Romeo Blue (29 page)

On the drive into town I was thinking about that prewritten card from my father.
Mr. Bathtub says READ!
And when The Gram pulled up to park the car near Babbington Elementary School, I looked at the pinkish-brown bricks of the school through the arch of trees and I knew I had to go in there. I had to look closer at something.

I did not want to leave Dimples to pick out her own paper dolls. I hoped I could persuade her to buy the set of army nurse paper dolls. Or perhaps the WAAC paper dolls. Those were the paper dolls of women in the army and they came with all sorts of posh uniforms and ball gowns and dancing dresses to cut out. There were hats and shoes and gloves and flags and all that. Of course I would not be playing with the paper dolls with Dimples but I might help her cut out some of the outfits. I was
very good at cutting out paper doll dresses, while Dimples always chopped off the tabs on the clothes by mistake.

“I shall meet you at the dime store,” I said to Dimples and The Gram.

Dimples scrunched up her nose and looked up at me. “Where are you off to, then?” she said.

“Miss Elkin asked me to pick up a music book on her desk at Babbington El,” I said.

The Gram frowned at me. “Is the school open?” she said.

“I just saw a janitor go in. The door’s propped open,” I said and then I took off without waiting for a real answer. I ran across the shady park towards the school. I needed to look again at something. It simply couldn’t wait.

The door was open but as I stepped inside, the school had a chilled emptiness about it. It was shadowy and unlit, except for the streaks of sunlight from the open front door that fell across the linoleum tiles. The halls were stark and silent. I did not even know where the janitor had gone. I hurried down the long hall towards Mr. Bathtub’s old room. I hoped the janitor would not leave and lock me in by mistake.

I felt a terrible pang as I entered Mr. Bathtub’s classroom, all closed up for spring break as it was, his desk empty, his bookshelves spare. The poster was still there, framed and behind glass and hanging on the wall above the shelf of collected seashells. I pulled a chair out across the room. It made a scraping noise along the quiet floor.

I stood up on the chair and stared at the picture of Mr. Bathtub in a suit and tie and bowler hat, sitting in an empty bathtub, reading a book. Underneath the photograph were the words
Mr. Bathtub says READ!
I studied it closely, my eyes rolling over every detail. I hadn’t noticed before, but up close, I saw that my father was winking. It was nice to see his face from this distance. The green book he was reading was firmly in his hands and if I tilted my head, I could read the words on the spine. It was called
A Season of Butterflies
.

The whole way to the five-and-dime store I was thinking about the book. I knew that Gideon loved nature and that he was fond of bird and butterfly watching in the summer. He always let the milkweed plants grow tall in the garden at the side of the house because he said the monarchs fed on the flowers and hung their cocoons among the leaves. He always considered it a sign of luck when a monarch fluttered across his path.

In the dime store I did my best to get Dimples to buy the army nurse paper-doll book but she wouldn’t listen. She bought the Shirley Temple set instead. At home later, when she cut everything out, she wasn’t at all careful and Shirley Temple ended up with a missing foot.

Back at the house, when I passed Winnie in the hall that afternoon, I saw that she was wearing one of Aunt
Miami’s dresses, a silk one that fit her much better than the housedresses someone had bought for her. It was a light red-and-white print and when Miami wore it, it had been one of Mr. Henley’s favorites. I didn’t think Winnie had asked The Gram if she could borrow a dress of Miami’s. I was just going to tell her about the card and the poster, but all of a sudden I felt upset that she hadn’t asked anyone if she could borrow the dress. It was odd to see Winnie wearing it and not Miami. I mean, of course, her other clothes were too big for her. Of course. I didn’t think I was at all disappointed with my mum. Not at all. But I wished she’d asked about the dress first.

I thought too about Mr. Henley and I suddenly wished Miami would come home and that she would call Washington, like our neighbor had done when he wanted news of his sons. I went out on the porch and got behind a book and when Winnie stopped by out there, I pretended to be asleep and wouldn’t answer her when she asked me if I had got a card from my father.

Then everyone disappeared into themselves the way they do sometimes on a long, quiet afternoon. Winnie was napping. The Gram was reading the newspaper on the porch and Dimples was having her Shirley Temple paper doll dance and sing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” (even with only one foot). It was then that I had a chance to go into the library. I began to look through the books on the shelves. Many of my father’s natural history and botany books were alphabetical and there I found the
book I was looking for, with its green leather cover and binding and its gold letters:
A Season of Butterflies
.

When I opened it, I found vivid colored plates of various butterflies. A purple emperor, a painted lady, a peacock butterfly, a clouded yellow, an orange mapwing. They were all beautiful. I was just about to close the book when I came across, on the last page, a lovely blue butterfly, a blue the color of heaven. The author wrote that this butterfly was called a Mazarine blue but sometimes people referred to the male as a Romeo blue. My heart shivered when I read that. It shivered and fluttered like a butterfly.

There was a folded piece of paper in between those pages. I read:

Dear Fliss and Derek,

If all has gone well, remind everyone to listen to the radio! They will know what I mean. How proud I am of you because you found this message, as I knew you would!

