Telegram For Mrs. Mooney

by Cate M. Ruane

  “You landed okay, sir?”

  “Bumpy, what with having to land on a freshly plowed field. But otherwise, I’d say it was a pitch perfect landing.” He pointed into the distance, narrowing his eyes as if he was viewing the long-past scene. He said, “Then, what would you know? In the twilight I saw a man who had his back to me. Seemed he was hoeing potatoes. I shouted out a greeting—in French, naturally. He slowly stood up, shrugged a shoulder, and went back to hoeing his bloody potatoes!”

  “Was the farmer Irish?” I asked. “They love their potatoes.”

  “No, no,” he said grinning. “Turns out I was in Belgium. Took me three hours and forty minutes to get there.”

  Belgium was exactly where my brother’s plane was strafing a German supply train when he was shot down. I said I was worried about Jack.

  “Well, Tommy,” said Lord Sopwith, “I’ve done quite a lot of crashing in my day and walked away every time.”

  I thought for a beat and then said, “It’s not a coincidence I ended up on your boat. It’s what you call fate.” I looked him in the eye. “Maybe we use that plane of yours to cross the Channel into Belgium and find my brother.”

  Lord Sopwith laughed at that one. “Tommy, that plane is long gone, and besides, one can’t simply glide over to Belgium these days.” He exhaled all his helium and now he looked like a deflated balloon. “The situation has become quite serious in Belgium from what we’re hearing—eyewitness accounts of Nazi devilry from refugees pouring into England. Terrible inhumanities. Unspeakable acts of cruelty.”

  “The plow will become the sword, and the wheat will be watered by the tears of war.” I said, surprised I’d remembered the quote. “Adolf Hitler wrote that in Mein Kampf. Them exact words.”

  “Good God!” said Lord Sopwith, shutting his eyes tight and shaking his head. “The brute.”

  When he seen how glum I looked, he slapped me on the back and said, “Cheer up. We pilots are made of resilient stuff. Your brother will turn up.” I tried to cheer up but was having a hard time of it. That is, until O’Reilly returned to the stateroom holding a serving dish and announced that pudding was being served. Turns out it was coconut cream pie and not pudding, which was fine by me.

  Things went a little downhill after that first lunch with the Sopwiths. O’Reilly nosed in and insisted I earn my keep mopping the decks and helping the cook with the washing up. O’Reilly, it turned out, had some of the same character traits as my sister Mary. But between work details, Lord Sopwith was willing to teach me navigation. It was a skill he said I had an aptitude for. I managed, single-handedly, to steer the boat all the way between N 61° 12’ 4.1518 and N 60° 30’ 59.0057, which is a big deal for a 12-year-old. That’s like the distance between Manhattan and Cleveland, Ohio.

  We was in a convoy, sailing in a pack with other boats—some of them navy vessels, one a fleet carrier. This was to avoid getting sunk by a German torpedo and ending up 2000 fathoms down. We sailed the long way to England, passing by Iceland. We might avoid a torpedo and get sunk by an iceberg instead. Lady Sopwith’s tan started fading.

  Since she had time on her hands, now with no sunbathing to be done, Lady Sopwith started giving me English lessons. “We do know how to speak English in England,” she said. “Not like you unfortunate colonials. We shall have an hour lesson, every day until we make landfall.” Turning to Lord Sopwith, she said, “How many more days, dear, until home and hearth?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen days, tops,” he said.

  “—Now, that’s a fortnight, Tommy.”

  “Forts?”

  She explained that a fortnight is equal to two weeks. Said that by then she’d have me speaking like an Eton boy, with no trace of my dreadful Long Island nasal accent. I had to ask what being Eton meant. And, gee, was my accent really all that bad? They shook their heads yes, and from there on it was back to school. But unlike the nuns, Lady Sopwith knew how to teach a fella so it didn’t hurt. Maybe it had to do with the tennis getup she wore while—I mean whilst—teaching me grammar.

  Mostly we practiced what you call “irregular verbs.” These are action words like run, jump, fly, fight, or explode. But somebody messed up the past tenses, making it near impossible for a kid to get it right. It was a wicked nun, I’m sure. She did it so’s she could whack a boy every time he said bringed instead of brought, or seened instead of saw. It wasn’t my fault I spoke like the son of straight-off-the-boat Irish immigrants, and I told Lady Sopwith as much:

  “Them nuns at Saint Brendan are the culprits. They teached me wrong.”

