Spitfire Girls (7 page)

‘Will you come?'

‘Do they let outsiders into Catholic weddings?'

‘Of course!' she laughed, wishing Edith could be a member of the burial-ground race.

‘Raine Fischtal might come here tonight. I told her we would love her to join our crowd.'

Errol and Kelvin exchanged looks.

‘She would never stoop so low,' said Errol. ‘Besides, she probably carries poison pellets to put into Yankee pop.'

‘Get back to Orc, Errol,' crooned Kelvin, and at that moment Raine Fischtal appeared at the door of Fidler's, Philadelphia's only kosher Automat.

Having wandered the streets of this colonial city, Raine had asked herself if it could be possible to like another woman who was earmarked for annihilation. She had made up her mind she would have to acknowledge Edith's courage in following her and wanting to pursue the matter of the canister. Now she was here at the Automat, and without the film and just her burnt hands she felt better able to talk to the strange world around her.

‘First Orc was born, then the shadowy female; then all Los's family. At last Enitharmon brought forth Satan. Refusing form in vain!' the coloured man declaimed.

Raine regarded him blankly.

‘This is Fräulein Fischtal, everybody,' said a hushed Edith. ‘You've already met Errol – in the dark.'

There was laughter as Raine regarded the one Negro face.

‘Do I detect a slight contempt emanating from this otherwise lovely lady?' Errol asked, motioning with a flourish
for Raine to sit. She squeezed in next to Molly, who was staring at her bandaged hands.

‘Did you do that while cooking?'

‘Cook? Cook? Why is everyone always talking about cooking in this country?' Raine asked, looking around at the variety of faces.

‘Hang around a bunch of greenhorns and you'll get all the recipes!' exclaimed Kelvin, reaching across to dump Edith's dinner of potato latkes on to the table.

‘Speak for yourself, sheeny Irish,' grinned Molly. She looked at Raine intently. ‘What do you eat for dinner where you come from?'

‘I spend most of my time travelling. In hotels it is all the same, wherever you are in the world.'

The table had fallen silent. Edith poured sugar from the metal-spouted jar and pushed it around her plate of latkes.

‘Raine hurt her hands at Lakehurst. She was very brave, staying there while everybody else ran away. She has some interesting film. We watched it at the studio today.'

Kelvin was mesmerized. ‘All this travelling … have you met Lindbergh?'

‘Amy Johnson, Valerie Cobb, Stella Teague, I know all the women fliers. They come to Germany and we all meet at the clubs. My job is to photograph good relations between the Reich and Great Britain. We are one people, you know. Hitler has said so.'

‘British pilots go to Germany?' wondered Errol.

‘Why not? As I say, we are one people, the British and the Germans. There are grand meets every six months, when the best of the English girls fly about alongside our
top women – Anke Reitsch comes when she can. We had some men along this year – Jim Mollison, and an American, Gordon Selfridge.'

‘But what about Lindbergh?' asked Kelvin.

‘He's probably a Nazi spy,' said Errol.

Edith kept silent, smiling to herself.

Raine was furious:

‘You should be proud of him – he is one rare example of an American not handicapped by his emotions.'

‘Exactly,' snapped Errol. ‘All the nigger, wop and greenhorn unworthies are to be eliminated to make room for replacement babies.'

‘What's wrong with Lindbergh?' whined Kelvin.

‘Dad says he's German American Bund,' murmured Molly.

Edith intervened. ‘Come on over to my house now,' she said, grasping Raine's arm and dropping a dime on to the table. Errol rose, placing his hand at her elbow. Raine moved away, as if instantly repelled.

‘I'll walk you back,' murmured Errol, and he did.

Arriving at the handsome semi-detached house, Raine was astonished to discover that Edith was allowing this man to enter.

‘All folks here have gone to Atlantic City, leaving eldest daughter to her photography, her flying lessons and her coloured man,' said Errol.

‘He means my parents,' Edith said, smiling at her guest. ‘Do you want something to eat?'

‘Again? You have just been to eat,' mused Raine, smiling back. ‘Do you keep beer?'

