Romeo Blue (22 page)

Love,
Flissy B. Bathburn

We had a little government brochure that told how to write to our GIs overseas. You were expected to be cheerful and jovial and not to mention anything gloomy. Don’t talk about sacrifices and shortages, the brochure said. Make jokes.

Dimples had written a letter too, even though she didn’t know Bobby Henley. But hers was very hard to
read because her handwriting was messy and she only talked about ghosts. I told her that it didn’t fit with the government brochure and she became grumpy with me and tore it up.

The Gram told me that Dimples had settled into the third grade at school quite well. The Gram had sent off a telegram to her mum all about it. And Miss Elkin adored Dimples. I could always see Dimples nipping along after Miss Elkin in the halls or sitting with her at lunch. And right off I knew Dimples went mad keen on a little boy named Stucky in her class. She found a small piece of driftwood that was shaped like an elephant and she painted it with gray poster paint. Then she wrapped it up and gave it to Stucky at school. The next day the elephant was sitting on her desk with a note under it that said,
No thanks
.

So Dimples was a bit cross that afternoon and wouldn’t go to school the following morning and The Gram had to climb a ladder and pull her out of a cupboard in the gymnasium. But she wasn’t the type to mope about for too long and before you knew it, she was racing round the house again.

But she kept after me about Wink. She really wanted to see him again. On Saturday morning Derek and I were gathering up laundry. We were dragging baskets of sheets into the laundry room. Most of the time we couldn’t get Dimples to help.

When we were piling cotton pillowcases on the ironing board, I remembered the invisible-ink letter that
Derek and I had ironed in here. I wondered if the person we saw on the porch in the darkness recently was another agent. Derek was standing so close to me, I could hear him breathing. I loved the sound of it. Perhaps it was dreadfully strange but I loved even the gruffness about him. I wanted to tell him that I still cared for him. I wanted to say so many things. “Derek,” I began, “I …”

Just then Dimples pushed into the laundry room. She was dancing and laughing and singing her “Wink song,” which I’d heard before in Selsey. But she hadn’t sung that song at all since she had been in Bottlebay.

“Wink is woolly brown with spice.

His bearlike heart is awfully nice.

Wink loves winter sun and snow.

He has a happy, fuzzy glow.”

I looked up, rather startled. “Dimples,” I said. “Is that Wink you are holding in your arms? It is, isn’t it? You’ve got Wink! Now, how did you get him out of the tower room?”

Dimples looked quite cheerful and she gave Wink a great kiss on his smashed-up nose. He was wearing his old overcoat and his wool sweater. “Oh, he’s lovely, Felicity. He’s every bit as friendly as I remembered him,” she said.

“Dimples, how did you get him?” I said. “The tower door was locked.”

“I know,” she said. “Well, I just had to get the key and I did and I opened the door and got Wink out. He smells lovely, doesn’t he?”

“Where did you get that key, Dimples? It wasn’t on the hook in the library anymore.”

“Oh, well, I found it quite easily, didn’t I?” she said, pushing up the sleeves of her raggedy dress. “The key was taped into the back of a book,
The Secret Garden
, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It’s a jolly good book and I know you’ve read it eight times, Flissy Bee Bee, but
I’m
reading it for the first time.”

“Well,
I
won’t be reading it again,” I said but in my heart I felt a little tug, because I rather missed reading that book.

Later I became a bit blue as I watched Derek, tall and gruff, bringing in a load of wood for the stove. I wished I’d had a chance to talk to him alone. And seeing Dimples with
The Secret Garden
made me remember all the times my daddy-uncle read aloud to me from that book, before I got too old for all that sort of thing. I so hoped he was safe, wherever he was.

But as the weeks stretched on and on and we had not heard from my father at all, I worried more and more about everyone. And The Gram was stewing too. I could tell by the way she did things, even little things, like knitting. One moment her needles would be clicking along like lightning and then those needles would freeze, stop cold for no reason and The Gram would stare at the empty air, looking still and distant, like a stark tree in winter.

Today as we were knitting away on our wool socks for the soldiers, Dimples said, “My mum’s working now. You want to know what she does?”

“Oh,” I said, “Dimples, are you supposed to say what she does?”

“I don’t give a toss. She’s working at a factory, making parts for bombers. Halifax bombers!”

“You’re not to say that, Dimples,” I said.

“She sent me off with the others ’cause she had to work at night and because they bombed Coventry in West Midlands, the Jerries did. It was all rubbish afterwards and heaps of brick from the cottages,” said Dimples.

“You shouldn’t say
Jerries
,” I said. “It isn’t polite.”

“Well, Dimples, I’ve gotten to know your mother through all this and I think she is very caring and loyal and responsible. A wonderful mother!” said The Gram. She then smoothed my hair and leaned her head against mine and looked out towards the ocean.

I suddenly wanted to shout out, “Is my mum caring and loyal and responsible? Do I have a wonderful mum too?” Why had she left me for so long? Why hadn’t she explained things to me? What would happen when Gideon came to rescue her? And then I closed my eyes and everything nagged at me, like a dark bird caught in a room, trying to get out by flying at the walls, bumping at them over and over again.

