Sirens and Spies Read online

  “How did you know I took it?” asked Elsie. She sounded relieved, respectful, as if Mary finally had done something she approved of.

  “I found your science notes right there, sticking out. It’s strange. I was looking for Miss Fitch, or trying, anyway, to imagine her in the war. She had a brother—did you know?—who was killed in the war. I was trying to imagine how that was. All those pictures. It was pretty bad, wasn’t it? She must have been scared the whole time. They arrested you if you did anything suspicious. They shot people.”

  “Scared?” Elsie’s eyes were on the photograph.

  “I knew she was in it,” Mary said. “I read the caption and figured it out. That’s why you started spying on her, isn’t it?”

  “She hasn’t changed much, has she?” murmured Elsie.

  “No.”

  “The traitor,” muttered Elsie.

  “I wonder what happened to the baby,” Mary said. “She never said she had a child.”

  “The liar. She thinks she’s gotten away with it, too.

  “You know how they cut off her hair at the hospital?” asked Mary. “She really does look like this picture, now.”

  “She is like this picture,” said Elsie. “She hasn’t changed. She was always the same, only we were fooled.”

  “I wasn’t fooled,” Mary countered.

  “What do you mean? You were!”

  “And I’m not fooled now,” Mary went on. “Whatever this picture shows it’s not the truth.”

  Elsie’s head shot up. “Are you crazy? Look at her! She was a collaborator, probably even a spy. She slept with the enemy. She came over here to get away, to hide and start over like those Nazi war criminals in South America.”

  “I don’t believe she was a traitor,” Mary said.

  “But here’s the picture!” cried Elsie. “It shows her being one. It’s history. She’s in a book!”

  “I don’t believe it, anyway. I know Miss Fitch. She wouldn’t do something like this. She was framed. Somebody made a mistake. It said so in the book, actually. Lots of people were accused of collaboration. Everybody was accusing everybody. It said that.”

  “But that’s crazy!” shouted Elsie. “What about this baby you’re staring straight at. Is it a doll? Maybe she was baby-sitting for the day.”

  Mary shrugged. “Maybe she was.”

  “And all those men who came to her house? What about them?”

  “That’s where you’re crazy,” replied Mary. “Miss Fitch isn’t like that. And anyway, it has nothing to do with this picture.”

  “It has everything to do with this picture!” shouted Elsie. She slumped on her desk and put her hands on her face.

  “I thought you’d get it,” she said through her hands. “I was sure you’d see when you looked at the photo. I was going to show it to you. I’d already decided.”

  Mary leaned over her. “Elsie?” she said softly.

  “What!”

  Mary squeezed into the desk chair beside her. Elsie even moved over to make room.

  “The thing I don’t get is you,” Mary said. “You loved Miss Fitch. She was your friend. And she loved you. She thought you had talent, and guts. She would have done anything for you. You were special, her favorite.”

  “So what?”

  “So, how can you do this to her? I think you’re the traitor.”

  Elsie raised her head. “But I’m not doing anything to her,” she answered in surprise. “She’s the one who did things. All I did was find out.”

  “But, Elsie …”

  “Listen. Miss Fitch knew she was no good right from the very beginning. That’s why she came to this crumby town. That’s why she lives here, four blocks away from us.” Elsie clenched her fists.

  “That’s why she gives violin lessons to dumb kids like us who won’t ever be any good, either. She knows we won’t. Miss Fitch bottomed out in Millport, Connecticut. Only she didn’t want to tell anyone, of course, so she put on this big performance. She showed everybody how great she was, and then she told everybody how great they were, to make sure they’d stay fooled. And they believed it! Too bad it was all a lie.”

  “But it wasn’t!” cried Mary.

  “Don’t be so stupid.”

  “Well,” Mary said, “I know how we can find out.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s ask her.”

  “Ask her!”

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t ask her about something like this. How could we? What would we say? ‘My dear Miss Fitch, we’ve found this ugly old picture of you. What on earth does it mean?’” Elsie mimicked a schoolteacher’s voice. “‘And we’ve been noticing odd things going on in your house.’ Oh, sure,” said Elsie. “Ask her. She’d just lie her way out, anyway. She’s been doing that for years.”