‘Not only do they keep it, they have a brewery downstairs
in the cellar,' joked Errol, motioning with his long, bony hands.

They sat down in the spotless living room, and Raine took in the expensively framed drawings round the walls. She thought of recent moves in Germany to confiscate Jewish property and did some quick calculations on the basis of America's vast acreage. There had even been jokes about future canvases being made from kosher epidermis. Her face tensed as she disturbed herself with that inner paradox: how could she feel tenderness toward a potential lampshade?

Errol was speaking:

‘Prohibition never besmirched this house.'

‘My father can't live without his schnapps, or his beer,' explained Edith. ‘He dabbled in bootleg stuff, but Mom made him give it up.'

‘They bought her a piano with the proceeds,' added Errol, and Raine resumed her calculation.

‘He never sold the junk, for Christ's sake,' snapped Edith. ‘You know perfectly well we needed wine for Seders, and the crooks who brought it charged us ten times normal. Most of them were haters.'

‘Haters?' asked Raine.

Edith looked back at her sharply, on her way to the kitchen. ‘Basically, the same sort of people who won't let Marion Anderson sing for the Daughters of the American Revolution.' A moment later Edith returned from the kitchen with a bottle of beer and three glasses. ‘Are you going to let us have your film?'

But Raine had been distracted:

‘Why three glasses?' she asked.

‘Oh, you can have most of the bottle – Errol and I will have a sip each.'

‘In Germany one person has several,' murmured Raine.

‘Films?' Errol grinned.

‘Beers, she means,' said Edith. ‘Don't you realize we'd pay any amount of money Hitler wants, just to keep that footage? It's great stuff.'

Errol looked at her curiously.

‘Money means nothing to us,' Raine asserted. ‘Besides, you would twist it around to look ugly and distribute it to schools.'

‘What a wonderful idea!' said Errol, pouring the beer into the bottom of the glass, the golden liquid looking like a jigger of whisky.

‘It has big propaganda value,' said Edith. ‘People would be fascinated and if it got nationwide distribution you could afford a new camera.'

‘My equipment belongs to the Reich, my dear. Fly me back to Germany, and we can talk further. In fact, when we get there you can see my studio and perhaps I will make you a copy to take back with you. Frankly I can't believe you can fly, any more than I can believe you can take pictures.'

‘Why not?' Edith's throat had gone dry. ‘I'd want to meet Anke Reitsch when we get there. What about those other fliers you mentioned?'

‘Valerie Cobb and Stella Teague have been avoiding us recently. Anyway, English pilots have inferior capabilities.'

‘What about an immigrant's daughter?' asked Errol.
‘You'd really trust an enemy of the Reich to do a super-woman's job?'

Raine stood face to face with Edith and her words shot out like pellets.

‘I am interested to see you do all the things you say come as second nature. That day at Lakehurst, your boasting went hand-in-hand with our preconceived notions about American racial types.'

‘Yeah, well, at least she emerged with her hands intact, honey,' crooned Errol.

‘I'd love to do it, Raine, whatever the cost,' Edith said, reaching over to the German and touching her arm before rage had time to surface.

‘He doesn't believe me?'

‘It's a figure of speech. When do you want to leave?'

Raine rose, having downed the beer.

‘I need to get back tomorrow, and I would like to go first thing in the morning. There will be no cost.'

Errol was standing, and the German turned her back on him.

‘Tomorrow – Christ,' whispered Edith. She walked to the front door, wondering how many other girls her age were making such absurd rendezvous at this time of night in some corner of the new world.

‘I would have assumed your government did all your travel arrangements,' Errol said, still standing in the middle of the living room. ‘It's either a great honour for Edith, or this is some kind of crazy trick.'

‘You can torment yourself about honour and tricks until she returns.' Raine turned back to Edith. ‘At the Philadelphia airfield there will be a small aircraft ready, waiting for you
to take the controls. Please have your papers and your licence for inspection.'

‘You're the one our guys will want to inspect. Have you forgotten this is our country?' Errol was standing next to her now, his shoulders burning as he sweated.

