by Phoebe Stone
I wanted to get there before my uncle Gideon did. I wanted to see if we got another letter in an airmail envelope. Uncle Gideon was already in the ocean, having a morning swim. I could see him bobbing up and down in the cold water like a lonely seal, so I ran extra fast to get there first. The postman looked very awake this morning and handed me another letter from Portugal addressed to Uncle Gideon. Another one.
Uncle Gideon was out of the water in a flash, and most of the time he was terribly hard to get out of the water. Usually, The Gram would look out the window at Gideon in the sea and she’d say, “Bathburn is in the bathtub again.” Then she would call out, “Gideon, out of the water now, dear. You’re going to freeze or wrinkle up like a prune!”
Today, Uncle Gideon was already drying off. He zipped over to the postman and me. “Flissy, I’ll have that. NOW!” he said, pulling the letter away from me. Then, when he had the letter firmly in his hands, he cheered up again and said, “Oh, Flissy, forgive me. But as you can see, it is addressed to me. Are you all right? What do you say, Fliss?”
“It’s from Danny,” I said again. “I know it.”
“Nosy as a rule, are they, the British?” said Uncle Gideon, pretending to steal my nose, holding his thumb between his two fingers and waving it round trying to trick me.
“Not at all,” I said. “Not normally.”
I sat down on the last wooden step and stared out at the sea. It was calm today like a quiet mirror, like the long mirror upstairs above the marble-top chest of drawers in The Gram’s room. When I had been up in that room yesterday, I had seen a framed photograph sitting there of Gideon and Danny and Miami when they were children. I had opened a top drawer, hoping to find a picture of Captain Derek, but all I found was Winnie and Danny’s wedding photo stuffed way at the back. It showed them standing on a white English chalk cliff with the sea below, Winnie’s bridal dress blowing about and Danny holding on to the corsage on his lapel. Both of them looked so happy. I turned the photo over and on the back it said, “Mother, I’m sorry, you know that. I could never have imagined any of this. Miss you all. Love, Danny.”
I leaned my head against the railing, and Uncle Gideon hurried past me on the sandy steps. How was I going to read that letter? How was I going to see either letter when he always locked the door to that room? Suddenly, I wished that I wasn’t a child anymore because no one ever tells children anything. Children are just supposed to guess at things, and that’s very confusing because some children might guess wrong. They do in school all the time. I remember when Jillian Osgood guessed how many wellies were standing in the hall at school and she was off by two dozen.
Perhaps there would be a moment, I decided, when Uncle Gideon might forget to lock the door, just once. Just once. And then I hurried up the steps to tell Wink what I was thinking, because I didn’t want Wink to feel left out and sad and full of curiosity because of unanswered, mixed-up questions.
On the way up to my room, I was just hurrying past Captain Derek’s door when I spotted a folded piece of paper sticking out from under it. At first I thought I had imagined it as I ran past, and I had to stop and back up, like the Packard screeching into reverse when The Gram went down the wrong street in Bottlebay. A piece of paper? A note?
I quickly reached down and snatched it up and I couldn’t wait to open it. So I did.
It said, An answer to your questions, YES. YES. AND YES.
“Flissy dear, Miami is making Romeo cookies. Would you care to help?” The Gram called from the kitchen. That kitchen in Bottlebay, Maine, was always as noisy as the sea, with pots banging and water hissing through the pipes and a teapot whistling with no one tending to it and glasses clinking and people talking. Someone was always in that kitchen poking about, making something. Once in the middle of the night, I slipped down the stairs and heard The Gram and Uncle Gideon whispering in the pantry together. Their voices sounded rapid and anxious. “Well, I’ll be making a phone call to Donovan’s office in the morning when everyone goes out, okay?” Uncle Gideon said. Another night, I heard him whispering to The Gram, “And what do we do about Flissy when the war is over?”
“Pop round, Fliss,” called Uncle Gideon now. “Isn’t that what you Brits say over there? ‘Pop round.’ We need an icer. Are you a good icer?”
