Romeo Blue (32 page)

“Yeah and then his mother wrote a letter to his captain and told him her son’s true age. They sent that kid right home with an honorable discharge after that! His name was Olen English.”

We all started laughing and talking about that and I forgot Mr. Henley and my father and Danny. They disappeared as if in a draft of warm picnic air and we chattered away, eating the potato salad and macaroni salad and slabs of Spam. Everything tasted salty and sweet and I felt normal and light for a moment. And then in a wave it would all come back to me. I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. But it was. Mr. Henley. Postman Henley. Bobby Henley had died on Valentine’s Day.

After the picnic we walked by his house. A sign that read
HENLEY’S HAVEN
was still in his front yard. I could not believe his house could still be here and we could still be here and yet Mr. Henley was gone. Where did he go? How could he have vanished? How was that possible? There seemed no reason for his death.

I did not want to leave his house and we sat on his steps for a long time. I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave and finally Derek pulled at me and so did Dimples. They almost dragged me away from Mr. Henley’s house.

“Mr. Henley will forever be remembered in the argyles of time,” said Dimples quite loudly as all three of us walked back along the downtown street in Bottlebay.

“That doesn’t sound right, Dimples. Argyles are
socks,” said Derek. “Socks with a pattern, like the ones The Gram knits.”

“No,” said Dimples. “In Selsey, by the sea, where I live with my mum, they say ‘the argyles of time.’”

“I think they say the ‘annals of time,’ Dimples,” said Derek. “Mr. Henley will be remembered forever in the annals of time. And you’re right. He will be.”

Dimples got very cross then. She ran off into the five-and-dime and I rushed in after her. I couldn’t find her for a while and then she turned up in the paper-doll section. When I finally got her back outside, Derek had disappeared. I looked all up and down the street and then towards the harbor where the little lobster boats knocked about on their moorings.

“He’s gone back to see Buttons, Buttons and Babbit again,” said Dimples. “And it’s good in some ways and it’s bad in others.”

“How do you know all that, Dimples?” I asked, looking directly at her. She decided to turn in circles and stare up at the sky instead of answering me.

“Shall we go along there as well?” I said. “I am tired of guessing and wondering about Derek.” I looked over at the green lawn in front of the courthouse. There was that ragpicker again. His wide bag on his shoulder was now full. He swung round and looked at me.

Presently, Dimples and I arrived at the street entrance of Buttons, Buttons and Babbit. Then Derek came bursting
forth from the doorway as if he were just rising from the bottom of a swimming pool or the depths of the ocean, his face wet with brightness and cheer.

“It’s good and it’s bad,” whispered Dimples. “You see, that’s what it is.”

When Derek was ready to tell me, he would tell me. There were some things I had learned this year and that was one of them. Meanwhile, it was a lovely spring on our point in Bottlebay, Maine. The birds seemed to dive and call in the most joyous way, as if the war and the losses we had taken were nothing to them, nothing to the flowers, nothing to the bees, nothing to the Mazarine blue sky. Dimples’s favorite puffins were back, floating in the water with their bright, wide, orange beaks. The lilacs were in bud again.

One morning a very nice lady in a blue uniform with a red cross on her sleeve dropped off about ten boxes of strips of cotton that we were to roll into bandages. I liked the idea of helping real soldiers with their real wounds. I wanted to do it because of Mr. Henley and I started jumping up and down in my stocking feet on one of the fat, stuffed chairs in the dining room. And then suddenly I felt foolish because I was thirteen now. Perhaps it was the last time I would do that sort of thing.

The Gram called out, “Felicity Budwig Bathburn, at your age you’re just as antsy as ever! I am sorry she’s so ‘enthusiastic,’” she said, shaking her head sadly at the
woman. “Come over here now, Flissy, and get a lesson in how to roll bandages properly.”

The Red Cross woman straightened her white cap and frowned at me.

Derek and I soon were wearing clean cotton gloves. We sat at the table and we rolled and we rolled and we rolled each strip of cotton and then we would fasten it with a little clip and stack it back in the box.

Derek only had to wear one glove and he got quite good at rolling up the bandages with one hand. We sat there for the whole afternoon, the sun falling through the curtains, lacy light and shadows moving slowly across the tabletop.

Towards the end of the day Derek started tossing the rolls he had finished into the box from a distance and I did it too. We got a bit more “enthusiastic,” playing a sort of ball game. “Touchdown!” Derek kept shouting. We had perfect aim and a perfect record, except that once Derek tossed a roll and it hit me on the shoulder and he started laughing. We laughed and laughed. I even got the hiccups. Suddenly, Derek and I were close to each other, almost nose to nose. He looked at me longer than usual and it made my hiccups go away. I felt myself blush.

The Gram arrived from the kitchen and I quickly dropped the roll. She swooped it up, popped it in with the others, and tied up the box with twine.

