Romeo Blue (31 page)

“I will find a way to make it up to you. I promise,” said Winnie. “You know that Danny and I were under-cover agents working in France. We did many things. We helped downed British pilots get back to England. I worked in an airplane factory and was able to send back information here. And we did something else. I have been making you a scrapbook so you would know. Danny took photographs of every child I helped smuggle out of France. He took the passport photographs and I sewed a copy of each one inside the hem and lining of a skirt and I hid the skirt at the convent because we always started from there. When Gideon rescued us and brought me back to the convent and I left to hike over the Pyrenees to Spain, I wore the skirt. Even though it was foolish and
dangerous for me. I wanted to remember the children I had saved. I wanted
you
to see what I had been doing. There are one hundred and fifty photographs, poppet. One at a time, I saved one hundred and fifty French Jewish children from dying at the hands of the Nazis. Look, you can see each child.”

And she opened the scrapbook and she showed me the child on the first page. “Look, this is Sylvie. She plays the violin. And she plays beautifully. We had to leave her violin behind. And this little boy was so darling. He had a book with him. He was reading
The Secret Garden
in English on the journey. He wouldn’t let go of the book. Just like you. Oh, poppet, just like you.” Winnie began to cry again and I sat with her on the bed and I looked through each page of the scrapbook, at the faces of each child, sweet and smiling and hopeful, and I cried too. Winnie pointed out one and another and told me little stories about each child.

And then I hugged my mum again and said, “Oh, Winnie, forgive me. Forgive me. I am so glad, so very glad you are finally home. It’s just that I wish, perhaps …”

“It’s no use wishing and trying to change things that happened. Your father was an amazing man and you should be very proud of him,” Winnie said and then she paused and looked down. “I did not choose to do the things that I did. When it comes to matters of the heart, one has no choice.”

During the next week Winnie brought the shortwave radio downstairs and set it up in the dining room. Oddly it got better reception there. And at four o’clock we all would listen to the station from London. But just as we had suspected, nothing came of it. Every evening when the program was over, we would turn off the dial and feel a bit of a letdown. The good part of all that was Derek became interested in shortwave radios and he started reading my father’s pamphlets on how to build a set. He still had not told me where he had gone for a week, and a couple of times recently he disappeared for long afternoons. I wondered and I guessed in a way what might be going on. I sensed The Gram knew, but I had learned to keep quiet where Derek was concerned. And how sad I was that the shortwave message didn’t have an answer for us about my father.

Today Dimples came across a harbor seal pup on the shore among the rocks. “It is not with its mum,” she said, frowning and stomping back and forth. “It’s just lying there all alone on the shingles and sand.” Derek and Dimples and I loved seals and we usually counted the ones that we saw swimming or lounging about on the
rocks. So far we had already seen fifteen this spring, or sixteen if you counted the seal that was possibly a dog.

Derek was just saying to Dimples, “Was it really a baby seal? Sometimes you make things up, don’t you.”

Then the doorbell at the kitchen rang and Dimples and I raced to answer it. Upon opening the door, I was handed a nice fat package and it proved to be from Doubleday, Doran Publishing in New York City, addressed to me.

“Derek, Mr. Henley’s book has arrived! It must be,” I shouted out. Dimples started pulling at the paper and jumping up and down.

“Oh, I wish Mr. Henley were here,” I said. “He will be so thrilled.” We all pulled the book out of the wrapping and looked at it. It was beautiful with a simple, pale yellow dust jacket, the color of sand and the words
Oh Morocco!
written across the front in ornate script.

Inside the package there was a note from the editor. Dimples grabbed it and then Derek chased her and finally I swiped it out of Derek’s hand. Then I unfolded the paper and read:

Dear Mrs. Felicity Budwig Bathburn,

It is our great pleasure to offer to you Private Robert Henley’s beautiful book, which we rushed to publication. I can assure you that because of the war, these poems will be all the more pertinent and helpful to others. It will be a tremendous comfort for people to be able to read this powerful testament to faith, endurance, and longing that this soldier has been able to convey in these poems. Thank you again for your help in all this. Please accept our warmest congratulations and we look forward to hearing from Private Henley upon his return.

Very truly yours,
Pike Jemson
Doubleday, Doran Publishing

“Oh, Derek,” I cried out, “this is so wonderful!” And then my eyes fell down into the shadows that speckled the dining room floor just now.

Dimples was tugging on my sleeve. Why was she tugging on me? Her eyes looked suddenly as blue and changing as wind over water. Her face was a sad white, like unwanted, fresh spring snow. “Felicity,” she said. “I must tell you about a letter that I pulled out of the letter box last week. I put it in the parlor. I set it behind the wooden ship with the tall sails on the mantel and I left it there. I didn’t think you’d want it.”