“What’s a good icer?” I said.
“Someone who’s willing to put pink goop all over those silly Romeo cookies,” said Uncle Gideon, rubbing his hands together.
“Oh, I’m ever so good at biscuits,” I said.
“Biscuits?” said Uncle Gideon.
“Yes, they’re sweet and sugary and you put them in the cooker and they come out all crisp and warm and you eat them with tea,” I said.
“A cooker?” said Uncle Gideon. “A cooker is a hot day around here. We say ‘Lovely day. It looks like it’s going to be a cooker. Would you like a cookie?’”
“Oh, but that’s silly,” I said.
“Oh, well, Fliss, we’ll never get things straight, will we? But we’ll keep trying, won’t we? Stiff upper lip and all that,” said Uncle Gideon, running his finger into the pink icing. The Gram swatted his arm, and he pulled his finger out of the icing and licked it anyway.
Then he got suddenly serious and said, “Flissy, can you smile for me? You haven’t smiled much. You have such a lovely smile. Do you know that?”
I turned my head away.
“She misunderstands your jokes, Gideon. He’s very kindhearted,” said The Gram to me, “really and truly.” Uncle Gideon just stood there with a dab of pink icing on the end of his nose, his folded hands resting on the table before him.
I tasted part of a cookie. Then I started to help Aunt Miami dribble pink, pink, ever so pink icing all over the Romeo cookies. They were all shaped like hearts. And it wasn’t Saint Valentine’s Day. It was a sunny day in July. And it was going to be a cooker.
The whole time I was smooshing that pink goop all over those hearts, I was thinking about Captain Derek and the note he wrote back to me. Yes, Yes, and Yes was all it said. But that was all it needed to say. Yes, Uncle Gideon cheated at Parcheesi. I thought so. Even though he seemed cheerful and sweet and was making Wink a new bear bed. Even though he was right about Frances Hodgson Burnett having written a ripping good story for children. And yes, Uncle Gideon was hiding something from me.
I just kept smearing pink on all the Romeo hearts, and the whole while I was thinking about Winnie and Danny. I wanted to explain to all the Bathburns how wonderful they were. I wanted to say that Winnie and Danny were so very intelligent. Winnie could embroider anything and faster than lightning and she could read a whole book in a day, while it was taking me two weeks to finish A Little Princess. And Winnie could speak three languages with a lovely accent. Someone came to our flat to make sure her French accent was perfect. The woman was called a coach. Danny was like that too with French, German, and Italian. They met at a posh university in England called Oxford and they studied things like that. And if I should ever talk with an American child who would say that I do not have parents at all, I would show them the photo of Winnie and Danny and me walking across the body of the Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex County, England.
We had just finished the last Romeo heart and there wasn’t enough icing and so it only covered half a heart, and Uncle Gideon made a joke about it being a halfhearted sort of Romeo, and Auntie got her revenge by taking a wooden spoon still covered in pink icing and smooshing it on Uncle’s cheek and then he began to chase her with a sifter full of flour, and they ran out onto the porch and down the steps towards the sea.
The Gram rolled her eyes at me. “Can you believe that girl is thirty-two years old? You wouldn’t know it, would you,” she said. Then she went on preparing a tray with two teacups and a pot of tea and a plate of Romeo hearts and two napkins. Then she lifted the tray off the table and handed it to me, saying, “Flissy dear, take this up to Captain Derek, will you? And cheer him up if you can. He’s been a bit sick.”
Take a tea tray to Captain Derek? How could I ever do that? I’d been here a whole month and a half and I’d never laid eyes on him. I had no idea who he was at all. After all this time, I had become, well, scared and rather shy to meet him.
