Romeo Blue (9780545520706)

by Stone, Phoebe

  Then we headed for the stairs. Soon a young guard came towards us and Gideon ordered him aside. “We will be inspecting the prison tomorrow. Oh yes, young man, things will be changing around here. I suggest you go up and discuss this matter of rearranging things this evening with your higher-ups. I am under orders from the top.”

  Soon we walked by the front door. “I shall be back in the morning,” said the colonel to the next guard. “I should warn you all that cleanliness and order will be a high priority in the inspection tomorrow. Good night for now. I will be staying at the Hôtel de France until my rooms are ready. I can be reached there if any problems arise. These guards here will help me out.” He handed the assistant the keys. “You’ll need these, I would imagine. Keep on your toes and I shall see you in the morning,” said the colonel, smiling. “Early!”

  We walked out into the courtyard where the car Gideon had driven in was waiting for us. We immediately climbed in. Gideon drove up to the gate and the guard saluted to him and let us pass. We drove off, following the prescribed route. And I must commend the planners who worked under Bill Stephenson. They thought of almost everything. We drove fast as we guessed within moments the whole area would be on our tail. But oddly it was quiet. The guards we tranquilized probably were sleeping peacefully, snoring away while the various lesser officers hustled about cleaning up the offices on the top floors.

  On a back street in the next town, we let the two men out who were dressed as guards. They disappeared, headed for a safe house not far away. And then we drove on into the night. All was well until we came to a small town some thirty-five miles from Limoges. A sleepy, dark town, all the shutters closed up and the streets narrow and empty as we drove through. Still, on the street in front of us, two Gestapo officers were walking along, having just emerged from a bistro. They were drunk and singing, blocking the road and waving their arms at us to stop. “We’re having a dance at the officers’ club up the street. Why don’t you join us?”

  “Oh no, I must continue. I am Colonel Ludswig. I am doing inspections in the town ahead early tomorrow. I must get to my hotel before it closes.”

  “Colonel Helmut Ludswig? But I just talked to you by telephone an hour ago. You were in Berlin.” He squinted in at us. “You don’t really look quite right. I mean for one thing, Ludswig has shaved off his mustache. He did it on a bet. I only saw him a day ago.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am his brother. Uh, I shall telephone him tonight when I get to the hotel,” said Gideon.

  “He doesn’t have a brother,” said the man. “Perhaps you had better get out of the vehicle.”

  Gideon then gunned his motor and took off. But one of the men shot at us, hit the side window with the first shot and the second shot hit Gideon’s back on his left side. His jacket was soon covered with blood. Danny shot at them. We do not know if he hit one officer or both of them. Perhaps he hit no one at all. We could only keep driving.

  Even though he’d been shot, Gideon stayed at the wheel, keeping his foot on the gas pedal. There wasn’t time to stop. At the edge of town we took a turn off the main road and careened along the river. The moon was out and the car rushed through the speckled larch trees and the wind shuddered and brushed through the empty branches around us and we listened for cars or sirens but we heard none. Finally, Gideon stopped the car and slumped at the steering wheel.

  Now Danny and I carried Gideon to the backseat. He lay beside me and we pressed on, Danny driving, using only back roads and moonlight. We turned off our headlights. In the darkness a mother deer and her winter fawn hurried across the road in front of our car and for some reason that made me cry.

  Gideon was bleeding profusely. I held his head in my arms. I tore some fabric from my habit and tried to make a bandage for him. He was losing so much blood. He looked up at me as we drove and he said, “Oh my God, Winnie, if I had known that I would be lying here in your arms.”

  We drove all night along the back roads, unpaved, some of them clotted with snow. Sometimes cows or long-horned sheep loomed up in the darkness.

  We approached Aubeterre-sur-Dronne. It seemed to be part of the sky, perched high on the side of the hill above a river. As we drew up the climbing streets, I put a blanket over Gideon in the backseat and got in the front seat. Then we were simply a priest and a nun headed for the convent. We passed through the elevated town square, where a narrow park waited among beech and oak trees in the darkness. Farther up the hill, Danny stopped the car in front of the large stone convent with its heavy, arched, wooden doors.

  “There you go, Winnie,” Gideon whispered, leaning forward and trying to sit up but not opening his eyes. “Off you go now. A guide will take you over the mountains when you are ready. Your papers are all in order. Everything is in order.”

  “Yes, but you are not in order, Gideon,” I said. “What about you? Danny, he’s so badly wounded. I can’t leave you. Where will you go?”

  “Dr. Sachet in Chalais. He will help us. I will take my brother there,” Danny said.

  “I want to go with you,” I said. “Please let me go with you.”

  “All this has been arranged. Winnie, think of what’s at stake. We haven’t any more time,” said Gideon in his faint, breathy voice.

  I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and then I leaned forward and kissed Danny. Danny smiled at me and said, “Give my love to Felicity. Tell her I miss her.” I looked back at Gideon and his face was full of pain at the mention of Felicity’s name.

  I forced myself to get out of the car. I struggled with reluctance up the convent steps and I knocked on the door.

