“See you then.”
An hour later on the nose there was a knock at the door. I heard Mother exclaim “Why, Miss Powell! How nice!” and the two of them yipped and yapped at each other until Mother walked her back to my room, and said, “Haley, isn’t this a nice treat? You have a guest!”
“How frightfully charming!” I said, trying to sound surprised.
“I thought I’d stop by and bring you this tea,” said Elizabeth, setting down a tin box on my nightstand. I guessed it was the Darjeeling from India. I opened it up and took a whiff of it. Your sense of smell can carry you instantly across miles and years, you know, and for a moment I was somewhere I’d never been: a tent in a high, foreign desert, the scent of nearby elephants competing with the odor of something delicious cooking in an iron pot, over a fire of fragrant wood.
“This for me?” I asked, returning to the here and now. “Wow.”
“It is, Haley,” she said. “For both of you,” she said, nodding at Mother, who practically curtseyed with gratitude.
Nobody had ever brought me anything from India before. I held the box close to me like it was some kind of religious relic. Elizabeth looked like she was trying to hide a smile. I guess around me she must have felt like Christopher Columbus, handing out mirrors and baubles to the natives.
“I can’t stay long,” she said. “I have an appointment in town.”
“You look nice,” I told her.
“Yes, I love your outfit,” Mother said.
Elizabeth looked the very model of an English lady, in fact. She wore a tweed skirt and jacket and a little hat pinned to her iron-colored curls, and a pair of white gloves. I could see Mother eyeing up those gloves, all right—it might have been the first time a woman was seen dressed like that around here. I wondered how long it would be before a pair of the same gloves found their way into Mother’s Sunday church getup. And yet you could tell that Elizabeth wasn’t trying to be fancy. She wore those clothes like they were everyday things, like housecleaning togs.
“You want to sit down?” I asked.
“Certainly,” she said.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” said Mother, not without a touch of envy—she wanted to be part of whatever we would talk about, but she could tell that Elizabeth had come there to see me, not her, and thank goodness she had the sense not to intrude. She stepped out into the hallway and went back into the living room. Elizabeth sat down next to the bed and folded her hands on her lap.
“Now,” she said, “what’s all this about Frankie?”
“I’ve really gone and done it,” I said. I told her about the snake, and the kinds of things I’d said to him, and how awful I felt about it.
“And I’m worried about him again,” I said. “It looks like his parents have decided not to move for now. But honestly, Elizabeth, they can’t live forever. They’re both heading into their eighties. What’s he going to do when they’re gone?”
Elizabeth settled back in her chair, took a deep breath and held it for a minute, like she was displeased.
“Is he really so incapable of taking care of himself?” she said, letting her breath out slowly. It wasn’t really a question—it was more of an out-loud thought. “Is he so helpless?”
“That’s what he acts like,” I said. “Because of that Fanex and everything.”
“But has he ever been encouraged to get beyond that? Or has he always been treated like he’s never going to grow older, and so he simply doesn’t grow older?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s been the same way ever since I’ve known him, which is practically forever. He’s not faking it.”
“I know that, Haley, dear,” said Elizabeth with a touch of impatience. “All I’m saying is, if Frankie were to be put in a situation where he had to rely on himself more, I think he might be equal to it—as long as he had friends to rely on in turn. Friends like you, for example.”
“Like me?”
“You would help him, wouldn’t you? If he was in trouble?”
“’Course I would,” I said.
“Even if it was something simple, like showing him how to cook, or something like that?”
An image of Frankie alone in the kitchen came to me, and I shuddered with dread. Frankie on his own wouldn’t need a friend—he wouldn’t even need parents. He would need four full-time maids.
“I suppose I could show him a thing or two,” I said.
“And do you think he knows you would do that?”
“Sure he does,” I said. “We’re always helping each other out. He saved my life when I fell through the barn roof, after all. I’ll always owe him for that one.”
“I haven’t known Frankie for very long,” said Miz Powell. “Yet he seems like one of those rare, trusting souls.”
“You’re right,” I said. “He does get worked up about things sometimes, but he’s not the type to stay mad. He’s like a little kid that way.”
“Of course, children are easily frightened,” said Miz Powell. “They often believe everything they’re told. Isn’t that true?”
Suddenly I felt like the biggest cad in the world. “Yes,” I said.
“So if you told Frankie something that upset him, yet you knew not to be true…”
“…but he didn’t,” I finished for her. I was feeling pretty sheepish by now.
“Maybe you ought to tell him you’re sorry,” said Miz Powell. “That you didn’t mean what you said.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said quietly. “You’re right. I will.”
“We have to take extra care with the Frankies of the world,” said Miz Powell. “Some may see them as burdensome, but the fact is they’re rare as white bulls.”
I didn’t say anything. Her point was well taken.
“Do perk up, Haley, dear,” said Miz Powell. “We all say things we’re sorry for later.”
