Telegram For Mrs. Mooney

by Cate M. Ruane

  “Bonjour,” I said. “And mercy.” Everyone laughed.

  Antoine said, “You’ll stay here until I sort out a better situation. My mother will dote on you, to be sure. You are now heroes of the Resistance!”

  “You’re not leaving us, are you?” I said.

  “Work to do, potatoes to sell,” he said.

  Once Antoine left, his mother went to a drawer near her sewing machine, found a measuring tape and began taking Daphne’s measurements. She wrote the numbers on a small pad of paper with a pencil she took from her mouth. When she was finished, she reached over to a bookshelf and grabbed a stack of magazines, handing them to Daphne. I seen they were ladies’ magazines.

  “French Vogue!” Daphne was thrilled and began thumbing.

  “Choisir,” said Madame DeQuick.

  “I do believe she’s offering to make me a new dress!” Daphne glued her eyes to the pages. There’s nothing girls like better than picking out clothes. I spent half my life cooling my heels while my ma and sisters went dress shopping. Mary never found anything that looked good on her, which was what took so long.

  The two began schmoozing about girl stuff. I left them to it and began exploring the flat. “Haute couture!” was the last thing I heard Daphne say before I began wandering down the hallway.

  Behind the first door was the bathroom. Amazing even myself, I started up the geyser using a match placed on the top. The funny thing was that there wasn’t a toilet in the room and I had to relieve myself by pointing out the open window. Soon the room was cloudy with steam so’s that I didn’t notice the bathtub filling until water pored over the rim. It’d been weeks since my skin touched a washcloth. The water was nice and hot. A jar of bubble soap stood next to the tub and I poured the whole thing into the water. I got naked and submerged myself—practicing deep breathing.

  A few minutes later, the door opened and I screamed. In stepped Madame DeQuick, with not so much as a how’d ya do (I mean How Do You Do.) She picked my clothes off the bathroom floor and said, “Très bon.” She removed everything from the pockets and took the clothes away with her.

  My worldly possessions were now lying on the bathroom floor: my flashlight, a slingshot, a pocketknife, a compass, a stack of American dollars, two marbles, a speedboat key, a stick of gum, and a four leaf clover. Even worse, it had only two leaves left. I’d left my bow and arrows in the living room.

  I rested back to enjoy a long soak. When my fingers and toes pruned, I dried myself off and wrapped a towel around my waist. Using a tortoiseshell comb, I made a part and slicked my hair back until I looked like Clark Gable.

  “Brilliant,” said Daphne when she got a look at me. “The smell of soap ought to throw the Germans off your trail.”

  Madame DeQuick left the room, returning with a pile of clothing she wanted me to put on. They looked old-fogy and I guessed they were Antoine DeQuick’s when he was a boy. She got back to work behind her sewing machine, moving the treadle pedal with her right foot. She had straight pins in her mouth. They were the kind of pins my sister Mary liked to stick in me—them ones with the little colored balls at the end.

  I didn’t miss Mary at all but did miss my big sister. I need to bring Nancy home a nice French dress, I thought—soften the blow when I gave her the news about Jack.

  “Madame DeQuick was telling me,” said Daphne, “that her son taught English literature at the Université Libre de Bruxelles before the war. When the Germans occupied the city, Antoine lost his place. And all because he continued speaking out against Hitler and encouraged his students to work for the Resistance.”

  “And now he sells potatoes from a horse cart?”

  “He was black-listed by the Nazis. His cousin needed help with the farm and offered him work.”

  “It’s a cover, Daphne. Antoine’s the one working for the Resistance,” I said. “ ‘In touch with someone in the Resistance,’ my foot. Why, I bettya he’s scouting out troop movements as we speak. Recon, that’s what it’s called. How else did he know exactly where the munitions factory was? What a good cover too, carting potatoes from town to town…too bad Ireland is neutral. Why, who would’a thought?”

  Daphne put her finger to her lips, reminding me to keep my trap shut. “Keep quiet or you’ll give the whole show away,” she said, and Lord Sopwith’s voice came back to me, thundering: Loose lips, good man, loose lips!

  I tightened my lips until my gums hurt.

