Sirens and Spies

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Good heavens! Two students of mine come to call in a blizzard. Did I forget? Did we arrange?” She patted her head in confusion.

  “Oh, no,” said Mary. “We just came. Should we have called? If we are interrupting we can come another time.” She frowned a small frown.

  “But, no! Not at all! Come in at once. You are more welcome than you know.” She smiled at Elsie, that strange child. “Come in. Sit down!”

  They floundered in, tracking up the hall with snow. Their heads and shoulders were quite white. Elsie’s dark hair turned damp and clingy the moment it hit the heat. She wiped it back from her forehead and took off her coat. How long since she’d come there? Three months? Four? Miss Fitch could have kissed her.

  “What a storm suddenly!” she cried instead.

  “Yes.” Mary removed her hat and hung it to dry with her coat on the coat rack Miss Fitch provided for her students in the hall.

  “I was upstairs and did not notice. It is coming down quite hard now, I see.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you warmer, now? Is it warm enough here?”

  “Oh, fine. Yes!”

  Elsie said nothing.

  They sat in the living room facing each other. Miss Fitch’s kerchief had fallen down over one ear. She reached a hand to adjust it, then smoothed out her skirt. She knew why they had come. She had known as soon as she’d seen Elsie, too proud and shy to come by herself. It was about resuming Elsie’s lessons and, of course, their friendship. Miss Fitch understood such things. Her own life was full of sudden stops and equally sudden resumptions. People were so unpredictable, so human. They came and went from each other’s lives, sometimes tiring of each other, then coming back together again. Miss Fitch had learned to wait, to accept. In the hospital, no. She had forgotten patience for a moment. She had written to Elsie a little desperately. She had missed her there, more than at home. A hospital will make anyone desperate. Elsie was not ready then. But, now, Miss Fitch gazed sympathetically at Elsie while her mind framed the words she would say:

  “All musicians need a sabbatical—a vacation—from time to time. No questions asked. No apologies, no. Tell me nothing. I am only glad to have you back, my dear friend.”

  “We wanted to talk to you about something. There is something we wanted to know,” Mary was saying, a little ominously under the circumstances, Miss Fitch thought. How dramatic these children were! So serious, they make it hard for themselves. Miss Fitch remembered that from her own youth. How a small thing, a tiny embarrassment, would churn and churn inside her until it turned big and catastrophic.

  Now Miss Fitch turned her eyes to Elsie’s cringing form and prepared to help her through this difficult moment. She raised her good arm and held it out to Elsie, and opened her mouth to begin. “My dear Elsie …”

  Her hand was met halfway by a folded scrap of paper. It shot out of Elsie’s pocket, between fingers which had twisted and kneaded it during the cold walk through the snow. It flew, thrust hard, to Miss Fitch’s fingers. Mary gasped.

  “You brought it?” she hissed.

  Elsie said loudly: “We wanted to ask about this picture of you. We found it at the library.” Then, she sat back on the couch and looked at her feet.

  “What is it?” asked Miss Fitch, surprised. She unfolded the photo.

  “Mon Dieu!”

  Mary couldn’t watch. This was not what she had intended.

  “Mon Dieu!”

  She had not meant to show the photograph, only to describe it in quiet words. That was the civilized way to do it. That was what her mother would have done.

  “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!” Oh, my God. When Mary looked again, Miss Fitch’s eyes were filled with tears.

  14

  “YOU MUST EXCUSE ME,” said Miss Fitch, wiping her eyes. “I am so sorry.” She brushed the tears back. Her makeup was smeared. “It is nothing, really. I am tired. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  Mary saw that she was fighting for control, and looked away.

  “I had not realized there was such a picture,” Miss Fitch said a minute later. The silence was awful. Both girls were struck dumb. Miss Fitch was not a person who wept. Mary’s face was fiery. Elsie looked at the floor.

  “Where was it?” Miss Fitch asked, after another minute had passed. “In a magazine?” She sounded more like herself.

  “A book,” mumbled Mary. “A picture book of the war. In the library. Elsie found it.” It wasn’t my idea, she wanted to add.