Later that afternoon I was having a little tea party for Dimples in the dining room to cheer her up because she had a nightmare last night. She woke up screaming and was all red and sweaty. The Gram had come in to comfort her. In the morning Dimples said, “I didn’t have a bad dream, Felicity. I was faking.” Well, she got herself a tea party out of the deal anyway.

Just as I was pouring out tea from a little child’s teapot that we found in a glass cupboard, The Gram walked into the room. She handed me another letter. Dimples was a bit of a crosspatch then because I was getting all the mail these days.

The envelope said the letter came from New York City. I opened it quickly. Was it from my father? The inside said:

Derek and Fliss,

I think Captain Bathburn has something to say to you! Have a look, won’t you?

I studied the card carefully. Yes, it was Gideon’s handwriting.

The way The Gram watched me reading it, I could tell she knew my father had written the card before he left and that a secretary at Mr. Stephenson’s office in New York had mailed it. The card was dated properly, as if planned ahead. On the front was a picture of Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny on a sailing ship.

Even though I knew my father had written it before he left and I didn’t understand what he meant by the words he wrote, I still felt joyous to have the note from him in my hands and to remember when he had taken me and Derek to see
Bambi
at the movie theater last year. Bugs Bunny cartoons were played at the intermission. But at the same time I was suddenly filled with anxiousness, as if the gates had been opened up farther and all the worry in the world had flooded in like rushing water.

When Derek saw the card, he said, “That’s Gideon for you. Perhaps we should have a peek at the painting of Captain Bathburn.”

So we went into the dining room and looked up close at the captain staring out at us with his green, finely
painted eyes. Derek checked behind the painting and there was a little tag hanging from the wire. It said:

Derek and Fliss,

I shall miss you both terribly. But please know you can depend on me. No matter where I am, I will always love you.

All of January and February the snow whirled and whined and washed and whittled at our windows. We huddled near the fireplace in the parlor or by the stove in the dining room because coal was hard to get for the old furnace and we ran the furnace only on the worst days to keep our pipes from freezing.

Derek and I tried all winter to keep track of the war. After
The Shadow
was on the wireless, there was usually a news broadcast. There had been victories in North Africa before Christmas and then some setbacks after that. Mr. Henley had been stationed, we thought, in Morocco. In his last letter he had included a photograph of himself wearing a kind of turban and a long, flowing cloak on his day off. But now we decided he had been transferred somewhere else because we had not heard from him in a while.

On Valentine’s Day I got fourteen crumpled valentines from Dimples. She’d made them all herself. They were mostly all of ghosts walking among heart-shaped flowers.

I had hoped and hoped and waited, but I did not receive a valentine from Derek. I had made one for
him
that said,
Derek, I still love you. Do you still love me?
But of course, I had torn it up at the last minute and I had thrown the scraps in the cold woodstove.

Though later when I opened the stove to light it, Dimples said, “Is that a sad, torn-up valentine in there? Oh, it looks so lonely. I should like to paste it back together.” Well, I threw a match quickly into the stove and that was the end of it.

Just before supper on Valentine’s Day, the phone rang. I made a great dash and beat Dimples to it by a long margin.

“Hello,” I said. “This is the Bathburn residence. To whom am I speaking?”

“Sweetest!” Aunt Miami said over the telephone. “Happy Valentine’s Day. How are things going at the old homestead? Oh, I do miss it so, in a way.”

“Will you be coming home soon?” I said.

“Well, they say things are turning around for the war. Perhaps if we win and the war ends. In North Africa, where Bobby is, they are winning some of the time against the Germans. There was a big battle that Bobby was a part of. He sent me a terrific poem. Have you heard from him? I haven’t had a letter in weeks and he usually sends me one a day. And there was no valentine.”

“No,” I said, “we haven’t had a letter in a fortnight.”

“I am worried about that. Are you worried, Flissy McBee?” said Auntie.

“Oh, not at all. But guess what? Derek gets to order a pair of Sky Rider shoes. They give you a free model airplane with them,” I said. And then later, after we hung
up, I felt a bit dreadful because I had stretched the truth about not being worried.

Russia was the front Derek was most interested in. There was a miserable fight that lasted months over the great Russian city Stalingrad and the surrounding area, and finally on February 2, the German general Paulus and his troops were cut off, cornered, and had to surrender. Over ninety thousand German troops were taken prisoner. It was a great victory for the Allies and in the next few weeks the newspapers were full of stories about it.

The Gram and I stood out on the porch for a moment on a cold windy day at the end of February. A Coast Guard boat was cruising the shoreline, always keeping watch. A coastie even waved at us and called out, “Helen, did you hear about that German general who surrendered in Russia?”

I think The Gram smiled for a moment before she wrapped her coat closely round her. Then she tilted her head against her woolen scarf, as if looking for comfort in the soft weave.