Romeo Blue (4 page)

Unfortunately, at school in Bottlebay, Maine, there was to be an autumn dance for teens at the end of October. I was only twelve and would not be admitted. Derek had been practicing waltz steps and swing steps in the parlor. Before the letter came, I had been helping him get his steps right. “How am I doing?” I had said to him a few weeks ago as we made a last twirl to a song called “When I’m Not with You.”

Derek had looked down at me. He smiled and he said, “You’re the cat’s pajamas, Fliss.” Ever since he had entered eighth grade, Derek loved slang. And I did too. I was awfully curious about
the cat’s pajamas
. I pictured a cat wearing flannels covered with cowgirl hats and stars. I hoped it was a good thing to be
the cat’s pajamas
.

I was thinking about that when the phone rang, which was a rarity at the Bathburn house. I knew Gideon used to ring up Washington when we were out. The whole family knew all about Gideon’s work — not his work at school as a teacher but his secret work with Mr. Donovan in Washington. It was the same kind of work Winnie and Danny did. Every time the phone rang I thought of them, because they were missing and lost and we hadn’t heard from them in months. How I longed for Winnie and
Danny still. How my longing followed me about the way the wind seemed to follow me sometimes.

Usually I had to race with Miami to answer the phone on the landing but she was in the gymnasium upstairs arguing with Uncle Gideon while he stood on his head. “Well,” Uncle Gideon was saying, “Henley should pop the question now so we can have the wedding before Christmas, when I have to go overseas.”

I would have rushed to the phone but now I stood frozen in the hall, frozen hearing those words,
when I have to go overseas
. I was frozen, suddenly thinking of Captain Bathburn’s ship in 1855, which finally came home, finally sailed over the horizon and into port. It was pure white, they said, frozen solid. The masts and sails all covered in ice. It was like a ghost ship, arriving eight weeks late in the middle of winter. But it had made it, with Captain A. E. Bathburn and half of his crew still alive and on board.

Two things were happening at once now. Gideon was going overseas at Christmastime? At
Christmas
? And the phone was ringing.

I finally picked up the receiver. “Hello,” I said.

“Oh, Flossie, it’s Brie. Derek’s cousin Brie,” the voice said.

“Well, actually, I’m your cousin too,” I said. “And my name is Flissy, not Flossie.”

“Oh, I never thought of you that way. I mean as a cousin. I guess because of your accent and you being so
foreign and everything.
Flossie
is cute, don’t you think? Is Derek there? I’m inviting him to the autumn dance.”

I held the receiver in my hand. It was very heavy and instead of answering Brie, I kind of dropped it on the small table and went off to find Derek.

I passed Aunt Miami on the stairs as she rushed by, her silky chiffon skirt fluttering past me in a whirlwind. “Gideon will be going overseas right before Christmas. Mother! Where’s The Gram?” she said and she seemed to swirl and dissolve in soft silk and tears.

“And Brie’s inviting Derek to the dance. She’s just rung up,” I called.

Aunt Miami didn’t answer. She seemed to lift up and disappear down the hall, past moving curtains and fluted shadows, past paintings of Captain A. E. Bathburn’s staring daughters. Then I heard her crying in the kitchen and The Gram too.

I went on up to fetch Derek from his room. He was studying a map of Europe in there, looking at France. I opened the door. “Gideon’s going to Europe before Christmas,” he said without turning round.

“But that’s where the war is,” I said. “Why would he go there now? I’ve been in the midst of that, Derek. It’s dreadful. Everyone at school thinks we’re not very safe here in Maine either, because of the coast. We don’t even know what’s lurking in the waters. The Bagley family moved back to Illinois because they thought the coast was too dangerous. Oh, Derek, everything is changing. I
don’t want Uncle Gideon to go. Must he? And I don’t want you to go away with your father either or even talk to him. None of the others want you to answer him.”

“I don’t know what they’re worried about,” he said. “But whatever I decide, it’s up to me now. I don’t want them to know any more about it. Okay?”

“Brie is on the phone, Derek. She wants to talk to you.”

“Oh well, that’s peachy keen,” said Derek, dropping his pencil and turning round.

Then I got rather bold in a British sort of way and I said quite sadly, “Derek, is Brie the cat’s pajamas as well?”

“Oh, Brie, she’s the dog’s necktie!” Derek said and he smiled that smile that sent me spinning out over the ocean like a piping plover or a bufflehead or a lost and diving common goldeneye.

I cried that night alone in my widow’s peak room at the top of the house, with the widow’s walk outside it and the terrible gray ocean beyond and all round me. That little walk was built so that Captain A. E. Bathburn’s wife could look out and wait for her husband’s ship to come over the horizon. And that fall it didn’t. And it didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t and winter came and the snow roared at these windows and she waited and she waited.

I cried for three reasons that night. The first was for un–Uncle Gideon, my newfound father whom I had grown to love during these many months in America. The second tears were for Derek, because his father had returned, changing everything here forever. And the third tears were for myself, because Derek was going to the dance with Cousin Brie. Those tears were the most raw. I wasn’t at all a pair of cat’s pajamas anymore. I was a pair of plain gray flannels with ugly buttons down the front.

That night, the wind and rain came in under the window ledges into my room, and when I woke up in the morning, my pillow was damp. When Gideon found out, he said, “Fliss, we’ll have to get you out of that room
for winter. The windows have gotten worse and you’re just too exposed to the sky and the sea up there.” Well, I had always liked Miami’s large, airy room anyway.

