Renee felt the forest move in close around her. She felt the night coming down out of the sky. She heard the wind walking toward her through branches, and far off, she heard the sharp squeal of a rooster, or a human voice calling, she was not sure which.
She leapt up and ran. She left him there without thinking to cover him, without a tear or a backward look. She was too frightened to cry. She ran, and as she ran, the forest shut down, black and terrible behind her. It became an evil grove of trees, then a menacing mound in the field and finally a dark smudge fading away into the night.
Inside the smudge lay the uniformed corpse of a German soldier. Renee ran away from it. She ran back home.
18
MARY AND ELSIE WERE NOT aware that Miss Fitch’s voice had stopped until they saw her rise from her chair. Then, in the new silence, they watched her walk slowly toward the living room’s front windows. They saw her stand before the windows and cradle her cast arm in her good one. From there, they followed her gaze outside. They had followed her such a distance in the past two hours that they could not immediately detach themselves. Some part of Mary continued running with Renee in the dark. A portion of Elsie stayed behind to hover over Hans’s body in the forest.
Outside the windows, a pale sheet of snow descended. This surprised them somewhat. They began to sit up, to straighten a blouse, rub an elbow, began to look around.
“What time is it?” Mary remembered to ask.
Elsie shook her head, still staring over Miss Fitch’s shoulder at the snow. The shoulder turned suddenly, came about like a ship at sea, and brought the older woman’s face to the light, so that every line, every hollow, was visible. Miss Fitch walked the length of the living room and stood before the windows at the opposite end.
“I have had the strangest feeling that I was being watched,” she said.
“What?” Neither girl could tell for a moment if this was a continuation of the story or something real, now. Elsie stood up.
“Where?” she asked.
“No, not now. What a storm this is!” Miss Fitch turned again and came toward them. She put her good hand on the back of the chair she had been sitting in.
“Before,” she said. “In recent days. Since the hospital.”
“Watched by who?” asked Elsie.
“By nobody.” Miss Fitch smiled reproachfully at herself. “It was no one, nothing, a trick my poor old head played on itself. I am fine now. Better than ever, in fact. Pull up the shades, turn on the lights, unlock the windows. You see? I am ready to come out again now.”
“Out from where?” asked Mary, confused.
“From somewhere, who knows? From being afraid.”
“Do you mean of that man who attacked you?” said Elsie.
“And him, too. Yes. Poor fellow. I see him clearly now. He was as frightened as I, and not right in the head, I think. ‘Play, play,’ he kept saying. I believe he wanted a concert in his honor.”
“But didn’t he beat you up?”
“He pushed me,” said Miss Fitch. “Or lost his balance and stumbled. I don’t know which. I fell. Then, bang, my head hit the table, and off I crawled to the phone. I was so dizzy I had to lie on the floor to talk. It wasn’t pretty, no. I bled like a pig. Look here, I have ruined the carpet.”
They followed her into the hall to stare at an ugly stain near the telephone.
“We heard you were attacked,” said Elsie, a little resentfully.
“Attacked, yes. Attacked, no. Who can say? I roll it around and try to decide. It was an incident. I will leave it there.”
“An incident!” exclaimed Elsie.
The telephone began to ring, then, as they all stood around it. And there was Mrs. Potter asking, “Where on earth?” and reporting the lights gone out at the house, an electrical wire down somewhere up the street. Mr. Potter had hauled an old propane camp stove down from the attic and was attempting dinner, a combination of noodles spiced with lima beans. (In the background, Roo was in tears.)
“We are all right here,” Miss Fitch told her. “Quite cozy, in fact. Can I keep the girls for dinner?” She glanced at Mary and Elsie and nodded. “And for the night? Yes?”
So, it was agreed. The weather was too treacherous for walking, some two feet of snow on the roads and they without their boots. It was no trouble. They could sleep in the guest room upstairs. And tomorrow?
“No school!” whispered Mary to Elsie, who was gazing fixedly at Miss Fitch, her hands on her hips.
