I was very quiet when Derek got off the phone. I didn’t answer him when he said, “Brie just told me a story that really snapped my cap.”
I turned my head away.
“She lives in Cape Elizabeth, you know. Something happened there last week.”
I was still silent, studying the wall next to me. Not that it was at all interesting. It was a very dull portion of the plaster, with no visible cracks or bumps that looked like a face or a rabbit or anything like that.
“It was touch and go,” said Derek. “Fliss? Are you there? Can you hear me?”
I suddenly felt itchy all over. I was itchy, itchy, itchy, and dying to ask Derek what he meant. I tried to stay angry and silent. I held on to my anger as tightly as I could, but soon it floated away like a great balloon and I couldn’t keep myself from jumping up, turning round, and saying, “Cape Elizabeth? What is it, Derek? What happened?”
“A German woman living down the street from Brie was just arrested. She had come to live in Cape Elizabeth on the seashore two years before the war. Brie said she had been living there quietly, not mixing much with the town.”
“Really,” I said. “What happened?” Derek went on to say that the German woman hung her laundry on a clothesline every day. But then it seemed someone noticed she was hanging her white shirts and red shirts and yellow shirts sometimes upside down, sometimes right side up. They were always hung in a planned order. It began to appear that the order and the color of the shirts had a meaning, a kind of code for the U-boats lurking under the water not far away. Since she lived right on the coast, her laundry drying on the line was a way to send messages, to alert the U-boats of cargo ships passing Cape Elizabeth.
Then those U-boats could follow the ships farther out to sea and when they were alone, the U-boats could torpedo the ships, blow them up, send them to the bottom. Those wolf packs had been sinking so many ships off the east coast recently. The newspapers were full of reports about it. Perhaps that Nazi washerwoman was to blame for some of it. But the FBI had caught her. They also found a wireless transmitter in her house.
“Oh, Derek, is that a coincidence?” I said and I remembered the blank letter written to a woman in Cape Elizabeth. Derek shrugged his shoulders.
“But still, I suppose you enjoyed your conversation with Brie?”
“It was great to hear from her,” said Derek.
“Yes, how lovely,” I said in my best British accent. It was changing a little and getting rusty. I had thrown out so many British ways of saying things that I often forgot what some of those phrases meant. The dance at the end of October still hung over me like a shadow and every time I turned round, Brie seemed to be in the air. Now she was ringing Derek up more and more. I walked into the dining room and sat down and looked at the portrait of Ella Bathburn, Captain Bathburn’s middle daughter. I knew very little about her life. Had she sat at this very table almost one hundred years ago, her heart full of sadness, like mine?
“You’re a bit off today,” said Derek, following me into the dining room and looking at me, with all those daring freckles tossed across his face. “But come on, Fliss,” he said. “Cheer up. You’ve got a letter!”
“You’re making a game of me,” I said.
“No, Fliss, here it is. A letter for you,” he said.
I got awfully excited as I’m mad keen on letters and I am always hoping for one from Winnie and Danny. Winnie. My mum. I could see her now, driving away with Danny in the little sports car after they left me here, her veil on her hat blowing in the wind. Danny waving.
Naturally, I rather tore the envelope to pieces. The letter inside proved to be from Mr. Henley. With his note he included a poem he had just written about the sea. He wrote poetry all the time and he got so many rejection slips from magazines that he had made a whole scrapbook of them. But he kept on writing his poems anyway. And they were growing more lovely, really. The letter said:
Dear Flissy,
Will you meet me at the library in Bottlebay tomorrow at three thirty? I have something to show you.
Yours,
Bob Henley
I put the letter in my pocket and went out on the porch. I wondered what Mr. Henley wanted to talk about. I wondered too why Brie was calling Derek so much. I wondered as well about the Nazi laundress, hanging her plain, colored shirts in different ways every morning. Yes, the war had a hidden side in which secret agents moved about in darkness, changing the course of the war with simple tools like a laundry basket and clothes-pegs and a long, cotton rope.
