Romeo Blue (20 page)

We planned very few presents for Christmas Day but that morning I couldn’t find my slippers and so I went down on my knees and looked under the bed. There I saw a tiny gold ring in a crack in the floor. It was shining in the darkness under there, next to my slippers. I could just barely reach it. It proved to be quite sweet, stamped inside with the initials
E.B.
In swirling old writing, there was a date, 1864. It had been Ella Bathburn’s little gold ring. I wondered when she lost it or why. It had been found nearly one hundred years too late, but because it
was Christmas morning, it almost felt as if Ella Bathburn had given me a gift.

We made it through New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and the long white stretch of sledding days before school resumed. Derek was friendly now, but he didn’t love me anymore the way he once had. It was over and gone. And that ragged and nagged and pulled on me. It just wouldn’t quit, for I still loved Derek.

But we did everything together because there was no one else about, I suppose. We stacked wood together for the woodstoves. We did the washing up after tea. We rushed home to read
Life
magazine together every week. There we saw photographs of battles, of fighter planes and parachutes dropping and we read stories of USO canteen belles like Auntie. I liked the advertisement for the lipstick called Patriot Red by Louis Philippe. I wanted to wear Patriot Red lipstick and I wanted Derek to notice it and stare at me, thinking me very patriotic indeed.

Derek and I had the same birthday on January 29 and that wasn’t very far off. I would soon be thirteen. But it wasn’t really Derek’s true birthday. It had been chosen for him because it was the day I was born. It had been done to make up for Gideon’s loss. Derek boiled and simmered about his birthday through all of early January.

Where did love go when it went away? It was as if Derek had opened a door and had thrown his feelings for me out into the wind. I wondered if perhaps his love
would be restored if he would just let Buttons, Buttons and Babbit find his true parents.

One day I came in from a walk along the water, watching frozen convoys move across the icy horizon. The Gram was in the dining room, leaning over Derek. They were whispering. She had her arm across Derek’s back. And then she had her cheek resting on the top of his head.

“What is it?” I said when I came brushing into the dining room, where the morning mail was scattered across the table.

“Oh, nothing,” said The Gram. But she had the card with the gold writing on it in her hand. I could see part of it, half a word here and there. I could read
uttons
on one end and
Bab
on the other.

The Gram then quickly slipped the card in her apron pocket and said, “Well, Flissy, we’ve a job to do now. We have been asked to knit socks for soldiers overseas and that will include our Mr. Henley.”

“Good,” I said, “because he never seemed to have matching socks, did he? But that’s because he’s a poet. Poets are like that.”

“I know you are a crack knitter, Flissy McBee. We’ll get the wool from Miss Elkin because she keeps sheep now along with her chickens. She spins it herself, the
way we have been churning our own butter here. It’s the best way to get butter these days.” As she was talking, she was putting stamps on a pile of letters. The Gram had elegant handwriting. I always liked to see the curls and the extra circles she added at the ends of words. I looked down as she went through the pile. Most of the letters seemed to be going to Washington, DC. I looked away.

Yes, my father and The Gram had asked me to stop noticing things and I was going to try. But things still went on in the house. Things I did not completely understand. In the middle of the next night I awoke in Aunt Miami’s huge canopy bed. I heard someone in the hallway slowly passing my room. I heard each measured step so clearly as that person moved along the hall. Then I heard keys rattling on a large, circular key holder. I heard a key being inserted into the lock. And then someone stepped into my father’s study and clicked the door shut behind them. I knew it was The Gram and I lay in my bed, chilled in spite of the piles of quilts and the soft pillow under my head.

We began our great sock-knitting project that next week. Well, I should say I began knitting. Derek made up a chart showing how many socks should be knitted each day and how long each sock should take and which sizes would be most useful. By evening Derek had a lovely graph showing all sorts of complicated information that I couldn’t follow and I had in my lap a pink-and-purple-striped wool sock on the large side. I was already knitting and purling the second sock, wondering all along if the soldier who would be wearing these socks would fancy the lovely, bright colors I had chosen.

The Gram wasn’t getting very far with her sock because she was on edge and flying up to the landing and lifting the receiver off the telephone and then dropping it back down. She changed her apron three times and paced through the house, like a small fox in a cage.

She checked the mailbox constantly and came back inside now, looking windblown and anxious. “You’ve gotten a letter, Flissy McBee,” she said and handed me an envelope. My heart started drumming inside me, as usual. Letters always made me leap and lunge, hoping still to hear from Winnie and Danny. If they wrote to me, I would have their address and then I could send
them both a pair of warm socks. Did they let people write from prisons in France? By now my parents had grown thin as mist, vague as clouds, distant as faraway smoke. But I had the habit of loving them and waiting for them and once you acquire a habit, it stays with you. It stands by you. It won’t leave you, just like hope.

I rather ripped open the letter.