They made dinner together in Miss Fitch’s strange little kitchen, where nothing was where it should be (she kept the sugar in the refrigerator!), and not one morsel of food came from a can. They made veal in cream sauce seasoned with thyme. Mary snipped the thyme from a plant growing in a pot on the windowsill and chopped it fine with a sharp knife. They made a salad of soft lettuce and pieces of watercress.
“Watercress?” asked Mary.
“I found it at the supermarket,” Miss Fitch replied proudly. “Imagine! Watercress in winter. They have everything there, truly everything!”
She showed them how to make a dressing in the bottom of a worn, wooden bowl: two dollops of vinegar, six of oil, a pinch of salt and mix fast with a wooden spoon.
“No pepper,” Miss Fitch cautioned. “Pepper ruins a salad. Meat likes pepper, but not these gentle greens.” She was in high spirits and tapped gaily about on her heels, just as if the forest outside of Paris had never existed, as if she had revived that grim memory only to pack it off and forget it again.
Mary rushed in her wake, smiling confusedly. Elsie watched with a serious expression on her face. She had a question to ask Miss Fitch, but she waited.
She waited until they had settled at the small dining room table, until Miss Fitch had praised the quality of the veal and applauded Mary’s salad. She waited until they had sipped (Elsie raised her glass suspiciously) a first sip of the pale wine Miss Fitch poured into glasses from a tall, green bottle.
“What is it?” Mary asked, sounding so much like Elsie in her days of getting to know Miss Fitch that Elsie frowned at her.
“A specialty of the house,” Miss Fitch said, smiling. “For tonight, to celebrate our lives, your short ones, my long one. And shall we prick our fingers, too, and run our blood together? I feel almost that we should!”
Miss Fitch laughed. She raised her glass high and looked through it. “It is a Rhine, a spatlese. A fine thing for a snowy night.” Mary stared at her, uncomprehending.
“From Germany,” Miss Fitch explained. “I have a case in the cellar.”
Elsie set her glass down abruptly.
“Who did it?” she said. It was the question she had been waiting to ask.
“Who…?”
“Who shot him?” asked Elsie. “You know, Hans. Who shot him in the forest?”
Mary glanced up, startled. “Elsie!” she would have cried, but she stopped herself in time. Across from her, Miss Fitch put her wine glass on the table and sighed. She looked at Elsie with dark eyes—with hurt eyes, Mary thought, but still she kept herself quiet, unwilling, this time, to interfere.
“I never knew,” Miss Fitch replied. “I never asked.”
“Why?”
“Because it was dangerous to ask. And because I didn’t care. It didn’t matter.”
“I see. Because it was another one of these incidents,” said Elsie. “Is that it?”
Miss Fitch glanced down. “In fact, yes.”
“Why didn’t they shoot you?”
“Perhaps they thought they had.”
Elsie scowled. She was determined to have an answer.
“Was it the Resistance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or it could have been Germans,” Elsie went on. “Maybe they thought Hans was collaborating, telling secrets.”
“Maybe.”
“Or it could have been a person from your town, someone who knew you were meeting Hans in the forest, someone who’d been spying on you and was angry.”
Miss Fitch shrugged. “Anyone,” she answered tiredly. “It could have been anyone. You decide who it was. I don’t care to think about it.”
Still Elsie would not stop.
“Someone must have known what you were doing,” she said, “because of what happened later, after the liberation.”
“People did know.”
“And when they saw you were pregnant, they knew why. And when you had your baby …”
“In July,” Miss Fitch said softly. “The baby came in July. Yes, they knew. I don’t know how.”
“And then!” Elsie continued, almost triumphantly. “Then, when the Germans were driven out, they came and got you.”
But now, Mary could stand it no longer.
“Stop!” she shouted, and her fork fell with a clatter on her plate.
Elsie stared at it, surprised, her face gleaming in the candlelight. Mary picked up the fork and placed it carefully on the edge of her plate.
“Please stop,” she told Elsie, quietly. “You don’t need to make her say it. It’s obvious what happened. It’s plain as day. You must stop, now. Some people have feelings, you know.”
Miss Fitch had spread her good hand over her eyes like a tent. Behind the hand, she nodded.
