Romeo Blue (15 page)

When I crept back downstairs, I put more wood on the fire. The flame snapped and flickered and seemed to consume the log instantly. That fire was always hungry, never satisfied, consuming one log after another. The room was warm but I was shivering.

Mr. Fitzwilliam had left in a dark blur, leaving my father storming about the house, making phone calls and pacing the halls upstairs. Finally, he went into his bedroom and closed the door.

I knew The Gram was still awake. I knew she would be waiting for Derek to come home and the light in her room burned from under the crack at the bottom of the door, burned in a patient, quiet, persistent way. In the dining room the paintings on the walls seemed to grow darker. When I looked at Captain Bathburn’s face, he seemed to tell me with his eyes that the journey home from India that winter was bitter, that the sea was ferocious and icy, that he had felt completely alone in 1855. The closed curtains, the shadow-covered ceilings, and the glowing fire surrounded me. Closed in about me. Mr.
Fitzwilliam was an FBI agent. That had certainly surprised me.

Soon, I heard an automobile pull up at the front of the house. I went out on the wraparound porch that faced the sea and leaned off the railing towards the garden. It was dark and windy and the houses down the shore loomed black and lifeless in the night. I could see the blaring lights from Brie’s mother’s car. Brie’s mom was my aunt Maggie. But she didn’t feel much like an aunt. I barely knew her. She popped round occasionally to play whist with Gideon and Miami, all the while making jokes I didn’t quite understand. She was tall like Gideon and she called Aunt Miami
Mouse
. “Oh, Mouse darling, don’t be so dramatic,” she would say. And then she would swoop off in her fancy car with the soft leather seats, calling out something like, “Ta-ta, I really must go. Brie will be waiting at the club. We will be lunching with the governor.” I knew Brie lived in a grand, pink-stone house on Cape Elizabeth. They called the place a cottage, which quite baffled and impressed Derek.

“If that place is a cottage, I’ll eat my hat,” Derek would say sometimes after Brie had left.

I slipped back to the parlor and soon Aunt Maggie and Derek opened the front door and came in. Aunt Maggie never used the back door. She always made a point of walking round the long porch and ringing the bell in front. Derek now plowed off into the kitchen and
I could hear him rustling through the shelves for something to eat.

Aunt Maggie stood at the bottom of the stairs and called out, “Mother, I’ve brought Derek back. He was marvelous. His fox-trot just swept everybody away. Didn’t it, Derek? Brie was in heaven. He was so darling with her. What a little gentleman you’ve raised, Mother. I have to say, I think my darling Brie is rather starry eyed over him.”

“Come up here, dear, and say good night,” called The Gram.

“Oh, Mother, I can’t. Brie’s waiting in the car. She has a million and one things to do tomorrow. Love you all. Where’s Mouse? I hope she has given up that dreadful postman. Ta-ta, as they say.”

Soon she left. We heard the car drive off. Then the house was still. I mean, it wasn’t just quiet; it was silent all the way down to its Bathburn stone foundations. I sat in the middle of that silence, listening to it. Derek came into the parlor with a sandwich and a glass of milk. He sat down in front of the fire next to me on the sofa. But the silence continued. It seemed to go on and on.

Finally, I said in a very low, slow voice, “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah, of course. Fun. Yup,” said Derek. He took a bite of his sandwich.

“And how was Brie tonight? Was it lovely, the dance?”

Derek said, “You know, Flissy, when I was a little boy, I used to hear about you all the time. I knew Gideon longed to have you here. He began talking about you from the moment I can remember. I could never escape it. My birthday was picked out because no one knew when I was born and they chose
your
birthday. That used to hurt me. Even my birthday wasn’t my own. The room I slept in would have been
your
room. Fliss, you were everywhere and nowhere. Everyone talked about you all the time. I think that after a while, I began to hate you.”

“Oh, Derek,” I said. “Don’t say that, please.”

“Well, no, not to say that The Gram and Gideon and Miami didn’t love me. They did and they were so good to me, but there was something temporary about it, while I sensed
you
were permanent, even though they’d never met you.”

“You mustn’t think that, Derek. It’s not true,” I said.

“And then one day last year, you arrived. And when I met you, Fliss, right away you were nice. You were fun. Right away, even though I hated you, I liked you.”

“I am so glad, Derek. I would have felt —”

“I used to have a crush on Brie, but something happened to it. You did something to it.”

“Me? I didn’t do anything,” I said.

Now we could hear The Gram at the top of the stairs. “Derek, Flissy McBee, time for bed.”

“Yes, you did, Fliss. You did something to my crush on Brie,” Derek whispered. He was blushing. “I don’t love her anymore. Instead, um. Instead. It isn’t Brie anymore. It’s someone else. Do you know who it is?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Guess,” he said. “Guess who it is.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Guess,” he said again, his voice growing louder and gruffer.

“No,” I said.

“I dare you. Guess! Now!”

“Please, no,” I said.

“You. You! It’s you, Fliss!
You
.” He leaned round me then and kissed me in an angry, awkward, melting way. All of a sudden I was a candle burning brightly. I was the fire in the fireplace, leaping out of itself in a blue-and-orange flame.

On Sunday mornings Derek and I always made breakfast for everyone in the Bathburn house. It gave us a chance to use the dumbwaiter. We loved hoisting the trays up and then carrying them to each room. A pot of coffee for my father, a pot of tea for Miami, and a pot of hot chocolate for The Gram (very rare these days, but we had some saved). That morning we were lucky to have a dozen fresh eggs given to us by Miss Elkin, who kept chickens in her garden.