Dear Felicity Bathburn Budwig,

I have been in Canada, as my mum sent me on a boat with the others. I am staying in Montreal with Monsieur Laport and his sister-in-law. She only speaks French. Montreal is close to Maine, said my mum in a letter. She thought I should come for a visit by train. May I? I saw a ghost last night and Madame Laport chased it out of the larder with a ghost detector. It is my greatest wish to own one of those myself. Do write back soon.

Sincerely yours,
Dimples McFarland

When The Gram read the letter, her eyes became two blue stars spinning and twinkling at me. It was the first time I had seen her eyes lighten since Gideon left. “Well, if she is your little friend, of course Dimples can come to visit,” she said. “Perhaps it will take my mind off things.”

“Um, Dimples is five years younger than me and she does much more gallivanting and hopping about than I ever did, if you know what I mean. But she doesn’t break things, actually,” I said.

“That’s good. And can she knit?” said The Gram.

“She learned at three,” I said. “She makes odd things, like capes for invisible tiny people. But she’s quite good at it when she settles down.”

“Well, that’s it, then. Knitters are more than welcome. We’ll have all the soldiers in Europe wearing a nice pair of wool socks before the year is out,” said The Gram, sitting down to work on her first sock. Her needles began clicking and flashing and a brown-and-gray argyle sock slowly began appearing right before my eyes. “But I should ask the office about the correct colors to use before we really get started,” said The Gram. “Pink-and-purple stripes for the army might not be the best choice, Flissy B. Bathburn.”

Soon The Gram and Dimples’s mum were exchanging telegrams. The first one from England read:

Dimples needs happy place to stay STOP Can

she visit you STOP I shall be grateful STOP

After all that
stopping
in the telegrams, I was quite happy to be
going
one morning to pick up Dimples at the Grand Trunk Railway station, the one that serviced the north, including Montreal. In the Packard, The Gram and I dropped Derek off in Bottlebay. He planned to walk home, he said. He had something important to do, but of course he wouldn’t say what it was. When I asked about it, The Gram said, “Oh, tra la la, Flissy B. Bathburn. Must you stick your little nose in everything?”

Train stations always made me breathless, the ceilings stretching off into almost forever. The Grand Trunk Railway station was on India Street and today it was full of soldiers in khaki uniforms. And there were sailors milling about with long duffle bags slung over their shoulders. Everything echoed and murmured
in that huge, vaulted area, as if it were a kind of cathedral.

Dimples, as she rushed towards me, looked tiny and jumpy and rosy. She was bobbing about like a fish on a line. “Felicity!” she called out, running into me. “I’ve got a suitcase that used to be Monsieur Laport’s typewriter case. Look,” she said, opening it. “It’s got clamps in here where the typewriter was attached. See that, do you?”

“Come along, you little nipper, close all that up now,” said The Gram.

But Dimples pulled out a nightdress and held it up. “This is brand-new. I didn’t pinch it. Madame Laport bought it off a lady in a frock shop only yesterday.”

“Come along now, close all that up,” said The Gram, pulling on Dimples’s little sleeve.

Then Dimples threw herself down on the station floor and looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, but I did want Madame to buy me a new pair of galoshes because mine are full of holes, but she said no.”

“Little nipper, up on your feet,” said The Gram. “And pack away your things now.”

In the car riding home, Dimples suddenly grew quiet and wouldn’t answer anyone. She kept kicking her foot on the back of the seat and her curly hair was quite messy looking.

“She’s an odd little thing,” whispered The Gram to
me when we got out of the car. “She can stay here but, please, not a word about certain matters. You know what I mean, dear. Good girl.”

Dimples was very subdued when we walked in the house. She mostly seemed to look down at her shoes, which were a scruffy brown and worn-out. She had all sorts of cuts and bruises on her knees and her socks quite sagged about her ankles.

Finally, she said, “I should like to have a look at your Wink again. Do you still love him?”

I wasn’t sure at all how to answer a question like that. Of course I still loved my old brown bear. But it was different now that I was soon to be thirteen. I was above all that. The thought of his fuzzy ears and cheerful smile did not make my heart soar the way it used to. In fact, when the war was over, I was planning to mail him off to a friend in England. But it’s very hard for an almost thirteen-year-old to explain that to an eight-year-old. And so I said, “The problem with Wink is that he is up in my tower room in a box under the bed and that room is locked up for winter. There used to be a key to the room hanging in the library but it is gone now.”

Just as those words left my mouth, I suddenly felt a rush of sorrowful air blowing through me. I remembered Gideon, when he was still my uncle, cutting out and sawing the headboard for Wink’s bed, measuring Wink, making sure he had plenty of foot room. How I missed my father. Where was he now? When would he
come home to us? Would he be able to rescue Winnie and Danny? He didn’t promise. He forgot to
promise
to me he would come home. His German uniform floated before me, the bright red armband and the swastika spinning and turning in the air.