more in command of himself, now that the situation had been made plain and the worst was past. He stood up and went around to open the door for her. He smelled of the sarsaparilla candies he chewed habitually.

  “That’s what the ten dollars is for. Go on, now.”

  WHAT ELSE WAS she to do, but to march out with her head held high? Every girl in the place watched her go with delighted fascination. They knew exactly what had just transpired, and what details they didn’t know could have been found out easily enough, if any of them dared jump up and run outside to offer Beulah a sympathetic ear. She would’ve happily poured out the whole sordid tale, from the day Mr. Pinkman noticed her on the box line and promoted her to the office, only to find that she could neither type nor write nor add a column of figures and was therefore entirely unsuited to the sending and receiving of invoices, to the way he took pity on her and arranged for her to put in her time at the office in the completion of correspondence courses aimed at teaching her something in the way of stenography and clerksmanship.

  “I want to see you make something of yourself, missy,” Mr. Pinkman had told her.

  They were in his office when he said that, but he’d left the door open. Anyone could hear what she said in reply. Beulah knew that would make it all the more exciting for him.

  “I’d like to make something of you, too, Mr. Pinkman,” she had said, in that breathy way Richmond girls did when they had something to offer a man. She made sure to sashay out before he was forced to fish around for a clever retort that she knew he never would find.

  But now he’d dismissed her, and no one did rush out after Beulah to hear about it. She didn’t blame them: it wasn’t worth losing a place in a good office for one salacious story about the boss. There were enough of those in circulation already. She was only the latest.

  It was a chilly afternoon in late February, but Beulah—thanks to Mr. Pinkman’s largess—wore the first good wool coat of her life, trimmed in white rabbit fur and lined in heavy silk that rustled pleasurably as she walked. Mr. Pinkman had been a generous benefactor: every time she bestowed a pleasure on him that he had never before known, he bestowed one on her. Owing to his timid nature and unwillingness to make untoward demands on his inexperienced wife, there were any number of new pleasures to grant him in exchange for a coat or a gold bracelet or a furnished room of her own.

  Although he never knew it—or never dared to ask—Beulah did, in effect, take him on a private tour of Richmond’s cathouses, saving him the threat of a police raid or the moral stain of the world’s oldest transgression. There weren’t even words for some of the things she did to him, or so Mr. Pinkman claimed, breathlessly, into the pillow they shared.

  Oh, but there was a word for everything. Beulah never told him that. Why ruin it for him?

  It was terrible to be fired right after lunch, when Mabel was still at work. Mabel, her only true friend in New York, plunked down cups and saucers at a horrible little tea-room up on Broadway. Beulah had never seen a room so overfull of chintz and toile, wicker and silk flowers, ceramic figurines and embroidered tablecloths. The owners—two men, to Beulah’s everlasting confusion—behaved as if they’d heard of women but had never actually met one. They seemed to have determined that the way to make a success of a tea-room was to gather every trapping of Gilded Age femininity and to cram it together in a riot of lace, ribbons, and ersatz gold.

  The place was absurdly old-fashioned, and the tea tasted of dishwater. The cakes were stale, too, although Beulah wasn’t above eating them directly from the box when Mabel was given extras for her dinner.

  As much as she detested the tea-room, Beulah found it unbearable to be alone after what had just happened to her, so she wandered up Broadway anyway. It was her good fortune that Mabel had stepped outside for a cigarette just as Beulah came into view.

  Mabel saw the box in her hand and laughed as she blew out the smoke. “Has Mr. Pinkman had enough of you?”

  “Well, Mrs. Pinkman certainly has. I’m dismissed from my position and I’ve been put out of my place. How’s that for a morning’s work?”

  Mabel ticked off the day’s events with her fingers. “You’ve lost a man, a job, and the roof over your head. That’s a record, even for you.” She had round cheeks and the kind of sweet dimples that grandmothers loved, but her sympathetic smile only made Beulah more despondent.

  “Oh, what am I going to do?” Beulah took the cigarette from Mabel and leaned against the wall. “I’m so tired of this city. When did I come here—four years ago?”

  “Well, you moved in with me just before Christmas of 1911. That’s five years, dearie, and a couple of months.”

  Beulah looked at her in shock. “Five years? Look at me. I’m exactly where I started. Tonight I’ll have to go around door-to-door, begging to be let into some boarding-house or another, with no references and no suitable explanation as to where I’ve just come from. I’ll have to be Betty off the train again, just like I was the night I met you.”

  “You were Lucy back then,” Mabel reminded her.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I liked Lucy. What was my last name?”

  “Lane. Lucy Lane. I could tell you’d made it up on the spot.”

  “Then why’d you offer to share a room with me?”

  “I thought you’d have an interesting story to tell.”

  Beulah choked on the cigarette and passed it back to Mabel. “Well, didn’t I just.”

  Mabel leaned over and looked in the window. The tea-room was empty. “I’m going to tell the boys to save themselves a few pennies and turn me loose this afternoon. We can walk uptown and eat shortbread.”

  “You know I hate that shortbread.”

  “Well, you’d best get used to taking free food, unless you’re going to sell that fur collar to buy us dinner.”

  Beulah tucked her chin into the white fur and waited while Mabel made her excuses and collected her things. She returned, as promised, with a box of shortbread and three cucumber sandwiches wrapped in a napkin.

  “Eat these,” she said, pressing them on Beulah. “You’ll need your strength.”

  “I’m not going to get my s
trength from a cucumber,” Beulah said, but she took them anyway.

  They crossed over to Park Avenue because it made them feel elegant to walk among the finer shops and the women who frequented them. They stopped to admire hats in the windows, including one so festooned with striped feathers that it appeared that an entire flock of guinea fowl had been sacrificed.

  “That’s a church hat where I come from,” Beulah said.

  “I think it’s a hat for the opera here,” Mabel said.

  “I wouldn’t like to sit behind the lady who wore that hat.”

  They went on that way, criticizing the impractical finery that they couldn’t afford, until another wave of misery came over Beulah and she said, “What am I to do, Mabel? I thought I’d be married by now, or in a more established position, anyway. I’ve done all the jobs in this town, at least the ones I’m qualified to do. I’ve been every sort of packer and spooler and carder and labeler.”

  “There was that nasty oyster house.”

  “Picker. They called me an oyster picker. Never again. I was done with fish and meats after that.”

  “You enjoyed stencil-painting,” Mabel offered.

  “Well, I enjoyed the fellow who managed the concern, but I can’t say that I enjoyed stencil-paintings so’s I’d make a life from it! I’m talking about . . .” She blew a little steam from between her lips. “I’m talking about becoming someone else. I came here to bury that business back in Richmond and to start again.” She said it quietly. It was not her habit to talk about her past.

  Mabel put an arm around her waist. “You did start again. This is what it looks like to start again. This is exactly how it feels to earn an honest living, darling.”

  “But I wanted—I just want something to change.”

  “Then you have to change! You need some kind of education if you want to advance. I thought Mr. Pinkman put you into a correspondence course.”

  “Oh, he pretended to care about my learning, and so did I,” Beulah said irritably. “I sat at my desk and contrived to look busy, but I never could make heads nor tails of those courses.”

  Mabel drew back in surprise. “For three months you’ve been sitting and pretending?”