  Lady Sopwith wrinkled her lips up so they looked like prunes someone had smeared lipstick on. Then she let out a little sigh. “Tommy, darling. Let’s reconstruct your sentence, shall we?”

  Now I had to rack my brain to remember what I’d said. “Those nuns at Saint Brendan?” I stared her in the eye.

  “The nuns will do.”

  “The nuns at Saint Brendan are the culprits,” I said, “They taught me wrong.”

  “Incorrectly—they taught you incorrectly.”

  “Glad you agree,” I said.

  The Sopwith’s idea of entertainment was to sit around after supper acting out a Shakespeare play. I would’ve rather listened to Captain Midnight on the radio, but we couldn’t get a signal out in the middle of the ocean. Shakespeare was a playwright like Gilbert and Sullivan of Pirates of Penzance fame but without the catchy tunes. Will had English down to a science, or so claimed Lord Sopwith. That’s why it was important for me to read the words out loud and have the Sopwiths correct my accent. They had the man’s Complete Works published by Methuen in the last century. The books were leather-bound with gold trimmed pages. If I rubbed hard enough, I got gold dust on my fingers.

  We had just finished off Richard III—a rip-roaring story but one you needed an Oxford dictionary to understand. I made it clear to the Sopwiths that I would put up with Shakespeare as long as they didn’t make me read Romeo and Juliet or his sappy sonnets. So we was were starting in on Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who spoke the King’s English for some reason no one could explain to me.

  After supper, on the eighth night at sea, Lord and Lady invited me into the stateroom. They were dressed to the nines, or tens more like it. Lady Sopwith was wearing a dress that made her look exactly like Glinda the Good Witch of the South. She had everything but the magic wand and the giant bubble that The Wizard of Oz witch travels in. She let me know straight off that dress was custom made by a fella named Norman Hartnell.

  “I was Norm’s first patron, and now he has a Royal Warrant as dressmaker to the queen. Of course, her majesty hasn’t the right figure to carry off his designs.” I caught Lady Sopwith taking a peak at herself in a mirror that swung from a hook, trying to angle so she could get a good look at her narrow hips. Every Catholic knows that vanity is one of the seven deadly sins. being a Protestant, Lady Sopwith was oblivious to the danger.

  Whenever the boat rocked on a wave the dress sparkled and so did the tiara that sat perched in a beehive hairdo. I counted at least 130 diamonds—couldn’t take my eyes off them—I mean those—rocks, trying to figure out how to chip one off without her noticing. Lord Sopwith was wearing a dark red velvet smoking jacket, tied around the waist with a satin rope—the kind of rope they hang murderous noblemen from in England. “It’s a privilege of the aristocracy,” he explained.

  We passed Hamlet around, taking turns with the parts. Lord Sopwith started us off by playing the part of Bernardo. “Who’s there?” he said, in a voice like a tuba. It’s the first line of the play, and if you want my opinion, not a very clever one. Treasure Island starts off with the words “Old Sea-dog,” which sucks you right in. The “Who’s there?” line reminded me of one of them “Knock, knock, who’s there?” jokes that were now so popular with grade school boys.

  “Landon!” I shouted, and Lord and Lady took their noses out of the play and looked at me.

  Then Lady Sopwith began laughing like a hyena. “Landon wh
o?” she yelped, clapping her emerald, ruby, and diamond studded hands.

  “Landon Bridge is fallen down!” I said. Lady Sopwith let out a hoot, but his lordship slammed Hamlet shut and went to fix himself a rum and soda.

  While mixing his drink with a glass swizzle stick, Lord Sopwith was deep in thought. I figured he didn’t get the joke. Then he said, “Macbeth, scene III.” He pulled the Macbeth volume from the shelf, opened to the right page, and handed me the book. Sure enough, there it was:

  Knock, knock, knock: Who’s there? i’ the name of Belzebub.

