Romeo Blue (7 page)

Aunt Miami was in the dining room now, folding napkins. As Derek walked in, Uncle Gideon did too and he grabbed Auntie and they started swinging and dancing round the room.

“Mr. Henley,” I called out, pretending he had walked into the house, “someone’s nabbed off with your dance partner!”

“‘Nabbed off,’ Fliss? I see you are still English all the way down to your wellies. Well, Bob’d better step up and pop that question. Miami’s dance card is filling up fast.”

“Oh, stop it,” said Auntie, pushing Uncle Gideon away. Then she went off to the parlor and threw herself on the sofa and soon he followed and they both sat there talking. I heard Uncle Gideon say, “Miami, what have you decided to do? Are you going to do volunteer work? We must all pull together.”

“Mrs. Boxman is urging me about the USO. Gideon, you do so much. You put me to shame.” Then they went on murmuring and laughing.

Derek was sitting
on
the dining room table in a very casual, daring kind of way. I don’t think The Gram would have approved, but she was upstairs, cutting out tiny quilt pieces for her new quilt. “I’m so happy to finally have a dad,” Derek whispered, swinging his legs back and forth. “They can’t know, but it felt fine, really fine. I’ve never had a dad before.”

“It’s quite nice, isn’t it?” I said, pulling at Derek’s good arm, as if to remind him we were to start dance practice.

“Knowing you, I’m surprised you didn’t listen in at the door when he was here last week.”

“Oh, I did, a bit, though I didn’t intend to. I hope you’ll forgive me. He’s quite charming, your father, isn’t he.”

“Would you expect less?” Derek said, smiling down at me.

Still, that dark photograph of doubt blurred before my eyes.

On the gramophone, or phonograph, as they say here, the song “When I’m Not with You” was playing again, over and over. Oh, when I was with Derek, the moon seemed to sail so lightly in the sky. Dancing to the music and looking out the window at the evening sea, my head felt like it was fainting. Can your head faint while your arms and legs and feet stay normal? If so, my head fainted away. I did care for Derek, swimmingly so, and the music made it stronger and the dance coming up with Brie made it all the more maddening.

“In fact, Fliss,” said Derek, “my true father coming here has really changed everything. You are right. He was nice. Very nice. I feel like I understand now who I am. It’s good to have at least part of a father in my life. Not everybody can be lucky and have two fathers, like
some
people I know.” He looked at me again as we danced and I felt a chill wash over me because somehow something didn’t seem quite right.

“Hey, what’s buzzin’, cousin?” Derek was saying on the telephone, the next day after school. I was sitting on the steps below. I am sorry to report I was listening, trying to hear his conversation with Cousin Brie. He was using all sorts of posh slang and he was laughing constantly.

I was very quiet when Derek got off the phone. I didn’t answer him when he said, “Brie just told me a story that really snapped my cap.”

I turned my head away.

“She lives in Cape Elizabeth, you know. Something happened there last week.”

I was still silent, studying the wall next to me. Not that it was at all interesting. It was a very dull portion of the plaster, with no visible cracks or bumps that looked like a face or a rabbit or anything like that.

“It was touch and go,” said Derek. “Fliss? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

I suddenly felt itchy all over. I was itchy, itchy, itchy, and dying to ask Derek what he meant. I tried to stay angry and silent. I held on to my anger as tightly as I could, but soon it floated away like a great balloon and I couldn’t keep myself from jumping up, turning round,
and saying, “Cape Elizabeth? What is it, Derek? What happened?”

“A German woman living down the street from Brie was just arrested. She had come to live in Cape Elizabeth on the seashore two years before the war. Brie said she had been living there quietly, not mixing much with the town.”

“Really,” I said. “What happened?” Derek went on to say that the German woman hung her laundry on a clothesline every day. But then it seemed someone noticed she was hanging her white shirts and red shirts and yellow shirts sometimes upside down, sometimes right side up. They were always hung in a planned order. It began to appear that the order and the color of the shirts had a meaning, a kind of code for the U-boats lurking under the water not far away. Since she lived right on the coast, her laundry drying on the line was a way to send messages, to alert the U-boats of cargo ships passing Cape Elizabeth.

Then those U-boats could follow the ships farther out to sea and when they were alone, the U-boats could torpedo the ships, blow them up, send them to the bottom. Those wolf packs had been sinking so many ships off the east coast recently. The newspapers were full of reports about it. Perhaps that Nazi washerwoman was to blame for some of it. But the FBI had caught her. They also found a wireless transmitter in her house.

“Oh, Derek, is that a coincidence?” I said and I
remembered the blank letter written to a woman in Cape Elizabeth. Derek shrugged his shoulders.

“But still, I suppose you enjoyed your conversation with Brie?”

“It was great to hear from her,” said Derek.