Edith interceded:

‘Fair is fair, Raine. When we leave here, you get inspected, and when we get to Germany I get inspected. Promise me I look Aryan enough to escape a real-life version of one of those beatings advertised in your film.'

‘You will be my guest, a kind of untouchable. Thank you for letting me see how they live in this country.'

‘Don't take us as examples. We're Shabbas goyim.' She opened the front door as an ice-cream man rattled by in his van, its bell jingling in rhythm with the trolley cobbles underneath.

‘Like the German ones,' said Raine with a smile.

They stared at each other as the street outside fell silent. ‘Tomorrow, as dawn breaks.' Raine left them.

At once Errol protested:

‘You must be nuts, flying some Nazi bitch to Germany.'

‘Burt Malone will think it's great. Imagine having to ferry somebody back home just for a piece of film. Tell my parents – tell everybody, will you? I might cross the Channel and join the RAF.'

‘They don't take gals.'

‘Yes, they do. I've heard Valerie Cobb is recruiting right now.'

‘There will be a war and I will lose thee to fortune and men's eyes. I can't bear it.'

‘Yes, you can, Errol. You have to – because we're not
supposed to think certain thoughts about each other. Maybe our grandchildren will be allowed to think thoughts about each other, but we can't.'

There were no more ice-cream vans and the room went dark as Errol reached out and the one lamp left burning was extinguished.

Night had never brought excitement to her skin, and Edith knew it was necessary to have the forbidden experience before she undertook her first transatlantic flight. Her father had at one time been an elder in the synagogue and she had experienced the humiliation of orthodoxy, sitting in the upstairs section reserved for the women. Later he stopped serving, and her family stopped praying, and in their home the women prayed with the men. Seder had come and gone each year, and she had remembered the symbolic foods, not so much for the ritual but to provide answers for Christian questions. Girls from her street would be banished for dating gentiles, but now she had acquired a questioning Christian who had a fierce intelligence and was also coloured brown.

Darkness had descended on her house, and that was the way she wanted it to be, as they walked up the old wooden stairs together. One light from the Acme Market pierced the blackness and made red, white and blue streaks on the menorah atop the bookcase, as if its glow sought out the holy object for some future thief. Now Edith worried that her black poet might become the animal against whom women of all white faiths had been warned.

Why did Negroes worship Christ?

At the top of the stairs Errol put his hands on her buttocks and drew her to him, lifting her off the floor. She
was transfixed as his hardness throbbed through the clothes that covered them in respectability and which now seemed capable of burning into hot vapour, leaving them on the brink of nakedness.

Now they were on her bed and they were naked, and in a split second she thought of her sister who had shared her bed all those years and then died. It was possible to die now. Errol took her breasts between his hands and squeezed them, his tongue devouring her cleavage as she grasped his head and let her hand slip down his back. He arose and she looked, and as his mouth met her navel she fought to rid her mind's eye of the grim shammas glaring up at her in the women's section of the synagogue. She would have to push the image away because her magnificent lover had begun to kiss her tongue of frenzy which had never before been unclothed. Now she could not control guilt or her heaving thighs or the pleading penis trying to make its way inside her so relentlessly that it seemed to cry out through Errol's head, now raised above her.

Dogs barked in the night.

Errol shivered.

In the Deep South he would be dragged out into the dirt road and beaten until he bled for doing what he had just done, and if her neighbours knew why she had moaned all through this night she would be one of the living dead. Tomorrow she could leave and take her secret with her, and pray never to have to sit in the women's section again.

Philadelphia was seeing the birth of an oil refinery and on its perimeter was an airfield and its first terminal building with lettering on its side:

 

WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA
THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

 

Edith had been ashamed and had wanted to burn the sheets in the morning. Not having slept, she had wild imaginings of her parents returning and calling in police, their canine corps instantly detecting a black man's scent. She folded one sheet and pushed it to the bottom of her duffel bag. He had gone, and had left her a handsome bit of writing:

O lest the world should task you to recite
What merit liv'd in me, that you should love,
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove.
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceasèd I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O, lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am sham'd by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.