A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  “That’s rotten Harry,” he said. “I think we ought to teach him a lesson, don’t you?”

  He searched around quickly, found a stone, and flung it at the log.

  “Take that, you devil!” he cried. Then he handed me a stick.

  I threw it. “You no-good, disgusting Harry!” I shouted.

  “Filthy wild pig!” he yelled, hitting the log with another stick. He made a little heap of missiles, and he moved fast, faster than I had ever seen him move, and his face and hands glimmered in the light that was like dusk there among the trees.

  “Loathsome dog!” he suddenly screamed and threw a handful of stones at the log.

  “Vile viper!” I called.

  “Wicked, mean, evil Harry!”

  “Fat, dirty hog!”

  I was spattered with mud and laughing so hard I was staggering as I turned here and there, bending, and scrabbling at the earth to find objects to hurl.

  “Hideous, horrible—” I began, when I realized, all at once, that mine was the only voice in the wood. I dropped the stones and sticks I was holding and looked behind me.

  Hugh was leaning against a tree, a thoughtful look on his face. There was hardly any mud on him. I was scared. Something bad had happened, and I had been part of the badness. He saw me staring at him. He smiled.

  “I got you going, didn’t I?” he said in a light voice.

  I felt something for him, at that moment, that was as close to dislike as a worshipper can get.

  What were we doing in this little stale wood? Why had I jumped into his game without a thought?

  “I’m going,” I said roughly. I started off to where I could see the trees thin out. Behind me, I could hear him following, twigs crackling beneath his feet, and my skin prickled and I rushed out into the open. I turned back. He was standing at the edge of the wood, his hands in his pockets, his face as blank as a plate.

  He had already begun to turn away when he said, “Goodbye, Victoria.”

  I ran down the hill to home.

  Ma was shellacking an old kitchen chair when I walked into the living room. She asked me if I’d been trying to dig my way to China.

  “Rich people are different,” I said to her.

  She laughed and replied, “There was a well-known conversation about that subject between two famous writers. One said, ‘The rich are not like us,’ and the other remarked, ‘Yes, they have money.’”

  “I didn’t mean just money,” I said.

  “You’re getting mud all over the floor,” she said. “What rich people are you talking about?”

  I took off my muddy shoes, but I didn’t answer her question. She was kneeling next to the chair, the paint-brush in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She looked kind to me, very kind. I’d never noticed that about the way she looked before.

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

  “Like anyone else,” she answered. “What a peculiar question! You must have had an interesting afternoon.”

  I didn’t tell her about my afternoon. I didn’t tell her about Jeremy Howarth, who, I knew, was nasty whether he was drunk or sober. And I didn’t mention Hugh’s house, so odd and beautiful, sitting over the river like a fortress, and how mean I thought they all were, Hugh’s mother, and her husband, and even Hugh, too, and that the meanness was not only in what they said but in the way they looked and dressed and moved.

  I went to the dictionary and looked up the word Hugh had used to describe what he wanted to be someday. Impresario. The manager, organizer, or director of an opera or ballet company … I had been the impresario’s entertainment that afternoon.

  I felt thick and restless. A heavy thing had come to burden me; the burden was that I cared so much about Hugh—and I had begun to not want to.

  School ended. We all went to see the play. Only the parents went to the evening performance. It was fun to see the people we knew in makeup and clothes that weren’t theirs. When the curtain fell, we all applauded for a long time, and everyone who had been involved with putting on the play came out to bow. Except Hugh. Later, I heard that he and his mother and Howarth had left that afternoon for Boston and, I suppose, to go from there to Italy.

  During the summer, I got some postcards from him. Most of them were from Florence or Siena or Bellagio on Lake Como, where his mother and Howarth had rented a house. But two of the cards, although they had Italian postmarks, weren’t views of Italy.

