A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Everything falls apart the last week of school. Exams are over; the books have been read; the problems done. The teachers don’t really see you any more—they’re looking toward their getaway, toward summer. One morning, a boy from my math class bounded into school, his hands high in the air, a huge pink balloon of bubble gum covering half his face, and he slid down the hall on the waxed floor all the way to the principal’s office, where he let out a wild yell as the balloon suddenly flattened. Then he stood there, dreamily pulling the gum off his face, and afterward he drifted into some classroom, looking sleepy. We were all a little like that, wild and vague. It was as if we were stuck on a train between stations—we weren’t one place or another. Even Mr. Mellers, our pal, kept his eyes glued on the wall clock instead of on us. Elizabeth and I passed notes to each other about Mel—about a summer camp, Camp Mellers, we invented, where every morning Mel’s disciples gathered to hear him tell how he had invented nature and the galaxies, and all the damp little children lying on their mothers’ tired bosoms. Elizabeth wrote that he had a special refrigerator hidden in a cave, and at night he went to the cave and ate mayonnaise sandwiches while his disciples thought he was up on a mountain getting the latest word from the universe.

  In the afternoons when I left school, I could hear the orchestra rehearsing. Elizabeth told me the play was not going well; nobody had learned their lines, and Mr. Tate and Hugh Todd raged and shouted at the actors all through rehearsal.

  “Does Hugh really shout?”

  “In his own way,” she answered in that chilly voice she had when Hugh’s name came up. “Actually, his voice drops down low and you can hardly hear what he’s saying, or else he spits out insults. And you can hear those all right. Yesterday he called Frank Wilson a moron because Frank came into the auditorium to look for a book he thought he’d left there, and he asked him how he was able to find his way to school with such a tiny brain. Frank started to howl at him, and finally Tate just pushed Hugh right off the stage as if he were a little iron statue. But I suppose the play will be okay on graduation day. I hate to say it, but Hugh seems to know what he’s doing. Even if he didn’t, he’d get his own way. Rich kids always do.”

  I had given up fighting with Elizabeth about Hugh. Anyhow, I really didn’t know how to defend him. There was truth to what Elizabeth had said about rich kids. They don’t expect anyone ever to say no to them. I remember a little girl who had stayed in the same hotel Papa and Ma and I had spent a week in one summer in Nova Scotia. She had been about three years old, pretty and plump, with golden hair. Once or twice, I’d read to her in the afternoons. I was eating a pear one day and she asked me for it—not a bite, the whole rest of the pear. And when I said she could have a bite, her little face got as hard as a pecan shell and she wouldn’t speak to me for several days.

  I suspected Hugh would look at me like a pecan shell if I ever really said no to him. And although I told myself it was crazy to care about someone you couldn’t say no to, I liked that hardness in him, just the way I liked his snobbery.

  When Elizabeth or my mother, or anyone else, said anything critical about Hugh, I would feel embarrassed and edgy, but terribly interested. Everything seemed true at the same time—all their faultfinding, and all that I felt for him. And no matter how harsh they were about him, I was glad to hear him being talked about at all. I would think about how I loved to look at him, how comic he could be, how joyful I felt when I said something that made him laugh, how important I felt when he was looking at me thoughtfully because he knew I was talking seriously.

  I knew when I bored him, or when I was irritating to him. Sometimes, during our evening phone calls, I’d feel restless and run out of things to say, and I had the habit then of saying, “All right, all right …” Once I said it five times. And he’d imitate my voice; he’d mock me, and I knew he couldn’t stand it. If I bit my knuckles or my nails because I was worried, he’d turn his head away as if I was doing something a little disgusting.

  I saw him alone one more time before school ended. We went to the Mill. He seemed nervous and far away. I figured he was worried about how the play was going, so I asked him about it.

  “I hate that play,” he said. “And Tate was stupid to have suggested it. Nobody is up to O’Neill. They haven’t even learned their lines—they flop on the stage like dying fish. They don’t care. I don’t care.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter so much,” I said. “It’s the graduation that counts.”

