Sirens and Spies

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Elsie had leaned forward on her elbows, then. Below the headline was a caption:

  “Surrounded by jeering crowds in a town near Paris, accused French collaborators are driven through the streets bearing the burdens of their shame: their German-sired infants. Minutes before, their heads had been shorn by their angry countrymen. Other female fraternizers had swastikas painted on their foreheads.”

  Only then did Elsie examine the faces of the women. She wanted to see what sorts of women would do such a thing, and why. She wanted to see beneath their faces into their minds, where hidden thoughts bubbled and churned. Were they ashamed? shocked? angry? Elsie looked at the faces of the women and saw … Miss Fitch! Recognition came like a thunderclap. Her face was younger, her scalp almost bald, but this served only to make the familiar features stand out more clearly.

  Elsie saw the thick, black hyphens of the eyebrows. (“So very French,” someone had told her once, commenting on Miss Fitch’s appearance. They had looked merely odd, rather exotic, to Elsie.) She saw the cheekbones plunging back toward the ears. She saw the long, proud neck. She knew it was Miss Fitch although no names were given.

  In the corner of the first cart she stood, leaning against the wooden side, swaying a bit. There was a swaying look on her face, too, a dizzy, half-blank expression. As if someone had struck her, Elsie thought, and she was just beginning to recover.

  And she had been struck! Elsie saw the spatter and drool of some soft vegetable on her skirt. Then Elsie had understood why she was leaning forward in that odd manner. Miss Fitch was shielding the bundle clutched in her arms against other flying missiles. Her baby!

  Elsie’s first instinct was to hide the photograph, to protect it from surrounding eyes. (Or was she really protecting her own eyes?) In the library that day she was stacking books around her, covering the frightening page with school notes before she knew what she was doing. Only later, huddled behind that barricade, did she decide to remove the photograph from the library altogether. The picture did not belong in the library, she decided. Right or wrong, mistake or not, it must be taken away, out of public view for private study.

  But to steal a book? This was no small venture. To steal was a crime and Elsie was not a criminal. To tear the picture out then, to mutilate? Elsie’s stomach churned. She sat up in her chair and surveyed the library. The chairs at the reading tables were mostly vacant. Three tables ahead, an old man in a ragged jacket licked his finger and turned the page of a magazine. Off to her left, two girls whispered together over a notebook. A librarian sighed behind the checkout counter across the room and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  Warily, Elsie opened the photograph book. The terrible picture nestled inside, black and white, clear as real life. Elsie made her decision and began at once.

  Using the edge of her thumbnail, she drew a line down the side of the picture where it attached to the binding, then across the picture’s bottom edge. The nail was too dull to cut, but it made a long furrow on the paper. Over and over Elsie worked the furrow with her nail. When its depth suited her, she glanced up again to inspect the room. Her heart thumped.

  Elsie bent her head and began to tear the photograph from the book. The noise was deafening. The old man’s head shot up. He gazed about him. She tore frantically. The photograph’s bottom edge did not part evenly. The tear left the furrow and wandered down into the print below, and up, with jagged leaps, into the picture. The page was ruined. With a last shriek of paper, Elsie freed the photograph. Then she sat perfectly still and waited to see what would happen.

  Nothing happened. No one was looking. The man’s face had dropped into his magazine again. Elsie’s hands shook. She closed the ruined picture book and placed it on the table. She tucked the photograph inside a school binder. She gathered her other books and her book bag and, rising unsteadily to her feet, she walked out of the library.

  8

  IF ELSIE HAD HAD a friend, she would have shown the photograph to her. Then, perhaps, they could have whispered over it, and made up stories about it, and laughed the shock away: “What a mystery! Is that really Miss Fitch?”

  But Elsie didn’t have that kind of friend. She meant to have one, even several. She tried sometimes. In the end, people her age always did something or said something that made Elsie shrink away from them. They were childish and disorganized—always forgetting their books in class, or losing their assignments. For their benefit, teachers repeated instructions ten times over and devised study hall rules that insulted Elsie’s acute sense of responsibility. The school was run like a kindergarten: don’t talk; don’t run; five minutes to go to the bathroom—all for their infantile benefit. And they were unreliable, muddle-headed. They thought one thing one moment and another the next. They talked behind each other’s backs. They laughed at other people’s mistakes and took no notice of their own.

