Sirens and Spies

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “But, Elsie. This is crazy. Miss Fitch wouldn’t …”

  “Yes, she would,” snapped Elsie. “Miss Fitch is not who you think she is. She lets people see only one side of her. She keeps the other side secret.”

  “But she’s too old!” cried Mary. “She must be over sixty.”

  “Sixty exactly. And she doesn’t think she’s old. You know the way she dresses, so flashy and flirty.”

  “I like the way she dresses!” protested Mary “I think she wears wonderful clothes.”

  “And she dyes her hair, too,” Elsie said. “I saw the stuff in the bathroom.”

  “She does?”

  “Oh, yes. You should see what she has upstairs. There’s a whole dressing table full of lipsticks and rouge and eye makeup. She has about ten different kinds of perfume and skin cream. She’s got false eyelashes, too. And false fingernails. All the stuff that women like her wear to make themselves look cheap and slinky. That’s how they get their business, you know.”

  “What business?” asked Mary. “What do you mean, ‘business’?”

  Elsie sat back in her chair and gazed sadly at Mary.

  “What do you think?” she said. She nudged her notebook with her elbow. “Look at the facts. I mean, one lover, okay. So what. Two lovers, well that’s borderline. But four, five, six? That’s a business.”

  Mary stared at the notebook.

  “I couldn’t believe it either, at first,” Elsie said.

  Mary opened her mouth, then shut it again without a word.

  “It’s actually seeing them that makes it clear,” Elsie assured her. “When you’re right there looking, you get the picture loud and clear. Now listen to this.” She turned to the notebook, flipping pages as she found and read the entries.

  “‘Friday, December 9. Man in tan Chevrolet. 6:32 P.M. New York license plates. Departs 10:48. Suit and tie. Gray hair.’”

  “But did you actually see them in there. I mean, were they …?”

  “I saw enough,” Elsie answered. “Now listen.”

  “‘Saturday, December 17. Brown, leatherish jacket. White shoes. 7:03 P.M. Blue Ford station wagon. Connecticut plates. Tall, skinny. Departs 11:26.’

  “‘Wednesday, December 21. 7:17 P.M. Plaid pants, down vest. White Rabbit …’”

  “White rabbit!” broke in Mary, nervously. “What’s this white rabbit?”

  “The car, stupid, not the person. The person was bald. And he had this kind of greasy beard. He’s been there a lot of times. He’s one of the regulars.”

  Elsie went on reading:

  “‘Monday, January 2. Blue Ford station wagon is there upon arrival at 7:49 P.M. Still there at 9:30 P.M.’

  ‘“Saturday, January 7. Fat man, smoking, black raincoat. Arrives 8:12 P.M. Plymouth. New York plates. Still there at 10:58.’

  “He was really suspicious-looking,” Elsie said, glancing up. “He kept looking around over his shoulder when he walked to the house. He littered, too,” she added in disgust. “He threw his cigar in the bushes. I’ve got it here if you want to see it.”

  Mary stared at the cigar. It was pretty grisly.

  “Well, that’s a sample,” Elsie went on. “Of course, I couldn’t be there every minute. Mother has a nervous fit when I get home late, so I didn’t always see them leave. If they did leave, that is.” She tapped her pen on a notebook page.

  “They were friends, of course,” Mary murmured, without conviction.

  “Could be. That sure would be a lot of men callers, alone at night, just for friends,” answered Elsie.

  Mary turned on her angrily then.

  “You’re a spy,” she hissed. “How could you do this? What does it prove? And anyway, I don’t believe it. Miss Fitch isn’t like that. She never even goes out. She goes to New York about twice a year for concerts.

  “Right! And that’s probably where she meets them. New York is full of creeps. It’s where Mother first started loving deadbeats. There are millions of creeps down there. She picks them up. Miss Fitch is a real charmer. You’ve seen her in action,” Elsie said bitterly. “She makes everybody love her.”

  “You’ve made this up,” said Mary. “You’ve decided to hate her so you’re making things up about her. You want me to hate her, too. That’s why you’re telling.”