“What?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It looked like a bad letter. I don’t like bad letters, do you?” she said.

“Dimples, where is that letter?” I said, going into the parlor and looking behind the small model of Captain Bathburn’s ship.

I pulled the envelope out and Dimples started to cry. “I hated that letter. I didn’t want to see it.”

I looked at the outside. It was addressed to Miss Miami Bathburn from the War Department in Washington, DC.

The War Department? Why would the War Department write to Miami? Who should open it? Who should read it? I could not.

Derek took the envelope.

Wait. Don’t touch it. Stop. It’s Miami’s. Wait. No. Stop!

Derek did not wait. He moved very firmly and very surely. He pulled open the envelope and quickly we read:

Dear Miss Bathburn,

As you have been designated as Private Robert Henley’s next of kin, it is with the utmost sympathy that I write to you now. First allow me to extend my deep condolences to you and your family. Private Robert Henley, US Army Second Corps, Tunisian Campaign, died as a result of wounds on February 14, 1943, in the Battle of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. I know that his fellow soldiers who lived and fought beside him will feel his loss greatly and his battalion will mourn his passing….

“Winnie! Winnie! Where are you?” I screamed. “Please come here. Help me. Hurry. Winnie!”

Winnie came rushing into the room, followed by The Gram. Then everything seemed to be flying every
which way, as if we were a flock of birds scared up by the wind. We flew everywhere, up and about and all round, knocking into one another. Then we rushed towards one another, Derek and Dimples and Winnie and The Gram and I. We all stood in a circle with our arms locked round one another and our heads pressing in together and we cried and screamed and shouted, “No. No. It can’t be. Please don’t say it is so.”

And the beautiful yellow book, just published, lay on the table waiting to be opened.

Dear, dear Miami,

Please come home as soon as possible. Here is Bobby’s beautiful book of poems. I know he would be so proud to see his words in print. Please telephone us as we have had some very bad news about him and I cannot bear to write it down. In the meantime, I am sending along this lovely engagement ring he had for you and asked me to keep until he came home. I send it to you now because I know you will want to have it. And as you can see, he dedicated his book of poems “To my beautiful Miami Bathburn. Here’s to the future.”

Dimples drew some strange pictures of ghosts as a tribute to Mr. Henley and, because he was a postal worker in town, the post office hung a flag at half-mast for him. And there was a memorial service in his honor at the Last Point Church down the road from us.

Auntie came home for the service and The Gram was worried about her the whole time because she seemed almost to be wearing a mask. She didn’t cry at all. At least not until she and Winnie took a long walk along the shore just before the service.

After the memorial,
Oh Morocco!
was for sale in the church entranceway. The bookstore in town had stacked all the sandy-yellow books in piles and everyone bought one. Many people wanted Auntie to sign the book because of the dedication and so she did in her very flowery handwriting, though it was then that she began to cry and had to stop signing the books altogether. Some people even asked me to sign a few but I shook my head no. Even my hands and fingers were sad and I did not think they would behave properly or be able to write in a brand-new book.

We could never go anywhere after that without someone rushing up to us to tell us how “bereaved” they
were for us and how much they loved Mr. Henley’s beautiful book. Oh, how that would have pleased him.

Miami and The Gram both wore black after that. It was an old-fashioned tradition that The Gram adhered to. And it seemed to soothe Miami. All her skirts were black taffeta now. All the silk flowers she tucked in her hair were black or dark and somber. And while she was at home I moved back to my tower room. But one night I heard my aunt talking with The Gram. Even with the wind outside and the ocean ever constant, their voices wavered up the stairs. “No, Mother,” Miami said, “I’ll go back to the traveling troop. I’ll continue, though I’ll never be happy again. You know, it’s funny, I hardly knew Juliet before. I didn’t understand her words. But now I do.”

“My sweet dear, I’ve been through it too. I lost your father. I know how you feel,” said The Gram.

“But you were older. I’m still young, Mother, and I’ll never be the same,” Aunt Miami cried out.

It is so very odd when someone you love dies. The pain of it seems to come and go like waves of water rolling in and rolling out. At the school picnic that next week in the park in Bottlebay, across from Babbington Elementary, we were sitting at picnic tables, laughing and talking. Soon I spotted the ragpicker way on the other side of the park. I could see his rough cheeks and his dark, bent-over body as he poked at the earth with his sharp stick. Then the pain of losing Mr. Henley came at me in a wave or as if it had drifted in on the wind. Mr. Henley had died. He was gone. And my father had died. He was gone too. Shot. Killed. Dead.

Someone passed a bowl of potato salad and said, “Did you hear about that sixteen-year-old boy who lied about his age and enlisted right before the war? He was a gunner during the bombing at Pearl Harbor and he shot down two enemy planes.”

“Really?” I said. “At sixteen?”