  “Etymologically speaking,” said Lord Sopwith, “that would be the origin of your ‘Knock, knock’ jokes—Shakespeare.” After proving his point, Lord Sopwith explained to me that Hamlet was not to be made fun of under any circumstances, because it was Shakespeare’s magnum opus. I didn’t even have to ask him to translate.

  “Masterpiece,” I said.

  “You do know your Latin. One good thing to come of religious education, I dare say, is an appreciation for the classical languages.” Why he thought I appreciated Latin was anyone’s guess. But I let him roll with it. “You’ve read Cicero, no doubt?”

  “I’ve read Saint Augustine of Hippo’s De doctrina Christiana, sir. It was plain torture.”

  “Not quite Treasure Island, what?”

  On the twelfth night at sea—surprise, surprise—we began Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. By then I was saying thou, thee, and thine instead of you, me, and mine. Thee had to do it. It was either that or get thrown overboard and end up like Jonah the Prophet. No kidding, we were spotting Orcinus orcas close to the convoy—killer whales.

  Lady Sopwith was especially “keen” to improve my tenses, which she said were “dreadfully tangled.” I was never to use the word was when were was what was needed.

  “Surely, you must see,” she said, “that improper speech is very off-pudding.”

  “Off-pudding?” I said, figuring this was a threat. Didn’t matter if half the people in the five boroughs messed up irregular verbs. If I wanted pudding, I had to speak like a baronet.

  “Not off-pudding,” said Lord Sopwith, cracking a smile. “Off-puttttting.”

  The only thing keeped me from going nuts was time spent swabbing the decks with the crew, talking like a sailor, and learning words that would have my ma after my tongue with a Brillo Pad. It was dirty this and dirty that. Ol’ Joe knew every swear word there ever was, and how to combine them for maximum impact. He even knew some in the Cantonese and Mandarin tongue, because he’d once sailed from England to China and back. With opium in the hold. They had stories to tell—some that put hair on my chest. (Especially the ones they told when the Sopwiths were out of earshot.) If I was to try and write out one of their sentences it would go something like this: %$@&*! @& * %$@^%! *&.

  On the afternoon of the fifteenth day we were up at the helm when I scanned the horizon with a Swiss-made spyglass. “Land ahoy!” I shouted.

  “Ireland,” said Lord Sopwith, and I begun to get jittery.

  “We shan’t be stopping off there, shall we?” I asked with perfect British diction. While I waited for the Sopwiths’ applause to die down, I pictured a horde of aunts and uncles waiting at the port to grab me and send me back to Long Island, thereby preventing me from becoming a traitor to my race. Irishmen never use words like thereby.

  “No, Tommy, first Liverpool and then we’ll hug the coast straight for Weymouth, where I’ll have to turn Endeavour back over to His Majesty’s Naval Service.”

  The yacht was requisitioned for war use. The Sopwiths also had a ship like the Titanic, which they’d once sailed all the way to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Equator. But Lord Sopwith hated Hitler so much he let the Royal Navy have both of them. The navy’d only leant back Endeavour so’s Lord Sopwith could sail over to New York for a secret meeting with Roosevelt. At the president’s place up in Hyde Park, they’d discussed the future armament of the U.S. Army Air Force. Big stuff. This was all hush-hush and I’d been sworn to secrecy.

  Using the spyglass, I gazed at the green hills my ma so sorely missed. I wondered what she was doing right then and if, in her wildest imagination, she pictured me looking on her homeland. Just like that I was homesick, something I shared with every soldier who’d ever crossed these waters on the way to fight for his country in a foreign war. I straightened my back, held my mop to my shoulder—as though it was a rifle—and looked as brave as I hoped to be. Inside my stomach fluttered.

  Lord Sopwith, taking a pipe from his mouth and chuckling said, “At ease, sailor.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Somewhere in German-occupied Europe

  THE HEEL OF A KNEE-HIGH black jackboot is pressed to a man’s chest—a man who has only a moment ago been thrown to the floor. Viewed from ground level, a Gestapo agent is a terrifying sight.

  The man on the floor doesn’t recognize the Gestapo agent, who has concealed his eyes with dark glasses. The agent’s nose is broken and there are cuts to his face, but the man on the floor did not inflict these injuries. He hadn’t seen the Gestapo agent coming. There was no chance for self-defense.

