Sirens and Spies

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “He was embarrassed to be seen like that,” she told them. Elsie’s mouth dropped open with scorn.

  “He wanted to stay, but he was embarrassed,” said Mrs. Potter.

  “Embarrassed!” cried Elsie. “He was not embarrassed. He’s forgotten how to be that a long time ago. He was a drunkard who didn’t want help from any woman who flies out of her house to grab him. He wanted the whole bottle, not something in his soup. I’m surprised he didn’t hit you up for money.”

  “He did,” Mrs. Potter admitted. “That’s how I got him to come in.”

  “That’s crazy!” yelled Elsie. The little ones watched her with guarded eyes. “It was crazy to bring him in here. He could have been a killer and murdered us all! He could have been on drugs, not liquor. Why do you always do things like this?”

  “He wasn’t dangerous,” Mrs. Potter said gently. “I saw it in his eyes. He’s a poor, sensitive man who’s down on his luck. He needed help. Anyone could see that.”

  “And you didn’t help him,” Elsie went on. “You can’t help people like him. Even he knew that. Everyone knows it. Nobody else tries to bring creeps like that into their houses for their own children to look at. Even Mary thinks it’s stupid!”

  This was a challenge that hurt Mary more than anyone. It gave her the look of having gone behind her mother’s back when it was only that she tried so hard to please them all.

  The little ones put their eyes severely on Mary. She stared, red faced, at Granny Colie, who was peering at something in midair that might have been her teacup if Mary hadn’t had a stranglehold on it two feet below.

  “Where’s my tea?” whimpered Granny. “Where did you hide my tea?”

  “Oh, hush,” Elsie snapped. “It’s right in front of your nose.” Then, she bit her lip.

  “Mother,” whispered Mary, in agony. But Elsie wasn’t finished yet.

  “You don’t think about us when you see those people, do you?” she continued. “You don’t think how we hate standing there on the sidewalk while you talk to them, those awful people with stumps that sell pencils, those disgusting men sleeping down in the train station, those women wandering like zombies around the park. You don’t think how it feels riding home in the car with them, not saying a word because they might throw up or have hysterics. Or pull a knife, some of them.”

  “No one has ever pulled a knife,” Mrs. Potter said softly. “They don’t do that.” Elsie wasn’t listening.

  “Do you know how much I hate to go anywhere with you?” she asked. “I’m praying the whole time you won’t see them, praying like mad they won’t be there. And meanwhile, you know what you’re doing? You’re actually looking for them. It isn’t good enough for you to run into them. You’ve got to look in all the right places to see where they might be hiding, to drag them out by their necks!”

  “Elsie!” said Mrs. Potter. “Elsie, it isn’t that way.”

  “It is that way,” Elsie said, “and everybody on this street knows it. Everyone knows about the Potters’ deadbeats. They watch us, and say things. Can you imagine what they say? Can you?”

  Then she turned and swept out of the kitchen, pushing the little ones away.

  All the time Elsie talked, Mrs. Potter had kept half an eye on the street. When Elsie had gone, she turned and faced the window. The man was far down the block by now, a gray shape lurching past hedges. Mrs. Potter put her head close to the window to keep him in sight.

  “He is walking on the sidewalk,” she reported to those waiting behind her in the kitchen. “He’s still on it. There he goes around the corner. He is definitely on the sidewalk!” called Mrs. Potter.

  “And bless the poor soul,” remarked Granny Colie, so unexpectedly that they all swung around to look at her.

  5

  FOR THREE DAYS, MISS Fitch’s hospital note drifted about the Potter house unanswered. It sat on the hall table beside Mrs. Potter’s beaten brown handbag until Mr. Potter picked it up with the mail and asked, “Whose is this?”

  Then it was cleared to the kitchen counter under the pencil sharpener, where anyone in the house with a worn down stub could read it again. It hung for a while on the bulletin board by the kitchen telephone, fell off into a pile of old bills on the shelf below, appeared magnetized for a day to the front of the refrigerator. From there, it vanished completely during an evening, and suddenly popped up again on the kitchen counter, just in time for Elsie’s announcement at the breakfast table on the morning of the fourth day.