  Elsie said: “Listen, Mary. I’m not making anything up. She’s a fraud, that’s all. She’s like one of Mother’s deadbeats, only worse, because she pretends to be respectable and she’s not. I know her better than you. I’ve seen all the signs. She’s a bad person. What happened to her happens to women like her all the time.

  “What happened!” cried Mary, who had completely forgotten how they had come to this discussion in the first place.

  “She got beaten up by one of the men. Maybe she tried to blackmail him or something. Maybe he just got tired of her, who knows?”

  “You saw that, too?” Mary asked in horror. Elsie, it seemed suddenly, was miles beyond her. Mary looked at her sister and she seemed like a wholly different animal, not related to her by a single cell.

  “Well, did you?” Mary asked again. Elsie had paused. She appeared to be thinking.

  “I didn’t actually see it,” she conceded at last. “I wasn’t there that night. But I know it happened. What else could it have been? Men don’t just walk in off the streets around here and beat women up for no reason. There was a reason, you can count on it.”

  “So, you really don’t know who did it!”

  “No,” Elsie agreed. “But I know everything else.”

  Mary nodded. That was true. Elsie’s notebook was full of facts. And behind the facts was Elsie, clear and practical herself, sitting at her desk under a painfully brilliant white light. Elsie wasn’t the kind of person who made mistakes. Mary cupped her hands over her eyes. Her head ached.

  Elsie began to tidy up her already spotless desk. She put her pen back in the pen holder and her journal back in the drawer.

  “Do you still want me to give this card to Miss Fitch?”

  “Well, I guess so.”

  There was nothing else to be said. Mary got up to go. It was late. Elsie’s clock read 2 A.M.

  “Why did you start spying on her anyway?” Mary asked, already resigned to whatever answer Elsie might choose to give.

  “I don’t know.” Elsie paused. “She’s French, you know.”

  “So what?”

  “She lived in a little town outside of Paris during the war.”

  “What war?”

  “World War Two, of course. The Nazis were there occupying France. She lived in this town. Her name isn’t really Fitch. It’s Fichet. She told me. Renee Fichet. She said she changed it because nobody here could pronounce Fichet. Hah!”

  Was this some kind of answer? Mary rubbed her forehead.

  “Look it up for yourself if you’re interested. The war, I mean,” said Elsie. “There are a lot of books about it in the library. You can find out things they never tell you in school.”

  Mary rubbed her forehead harder. Her head felt fuzzy, wrapped up in something. She thought of Miss Fitch’s bandages.

  “It’s interesting,” Elsie went on. “You can find out what life was like during the war.” She watched Mary carefully, as if her words carried some special meaning. Mary gazed at her blankly.

  “You can find out what some people were doing while other people were risking their lives and fighting and getting killed,” Elsie said slowly, still watching.

  Mary shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she mumbled. Elsie’s eyes flicked away.

  “No. You wouldn’t.”

  Then Elsie turned back to her desk and gave Mary her profile to look at: the small nose twitched arrogantly up at the end; the chin thrust forward; the skin stretched over her cheeks, absorbing the heavy bronze color of those strange implements ranged before her.

  To Mary, squinting into the light, it seemed for a moment that Elsie had turned into bronze, for she sat still and gleaming as a metal statue
while the shadowy room whirled around her.

  Quietly, Mary let herself out the door and tiptoed down the hall. Her own room looked cluttered, overstuffed, beside the starkness of Elsie’s. She switched off her bedside lamp and lay in bed. Elsie’s bright light had burned into her head. When she closed her eyes, its sharp point rose up and danced inside her eyelids.

  7

  ELSIE HAD NOT TOLD Mary everything. Oh, no.

  There was more about Miss Fitch. Much more. The callers, Elsie believed, were only symptoms of another terrible disease. The callers were what Elsie had expected to see (she almost could have predicted them!) after uncovering the larger, blacker secret that Miss Fitch kept hidden beneath her charm.

  This larger secret Elsie could tell no one. She could only hint: “I’ve been doing some research on World War Two in the library. In the library, you can find out things they never tell you in school.” Big secrets are hard to keep, no matter how much one needs to have them all to oneself Slowly, imperceptibly, like air from a tightly bound balloon, they leak.

