Spying on Miss Muller (9 page)

So here we were, sixteen of us, in German II. Dolly and I sat together in one of the front rows with the other girls. The boys were spread out in back.

Behind us Pat Crow was telling how she'd seen what Pearl Carson and Michael Moran were doing last night in the shelter, and it was no wonder Pearl had gotten into trouble. Dolly and I turned, all agog. “What? What?”

“You know!” Pat said smugly. She sounded just like Ada, very advanced in forbidden knowledge.

“No, we don't know. That's why we're asking,” I said.

Dolly unbared her wired upper teeth to announce, “I know. If they were doing
that,
I know about it. I saw a fearful drawing.”

“A drawing of Pearl and Michael Moran?” I asked. “Of course not. Don't be so silly,” Pat said. “Who'd be drawing them?”

Just then Miss Müller came into the classroom. “Guten Morgen, Kinder.”

We stood politely. “Guten Morgen, Fräulein Müller.”

I could hardly bear to look at her. Honor the Fatherland, her father had commanded. He died, she'd told me. I miss him so much, she'd said. I am so fortunate to work here. You bet you are, I thought.

She gestured to us to sit, but she stood behind her desk. “Öffnet eure Bücher,” she said, which meant to open our books. There was a rustle of pages turning.

Suddenly I heard this funny little tinkling noise on the floor. We squirmed and craned our necks to look down. Two small silver beads rolled past along the floor. One hit Miss Müller's shoe, the other bounced off the leg of her desk and stopped. She bent and picked them up.

“Hat jemand diese verloren?” she asked, which meant “Did somebody lose these?”

No one answered, so she set them on her desk.

“Heute Morgen...” Miss Müller began. She stopped. Three or four more of the silver beads were rolling merrily around her feet.

“Ball bearings,” Dolly whispered to me. “Some of the boys must have brought them.”

“Wer macht das?” Miss Müller asked. Her voice had a tremble in it. She was asking who was doing this.

Again no one answered. The boys were all bent over their desks, intent on their German literature books. But someone's hand had to be down, hidden behind the legs in front. The ball bearings kept rolling past us, four, six, ten, some hitting Miss Müller's feet, some going as far as the wall and bouncing back. The room was filled with their silvery noise.

“Hört auf, bitte,” Miss Müller said. “Wir müssen mit dem Unterricht weitermachen.”

“What did she say?” Dolly whispered.

“We have to get on with the lesson.”

The little beads were all over the floor now. The boys had premeditated this, as they say in mystery books.

Miss Müller stood straight. Her face had two red blotches high on the cheekbones, and her hands clutched the edges of her desk as if to keep from falling.

“Heute Morgen studieren wir das berühmte Gedicht ‘Die Lorelei' von Heinrich Heine,” she said, not loudly enough to have been heard from behind a newspaper.

“Please, Miss Müller, will you translate?”

“This morning we are going to study the famous poem ‘Die Lorelei' of Heinrich Heine” she said. Through the flutter of a few turning pages came the uninterrupted rumble of the tiny ball bearings. The floor was covered with them, like confetti on the floor after a wedding.

“ ‘Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,' ” Miss Müller read.

Roll, tinkle, rattle. Some of the little balls stopped close to us, and when they did we gave them another nudge with our feet, sending them rolling again. Miss Müller kept on reading. When she finished, she told us more about the beautiful maiden known as the Lorelei, and about the rock that rose so high above the Rhine River, and about how the maiden enticed sailors to their deaths.

A boy's hand went up.

“Ja?”

“Is the rock still there, Miss Müller?”

“Yes, David. It is a piece of history.”

“I thought maybe now the Royal Air Force had blasted it out of the Rhine River,” David said. “Boom. Boom.” He made plane-diving swoops with his hands.

There was a gust of laughter and some clapping. Then another flurry of rolling ball bearings.

“We will finish reading the poem,” Miss Müller said.

Even through the constant metallic rattle I could recognize the beauty of “Die Lorelei,” and I thought, If I live to be a hundred and the world is at peace, I will never hear this poem without hearing also the small rumble, tumble of the ball bearings around Miss Müller's feet.