  “Yes, I see. I haven’t ever looked. Pardon.” She went to the kitchen for a tissue, blew her nose and returned.

  “Well! You must wonder what it is all about!” she said, trying for her old light-hearted voice. Elsie had her hard face back on again by this time.

  “Yes,” she answered coldly. “We wondered.” That was too much for Mary.

  “No!” she cried. “Not ‘we.’ ‘You.’ You wondered!” She turned to Miss Fitch. “Oh, Miss Fitch, I knew it wasn’t true! I never believed it. I told Elsie it was a mistake. They made a lot of mistakes about people in the war. The book said so. I knew you wouldn’t do something like this. Elsie believed it but not me. Not me!” Her hand chopped furiously in Elsie’s direction.

  There was a pause while Miss Fitch dabbed at her nose with another tissue. When she looked up again, it was to Elsie.

  “But you are right,” she said. “There is no mistake. This picture shows the truth.”

  “No!” shouted Mary.

  “Yes.”

  Elsie folded her arms across her chest.

  “What can I say?” Miss Fitch asked her. “There are things in one’s life that one cannot explain.”

  “That isn’t fair.”

  “Probably not.”

  “No,” said Elsie. “I mean it isn’t fair to pretend that you can’t explain, to say things are not explainable. There are always reasons, good reasons and bad reasons. It’s when someone does something for bad reasons that suddenly they can’t explain.”

  “Elsie, stop it! That’s horrible!” cried Mary.

  Miss Fitch was staring at the photograph again. “This is why you stopped your lessons,” she told Elsie.

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “And you couldn’t come and tell me all this time?”

  “Why should I? You were the one who wasn’t telling.”

  “I understand,” said Miss Fitch. “I would feel the same.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’re not like me. You never were!”

  Miss Fitch nodded, as if this insult were perfectly acceptable. Mary couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t she get angry?

  Miss Fitch was gazing at the photograph again.

  “I was so young,” she said. “Look at me. Just a child, really. Not much older than …”

  “We are now,” Elsie finished for her. “I know it. Don’t you think I know? People always say that but it’s no excuse. I’m old enough right now to know. It’s no reason. Age doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does!” shrieked Mary, but no one answered.

  “You can see things when you’re older that you can’t when you’re young. You get wiser,” she explained. Nobody said a word. Mary felt silly, suddenly; childish and out of place.

  Miss Fitch lifted her chin and spoke again:

  “It is strange, this photograph. To see from the outside what I have remembered so long from the inside only. It was a small thing really, wasn’t it?”

  Elsie stared at her.

  “Well, a cart, a crowd, some shouting—a little event, I see now. Afterward, the people, they went away to buy a vegetable in the market, or walked home to make a soup for lunch. They opened a shop for business or sat and drank a coffee in the café. Life went on for them. For me, yes, for a long time my life would not go on. It stopped just here, at this moment. Whatever I did, I did in the glare of this street. Whatever I said was drowned out by these voices. I went away, traveled, but the street followed. Oh, for a long time.”

  She stopped, and sm
oothed the wrinkled face of the photograph.

  “Now I see I must have escaped somewhere, in some place I can’t recall. It is behind me now. I can look at this picture and see how far behind it is. Farther than I’d thought. Yes, I can think about it now. But can I talk about it?”

  She seemed, really, to be asking for advice.

  “Why not,” said Elsie sarcastically. “Who’s to know the difference. Mary won’t tell. Everybody else has forgotten. What are you afraid of?”

  “Of you.”

  “Me!”

  “And of myself. Yes. Of both of us.” Miss Fitch sighed. “Elsie, I am glad you have come. You can be angry. It is better so. You will help me think.”

  “And what about me!” cried Mary. “You keep forgetting. I’m the one who started this whole thing!”

  “And Mary.” Miss Fitch nodded absently. “You will both help me to think.” But Mary could see that, for some incomprehensible reason, she was not the one who was helping. She was getting in the way, if anything, just as her violin lessons had gotten in the way, had wasted time that Miss Fitch might have spent more profitably with Elsie.

