IF MISS FITCH HAD CAUGHT Elsie’s look, she gave no sign of it. She rose suddenly to turn on a lamp. The room had grown quite dark. In the hall, Miss Fitch flicked a switch that lit the porch light over the front door outside. She spread the curtains at a living room window and looked out. Now the girls could see the snow pelting slantwise across the window. Pelting, but making no sound at all. Subtracting sound, if anything, so that the clicks of Miss Fitch’s high-heeled shoes across the hall floor, into the kitchen, stood out sharp and separate.
Miss Fitch turned on the kitchen lights and came back to sit down.
“Would you like something?” she asked. “Hot chocolate?”
“Go on,” answered Elsie. The lamp light had turned her skin rosy. They all looked rosy. Mary’s cheeks were glowing. Miss Fitch was still wearing the long, transparent scarf from the trunk upstairs. It glistened in the light, palest pink, magical.
She was magical, Mary decided, watching her. Straight and still, she sat in her chair, and her dark eyes gazed powerfully across the room, as if there were something there to be controlled or subdued by a force inside her. And if there was something there (Mary glanced quickly over her shoulder), if there was something no one but Miss Fitch could see, it was controlled, Mary was sure. Miss Fitch had strength. In the lamp light, she appeared stern, almost fierce. She was no victim, Mary realized suddenly. She was not some charity case to be sheltered and plied with soup and good intentions. She did not need Mary’s sympathy, did not want her loyal heart. These were useless offerings, silly feelings that Miss Fitch rightly brushed aside because something more important was at stake, something to do with Elsie, and with Miss Fitch herself.
But what? Mary could not see it, and she was hurt. Angrily, she watched Elsie lean back on the couch, as if she knew this room well and felt a part of it. Angrily, she saw Miss Fitch lower her dark eyes to Elsie’s face, and hold them there, full of strength and understanding.
“Well, go on!” Elsie’s voice shot irritably through the room. Mary jumped.
Miss Fitch nodded. Her eyes were once more on the photograph.
“It’s of no consequence, of course, but this picture, it is backwards,” she said. “I have just noticed it.”
“Backwards!” Elsie leaned forward in surprise.
“Printed in reverse, I mean. The street curves left here, not right. My family’s house was around this corner, rather than that one.” Miss Fitch pointed. “I remember clearly now. Everything here is backwards.”
Elsie examined the photograph with a frown.
“Well, how could they have known?” she blurted out. “I mean, the people who made this book had obviously never been to your town. It looked like any old town to them.” She sounded angry, as if Miss Fitch had accused her of making a mistake.
“No matter,” said Miss Fitch. “I was trying only to put myself back there, as a girl walking along with my violin. I was a little arrogant in those days, I think.” She glanced at Elsie, smiling.
“I worked so hard, you see. Nobody, I thought, worked so hard as I did. Privately, I thought very highly of myself and not so highly of other people, who were not so serious. I prided myself especially on my clear head. I knew what I wanted to do and how I would do it. I was very organized. I made a schedule and stuck to it.” Mary looked over at Elsie. She was fiddling with a button on her blouse.
“That was before the Germans came,” Miss Fitch said. “Afterward, well, it was impossible to have plans. My music school closed up. The teachers had gone away. A year later, it reopened, but by then the trains did not run to Paris. There was a fuel shortage. People rode bicycles, or walked. I had no money to buy a bicycle. It was too far, too dangerous, for me to walk.
“I practiced when I could at home. I was angry at this war, frustrated all the time. It interrupted my life. I had planned everything around my violin, you see: my fame, great wealth, travel.” Miss Fitch smiled at herself. “I could not imagine spending the rest of my life in that little town, among all those plain people. I wanted to get away, and then, even Paris was out of reach.
“Life became harder, too. We could not buy good food anymore as the war went on. There was no meat, no butter. Everything was rationed, even vegetables. And we were cold in winter. No coal, little wood to burn. And the war went on and on. There were those who thought that it would never stop, that life would be like this forever.
“We were very poor,” said Miss Fitch, “and I was still growing. I grew out of my only coat. My arms hung out the sleeves and I could not fasten it around me very well. Too tight. Too small. You can imagine how I felt, proud, serious me, to be seen in such a coat. It is hard to think highly of someone who goes about like a scarecrow, hanging out of her clothes.
“I remember that I was wearing that coat the first day Hans came to our shop,” Miss Fitch said. “I remember that it snowed. I came home late in the snow.”
“Snow?” asked Mary.
“How strange,” Elsie added softly, glancing toward the windows.
“Not so strange,” Miss Fitch said. “Why strange?” she murmured. “Unusual, perhaps. Yes, and very beautiful that evening, a fine white veil of snow coming down over all our little town. I remember it so well. I remember …”
“Yes,” whispered Mary. “I can imagine.” And suddenly, she really could. She was forgetting her anger now, forgetting to be hurt. She was forgetting everything and becoming a part of Miss Fitch’s story.
“I remember … I remember …”
Then Elsie was imagining it, too, for Miss Fitch had a way of speaking that lured people behind her words, even cautious people who have ever an eye on themselves.
Now, as Miss Fitch talked on, both Elsie and Mary saw clearly the person whom she was describing: a proud girl in a rough coat, standing on the sidewalk in the photograph. They could see her dig her fists into her pockets and hunch against the cold. They could see her bare legs, and the snow beginning to fall, thick and heavy, just as it was falling now, outside, on Grove Street.
Only, in Mary’s and Elsie’s imaginations, the snow fell on the roofs of the shops in the photograph; on the doorsteps of the houses; on the heads of the shoppers rushing to finish a day’s meager marketing; on the shiny black boots of a German soldier who stepped, with menacing precision, up the sidewalk.
Was it then that the sound of Miss Fitch’s voice faded in their ears? Later neither sister could remember exactly when Miss Fitch had swept them out of themselves into that other, wartime world. Later, Elsie did not like to admit that it had happened.
“I didn’t forget to call Mother,” she told Mary, after Mrs. Potter had phoned hours later to ask where on earth they were,
“And I didn’t forget about the snowstorm, either,” she sniffed. “I knew it was getting bad out there. I just didn’t want to interrupt Miss Fitch.”
But Elsie had forgotten, and Mary with her. They had forgotten because suddenly they were there, right there, in the photograph.
They stood in the street beside Renee Fichet and turned their faces to the sky to catch perfect snowflakes on their tongues. They rubbed their cold knees with their cold hands, as Renee rubbed hers. They watched a German soldier go by out of the corners of their eyes, and when he had passed, they walked with Renee up the street, around the corner, to a narrow two-story house where the front door rang a bell when it opened and a man glanced up from the shoe in his lap.
“You’re late,” he said. “Your mother is worried. Come in and lock the door. We’ll have no more customers now the snow has started.”