I stepped to the lady, holding out my coin. “Is this a bob?”
“Right you are,” she said.
“Then I’ll have a dozen posies, please.” She handed me a bouquet of blue flowers with yellow centers. They had no smell, but what could I expect for a bob?
“Got a sweetie, have you?”
“Can you point me to this street?” I showed her the envelope. Wadley Road, I was happy to learn, was a hop, skip, and a jump from the station.
I would’ve gotten to Daphne’s faster if it weren’t for being distracted by bombed out buildings where people sifted through rubble looking for their worldly possessions. I found an alarm clock for one lady and a kettle for another. An air raid warden chased me out of a bombed out house where I’d joined the search for a missing grandmother. Then I spent an hour helping two kids find their cat. Spotted it hiding out in a crushed wardrobe with its fur sticking out like a porcupine. After I rescued the cat, an ambulance driver applied Mercurochrome to my scratch wounds and brought me to a canteen for a cup of tea, which she said would do wonders for my rattled nerves. (See, I was still shook up about the missing grandmother.) Then I came to a cordoned off street. I saw the damage with my own eyes, and it didn’t look too bad: a hole in the roof was all. But then a man said it was a UXB. I asked him to explain.
Unexploded Bomb, that’s what the letters stood for.
That bomb crashed right through the roof and was sitting somewheres in the house waiting to blow. A crowd of fools stood by the barrier gawking but, as soon as I got the explanation, I flew from that place like my pants were on fire. Then I had to figure a new path to Daphne’s house.
My heart was pounding soon as I spotted the right house. I double-checked the envelope. The house was an attached two-story stucco number, like a Brooklyn brownstone. There was a flower garden in front. I could’ve saved the bob.
I opened an iron gate, which led me up a short walkway to Daphne’s door. I thought to myself, Jack’s opened this same gate. Jack’s walked down this same path. Jack’s rung this same bell.
A mother-type cracked the door open after three slams of a brass doorknocker. “Delivery for Miss Daphne,” I said, holding up the wilted flowers.
“Now, who could they be from I wonder?” said the lady. “Best you come in, luv.” As I wiped my feet on the doormat, she whipped her head backwards and called out, “Daphne! There’s a delivery for you!” She pointed me to a bench padded with needlepoint letters that spelled HOME. Getting there, I tripped over shoes, boots, and umbrellas. Meanwhile, the lady vanished. I could’ve been a robber.
My eyelids began drifting south. I was half-asleep when I heard footsteps on the staircase above. I shook myself awake and looked up at the landing. For a second I thought I must be dreaming.
Her skin was like real butter, not margarine. Lips as luminous as a candied apple. Her hair was like hot fudge. Her face reminded me of an icon of the Virgin Mary that hung above our mantel. Except she was wearing a pink quilted robe over matching slippers, with pompoms near where her pink lacquered toenails stuck out. She floated down the stairs like a hot air balloon or a zeppelin, not that I’m calling her a blimp, you understand. It was just that her feet didn’t seem to touch the ground. And I’d bet a year’s worth of Cracker Jack prizes she was 34-18-34. No wonder Jack was head over heels. I was pretty sure they didn’t make them like that in Ireland.
“Daphne?” I said with a stammer.
“That’s me,” she said, taking the flowers and putting them to her nose. “Who could be sending me flowers, cheeky devil?” She looked me in the eye. “There’s no card?”
I whispered, “Daphne. It’s Tommy Mooney.”
“Why would Jack’s brother be sending me flowers?” Then she turned white as a ghost. “Good grief! Oh no! Jack!”
Woops! She figured somebody was sending her the kind of flowers people send to funerals. Condolences, they’re called—they only ever mean one thing. I said, “Daphne, you don’t get it. It’s me, Tommy Mooney.” I smiled wide and pointed to myself.
“Jeepers Creepers! Tommy? What on earth?” She took in a big gulp of air and then froze in place holding her breath. If she didn’t take in oxygen soon, she was going to pass out.
“Look,” I said. “Can we talk somewheres private?”
Grabbing my hand, she pulled me up the staircase and into her bedroom, locking the door behind us. She still looked like a deer caught in the headlights. I looked around the room and seen a photograph of my brother Jack, propped up on the side table near her bed. It was one I’d never laid eyes on before. Jack looked more grown-up than I remembered him. Daphne noticed my eyes riveted on the photograph. She lifted the frame and placed it in my hands gently, like it was an egg.