Through the lace curtains I could see Dimples out on the porch, jumping up and down. She had her arms
wrapped round Mr. Henley’s book. “Read one aloud, Felicity,” she called and then she knocked on the window. “Read me one aloud. I want to hear the music of Mr. Henley’s words.”

So I went out on the porch to the glider and I began to read Dimples one of Mr. Henley’s poems. Dimples was now lounging in a wicker chair with her feet up on the wicker footstool and her eyes wide open and serious, listening. She had Wink sitting next to her, wearing his checked bathrobe and plush slippers that The Gram had sewn for him.

Then Derek came busting out on the porch and flopped down next to me on the porch glider. “Dimples, can you go get me the Brer Rabbit molasses? I’m going to put some of it in my milk. Bring a spoon too,” he said. He set the glass down on the wicker table in front of us. “I mean, hup, two, three, four, about face. March, Dimples!”

“Derek, I’m on shore leave. Soldiers don’t march when they are on shore leave,” said Dimples.

“Yes, but they always obey their captain,” said Derek.

“Oh, all right, then,” said Dimples, stumping off to the kitchen. We could hear cupboard doors banging about and glasses clinking.

Derek looked at me again with his velveteen eyes, his silky, brown, long lashes, his heavy, dark, handsome eyebrows. Suddenly, he moved closer to me. He put his arm round me and pulled me towards him and he kissed me. It was a fierce and gloomy kiss. It was a Hurricane
Derek kiss and I closed my eyes because my head was swimming.

Then he said in a low, whispering way, “Flissy, this is the second time I have kissed you. And it’s also the last time. It’s a good-bye kiss.” And he looked at me as if he were trying to say more but the words were lining up and refusing to leave his mouth. “And I don’t mean good-bye because I am going to Government Study Camp in a few days. No, I mean another kind of good-bye. I’m not mad at you anymore. I’m glad you did what you did. You were right. I’ve read about first love in a lot in books. I shall always think of you as my first love and for that reason, you will always be special to me.”

“Oh, Derek,” I said, “I didn’t know you still …”

“I shall always care,” he said. “But I shall never say it again or tell you again because something will be different when I get back from camp.”

“How will it be different?” I said, feeling a great happiness and a great sadness all at once. “What do you mean?” But he didn’t say anything else. We just held hands and glided forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards, as if moving into joy and then away from it again.

Soon Dimples plunged out onto the porch. “Don’t you love this picture of Brer Rabbit? He’s wearing such a grand pair of trousers. For a rabbit, I mean. When the jar is all empty, I shall soak the label off and save it forever. It’s lovely, don’t you think, Flissy Bee Bee Bee?” Dimples said.

I sat there with Derek, feeling as if I’d just breathed in or absorbed an entire vanilla soda or a slice of yellow cake with pink icing, the sweetest thing ever tasted. And yet everything was oddly tinged with questions. What was Derek trying to tell me? Then I thought about the bandages he and I had rolled together and I wondered what soldier would receive the bandage that Derek tossed at my shoulder by mistake. Perhaps
that
bandage would bring extra luck to the poor soldier because
that
bandage had caused Derek to finally tell me that he still loved me.

Yes, I knew that Derek had applied to a camp for teens interested in government service. Many of the campers would be training to be pages next year at the Senate. Pages, Derek told me, were young messengers at the state house, who ran about with notes and messages from one senator to another and to the speakers or other politicians. The camp took place during the school year and counted for school credit. You had to have good grades and great manners to get in. Derek had been accepted recently. He would be gone almost a month and would come back ready to be a page during the summer session this year.

A month wasn’t very long to be away. I was sure I could manage just fine, though as soon as Derek left, I missed him terribly. Everything would be different, he said, when he got back. I thought about it and I decided I didn’t want to know what he meant. But that knowing seemed to linger anyway at the edge of my mind, like the ragpicker far off on the other side of the park.

Miami had gone back to her theater too. I had said good-bye to so many people. And we were a gold-star family now. We had lost Mr. Henley and Gideon and Danny. Nothing could mend the torn feeling inside me. I walked round the Bathburn house like one of the injured.
Walking carefully because I felt weakened by the losses. There was a quiet, unspoken wall around all the remaining Bathburns. And things seemed as if they would never be the same.

I spent every afternoon playing “I Think of You” on my father’s piano. It was comforting to know that my fingers were touching the same keys that his once did. At first I was hesitant and slow and clumsy but soon my fingers knew the way and the song rolled out of me like water.

When the mist is sheer

and the shadows too

When the moon is spare

I think of you.

I think of you.

One day The Gram and Winnie went into Gideon’s room and opened every drawer and laid out every piece of his clothing. I walked by and saw The Gram holding one of Gideon’s shirts in her arms. She was rocking back and forth, cradling it. Winnie took the shirt and laid it down on the bed, folded it carefully, and then she hugged The Gram. “He saved his heart for you, Winnie,” said The Gram sadly. It was the first time I heard The Gram call my mum Winnie and not Winifred.