  The girls Elsie knew screamed about nothing and hid around corners where they could watch the boys talking in groups. The boys shoved knowingly against each other and sneered back. To Elsie, this seemed disgusting in some way, cheap and unnatural, like the love songs that moaned from the transistor radios slung from their shoulders during recess.

  “Hey, baby!” called the boys. “Come on over here. We got something you wanta see.” Disgusting love-song talk. Elsie was embarrassed to hear it, embarrassed to see other girls saunter over, smiling queer, self-conscious smiles: “So, David. What’d you end up doing last night?” Couldn’t they see how they degraded themselves?

  “Ah! They are so young!” Miss Fitch had exclaimed when Elsie had brought the matter up one day, long before her research in the library, before the callers. “Full of youth and high spirits and not knowing yet what the world is all about. So unsure of themselves! They must make it up with loud talk.”

  Elsie understood, but she would not be part of it.

  “No. Not you,” Miss Fitch agreed. And turning to look at Elsie fondly: “You. You are as I was. Oh, what a child that was! So stern and proud and wanting all the time to be perfect. Wanting the world perfect too, I think. I’ll tell you, I wished only to get away from the others. I wished to get out.”

  “Yes!” Elsie had cried. “That is just what I feel!”

  “Yes,” said Miss Fitch, and they had smiled at each other.

  This was the Miss Fitch, the young Renee Fichet, whom Elsie now tried to reconcile with the woman in the terrible photograph. And while the two images warred in her, mind, she could not go to Miss Fitch either. She could not breathe a word to her. She could only watch her closely, gathering more evidence.

  The photograph grew large in Elsie’s mind. It obsessed her. Almost every night during the long winter she drew it out of her desk drawer to look again.

  “Accused collaborator.” Elsie knew what that was. “Burden of shame.” Elsie stared at the baby, shocked. The charge against Miss Fitch was awesome. For Miss Fitch had been like Elsie. She had said so. She believed like Elsie in perfection, in trying for the best and rejecting the second rate. She had believed, and believed now, in independence. Didn’t she live alone, supporting herself and keeping her own counsel? Elsie admired that. Quite apart from the violin lessons, the constant quest under Miss Fitch’s sharp eyes for better and then best, besides the lessons, Elsie loved being inside her house, her rooms. It was not a large house, nor was it fashionably decorated. But the house was Miss Fitch’s own, a private place she had won from the world and could arrange and live in just as she pleased.

  “Can I come sometimes? You know, just to visit?” Elsie had asked Miss Fitch shyly during the first year of her lessons.

  “But, of course!” Miss Fitch was almost too pleased, too eager. And Elsie had gone. She had studied in the strange dining room with its swooping white curtains while Miss Fitch conducted lessons in her living room. And later, they had made coffee together, a rich aromatic brew that Miss Fitch stewed in an odd-shaped metal pot, then poured, steaming, into two small elegant mugs nestled on two tiny
saucers. The mugs were white and fluted up the sides like Greek columns Elsie had seen in pictures of ancient ruins. The coffee tasted bitter, mysterious.

  “It is a very special mixture. I grind the beans myself,” Miss Fitch had told her the first time, never even asking if Elsie drank coffee, if she was allowed to drink it. At home, Elsie’s parents spooned instant coffee into cups of hot water.

  “Where does it come from?” Elsie had asked. It was what she wanted to ask about everything in Miss Fitch’s house: about the strange cuts of cheese she kept under a glass cover on the kitchen counter; about the panels of lace hung down the double doors leading to the living room; about the fringed lamp shades, the densely patterned wallpaper, the unfamiliar plants on the windowsills.

  Wherever Elsie put her eyes there was a difference. It came out of Miss Fitch and shot through all the rooms of her house, making them peculiar, a special mixture all her own.

  “But were you never married?” Elsie had asked. “Not even long ago?”