Without warning I started blubbering like a newborn who’d had his rear-end slapped. Once it started, there was no stopping—I could hardly breathe and began hiccupping. Snot flowed from my nose. My shoulders shook and I began to feel dizzy. I hadn’t cried that hard since the time I crashed into a milk truck and dislocated my collarbone, totaling my brand new pedal car.
Made a spectacle of myself, that’s all I’ll say. Maybe it was seeing this new photo of Jack. Or being with the fiancée. Maybe it was missing my ma and being so far from home. Or maybe it was that the whole neighborhood might blow at any second.
Daphne took my hand and sat me next to her on the bed. She put her arm around my shoulder and handed me a lacy handkerchief. She said softly, “Come on now. Jack will come back to us. We have to believe that.”
When I went on sniffling, she pulled up my chin with her index finger. “Come now. Stiff upper lip.”
“Daphne, we have to find Jack. It’s up to us.”
“Of course we will, Tommy,” she said, patting my hand. “Of course we will find Jack.”
So that’s when Daphne first agreed to come to German-occupied Belgium with me. Although later on she tried to wiggle out of it—said she’d only been trying to humor me, was how she put it. No way I was letting her out—a promise is a promise. Our fates were now tangled up like shoelaces—two bodies destined for the same place.
Belgium.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHILE I WAITED IN DAPHNE’S BEDROOM, she dressed in the hall bathroom and then went downstairs to her folks, who expected her to eat breakfast with them. I decided to stay clear of the grown-ups, skipping breakfast to do it. Meanwhile, I took a look around her room, going to her bookshelf first. You tell a lot about a person by what they read. You just had to look at my sister Mary’s bookshelf to know she was a dope.
I’d never heard of most of the books on Daphne’s shelf: some broad named Jane and a few writers all from the same family, Brontë, made up the bulk of her book collection. I flipped some pages and saw loads of thee, thou, and thines. A fella could learn a lot about English reading Daphne’s books. She spoke like a princess; if I borrowed her books I’d be talking like Prince Charming before long. But a couple of Daphne’s books were in a foreign language, most likely French. Then again, it might a been Gaelic. She also liked Shakespeare, which figured. Americans have Dick and Jane; English folks have Romeo and Juliet. The rest were art books, some as heavy as the illustrated Bible that sat in our family parlor.
Next I took a quick peek into her top dresser drawer hoping to find chocolate, only to slam it shut when I realized what a blunder I’d made. The drawer contained nothing but brassieres and underpants.
Safer to look at her wall decorations, which were mostly pencil drawings and watercolors. Most of the drawings were of my brother and the likeness was dead-ringer. Filling one wall was a half finished painting of a girl standing in front of some sort of a piano. Once I went with my older sister Nancy to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’d gone to look at the mummies and treasures of the ancient world but my sister forced me to look at the paintings too. Daphne’s painting looked like something that might hang in a city museum once it was finished. Under the painting was a coffee table piled with
half-squeezed tubes of paint, paintbrushes, and coffee cans full of turpentine. It made the room smell like art class.
By and by, Daphne returned to the room and looked relieved. “They’ve left for Hyde Park,” she said.
“The Roosevelt place upstate?”
“The London park, silly. It’s like your Central Park. I talked my parents into taking a picnic lunch and they plan to go rowing on the Serpentine, so with a bit of luck they shan’t return until tea time.”
I followed her downstairs and into the kitchen, and she motioned for me to sit on the kitchen counter. She asked if I was hungry. “We’re out of eggs, but I’ll make you a burger,” she said, waving a spatula in the air. “Jack taught me how.”
“A hamburger for breakfast!” I thought, No wonder Jack fell for her.
“Do you like it with fried onions, like your brother?” She tossed an onion up in the air, twirled around and grabbed it from behind. “These are as rare as pomegranates.”
I thought to myself: Was there ever a sweller girl in the world? She diced up some onion and using the spatula like a tennis racket, aimed each piece into a frying pan. She didn’t miss once. I thought, My God, she’s super!