  Out of sight, Mary’s hand knotted to a fist in her lap.

  Meanwhile, Miss Fitch thought. She pushed her kerchief back and forth on her head with little thrusts. Elsie watched her carefully. She took in every thrust, every flutter of movement on the older woman’s face. She would have liked to spread her notebook on the table between them. A spoken word is a shifty thing, depending for its sense on the moment during which it is said. A day later, a year, and its meaning might have changed, reversed itself entirely to suit other circumstances.

  Elsie’s hand missed the weight of her heavy pen. She missed her desk too, so orderly and secure against confusion. By rights, Miss Fitch should have come to her room, she thought. There, Elsie could have listened and judged with a clear mind. Here, in Miss Fitch’s foreign living room, who could be sure of anything? The air itself was thick with Miss Fitch’s charm. Even the couch (Elsie was actually sitting on it!), the very same couch she had spied on through the window, was bewitched. Black and grotesque it had appeared to her from outside. Now, it seemed a rather quaint, rusty-brown old thing, worn out at the arms.

  Elsie moved uneasily upon it. She felt trapped. When she tried to sit up straight, the old cushions collapsed beneath her, drawing her down into a maddening slouch. Across from her, Miss Fitch had the advantage of a higher, hard-seated chair.

  “It was a difficult time,” Miss Fitch was saying, trying to bring up more excuses. “France was occupied, you see.”

  Elsie shrugged, but the couch smothered her shoulders. Her eyes were just level with Miss Fitch’s throat. She raised her chin an extra, uncomfortable inch, and looked up at Miss Fitch’s face.

  15

  WHEN MISS FITCH OPENED her mouth to speak again, it was not to tell a story. Mary and Elsie knew the difference at once. A story has been told before and will be told again. Its words are worn with speaking, easy to say. A story has made a life for itself, apart from real life, perhaps even safe from it. Stradivarius’s perfect ear, a dead fiddlers bad luck, these were stories. Miss Fitch’s words were not easy to say. For forty years they had traveled with her, little bags of words packed away at the edge of her memory. For forty years they had remained unspoken, hidden even from herself.

  Now she drew them out, reluctantly at first, warily, for they were words which still had power to harm her. She held them up for Mary and Elsie to see.

  “I have never told this to anyone,” she told them. “You are the first. In the beginning, there was the child to protect. After the child …” Miss Fitch smoothed the photograph. “After her, well, to be frank, I found it necessary to protect myself.

  “People are vicious,” Miss Fitch said. “It is a fact of life. They are afraid for themselves and therefore eager to condemn others. I had a life to live. Do you understand?”

  “Yes!” cried Mary. Elsie said nothing.

  “I have a life still,” Miss Fitch warned Elsie, then waited for her nod.

  “So, now we’ve made a bargain,” Miss Fitch announced. Elsie frowned. She was aware that she had given something up, but could not quite see what it was.

  “His name was Hans Loffler,” Miss Fitch said quickly, as if she wished to get the name over and done with. “He was a soldier in the German army. The child is long dead,” she added. “But this is not what you want to know. For that, I must start at the beginning.”

  And she began to tell about the war: about the German army marching headlong through Europe into France; about the fall of Paris, so quick and easy that it shocked the world; about the soldiers who came to rule over the people in Poland, in Holland, in Belgium and in France. Not only in Paris, but also in the smaller towns, the suburbs around Paris.

  It was a strange scene she described, or it seemed strange to Mary, who could find nothing in that dark, terrorized past to compare with her own life in Millport.

  Elsie, meanwhile, listened with a look of angry recognition on her face. Miss Fitch spoke of events which she knew well from her reading in the library. She spoke of governments fallen and countries disintegrated, of people confused, homeless, wandering. Elsie had imagined these fearful things already. She knew about that kind of fear. She had dreamed about it even and had felt it herself. Miss Fitch’s words frightened Elsie just as the sight of Jimmy Dee slurping soup in her mother’s own kitchen had frightened her, and filled her with fury.