  “No. Never. Not even once. Does this seem odd?”

  “Oh, no! Not at all!”

  “Marriage was not for me,” said Miss Fitch. “Not in the cards, as they say. I had my career, you see. I moved about. I made friends, many good friends. At times, I thought, ‘Yes. Perhaps marriage.’ But then, well. It is hard to remember exactly why, but I chose not to have it.”

  Elsie had nodded. She liked the way Miss Fitch confided in her, as if they were equals, ageless.

  “I like to be on my own, too,” she had said. “I don’t have plans to get married ever. But I have plans,” she’d added hastily.

  They talked over the coffee. Oh, talked! Of people and places. Miss Fitch was extremely well-traveled. She had toured as a concert violinist with an orchestra: Europe, Russia, South America. She understood things. She knew things that people in Millport would never know. She made the world open up, and sparkle.

  “A concert violinist!” sighed Elsie.

  “I’ve had some adventures,” said Miss Fitch, with a twinkle in her eye. What adventures? Elsie was dying to hear them. Miss Fitch kept corridors of mystery around her, though. She spoke sparingly of the personal events in her life. “Ah, but life itself is an adventure,” she would say, and Elsie had understood. If she hadn’t completely understood before her research in the library, she understood afterward.

  “How did you happen to come here?” Elsie asked, in wonder. Miss Fitch had smiled and answered in her own way.

  “Who would not want to live in this beautiful country?” she said. “Everything is here: fine houses, fine people, fine music. And peace, oceans of peace. To live in a strong country, it is what every person wants. I had traveled enough. I wanted to settle down. I chose America. I knew I would be happy here, and safe.”

  Safe. Before the photograph, Elsie had known exactly what Miss Fitch meant. She had approved of her patriotic answer. Afterward … She stared at the photograph and understood nothing. Up high in her mind dwelt Miss Fitch, a strong-shining star. Down low, crept the picture. She could not put them together. She kept them apart. She watched each carefully to see what would happen next. Then, something happened.

  Elsie was late. It was an evening in late November. She had said she would help Miss Fitch in the afternoon, after school. She had promised—what was it?—to help her move a bookcase. Something. Miss Fitch needed help from time to time.

  “Living alone,” she had explained once, “without relatives nearby, I must depend on my friends to help.”

  Elsie was proud to be chosen. And she was never late. She was not like her mother who was always late. But, this time, she was kept late at school. Play rehearsal. It went on and on, not her fault, making her late. Two hours late.

  She ran up the walk to Miss Fitch’s house on the way home to apologize: “So sorry! It wasn’t my fault!”

  The living room was strangely, dimly lit. She glanced in the front window. Miss Fitch never shut the blinds. It was part of her feeling safe, perhaps. Elsie glanced in the window to see if Miss Fitch was home, and there they were, framed, still, two shadowy black-and-white forms half-turned toward each other on the couch.

  His hair was white and wavy, slippery-looking. Elsie hated him on sight—the enemy. His arm was around Miss Fitch’s shoulders. Her face was lifted to his. They clung together, and kissed, two pale ghost-bodies in the webby half light.

  It wasn’t love but information their lips passed back and forth. Elsie saw it, just as clearly as if this were another photograph in the big library book. She understood how it had been, back then and now. There was no difference. They traded secrets while around them innocent people went about their business of eating dinner, talking, washing dishes, betrayed. They were conspirators. No. Collaborators. This was collaborating! Elsie stumbled back, away from the window.

  From that moment, she was a spy. She spied on Wednesday afternoon after basketball and on Friday nights coming home late from play practice. On Saturday evenings while the other Potters watched television or played Monopoly, Elsie walked, regardless of the cold, and nearly always ended up outside Miss Fitch’s house. She gave up going to Miss Fitch’s dining room to study. She gave up violin lessons. She spied instead, through December, January, into February.

