The Romeo and Juliet Code

by Phoebe Stone

  Mr. Henley asked right away about our secret report on the great blue heron. “But aren’t they gone by now, migrated south, or do they stay behind all winter?” he said, starting up the motor again.

  I stared blankly at Mr. Henley. “Um, well, actually, great blue herons decide at the last minute…. Um, that’s why they stand on one leg; they are deciding about migrating. Should we go or should we stay? That sort of thing.”

  “Our secret report will cover all that,” said Derek, nudging me with his good elbow.

  The boat was cutting through the water now and I was looking down into the depths of the ocean for seals. In the summer, you often saw them sunning on rocks. We putted along through the waves, the shore and rocky cliffs passing by above us. We saw the Bathburn house then from a distance with its widow’s walk and the tower room at the top of the sky. The whole place seemed wrapped in isolated autumn silence.

  Derek said, “I heard there was some waiter at the White Whale Inn this summer who took off during his shift and cut all the telephone wires to the inn.”

  “He was unstable,” said Mr. Henley. “He just up and left. No one knows where he went. I guess the police were looking for him because the guy had a bunch of Nazi flags in his room.”

  “And they say we are teetering on the brink of war,” said Derek.

  “Yes, they do say that,” said Mr. Henley. “Any day now, I’m guessing. Any day now.

  “A sea so gray I woke all night

  and rose at dawn to find dark light.

  “Like poetry?”

  “Usually,” I said. “You seem very different to me without your postman’s suit on. I almost didn’t recognize you. You look like a true fisherman.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Henley. “‘All the world’s a stage and all men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts.’ William Shakespeare, a great poet and a true visionary.”

  “Mr. William Shakespeare?” I said. “Isn’t that the chap who wrote the play Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Indeed it is. The greatest playwright ever.”

  “Shakespeare?” Derek said. “Would you say that you enjoy his plays?”

  “I would,” said Mr. Henley. “I’m not just a mailman and a fisherman. I also write and read poetry. I send my poems to the Saturday Evening Post, hoping to get published. But they always send them back to me, saying ‘No, thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you.’”

  “Well, it’s their loss, Mr. Henley, I’m sure,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So,” I added, “did I hear you say you favor this Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “Yes, I most certainly do,” said Mr. Henley. “As a reader and a writer, I most certainly favor Shakespeare.”

  Derek and I looked at each other straight on. Our eyes snapped tight and we both nearly jumped up out of the boat and leaped into the tossing sky.

  But we were nearing Peace Island. It loomed before us, and thousands of birds, whole clouds of them, were calling and crying and fluttering against the rocky cliffs that seemed to jut straight up from the sea.

  I followed Derek as he climbed the steep path that zigzagged up the side of Peace Island. There were wild, scruffy, autumn-colored rosebushes on either side of the narrow way. I could look straight down and see the now-green deep water far below us. Seabirds like puffins and storm petrels and terns and seagulls hovered and landed on the cliffs above us. I could see Mr. Henley and his small blue lobster boat moving out towards the open sea. I rather wished he would have stayed closer by.

  The wind was picking up. It was almost howling, like a choir singing in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. I kept hearing The Gram in my mind saying, Stay off those rocky bluffs to the south of here, Flissy. The wind gets ferocious over there and a little stick of a girl like you could be swept out to sea in a snap.

  When we had climbed all the way to the top of the cliff, where the island then flattened out into long waving grass, we could look off into the distance and see Mr. Henley’s boat getting smaller and smaller.

  “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” I called out to the wind.

  And Derek said, “Shhh. We’re not alone on the island, remember. But you’re right, he is our Romeo. Why didn’t we ask him outright, Flissy? We should have.”

  “No,” I said, “we can’t risk it. If we ask him outright, he might say, ‘Oh no, I’m way too busy.’ We really must be terribly clever about this. Don’t you think?”

  I looked off one more time at the sea stretching away into forever. Mr. Henley’s boat was fast becoming a blue speck on the horizon. What if he forgot to come back for us? What if a stray Nazi U-boat prowling about the coast came upon Mr. Henley’s little lobster boat?

  Seabirds still circled overhead, and the long switch grass rolled and rippled and simmered like water. “Come on,” said Derek. “Hurry. We don’t know how long Gideon will be out here. Let’s head to Savage Point.”