  “Counts for what?” he asked morosely. “Half of them won’t go to college, and the other half will stay in school for four or six or even eight years, buried in books, books, books … days and years of them. I want to read what I want to read. I don’t want to be graded like beef—prime or scraps.”

  He wasn’t looking at me but staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t know what to say or do. But suddenly his head came forward and he looked right at me. He made a little hut with his hand, cupping it on the table, his thumb and index finger making a door.

  “Here’s where we’ll go,” he said. “This is our little house in Tierra del Fuego.”

  He made the fingers of his other hand run toward the door of his hand. “That’s us. We’re coming home from the wild beach, and the breakers are crashing on the sand behind us. And we’re going to have a wonderful lunch of Tierra del Fuego lobsters with melted butter made from the milk of the very small Tierra del Fuego cows. And then we’ll have coffee that no one but us will ever taste, made from the beans of our coffee bushes, picked by the peons who work for us.”

  I stared at the cave of his hand for what seemed like many minutes. I didn’t know where Tierra del Fuego was. I didn’t care. I only wanted to be there.

  He lifted his hands from the table and dropped them to his lap. He started smiling, then he snapped his fingers. “Wake up, Victoria,” he said. “It was a dream.”

  “I knew that,” I said.

  “For a moment, you weren’t sure,” he said, laughing.

  I changed the subject. “When are you coming back from Italy?” I asked.

  “Probably the middle of August,” he answered. “By then, you’ll have finished the play.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m going to try and get a job this summer.”

  “You’re too young to get any kind of job that matters.”

  “I don’t care about it mattering. I just want to make some money of my own. I’ll be fourteen in the fall. There are lots of jobs I can get, clerk in a store, or checkout girl in a supermarket, or run a day camp for little kids—”

  “Impresario,” he interrupted.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said. “This is serious to me—getting work this summer.”

  “You’d better find out what impresario means,” he said. “Because that’s what I intend to be.” I could tell he was making fun of himself, but not quite.

  “I’ll finish those scenes when I can—”

  “They’re not scenes. You’re writing a play—” he interrupted.

  “It’s not my whole life,” I said. “I don’t even like to write.”

  “I’m renting out our house in Tierra del Fuego. I may even burn it to the ground,” he said. “Your play matters. It will matter more than graduation will next year. I’m going to make it the best production that school has ever put on.”

  I interrupted him then. A question had risen in me that must have been lying in the bottom of my mind a long time. It floated free, perhaps because he had recently talked about being rich, or because, just now, he had spoken of the New Oxford public high school as that school, the way you talk about a place you don’t like, or where you are an outsider. I asked, “Why don’t you go to a private school?”

  “There’s always been a Todd in that school,” he said in a slow, cold way, as if I should have known the answer to my own question. “We keep our hand in,” he added. “But I want to talk about your play. The way it opens is right—those children,
bored in their house on a rainy day, and their father dying a few blocks away, dying when he’s still pretty young, like your father and mine were—and then the telephone ringing. It’s the mother who isn’t right yet. I’ve wondered if the mother ought to be there at all. Why not an aunt? Maybe an aunt the children have never met—someone who’s been living abroad, in Sicily, or Paris. You want to keep that feeling of strangeness about everything, the way death is strange. All the crying people do just hides the surprise of it, a person disappearing forever …”

  “I really miss my father,” I said suddenly, and I was afraid I might cry myself.

  He got up very fast from his side of the booth and came to sit beside me.

  “Listen! I’ll miss him, too, if that makes you feel better.”

  I started to laugh. I felt like a monster, considering what we were talking about. But there it was. I was happy, all at once, and everything seemed wonderful to me.

  “All right … all right …” I said.

  “And stop saying ‘all right,’” he commanded.

  When we reached the corner where we usually went our separate ways, unless he was coming to visit me, Hugh stepped in front of me.

  “Wait. Come to my house. All this time, and you’ve never seen it.”