  Mary turned to look at her.

  “It’s only fair to ask her,” she said. “What’s not fair is to go around thinking things about her that may not be true.”

  “Except they are true,” put in Elsie.

  “Well, I’m going to find out,” Mary said. “You keep on spying on her if you want to, and keep on collecting facts for your notebook. I’m just going to ask her, and whatever she says, I’ll believe.”

  “Go ahead!” shouted Elsie. “I don’t care. Do what you want!” She had risen from her desk. Her face burned.

  “Go tell Mother, too! Tell the whole world. It’s just what everybody needs to hear—how they all got fooled and get fooled every single day. How they can’t believe anything, especially not what they see with their own eyes, because there’s always some explanation, some reason. The whole world is mixed up that way. You can’t put your foot down anywhere without there being a. million reasons why you should put it somewhere else. And after that, a million more, until you don’t know where to step next, until there’s no place left to step!”

  Elsie caught her breath and stopped. She was trembling.

  Mary stared at her. “Elsie,” she said, “you’re scared of something, aren’t you?”

  “I am not!”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Are you afraid of Miss Fitch?”

  “Of course not! Will you shut up?”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell Mother,” Mary said quietly, moving toward the door. “I’m going to go see Miss Fitch tomorrow, after school. I’ll come home first, though, in case you change your mind.”

  “Oh, great,” said Elsie. “Great!” She turned and flung herself into the chair.

  12

  ABOUT NOON THE FOLLOWING day, which was a Wednesday, the sky over Millport turned rat gray. By 3 P.M., snow was falling, the kind of small swirling flakes that bode large storms of evil intent.

  Jimmy Dee, skulking on a bench outside the public library, saw it coming before anyone. Without a second thought, he headed over to the Millport Pizza Palace to stake out cover in a flanking alley. He knew from experience where the vents for the big ovens opened through the wall. He knew which corner caught the heat, which metal trash container retained it, which rotten eave of which rotten roof broke the down draft. He sat on a piece of packing crate, lit the end of a well-chewed cigar and watched the sky.

  “Looks bad. Real bad,” Mrs. Mott told Mrs. Cruikshank on the phone from her house. “I hear New York City is going to get hit right smack on the head.”

  “Serves it right,” replied Mrs. Cruikshank. “Are you calling off our bridge game tomorrow?”

  “Well, I can hardly see to the street already!”

  Mrs. Mott hung up and went down to the cellar to hunt for the snow shovel.

  In the kitchen of the Potter house, Mrs. Potter was taking stock of her food supplies, and groaning.

  “Wouldn’t you just know it?” she told Roo. “The very afternoon I was planning to go to the market and here comes more snow. We’ve got spaghetti, I see. And these canned lima beans.”

  “Ugh,” said Roo.

  “A spring snow’s the wo
rst snow,” Mrs. Potter went on, glancing out the window. “All those poor little animals just coming out to get warm; all the buds getting ready to grow, and then, snap, the freeze buckles them right down under again.”

  “This isn’t spring,” Roo pointed out. “This is just more freeze on top of freeze that was already there.”

  In her room at the top of the house, Granny Colie pulled down her shades. She turned her reading lamp up on high. She took her sunglasses out of a drawer in the table next to her chair. Then she sat down to bask and wait for the arrival of tea. It felt just like Florida.

  Mary came down the front stairs buttoning her coat. She tied a scarf around her neck.

  “I’m going out,” she called to her mother. “I’ll be back for dinner.”

  “Out! But you’ve only just come in. And this snow!”

  “It’s not so bad. I’ve got to go see Miss Fitch,” Mary called, louder than she needed for her voice to reach into the kitchen. She turned around and looked up the stairs. Nothing stirred. Down at the end of the hall, Elsie’s door stayed firmly shut.

  “Goodbye!” shouted Mary. But she stood before the hall mirror pulling her woolen cap this way and that. She put on her gloves, took one off again, inspected some loose stitching in one finger, then put it back on.

