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 wav
es 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?”
“Yeah and then his mother wrote a letter to his captain and told him her son’s true age. They sent that kid right home with an honorable discharge after that! His name was Olen English.”
We all started laughing and talking about that and I forgot Mr. Henley and my father and Danny. They disappeared as if in a draft of warm picnic air and we chattered away, eating the potato salad and macaroni salad and slabs of Spam. Everything tasted salty and sweet and I felt normal and light for a moment. And then in a wave it would all come back to me. I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. But it was. Mr. Henley. Postman Henley. Bobby Henley had died on Valentine’s Day.
After the picnic we walked by his house. A sign that read HENLEY’S HAVEN was still in his front yard. I could not believe his house could still be here and we could still be here and yet Mr. Henley was gone. Where did he go? How could he have vanished? How was that possible? There seemed no reason for his death.
I did not want to leave his house and we sat on his steps for a long time. I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave and finally Derek pulled at me and so did Dimples. They almost dragged me away from Mr. Henley’s house.
“Mr. Henley will forever be remembered in the argyles of time,” said Dimples quite loudly as all three of us walked back along the downtown street in Bottlebay.
“That doesn’t sound right, Dimples. Argyles are socks,” said Derek. “Socks with a pattern, like the ones The Gram knits.”
“No,” said Dimples. “In Selsey, by the sea, where I live with my mum, they say ‘the argyles of time.’”
“I think they say the ‘annals of time,’ Dimples,” said Derek. “Mr. Henley will be remembered forever in the annals of time. And you’re right. He will be.”
Dimples got very cross then. She ran off into the five-and-dime and I rushed in after her. I couldn’t find her for a while and then she turned up in the paper-doll section. When I finally got her back outside, Derek had disappeared. I looked all up and down the street and then towards the harbor where the little lobster boats knocked about on their moorings.
“He’s gone back to see Buttons, Buttons and Babbit again,” said Dimples. “And it’s good in some ways and it’s bad in others.”
“How do you know all that, Dimples?” I asked, looking directly at her. She decided to turn in circles and stare up at the sky instead of answering me.
“Shall we go along there as well?” I said. “I am tired of guessing and wondering about Derek.” I looked over at the green lawn in front of the courthouse. There was that ragpicker again. His wide bag on his shoulder was now full. He swung round and looked at me.
Presently, Dimples and I arrived at the street entrance of Buttons, Buttons and Babbit. Then Derek came bursting forth from the doorway as if he were just rising from the bottom of a swimming pool or the depths of the ocean, his face wet with brightness and cheer.
“It’s good and it’s bad,” whispered Dimples. “You see, that’s what it is.”
When Derek was ready to tell me, he would tell me. There were some things I had learned this year and that was one of them. Meanwhile, it was a lovely spring on our point in Bottlebay, Maine. The birds seemed to dive and call in the most joyous way, as if the war and the losses we had taken were nothing to them, nothing to the flowers, nothing to the bees, nothing to the Mazarine blue sky. Dimples’s favorite puffins were back, floating in the water with their bright, wide, orange beaks. The lilacs were in bud again.
One morning a very nice lady in a blue uniform with a red cross on her sleeve dropped off about ten boxes of strips of cotton that we were to roll into bandages. I liked the idea of helping real soldiers with their real wounds. I wanted to do it because of Mr. Henley and I started jumping up and down in my stocking feet on one of the fat, stuffed chairs in the dining room. And then suddenly I felt foolish because I was thirteen now. Perhaps it was the last time I would do that sort of thing.
The Gram called out, “Felicity Budwig Bathburn, at your age you’re just as antsy as ever! I am sorry she’s so ‘enthusiastic,’” she said, shaking her head sadly at the woman. “Come over here now, Flissy, and get a lesson in how to roll bandages properly.”
The Red Cross woman straightened her white cap and frowned at me.
Derek and I soon were wearing clean cotton gloves. We sat at the table and we rolled and we rolled and we rolled each strip of cotton and then we would fasten it with a little clip and stack it back in the box.
Derek only had to wear one glove and he got quite good at rolling up the bandages with one hand. We sat there for the whole afternoon, the sun falling through the curtains, lacy light and shadows moving slowly across the tabletop.
