The Romeo and Juliet Code (22 page)

It was mid-November, and Thanksgiving was soon to be here. I had never had a real American Thanksgiving before. We did actually have a little mock Thanksgiving in London once, but after dinner, Danny looked a bit disappointed.

“Never mind, darling,” said Winnie, patting Danny on the back, “we’ll have a real Thanksgiving in Bottlebay, Maine, one day soon, with all of your family, perhaps after the war when all our differences can be patched.”

Naturally, I was looking forward to Thanksgiving. At school, Mr. Bathtub had us all drawing turkeys and cutting them out and pasting them in the windows. He said it was a Babbington El tradition. There were turkeys in all the halls and cutouts of pilgrims’ hats with buckles on them pasted up everywhere and it was all jolly good fun. No one seemed very worried about U-boats snooping about in the harbor.

Mr. Bathtub told our class that President Franklin Roosevelt had recently changed the date of Thanksgiving. He had moved it to the third Thursday in November instead of the fourth Thursday. He did that because America was not doing very well financially and he thought that it might boost Christmas sales to have a slightly longer time for people to buy things after Thanksgiving and before Christmas. This year, we would be celebrating Thanksgiving on the twentieth of November instead of the twenty-seventh.

“A lot of people do not like the change in holiday,” said Mr. Bathtub. “They call the holiday Franksgiving and have made an uproar about it. But in our house, the Bathburns of Bottlebay will be celebrating on the twentieth with President Roosevelt.” And the class cheered.

That week, I decided to write President Roosevelt a letter. I went up to my room, smiled quickly at Wink, and set to work. I did notice again that recently I hadn’t spent much time with Wink, which would have been quite sad except that Wink was clearly changing and hardly seemed dependent on me anymore. I got out my paper and wrote in my best British penmanship:

Dear President Roosevelt,

I am a British girl living in Maine for the duration of the war. I should like you to know that I am a very big fan of yours. So is Derek, who is also a polio victim like yourself. My grandmother has been to Warm Springs, Georgia, and says you help children with polio in your spa there. Derek is quite wonderful and was adopted at age one. I actually hope some day to marry him. (That fact should remain in your secret files!!!) Anyway, I’m looking forward to Franksgiving. Keep up the good work and please say hello to my fellow countryman, Mr. Winston Churchill.

Sincerely yours,
Felicity Bathburn Budwig, age 11

P.S. Thank you ever so much for your help escorting cargo ships to England with all those fine American destroyers.

I brought the letter with me on the way to rehearsals, which sometimes took place after school. Across the front of the envelope I had written,
“To: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The White House, Washington, DC, USA.”
I was ever so pleased to be able to post a letter really and truly, since so many that I had written to Winnie and Danny were simply piling up in a box under my bed, more and more of them every day.

We had extra rehearsals that week and they were becoming quite difficult. Derek stopped being willing to play Romeo at all and didn’t show up one day, which put Mrs. Boxman in a frantic mood and caused her to ask Mr. Fudge, when he stopped by with his wife, if he might read the part for the evening. And then Mrs. Boxman found a spot in the lineup for Mrs. Fudge and her singing parrot. I thought she did a very good job and I was glad that parrot finally got his chance.

Mr. Fudge, however, proved to be a dreadful Romeo. “He killed every line,” said Aunt Miami to me on the way home that evening.

All this made me decide that Derek and I
had
to figure out a way to get Mr. Henley to the town hall right away. And so the next day, as we were leaving school, I said to Derek, “I think we should visit Mr. Henley at the post office this afternoon.”

“Good idea, Flissy,” said Derek. “And?”

“We’ll tell him that Mrs. Boxman has two free lobster traps to give him over at the town hall. Well, she does, Derek. There are those two extra lobster traps that they couldn’t use in a scene last night, and Mrs. Boxman asked if anyone wanted them and no one did, so they’re still there on the stage. And then we’ll ask Mr. Henley to hand-deliver a letter to Mrs. Boxman while he’s there. We’ll say we don’t have an address and we don’t have time to post it. We’ll ask if he could pop round this evening at six thirty and give her the letter and pick up the lobster traps.”

“That
will
get him there for sure,” said Derek. “Flissy, I think you’re a genius. What will the letter say?”

“Hmm,” I said. “It will come to me. You write it down.” And we sat on our favorite bench outside the John E. Babbington Elementary, Derek with pen in hand and me with my eyes closed, tilting my head back towards the sky. I began:

Dear Mrs. Boxman,

Mr. Bob Henley, who is standing before you, is an expert on William Shakespeare. I believe he favors him entirely. He is also a poet and a reader and will make a simply grand Romeo. Perhaps you should ask him now.

Sincerely yours, Fliss and Derek

P.S. Mr. Henley will like the lobster traps as well, I should imagine.

And we
were
able to entice Mr. Henley to come round to rehearsals that evening. Of course it was the lobster traps that did it. He used them to catch lobsters, but he also collected old and interesting ones, and it is generally known that collectors will go anywhere to find yet another addition to their collection. I had heard that Mr. Henley’s cottage was all decorated with lobster traps hanging from the ceiling and nestled among fishing nets above his fireplace. And someone said he calls his house Henley’s Haven.

About six thirty, Mr. Henley had come promptly through the double doors at the town hall looking all-business and brisk and still in his postman’s uniform. He handed the letter to Mrs. Boxman and then began inspecting the lobster traps that Derek and I had set out in plain view.