British children are usually very brave. I saw many, many of them getting on trains in London, saying good-bye to their mums and dads, going alone to the countryside to get away from the bombs. And yet most of them didn’t cry. They kept a stiff upper lip, as Uncle Gideon would say, trying to pretend to be British. One day, Uncle Gideon had on a fake handlebar mustache and a silly riding jacket and he was horsing about in the library, teasing Auntie and me with his fake British accent, pretending he was on horseback and that he was going off hunting and all that nonsense. I did finally laugh, but only because I couldn’t help it. I did hope Captain Derek was more sedate.
I set the tray down for a moment and I tucked Wink under my arm and then I picked up the tray again. I just wasn’t going to go up there without Wink. So I climbed the stairs with the tea tray rattling in my arms, and with every step, I was thinking about that nice, big, fat Mr. Winston Churchill, our prime minister, who was keeping Britain strong and safe. Danny told me that he said to the British people as the war began, “People will say of the British joining the war, this was our finest hour.” Or something like that. But it wasn’t my finest hour just now. I was very nervous, not having ever met Captain Derek properly, and so was Wink.
I tried to imagine what a sea captain would look like as I approached the dark wooden door. I could hear jazzy, sad music as usual coming from in there and I thought I could smell medicine again and it was all a bit spooky and ever so strange.
I knocked lightly on the door. “Captain Derek?” I called out. I could only hear that song playing and the words clearly,
When the clouds roll by
and the moon drifts through
When the haze is high
I think of you.
I think of you.
When the mist is sheer
and the shadows too
When the moon is spare
I think of you.
I think of you.
“Captain Derek?” I called again. I turned the doorknob and stepped into the very dark room. The curtains were drawn across the windows. I looked at the bed and there was someone in it, but the blankets were pulled up over that someone’s head. It looked like Captain Derek had died and someone had covered him up the way they do with dead bodies. Hearing the sorrowful music and looking at the bed with the body in it all covered up, I thought I might faint, even though Uncle Gideon was always saying, “Fainting is fake, no one ever really faints. They just throw themselves on the ground to get attention.”
“Captain Derek,” I said and I set the tray on a little table by the bed. “I brought you some tea.” I forgot to mention the biscuits, but he didn’t answer anyway. I was about to call out to The Gram when a foot moved under the blanket. I saw it clearly. “Captain Derek,” I said, “what did you mean by ‘Yes, yes, and yes’? Would you care to say?”
“No,” said a voice, “not now. Please leave.”
“But we’ve got some nice things to eat, some sweets and a pot of English tea.”
“Sweets?” said the voice.
“Yes, lovely sugary things. Cookies.”
“Hand me one, then,” he said.
And I put a Romeo heart on the pillow and I saw some fingers snatch it down under the covers. Then I heard some munching and crunching. “I’ll have another,” he said.
“Come out and say hello first,” I said.
There was a long pause and suddenly the covers began to roll and shudder and I began to feel all quivery and nervous, and Captain Derek sat up straight and the covers fell back and there he was, sitting up before me.
“Oh, excuse me,” I said. And I closed my mouth quickly and almost bit my tongue.
There was Captain Derek and he was not an old man with a beard or even an adult at all. Captain Derek was a boy near my age, with brown hair and a kind of nice face, rather handsome, as Winnie would say.
“You’re Captain Derek?” I said. “But you’re a child like me!”
“I’m twelve,” he said. “And I’m not a child.”
“But why are you called a captain?” I said.
“Because I am a captain to them,” he said, pointing to a pile of metal soldiers lying on the rug. “I don’t play with them anymore ever. Really. I used to be their captain. That’s all. And anyway, why are you carrying around a bear? Isn’t that for little kids?”
“Oh, he’s not really just a bear,” I said. “He’s special. He’s Wink. I know it’s terribly strange. But he’s quite lovely and worth all the strangeness.”
“Do you always have that funny way of talking?” Captain Derek said.
“Well, to me, you have a funny way of talking. You sound very American,” I said.
“No, I don’t. I sound normal. You sound different,” he said.
