The Romeo and Juliet Code (4 page)

Uncle Gideon patted me on the top of my head again, but his hand was rough and awkward like a great bear’s paw, and one of my braids got caught on his cuff link. “Okay, then, Fliss?” he said. “Okay? Fine?”

I went off into the parlor without exactly answering him. I was listening instead to a lovely song in my head that reminded me of England. I stood by the velvet curtains, halfway humming and standing on one foot. Aunt Miami was in there. She was all dressed up in a purple taffeta dress with a rose pinned in her hair. Aunt Miami was reading
Romeo and Juliet
again.

After a while, even though I was switching from one foot to the other, both feet were getting ever so tired. Auntie nodded at me and patted the cushion on the sofa next to her. I finally gave up and went over and sat beside her.

She was reading aloud the scene in which one night Romeo stands in the courtyard below Juliet’s bedroom. Aunt Miami read those words with great feeling.

Then Uncle Gideon came barging in, saying, “See what I mean about being stuck, Flissy? She just keeps reading
Romeo and Juliet
over and over again. There are other wonderful books in the world. What do you say, Fliss? Do you agree? Isn’t it so?”

Aunt Miami sighed and held the book up, covering her face.

“Alas,” said Uncle Gideon, “we Bathburns are a lonely lot. All we know is the wind. None of us have gotten mixed up with life. Your aunt Miami is a frustrated actress. She wants the stage! She wants lights! Applause! But does she do anything about it? No. Typical Bathburn.”

“What about my dad, Danny?” I said. “He’s a Bathburn.”

Uncle Gideon didn’t answer. He looked down at his feet instead and then he looked away altogether.

Aunt Miami said, “Oh, Danny’s different. He’s the daring, brilliant one. It’s always been like that.”

“I see,” I said to myself.

“Anyway, you mustn’t listen to
him
,” Miami said, pointing to Uncle Gideon. “He’s a big tease and doesn’t know beans. If you hang around with him, by the time your parents get back you will be completely confused.”

By the time my parents get back
. That’s what Auntie Miami said. It was lovely to hear those words.

Dear Winnie and Danny,

I was outside today even though it was still raining. I made huge letters out of sand, ones that you can read from high up. The letters said “I Love You, Winnie and Danny” stretched across the beach, so if you happen to fly over in an airplane, look down and see it.

Love,
Fliss

P.S. That’s what Uncle Gideon calls me. I can’t get used to it at all. Miami says Gideon thinks he’s hot potatoes cause he’s got the same name as the Gideon Bible
.

The smokestacks were painted gray; in fact, the whole enormous ship was painted gray; even the windows were painted out, covered in gray and sealed shut. That was how I came to America, on the HMS
Queen Anne
’s maiden voyage and it had to be secret because the waters were full of German U-boats. They had to sneak the
Queen Anne
over the ocean to New York City. The windows were painted over so no light would escape, so no bomber at night, flying overhead, could spot the
Queen Anne
sailing along in great silence. Winnie and Danny and I were some of the few passengers on that boat. It had been built to be a luxury liner, but it was now being moved to an American harbor for safekeeping.

And the whole enormous dark boat was empty except for us and a handful of other passengers and a small crew. There were long empty dining rooms, tilting dark corridors, vacant lonely staterooms with their portholes painted over.

We got on the boat at night. Danny had talked to an officer friend for a long time, trying to convince him to let us board. “We are American citizens and we need to go home,” he said. We waited in the small dimly lit office with some other people. We hadn’t been able to find any boat that would take us to America. We heard about another British boat, the SS
Athenia,
that had been full of Americans going home and had been sunk by a German U-boat.

But Winnie and Danny were not scared. They played cards all night in that office, waiting to hear. I slept on my suitcases with my head on my stuffed bear, Wink. Danny said later it was Wink that turned the tide. The officer finally just couldn’t say no.

When I stood on the huge pier on the second level that cold night and looked at the enormous
Queen Anne
all dressed in her gray war costume, I thought I might faint. I had never seen anything so big in all my life. We boarded quietly and quickly and lay in our tiny room belowdecks listening to the churning engine carrying us through dangerous waters to America.

Everything on the boat was bolted down, all the chairs, all the many tables in the dining room, a sea of tables, and we were only a tiny group of people sitting in a corner being quiet, listening for a U-boat or a torpedo, listening overhead for a bomber. For the whole eight days, we never saw the sky. And there was a storm at sea and we heard that the waves were as steep as mountains rising gray, higher than we could imagine. Winnie was sick in the hall, and I found a room with a huge swimming pool with no water in it, and the stairs were wide and empty, and most of the time we didn’t speak and when we did, all our voices echoed.

In June, the sky continued to drizzle and drip in Bottlebay, Maine, USA, and I wrote a letter every day to Winnie and Danny. Most of the time, I tried not to talk to anyone except for Wink. He was quite playful really when we were alone, but with the Bathburns, he too fell silent. The Gram went into town for supplies a couple of times and I was invited along, but I always looked up at the sky instead of answering. Finally, one day I said, “Oh, all right. I’ll go,” but only because I
had
to.

And that very morning at the end of June, it stopped raining. It stopped and it stopped and it stopped. And the sun did come out and the sky was a hot summer blue and a few people appeared on the beach below with sun umbrellas and pails and towels.

If you are feeling uneasy, sometimes a blue sky can make things worse. Better to have the sky match how you feel than to have it be so lovely out while you are so dark and rainy and lonely inside.