“It’s so peculiar,” Daphne said, as she examined my ears, “but you bear an uncanny resemblance to Jack.” She thought this was “smashing,” said it made her feel happy for the first time since he went missing. She opened the icebox and peered in. “Mayonnaise? Tomato sauce? Marmite?”
“Gee, you’re nice,” I said, trying hard not to sound gushing.
As I ate my burger, she told me about her getting a letter from my ma, and how I’d made everybody worried sick. There was a five-state bulletin out to find my kidnappers and bring them to justice. Daphne insisted we get on the horn to Ma and let her know I was safe. Her folks were going to faint when the bill came for a transatlantic call, but she said it couldn’t be helped. We went to the parlor where they kept the phone. Daphne had to untangle the cord that was attached to a wall. Meanwhile, I took a look around the room. They had some nice furniture, the kind with feather cushions, but otherwise it was a regular kind of house, nothing too fancy.
Except for a table set in the corner of the room. The goods on that table might be worth something: family photographs, framed in silver. What I needed was a magnet to see if the metal were real or not. Instead I looked for the telltale number stamped on genuine sterling: .925—that’s what you wanted. The first frame I lifted was silver plated, not worth the picture it came with. Then my eye fell on a candlestick: more like a candelabra it was. On the base were the three magic numbers. The thing was heavy, too, with places for nine candles. I’d seen one before. “My German teacher’s got one like this,” I said.
“A menorah?”
I had no idea what a menorah was but I didn’t want to look dumb, so I said: “Right-O.”
“It’s for Hanukkah,” she said, helping me out of a spot.
“I know what Hanukkah is: the Jewish version of Christmas.”
Daphne laughed. “Not exactly. But you’re right: the two holiday’s often fall at the same time in December.”
To let her know I was grown-up, I said, “I know Santa Claus is made up.”
She hammed it up like an actress in a silent movie. “Oh my stars! Tell me it’s not true!” Then she got serious. “I’m only half Jewish. My father’s Anglican.”
“What’s an Anglican?”
Then Daphne let the bomb drop. Turned out Anglicans were the ones who broke off from the Holy Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation. I’d learned about them in catechism class, only the priest called them Episcopalians. And while messing with my sister Mary’s report on Henry VIII, I found out that it was them who martyred Sir Thomas More, an actual saint. Ma was going to flip when she found out Jack was marrying a heretic.
Daphne showed me her profile; it sure was perfect. “Can’t you see the resemblance to Pauline Goddard?” she said. “She’s also half Jewish/half Anglican.”
“The dame in Pot o' Gold with Jimmy Stewart?”
“That’s right. It means we get gifts at Hanukkah and more on Christmas. I’ve already warned Jack to be prepared.”
Daphne sat on the sofa and placed the phone on her lap, lifting the receiver and pressing down a few times until she got a dial tone. She used a pencil to dial, sticking the eraser side in the “O” slot so she wouldn’t chip her nail polish. I let her know a call wasn’t necessary, because the American Embassy was already in touch with Ma.
“American Embassy? They’re involved?”
“Yes, and they’ll be on to the fact I’ve flown the coop and start hunting for me, so we can’t dawdle.” My plan, I told her, was to return to Warfield Hall, borrow the speedboat and get over to Belgium before they picked up my trail.
“We?” Daphne coughed. She placed the phone on a coffee table. “We? I’m not doing any such thing. Are you mad? There’s a war raging over in Belgium. People are having bombs dropped on their heads everyday.”
“As far as I can tell, people are getting bombs dropped on their heads every day here too, so where’s the difference?”
She stared at me like a dare.
“Look,” I said, “Jack might be wounded and need our help.”
She started biting her nails. Then she told me about training to be a nurse, which she was failing at miserably. She gave me some examples and I winced. She was as bad at nursing as I was at English. Next I mentioned that Jack might be in a German prison camp and need our help to escape. This was the one possibility worried me the most. It was always in the news about gangsters trying to break out of prison but they never succeeded. Not if they were on Alcatraz Island, anyways. Sharks ate one of them convicts.
“I’ve heard horror stories about those camps,” she said. She inhaled and her eyes misted. I needed to divert a crisis.