  The sisters surrounded me like a flock of dark swans and they pulled me in. They said when they saw me that I made a perfect nun. They fed me some thin soup. I remember the warm bowl in my hands. I was led to a plain room with a small, cold bed and I lay there awake for the rest of the night. We had not prepared for this. Danny had not told me much about Dr. Sachet. I did not know where Danny and Gideon were going. It was the last time I saw the Bathburn brothers and I had loved them both so dearly.

  “Flissy McBee,” The Gram called from downstairs, “will you come here, please? Dimples has locked herself in the pantry and she’s in there eating all the cookies we made last night. Will you talk to her, please?”

  I closed the journal and I sat there for a moment. I could not close away the image of my father lying in the backseat as my Danny drove over bumpy roads towards some doctor that might not even be there when they arrived. Try as I would, I could not shut out what I had just read and the pages of Winnie’s journal seemed to flutter and fold open even when I closed my eyes.

  I went downstairs. Night was falling. Passing the front door I saw Winnie was out on the porch, all alone in the darkness.

  Winnie’s journal threw me into a bit of a panic. It seemed as though everything in my life was funneling and spinning in a great vortex and I was lost in the middle. I had tried to ring up Stu Barker because I wanted and needed to talk with Derek, but their telephone had been disconnected. Well, they had a ten-party line anyway and you never could get through.

  The next day I sat with The Gram in the hallway upstairs. She was unpacking a chest and stacking all the bedspreads and old linen sheets on the hall rug. Then the chest was empty except for a tortoiseshell hair comb and long, ornate hairpins lying on the bottom. One of the long pins had a silver filigree butterfly perched on a tiny spring at the end of the hairpin so whenever someone wore it in their hair, the butterfly would bob at the top of their French twist or braided bun. I picked it up. “Have you rung up Derek since he left?” I said. And then I added, “Winnie would probably like this hairpin because of the butterfly.”

  “It’s a treasure and it’s part of this house and I wouldn’t give it to her,” said The Gram. “She’s caused enough trouble, hasn’t she? Why should she have something that belonged to Ada Bathburn?”

  “But you are talking with her now,” I said.

  “Well, Winifred and I
do share certain interests, you being one of them. Take the hairpin for yourself, dear. It’s yours. When you are a little older, you can pull back your hair with it and show off your lovely Bathburn forehead.”

  Perhaps The Gram was right about Winnie. I wasn’t sure anymore. I had wanted to smooth out the wrinkles and rumples between the Bathburns and the Budwigs and now I too was all mixed up and muddled. I could hear Dimples shouting from the parlor, “Felicity, you’ve got another letter. You get all the letters here and my mum never writes to me.”

  “She has to send a telegram and they are expensive, Dimples,” I called as I clumped downstairs to see what she had for me.

  Dimples saw me and started piloting through the house in her invisible airplane, rising up in her Halifax bomber, with an envelope in her hands. She soared by me, waving it at me. I grabbed it.

  I saw immediately it was another prewritten card from my father. I could tell by the stamps. The Gram swooped down from upstairs and watched me from across the room with a look of great sorrow looming over her, like a dark mountain full of rainfall. I took the card out to the porch. I tore open the envelope. On the front was a sketch of Bugs Bunny sitting in a bathtub eating a carrot. Inside it said, Mr. Bathtub says READ! And then in small letters it said, But what’s he reading?

  I sat on the top step of the stairs to the sea. There it felt like the whole world was falling away below me. I stared out across the ocean. From here I could not see the bombs falling or the sky burning red in Europe but I could feel it. Mr. Bathtub says READ! What had my father meant when he had written that card to me, so many months ago? Whose child was I? I knew where I belonged, but whom did I belong to?

  It had been almost a week that Derek had been visiting the Barkers. I quite missed him and I would be glad when the Barkers left and Derek came home. If only he loved me as he had before. Of course I was beginning to understand that you could not control love. It went where it wished and it did as it pleased, just like the hiccups. Still, if he loved me, I felt I could endure the low pressure and the dense air that seemed to be hovering in the Bathburn house. The needle on the Stormoguide in the dining room almost seemed to register all that was inside my heart.

  As school was soon starting again after spring break, The Gram and Dimples and I were going into town. Dimples would be allowed to buy a set of paper dolls because she had knitted so many pairs of socks. I had grown taller and hoped the five-and-dime would have a light skirt for a thirteen-year-old, size 12 girl, which I now was.

  “Oh, you’re going shopping for clothes. Oh, poppet, I wish I could go,” Winnie said, looking sadly at me.

  “No,” said The Gram. “You need rest. And we’re used to shopping together, aren’t we, Flissy McBee?” The Gram drew me towards her.

  As we got in the Packard, I waved to Winnie and I hoped while we were gone, she would manage being alone. She was working on some project in a scrapbook she wouldn’t let me see. Perhaps that would occupy her. I didn’t think I was still mad at Winnie for leaving me for so long or for not telling me things she should have. But now I wasn’t sure. I did not think I was mad at her really for what happened in France with my father and yet when she looked at me in that sad way, I felt awkward and looked away. I knew it was hard for her to be here. She was jumpy and nervous and she didn’t eat much. As we drove off she stood there in the garden, waving in a wistful way. I was torn between anger and pity. Yes, it hurt me when The Gram barked at her.

  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 Dimple
s 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.