  But Miss Fitch’s secret wasn’t in the library any more. Now it lay hidden, a secret within a secret, inside a drawer of Elsie’s desk. Even as Mary shut the door and passed quietly down the hall to her room, Elsie’s hand twitched and she longed to bring it out into the light again.

  But not yet. Late as it was, Elsie must first rise from her desk to stretch, to waggle a foot that had fallen asleep, to make order of the conversation just concluded; to make order of the whole day, for that matter. She was a careful person, start to finish.

  With her hands shoved deep into her jeans pockets, Elsie walked twice around the room in one direction; then, turning, twice around in the other. As she walked, all the parts of her room—the lamp and the desk, the bed and the table, the windows and the walls—revolved obligingly around her, and she thought how perfectly arranged they all were. Everything was put just where it should be. (But, there was a wrinkle in the bed where Mary had sat. She smoothed it down in passing.) Nothing was there by mistake, but only because she wanted it there.

  Elsie was glad she had told, that was clear to her immediately. She felt lighter all over. Not that she needed to tell. Certainly not. But to see Mary mooning over Miss Fitch like a lovesick dog, to watch her day after day being deceived, to be honest, it had made Elsie nervous. It was as if Elsie, by not telling about the callers, was telling a lie.

  “So there, you old witch,” Elsie said out loud, rounding the carpet a fourth and final time. She was speaking to Miss Fitch: to Miss Fitch wired up in her hospital bed across town; to Miss Fitch, wearing a horrid white turban that gave her skin a yellowish shine; to Miss Fitch, without makeup, leaning queerly against the propped-up pillows, as if she were pinned to them.

  “Thank you for coming,” Miss Fitch had said hoarsely that afternoon, trying to give Elsie a special look of welcome. Elsie had refused it by turning her face to the windows. She wanted to look, but not while Miss Fitch was watching. She wanted to see exactly what had happened to Miss Fitch, to measure its shockingness. Elsie was curious to know the details of being beaten up, and later while her mother gushed and chirped, she had stolen small glances at the plaster-cast arm hauled awkwardly up in traction, and at the limp legs under the blanket, and at an evil-looking scrape that ran up the inside of Miss Fitch’s unbroken arm.

  The scrape, being bare, appeared more dreadful than the other covered wounds. It spoke of violence and, by extension, of fear. It made Miss Fitch a victim of attack and not someone who was recovering from surgery or disease. Elsie felt a twinge of sympathy when she looked at the scrape. But she had only to raise her eyes to meet Miss Fitch’s questioning ones to freeze herself again.

  Boldly, steadily, Miss Fitch regarded her, asking without words, over and over:

  “Why? What is wrong? Talk to me!” They knew each other well enough to talk through silence. It had been one of the pleasures of their alliance. But Elsie would not talk. In the hospital, she turned her eyes away, turned her back, looked out the window.

  Now, in her late-night room, Elsie stood before her desk and her hand moved, was pulled, toward a certain drawer, toward a certain corner far back in the drawer, toward the secret she had not told Mary, the black, secret center of Miss Fitch.

  It was a photograph. Elsie drew it out. at last. She flattened it carefully on her desk, for it was shabby, creased in places, from having been handled too often. She moved it close to the light and examined it for details, as if it were a portrait whose subtle composition might hold secret meaning.

  There was a face in the photograph, but it had never yet allowed Elsie to enter. Turn it this way, turn it that, it rebuffed scrutiny. The face never changed, although at times Elsie had thought it must change, must be changed by all her looking and knowing. It was the same as the day in the library last November when Elsie had first come across the picture in the book containing photographs of World War II.

  World War II. Elsie had heard about it, of course, even before Miss Fitch. She knew it was bad. The Civil War was bad, too. (In history class, Elsie had listened to a tape dramatizing the Battle of Gettysburg: “General Meade, sir! The Confederates have broken through. They make for the ridge.” Explosions, followed by screams and groans.)

  All wars were bad, but until Miss Fitch they were anonymous too, and old-fashioned like history itself. They were a matter of dates and treaties that Elsie memorized for school tests.

  Miss Fitch’s war had no dates and no treaties. It broke slowly into Elsie’s mind as a series of stray comments that Miss Fitch tossed off during violin lessons.