  “I will go see Miss Fitch this afternoon, after school,” Elsie proclaimed, just as if—with her nose in the air—she really were queen of something.

  “Good!” Mrs. Potter said brightly.

  “Why now, after all this time?” demanded Mary.

  “I’ll call the hospital this morning,” Mrs. Potter added. She glanced at Mary with a question ready on her lips.

  But Mary shook her head: No. She wouldn’t go. Not without Elsie and now certainly not with her. Her forehead was knitted. She frowned at her orange juice and up at the kitchen clock. She did not look at Elsie, who was reading a history book at the table and not looking at anyone, either.

  “You’ve done this just to be mean, haven’t you?” Mary said, still not looking. “Mean to me and mean to Miss Fitch. You’ve taken care of both of us all in one swoop.”

  “Untrue,” answered Elsie. “You don’t understand the least thing about it.”

  “Oh, I understand!” Mary declared. “I understand how you didn’t have a friend in this world until Miss Fitch took you on.”

  “She did not ever take me on!” snapped Elsie.

  “I understand how you couldn’t have a friend because nobody could stand you, because you were too stuck up to even talk to anyone. And then Miss Fitch made you into somebody special.”

  “She did not.’” hissed Elsie. “It was all a fraud.”

  “And she cared about you more than she cared about anyone. She was different around you. I saw it. I saw the whole thing,” said Mary, bitterly.

  “Hush, Mary!” cried Mrs. Potter. Elsie had risen from her chair. She was gathering her books, preparing to leave.

  “And then,” said Mary, “when you saw you had her, you turned against her. Suddenly she wasn’t good enough for you. Oh, yes,” called Mary, as Elsie walked stiff shouldered out of the kitchen. “I understand! Nobody is good enough for you, are they? Especially not the people who happen to like you. Especially not them!”

  But the front door banged and Elsie was gone.

  “Mary, I’m surprised at you,” exclaimed Mrs. Potter. “That wasn’t like you at all!”

  That afternoon, Mary walked a long route home from school. She didn’t want to run into Elsie. She wanted her gone—out of sight, out of mind. Mary walked twenty minutes in an out-of-the way direction. (She checked her watch.) Then she walked twenty minutes back again. This should have been long enough for anyone to come home, comb her hair, check a bus schedule and leave for a hospital visit.

  But time in the Potter house had a way of losing its grip. Complications arose. Plans dissolved and reformed. So the first thing that Mary saw when she opened the front door was Elsie, lounging against the hall banister.

  “I thought you’d be gone, by now,” muttered Mary, just to let her sister know the meeting wasn’t her idea.

  “Actually, we were waiting for you,” Elsie answered, half a smile on her lips.

  “For me!”

  “Heidi and Roo need a sitter. Mother is coming, too,” Elsie said. “If she can ever pull herself together.”

  From upstairs came the thumps and bumps of a body in frantic motion. Mrs. Potter appeared on the landing overhead, then disappeared again.

  “Where is my purse? Where are my gloves?” they heard her wail from far-off corners of the house.

  Elsie nodded at Mary, and shifted her weight away from the banister.

  “It’s amazing we ever get out of this house at all,” she said, examining her nails. She turned
her arm over to look at her watch.

  “You look nervous,” Mary told her. “Is that why you’re taking Mother?”

  “I’m not nervous at all,” Elsie answered. “Mother wants to go. She’s desperate to go. You know what she’s like with wounded birds. She can’t keep her hands off them.”

  “You look nervous, all right.”

  “Quit that, will you?” snapped Elsie. They stood together waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What about the violin?” asked Mary suddenly. “She wanted you to bring it.”

  Elsie shrugged.

  “Well, there’s still mine,” Mary offered. She hated to think of Miss Fitch being disappointed.

  “No!” said Elsie, so sharply that Mary stepped away from her and went into the kitchen to hide her anger.

  Then Mrs. Potter came downstairs in a great fluster and they were off.

  “Heidi and Roo are upstairs playing,” called Mrs. Potter from the back porch. “And Granny …”

  “Needs her tea,” Mary called back.

