Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart Read Free Book Online

Brooklyn, she had almost everything delivered, and when we moved to the countryside, it became Francis’s responsibility to ride into town and get things for us.
    My mother named me after her, but I was never like her. She was Constance Clementine Kopp and I was Constance Amélie, my middle name being her mother’s name. Francis was her firstborn, but having grown up with four brothers, a boy was unremarkable to her. She was waiting for a girl: a girl she could wrap inside her cloistered world, a girl who would sit next to her and work at needlepoint and keep her secrets and pretend not to hear the door when someone knocked.
    She lived most of her life in this country, but she was never an American and she didn’t trust Americans or American ways. Her parents left Vienna when she was sixteen, like so many of the middle class did in the wake of the revolution of 1848. My grandfather—an educated man, a chemist—liked to say that he brought his family here to give them a more stable and certain future, and to keep his boys out of the endless wars with France and Italy, but my grandmother once whispered that they moved to get away from the Jews. “After they got to leave the ghettos they could live anywhere,” she hissed, and glanced out the window as if she suspected they were moving to Brooklyn, too, which of course they were.
    My mother married my father, Frank Kopp, at the age of twenty. He was what my grandparents called Bohemian, which meant that he was Czech, but in some convoluted way having to do with the outcomes of wars still being fought in those distant countries, they had decided that he was practically Austrian. They were relieved he wasn’t a Jew, and even though my mother had met him in New York, he wasn’t an American. On the grounds of what he was not, my grandparents allowed him to marry their daughter.
    He was a wine merchant when they married, but he failed at that and became a bartender, and when that occupation didn’t agree with him, he was only a drunk. My mother forced him out of the house many times, but he didn’t leave for good until I was about ten. After that we saw him so infrequently that people began to think that Mother was a widow, an idea she encouraged. When we left Brooklyn she didn’t tell him where we’d gone, and as far as I knew, he’d never tried to find out.
    Secrets and deception were my mother’s specialty. She invented new birth dates for herself whenever it suited her to lie about her age. She mistrusted authorities and never quite believed she had a right to live here. There must have been some record of her entrance to this country, but she knew nothing about it and claimed not to be a citizen. She possessed no identification, no marriage license, and no birth certificates for any of us, having birthed us at home and breathed not a word of it to any official. She had a dread of doctors, tax collectors, census-takers, inspectors, newspaper reporters, and the police—particularly the police.
    She believed that Americans were crude and uncivilized, and tried instead to raise us as good Austrians, insisting that we speak her own peculiar blend of French and German, and engaging us in the tedious practices of lace-making and decorative painting in an effort to keep us indoors and away from the other children in the neighborhood.
    As a result, there was not a bread tin or a sewing box in our Brooklyn apartment that hadn’t been painted with a spray of roses and then covered with a doily. Our home was a dark and crowded museum of our mother’s Viennese girlhood. Her faded needlepoint hung on the wall alongside oil portraits of unnamed ancestors and a china doll in a glass case that wore the hair of her long-dead grandmother. A miniature porcelain tea set—each dish edged in gold and hand-painted with delicate toadflax and fern—sat inside a mahogany breakfront alongside a collection of miniature glass