And so it was that I packed my yellow suitcase and Uncle Gideon shut up the tower room. “Leaving Wink up here, are you? Too old for Wink now, I imagine,” he said to me as he turned the key to lock the door. “Well, you’ll outgrow us all, I suppose, soon enough. Yes, soon enough.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t need an old bear anymore. I’ll be sending him off to England soon.”

“It’s a shame you and Derek are in such a hurry to grow up and throw away old friends,” said Gideon. “Well, bears like the cold and I suppose he’ll be hibernating anyway.” He looked at me then with a good-bye kind of look in his eyes that reminded me a tiny bit of Wink for just a moment and then I did feel a little tug in my heart.

That night I moved downstairs to Auntie Miami’s room, which was quite grand. She had a lovely canopy bed that they said had once belonged to Captain A. E. Bathburn and his wife, Ada. And there were great, long windows to the sea and soft hooked rugs on the floor, covered in wild roses and trumpet lilies. (The Gram had hooked them all.) I had a little bed at the far end of the room. It had a bedspread with a cat on it but the cat was not wearing a pair of fancy pajamas.

It was nice because Auntie and I could lie in the darkness and talk. That very first night we did. Uncle
Gideon popped in with a cup of Ovaltine for me. He wanted to say good night. He sat on the edge of my bed with the hot chocolaty drink steaming up between us, looking at me as if I were a new kind of seashell he’d just found on the shore. “I was visiting Derek a moment ago, and I think he’s going to listen to us, so there’s no need to worry. And I won’t be leaving for several months. That’s ages away.” Then he frowned in the almost darkness and said, “It’s for Winnie, you know, and Danny.” And he didn’t say anything else and I understood what he meant and in my heart I felt proud and sad and nervous.

Later I heard his Victrola in his room playing jazzy songs again. One of them was “I Think of You.” And I knew he was thinking of Winnie, dreaming of her, reaching out to her as she floated near him, with her beautiful, dark eyes, reaching out to her as she floated away into his brother’s arms.

When I came downstairs the next day, Derek’s face was bright, like a fire in a fireplace, and yet hidden at the same time, like a fire in a closed-up stove. There was no one about. The Bathburn house was empty except for the two of us sitting at the card table in the parlor.

“This is to be a secret, Fliss,” said Derek, looking over at me, “but I am going to write to my father. I’m going to invite him over when everyone’s out next week.”

“But, Derek,” I said, “I don’t think Gideon will like that. Nor will The Gram. They don’t like people coming to the house. And they’re so upset about this. They don’t want to lose you, Derek, because you were not adopted officially.”

“Never mind about all that,” said Derek. “My father
will
be coming over. Let’s write a letter to him now.”

I do love writing letters and straight off I suggested he say,
“Dearest Papa, how long it has been since we’ve strolled down the avenue of life.”

But Derek said, “No, I’d rather just say,
Hello, would you like to come for lunch on the point in Bottlebay? Thursday at noon?
”

“For lunch?” I said.

“Yes,” said Derek. “We don’t drink tea like you do over there. He’d probably rather have that swell new instant coffee called Nescafé. Everybody loves it.”

Derek looked pleased as he signed the letter and handed it to me. I stuffed it in an envelope and addressed it, though I did not want to. Still, I bent towards Derek and his wishes.

We gave the letter to Mr. Henley when he popped round with his mail pouch slung over his shoulder. We were standing on the little porch outside the kitchen. Mr. Henley smiled and looked up at the house, hoping to see Auntie at the window.

Then Derek said to him, “Are you driving into Portland later today and could we possibly go along?”

I loved being
we
with Derek. I suddenly felt like the cat’s pajamas again. Like fancy silk pajamas, pajamas with pizzazz, as they say here.

“Yes,
we
should very much like to go along,” I said, jumping up a step and then down a step and back up a step again.

As soon as I could, I whispered to Derek, “Why are we going to Portland?”

I didn’t really get an answer from Derek until later when we were in Mr. Henley’s car, riding along in the rain. More gray, gloomy autumn rain. We drove along the rocky coast with the ocean below us cloaked in mist and drifting fog.

Mr. Henley was breezy at the wheel. He loved his car. And so did Aunt Miami. They were always putting on fancy “duds,” as Derek would say, and driving to Portland to the Rotary Club dances just for the fun of it.

“I shouldn’t be driving at all now because rubber tires wear out and you can’t get new ones these days. The rubber is all being used by the government for the war. And you know gas is going to be rationed soon but because I am a mailman, I’ll have a C sticker and I will get more ration tickets for gas than some,” said Mr. Henley, smiling. Then he began to recite some of his poems. He was a poet and getting better and better with every poem, Auntie said. But no publishers ever liked them. He could never even get his poems accepted by a magazine.

Mr. Henley was coming into his third verse of his third poem when I whispered again to Derek, “Why are we going to Portland?”

“Because I want to see my father before he sees me,” Derek said.

“Oh,” I whispered. But my heart dropped and sank, like a small pebble tossed into the sea.

“Have you heard the poem about Portland and the harbor there, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?” said Mr. Henley. “He grew up in Portland, you know.”

I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea-tides tossing free;

And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea.

“Oh, that’s lovely,” I said and then I whispered to Derek, “You mean we are going to the Eastland Park Hotel?”