  “Yes.” They got into the car and drove away. The house turned quiet.

  Mary made Granny her tea and brought it up on a tray. But Granny was far-off somewhere in her mind, her head thrown back against the chair cushions. Mary left the tea and went to check on the little ones. They were playing with dolls in the attic, a dusty, unfinished room down the hall from Granny’s quarters.

  Did we ever play here? Mary wondered, thinking of Elsie. It looked so cozy and private. The little ones knelt together in a dim corner, pulling pieces of material from a trunk. Their dolls lay about them, swathed in other fabrics.

  “May I come in?” Mary was about to ask—for it seemed the sort of scene one should ask permission to enter—when her shape at the door caught the little ones’ eyes and their faces flicked up, pale and secretive.

  “I’m downstairs, if you need me,” Mary told them instead, and she stepped almost guiltily away from the door.

  Going down the stairs, she recalled a game that she and Elsie had liked to play together when they were little, and still shared a bedroom. The game involved transforming their room into a huge doll palace with silk scarves borrowed from their mother’s top bureau drawer. Each scarf, spread out square on the floor, became a room in the palace, and upon it they arranged such doll furniture as they had, and other things, like an upside-down tissue box for a mansion-size dining-room table, or a round piece of tin foil for a silver swimming pool. The palace might have gone on forever, for as many silk scarves as they could find. But their bedroom was not large, and—filled as it was with two bureaus, two beds, two toy chests—in the end Mary and Elsie always ran out of space. Then:

  “It’s too small in here!” Elsie would cry in frustration. “There’s never enough room!”

  In later years, this was a charge she had brought against Mary as well: “You take up too much room!”

  Mary frowned, remembering. She sat in the living room on a chair by the window where she could watch for her mother’s return.

  “But it wasn’t me,” she said out loud to herself. “I never took up too much room. It was Elsie. She always needed more.”

  When Elsie and Mrs. Potter came back, Elsie’s face was closed and unreadable. She went directly to her room and shut the door of that, too. Mrs. Potter advanced on the kitchen, discarding her purse and scarf and coat on various chairs and tables along the way. She tied an apron around her waist.

  “Dinner!” she cried to herself, and opened the refrigerator door. Mary was at her elbow.

  “Well, how was she? What did she say?”

  “Say?” Mrs. Potter rifled in the freezer.

  “Miss Fitch!” said Mary. “How is she?”

  “Miss Fitch,” mused Mrs. Potter, staring at a lump of frozen meat. “Miss Fitch is …”

  She paused, and left Mary hanging, while lower down in the refrigerator, the cheese, and then the milk, and then the eggs arranged themselves in her mind.

  “Omelets!” cried Mrs. Potter, inspired at last.

  “Miss Fitch,” she added, “is fine. She is much better. Much, much better.”

  “Oh, Mother,” sighed Mary, for this was Mrs. Potter’s standard response. It was what she always said about whatever wounded bird she had just visited. They were always much, much better.

  “And we are going again tomorrow,” Mrs. Potter went on. “She asked Elsie specially.”

  Mary said, “Oh.” And then, later, softly, “Did you tell her hello from me?” But her mother was plunged into omelets by that time and would say only that Miss Fitch’s head was wrapped up in bandages of some sort, which made hearing a little difficult for her.

  Quite late that night, long after Mr. Potter had returned from a three-day business trip and sighed, bleary-eyed, at the omelet on his plate; long after the little ones were bounced and jostled noisily into bed; after a full moon had risen and Mrs. Potter had exclaimed and rushed outside, heedless of the cold air that poured in behind her; long, long after, Mary knocked on Elsie’s door.

  “Who is it?” Elsie called out, and when she heard who, “Come in,” with a snap in her voice. She was sitting upright at her desk amidst a gleam of bronze. Her new pen was in her hand. The bright light from her desk lamp dazzled Mary’s eyes.

