WHY ELSIE SHOULD HAVE chosen that moment to tell about Miss Fitch, Mary could not, afterward, imagine. It was past midnight. Outside the frozen windowpanes, Grove Street slept its peaceful suburban sleep. Two miles westward, the city proper winked and blinked with lights, but they were forgotten lights, like the traffic signals that changed red, and then green, and back to red again without a soul in sight to make sense of them.
The ugly stone school buildings to which the girls would report at 8:05 the next morning were shut up. The old library nearby was dark. Farther west, across the railroad tracks, crumbling warehouses well known to such as Jimmy Dee in warmer hours lay abandoned now, frozen to the core of their creaking timbers. Everything in Millport was dark, cold, bedded down, except Elsie’s room with its bright lit desk shoved into a corner. It had been a strange time to talk. But then, why should Elsie have wanted to tell at all? It made Mary shiver to think of the journal in Elsie’s desk, which all this time had been collecting secrets, who knew what secrets, or whose.
“Why are you telling me?” Mary had exclaimed. “You never tell me anything!”
“Because you should know. You especially,” answered Elsie, as if she, Elsie, were some kind of white knight come gallantly out of the dark to protect her sister’s virtue.
“It can’t be true!” wailed Mary.
It was true, all right. “I saw it,” Elsie said. She had everything written down in her journal and had only to refer to Friday, the night of December 9, or Saturday, the evening of January 7, to prove the facts.
The facts were the callers. They came to Miss Fitch’s house in the evening, six times a month, seven times, sometimes three times in one week.
“But never together,” said Elsie. “I’ll say that for her, she’s got a neat schedule.”
“Callers?” Mary had asked. “What kind of callers?”
“Men, of course,” said Elsie casually. But she was embarrassed and glanced away.
“Men?” Mary asked.
“Mary! Get smart for a change. You know, men! Like in lovers.”
“Lovers!”
“Anyway,” Elsie continued, “there are at least four or five different ones. Probably more. I couldn’t always see them very well. It’s dark outside when they come, and I had to stand back. I couldn’t get too close to the window.”
“What window?”
“Mary. Listen!”
“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.