  One was from Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and it said they had a rodent problem in the area and I’d be advised to stay away. The other looked as though he’d found it in an attic. It was a cartoon of a baby wearing a big pink bonnet and a frilly pink dress. She was standing on a beach, and in one hand she carried a pail and shovel. The caption said: The Beach at Santa Monica. On the back, Hugh had written, “Finish that play and I’ll make a star of you!” It was signed: Louis B. Mayer.

  Ma told me Louis B. Mayer had been a big movie man before I was born, back in the 1930’s. I didn’t laugh much, even though I felt Hugh would have expected me to. Ever since the afternoon with rotten Harry in the little pond in the wood, I had such contrary feelings about Hugh. If I had known how, I would have tried to talk about them, to anyone, to a passing horse. I didn’t know how.

  I didn’t do much work on my scenes. Other things came along to distract me. School seemed far away. I didn’t think of it. Hugh really was far away. But he was often in my thoughts, like a toothache in the brain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Elizabeth and I didn’t have any luck finding jobs. New Oxford was not a center of industry. Once, there must have been little stores, hardware and dry goods and a 5-and-10, and maybe a butcher shop. The big shopping malls had taken most of their customers, and there was no work for us in the few places that hung on, places like the Mill or the bakery or the little grocery store, where there was dust on the tuna-fish cans and the peanut butter was dry and stony. You would have needed an ax to spread it.

  We had to start a business of our own, a kind of super baby-sitting. We managed to find eight little children, the youngest being three, whose parents were glad to park them with us for the mornings. Right away, we found out a few things about little kids—they like big pans of water in which they can wash things, their own shoes, for instance, and they like jelly sandwiches to eat as well as to carry in their pockets.

  The first week was the hardest because we had no capital to buy equipment with, but the second week, after the parents paid us, we bought a few things, beach balls, shovels with which to dig up Mrs. Marx’s begonias, blocks, and a few little trucks. And we made do with odds and ends we found in our houses, rusty pots and wooden spoons and a muffin tin Ma had used to mix paint in. Most of the children tired of things pretty quickly, but there were a couple of loony ones who would keep on doing the same thing until you lifted them up and carried them to something else. Making mud pies, we discovered, was by far the most popular activity. As Ma said, mud cooking wasn’t likely to go out of style for a long time.

  The afternoons belonged to us. We had our routine. First we went to the village bakery and bought sugar doughnuts. Then we got on our bicycles and rode for miles, stopping to eat our doughnuts when we got tired.

  We talked. That was the summer of talking—Elizabeth and I, sitting under a tree, somewhere off a blacktop road, talking about our lives, about ourselves. We got more attached to each other than we’d even been in the spring, and the feeling between us shut out everyone else; just because we were alone inside that feeling, it often made me sad, as though we’d been shipwrecked and only had one another. There were two people I couldn’t speak about to Elizabeth. One was Hugh. If I told her the bad thoughts I had about him, I knew she would agree with them. If I told her all the things I loved about him, she would become cold and distant. But I wanted to talk about him! Sometimes I felt I was brimming over like a cup with feelings about Hugh, and there were moments when I almost hated Elizabeth, because she didn’t make it possible
for me to even say his name. Not unless I was willing to fight with her. When those moments came, I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t speak. Then she’d ask, “What’s the matter, Tory?” and I’d answer, “Nothing.” That’s one word that can cover a big territory of something. Since there was no one I could talk about Hugh with, I talked to myself about him. Once I tried to draw a picture of him. But I can’t draw at all. The clumsy marks of my pencil embarrassed me as much as if he’d been standing there, looking over my shoulder at the drawing.

  The other person I didn’t mention was Mrs. Marx. She was unlike Elizabeth in every way and I sometimes wondered if Elizabeth had been adopted.

  Mrs. Marx was a person made out of electric wires. She seemed to hum with messages you couldn’t make out, except you knew they carried news of trouble, of accidents. Often, during our mornings with the little kids, I’d glance up at the Marx house and I’d see Mrs. Marx staring at us from a window, a restless ghost, her eyes glaring and huge like someone who never sleeps. She always asked us questions that sounded as though she suspected us of criminal activities.