I would have felt sorry for her if she hadn't been a Nazi.

I
GOT EXCUSED
from the last ten minutes of last period, chemistry with Stinky Larrimer, so that I could call home. We were doing experiments with Bunsen burners and liquids that turned into gases with disgusting smells. The boys said they loved it, even though they were choking and coughing like the rest of us. I was happy to get away.

There were only two phones in Alveara, one in Mr. Atkinson's study, the other in Old Rose's sitting room. Our parents could ring us and leave messages or arrange for us to ring back. When we did, Old Rose was always right there, sitting by her fire, not listening to our conversations, of course. She'd never do that.

“Talk about censorship,” Ada said.

“It's one way to make sure we don't complain,” I said. “But you'd think today, after the air raid, she'd have the decency to let us talk to our parents in private.” Never. The word
privacy
wasn't in Old Rose's vocabulary. Hers or the maids'.

From outside her sitting room I could faintly hear Ada's voice talking on the phone. In a few seconds she came out and whispered, “Oh yes indeed, Mummy and Daddy. Miss Rose is being wonderfully kind to us. Everyone is. Oh yes. We were so well organized for air raid drill there was no panic at all.”

Ada pulled down on the corners of her eyes and up on the corners of her lips to make a gargoyle of her face. It was hard not to giggle. Ada looks enough like a gargoyle without exaggerating it. “I could boke,” she said, leaning over and making boking noises.

I tap-tapped on the sitting-room door and was sweetly invited to come in. As usual Old Rose was in an armchair close to her nice cozy fire, and the room had that warm, peaty smell that reminded me of home. The
Belfast Newsletter
was open across her knees, and her academic gown was folded over a footstool beside her. When it was off you could plainly see that Old Rose was shaped like an overstuffed sausage. Her legs were thin, though, and when she wore the gown she was well camouflaged.

She turned a fake-concerned face toward me. “Come in, precious. I hope you're not too nervous after last night.”

“Not really, Miss Rose.” I thought about Ian McManus. His lips had been so warm, and up close there'd been a pepperminty smell, toothpaste maybe. The ads for a certain brand said, “Did you McClean your teeth today?” I tried not to think about Ian because we had a firm belief that Old Rose could read your thoughts by looking at your face, so in her presence it was best to stay blank. She was looking at me closely now.

“Help yourself to the telephone, macushla.” Her hand waved toward where it sat on its table in the bay of the mullioned window.

“Thank you, Miss Rose.”

“Just sign the book like a good girl.”

We had to sign for everything in this place. I put my name under Ada's. Now our parents and the parents of all the names in front of mine and after could be billed for the calls.

“And please keep your conversation short, Jessica. We have a lot of concerned parents today who want to talk to their daughters.”

“Yes, Miss Rose.”

“I did speak with your parents earlier. They called very early indeed and I was able to reassure them.” Her voice let me know she felt it was really thoughtless of them to have disturbed her like that. Then she smiled again. “Of course they want reassurance from yourself.”

I nodded and dialed home, hearing the ring, visualizing the phone on the hall stand. My father's squashed cap would be hanging on the rack, the umbrellas and walking sticks would be standing higgledy-piggledy in their brass holder, the stained-glass window in the hall door would be dropping its red and green patterns on the wallpaper. I swallowed down a rush of homesickness. Just thinking of home could do that to me.

Mummy would be getting up from the fire now, complaining a bit if Daddy was there. “I don't know why we have to keep the phone in the drafty hall anyway. It would be far better in here.”

They'd been having this argument as long as I could remember. The phone couldn't be changed because of something to do with the plug.

Daddy would have the radio on. He had to listen to the prices of pigs and potatoes and grass seed, though he wasn't a farmer himself. He'd likely be listening... if he was there.

Someone picked up the phone. “Mummy?”

“Jess?” My mother's voice was warm, filled with worry. “Are you all right, love?”

“I am. The bombs weren't anywhere near us.”