  “I’m going now!” cried Mary toward the second floor.

  Roo shot out of the kitchen wearing a white milk mustache.

  “You’ve been saying that for ten minutes,” she said, severely.

  They went into the living room together. Mary sat on a chair and took off her gloves again. Heidi was there building something out of the furniture.

  “What is it?” asked Roo, sidling up.

  “A fort,” answered Heidi. She had pulled a large blanket over the tops of two chairs to make a roof and blanket walls. Inside sat her beloved Paddington Bear wearing his blue coat and one yellow plastic boot.

  “And you can’t come in,” Heidi told Roo. “See the sign?”

  “Where?” asked Roo in a surprised voice.

  “Here.” Heidi pointed. “It says ‘keep out.’ If you can read, that is,” Heidi added meanly.

  “I can read,” said Roo, who couldn’t.

  “Then you know what it says. It says ‘keep out’ and that means you.”

  “But Heidi! I want to come in!” Roo’s voice rose anxiously. “Paddington is in there. I want to be, too!”

  “You can’t. You’d mess it up,” declared Heidi. “I’ve got it all fixed and … and I’m doing my homework.” She went inside the fort and dragged a flap of blanket over the door.

  “You are not!” shrieked Roo, nobody’s fool.

  “I am!

  Mary put her gloves on for the third time and stood up.

  “Heidi,” she said. She walked over and stood, frowning, before the blanket. “Heidi. That isn’t fair. You can’t build a house in the middle of the living room and then tell people they can’t come in.”

  “It’s a fort,” said Heidi from inside. “And yes I can.”

  “But the living room is everyone’s room,” Mary said. A prickle of anger was in her voice. “It’s just plain mean to make a fort here. Look at Roo. She’s all upset.”

  “I am not!” said Roo. “I don’t even care.”

  “Yes, you do. You do care,” Mary told her, angrily.

  “I do not!”

  “Heidi!” Mary was furious, suddenly. “Heidi! You are hurting Roo’s feelings. Let her in, right now!”

  “No!” yelled Heidi.

  “Then, I’m coming in anyway!” Roo shrieked.

  “No, you’re not!”

  “Then, I’m pulling this blanket off …”

  “Wait, Roo!” cried Mary.

  “And wrecking this fort!” screeched Roo. She gave the blanket a mighty yank that toppled one of the chairs and collapsed the fort.

  “You creep!”

  “You dumbhead!”

  Mary stamped her foot and turned to leave.

  “Mother!” wailed the little ones in unison.

  Mary closed the front door hard behind her. Outside, the snow fell thickly and peacefully. She tramped up the driveway toward the street, then stopped angrily to look back at the house. It was white with black shutters, as plain and ordinary as any on Grove Street. Who would guess from here what wars raged within?

  Mary glanced at Elsie’s windows, second floor, right corner. They stared back at her, pale, secretive, admitting nothing, asking nothing. There was no clue, at this distance, to who lived behind them. But even knowing who lived up there, even knowing her for fourteen years, didn’t tell Mary anything.

  “Talk about forts!” muttered Mary, and a new surge of fury went through her. “Who does she think she is, locking herself up like that? What is she trying to prove?”

  Mary started walking. She lifted her chin and imagined Miss Fitch, lonely and hurt, in her small home up the street. She began to think of what she would tell her, gently, and of how surprised Miss Fitch would be.

  “Elsie spying on me?” She would laugh at that. “Poor Elsie,” she would say, and, “How sweet of you, Mary, to be worried.” Mary smiled to herself.

  “Hey! Wait up!” Mary spun on her heel in the snow.

  “Wait!” Elsie ran to catch up, her coat flapping open. She wore neither mittens nor a hat. Mary glared at her.

  “I thought you’d decided not to come,” she said.

  “Too bad, I’m here,” said Elsie.

  They walked in silence, reaching up to shield their faces from time to time. The sidewalk was slippery. The snow was beginning to mount up.

  A little later Mary said:

  “Well, what are we going to say, anyway?” But Elsie didn’t answer, and they were, by this time, close enough to Miss Fitch’s house to see it.