  For instance, she wouldn’t say, What are you going to do this afternoon? Instead, she’d say, “Now, what are you two up to?” And once she laughed wildly while she was watching us put away the play-group equipment in the garage.

  “Secrets!” she cried. “I know your secrets! I know them all!”

  What was strange was that Elizabeth never made any comments about her mother’s behavior. But I would see her shoulders droop and her head bow down, and on our bike rides, after such a scene with her mother, she would pedal fiercely and my legs would ache trying to keep up with her. The older I got, the more things there seemed to be that people couldn’t talk about, couldn’t say. When I thought of myself as a little child, with Papa and Ma, it seemed to me I’d always said everything that came into my head. Maybe I hadn’t.

  I felt that Elizabeth and I went far away from our homes, our ordinary lives, on our bikes, and that we were like colonists in a country where everything was new. Sometimes, when I got back to my house, after our long rides, it looked so small and dull. I began to hate to clean my room—there didn’t seem any point to it, so I’d let things pile up until I had to climb over them to get to my bed, which I shared with books, shoes, and one or two records I couldn’t bother to put away.

  It seemed a long time ago that Ma and I had talked about old deserted houses and factories and how we felt the same way about their mystery.

  There was something new in Ma’s life. She’d met Lawrence Grady at Uncle Philip’s on one of her trips to Boston, and, I guess, she must have met him a few times after that, although I didn’t ask her.

  He looked a good deal older than my father would have been. Elizabeth was at my house once when he came for supper, and she said later that he looked nice. We both knew that nice didn’t mean much; it was like the X in an equation, just a variable.

  Mr. Grady didn’t pay much attention to me, and I was relieved at that. Ma tried to get him to. I could see her trying and I didn’t want her to. It turned out that he taught in a Boston college, John Milton’s poetry, Ma told me. I wondered if we’d ever get out of the school system, and I told Elizabeth I should have been an elementary-school dropout to break the grisly grip of education on the Finch family.

  When I looked at Ma looking at Lawrence Grady, she was like someone I hardly knew. He liked her to play the piano for him, and when she played, he’d sit near her and tap his foot on the floor. I wished he wouldn’t do that.

  Well. He was all right, I guess. Still, when he raced down Autumn Street in his little French car, which you could hear a mile away, and came to spend the evening, I really wanted to be some other place. I tried to explain my feelings to Elizabeth, but they didn’t come out right. I remember once that I told Mr. Tate that I knew what I meant but that I didn’t know how to say it. Mr. Tate had said, If you don’t know how to say it, you don’t know what you mean. I was glad Ma was so cheerful, but it was a distant gladness.

  The dead go away, then they come back stronger than ever. I had been looking in Ma’s closet to see if she had any broken-down shoes the little kids could wear for pretending they were grownups. I glanced up at the one shelf, and I saw an old tweed hat. I knew it was Papa’s even before I took it down. Ma was out shopping somewhere. I went and sat on her bed and looked at my father’s hat. I remembered it.

  He had worn it in all kinds of weather, snow and rain and even when the sun was shining on hot days. He’d worn it when we went for a walk one day and he asked me if I’d like to go and have lunch in a restaurant. I don’t think I’d eaten in a restaurant before that.

  He had taken me to a place out on a pier that stretched its length into Boston Bay. We sat by a window where I could look down at the water, and just before I wiggled into my seat, he waved his hat at it and then at me.

  The hat was softened with age, and there were stains around the inside—Papa’s sweat, I guess. I got up and put it on my head and went to look in Ma’s mirror. I looked like my father. I shivered, and snatched the hat off and buried my face in it a moment, then put it back on the shelf.

  Ma asked me, one morning, what I thought of Mr. Grady.

  “He’s okay,” I replied.

  “That doesn’t sound okay,” she said.

  “He’s not Papa” I cried out.

  “No one is,” she said.

