by Sarah Blake
“Listen, I came over here because I had some crackpot idea of order—because a woman died in my care, I thought I ought to go where I could do the most good, help, stand in the way of more death. But you don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t stand in the way of anything.” He was so sure, it was almost electric in the dark. “You can only stand alongside.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She pulled away. It was embarrassing, this naked excitement. She’d heard it in her father’s voice at the end of too much drink. Flushed and possessed by the wine and the fervor, he would denounce some politician, or make some sweeping absurd gesture and the fire in him would blaze up, too hotly she’d feel, looking at her mother, ashamed. Too bright. Like some great beautiful boy. She looked away into the shadows. That was it. The memory of her father was coming toward her, pale and urgent, through the dark. Gliding forward on the low begotten currents of Will Fitch’s voice. Her father. Ruined sorrow.
“For the first few weeks after I got here,” he went on, “I walked into the hospital ward every day, desperate to heal, to soothe, to save. I worked hour after hour, steady, more like a miner than a man. Inching forward along the beds, taking pulses, temperatures, stitching and binding wounds. Keeping careful records. How many. Who. After a month I had worked more hours, seen more patients than any other doctor on the hall. And they would keep coming. Day after day. No matter what I did, they would keep on dying. Or living.
“And one day, I got it. I lifted my head from the child’s chest I was listening to and realized, with a shock of relief: whatever is coming, comes. That’s what holds it all together. We are all of us here in the mess. There’s no way around it. And all I am in the face of it is a single voice and a pair of hands. Not anyone’s son anymore. Not anyone’s husband. Anonymous but necessary. Vital. A Lucky Strike.”
“Listen,” Frankie snapped. His happiness was maddening. “Whatever is coming does not just come, as you say. It’s helped by people willfully looking away. People who develop the habit of swallowing lies rather than the truth. The minute you start thinking something else, then you’ve stopped paying attention—and paying attention is all we’ve got.”
“I’m looking straight at it, Miss Bard,” Will replied calmly. “You can’t stop the mess. You can’t change what’s coming”—he looked across at her—“and you shouldn’t try.”
With an impatient sigh, Frankie pushed off the floor and stood all the way up, needing to move. Needing some air, some light. She reached to refasten her skirt, which had come unbuttoned in the back, and bending to grab her crumpled sweater, she saw that the doctor hadn’t moved. Unnerved, she reached for her satchel beside him.
“If the world had paid more attention in 1939,” she thrust, “maybe we wouldn’t be sitting here in the dark, dodging bombs.”
“We’d be sitting somewhere else.”
“With your wife, for instance.”
“Yes, all right,” he agreed sadly. “With my wife.”
The door to the shelter was thrown open and the long, high whine of the all clear sounded as first light stretched through the opening. Something like a sob was rising inside her, and she pulled her satchel over her head, settling it across her breast.
“You’ve just got to get home,” she said carefully, “that’s all.”
He stood up and held out his hand. “I don’t know.”
Frankie hesitated with her hand in his just briefly, before dropping it and slipping through the knot of waking Londoners and out the shelter door into the soft blue morning. She stood a minute on the pavement above the shelter, back up in the spring air. It was a little after five o’clock. The light shifted on the street, suddenly plunging dark and then immediately bright again upon the pavement. No matter what happened, spring behaved as it always had. It was still just one morning in late May in London.
Late May in London. On her bed under the eaves at school, these would have been the words that called to mind tea parties and strawberries and Henry James, when all civilization could be contained within the blue borders of an English sky. Except for the smoking buildings and the stink of burning rubber and metal, one might almost imagine Dorian Gray, flushed and gorgeous behind one of those windows, and Mrs. Dalloway coming out onto the square. Almost, Frankie thought, noticing the hunk of mortar missing from the side of a house across the square. As if it had been bitten.
“So long,” Will Fitch said behind her. “I’ll be listening for you.”
“So long.” She nodded at him again and watched him walk briskly, singly away down the long block of Wilmot toward the busy hustle of Oxford Circus. She watched him set his hat back on his head with one hand, and watched his suit jacket narrow smartly as he buttoned it at the waist. And she could feel herself unclench as he walked away. Christ, he had gotten under her skin. What had happened to her down there? She tugged at the strap across her chest, embarrassed in the upstairs world by the force of her reaction to the doctor below. She shivered. It had just been too damn dark, too close. And his voice beside her, probing, prodding, insistent as a ghost. That American voice. Out here, aboveground, in the familiar ruin, she felt more like herself.
The doctor had gotten nearly to the end of the street. She stifled a momentary urge to call out to him, and stood a minute longer to watch him move out of sight. In the distance, at the far corner, men and women crossed the street. It looked like it would rain. A woman walked toward him from the opposite direction, carrying a baby in her arms.
Afterward, Frankie couldn’t remember, but something the woman did made the doctor turn and look at her, as though he had recognized her, and didn’t see the London taxi coming from the direction no American thinks to look, didn’t see the black, efficient machine, and stepped off the curb. Frankie took one step forward with a scream and the other people emerging from the shelter turned and all of them saw the large man flipped up off his feet and tossed into the air—where, even still, though they all saw it happen, he might live, he might not have to fall back down—until he did fall, hit the road flat on his back heavy and hard, with a sick, unmistakable thud, his body a punctured sack.