  13

  MISS FITCH COULD NOT sleep. Nine days she had been home from the hospital, and for nine nights her eyes had hardly closed.

  “Mon Dieu. Mon Dieu. J’arrive pas a dormir. Ah! J’arrive pas’.

  She caught herself muttering in French at odd times: after midnight, sitting up suddenly in bed, “Mon Dieu!” In the dark afternoons, alone with a book, “Ah! J’arrive pas a dormir. Calme-toi. Calme-toi.” (“Oh! I cannot sleep. Calm down. Be quiet.”)

  Why French after all these years? she asked herself. I speak English. I think en anglais. Je suis American. (I am an American!) But her mind was speaking French, babbling: Mon Dieu! Calme-toi!

  It was the shock of the attack, she told herself. Of course. A great fright will send you back to your origins, to what you first knew and still know best. It was only the shock. She would get over it.

  But she didn’t. She got worse. She couldn’t sleep. White nights, she called them from the French nuits blanches (sleepless nights). How appropriate! She understood the phrase all over again in translation. The blinding, burning wide-awake hours, the tossing on the hot, pale sheets had nothing to do with dark, with dreams. She was lit up live, sealed within a spotlight. Her eyes itched, then ached.

  She couldn’t read, couldn’t listen to music. Naturally, she couldn’t practice. Not with that arm. Her violin, a friend (a lover even!) through sadness and joy, through hope and disappointment all those difficult years, lay silent as a dead man inside its shut-up case. She became a wanderer in her own house, room to room, window to window. What did she expect to see? Out the front windows, the icy street carried cars and pedestrians by day: gleaming emptiness by night. Out the back, she watched the whitened garden, motionless except when wind passed through the bushes dislodging small clumps of snow.

  She locked all the doors. Then Est-ce que je suis folle? (Am I crazy?) She went through all the rooms and locked the windows, too. She drew the blinds tight. She was safe. She knew the number to call for emergency. She had visitors: neighbors and students. One evening she went to a concert, was thoughtfully driven to it by a student’s mother. She had trouble driving her own car. The plaster arm got in the way.


  She kept face. She made jokes about herself, all the old tricks from the past. “Sign here!” she told her visitors, handing them bright-colored felt-tip pens. “Something scandalous! Something to shake up my old prune of a doctor.” Her cast blared like a Broadway marquee.

  Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! She thought about things she had not thought about for a long time. They came, these memories, like the French words themselves, in a sort of babbling undertone, unexpectedly, up back stairways in her mind that she had closed off years before. She remembered a house, a street, a series of faces.

  “Come now!” she snapped to herself. “Not that.” The trouble was she had time on her hands. She was not yet up to teaching, the doctor said. (He looked exactly like a prune! All wrinkly and medicinal.)

  “Give it a week or two. That head needs a rest,” he told her.

  Yes, and what a head. She was not eager to be seen looking so … so … crewcut. Like an American soldier. Like … like …

  She knew what she looked like. Hadn’t she been afraid of mirrors before? Hadn’t she, then as now, wrapped kerchiefs around her head? She remembered. She did not have to look at herself to remember. The naked feel of her head on the pillow at night, the strange weight of that head (so light! too light!) sent her back automatically to other places. She did not want to be sent back. She fought to stay where she was. But the mind—ah! She rubbed her eyes and forehead.

  The mind has ideas of its own, she thought. It makes its own connections. Mon Dieu!

  She dressed most days, now. It gave her something to do. She was thinner than she had been for twenty years and fit into clothes she had worn during her concert touring days. Some of them were still pretty: a rose-colored skirt of fine, soft wool; a gypsy blouse with silk tassels. She found a chiffon scarf at the bottom of a trunk and flung it around her neck.

  “Look at me! So slim. Young again.” But that, too, brought the thoughts, the connections: a face, a sunny place in the forest, a picnic. Mon Dieu! She pushed the thought away.

  She was about to unwrap the scarf, to put it back inside the trunk—and good riddance!—when the doorbell rang. Who? She rattled downstairs, opened the door (after glancing through the tiny peephole) to Mary and … Elsie!