I did my best to smile at her. She smiled back. Then she checked her watch.
“Do you have to go just yet?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t actually have to go anywhere.”
“But I thought you—”
“It was a fib,” she said. “A white lie. Just in case—” She jerked her head toward the door, to where Mother was lurking in the kitchen.
I stifled a laugh. Mother could drive anyone nuts. Then, suddenly, I felt shy. “Will you tell me about the old Flash?” I asked her, toying with the ratty old quilt on my bed. The Shumacher twins had made that for me, a present on the day I was born.
“The old Flash?”
“The guy you said got shot by the East Germans.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “That Flash.”
“You don’t mind me asking, do you?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Because, I was wondering…how was it you came to know someone like that?”
“You mean, someone who found himself in predicaments where getting shot by the East Germans was a real threat?”
I nodded. Elizabeth peeled off her gloves one finger at a time and dropped them into her handbag, thinking.
“Do you know what OSS stands for, dear?” she asked.
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“Back during the war, which started when I was about your age, the Office of Strategic Services was much like what the CIA is today. In fact, the OSS became the CIA after the war ended. It was an intelligence service, you see, made up of America’s best and brightest.”
“Like you?” I asked.
She smiled again, weakly. “No, no. I was only a secretary then. In fact, at first I was only a WAC—that’s the Women’s Army Corps, you know. I was attached to the Eighth Army and sent to England, where I worked in an office. But then I was…approached, as we used to say.”
“Who by?”
“By whom.”
“By whom?”
“By someone who wanted to know if I could be trusted with some special work. Someone with an interest in my linguistic abilities. I speak French, you k
now, and some German. And a little Russian.”
“Wow,” I said. “What kind of work? Spy work?” This was getting good, I thought. Elizabeth Powell in a dark cloak, dagger in hand, skulking around the shadows. Elizabeth and James Bond rocketing around in a car with built-in machine guns.
“I can tell what you’re thinking, and it was nothing like that,” she said. “It had to do with coded messages. They needed someone to help type them out and make sure they were delivered in a secure fashion. It wasn’t very dramatic or exciting, but it was important. They had to be absolutely sure you wouldn’t talk. ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ as they used to say. And I was flattered to be chosen, because in those days women weren’t often entrusted with much that was really important.”
“So you learned code?”
“Well, not exactly,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. There was a Nazi coding device called the Enigma machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their messages to each other. What they didn’t know was that we also had an Enigma machine, which we used to decode those messages.”
“And you worked on that machine?”
Elizabeth smiled. “Well, to tell the truth,” she said, “I’m still not allowed to discuss that part of it. I signed an oath, you see.”
“Wow,” I said. “Would the OSS come after you if they knew you blabbed?”
“The OSS doesn’t exist anymore, actually,” she said. “After the war I went to work for the CIA. And of course I had to sign an oath for them, too. More than once, as I recall.”
She sat there with a twinkle in her eye and her handbag on her lap, looking for all the world like the grandmother I wished I had instead of that crazy old biddy out in the woods.
“The CIA?” I said. “Come on. You were a spy!”
“I never once went undercover,” she said, “so if you’re hoping for tales of espionage and intrigue, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“What I did do, for a time, was work as a handler,” she said.
“What’s a handler?”
“This was after I’d been asked to stay in London, when the war ended. I saw no purpose in coming back home—after all I’d seen and done, even though I was still effectively a glorified secretary, life on the farm seemed like it would be the end of me. So I stayed in England, a choice I never regretted. Even though I lived there more than two-thirds of my life, I never grew homesick, and England never stopped fascinating me—it was so rich in history and tradition, and those are two things that have always impassioned me. And eventually, I worked my way up to more responsibility, and more sensitive material.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling, like the memories she was talking about were dancing around up there. “A handler is someone who deals with spies,” she said. “There aren’t as many spies in the world as people seem to think there are. Very, very few people in the CIA’s employ ever go under deep cover. But those that do have an extensive support network behind them—people to receive their messages, and to make sure they safely get in and out of wherever in the world they’re going, and to debrief them when they get home.”
“That was what you did?” I asked.
She smiled again. “I can’t confirm or deny that I actually did that,” she said. “I can only tell you that such things went on.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “Or they’ll shoot you.”
“For heaven’s sake, I doubt that very much,” she said.
“And was this Flash guy your spy? Were you his handler?”
The smile disappeared. “I can tell you we called him Flash because that wasn’t his code name,” she said. “It was his nickname. He had a different code name altogether. But that’s actually all I can tell you about him. The rest is still classified.”
“Did you even know his real name?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I worked with him for over ten years, and I never knew his real name at all.”
“That’s a long time to know someone and not even know what to call them.”
“Yes, it is.”
I saw a look of pain cross her face then, for the first time since I’d met her. It was quick, but it was there. She had cracked the tiniest bit.
“And he got shot?” I said.