“Riding into town with The Gram, eh? Taking your life in your hands, are you?” said Uncle Gideon, slapping the side of the old black automobile that he had just backed out of the barn for us.

I frowned to keep the sun out of my eyes and waited while Uncle Gideon helped The Gram ever so gently into the car. She smiled up at him from the driver’s seat with her white hair slipping slowly out of its bun in the wind. I hadn’t seen The Gram smile much before. Then I heard Uncle Gideon say very quietly, “I do think this is a good idea. We
should
introduce her to the town. Better not to raise any suspicions about
anything
.”

“Well, Flissy, perhaps you’d like to buy some supplies to make a proper British tea for us,” said The Gram quite loudly, shaking her head at Uncle Gideon.

“Jolly good, old thing,” said Uncle Gideon. “Isn’t that what they say over there? ‘Old thing’? I’d love to have a real British cup of tea again.”

“Have you had one before?” I said, feeling the word
suspicion
floating round now in my head.

“But, of course, Flissy,” said Uncle Gideon, “I’m very fond of England.” And he put his hand over his heart and looked at me in a mournful sort of way. “I certainly know the difference between a good cup of tea and a bad one. And I went to university there, you know.”

“Oh,” I said.

We were standing in the scruffy grass, looking at the Packard, which was ever so much bigger than our little Austin Minor in England. All the British cars were so much smaller. We were standing there in the bright morning sun, with wild rosebushes all round us being bumped and battered about in the wind.

“Well, Fliss, the windows are all broken, so don’t try to roll them up and down. And The Gram doesn’t like to go in reverse, so don’t get yourself in any situations where you have to back up. And don’t try to open the door on the passenger side. It’s jammed. But otherwise, have a good time!”

“Gideon dear, we don’t need any more instructions. Stand aside. Now get in, Flissy McBee.” The Gram started the motor with great pizzazz, as Uncle Gideon would say, like she was just settling into a Halifax bomber and getting ready to take off.

“Be careful, Mother,” said Gideon, backing away, frowning, and then waving. He stood there waving and waving and waving.

We drove out onto the road. It was a hot morning and we wound our way along the sea through the gnarled and knotted low-growing bushes and little rocky patches.

And suddenly I remembered being on holiday once with Winnie and Danny. We had a motorcycle with a dear little green sidecar. Danny was driving the motorcycle (Winnie always said he was a bit wild), and Winnie and I were snuggled into the sidecar. We were whizzing past the chalk downs and the chalk cliffs along the sea in Sussex and we could see the white cliffs of Dover in the distance. Danny stopped the motorcycle and we climbed a great grassy hill to see the Long Man of Wilmington, which was a figure, a great white chalk outline of a man carved on the side of the hill hundreds of years ago. Danny said it was something only someone from high up in the sky could really clearly see all at once, like a God or an angel or an airplane pilot. I wondered about the German bombers flying over England on their way to London. I wondered if they saw the Long Man of Wilmington on a hill in the green grass not far from the ocean.

The Gram was looking over at me. “You’re very pensive, Flissy,” she said. Then she beeped the horn for no reason at all and said, “What a horn! They just don’t make them like this anymore!” Then she looked over at me again. “Flissy, don’t worry about any questions people might ask you today. Just say ‘la-de-da’ to all of them.”

I nodded.

She smiled and beeped the horn again and then she looked over at me in a worried sort of way.

Finally, we took a turn on the road that headed away from the ocean into town. “Now, keep your eyes out for a nice parker where I won’t need to back up to get out,” said The Gram. “And we’ll just do our marketing and we won’t meander at all. We won’t get mixed up with those ladies at the church with their quilt sale today.”

But the only “parker” that The Gram and I could find in all of Bottlebay, Maine, was right in front of the white wooden church with a tall, white wooden tower where the quilt sale was going on. A sign said, Q
UILT
S
ALE
, R
AISING MONEY FOR THE
B
RITISH WAR EFFORT
. No sooner had The Gram and I climbed out of the Packard through the only working door on the driver’s side, when one of the women from the sale, wearing an apron, hurried towards us. “Hello. Hello. Hello, Helen Bathburn! Where have you been keeping yourself? This just isn’t like you. Come on over to our sale,” she said. “You should have put in one of
your
quilts. And who is this, may I ask?”

“This is my granddaughter, Flissy McBee,” said The Gram, pulling me tightly against her.

“A granddaughter? And you didn’t tell us? Which of your children is married?”

“Oh, Danny was married some years ago while he was away in England,” said The Gram.

“Oh, really? It wasn’t in the papers. It’s as if Danny disappeared into thin air. And Gideon doesn’t ever have a good word to say about him anymore. It’s such a shame. Well, if Danny’s home, we’d love to come out and see him. It was so daring the way he once saved Marge Peterson when she was drowning.”

“Well, actually he’s not here right now,” said The Gram, putting her hand up to shield her eyes suddenly as if she was feeling ill.

“Oh. Where is he, still overseas? Doing what?”

“Well, Danny is in sales now. You know how charming he is. He could sell salt water to the sea!” The Gram said. Everybody laughed. The Gram swallowed and started rapidly nodding at several people on the other side of the lawn. Then someone else came up to her, and The Gram was hurried away, leaving me to stare at the quilts draped on lines between the trees. I wasn’t sure what my Danny did for work, but I didn’t think he was in sales. I looked among the hanging quilts. Walking through the sunlight and the shadows the quilts cast, I suddenly felt lost, as if I were in a maze.