Spying on Miss Muller (16 page)

She stood still, not looking at him or us, rigid, like some beautiful statue. As lifeless as a vampire in a coffin, I thought.

Mr. Bolton ran a hand over his thinning hair and sighed. “She didn't do anything, you know. She did nothing to make you treat her the way you did.”

I started to say, “We didn't do anything. It wasn't
us
put the egg on the door.” But I stopped. Of course we'd done things. We'd turned against her.

“You mean she wasn't a spy?” Maureen asked.

“I was half German and that was enough,” Miss Müller said to Mr. Bolton.

Ada slitted her eyes. “Your father was a Nazi. We know that.”

“Yes,” Miss Müller said, “he was. I loved him, and I was ashamed of him. Now I'm ashamed that I was ashamed. It's wrong to feel that way when you love. Love should be stronger.” Her voice was monotonous, no note of sadness in it or sorrow.

Greta pushed past us. With a rush of her hand she swept the rhododendron to the floor. Water splashed across the bunk. “You... you Germans,” she said. “You have no right to be in the company of decent people. No right.” Her voice shook and she turned and stumbled out of the coffin room. Thank goodness I'd taken the nail file away from her. The rest of us shuffled uneasily.

Mr. Bolton touched Miss Müller's cheek. “She doesn't mean it, Daphne. She's just a little girl who has been through too many horrors. She wants to hurt back, and you are all she has to hurt.”

“And what have I been through?” Miss Müller wailed. “What have I been through?” She ran to him and he gathered her into his arms and she leaned against him as if we weren't even there.

“Come on,” I muttered, and we pushed one another out the door and down the steps, hurrying to get away from something that wasn't our world, that wasn't even in our understanding.

 

We huddled in the bathroom, unsure, talking in whispers.

“What have we done?” Lizard moaned. “What have we done?”

“He was her friend,” I mumbled. “He comforted her.”

Maureen sighed. “He loves her. Anyone can see. It was a romantic tryst, and even though he's not handsome, he almost is.”

“How did he get up to the coffin room all those times, though?” Ada asked. “You'd think Nursie or someone would have seen or heard him.” Then she nodded, answering herself. “He climbed the fire escape, of course, straight as a homing pigeon.”

Maureen sighed again. “A brief encounter,” she said.

“I wonder why they didn't get married.” I was thinking out loud.

“Teachers here can't be married to each other, remember?” Ada said. “They both would have been fired.”

“They'll be fired now,” I said, and added, “unless we don't tell.”

Lizard had her hand over her heart. “Oh, let's not. Let's promise to never ever tell.” Tears were in the corners of her eyes.

“Greta will tell,” Ada said. We looked at each other, knowing truth when we heard it.

“Should we go to her cubie right now and beg...” I began.

“You could give her the moon and she'd still tell,” Ada said. “Unless...”

“Unless?” Lizard moved closer.

“Unless you can bring back her father,” Ada said. “That's the holy only of it. And that's not going to happen. Even Winston Churchill himself couldn't arrange that.”

 

Greta told.

Miss Müller was asked to leave. Two days later she was gone. As Greta said: “There are more ways of killing a cockroach than swinging it by its tail.”

“What does
that
mean?” Maureen asked.

“It means Miss Müller might as well be dead as out of work now, here in Belfast,” I explained.

Greta stuck her hands in her blazer pockets. “I thought we were going to stick together against the dictator,” she said. “Wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?”

“She wasn't a dictator,” I said. “She was just a person. And I hope you're happy now, Greta Ludowski.”

Greta gave me one of her deep, dark, forever looks. “I'm not expecting to be happy,” she said.

The night before Miss Müller left, I heard her go up to the bathroom and I followed her and waited. “I'm sorry,” I said miserably. “We're all sorry.”

“Es macht nichts,” she said, and shrugged. There were hollows in her cheeks, and her eyes looked at me as if she'd never seen me before. Es macht nichts. It doesn't matter.

Mr. Bolton was not fired.

“It's just like what happened to Pearl Carson and the mighty Michael Moran,” Ada said. “Boys will be boys and the woman's a slut.”

But there was a difference. Mr. Bolton resigned and we heard he joined the army. We missed him too. We talked about the time he said this strange grace for about a month: “ Aut id devorabis amabisque, aut eras prandebis.” It was ages before anyone figured out that it meant “Either you'll eat it and like it, or you'll have it for breakfast tomorrow.” It had sounded so devout when he said it. We'd liked him so much for doing things like that.

A week after the first air raid we had another ferocious one. The city was almost leveled. Two hundred pounds of high-explosive bombs were dropped and seven hundred people were killed. This time we didn't have Miss Müller to blame. A month later the Luftwaffe hit Belfast again and dropped ninety-six thousand incendiary bombs. By now we had stopped thinking that going to the shelter in the basement was fun.