  Madame DeQuick said something in French, but with the pins in her mouth I couldn’t make out the words.

  “She’s inviting us to help ourselves to anything we find in the kitchen.” Daphne asked if Madame DeQuick wanted anything. Madame DeQuick mumbled something, and I thought: I hope she doesn’t swallow one of them pins. Lady Sopwith’s voice jumped into my head saying, “Those pins, my dear child. Those pins.”

  We found the kitchen and Daphne looked in all the cupboards, and I checked the icebox. Even a mouse would’ve complained. Daphne said we’d better not impose of Madame DeQuick’s hospitality, even if she begged us to stay. Obviously, folks were worse off here than in London.

  “You know, I still have my American dollars,” I said. “Do you think they have a black market here in Brussels? I heard that’s the place to switch money.”

  “There’s a black market everywhere, Thomas. Perhaps we’ll buy Madame DeQuick some Belgian chocolate, as a way of thanks!”

  But for the time being we had to be happy with tinned sardines and a half-loaf of day old bread. Daphne swallowed a fish whole and then started humming, like she was trying to remember something. “What day of the week is it?” she asked.

  “Beats me,” I said. I spotted a calendar hanging from a thumbtack in the wall. In a split second I had it in Daphne’s hands. She tapped her finger over the page, landing on a Friday square, “I was right!” she said. “We’ll look for a bottle of sweet wine and two loaves of egg bread—each woven into six strands—and a pinch of salt. Then we’ll need a candle, of course.”

  “Is this a scavenger hunt?” I said, perking up.

  “No. It’s for Shabbat,” she said. “Tonight starts the Jewish day of rest and we’ll welcome it in with a little ceremony…if I can remember how to do it. This will be our little act of resistance.”

  “Or we could blow something up,” I said. “Gestapo headquarters, say.”

  “Tsk-tsk,” she said. “Have you no romance in your soul? Not every act of resistance must involve explosives.”

  I pointed out that ours had involved Romeo and Juliet. But the truth was, I needed little R & R myself. I yawned. There’s nothing like a hot bath to make you drowsy. Daphne had to prop me up as we walked back to the living room.

  Meanwhile Madame DeQuick was making progress on the dress. Daphne said: “It’s going to be a copy of a Coco Chanel!” Then she asked me the obvious question: “By the way, I suppose that you saved nothing of mine from the suitcase—nothing but the photograph of Jack?”

  “I’m sorry. I had to get out of there light. And besides, I used a lot of your stuff for kindling.”

  “My brassieres?”

  I felt my face flush. “Never!” I said. “You didn’t expect me to go running out of there holding ladies’ things? I’d of been the laughing stock of the Third Reich.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “I am glad you thought to save Jack’s picture, at least.”

  She glanced down at her finger and then held a tiny diamond ring up to the light. I hadn’t noticed the engagement ring until then, which was odd. “Nice ring,” I said.

  “It’s art deco.”

  “Maybe we hock it.”

  She held her hand behind her back and growled. Then she turned her eyes back to Madame DeQuick, who was now holding up the dress and instructing Daphne to try it on. “Could you please give me some privacy, Thomas?” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AFTER CATCHING A SECOND WIND, I decided it was time for some recon of my own. Back I went to the staircase, down t
o the garage and through a door to the street. Too bad I didn’t still have my baseball cap. Or my sunglasses—left in my duffel bag, I’m sorry to say. I lifted the collar of my shirt.

  Wandering a few blocks, I looked in shop windows, glad for a change of scenery. That is, until I noticed a boarded up shop with the word Jude and a Jewish star painted sloppy over the window glass. Through a crack the size of a baseball, I saw a mannequin with no head, a broken sewing machine, and bolts of fabric thrown on the floor. A German soldier stepped over and said, “Geschlossen.” What’d he take me for, an idiot? I could see for myself that the place was closed.

  Around the corner I stumbled on a flea market. People sold junk: tables with three legs, chairs without seats, rusty weathervanes, and moth chewed blankets. One old man sold corncob pipes and it made me miss my guardian, even though Lord Sopwith’s pipes were made of ebony. Then something in a shop window grabbed my eye.