“Thank you, Mary,” she said, so simply and kindly that Mary blushed. “It was enough,” Miss Fitch said. “You are right. Quite enough.” She lowered her hand and reached for the napkin to wipe her eyes.
“Now, I am all right again,” she said after a minute. “Yes, thank you, I am fine.”
She turned to Elsie.
“If you were asking if I was sorry, the answer is no,” she said.
“I didn’t mean …” Elsie began.
“I was frightened, though. Afterward, I went away to live in Paris with the baby. I was sorry for my parents. They could not go away. My mother was an old woman after the war. She walked slowly and thought slowly. My father took care of her. They were ashamed for what had happened. We did not speak openly. I was sick of everything, sick of them. The child was sick, too. She had a …”
Miss Fitch shook her head angrily. Her hand rose to her forehead to adjust the scarf.
“I was not sorry for that, either,” she told Elsie. “In those days, nothing could make me sorry anymore. I picked up my life and went on. I was strong. I worked. I tried not to look back. Nothing is perfect in this world, I told myself. I am not perfect. They are not perfect. We contaminate each other. Let it be.”
Miss Fitch glanced up at Elsie. “Or,” she added sternly, “let it at least be understood.”
Mary stared at her fork. And even Elsie did not dare to ask another question after this. She pushed her food into neat, orderly piles on her plate and ate careful mouthfuls. After dinner was finished, she was the one who ferried the plates to the kitchen and offered to wash the dishes.
“No, thank you,” said Miss Fitch. “I never allow my guests to wash dishes.”
“But we are not guests,” replied Elsie, and she began defiantly to fill the old-fashioned sink with water.
19
THE ROOM THAT MARY and Elsie shared that night was as neat and plain as a room in a country inn. But a faint musty odor sprang from the twin beds.
“I don’t know why I keep a guest room when I have so few visitors to make use of it,” Miss Fitch remarked, showing them in. “I have thought of making it into a sewing room, but tonight, well, I am happy for it.”
“What about all your friends?” asked Elsie casually. “Doesn’t anybody ever stay?”
“My friends?” replied Miss Fitch. She gave Elsie a sharp look. “But, no. They do not stay here. They have their own apartments not far away. Most of them are boring old bachelors who need a well-cooked dinner, not a bed.” Miss Fitch laughed at herself.
“So much the worse for me,” she added, still laughing. “We elderly, single women have a poor time socially, I’m afraid.” She took the blankets from the beds and prepared to make them up with clean sheets.
“Occasionally, I’ll put up a traveler,” she went on, while Mary and Elsie stuffed their pillows into cases. “My friend Gustav from France—have you met him? No? He was with me for a week last summer. He is a dear man, a violinist, like me, and lonely since his wife died four years ago. We all knew each other in the old days, touring. Well, and what do you think? He came all the way from Marseilles to court me. Yes! It is true. He asked me to marry him!
“So,” said Miss Fitch. “So, you see, I am not completely in the pasture yet. I was quite pleased!”
“You turned him down?” Mary asked.
Miss Fitch laughed. “But of course, I am not a marriageable kind. And besides, he wanted me to come to live with him in Marseilles. Horrors!” She clapped a hand to her head to show her dread.
“He was here again this fall, one evening just after Thanksgiving. A sweet man, very lonely. I sent him away. ‘Why me?’ I cried, ‘when you have thousands of beautiful French girls under your nose in Marseilles!’ He will find someone soon. I will get a letter inviting me to the wedding. And perhaps, well, what do you think? Should I go?”
“I would,” Elsie said, solemnly.
“It has been fifteen years since I was in France,” Miss Fitch warned her. “Fifteen years since my father’s funeral. What a long life he lived, and all in that little town. I would not go there, of course. But I could see Paris again. What do you think? Would it be good for me?”
“Yes,” Elsie said. And then, with typical bluntness, she posed another of her logical questions:
“But do you have enough money for a trip like that?”
“Elsie!” shrieked Mary.
It was all right, though. Miss Fitch was laughing again.
“Elsie?” whispered Mary.