  “We could not get sheet music during the war.” Or, when Elsie arrived one day eating an orange: “Oranges! Such plenty, now. But, then? Oh, then! I did not see an orange for four years. And at night? I dreamed for oranges”

  Another time, Miss Fitch began:

  “A friend I had who died during the war …”

  “How? Killed, you mean? Shot?” Elsie asked.

  Miss Fitch had brushed her off quickly.

  “No, no. Just died. She was an old woman, like I am old now.”

  “You’re not old, Miss Fitch!” Elsie had cried. They had been friends then. They had begun to understand each other. Miss Fitch understood that Elsie could not be teased or hounded, like other students, into a better performance. She had her dignity.

  Elsie learned not to ask Miss Fitch about her war. It was a subject Miss Fitch did not care to discuss, she saw. Respectfully, she let Miss Fitch’s comments pass by her.

  Respectfully, but—in the library that fall, Elsie began a small investigation. She checked out a book about World War II, read it through in her room and returned it. She took out another. She began to see how Miss Fitch’s war fitted in, how Miss Fitch herself had been part of World War II. It was exciting. France During the Occupation. The French Resistance, 1941—45. She read with increasing interest, whole Saturday afternoons in the library. And after school, hidden between the tall book shelves, she sat cross-legged on the library floor, too fascinated even to carry the books to a table. Too fascinated, and also—too appalled.

  The war was horrible. There were heroes in it, and stories of great daring. School children carried messages. Women ran secret radio stations. Men dropped by parachute behind enemy lines. But beneath the daring was horror: murder and torture and unspeakable fear. Chaos, too. Who was a friend? Who was an enemy? People told on their neighbors. Traitors collaborated with the Nazis. Whole families were marched away, betrayed by spies and double agents. There were times when Elsie, crouched in the library stacks, looked up at the long, even rows of shelves around her and let her eyes cling to them for relief. She would listen to the squeak of a chair, to the calm murmur of voices, and feel grateful for the immense peace and order in that library.

  And later, arriving exactly on time for her weekly lesson with Miss Fitch (“Order. Order!”), Elsie watched her teacher with new interest. That fall, she practiced hard on her violin. She w
as getting better, and knew it.

  “Amazing.’” Miss Fitch had cried. “You are amazing!

  This pleased Elsie as much as anything ever had pleased her.

  Then, one day in early November, Elsie found the photograph. The picture book was a large volume, rather thin for its size, but heavy. It was marked “R” for “Reference,” and could not be taken out of the library. Elsie had looked through the book several times before, and came back to it that day with a little thrill of dread. The book showed scenes from the war, and, because the pages were large, the black and white pictures were big and bold and full of detail. Elsie examined them carefully.

  There were bodies sprawled at the sides of roads, their legs flung at sickening angles. There were terrified children peering through walls blown apart by bombs. There were buildings actually crumbling, blowing up before your eyes, while people ran screaming in all directions. And there were country scenes in which every leaf on every tree was gone, blasted off, Elsie supposed, so that the trees stood about naked and frightened, pointing skinny arms to the sky.

  Elsie was turning these pages slowly when she came upon the photograph. Even then, she had nearly gone on because there seemed nothing very violent or awful about it at first. The picture showed the street of an ordinary French town teeming with townsfolk. They were everyday sort of people: mothers holding the hands of children, and men wearing plain work clothes; grandmothers in long skirts with scarves tied around their broad faces; older children running ahead by themselves, scampering ahead as children do to keep up with a parade.

  Well, it was a parade, in a way, Elsie saw. Celebration was in the air. The German armies which had occupied France for four years had been defeated.

  “Liberation!” Elsie read the headline below the photograph. “And Old Scores Are Settled.”

  She had not understood. She had stopped to look more closely at the picture.

  Two rough wooden carts—old-fashioned farm carts—were being pulled down the street by two solid farm horses. In the carts—strange—stood women. Two women in one; one woman in the second. They held babies in their arms and, what was stranger still, their hair was all shaved off. To Elsie, they looked hardly like women at all. They looked more like men, like the skinny-headed men in other photos who were prisoners of war, and whose heads had been shaved to disgrace them.