  So that’s where we went, up the long hill, and then instead of continuing toward school, we turned left, toward the Matcha River, and walked into the fresh, sweet smell of the water. We passed a long driveway which led to a great stone house with shuttered windows.

  “That used to be ours,” Hugh said, waving a hand at it. “But my mother sold it after my father died. The Todds once owned this entire hill. Look! See the three small windows on the top floor? Those were my rooms, up there right under the roof. My father read to me every night.”

  “Papa read to me, too,” I said.

  “One night, there was a big storm and it drowned out his voice, but while the rain beat down he drew a story for me with my crayons, and after each drawing was done, he’d pass it to me.”

  “Do you still have them? The drawings?”

  “They’re lost,” he said. “And I’ve forgotten the story they told.”

  We had nearly reached the river by then. And I saw a house unlike any other I had ever seen. The most amazing thing about it was the three balconies that hung right over the river. “That’s the new house,” Hugh said. The remembering, eager sound was gone from his voice now, and he didn’t seem much interested in his new house, which he’d brought me to see.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “It’s a freak,” he said, and then he told me it was a copy of an Italian villa—an architect back in the 1920’s had built seven or eight such houses in various New England towns.

  On one side, there was a huge garden and white painted iron benches with feet like the feet of animals, and there was a fountain, and near the house, a swimming pool. Where the garden ended, with trellises and climbing vines, a small wood began.

  We walked in the front door, and we passed rooms that looked as though no one used them but were filled with a kind of furniture quiet, and a smell of wax everywhere. I thought of Ma’s seashell and jar-cap ashtrays as I touched a heavy glass bowl where an amber pipe rested. In niches in the walls were Oriental statues which Hugh said were carved from different kinds of jade. Silky cloth embroidered with flowers covered great wing chairs. The rugs were like beds of flowers, too. And on the walls hung paintings of soldiers, and horses, and rivers bending through tall, slender trees. On a mantel, I saw a clock, and its face was made of tiny squares of blue and white china, and in each square I saw a different scene of people skating, or windmills, or a town square from long ago.

  “It comes from Holland,” Hugh said. I could have looked at it forever.

  We walked through French doors and stood on a stone terrace overlooking the swimming pool. There was no water in it. A few frogs jumped around a drain hole, and a black and orange butterfly wove back and forth across the pool like a shuttle on a loom.

  We went inside again, and I went back to the clock. “It’s so lovely,” I whispered.

  “Poor little rich boy!” Hugh’s voice suddenly boomed. “Here is the house of the poor little rich boy!” At that moment a door opened and a small woman came in and looked at us. She was wearing a long dress. Its color was a kind of buttery yellow, and the ruffle around the neck cast a pale-yellow glow on her face.

  “Hello there, Hugh,” she said in a low, pleasant voice. “This is my friend Victoria, Mother,” he said.

  She touched my hand with her small, cool one. I was suddenly aware that my shirt was sticking out of my jeans and I wanted, frantically, to stuff it back inside.

  “How nice to meet you, Victoria,” she said. “Hugh has told me about you. I hear you are writing a fine play.”

  I mumbled something and stepped back, wishing I could hide behind one of the big chairs. And I felt persecuted. That play again! I wished I’d never begun it. I glanced at Hugh, who was looking out the French doors, and I felt as if he had his hands against my shoulders and was shoving me along a road I didn’t want to travel.

  “Hugh, why don’t you go and get some iced tea and put it on a tray and bring it out to the terrace. We can sit and chat a bit. By the way, your new passport arrived today. The picture of you is quite comical. You’ll like it.” She smiled at Hugh’s back, showing teeth that were faintly yellow like her dress. I was glad there was a touch of rust on her.

  Hugh turned and looked at her, but he didn’t speak. They stood like people acting a charade. I couldn’t guess the words. Then someone else came in. He was a tall, thin man, wearing a suit that looked as if it had just come from the cleaner’s. He had a thin mustache that grew down around his mouth like parentheses.