Mr. Henley explained to me how the lobster comes into the kitchen area of the trap, tempted by the food that lures him in. Mr. Henley waved his arms in the air, mimicking the lobster.

“Then, when the lobster tries to get out, he goes into the parlor, where he becomes hopelessly trapped,” said Mr. Henley.

As Mr. Henley pointed out the kitchen and the parlor of the lobster trap, Mrs. Boxman was reading the letter. He was just testing the parlor door on one of the traps when Mrs. Boxman, who had just finished the letter, said, “Tra la la, Bob, we’re in a bit of a pickle here. We’re down a man in one of our acts. We desperately need a Romeo for our performance coming up at Christmas. I heard you like Shakespeare and I
know
you like poetry. Would you consider taking on the part of Romeo? We mostly rehearse in the evenings after work.”

Everyone in the room seemed to gather round Mr. Henley quietly. There was a long silence. I thought of a group of seals in the ocean circling one lone big fish. Mr. Henley continued looking over the second lobster trap, turning it this way and that, saying nothing.

Finally, he looked up at Mrs. Boxman. His face was like the sky at dawn, luminous, light-filled, joyous, and slightly pink. “Indeed I do love Shakespeare and I would be honored and pleased to accept the part in
Romeo and Juliet
.”

Everyone in the room started clapping. Mr. Henley basked in the applause. “Thank you. Thank you,” he said. “And yes, I do write poetry, and in fact, I happen to have a poem I wrote, here in my pocket. May I read to you?” And so he did. But the poem went on a bit too long and when he brought out a second one, Mrs. Boxman suggested they get started with rehearsals.

While they were rehearsing, Derek and I went outside and kicked a stone about on the sidewalk. We could hear Aunt Miami calling out onstage, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” We stood there in the darkness together looking at the big, glowing Bottlebay moon and thinking quietly of the code we could not crack.

After rehearsals, I did end up “musing,” as Uncle Gideon says, about the story of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet were two people who loved each other so very much. Because of their families, they were not supposed to be together, but their love was too strong to ignore or deny. Perhaps that was how it was with Winnie and Danny. Even though Winnie had been married to Uncle Gideon for a short time, when Winnie met Danny, their love for each other was something so special that they had to follow it. It must have cost them greatly, but I was ever so glad they did or I wouldn’t have been born and wouldn’t have been here at all.

Yes, Romeo and Juliet were a bit like Winnie and Danny. But wasn’t Gideon too a kind of Romeo, even if his Juliet had found another? I was musing about all this as I rolled out pie dough with Aunt Miami on the morning of Thanksgiving. Every time I dusted the pastry board, I thought about Romeo and Juliet and all the ways they truly reminded me of Winnie and Danny. Lily Jones told me one day that she thought my parents were like two stars. “Very glamorous-looking, the both of them,” she had said as we were paging through one of her movie magazines.

We had been expecting enough relatives for Thanksgiving that we had made place cards for the table. I had made the place card for Cousin Brie, a girl just Derek’s age. “You’ve never had a real Thanksgiving, Flissy?” said Derek earlier. “I love it because of the turkey and because my favorite cousin, Brie, comes over after dinner for pie. And she’s pretty.”

“Oh, how very
nice
,” I said, trying to not to make that word
nice
sound prickly like a spiny sea urchin. But somehow it came out prickly anyway, because none of my words ever did what I wanted them to. But in the end, the arrival of Cousin Brie turned out actually to be another blessing in disguise.

I heard that phrase over and over again through the year. That’s what Danny had said of my having to go live in America with his family. “It’ll be a blessing in disguise. She’ll love it. I did. No, really, it will be like giving her a great gift. The best gift we could ever give her.” Winnie had cried and cried and then Danny had put his arms round her.

Yes, Cousin Brie did turn out to be a full-blown blessing in disguise. A terrible one. She and her mum showed up after we’d had Thanksgiving dinner. We were just serving the pies we’d made. Mine looked rather sorrowful because I had forgotten about it in the oven and it was a bit singed. But it was still quite edible. Uncle Gideon had two pieces and he kept saying over and over again, “Flissy, you’ve done it again. This pie has a marvelous smoky flavor. I’ll have another!”

Cousin Brie pointed to my pie and said right away, “Ooh, who made that pathetic-looking thing?” But already I had misgivings about her anyway, because in England, Brie is a kind of stinky French cheese.

After dessert, Derek and Brie and I went off to the parlor alone. We could hear all the relatives talking in the next room. Brie told us that she was wearing brand-new expensive saddle shoes that came all the way from Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Then she said, “Cousin Derek, where did the little creep with the snooty accent come from?”

I did think that her saddle shoes were ever so lovely. They had a blue saddle on them instead of brown or black, and the laces were twists of many colors.

She was much taller than me, about the same height as Derek, and they stood back to back to see if either of them had grown taller than the other since they’d seen each other last. I had to get up on a chair and put a book over both their heads to see if it was level, meaning they were still the same height. And they were. Then they patted each other on the back like they were club members after a special meeting.

“Does the little creep have a real name?” said Cousin Brie, dropping back down on the sofa and putting her feet up on the low table in front of her so she could look at her saddle shoes. “I mean other than Fleecy or Flossy or whatever. And how long is she going to be here?”