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something she had seen and turning it until it was torqued tight. Not snapped. Not with the air rushed out of it. But tight and telling. Telling something about living. About life.
    Until the evening last spring when she had let herself into her house and heard William Shirer coming through from Berlin on the radio that very minute, and Frankie sank down on the stairs and leaned against the banister, listening to his voice. Thin and reedy, pained, it was not at all like Murrow’s mahogany tones. But for these minutes he was speaking, all of the unseen world was carried in his breath, in his careful, calm measures across distance and time. Here was the world in a voice: what was happening now . There in the effort he made to keep his voice under control, in his broad unaccented pronunciation of the words, Führer and Herr, a Midwestern disgust slipped right by the censor. In this voice lay more than the story, more than the words. Within two weeks, she’d booked herself on the SS Trieste and come over with nothing whatsoever to recommend her into radio but a letter from Prescott, her typewriter, and her smile.
    When she saw the “studio,” however, not much bigger than a closet, equipped with a battered table and chair and a single light shining on the microphone set in the middle of the table, heavy and blunt as a murder weapon, she nearly laughed at how humble it all was. And how uncertain. You sat at the table, listening on the headphones for New York to say Come in, London , and then you flicked the switch on the side of the mike and spoke. If the weather cooperated, your voice was relayed, like a distance runner, through the British air, from the vacuum tubes through to the wires and cables and on to the transmitters, somehow emerging beneath the click and stutter of three thousand miles back out into the air, into America. Or, all of the points along the way could fall through at any time, and your voice would simply vanish into the airwaves.
    She typed Murrow’s scripts. She filled the water glasses and set them beside the microphone. She found the people Murrow needed to speak to, and brought them to him for interviews. And she did what she had always done: she walked and she listened. She walked London without a map, turning down streets toward the sound of voices in pubs and in the still-bright lights of theaters and dance halls. Hitler marched on Paris. The British pulled back to Dunkirk. Civil Defense passed out gas masks to the city. The children were sent to the country. And in the shops and waiting in line for the buses, she listened to the Londoners making flesh of these facts. “What does the grocer have to say today?” Murrow had asked her one day early on, and without thinking she’d replied, “Well, he says the sheep won’t make it to mutton if the bombs keep up like last night.” Murrow had chuckled. Two nights later, she was on the air with him, and What does the grocer say, Miss Bard? had been a hit with New York, becoming Frankie’s beat. The milkman’s struggle to keep glass bottles; the pair of men’s shoes left unmolested on its plinth in the bombed-out window of a shop, for two entire weeks, Frankie noted, as necessary in their perfect peace as the king. With shoes like this still standing, England stands. For the past six months, Frankie had roamed and gathered these scraps of life. But tonight would be a brand-new game. It was a single piece, on men in battle, and it would be all hers.
    At nine o’clock, Frankie let herself out the door and back onto the street, casting a reflexive glance upward to check the blackout curtains in her windows before heading west toward the Antiaircraft Gunnery station. When the bombing first started, the guns on the ground were left silent, the War Office betting that the RAF could better blow the Luftwaffe out of the skies. But it made everyone in the city loopy, like sitting ducks, remarked Mrs. Preston from two doors down to Frankie, us down here