At nearly three thirty, after school, I walked back into town by myself. I felt a little lonely as I moved quietly through the fog. I could hear a foghorn repeating its call over and over again, mixed with a distant bell clanging somewhere offshore. Seagulls followed me and seemed to dive in and out of the murkiness.
I first came upon the harbor full of lobster boats and sailboats wrapped in blankets of mist, their masts and sails shrouded in wispiness and clouds. The fog too poured through the narrow streets of Bottlebay. It floated and twisted into cracks and crevices, like white smoke. I wondered if I would ever see clearly the shapes of things as they were forming round me. Everything seemed hidden, as if in a dream.
The town was quite empty, which gave me a shivery feeling. The lights from the shops and houses glowed a soft yellow in the dampness of the afternoon. I walked up the narrow winding streets to the central part of town and found the library sitting up on a rise, with four large white columns at the front.
I opened the door and went into the warm, cheerful room, full of library tables, each with a green lamp on a small brass stand. All round the tables were walls of shelved books. Mr. Henley was sitting at a large oak desk in a corner. He waved. “Flissy McBee,” he whispered. “Good to see you! Thanks for meeting me. Let’s step back into the stacks, where we can talk.” We spotted two tall stools under a large oval window, and after struggling a bit, I found myself perched on the top of one.
“You have something on your mind, then,” I said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Henley, reaching in his pocket. Now he had a small red leather box in the palm of his hand. He held it out to me. “Open it,” he said. His face was all tingly with nervousness and excitement.
I took the box carefully and opened the lid. Inside was a delicate little ring propped up in velvet. The gold band was thin and fragile. The ring had little red rubies and pearls round a miniature portrait of a young woman painted on a tiny dome of porcelain.
“Doesn’t the woman in the little painting remind you of your beautiful aunt?” said Mr. Henley. He looked pleased and shining, the way postmen often do when they know they have something nice in their mailbag for you.
“Yes,” I said, “she does.”
“Do you think Miami will like it?” he said with his eyes all lit up softly, like the lamps on the library tables.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said. “It’s lovely.”
“It’s an antique,” he said. “It’s from 1750. It’s a family ring. I needed to show it to you. Do you think it makes a good” — he paused — “a good” — he paused again — “a good engagement ring?”
“Oh!” I said. “Oh my. Oh yes. Uncle Gideon will be terribly pleased. I mean, oops, I mean, Auntie will be pleased, of course. An engagement ring! It’s a smashing good idea. Perfect!”
“Really? I mean, do you think she’d rather have a more traditional ring? I mean, are you sure?” Mr. Henley looked quite wobbly and ruffled in a cheerful sort of way, tipping about on his tall stool. “Flissy,” he said, “could you by chance find out for me what kind of rings your aunt likes? I mean, how does she feel about antique rings? Can you let me know as soon as possible? Everything shall be on hold until I hear from you.”
I felt quite fond of Mr. Henley as we left the library. He trusted me and he loved my aunt so very much. “You sent me your new poem and I read it,” I said. “And I thought it was wonderful.”
“Oh, thank you,” he said. He s
miled at me in a happy, wistful way. “You liked it. I’m very glad to hear that. Well then, it doesn’t matter if I never get published as long as my friends read my poems.” Then Mr. Henley headed off down Vine Street. He turned and waved to me in his chipper postman sort of way and the fog seemed to wrap its long, smoky arms all round him and draw him away into the whiteness.
Yes, when you live among a family of intelligence agents, everything is hazy and yet a word or a picture can come up out of that haze in spite of itself and can hang before your eyes at night when you should be sleeping. The blank letter to a woman in Cape Elizabeth seemed to swirl before my eyes. Why would someone stamp and address an envelope with a blank piece of paper in it?