  It was a toy biplane made of wood and metal and was super-realistic. Jack learned to fly in a biplane just like it. When I entered the shop a bell tinkled above the door. A bald man stepped out from behind a curtain in the back, and when I pointed to the airplane in his window, he said, “Oui, jeune homme!”

  Reaching inside the window display, he handed me the biplane. I was surprised at how light it felt in my hands. With the right wind, it might fly. The shopkeeper reached over and found a tiny tag attached to the wing strut.

  Already, I was desperate to have the airplane, because it would make a swell gift for my brother…if Jack was still alive. For a split second I thought about my brother, dead with blood covering his broken body, with more blood running out of his nose. My imagination was doing me dirty. I looked at the airplane and forced my mind to switch to a picture of me handing the biplane to Jack, him alive and well. I reached into my back pocket and removed the stack of American dollars I’d been carrying since leaving East Hempstead. When the shopkeeper saw the stack, his pupils widened.

  “Will this be enough?” I said, worried because antiques cost more than spanking new things, which never did made sense.

  The shopkeeper spun the hour hand on a fake clock sign, locked the door and pulled down a blind. I followed him behind the curtain and into a windowless room with a desk and shelves filled with more toys. And mechanical banks: a lion eating a franc from a tamer’s hand, a cricket player batting centimes, Jonah the Prophet feeding coins to a whale.

  Sitting me down in a chair, the shopkeeper shook his head and wagged a finger. I held the airplane in one hand, my dollars in the other. “Please,” I said. “S’il vous plait.” And in case that wasn’t enough, “Dankeschön.” He calmed down and took a seat behind the desk—all the time keeping his eyes fixed on me. After removing his spectacles, he detached a keychain from his belt. Opening a locked drawer below his desk, he removed a tray of money and counted out Belgian francs. He pulled a ten-spot from my stack but left me the rest. I bolted out the door.

  With my Belgian change I’d do Daphne’s shopping and bring back a treat for Madame DeQuick. Strolling down the street, I passed a bakery, a shoemaker, and the kind of store that sells rubber bands, paperclips, and notebooks. Belgian children lined up to buy school supplies. Down an alleyway, a sign dangled from a hook: Chocolaterie. The window display was bare, but I stepped inside and asked for a Whitman’s Sampler, the world’s best box of chocolates: caramel, cashew clusters, maple fudge, marshmallow, and toffee. Plus cherry cordials soaked in brandy—which only grown-ups are allowed to eat. The shop girl looked at me like I had two heads, then handed me a bar labeled Congobar—the Belgian version of a plain ol’ Hershey bar.

  Four things left on the shopping list.

  An hour later and I’d about given up. Until I spied a saltshaker sitting on an outdoor café table, next to an uncorked bottle of red wine and a basket of fresh baked rolls, eggless unfortunately. I waited until the Wehrmacht officer got up to use the men’s room—probably to wash his blood stained hands—before swooping in and grabbing a candle out of a jelly jar, too. My conscience was squeaky clean, because in the window was a poster: Juden nicht erwunscht—Jews not welcomed. Served them right.

  Daphne would be in a tizzy seeing me missing and so I made a beeline back to the flat, getting lost once when I turned at the wrong place and found myself in front of Nazi headquarters. I turned tail when I caught sight of the giant swastika flag hanging from a balcony. Holding my new biplane high above me, I flew back to the flat, battling the Red Baron the whole way.

  Daphne was still absorbed in her magazine, without a clue that I’d been gone. When I walked into the parlor, she looked at my airplane puzzled-like. A blow-by-blow of my adventure threw her in a snit, but I calmed her with the chocolate bar. With a smile back on her face, she twirled around in a circle and said: “What do you think? Delicious, no?”

  “You sure do look chichi,” I said.

  “This is the latest from Paris. Madame DeQuick had the black crepe wool left over. She’s a professional seamstress. It’s otherwise impossible to obtain fine wool nowadays, simply impossible.” She held out the sleeve of her dress for me to feel. “It’s stylish, feminine luxury that will never go out of style.”

  She’d been reading too many magazines.