Towards the end of the day Derek started tossing the rolls he had finished into the box from a distance and I did it too. We got a bit more “enthusiastic,” playing a sort of ball game. “Touchdown!” Derek kept shouting. We had perfect aim and a perfect record, except that once Derek tossed a roll and it hit me on the shoulder and he started laughing. We laughed and laughed. I even got the hiccups. Suddenly, Derek and I were close to each other, almost nose to nose. He looked at me longer than usual and it made my hiccups go away. I felt myself blush.
The Gram arrived from the kitchen and I quickly dropped the roll. She swooped it up, popped it in with the others, and tied up the box with twine.
Through the lace curtains I could see Dimples out on the porch, jumping up and down. She had her arms wrapped round Mr. Henley’s book. “Read one aloud, Felicity,” she called and then she knocked on the window. “Read me one aloud. I want to hear the music of Mr. Henley’s words.”
So I went out on the porch to the glider and I began to read Dimples one of Mr. Henley’s poems. Dimples was now lounging in a wicker chair with her feet up on the wicker footstool and her eyes wide open and serious, listening. She had Wink sitting next to her, wearing his checked bathrobe and plush slippers that The Gram had sewn for him.
Then Derek came busting out on the porch and flopped down next to me on the porch glider. “Dimples, can you go get me the Brer Rabbit molasses? I’m going to put some of it in my milk. Bring a spoon too,” he said. He set the glass down on the wicker table in front of us. “I mean, hup, two, three, four, about face. March, Dimples!”
“Derek, I’m on shore leave. Soldiers don’t march when they are on shore leave,” said Dimples.
“Yes, but they always obey their captain,” said Derek.
“Oh, all right, then,” said Dimples, stumping off to the kitchen. We could hear cupboard doors banging about and glasses clinking.
Derek looked at me again with his velveteen eyes, his silky, brown, long lashes, his heavy, dark, handsome eyebrows. Suddenly, he moved closer to me. He put his arm round me and pulled me towards him and he kissed me. It was a fierce and gloomy kiss. It was a Hurricane Derek kiss and I closed my eyes because my head was swimming.
Then he said in a low, whispering way, “Flissy, this is the second time I have kissed you. And it’s also the last time. It’s a good-bye kiss.” And he looked at me as if he were trying to say more but the words were lining up and refusing to leave his mouth. “And I don’t mean good-bye because I am going to Government Study Camp in a few days. N
o, I mean another kind of good-bye. I’m not mad at you anymore. I’m glad you did what you did. You were right. I’ve read about first love in a lot in books. I shall always think of you as my first love and for that reason, you will always be special to me.”
“Oh, Derek,” I said, “I didn’t know you still …”
“I shall always care,” he said. “But I shall never say it again or tell you again because something will be different when I get back from camp.”
“How will it be different?” I said, feeling a great happiness and a great sadness all at once. “What do you mean?” But he didn’t say anything else. We just held hands and glided forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards, as if moving into joy and then away from it again.
Soon Dimples plunged out onto the porch. “Don’t you love this picture of Brer Rabbit? He’s wearing such a grand pair of trousers. For a rabbit, I mean. When the jar is all empty, I shall soak the label off and save it forever. It’s lovely, don’t you think, Flissy Bee Bee Bee?” Dimples said.
I sat there with Derek, feeling as if I’d just breathed in or absorbed an entire vanilla soda or a slice of yellow cake with pink icing, the sweetest thing ever tasted. And yet everything was oddly tinged with questions. What was Derek trying to tell me? Then I thought about the bandages he and I had rolled together and I wondered what soldier would receive the bandage that Derek tossed at my shoulder by mistake. Perhaps that bandage would bring extra luck to the poor soldier because that bandage had caused Derek to finally tell me that he still loved me.
Yes, I knew that Derek had applied to a camp for teens interested in government service. Many of the campers would be training to be pages next year at the Senate. Pages, Derek told me, were young messengers at the state house, who ran about with notes and messages from one senator to another and to the speakers or other politicians. The camp took place during the school year and counted for school credit. You had to have good grades and great manners to get in. Derek had been accepted recently. He would be gone almost a month and would come back ready to be a page during the summer session this year.
Romeo Blue (9780545520706) Page 20