“Dear people of Belfast, your city is burning,” Lord Haw Haw said smugly. It was burning from end to end, from the Cavehill to Castlereagh. From the Falls to Sydenham. Our school was untouched, though, so I stayed on.

Ada's parents took her and Jack home out of danger. She's a day girl at Dungannon High now and she hates it. She says the girls are all sticks. She has already sent us tuck boxes, Marmite, and anything else she can scrounge. We've got Dolly McConnell and her teeth wires in Ada's cubie. Dolly's okay. She says she wishes we'd stop calling it Ada's room. It's her room now, but we can't seem to get that into our heads.

Pat Crow has been sent to boarding school outside Toronto, Canada. That seems the other end of the world. We're glad Ada's at least closer.

Maureen has finished her balaclava and dispatched it. She's waiting for a letter from the lucky soldier who got her work of art, and letting her eyebrows grow out. It's the new Joan Crawford look.

Ian McManus and I write letters, and we have a special hidden postbox under one of the pillar stubs by the missing front gates. I send his on to Ada after I've read them. They're safer away from the maids. I have a problem, though. Ian wants me to meet him behind the gym, where I'd have to kiss him instead of his letters. Kissing once by accident was all right, but I'm not sure I'm ready to do it on purpose.

I think a lot about a lot of things. About Bryan. Aunt Clara and Uncle Eammon had a letter from him and they are ecstatic. Uncle Eammon is keeping Bryan's Norton 350 tuned up and at the ready so the two of us can go zooming up the Sperrin Mountains to Glenshane Pass as soon as the war's over and Bryan can come home.

I think about the war and I believe them when they tell us we're winning it. A lot of people say the Americans will be coming to fight with us. We're hoping we'll see some handsome GI's; that's what the Americans call their soldiers.

I think a lot about Miss Müller and the things she said that night in the coffin room, the night we found her and Mr. Bolton. I can't forget what she said. I remember it all, word for word. “I loved him, and I was ashamed of him. Now I'm ashamed that I was ashamed. It's wrong to feel that way when you love.”

Soon it will be the long summer holidays and Lizzie Mag will be left alone at Alveara except for some of the teachers and Old Rose and Boots.

One night she and I are in her cubie. Lizzie Mag is standing in front of her mirror putting in her rows of pin curls. Farther up the dorm Maureen is warbling “God Save the King,” but she has American words that none of the rest of us know. They're on a song sheet she got in Woolworth's:

 

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty...

 

Maureen's
really
hoping!

I watch Lizzie Mag roll a curl into a little flat circle, put a clip across it. “Lizard.” I try to keep my voice steady. “Will you come home with me for the summer holidays? We can go bike riding and swim in the Moyola, and...”

In the mirror I see her eyes open wide. “But what about your daddy? Isn't he too sick...?”

I interrupt while my courage is still with me. “My father isn't sick in
that
way.” My tongue seems to be swelling inside my mouth, making it hard to speak. “He drinks,” I say. “He's drunk most of the time.”

“Oh, Jess.” Lizzie Mag's hugging me. Her pin-curl clips dig into me, but I don't care. The words are out. The dread words. I've always thought saying them would be a betrayal of my father. Saying them, having my friends know, would make me die of shame. But it isn't like that. I feel I'm in an open meadow, filled with sunshine, running free under a blue sky. “He can't seem to stop,” I say, and I try to smile. “Still, where there's life there's hope, and I love him so much. I love him anyway.”

“I know you do,” Lizzie Mag says shakily. We stand a little away from each other. “I love my father so much, too. I love
him
‘anyway.' ”

I think she's going to say more about that “anyway,” but she doesn't.

Over the summer, lying in my bedroom at home, or sitting on the bank of the Moyola, maybe Lizzie Mag will tell me. Then maybe we can talk about the hurtful things in our lives and the good things, and help each other.

“Lights out, girls,” Miss Hardcastle calls from the top of the dorm. She's our mistress now in Snow White. She doesn't come into our cubies one by one to say good night the way Miss Müller did. Instead she stands by the light switch and waits impatiently, then plunges us into darkness.

Sometimes I lie there listening to the trams clattering up the Lisburn Road, to the quad clock striking, to Maureen's endless snores. I listen for the heart-stopping wail of the air-raid sirens.

Every night I think of Miss Müller and Mr. Bolton. I imagine them married and happy, though I don't know if that will ever happen. Miss Müller is the way she was when I first knew her. She's light and laughing again, a beautiful daffodil. In my imaginings she forgives us and understands that we never hated her, that she was just the only German at Alveara.

Sometimes in the night I think I smell apricots.

E
VE
B
UNTING
has written over two hundred books for children, including the Caldecott Medal–winning
Smoky Night,
illustrated by David Diaz. She lives in Southern California.