“What!”
They were in their beds, staring up at the ceiling of Miss Fitch’s guest room. Mary rolled over toward her sister on an elbow.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“What should I say?”
“Well, Miss Fitch is no traitor, that’s one sure thing.”
“Who said so?”
“She did. That’s what she spent this whole night telling us, remember? Didn’t you hear?”
“I heard everything,” answered Elsie, “including how she collaborated with a Nazi soldier …”
“She fell in love, you idiot!”
“… and slept with him …”
“But she was so lonely. He was her only friend.”
“… and how she got him killed …”
“That wasn’t her fault! It was the war. The war killed him! She was terrified.”
“… and then, how she lied about it and got caught. Got caught twice,” Elsie said, grimly.
“She didn’t lie!” hissed Mary, trying to keep her voice a whisper. “She didn’t tell anyone. That isn’t lying. She was scared. She had to protect herself.”
“It really depends,” said Elsie, slowly, “on how you look at it.” She put her hands behind her head and stared straight in front of her.
“And anyway,” Elsie added. “Why do you care about Miss Fitch so much? She was never your friend.”
Mary flushed under cover of the dark.
“I just happen to believe in her, that’s all,” she said. “I probably would have done the same thing in the war if I were her.”
“No,” Elsie answered thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think you would. You never would have gone to the forest to meet Hans. You would have lasted through that war no matter how lonely you were. You wouldn’t have betrayed your family and put them in danger, either. You care about other people too much.”
“But I can imagine …” Mary said.
“But I might have,” Elsie cut in. “I might have done all those things.”
Mary was silent.
“It’s scary, isn’t it,” whispered Elsie, “not knowing what you might do. Things get out of control, like in a war, and anything could happen. And not just in a war, but anywhere
, anytime, things could get mixed up and go wrong.”
“Yes,” Mary said. “You’re not the only one who worries about that.”
“And then,” Elsie went on, “everybody is there watching, ready to get you.”
“Not everybody,” Mary said.
“Just about. Miss Fitch wasn’t the only one who felt she was being watched. I feel that way all the time.”
“Elsie!” whispered Mary. “You were the one who was spying on Miss Fitch. You make people into enemies. You cut them off and don’t talk to them and keep secret notes that nobody is allowed to see.”
“Untrue,” said Elsie. “I’m just watching out for myself.”
“Like Miss Fitch was protecting herself, right?”
Elsie didn’t answer.
“Only, you’re really not like Miss Fitch at all,” Mary said. “She’s like me. She believes in her friends. She trusts them. And,” Mary added proudly, “after today, she knows I’m a friend. Maybe I can’t play the violin as well as you do, but I’m her friend. She needs me.
“Oh boy,” said Elsie. “One ‘thank you’ from Miss Fitch and you’re off and running. She doesn’t make friends as easily as you think. She guards herself”
“Well, at least she knows I’m on her side.” Mary looked across at Elsie’s dim shape in the dark. “At least she knows I won’t tell on her.”
“Who said I was going to tell on her?” asked Elsie.
“Or spy on her.”
Elsie leaned toward Mary. “If you ever tell Miss Fitch about that, I’ll kill you!”
“Don’t worry,” Mary answered. “I wouldn’t tell. You still don’t get it, do you? I wouldn’t tell even if you weren’t going to kill me.”
“I know.” Elsie leaned back on her pillow again. She stared at the ceiling. “I guess I wasn’t planning to kill you anyway.”
After this, there seemed nothing left to say. Both girls lay in their beds thinking, privately and sleepily, just as they used to do, years before, sharing a bedroom that was too small, in a house that was too noisy, on a street that watched and whispered and gradually fell asleep, too, in spite of itself.
Meanwhile, outside Miss Fitch’s house, the snow fell slowly, then more slowly, then ceased. It covered the roofs and dormers along Grove Street, giving the houses there the very same eye-browed look that Renee Fichet had noticed so long ago on her own street. It whitened the corroded chain-link fences surrounding the downtown factory buildings and dignified the shapes of the ramshackle warehouses.
Sirens and Spies Page 11