  “By what right did it happen!” she might have screamed at Miss Fitch. And: “You. You! It was people like you who made it happen!”

  “The Germans came to my town,” Miss Fitch explained, slowly, hesitantly. “They nailed posters to the walls of our buildings and shops. ‘Trust us’ these posters said. ‘We come to help you.’ The soldiers did not burn our homes or shoot us as we had feared. They were polite, orderly, but they took over everywhere. They moved into the houses of those who had fled. They took over the public buildings. They bought from our shops. In Paris, not far away, they attended our theaters and ate in our restaurants …” Here Miss Fitch faltered. Her hand clenched the tissue it held.

  “Miss Fitch!” cried Mary. “Please! You don’t have to tell us.”

  “No. It is all right. Elsie must hear this, and …” She smoothed the photograph gently. “This picture brings me back. The street here is my own. If you could see just here, around this corner, you would find my house. My father kept a small shop on the ground floor. He was a cobbler who repaired shoes and also made them to sell. Our family lived above, my mother, my older brother and I.

  “When we heard that the Germans were coming, we wanted to leave. Many people left. They packed what belongings they could and went away in wagons or cars. Everyone was afraid. We were afraid. But my father said: ‘No. We will not leave. Where could we go? How could we live?’ So, we stayed. Anyway, we had no wagon or car.” Miss Fitch paused thoughtfully.

  “I was fifteen, I think. Yes, fifteen. It was early summer. June, 1940. I was a student at a nearby school, and also, twice a week, I went by train to a small music school in Paris.

  “I was very ambitious to play well, to have a great career. I remember that my father purchased for me a used violin. This violin and my lessons cost him more than he could afford, but I was wild for the music so he found the money somehow.

  “I loved my violin and practiced very hard. But for some days after the Germans came, I did not dare to play. We drew the shutters of our house and stayed inside. We tried to be quiet. We were all afraid, even my brother. He was sixteen, too young to be a soldier and angry with our parents for not letting him go to fight anyway.

  “At last, we were forced to come out to buy food, other things. Shops in the town began to open. People visited each other. My father opened his shop for business and life started up again, almost as it had been. Except, of course, everything was different. The German soldiers were there, watching us.”

  Elsie moved
impatiently on the couch. “Look,” she said, “I don’t care about all this. Just tell what happened when …”

  “I remember the first time a German soldier came to our shop.” Miss Fitch’s voice broke over Elsie’s like a wave. She was picking up confidence, Mary saw.

  “I had just come home from school and was upstairs with my mother. We heard the bell on the shop door ring and, then, a loud voice speaking very bad French to my father.

  “‘Go look!’ my mother whispered to me. I crept downstairs, quiet as a mouse. He was showing a boot to my father, pointing to a place where the sole had worn through and flapped open. My father nodded.

  ‘“Leave it here. Come back tomorrow,’ my father said, rather loudly himself so that the German would understand.

  “The soldier was very tall and he leaned over the counter looking down at my father. I had never thought of my father as a small man, but suddenly he looked small to me. His shoulders were small and weak. His face was worried and gentle. Too gentle, I thought. I went into the room and around the counter to stand beside him.

  “The German was speaking again. At first, we could not understand him. His face turned red and his voice became louder. Then, we understood that he wanted his boot fixed immediately. Within the hour. This was not possible, I knew. My father could not work that fast. I was already shaking my head, beginning to explain, when I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder.

  ‘“Come in an hour,’ he told the German. It will be fixed.’ When the soldier left, my father sat down right away to work on the boot.

  ‘“Always do what they say,’ he told me, without looking up. ‘Otherwise you ask for trouble.’

  ‘“But how will you finish?’ I cried. In the end, we helped him, my mother and I. Like a nurse at an operating table, I stood beside him holding the proper tools, running to find what he needed.

  “My brother was angry that night when he heard about the German coming to our shop, and about what my father had done.

  ‘“This is the enemy you are dealing with!’ he shouted at my father. ‘You are helping France’s enemy when you fix his boot! Next time, you must refuse. Turn him out. Let him know his trade is not welcome in our shop.’