  They often spent Saturdays together in Boston, and I was glad to have the house to myself. On Sundays, he would drive those sixty miles to bring us newspapers and the sweet rolls he bought in some fancy Boston bakery. It was all very comfortable, except for me. I wasn’t comfortable.

  Elizabeth and I had our hands full with our play group. We had two kids that gave us real trouble. One was Barry, who was four, and had a career in mind based on Attila the Hun’s. He would take a shovel in one hand, a pail of dirt in the other, spot an unsuspecting victim, usually a girl, then run to her and dump the dirt in her hair and, at the same time, bang her on the head with the shovel. Someone, somewhere, must have laughed at Barry when he did such a thing. He clearly thought it was a wonderful joke. We told his parents we thought Barry needed a more adventurous atmosphere than we could provide. (We’d learned a thing or two about not quite saying what one means from reading our school reports.)

  The other child was our youngest, three, and she bit everything, tree bark, begonias, metal spoons, plates, stones, and passing kitties, but mostly human flesh. She didn’t have to be angry to bite, just in the neighborhood of something living. We told her mother that her little Gladys bit the other children hard enough to leave scars. Her mother said we’d made it all up—her child wouldn’t do such a thing—who did we think we were anyhow? She wouldn’t dream of exposing her daughter to liars like us.

  We ended up with six children, which was really enough, and we kept the play group going until mid-August. We got very fond of some of the little kids, but it was marvelous one morning to wake up and know I didn’t have to go and collect our little pack and go to Elizabeth’s house, where we had spent all those mornings protecting the kids from dire fates.

  We each made just over a hundred dollars, subtracting the expenses for replacing Mrs. Marx’s flowers and for our equipment.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it? To earn your own money?” Ma said.

  I agreed.

  I couldn’t think, at the moment, what to do with the money, so Ma opened a savings account for me, except for $15 Elizabeth and I had agreed we should each keep for a day when we would do just as we pleased. Elizabeth suggested we go to Boston to a movie, or to the Glass Museum, and look at the store windows, and then have a real lunch, not hamburgers, but Italian food, which we both liked especially. Ma said she’d go in with us on the Boston bus if we’d go on a Saturday. She and Lawrence Grady wanted to spend some time in Marblehead, and they would meet us in the afternoon and then drive us back to New Oxford.

  “What for?” I asked.


  “What for what?” Ma asked.

  “What’s in Marblehead?”

  “We just want to look around.”

  “Look around for what?” I asked.

  “Are you cross-examining me, Tory?” she asked.

  I burst out, “Well—why are you being so secretive?”

  “We all have our secrets,” she said. “And our privacy.”

  I was furious. But I knew Ma’s tone. It meant she wouldn’t say another thing. I wished Lawrence Grady would move to California. Or disappear from the face of the earth.

  When we were walking to the bus station on the following Saturday, I realized Ma and Mr. Grady were going to Marblehead because of something that wasn’t there. Me. Just as the bus shelter came into view and I saw Elizabeth standing there waiting for us, I said to Ma, “You want to get away from me.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” Ma said in a firm voice. “But I can’t explain it to you, and I’m not going to try.”

  The heat was terrible that morning. My face stung with perspiration. All of August seemed to have poured itself into the inside of the bus. Ma went to the back, where she could smoke herself to death. I told Elizabeth I thought it was a poor idea to go into the city on such a day, and she snapped back that she didn’t want to start off with my complaining. I was mad at everyone and everything for the whole bus ride. Why do days you plan and look forward to turn so sour?

  I didn’t even say goodbye to Ma when we parted at the Common. Elizabeth and I watched the swan boats for a while, not talking. I wasn’t cross now. I was silent, because I had realized that this was the first time I’d been in Boston since we’d moved to New Oxford.

  I turned away from Elizabeth then, in a flash, spun around, thinking, Papa is here, I’m small, we’ve come to see the swan boats! Elizabeth was staring blankly straight ahead of her. I was about to tell her of the mirage I’d just had when three boys on bicycles began to circle around us, whistling and gurgling, and we ran for it while they shouted rotten things at us.