She heard a low hissing from the front of the cab. The taxi driver sat frozen inside, his hands on the wheel, the taxi inching forward toward the spot where Will had been flung.
“Stop!” Frankie ran along the street. “Pull your brake, God damn it.” She scrambled to Will and sank down beside him. His nose was broken and the bone had shot through the skin, naked and off-kilter, bleeding a steady stream down his cheek. He stared up past her shoulder at the sky. Frankie tried to wipe the blood away with her hand, but there was too much, and the mark of her fingers crossed his face. She tried to gather a part of her skirt to wipe it off, but the blood was streaking past now, covering the marks. His eyes opened and shut, and he moaned.
Frankie couldn’t see anything broken other than his nose, though beneath his breathing she heard a low persistent sigh, as if air was escaping somewhere.
“What do I do? What should I do?” The cabbie had gotten himself out of his taxi.
Above Frankie, all around her, a crowd of people stood and stared down at Will lying flat on his back, the breath wheezing in and out of him, his eyes open. Behind them, ambulance bells rang and the daytime traffic of the city honked and whirred. Even now, in a city where the number of dead had climbed into the thousands, where the rotten smell of burnt flesh and rubber hung in the air and where the exhausted grimy faces of men and women in the mornings on the streets were unremarkable, this was not. The man had simply not paid attention. It had nothing to do with the war. They couldn’t help it, they had to talk, and their voices above Frankie sounded like the wild clucking of birds.
“Get an ambulance,” Frankie cried. “Get an ambulance, someone!”
Will made a sound as though he were clearing his throat. There was blood coming from his mouth now. Frankie felt faint.
“Dear God,” the cabbie whispered.
The cabbie was trying to give her something. An envelope. She stared at him. “It was on the street, there,” he pointed. “His, I think.” She looked at the address and shoved it in her jacket pocket, and caught Will’s eyes on her.
“It’s okay,” she said to him quietly, though she knew he could not hear or answer. “I’ve got you.” And she rested one hand on his head and the other on his heart, until she felt it stop.
14 .
A LONG WHILE after the ambulance had driven away with the doctor’s body, Frankie sat on the curb, her mind scrambling backward to the earlier minutes when he was there beside her in the dark, before the air and the light and the cab. The London dawn clattered and called its way into a full morning, and the crowd that had gathered around her slowly melted back into it. Taxicabs continued up and down the street. She sat there for ten minutes, twenty, another half hour. In the tiny garden across the way the dew-heavy crown of a daffodil slipped sideways onto the grass. Someone’s baby wailed from one of the open windows. A footstep struck hard along the pavement. One of the house doors thunked shut upon the street. The blood on her skirt had dried. Finally, she stood up and made her way home.
By four o’clock, the spring day had soured and a quiet drizzle begun. Frankie woke up, her heart racing. The tired-looking pot of geraniums on the fortress-deep windowsill in her single room faced her. She shivered and sat up on her elbow. But for the geraniums, it still looked like the room of someone living elsewhere. Her heart slowed and she swung herself out of bed and sat down in front of the typewriter.
Perhaps by now the doctor had been identified, and the word had begun its journey out along the cable, through the telegraph wires, to someone in Massachusetts who would type it up and send it on. From Boston down the Cape, out to the end to Franklin, where someone else would hold the telegram, and know what it meant, and have to deliver it. And Frankie tried to imagine who would hand the doctor’s wife that piece of paper. But she couldn’t see the town, or the person in her mind’s eye, or even the wife. Just a hand holding the piece of paper, with the fact, but not what happened. She took a piece of paper from the drawer below the typewriter and slid it into the roller, then flicked the carriage lever several times until the page rolled up on the other side. May 18, she began, London.
We think we know the story, she typed slowly. We think we know the story because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories. She stopped, reading the two lines on the page. We’ve read Hemingway. We’ve read Miss Thompson and Martha Gellhorn. We think we know who will die and who will live, who is a hero, who will fall in love with whom; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right. That’s the—Frankie flicked the carriage lever three more times, rolling the paper free of the typewriter. It wasn’t going to fly, she knew it wouldn’t. Not for Murrow, certainly. But neither for Max Prescott or the Trib. What, for starters, did she think she was writing about? The Death of an Idealist? Death of a Good Old Boy? She stood up, rereading the lead. There was nothing to say. On a night when many may have died, she wanted to write about one. A man had died by accident this morning. A man who believed that despite the mess, everything added up. A happy man in the middle of the Blitz. She rubbed her eyes, thinking of Max on the other end of the line, Hell, Frankie, where’s the story?