  Daphne admired herself in the mirror. She strutted across the room like a Hollywood actress about to get handed an Oscar. Then she pointed to her head. “Madame DeQuick is giving me this hat, shoes, and bag. As well as—other—unmentionables. It means so much to me…as they belong to her daughter.” Daphne lowered her voice. “She was taken away by the Gestapo—a student leader for the Resistance. Caught handing out anti-Nazi literature on campus—pamphlets printed clandestinely using the university printing press. You see, she worked there in the evenings and that’s how the Gestapo put two and two together.”

  “Saints alive,” I said, shaken. Something had to be done and fast. First I needed to know where the Nazis were holding the daughter. Mother of God, I thought, but tried to act calm. Because I’d just seen Nazi headquarters and it looked like a fortress if ever there was one. And I knew zero about breakouts.

  “They haven’t a clue where she is,” said Daphne, sad enough to cry.

  Right then a bang shook the building and I dived under the couch, sure it was a bomb. Daphne hollered with laughter. Lightening flashed through the windows. A second thunderclap and it started raining. Madame DeQuick got up to close the windows. From my position on the floor, I spotted Les Aventures de Tintin in a magazine rack. But as good as them cartoons were, they had to wake me for supper.

  After the Jewish ceremony, Daphne didn’t want to turn on the lights. I figured she was angling for a candlelight supper. More romantic. I’d just opened my mouth to protest when suddenly the electric clock stopped ticking and the fan made a wheezing sound and went dead. I jiggled the light switch every which way before giving up. So in the end, Daphne got her cockamamie wish. And claimed the whole thing was an Act of God. Even after Madame DeQuick explained that power cuts were becoming nightly occurrences in Brussels.

  In the flickering light we ate the kind of meal you get stranded on a deserted island, and then Madame DeQuick and Daphne began yapping away in French.

  In the pitch dark, I felt my way to a bed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE CITY RACKET WOKE ME early the next morning. Candle wax coated the kitchen table, along with breadcrumbs. Sitting in the parlor was a pretty lady on the sofa next to Madame DeQuick, her legs twisted daintily at the ankles. She wore flat mannish lace-ups, scuffed up and needing polish. Antoine sat cattycorner to her, dressed in a suit and tie, and with all the dirt scrubbed out from under his fingernails. Daphne was drinking something I figured was tea. They all stood to greet me.

  “Would you like some?” asked Antoine, pointing to the coffeepot. “There’s no coffee available, but we have this substitute—a mixture of chicory. It’s more of a laxative than anything.” Taking another sip, he made a sour face.

  “Sh
abbat Shalom, Thomas,” said Daphne pouring herself another cup.

  “Let me introduce you to Dédée,” said Antoine.

  Her real name was Andrée Eugénie Adrienne De Jongh, but I didn’t learn that until much later. I took her hand and kissed it, because I felt like I was in the presence of royalty. She wasn’t dressed fancy or anything; it was the exact opposite. She was wearing a plain grey skirt and a white button down blouse—nothing that stood out in a crowd, which was what she was going for.

  “Dédée may be able to help get you out of this predicament,” said Antoine.

  “You did a daring thing,” said Dédée. She laughed and her whole face lit up like on a billboard for toothpaste. “Now the Gestapo is hunting for you, and so I’m here to arrange a way to get you out of Belgium.”

  “We’ve yet to find my fiancé,” said Daphne.

  “So I understand from Antoine,” said Dédée. “That’s why I’ve gotten involved. It’s my job to help downed RAF pilots get back to England.”

  “Dédée is being modest,” said Antoine. “To date she’s helped dozens of pilots evade capture and return home. It started last year when a Scottish airman was stranded in Belgium. Dédée managed, single handedly, to get him to the British Consulate in Bilbao, Spain.”

  “Not single handedly, Antoine.”

  She launched into the story: with the help of a Basque guide, they’d made it over the treacherous Pyrenees Mountains. Slipping on ice, snow up to their belt loops. Without that guide it would’ve been impossible; they’d now be laying dead in a crevasse. Dédée arrived in Bilbao, Spain with frostbitten fingers and chapped lips. The diplomats at the British Consulate were shocked to see them and “jolly” glad to have their airman back. Dédée couldn’t wait to turn around and do it all over again.