There was a drawing of a radio and an arrow pointing to it. It looked to me like the shortwave radio set that Gideon had built himself.

But all had not gone well, so what was the use of any of it?

I jumped on my bicycle and I pedaled off down the road. I had to talk to Derek. The note from my father made me cry. All of this was too much and I needed Derek’s advice and I missed him. I could hear clusters of crows cawing in the tops of the pine trees and it was such a melancholy sound, as if they were announcing my sadness to the woods and the sky. I did not think the Bathburn house would ever be the same without my father. I wondered if Danny and Gideon had been captured en route to Chalais. Perhaps the doctor turned them in upon arrival. Or perhaps they had been shot as they drove along the back roads after leaving Winnie at the convent.

Stu Barker lived down a pine-tree lane among several other houses that were not far from the tall, cement, sub-watching tower that stuck up high out of the trees. As I turned down into the woods, I passed a parked army jeep and later, a Coast Guard vehicle heading towards the tower. I pedaled on over a little bridge and found the driveway of the Barker house. I tossed my bike down in the pine needles, remembering the time Stu Barker got a terrible reaction to poison ivy in these woods.

I looked up at Stu’s small house. It seemed dark and quiet and then I noticed that the windows were boarded up with shutters. People here did that when they went away for long spells to safekeep the house. “Stu!” I called out, walking over the soft floor of pine needles. “Derek! Stu!”

I went up on the little cement porch. I lifted the knocker and pounded on the door. The sound of the knocker hit with an empty thud. “Derek!” I called out again. I ran round to the back of the house only to find the windows boarded up there as well and the garage locked tight too. “Derek, you have to be here. Where are you?” I shouted, propping my hand across my forehead against a shaft of sunlight that fell through the pine trees.

I got back on my bike and pedaled up the hill. Early spring gnats buzzed round my ears. I called out again, “Derek! Where are you?” Nothing echoed in a pinewoods. Everything was softened and quiet and padded with pine needles and pine boughs and branches, matted and thick and webbed and twisted, just like a mixed-up, tangled knitting project.

I tore along the pine trail, my heart bumping and banging against my rib cage. I passed an old man hunched over as he walked. As he looked up, his splotchy, rough face reminded me of the ragpicker in the park in town. Perhaps he lived near here. “Where are the Barkers?” I called to him.

“They left a couple weeks ago,” he said. “There was a moving truck blocking up the road that day.”

I biked on as far as the cliffs near the Bathburn house, the rocks piled up high in a kind of lookout. I dropped my bike and climbed the rocks and sat up there, watching the ocean waves roll in and roll out. If Derek wasn’t at Stu’s, where was he? I imagined a Nazi submarine surfacing in the water below. There were several of those subs spotted this week, so The Gram said. She had been told by a friend who was volunteering in the sub-watching tower.

And this was the exact spot where Derek sat while the Gray Moth was back at the house being arrested. Derek sat and stared at this same sea, feeling betrayed and heartbroken, thinking he had a father when he did not. I could not imagine such disappointment. And yet I too felt a kind of disappointment about my mother. She had married one brother and then left him for the other. She hadn’t told me who my father was. She had left me for almost two straight years without telling me the truth about things. She had taken Miami’s clothes and was wearing them without asking.

Perhaps Derek had felt the kind of confusion that I was feeling. But where was he now? Had he run away? I tried not to cry again. Did he want me to tell everyone that he was not at Stu Barker’s or would I be betraying him if I said anything? Was he off on his own or had he
been taken away by someone, a Nazi agent perhaps, looking for reprisals or leverage?

I finally resolved to go back to the house to tell everyone that Derek was not at Stu Barker’s, even though I was perhaps betraying him again. I threw my bike down in the garden and then I rushed in the back door, sweeping through the kitchen and down the hall, glancing in the parlor and dining room. “Winnie! Where’s The Gram?” I called out. “Hurry. I need to talk to The Gram and to you. Now. It’s important. It’s about Derek. It’s about Derek!”

Then I pushed through the screen door and rushed out on to the wraparound porch. There was someone in the porch glider, sliding back and forth slowly and reading a book and relaxing in the new spring sunlight. I took in the sight of a long pair of blue-jean legs and high-top black tennis shoes. The legs were stretched out in a casual, self-confident manner. The book propped over the face was a Hardy Boys mystery. The someone, who was wearing a brand-new shirt, peered at me in a cheerful way over the top of his book. It was Derek.

“Derek,” I said, “where have you been?”

“He’s back from his journey,” said Dimples, who was eating an apple and reading the Bobbsey Twins. “It’s lovely to see him, isn’t it, Flissy Bee Bee Bee?”

I ran into the house and went upstairs and slammed my door and threw myself down on my cot. Why had Derek lied about where he had been? He had not been at Stu Barker’s. The family had left two weeks ago. I did not want to say anything of course; I knew better than that, but I was angry with Derek and hurt that he hadn’t told me where he had been. I lay there for a long time, until the sky darkened and Dimples went round closing all the blackout curtains.