“Forget I said that. He’s not in a camp, Daphne. Jack’s too clever to let the Nazis get him.” She wiped her face with the sleeve of her blouse, sniffled and blew her nose with her hankie. “But he might have amnesia,” I said. “That happens when you get a bump to the head, which almost always happens in a plane crash.”
(I’d got this idea from a film preview. The flick was called Random Harvest. It looked awful sappy, but I didn’t tell Daphne that. It starred Ronald Colman, a soldier in the Great War who gets a bump on the head and suffers amnesia. Before the war he was married to Greer Garson—the love of his life—but after the bump, he doesn’t know her from Adam. If it could happen to Ronald Colman, it could’ve happened to Jack.)
“Heaven forbid,” she said. “What if Jack is wandering around Europe right now, not even knowing his name, nor whence he came, nor who he belonged to. I can’t bear the thought. Why, he might not even remember he’s engaged to be…” She stopped short. She was a girl with a vivid imagination, which was now working to my advantage. I decided to help her along, suggesting that maybe Jack could find a French bombshell to help him remember who he was.
“Where did you say that powerboat was?” she asked.
“Southampton,” I said. “We take the train from Waterloo Station. I know how to get there on the subway.”
“You mean The Tube?”
“Yeah, that.”
“And this fellow, Lord…”
“Sopwith.”
“He’s going to lend a 12-year-old boy and an 18-year-old girl his speedboat to take over the English Channel to Nazi-occupied Belgium?” I kept my mouth shut, but I must’ve had a guilty look on my face because she said, “My God Tommy, you aren’t thinking of nicking a boat from a peer of the realm?”
I explained that there was no such thing as stealing in matters like this. In a military operation it’s called commandeering. Daphne looked at me, her mouth crooked. So I tried something else. “It’s a long swim. Possible though. Why, in 1926 a mother—”
“Forget swimming, Tommy. I’ve never learned properly. I can only dog paddle, and you can’t dog paddle from England to
Belgium.”
We were both speechless, each trying hard to think up a plan. Then Daphne suggested we ask one of Jack’s mates to fly us over. I reminded her that they all flew Spitfires and it was a tight squeeze for even one pilot. Jack had wrote—I mean written—to us about a friend of his who tried to take his girlfriend up with him and crashed the plane while taxiing. That got me thinking maybe we could parachute in. I asked her if she was acquainted with any bomber pilots.
“Jump from an airplane? I would die of fright before my feet hit the ground.”
“Than the speedboat seems like our only option,” I said.
“I suppose it is better than jumping from 10,000 feet, I’ll grant you that. But what about German U-Boats?”
“The speedboat goes almost 52 knots per hour. That’s faster than a torpedo, put it that way.”
“How much faster?”
“Fast enough.”
“Well, then. It’s all settled.” She patted my arm. I’d convinced her, and then some.
That’s when my conscience snuck up on me. Maybe it was her eyelashes done it, so long and curly. Or maybe her eyeballs, whiter than golf balls. Could’ve been that her finger was rubbing at the ticklish underside of my arm. Funny enough, my conscience spoke in a combination of voices: Jack and Mr. Fisch. It said: What are you doing risking her life? After all my scheming, I had to warn her. I started the sentence with a moan, followed by: “What about the despicable Nazi agenda?”
“Which one?”
“The Jewish one,” I said, figuring this was the end to all my plans and that I’d never see Jack this side of purgatory.
“Oh.” She fixed her eyes on my head like it was a crystal ball. They moved around in the sockets, squinting one second and flashing open the next. She made little grunts and sighs, sad then angry. “It’s not as though we’re going to Germany,” she said.
“Nooooo, never!”
But then I remembered Hitler’s own words and how they’d made me tremble, how they’d given me nightmares. And I remembered Lord Sopwith telling me about Belgian refugees and “unspeakable acts of cruelty.” And what else? Horrible inhumanities. Maybe I was making a big mistake dragging Daphne to occupied Europe. Heck—maybe it was a big mistake dragging myself there. All the gung-ho was seeping out of me, getting replaced with worries. To be honest, I half wanted someone to talk me out of going. Like the time I stood on the high board getting ready to dive and Jack suggested I practice at the poolside first. Oh, the relief! And here was my chance—maybe my last chance to turn back. Helping me along was Jack’s voice, whispering in my ears: Tell her already!
Telegram For Mrs. Mooney Page 8