Oh, why must all the best things in your life happen at the same time all the worst things are happening? Derek’s eyes, as he looked at me this morning in the kitchen, were as brown and warm and sweet as the hot, dark chocolate we were stirring. I felt dreamy and delicious and sorrowful all at once. I could not tell him what happened last night while he was at the dance, what Uncle Gideon and the FBI agents were planning. I felt joyous this morning because Derek loved me and I felt terrified and terrible because I was betraying him. I hadn’t wanted to, but I had to.

“We should make some muffins for my father’s visit today, after everyone leaves. He likes muffins,” Derek whispered. As he looked at me, I remembered last night.
I closed my eyes and happiness poured through me. Then terror. Cold fear. What had I done?

I didn’t say anything. Instead I just began preparing my father’s breakfast tray. I set the plate of scrambled eggs on the little white damask cloth, along with the bread and jam. As I tucked the newspaper under the coffeepot, I saw photographs of an oil tanker with smoke pouring out everywhere and sailors being picked up out of the water by rescue boats.

I carried the tray up to my father’s room but my hands were shaking. With every step I took, I could hear the cup and saucer rattling.
Die Graue Motte. Die Graue Motte
. When I carried the tray into the front bedroom, my father looked at me darkly and said quietly, “Fliss, you must promise me you will go to Bob Henley’s this afternoon. I do not want you here when Derek’s father arrives. Promise me, Fliss. Promise me that.”

I nodded my head, but my heart did not answer. My head went up and down, but inside my heart I was sure that I would not ever be able to leave Derek alone to face what I felt had somehow been my fault. My hands trembled, my whole being trembled. I had not planned on betraying my Derek. I had not planned on lying now to my father.
Daddy. Oh, Daddy, forgive me. Forgive your mixed-up daughter.
I was surely being ripped into a million pieces. I was no longer Felicity Budwig Bathburn at all. No, I was just a million conflicting particles,
battering and bumping and battering and bumping into nothingness.

I did go that afternoon to Bob Henley’s house. Before I went I had baked muffins with Derek for his father’s visit. When everyone was upstairs, Derek and I stood very close to each other. We stood there with beautiful, swimming, shimmering air between us.

Now as I sat in Bob Henley’s dark cottage, I thought of that moment. I thought and thought about it and I worried. I was afraid Derek would never speak to me again after he found out it was I who had betrayed him and his father. But he wasn’t Derek’s father. He was a German agent, a spy. He was the Gray Moth,
die Graue Motte
. Why hadn’t Derek believed me? Why had he held so tightly to a father made of nothing but lies and tricks and traps? What would happen when the FBI agents descended on the house? Would Derek be in jeopardy? Would my father be in danger? I worried and I worried.

Mr. Henley was making me tea. He was working in his small kitchen nearby and calling out to me now and then. As he talked along I realized that he seemed to know nothing of the true nature of the Bathburns. He did not know, as I did, that the favorite sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Bathtub, was a US intelligence agent. He did not know that FBI agents and a Nazi agent would
soon descend on the house. He did not know that the Bathburn house seemed to be at the center of something enormous and terrible. He did not know that I was caught in the middle of it all, as if in a whirlpool circling downward into darkness.

I was not even sure Bobby Henley knew anything about my aunt’s intention to go away to join the USO traveling troop. Winnie always said to me that life was like a kaleidoscope: With just the slightest movement the pattern changed. The pattern was constantly regrouping. It never stayed the same.

Mr. Henley brought out sandwiches and tea. He sat down on his sofa, which he called a couch. “No sofas in this house, Flissy miss, only couches. Well, I have some bad news and I have not been able to tell your beautiful aunt. I haven’t been able to find the words. Perhaps you will help me, Flissy. You are like Miami’s little sister. Perhaps you can tell her.” He had an envelope in his hand. Above him on the mantel, fishing nets draped. He had starfish in the netting and two old lobster traps were settled on a wide shelf under the window. He put the envelope down on the table. “This letter is from the US government. I am in the reserves and I have been called up. I will be shipping out immediately.”

“Oh, Bobby,” I said, forgetting to use his proper name, forgetting everything. “I am so very sad and sorry.”

“Well, I should have expected it. I want to go, of course. I couldn’t sit by and not help. But there will not
be time to marry Miami before I leave.” He tilted his head back and looked at the old, rough, pine-paneled ceiling.

“Auntie said to me that you and she will be spending the rest of your lives together after the war,” I said.

“She really said that?” said Mr. Henley.

“Yes,” I said. “And perhaps Miami can find something to do while you are gone, something that will truly engage her.”

“I hope so,” he said softly.

Minutes later Aunt Miami came in the cottage door of Henley’s haven. She was wearing a silk scarf with starfish on it. She matched the room perfectly and she pulled the scarf off her hair and it went floating down to the sofa like a small silk parachute. It made me think of a local girl we knew who was having her wedding dress made out of her fiancé’s white silk parachute. He was in the air force and his parachute had been retired because it was full of bullet holes where it had been shot at as he floated out of his plane and landed safely on the ground.

Bob Henley drew my auntie towards him now and they disappeared into the kitchen together. As they closed the door, I noticed he had the envelope from the US government in one of his hands.

The very second I found myself sitting all alone on Mr. Henley’s sofa, I made my plans for escape. Now was the moment to slip out the door quickly and quietly and race back to the Bathburn house. Nothing was going to
keep me away. Nothing in the world would stop me from helping if I could. I had to go. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t care. I had to be there.