  The Gestapo agent’s long black leather trench coat is opened, revealing a previously concealed service revolver, resting in a holster.

  The man on the ground wiggles, hoping to get loose, but his hands and feet are bound making it impossible. The Gestapo agent removes his revolver and the man on the floor tries to scream; but there is a gag in his mouth.

  The man on the ground has no idea what is happening, or why it is that this Gestapo agent has targeted him for execution. His boots flail in the air, aiming for the Gestapo agent’s crotch, but miss; his steel helmet comes off his head and rolls across the hardwood floor, crashing into the leg of a metal desk. This is unfortunate, to say the least.

  On the side of the helmet is the insignia of the SS—the one that resembles two thunderbolts. His insignia is the last thing the SS Waffen troop leader—or rather, Truppführer—sees before he is shot in the head.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I WAS PINNED INTO THE CABIN of a flat bed truck—stuck in the middle, straddling the gearbox. O’Reilly was gripping my elbow so I couldn’t escape. The truck driver was keeping me from making an exit from the driver’s side. The ship’s crew loaded steamer trunks into the back of the truck. Lord Sopwith stood beside us smoking a pipe, while Lady Sopwith directed the crew, making sure the trunks containing her dresses got loaded right side up.

  “Sorry about this, my boy,” said Lord Sopwith, who was the first to thwart my escape from the boat once we’d docked in Weymouth. “Just rang up an old schoolmate—works at the American Embassy. Hum—so it’s decided you’d best stick with Lady Sopwith and I until we can put our heads together and work out a plan to get you home. It’s either that, or I turn you over to the customs police. More comfortable with us, what?”

  “We can’t have you wandering about the English countryside, Tommy,” said Lady Sopwith, who had a soft spot for me. “There are ruffians everywhere.”

  “The chaps at the embassy will sort it all out. Meantime, best we keep an eye,” said Lord Sopwith wiping dust from his wire-frame glasses.

  “His lordship means I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” whispered O’Reilly as he tightened his grip on my elbow.

  “You traitor. You…Benedict Arnold!” I knew that got him where it hurt.

  Lord Sopwith looked slack-jawed at Endeavour, docked at the pier, like he’d never see her again. “Straight to Hampshire,” he said, hitting the hood of the truck. “It will be good to be home again, O’Reilly.” Walking over to a Rolls Royce, he waited for the chauffeur to open the door. Then he jumped into the back seat, next to his wife.

  I was a prisoner. That much was clear. The Sopwiths, as much as I liked them, were now my mortal enemies. They stood between me and rescuing my brother Jack. I would have to devise a plan of escape, and quickly, if I didn’t want to be carted back to East Hempstead.

  As we began drivi
ng, I tried to imagine the Sopwith place—picturing an ancient castle with a moat around the perimeter, filled with vicious, man-eating alligators. I might drown trying to swim across a moat, but the alligators I’d handle with my slingshot, using rocks as ammunition. There would be tall, stone fortress walls, built to keep people out—but in my case, in. This posed no obstacle whatsoever for an expert climber, so long as he didn’t remember his fear of heights. There would be turrets with narrow slits for windows, designed to be just wide enough to point a bow and arrow, and if I was lucky, wide enough for a kid to squeeze through. I sucked in my stomach.

  It was the dungeon I feared most. This is where O’Reilly would want to keep me—chained to a wall and fed on bread and water until the embassy people came to get me. Born a little earlier, I might’ve learned the art of escape directly from Harry Houdini, because he’d lived in New York too. Unfortunately, he’d died in 1926 and was buried along with his top secrets. I have to admit my training was lacking in this one area. All I had was my sister Mary’s nail file.

  I looked over to O’Reilly and he glared back at me with a sinister gleam in his eye. When I stared back with a wild look, he growled under his breath.

  As we drove through the English countryside, I began to see signs of war for the first time. There were people in uniform everywhere I looked, even girls. It’s true that men were beginning to join up in America, and I’d recently seen some in their spanking-new army uniforms. But here, half the population was ready to take on the Nazis. Adolf Hitler better not dare put a toe in England. Once we got stopped at a crossroad and forced to wait ages as a convoy of army vehicles a mile long passed in front of us. The rumble shook the ground.