“I suppose I am very different,” I said. “I’m British and I am planning on going home soon. I don’t belong here at all.” I sat down on a chair next to the bed, and I let go of Wink and he fell to the floor. Poor Wink always ended up being dropped somewhere and having to make do with staring at the underneath side of a chair.
Derek leaned against the pillows in his bed and reminded me of the handsome boy in the poem “The Land of Counterpane.”
When I was sick and lay a-bed
I had two pillows at my head.
“Do you always listen to music?” I asked.
“Yes, I love jazz and I love this song called ‘I Think of You.’ It’s my favorite. Gideon likes it too. But none of that matters because I’m not going to get out of bed ever again.”
“What?” I said. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Why not?”
“Because of this.” He picked up his left arm and he dropped it on the tray and it rattled the teacups and knocked a Romeo cookie onto the floor. “You see this arm. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s paralyzed. I can’t feel it at all. That’s because I’ve had polio.”
“Oh, well,” I said, “you’ve got the other one.”
“That’s not the point. I can never join the army now. They’d never have me. And soon enough everyone will be joining the army. America will join the war and I want to be a part, but now I can’t.” Derek lay back down and covered his head with the blanket.
“Captain Derek,” I called, “do come out and talk.”
“No,” he shouted, “go away. Turn up the music and go away.”
And so I gathered up Wink and we stood there listening to that song playing over and over again and then we walked downstairs. We went out on the porch and sat down on the swing. I looked out at the gray, rumbling, anxious sea, a sea full of secrets and questions. And I pushed the swing with my feet, back and forth, back and forth, in and out of the shadows.
Aunt Miami and I had just picked a bouquet of wild roses and had brought them into the house. She was arranging each stem in a vase on the table. “These are so lovely, but they won’t last long. They fade in an afternoon,” she said in a very wistful way, glancing up at herself in the long mirror over the mantel.
“Auntie,” I said, “about Derek. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Oh, Flissy,” she said, turning round. Her eyes were not exactly blue but, rather, violet. “We didn’t want to frighten you, because polio is quite contagious. We hoped Winnie and Danny would leave you here. We didn’t want to give them any reason not to. And it’s fine now. Derek is all better.”
“But his arm will never be all better, and he won’t come out of his room. He won’t even get out of his bed,” I said.
Miami went to the window and stood with her back to me.
“But why didn’t Winnie and Danny tell me anything about Derek before I got here?” I said. “They didn’t know there even was a Derek.”
“What is a rift?” I said.
“A great big terrible tear in the fabric of this family,” she said.
Just then, The Gram stopped at the doorway. Her face looked cloudy as if she was wearing a dark veil over her eyes. She shook her head back and forth.
“You’re wandering into trouble, Miami. Come to the pantry immediately. I need some help cleaning out the icebox,” she said.
After that, silence covered the room like fog, like the fog we got in the mornings here, drifting over the point. I sat down with Wink on the sofa. I had my arm round him because I knew how he was feeling. “There, there, Wink,” I whispered. “There, there.”
In the newspaper, I had seen photographs of people in Europe carrying suitcases, long lines of them leaving one country for another because of the war. They were called refugees and they didn’t belong anywhere either. Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else’s shoes.
It was already early July, and it was hot and windy and I spent a lot of time wading about alone in the sea. No one came to the house at all or rang up on the telephone. Sometimes, I would see Uncle Gideon taking his very long walk, but otherwise no one left the house much. The beach was empty a lot of the time because The Gram said everyone went to the other side of the point, where the ocean had bigger waves. Uncle Gideon had Wink’s bed all cut out, but he hadn’t had time to put it together yet, so it lay about in the library, looking like a big puzzle on the table.
The house and the Bathburns were also a puzzle to me, but at least now I had found Derek, though things had not improved with him at all. He had not put one toe out of his room or even out of his bed (except for trips to the loo), as far as I could tell. It was my job to bring up his tray of food every day. Every morning, I would set the tray down on the table across the room and say, “If you would like breakfast, Derek, it’s here on the table.”