“I know. Old Rose told us that this morning. Oh, Jessie, we were that bothered. We heard the German planes go over last night. The whole town was out in Bank Square looking up at the sky. Your daddy got into the car and we started off to go and get you, but the police stopped everybody on the edge of Belfast. They had roadblocks up. No one was to be let in or out of the city except emergency vehicles.” She stopped for breath.

“We were fine,” I said. “I'm sorry you were so worried.”

Old Rose had the
Belfast Newsletter
up in front of her face, reading supposedly, but the page was too quiet. I saw the big, black headline, “German Bombs Rock Belfast.” Below was a picture of houses and fire engines and people running about. There wasn't the littlest rustle of the paper. I knew Old Rose was listening to me with those big antenna ears of hers. Let me utter one wrong word and she'd pounce.

“Now, Jess,” my mum was saying, “if you want to come home and be out of Belfast in case of another raid, we'll come for you. We have enough petrol.”

She and I stood, me here, her there, the two of us listening to each other's thoughts. All the reasons I'd been sent to Alveara in the first place hummed in the space between us. There was no school near Ballylo, and enough money was coming in from the family business and something called “investments” so they could send me away to a good school.

Besides, if I were there I'd be with my father... my father who drank himself senseless every day of the week, who had to be carried from the pub night after night. Somebody was always banging our front-door knocker. “Here's the boss, missus. He's had a drop too much. I'm bringin' him home for you.”

And the click of my mother's purse opening, a half crown changing hands. “Thanks, Paddy. Very good of you.”

“Will you be needing help to get him up the stairs and into bed, missus?”

“No, thank you. I can manage.” My father limp and boneless as a scarecrow, but still gentle and loving even when he didn't know who he was or where he was.

Maybe the same scenes were flashing along the telephone wires between my mother and me, the same remembered heartbreaking words.

“Your grandma and grandpa think we should bring you back right away,” my mother was saying. “But...” Her voice got fainter. “But perhaps you're better staying where you are.”

“Yes. I'm fine here.”

Old Rose gave me a dazzling, false-toothed smile around the edge of the newspaper and said in a stage whisper. “One minute left, Jessie dear.”

I quickly asked about my cousin Bryan.

“Aunt Clara hasn't had a letter in a long time. She's awfully worried.”

And then I heard Mummy say, “No, Magnus. You don't need to talk to her at all.” And the dry slide of the phone being dragged across the hall table and silence, then the boom of my father's voice, slurred and thick. “Jessie, Jessie me darlin'?”

“Daddy?”

Old Rose's newspaper gave a little twitch. Did she know? I always wondered if she knew. I turned my back and stared out the windows at the Alveara grounds, the roll of wet lawns, the dripping trees, the darkened purples of the rhododendrons that lined the drive. Rain slanted down, thin as threads.

“I'll not have them dropping bombs on my daughter,” my father bellowed. “Do you hear me, you murdering Huns? Stay away from my girl.”

I didn't know if the murdering Huns could hear him, but surely Old Rose could. I held the phone tight against my ear and tried to curve my arm around it. Mummy and he were having words now. There were the sounds of her trying to get the phone away from him.

Then her voice. “Jess?”

“I have to go,” I said. “I love you. Tell Daddy I love him, too.”

“Hang up now, Jessie.” That was Old Rose using her most imperious tone. “We mustn't take more time than we're entitled to. We must abide by the rules.”

Old yap!

I hung up.

A turf shifted in the grate, sending a firework display of orange sparks up the chimney. At either side of the hearth Old Rose had a white china dog; their names were Gog and Magog.

“How is your father?” she asked me, sitting forward.

“He has good days and bad days,” I lied. He had only bad days. Good hours and bad hours would have been more like it.

Old Rose's little green eyes watched me carefully.

“What do the doctors say about his illness, Jessie? Will he get over it?” Once I'd hinted he had rheumatism, but I was always vague.

“It's hard to say,” I said, and backed toward the door. We always backed away from Miss Rose's presence, the way commoners do leaving the presence of a queen. Ada said it was because we were afraid of getting a knife in the back.

“Thank you for letting me use the telephone,” I said.