I also knew I had to ask Auntie about her favorite type of ring and I didn’t know how to begin. I didn’t want to give away Mr. Henley’s surprise. It made me feel awfully nervous and important at the same time. I wondered if other children, age twelve, had any of the same problems I had. I rather guessed not. I wondered too if any other children had a mother and father missing in France. It was hard to even say those words. Were they missing or were they just out of contact? We hadn’t had a coded letter from them for almost a year. The Gram kept telling me they had gone underground. It made me think of rabbits or foxes or groundhogs, but not people, not parents. Parents didn’t go underground. Oh, how I missed my mother especially. To want your mother as I did was like living with a river that ran under everything that happened. That river flowed on behind everything, with its ice-cold, freezing, uncaring waters. And soon my new father was going off to the war as well. Were there other children out there, beyond our blackout curtains, beyond our wind and salt spray, beyond our point and peninsula, who felt as I did?
“Auntie,” I said into the darkness of our bedroom, guessing she hadn’t fallen asleep yet either. “What do you think of old things?”
“Well, like this house, you mean?” she said from across the room, in her bed.
“Well, yes, sort of,” I said.
“Oh, I would like to give this house a big face-lift. I should like to steam off all the old wallpaper and put up something with some pizzazz, like big, bright daisies in the dining room. Now, how would you feel getting up in the morning to big, bright daisies?”
“I rather like the house the way it is,” I said. “I like Captain Bathburn’s daughters.”
“I think they are a dreary bunch, clutching their whalebone combs,” she said.
“But I like the whalebone dominoes in the parlor, carved by one of the shipmates of Captain Bathburn on his voyage to India. Don’t you? Mr. Bathtub told us in class that Captain Bathburn’s cargo, on the way to India in 1855, was ice. Ice! Great blocks of it wrapped in sawdust and hay, stored down in the hold. That way, after three months, the ice only melted a little bit. Ice was like gold in India. It fetched huge prices. After all, they couldn’t keep iceboxes there without ships bringing ice to them from places with winter and icy rivers like we have here in Maine.”
“Flissy, you are a card. You’re always running around like a little ladybug all wound up, even when going to sleep at night. When do you slow down, sweetest?” said Aunt Miami.
“Um, well, if you don’t like old houses, is there anything old you do like?” I said.
“Hmmm, I like The Gram,” said Auntie.
I felt a bit discouraged after that and so I changed the subject. “Auntie,” I said quietly, “have you ever seen a letter arriving with an address and a stamp and simply nothing on the letter?”
“Well, either the person forgot to write something or they’ve used invisible ink, which is a subject Gideon would know all about. Speaking of my brother Gideon, you know, I think he rather enjoys intrigue and danger as much as Danny. I wish he’d get on with it and forget Winnie. Sorry, sweetest. I know you adore Winnie and I’m sure she’s lovely. It’s just that Gideon is wasting his life pining over a woman who ran off and married his brother.”
“How do you make invisible ink visible?” I said.
“Oh, I think there are several different kinds that respond to different things. I believe the Germans are experts at it. Some types of invisible ink must be treated with chemicals, while others can be ironed, I believe.”
“You mean, ironed like a pillowcase or a napkin?” I said.
“Yes,” said Auntie, yawning. “Shall we go to sleep, sweetest? Oh, little ladybug, with all your questions. Flissy McBee, you are such a card.”
I wondered if ladybugs went to sleep at night or did they stare at the ceiling for hours as I did. Did little insects go to sleep? I knew they drank water because I had seen them at our birdbath, perching delicately on the edge, leaning over to drink. Being restless tonight was not my fault. The sea was quite rambunctious and noisy and I couldn’t wait to tell Derek about invisible ink. I wanted to write a letter to Winnie and Danny with invisible ink. I could say anything I pleased because most people knew nothing about invisible ink. But Winnie and Danny would know. The letter would say, completely invisibly:
Dear Winnie and Danny,
I have grown weary of missing you. Every night I still cry for you. Do you hear me when I cry? And do you know that I truly love Derek Blakely? It’s rather painful and seems to get worse every day. We are practicing dancing together and we are getting to be very good. Even Gideon says so. He called Derek “a good hoofer.” I wish you could see us. I shall wait for you forever. I shall never stop waiting. Please be safe and if you did go underground, I hope you will soon surface. And when you do, I shall finally stop longing and smile gladly again.
