Romeo Blue (2 page)

“Oh, I hear things. People saying this and people saying that. Take another cookie. You too, Derek,” he said. “I hope you will tell me more about your mother. I do know she mails things to the Bathburn house. I hear she’s as lovely as a butterfly. Just as pretty and delicate as a swallowtail. I have more cookies and lots of time. I’m very interested.”

“Derek, we might be too busy to sit and talk. Perhaps we should head back before it storms,” I said, frowning and trying to smile at the same time.

“You know, I tend to be good at finding people. You see, here I have located an address for Derek’s birth father. When a person has been living with a family, without official records, it isn’t always easy. But I followed a lead and have come up with this.” And he pulled a piece of paper from a little side pocket and he waved it in the air like a flag. “He’s only given us a hotel address, the Eastland Park Hotel in Portland. I took the liberty of mailing him your address too. So one of you will have to get in touch. Perhaps you will be the one to reach out first, Derek.” Then he dropped the paper on the little table in front of Derek.

Derek flopped back on the sofa and I thought he suddenly seemed quite pale round the edges. He looked down at the paper and then he closed his eyes.

“Oh, but, Derek,” I said, leaving my teacup on the table and going to sit beside him, “don’t you think we ought to ask The Gram and Uncle Gideon first, I mean …” I took the opportunity to touch Derek’s hand, not the one that got paralyzed by polio when he was sick last year, but the other perfectly good one. I squeezed it gently and I meant for that squeeze to tell him that we ought not to be talking about any of this. But Derek didn’t seem to hear me. He had gone all silent, like a cabinet with its doors closed and locked.

“This is a wonderful opportunity, Derek. One that may not come along again,” said Mr. Fitzwilliam a few
moments later. “And in the meantime, if you’ve finished your tea, come into my garden room at the back. In his day, my grandfather called it a conservatory, but we’re modern folks now, aren’t we? To us, it’s a garden room. Felicity Bathburn Budwig will like this, won’t she, Derek? And as we walk together toward our garden room, perhaps we could have a little chat and you could tell me when and if your mother ever comes to visit. I adore butterflies.”

My head started to spin. I looked up at the ceiling, where a carved figure seemed to be swimming among birds in the plaster.

Derek patted my back in a chummy way that made me feel a bit better. “Oh, Fliss, you’ll like the garden room. It’s full of butterflies. Mr. Fitzwilliam hatches them from cocoons. They live in there. That’s what I wanted to show you. That’s why I brought you here.”

“But, Derek,” I said, “weren’t we supposed to hang these posters downtown? Didn’t the air-raid warden ask us to do that for him?” I unrolled one of the posters and showed it to Mr. Fitzwilliam and Derek. It pictured a great multicolored battleship sinking in waves and underneath were the words
LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS
.

“Lovely artwork and a most important message,” said Mr. Fitzwilliam, walking away.

Derek then pulled me along as Mr. Fitzwilliam beckoned us from the end of a dark hallway. I looked back at the table and saw that the crumpled piece of paper was
gone. Derek must have put it in his pocket. I had hoped he would leave it here and forget the whole matter.

We followed Mr. Fitzwilliam into the garden room, which proved to be all glass. There were green trees and flowering plants in that room, just as if we were outside on a summer day. And this was late September 1942, on the cold, windy, rainy coast of Maine. Among all the flowers and trees, there were hundreds of butterflies, all different sizes and shapes. They floated over my head and brushed against my hair, beautiful blue ones and tiny yellow ones and stunning black-and-orange monarchs. I thought for a moment about my mum, Winnie, somewhere in France. I felt quite nervous because I knew very well I wasn’t supposed to talk about the work my mum had been doing. I knew the code name she used. It fluttered now across my mind.

On the way home I decided Derek’s mood matched the autumn sea. Both were rough and shadowy, verging on stormy. We didn’t walk home along the water because the south wind was even more fierce down there on the rocks and it would have been like walking against a wall of wind. Up here on the road, we were closer to the tumbling clouds and the gray, stirred-up sky.

“Derek,” I said as we passed the old White Whale Inn with its long, lonely porches, “perhaps we should not go back there to Mr. Fitzwilliam’s house. How did he go about finding your father? And wouldn’t it upset everyone at home if they knew?” I was walking backwards, all of me pushing against the wet wind.

“Never mind,” said Derek, looking up at the sky, letting the rain hit his cheeks. “It’s my business, that’s all. Mr. Fitzwilliam feels that it’s my choice and it is. Perhaps
they
don’t have to know.”

Derek smashed his foot down in the center of a puddle in front of us. Then he kicked at the air.

“I don’t think I like Mr. Fitzwilliam,” I said. “He seems a bit nosy.”

We were getting closer to the Bathburn house, my grandmother’s house. I could see it rising up from the
rocky point. It was brown and sober looking with all of its many roofs and gables. As we drew closer I could hear music. Uncle Gideon was playing the piano. Whenever he played, it seemed to thunder out to the whole world.

Just as we neared the garden gate we passed a group of American soldiers in training. They were jogging along the road in khaki pants and white undershirts, which we called vests in England. I felt dreadfully sorry for them as it was quite rainy and wet. Derek said there was a training camp nearby and we often saw soldiers in town, because America had joined the war ten months ago. That was the war that I thought I had left behind in England when my mum, Winnie, and my dad, Danny, brought me here last year for safekeeping.