  “This is my husband, Jeremy Howarth,” Hugh’s mother said. “Jeremy, this is Victoria. Hugh? What is her last name?”

  “Finch,” Hugh answered, hardly opening his mouth.

  “What a pretty name,” remarked Mrs. Howarth, looking at the Dutch clock on the mantel, then at her wristwatch.

  “We don’t have time for tea, Mother,” Hugh said. “Victoria has to go home and practice her oboe.”

  Jeremy let out a strange giggle. Mrs. Howarth smiled at me and shook her head. “My goodness! A playwright and an oboist! What an accomplished child! Isn’t she, Jeremy?”

  “She doesn’t look like a child to me,” Jeremy muttered. “She looks like an engineer.”

  Mrs. Howarth laughed gently, and turned to me, but before she could speak, Hugh grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the room. As we passed Jeremy, I realized he was terribly drunk and that he was clutching the back of a chair to keep himself upright.

  I found myself in another large beautiful room. This one was lined with bookcases. A long desk sat in the middle of the floor, and there was nothing on it until I left my fingerprints in the wax.

  “Oboe!” I exclaimed.

  Hugh put a finger to his lips. “Sssh!” he hissed. Then he pointed silently to the painting of a small child which hung on the wall. I walked over to it while he watched me.

  “That’s me,” he said softly. “I was six.”

  I put my hand toward the smiling face of little Hugh.

  “Don’t touch,” he said.

  “I never knew anyone who had a painting of himself,” I said.

  “Jeremy plans to have it bleached, scraped, and cut for a vest,” he said. I started to smile, but seeing the expression on Hugh’s face, I stopped.

  We went out into the garden then, and I followed Hugh down the slope to the wood. He gestured toward it. “Jeremy wants to sell off our wood to a developer,” he said. “It’s the last piece of land we own around here that hasn’t had something ugly done to it.”

  I glanced back at the house. It looked so empty!

  “What does an engineer look like?” I asked.

  Hugh frowned but didn’t answer my question. “Jeremy is drunk by noon every day,” he said. “
And his brain, if he has one, is rotted out.” He told me that his mother had married Howarth eight months after his father’s fatal accident, and that he and she had had a terrible fight about it, so terrible he had run away to Boston and gone to a club his father had belonged to, where they let him stay a week. Later, he found out a club official had telephoned his mother as soon as he’d showed up.

  “I slept most of the time,” he said. “I ordered my meals up to the room so I wouldn’t have to see anyone. Then she came and got me. I had to come home. The thing to do is to get through this time—get through it until they can’t tell you what to do any more.”

  I heard a thrush sing. A slight breeze rose and died almost at once, and the late-afternoon sunlight, which lay across the garden and the house, was the color of Mrs. Howarth’s dress.

  Beneath a maple tree, Hugh stooped and picked up a small branch from the ground. He began to strip off the bark. “He drinks all the liquor in the house, and he fights with her about the hotels where she makes reservations for them. That’s about all he does,” he said.

  “It must be terrible for her,” I murmured, but I didn’t mean it—Jeremy and Mrs. Howarth seemed like dolls to me, or actors in a movie that isn’t interesting enough to make you forget they’re only photographs of people.

  “Not at all,” Hugh said snappishly, hitting the ground with his stick. “She’s crazy about him. But I’ll be leaving in a year, so I keep the peace. Come on. We’ll go through the wood. It takes a little longer to get to your house, but you don’t have an oboe to practice, so you don’t care. Do you?” He didn’t give me a chance to answer but stepped across a thatch of underbrush and in among the trees.

  It was a little, musty, dark forest. There was a strong smell of damp and leaf mold in the air. We came to the edge of a pond. It was still and without reflections.

  “Beaver pond,” Hugh said. “See where they’ve gnawed the trees?” I saw the marks of animal teeth on the tree trunks, and I touched the raw wood on a small oak. Hugh thrashed about a few feet away. When I looked at him, I saw he was holding a rotted log. He heaved it out into the center of the pond.