Love,
Your Felicity, waiting. Waiting.
I didn’t say a word about Brie and the dance coming up. It was such a lovely letter without it, all invisible the way it was. I wrote to all sorts of people in my mind that night with invisible ink. And in the morning, I am afraid to say that I was bit cross. I hardly slept at all and I was late getting downstairs for breakfast. I missed helping Uncle Gideon feed Sir William Percy. That seagull had been trained to sit on Uncle Gideon’s knee and squawk. It was quite my favorite way to start out the morning, but today everyone was ready to leave when I finally got downstairs.
Mr. Bathtub had on his macintosh and Derek was all set for school, wearing a little cap with a bill that his father had given him.
Mr. Bathtub did say, “Is that a new hat, Derek?”
And Derek said, “Not really, I just haven’t worn it before.” Of course in my loyalty to Derek, I would never say a word. If he needed to see his father in peace, then I would stand by him.
I had to eat cold toast in the car and I didn’t have a chance to tell Derek about invisible ink on the way to school because Mr. Bathtub was driving. He was singing a song called “Lily Marlene,” which he said was a favorite among the German soldiers.
“Outside the barracks by the corner light,
I’ll always stand and wait for you at night.
We will create a world for two.
I’ll wait for you the whole night through,
For you, Lily Marlene,
For you, Lily Marlene.”
“That’s a very pretty song, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, it is,” said Gideon. “Soldiers on both sides suffer. They are cold. They’re hungry. They all want to go home. War is a terrible thing.”
“When we are marching in the mud and cold
And when my pack seems more than I can hold,
My love for you renews my might,
I’m warm again, my pack is light.
It’s you, Lily Marlene,
It’s you, Lily Marlene.”
Then my father sang the song in German. Looking out the window as we drove along the road to school, I felt a strange worry ripple through me. We passed the salt marshes and I saw a last great blue heron and flocks of gathering ducks preparing to set off on long journeys. Autumn was slowly opening up like a great papery orange flower and I marveled at it, in spite of the darkness that seemed to loom at the edge
of my vision.
Gideon took me and Derek to the movies on that Saturday and so we did not have a chance to iron the letter. At the intermission we saw Bugs Bunny cartoons. (After that my father did a great imitation of Bugs Bunny chewing his carrot and saying, “Eh, what’s up, doc?” Later at school the first graders adored it and flocked round him as he chewed his invisible carrot.)
We also saw a newsreel about Eleanor Roosevelt and her trip to Great Britain to visit Prime Minister Churchill. The newsreel showed her visiting the American soldiers stationed there too. I heard she said that our soldiers had blisters from tight cotton socks and that they needed nice wool socks.
All through the end of the movie I was feeling antsy and itchy. I was hoping we would have a chance to go into the laundry room later at home and do some ironing. Just to try it. Just to see. And, in fact, when we got home, The Gram and Auntie had gone off in a carpool to visit Miss Elkin. My father went on one of his long walks, leaving Derek and me alone in the house.
“Perhaps now is a good time to see if we can iron that letter,” I said.
Derek nodded at me. I jumped up and we headed for the little laundry room next to the larder and kitchen.
The room still smelled of fresh, damp, ironed sheets and pillowcases because Aunt Miami had been in there working earlier. There was a lovely, white, lacy cotton nightdress hanging on the wall. It had been Ella Bathburn’s. Her name was written under the collar. Auntie had washed and ironed the nightdress carefully. And she told me she planned to wear it on her wedding night. I had been quite relieved, actually. That proved to me Miami did like old things after all and I had already reported my findings to Mr. Henley, who had turned lobster red in the cheeks and smiled.
Now I plugged in the small, heavy iron with its black-and-white argyle cloth cord. And Derek got out the envelope addressed to Louise Mack, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Inside was the blank piece of paper. “Fliss, you really know your onions,” Derek said, looking at me in a close sort of way as we waited for the iron to heat up.
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