  “Savage Point?” I said.

  “Yep, it’s named after a hermit who used to live out there. He took care of the lighthouse. His name was Joe Savage. People in town used to say, ‘Joe Savage took a bath once a year, even when he didn’t need one.’” Derek smiled up and out at all that was before us.

  “There’s a lighthouse?” I said.

  “It’s not in use anymore since they built a new one over on Turtleback Island. The Savage Point Lighthouse is pretty much abandoned.”

  The wind was behind us and it felt as if we blew through the wide field of grass, as if we were flying across the open stretch, as if the clouds were piling up higher and higher above us, as if the dark trees against the sky were ripping back and forth faster and faster. Derek got ahead of me and I had to call out to him to slow down, but my voice seemed lost in the wind. Finally, we came to a wooded sheltered area and we slid down a steep slope into a rocky, bushy glen and then we went through a group of trees that were short and bent over, as if they had been standing up too long against the weather.

  Just on the other side of the trees, there it was, the Savage Point Lighthouse, sitting high up on the farthest and outermost spot on the island, the final piece of land before the vast open Atlantic. We came upon it slowly although the wind seemed almost to push us along. The lighthouse was gray, a forlorn bitter gray. Its windows were broken. The door hung open on loosened hinges. A rope was strung across the path and there was a sign hung on it that said DANGER. NO TRESPASSING.

  As we got closer, we began to hear a noise like a small motorboat coming from inside the lighthouse. I looked out at the ocean and could see nothing but the endless water, with no sign of Mr. Henley.

  Derek stepped over the rope and moved towards the half-open door. He took my hand in his and suddenly, though I was scared, my hand felt tingly and warm lying in Derek’s hand, almost as if I could feel all of Derek’s being in his palm pressed close to my palm. I followed him through the door, nothing between our palms, just his against mine.

  Inside, light came down in shafts through broken windows from above. Old plaster lay on the steps that curved round and up, round and up, to the top of the lighthouse. Palm against palm, I followed Derek. The noise was a kind of even hum now. Up the steps and round the first turn, we looked out a broken window straight down into a drop-off to the sea below. Round the next curve, there was more plaster, an old pair of boots set off to the side, a bird nest above a broken window, hay and bird droppings, and the low drone of a motor as we rounded up and up. Then at the top there was a green wooden door mostly closed, only a crack left open.

  Derek, still holding my hand, leaned closer and we both peered through the crack. Uncle Gideon was sitting at a table, his back to us. On the table was a machine connected by a wire to a small motor on the floor. Uncle Gideon was tapping out something on the machine. Even over the motor, we could hear tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

  Everything sifted through me that next week like a great confusing kaleidoscope—t
he image of Uncle Gideon sitting at that table with his back to us, the man from Washington who had visited with the locked briefcase, the film hidden in the little pincushion, the gun in the overcoat pocket in London, the calling away of my Winnie and Danny, the Romeo and Juliet code, and the letters. The letters. All of it seemed to fit together to form a picture that felt blurry and dark to me, a picture I couldn’t quite read. All the images cut and fluttered and changed form in my mind at night. Then the house would seem even darker and more ominous. There were shadows on the stairs. Lights seemed to flicker in the parlor. The news of the war on the radio would play in my mind over and over again.

  And yet, by day, everything seemed to go on as usual. No one seemed worried that the Nazis might come here in their U-boats. People were not ordered to put dark curtains over their windows at night to keep the light from alerting planes overhead of our presence. There were no food rations, and most anything you needed you could buy in the grocery store in downtown Bottlebay.

  “Flissy, of course you would be more sensitive to all that,” said Aunt Miami. “You were there and saw all of it.” We were sitting in the library. The whole Bathburn family was in there reading away. Uncle Gideon got up for a moment to put on some water for tea, and when he returned, we both suddenly looked at Aunt Miami. She was back behind her book, reading again. Uncle Gideon and I happened to see the cover of the book both at the same time, and it was not Romeo and Juliet. Aunt Miami was reading a book called The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I looked at Uncle Gideon and he looked at me. Then he put his hands together like he was praying and he rolled his eyes up at the ceiling and smiled. Aunt Miami had broken free.

  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 tra
p, 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.