“Well, Mr. Fitzwilliam was helping me. It was
his
idea. At first I was unsure, but now I think it might be something I
should
do,” Derek said, opening the back door at my grandmother’s house. He had such brown eyes and they seemed almost black at this moment, with extra shadows stirring round in them. We stepped into the house, headed towards the kitchen. Piano music rippled down the hall and through the air.

On the metal, enamel-topped table in the kitchen were two sandwiches sitting on a blue willow plate. The plate had a funny crack along the rim and I was thinking it looked like a strange little smile. And then I noticed leaning against the plate was a letter, an envelope addressed to Derek Blakely. Most people did not know
that Derek’s true,
real
last name was Blakely. Everybody thought it was Bathburn. We didn’t ever talk much about it and so it was very strange to see that name. I wasn’t sure that I had read the words properly and so I looked closer. The upper left corner said it was from Edmund Blakely.

Derek grabbed the letter. He held it against his body so I couldn’t check to make sure that I hadn’t mixed up the whole thing. And I have been known to mix things up, to think I’m dreadfully right when I’m dreadfully wrong. “Oh, Derek,” I said, jumping up and down. “Do let me see what you’ve got.” But he held the letter high. It was very silly of me to leap and grab, but I kept on trying. And then Derek turned round and drummed down the hall and pounded up the stairs and went in his room and slammed the door.

I sat alone at the blue metal kitchen table listening to the music, which seemed to get in under the wallpaper, to get in behind the wooden cabinets, even to get in under the soft linoleum. I felt for one moment a pang of regret about boxing up my old, stuffed, British bear, Wink. I had wrapped him in soft tissue paper and I had put him in a box under my bed. I hadn’t mailed him away to my friend in England yet because Uncle Gideon suggested I save it till things quieted down on the sea. “You don’t want Wink to end up at the bottom of the ocean, do you? Mail vessels are prime targets these days, Fliss.” So Wink was still waiting patiently under my bed
in his box for the seas to quiet down, for the world to quiet down. I thought about getting him out but then I reminded myself that I was twelve years old now and girls of that age never get out their old bears and start hauling them about again. And so I let Wink rest and I let Derek stew and I hoped soon enough he would come to a full boil and let me see that letter.

I stayed there at that kitchen table for a long time for me, because normally, even though I was twelve, I still liked to hop about and leap from chairs to sofas just for the lark of it. I liked to see if I could jump from rug to rug without ever touching the wood floor. I did once make it from one end of the house to the other, but Derek said it didn’t count because I pushed a rag rug all the way down the hall to the kitchen.

I had a lot on my mind recently. And I knew what Derek was going through. So much had happened in the last year concerning
my
father. After being here in Maine for nine months, I found out that, even though I had only met him recently, Uncle Gideon was my real father. My mum Winnie had been married to him thirteen years ago and that’s when I was conceived. Everyone was mad at my mum now because she had broken Gideon’s heart by leaving him then and marrying his brother, Danny, instead. After I was born, Winnie and Danny had raised me in England until the war came. Then they brought me here and left me, without explaining much of anything.

I hadn’t quite become accustomed to the whole thing yet. Gideon wasn’t exactly my uncle anymore but he didn’t exactly feel like my father either. I still called him
Uncle Gideon. I needed to find a new name for him that seemed right. What should I call him? Papa? That sounded very old-fashioned or French. Isn’t that what Sara Crewe called her father in
A Little Princess
? Pa sounded very American but more like what a cowboy child would call his cowboy father. Like, “Pa, should I saddle up your horse so you can race those other ranchers to the canyon?” Perhaps a different name every day would do, until suddenly one would just feel right and would stick like spaghetti when you threw it against the wall to see if it was done.

So far I felt very awkward about calling my new father anything at all. And I tried to avoid it. Gideon said I could call him “Thing-a-ma-bobby,” if I wanted to, or even “What-cha-ma-call-it.” He said he didn’t mind at all. Any name would do. But my mum Winnie would not have liked me calling my sort-of dad “What-cha-ma-call-it.”

But then, I wasn’t sure at all when I might see Winnie and Danny again. I missed them terribly and sometimes I would sit at the window and simply wait for them. I had been sitting at that window for almost a year and a half.

That was something I was always trying
not
to think about and so I took a nice bite of a very lovely strawberry jam sandwich. And just as I did, Gideon poked his head through the kitchen doorway. “Hello and good afternoon, Fliss,” he said. “It’s your what-cha-ma-call-it here.
Haven’t forgotten me, have you? Haven’t come up with a name for me yet, have you? You know it doesn’t really matter. Even Thing-a-ma-jig would be just fine.”

“Oh, hello,” I said, leaving off his name all together. “It’s
you
!”

“I put a letter for Derek on the table here a while ago. It arrived this morning while you were out putting up posters. Fliss, the letter appeared to be from a relative of Derek’s, oddly enough. Derek doesn’t exactly have any relatives and, um … well, do you know who the letter is from? Has he read it?”

“Oh,” I said, and the posters we hadn’t hung yet swirled in front of my eyes for a moment.
CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES. DON’T SAY WHAT YOU KNOW. YOU NEVER KNOW WHO … WHO … WHO
… That poster showed an owl in a tree and a battlefield in the background. It floated up in my mind now.

“These posters,” the air-raid warden had said to Derek and me, “are to inform people not to talk too much about the things they know, things like where a husband or brother or father might be stationed, or what his squadron is doing, or even what boats you might have seen passing along the horizon. There are people sending information back to the Nazis. They sell the information you know. This is war and every family has their secrets that must be kept.” He had then handed me a pile of rolled-up posters.