  Jimmy Dee saw her. She became another of the daily obstacles that he learned with craft and stealth to circumvent. In the waning light of early evening, in the dead dark of night, he remembered to look for Elsie’s small shape near the front of the house, and to avoid it in the same manner as he would have avoided a street lamp or a car idling at the curb. To Jimmy Dee, Elsie’s lurking form was neither man nor woman nor child nor ghost. It was danger only. Or rather, it was a shape that radiated a more intense danger than usual. He passed by and forgot it. Elsie never saw him. Her post was a tree near the middle of the lawn. She dared go no nearer.

  There were nights, many nights, when, unaware, they watched the house together. But while Miss Fitch’s solitary playing warmed Jimmy Dee, Elsie’s heart slowly froze against it. Jimmy Dee waited for the music and slunk away at the first sight of a visitor. Elsie waited for the men. Beside them, the music sounded preposterous to her, and later, demented.

  Slowly, everything that had been beautiful about Miss Fitch turned ugly. And the violin became an ugly instrument, and the act of playing became an ugly act.

  “The old witch. The fraud,” Elsie hissed to herself, over and over, outside the house. But beneath these words were others which she did not say out loud, which she only thought: liar, coward, collaborator. Frightening words. And the most frightening of all: traitor.

  9

  AMIDST SHRIEKING SIRENS, IN the glare of frantic lights, Miss Fitch had gone to the hospital. Now she returned without drama, sitting pale but upright in the hushed interior of a slow-driven ambulance. A pot of pink geraniums greeted her on the doorstep. “Welcome Home! From the Potters,” the tag read.

  Miss Fitch paused to pluck a bit of tissue from her bag. She blew her nose and went on into the house to make a thank-you phone call, to issue—“Yes. Come tomorrow. I am fine. Fine!”—an unconvincingly hearty invitation.

  How was she really? Nobody knew.

  “Tired, I should think,” said Mrs. Potter, drawing on her vast experience of recuperations. “Hospitals are nervous places. The body is well tended but the head is left to fend for itself.”

  “It’s about time she came home,” declared Elsie. “She’s been there for eleven solid days.”

  “Heavens! Has it been that long?” asked Mrs. Potter.

  “Well, she went in on Wednesday, February 28, and today, if you notice, is Sunday, March 11. That’s eleven days,” Elsie said.

  Mrs. Potter smiled and ruffled her daughter’s hair.

  “That’s my Elsie,” she said, proudly. “Always exact down to the minute. How did I, from my muddle, produce such a child?”

  Mary, standing nearby, frowned at both of them.

  “You sure have been counting days
for someone who doesn’t care,” she said to Elsie.

  “Anybody can read a calendar,” sniffed Elsie. She wasn’t going with Mary and Mrs. Potter to visit Miss Fitch the next afternoon. Two visits were enough for her. Enough for Miss Fitch too, it seemed. She hadn’t asked for Elsie again.

  “Let Mother go if she wants,” Elsie told Mary privately, later that night. “It’s Mother’s job to go. That’s what she does with her life, visits deadbeats. What would Mother do all day if she wasn’t poking into places where she isn’t wanted.”

  “But she is wanted!” cried Mary. “How can you say such a thing about Mother?”

  “Well, then,” said Elsie cruelly, “you’re not wanted. So why are you going?”

  That hurt. Mary blushed.

  “I’m going because … because … I want to,” she stammered. Elsie snorted.

  “And because,” Mary glared at her sister, “because I don’t believe one thing you’ve said about Miss Fitch. Not one thing!”

  “You mean you do believe it and you’re going to look for yourself,” Elsie replied, smiling.

  Mary fled, then. She ran upstairs to hide her face in her room. And to clench her fist and pound it into a pillow. For Elsie’s words had truth in them. Not that Mary believed Elsie’s facts. No, she didn’t. She couldn’t. But:

  “Mother? Elsie has been watching Miss Fitch and …” Mary had almost said it a hundred times during the past few days.

  “Mother? Do you think Miss Fitch would …?” Mary wanted to tell. She needed someone to think it out for her. She wanted to hear her mother say, “Ridiculous! Whatever has gotten into Elsie?”

  Mary had not told. She had gone upstairs to work on her homework instead, or she had washed her hair. (“Why is there never any hot water in this house?” bellowed Mr. Potter.)