“Our project was ultimately a failure, yes,” she said. Her voice was hard now.
“Did you miss him?”
Elizabeth looked straight at me. After a while I realized she wasn’t going to answer.
“Sorry,” I said. “None of my business.”
“That’s quite all right,” she said.
“Was your husband in the CIA too?”
Elizabeth rooted around in her purse for something, but I could tell it was the kind of rooting women do when they’re not really looking for anything in particular except a distraction.
“Haley,” she said. “May I tell you something?”
“Sure,” I said.
“This is a secret,” she said. “Not something I wish to be known. You understand?”
I nodded.
“I was never actually married,” she said. “To my career, yes. But I didn’t have time for a husband. I was always traveling, and the Agency didn’t exactly encourage me to form emotional ties to people. So I simply didn’t.”
“I see,” I said. “You just tell people you were married so they don’t ask questions, is that it?”
“You are a bright girl, Haley,” she said. “It’s such a pleasure to meet a young person with your perspicacity.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, thinking meanwhile that the first thing I’d do when she left would be to head for the nearest dictionary. “So—then you never had any kids, I guess. And if you weren’t married, you didn’t have any family over there either.”
“No,” she said.
“So…who is there?” I asked. “I mean, who do you have?”
Too late, I realized I already knew the answer. And she could see that I knew it by looking at me, and that she didn’t have to respond: The answer was no one.
Elizabeth and I sat for a good hour, just talking away, while I could hear Mother fluttering around in other parts of the house like a trapped bird.
“What, may I ask, is your interest in Flash?” she asked. “Didn’t you mention another fellow by that name to me, when we first met?”
“Oh, him,” I said. “That’s Flash Jackson. He’s not a real person. He’s kind of like a…I don’t know what you might call it. An idea. Or no—a philosophy. Inside me.”
“An alter ego, you mean,” she said. “A persona.”
“I guess so. It’s hard to explain. It comes out of a game me and my dad used to play, but it’s gotten bigger since those days. It means more now.”
She settled back in her chair.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
Why the hell not? I thought. She’d told me secrets, and I felt like I could trust her. Besides, Flash wasn’t really a secret. I didn’t give a crap who knew about him. I liked talking about him. So I did just that for quite a good little while, about how when I was racing down the road on Brother, imagining that I was a stuntman, I didn’t feel like chubby old Haley Bombauer, farm girl, anymore. When I started thinking like Flash Jackson I started seeing things through his eyes, and everything became an adventure. Life was suddenly dangerous, but the good kind of dangerous—the kind that kept you awake and on your toes every moment, waiting to see what perils lurked around the next corner. A dive in the swimming creek was a lot more interesting when the creek was full of crocodiles, after all.
But hearing myself talk about it made me realize that it sounded childish, kind of dumb—juvenile, to use a Miz Powell kind of word. It made it sound like the kind of game an eight-year-old kid plays to keep himself amused. And it wasn’t that at all. It was way more than that. I thought of how to explain it in a way she would understand, and suddenly I hit on a good one.
“Flash Jackson is a code,” I said.
“Do you mean a code
of honor, or an encryption?” she said.
“Both, I guess. Does encryption mean all scrambled up so no one else can understand it?”
“Precisely.”
“Then yes, it’s that. But I like code of honor, too. Not really honor—a code of living. A promise.”
“A promise?”
“A promise that life will always mean something,” I said. “That I’ll never let myself get trapped, or bored, or sucked under into this stupid small-town life. I mean, I like living here. I don’t want to leave. But sometimes the people around here drive me crazy. Why can’t a person live in a small town without being that small town? Can’t I be New York City and still live in Mannville?”
“I’m not sure I understand you,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s just the gossiping, and the boredom, and the…I don’t know what you call it, the nearsightedness.”
“Myopia,” she said.
“Beg pardon?”
“It means nearsightedness.”
“Well, do we have to be that way? Can’t we be higher than that?”
“A very good question,” said Elizabeth. “Haley, I don’t know the answer. But I do know that a girl can certainly try. She can show her spirit, so to speak.”
“I guess that’s what it’s all about, really,” I said. “Spirit. I see so many people around here just going through the motions, like. They don’t care much about what goes on in other parts of the world. They don’t care about anything, in fact. They just want to get through their day with nothing out of the ordinary happening. That’s a good day for them—a day when everything happens exactly the way it’s supposed to, and they don’t have to learn anything new.”
“Indeed,” said Elizabeth. “That’s never changed, not since I’ve been around.”
“I’m not saying a person has to travel the world to be interesting,” I said. “Although I think it’s pretty neat that you’ve done that.”
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth. “I think you’re pretty neat too.”
I kind of blushed. Nobody had ever called me neat before.
“You sound a whole lot less English all of a sudden,” I said.
Elizabeth smiled a new smile, for her—her whole face lit up, as if she was laughing with her eyes.