A clot of blood released into her underpants. Then another. Christ. She shimmied the three steps over to her bureau, holding her hand between her legs so nothing dripped onto the landlady’s carpet. She reached and found a Kotex and a pair of clean underwear and fastened the one to the sanitary belt around her waist, pulled the other up, and tossed the soiled underwear on top of the blouse already soaking in the tiny sink by the door. The tap sputtered as she filled the sink higher, and then she filled a water glass and poured it around the roots of the geranium, and the chalky green smell rose from the leaves and reminded her sharply of her mother’s garden and of summer at home. Her mother would have liked Dr. Will Fitch. She put down the glass, gently. The slant view out the window gave her back slate rooftops, slick and blackened by the soft English drizzle. It was nearly five o’clock.
She changed quickly into her clothes and closed the shutters on the window. Outside, the mist clung to her hair and the wool of her sweater, making her feel safer, as though bombs couldn’t do their full damage in soft weather, which was absurd, but there it was. After two or three blocks, she realized she was getting soaked and put up her umbrella at the same time as someone across the street, the umbrellas opening like black blooms. She pushed down the handle at the cleaner’s and shook her umbrella slightly, not sure of what to say about the doctor’s blood.
“Never mind that,” said tiny Mrs. Dill, forcefully gathering the skirt and rinsed blouse into a pile. “We’ll get it out in a jiff. Hold on.”
Frankie turned around, nearly out the door.
“Yes?”
Mrs. Dill was holding up Will Fitch’s letter, which she’d taken from the pocket of the skirt.
“Thanks.” Frankie slid it into her skirt without looking at it.
The rain and the green spring had crept forward across the soaking opened husks of buildings along Portland Place. Broadcasting House always appeared to Frankie to rise up out of its surrounds like a fortress, ringed by a moat of canvas sandbags, now sprouting, Frankie saw, what looked to be grass. She pushed through the swinging doors into the lobby where the smell of cabbage seeped up from the two sublevel floors on which the studios and the shelter shared space with the kitchen. Aboveground spread the archives and offices. And the people. Frankie made her way to the linoleum staircase rising through the middle of the building. People and their voices, the short waves of laughter and hot, high speech echoed all around her. And gossip. Hello, Frankie. Hello, hello. She rose through her compatriots as though she were swimming back up for air.
“You look like hell,” Ed observed as she slipped into the office where he stood at his desk.
“Thank you, Mr. Murrow.” Frankie tried to be light, hanging her coat on top of his on the back of the door.
“What happened?”
She turned around and didn’t meet his eye. “A man was killed this morning.”
Murrow studied her. “Someone you knew?”
Frankie shook her head. “I met him in the funk hole last night.”
He frowned.
“Hell, Ed.” She blushed. “It wasn’t like that. He was American, that’s all. And he was hit by a cab because he was looking the wrong way.”
“That’s tough.”
Frankie looked up. “Yeah,” she said. “And he’s got a wife back home.”
“That’s tough,” Murrow said again, more quietly. He pointed to the chair in front of him. She sank down in it.
“Okay?” He was watching her.
She nodded.
“Look at this.” He handed her a teletype from the New York office, the excitement in his voice making her look at him quickly before reading the page in her hand. J. Edgar Hoover had just come out in print damning what he called the Fifth Column Hysteria overtaking the nation. Suddenly, there seemed to be spies under every bed, illegals hiding in every corner, saboteurs skulking in every garage. The FBI received nearly three hundred calls a day reporting suspected foreign-born spies and Hoover wanted to inject some sense into the population. This was a reversal. A year ago he’d been warning the country about b
eing careful.
“There you go, Frankie.”
She looked at him, uncertain.
“There’s the frame. Now it’s American news,” Murrow said. “Now there’s a reason to tell the story—who is fleeing Germany, who’s really on those refugee trains.”
The familiar rush of getting an assignment coursed through her, her excitement surging up and subsuming the doctor’s death. “When do I go?” Frankie sat forward in her chair.
He grinned the smile that inspired all of them to try anything he asked. “Soon as you can pack.”
“Done.”
“Good girl,” he said. “Here you go.”
She stood up and took the press pass, gaining her safe transit through Germany and France. PRESSE ETRANGÈRE was stamped across the page. Valable du 19 Mai au 9 Juin, 1941. Nom et prénoms: Mlle. Bard Frances. Nationalité: Americaine. Profession: Collaboratrice au “Columbia Broadcasting System.”
“Here’s the deal, Frankie. I’ve got you three weeks to get in, go around, and get out. It’ll take you two or three days to get into Berlin, depending on the trains, and I’m slotting you in for three broadcasts along the route to Lisbon, starting in five days from Strasbourg just over the German border in France. Choose a family for each leg of the journey, all the way from Berlin to Lisbon—that’s how this story has legs. It won’t matter what language they’re speaking because you’re bringing us along with you, you’re the eyes, the ears, and the translator, too. They’re story is alive because you’re in the train car with them.”
“Okay,” she said, hardly believing her luck.
“And I’m giving you one of these.” He pointed to the square wooden case about the size of a Victrola sitting on his desk.
“That’s what they’re calling portable?” Frankie frowned.
“What’s the trouble?”
“It looks heavy as hell.”
“It’s about thirty pounds,” he conceded. “They put it in a wooden case for you to lighten it up. The others come in steel.”