“Yes, how lovely,” I said in my best British accent. It was changing a little and getting rusty. I had thrown out so many British ways of saying things that I often forgot what some of those phrases meant. The dance at the end of October still hung over me like a shadow and every time I turned round, Brie seemed to be in the air. Now she was ringing Derek up more and more. I walked into the dining room and sat down and looked at the portrait of Ella Bathburn, Captain Bathburn’s middle daughter. I knew very little about her life. Had she sat at this very table almost one hundred years ago, her heart full of sadness, like mine?

“You’re a bit off today,” said Derek, following me into the dining room and looking at me, with all those daring freckles tossed across his face. “But come on, Fliss,” he said. “Cheer up. You’ve got a letter!”

“You’re making a game of me,” I said.

“No, Fliss, here it is. A letter for you,” he said.

I got awfully excited as I’m mad keen on letters and I am always hoping for one from Winnie and Danny. Winnie. My mum. I could see her now, driving away with Danny in the little sports car after they left me here, her veil on her hat blowing in the wind. Danny waving.

Naturally, I rather tore the envelope to pieces. The letter inside proved to be from Mr. Henley. With his note he included a poem he had just written about the sea. He wrote poetry all the time and he got so many rejection slips from magazines that he had made a whole scrapbook of them. But he kept on writing his poems anyway. And they were growing more lovely, really. The letter said:

Dear Flissy,

Will you meet me at the library in Bottlebay tomorrow at three thirty? I have something to show you.

Yours,
Bob Henley

I put the letter in my pocket and went out on the porch. I wondered what Mr. Henley wanted to talk about. I wondered too why Brie was calling Derek so much. I wondered as well about the Nazi laundress, hanging her plain, colored shirts in different ways every morning. Yes, the war had a hidden side in which secret agents moved about in darkness, changing the course of the war with simple tools like a laundry basket and clothes-pegs and a long, cotton rope.

At nearly three thirty, after school, I walked back into town by myself. I felt a little lonely as I moved quietly through the fog. I could hear a foghorn repeating its call over and over again, mixed with a distant bell clanging somewhere offshore. Seagulls followed me and seemed to dive in and out of the murkiness.

I first came upon the harbor full of lobster boats and sailboats wrapped in blankets of mist, their masts and sails shrouded in wispiness and clouds. The fog too poured through the narrow streets of Bottlebay. It floated and twisted into cracks and crevices, like white smoke. I wondered if I would ever see clearly the shapes of things as they were forming round me. Everything seemed hidden, as if in a dream.

The town was quite empty, which gave me a shivery feeling. The lights from the shops and houses glowed a soft yellow in the dampness of the afternoon. I walked up the narrow winding streets to the central part of town and found the library sitting up on a rise, with four large white columns at the front.

I opened the door and went into the warm, cheerful room, full of library tables, each with a green lamp on a small brass stand. All round the tables were walls of
shelved books. Mr. Henley was sitting at a large oak desk in a corner. He waved. “Flissy McBee,” he whispered. “Good to see you! Thanks for meeting me. Let’s step back into the stacks, where we can talk.” We spotted two tall stools under a large oval window, and after struggling a bit, I found myself perched on the top of one.

“You have something on your mind, then,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Henley, reaching in his pocket. Now he had a small red leather box in the palm of his hand. He held it out to me. “Open it,” he said. His face was all tingly with nervousness and excitement.

I took the box carefully and opened the lid. Inside was a delicate little ring propped up in velvet. The gold band was thin and fragile. The ring had little red rubies and pearls round a miniature portrait of a young woman painted on a tiny dome of porcelain.

“Doesn’t the woman in the little painting remind you of your beautiful aunt?” said Mr. Henley. He looked pleased and shining, the way postmen often do when they know they have something nice in their mailbag for you.

“Yes,” I said, “she does.”

“Do you think Miami will like it?” he said with his eyes all lit up softly, like the lamps on the library tables.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said. “It’s lovely.”

“It’s an antique,” he said. “It’s from 1750. It’s a family ring. I needed to show it to you. Do you think it makes a good” — he paused — “a good” — he paused again — “a good engagement ring?”

“Oh!” I said. “Oh my. Oh yes. Uncle Gideon will be terribly pleased. I mean, oops, I mean, Auntie will be pleased, of course. An engagement ring! It’s a smashing good idea. Perfect!”

“Really? I mean, do you think she’d rather have a more traditional ring? I mean, are you sure?” Mr. Henley looked quite wobbly and ruffled in a cheerful sort of way, tipping about on his tall stool. “Flissy,” he said, “could you by chance find out for me what kind of rings your aunt likes? I mean, how does she feel about antique rings? Can you let me know as soon as possible? Everything shall be on hold until I hear from you.”

I felt quite fond of Mr. Henley as we left the library. He trusted me and he loved my aunt so very much. “You sent me your new poem and I read it,” I said. “And I thought it was wonderful.”

“Oh, thank you,” he said. He smiled at me in a happy, wistful way. “You liked it. I’m very glad to hear that. Well then, it doesn’t matter if I never get published as long as my friends read my poems.” Then Mr. Henley headed off down Vine Street. He turned and waved to me in his chipper postman sort of way and the fog seemed to wrap its long, smoky arms all round him and draw him away into the whiteness.