  “I have something,” Mary began. “Sit down,” ordered Elsie. Mary fidgeted and squinted to see where, and finally chose the very edge of Elsie’s bed, in case she had to get up fast. The bed was tightly made, but coverless. In Mary’s room, its twin lay disguised under a washable quilt printed with pink flowers. “Here is something …” Mary said again.

  “Let’s see.” Elsie put out her hand. It was a card for Miss Fitch. On the front was a violin surrounded by multicolored musical notes. Inside, more notes, some flowers, and “Please get well soon, Love, Mary Potter.”

  “You made it,” Elsie accused her.

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to give this to her?”

  “Will you?”

  “Mother’s going, too,” said Elsie.

  “I know.” Mary had thought, at first, that she would give the card to her mother. But then, “It must come from Elsie,” she had decided, and steeled herself for the knock on her sister’s door. It must come from Elsie so that Miss Fitch would notice it, and approve of it, and not cast it instantly aside as from just another student. Elsie would make the card official, Mary thought, watching her anxiously now. Elsie was turning the card over, reading it again. Mary could see she didn’t like it.

  “Sure,” Elsie said at last. “I’ll give it to her.” Then she gave the little snort that Mary dreaded. The snort was to tell Mary that not in her wildest dreams would she, Elsie Potter, ever think of giving Miss Fitch, or anyone, a silly card like this. But, if Mary wanted to, well, so much the worse for her.

  Mary ignored the insult.

  “Thank you,” she blurted, and jumped for the door.

  Elsie watched her go. She watched Mary walk all the way across the room and open the door and almost close it again. Then she spoke, softly, so softly that Mary might easily have missed it.

  “What?” gasped Mary, wheeling in the doorway.

  “I said, ‘I know who did it,’” Elsie repeated.

  “You what?”

  “I know who attacked Miss Fitch,” said Elsie, raising her voice a notch higher. She passed her hand over the brilliant blue cover of her notebook. “And I know why,” Elsie added, turning around to face her sister.

  Mary stepped back into the room and closed the door behind her.

  “Why?” she asked breathlessly.

  6

  WHY ELSIE SHOULD HAVE chosen that moment to tell about Miss Fitch, Mary could not, afterward, imagine. It was past midnight. Outside the frozen windowpanes, Grove Street slept its peaceful suburban sleep. Two miles westward, the city proper winked and blinked with lights, but they were forgotten lights, like the traffic signals that changed red, and then green, and back to red again without a soul
in sight to make sense of them.

  The ugly stone school buildings to which the girls would report at 8:05 the next morning were shut up. The old library nearby was dark. Farther west, across the railroad tracks, crumbling warehouses well known to such as Jimmy Dee in warmer hours lay abandoned now, frozen to the core of their creaking timbers. Everything in Millport was dark, cold, bedded down, except Elsie’s room with its bright lit desk shoved into a corner. It had been a strange time to talk. But then, why should Elsie have wanted to tell at all? It made Mary shiver to think of the journal in Elsie’s desk, which all this time had been collecting secrets, who knew what secrets, or whose.

  “Why are you telling me?” Mary had exclaimed. “You never tell me anything!”

  “Because you should know. You especially,” answered Elsie, as if she, Elsie, were some kind of white knight come gallantly out of the dark to protect her sister’s virtue.

  “It can’t be true!” wailed Mary.

  It was true, all right. “I saw it,” Elsie said. She had everything written down in her journal and had only to refer to Friday, the night of December 9, or Saturday, the evening of January 7, to prove the facts.

  The facts were the callers. They came to Miss Fitch’s house in the evening, six times a month, seven times, sometimes three times in one week.

  “But never together,” said Elsie. “I’ll say that for her, she’s got a neat schedule.”

  “Callers?” Mary had asked. “What kind of callers?”

  “Men, of course,” said Elsie casually. But she was embarrassed and glanced away.

  “Men?” Mary asked.

  “Mary! Get smart for a change. You know, men! Like in lovers.”

  “Lovers!”

  “Anyway,” Elsie continued, “there are at least four or five different ones. Probably more. I couldn’t always see them very well. It’s dark outside when they come, and I had to stand back. I couldn’t get too close to the window.”

  “What window?”

  “Mary. Listen!”