A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  I was thinking about Hugh Todd, thinking that here I was, on a lumpy seat in a tattered old bus, and he was probably sitting on a velvet chair in a palace in Italy. I wondered what he was like when he was by himself, walking down a street alone, and if he ever thought of me. I missed him then, with a sharp gloomy missing that didn’t seem to have much to do with the thousands of miles between us.

  We arrived at Edgewater at twilight. Main Street was only a few blocks long. A spindly handrail ran along the sidewalk on the water side, opposite the little shops that sold magazines or bathing suits. Down below the rocky cliffs, I could see the gray ocean, which lay there like the earth’s armor. Our inn was at the north end of the village.

  Ma had once told me about five blind philosophers who were touching an elephant, trying to figure out what it was, and each philosopher described the whole animal according to the part he’d got hold of.

  I think someone must have hired that same gang to build the inn. It wandered all over the rocks on different levels. None of the windows matched, and we had to spend some time figuring out which, among so many doors, was the entrance.

  We went up a long flight of broad creaking stairs to our room. It was big and smelled musty and stale, and the bed coverlets were as thin as paper. But that first evening, when we sat in the dining room, which looked out over the Atlantic, it felt fine, much better than a motel. We were brought little ordinary glasses filled with ordinary tomato juice, but the glasses stood on pretty plates covered with faded flowers and that made it seem like a party. I looked out the big, dusty window next to our table, and I could see lights over the water. It was as though the black sky and the black water were only a thick cloth and those pinpoints of light showed another ocean and another sky that was always light.

  The week went slowly for me. I was bored except when I was reading Wuthering Heights. Lawrence Grady had given it to me before we left. It was a small book, not much larger than my hand, and I liked its size and neatness nearly as much as I liked the story. With our books, and a bag of apples and cheese, Ma and I would go to the Edgewater beach, a collar of round gray stones at the bottom of the cliffs which we climbed down to on rickety wooden stairs.

  It was the first time I remember ever feeling restless alone with my mother. I wrote a long letter to Elizabeth, including two pages I left blank except for a question mark in the middle of each one, and I told her part of my thoughts. I wrote quickly until my fingers began to ache. As I read the letter over, I counted thirty-two I’s, so I added a description of some other people in the inn that was so boring it made me groan out loud. In my mind, I wrote to Hugh, and that letter was marvelous and it made him leap from the velvet chair in the palace in Italy and rush to the nearest airport and fly home. I even began the letter in reality, but the moment I had written the two words: Dear Hugh, I flung down the pen and felt my face turn red. My handwriting was childish and, even worse, looked pudgy! His writing was neat and clear, each letter formed so distinctly. I was glad I didn’t have his address.

  On our last evening in Edgewater, after supper, after a long, blue day like the one Hugh had described in Tierra del Fuego, Ma and I took a walk.

  The sea was a dark-lilac color, and there was a sickle moon. Other people were out walking, too, along the cliff edge. I suddenly thought of Hugh’s father, plunging over a cliff in his rented car, and I felt a stab of fear at the thought of all the things that can happen to a person, and I wondered what might happen to me.

  Ma put her arm around my shoulders, and I leaned against her. I realized that I was as tall as she was, and I would have to stoop to rest my head on her shoulder the way I used to.

  “I’m glad we had this week together,” she said. “It’s been a bit boring, I know, but in a pleasant way, hasn’t it?”

  I laughed a little, glad she had known how I was feeling and relieved to be distracted from my thoughts. We paused at the stairs that led to the beach. A boy of about twelve, wearing a bright-red sweatshirt, was sitting on the top step, blowing softly into a harmonica.

  “Want to go down?” Ma asked.

  But I didn’t. It looked dark and lonely down there where the little waves breaking made a chalky line against the shore.

  “Tory,” she said. Her voice had changed. It was solemn. I glanced at her quickly, at her profile, and I saw, just past her forehead, a star that seemed for an instant to be attached to her.

  “What would you think if I got married again?” she asked. “Would you find it very hard to take?”

  I didn’t answer. I wanted time to go backward, just two minutes, to when we’d been silent, listening to the boy play his harmonica. I had known what she was going to say—the way you suddenly hear a tune someone is whistling and you realize that same tune was in your head a second before you heard it.

  “Tory,” she said again, her voice low and less grave. For a moment, I imagined myself to be a crazy queen who could tell everyone what they had to do: Jump off the cliff! Bring me a golden harp! Never marry again!

  At that same moment, an ancient woman, small as a peanut, wearing floppy white tennis shoes that shone in the dusky light, passed us hurriedly. She was singing to herself: Greensleeves is all my joy …

  “The Yankee cuckoo,” Ma said.

  “I don’t know how I feel about your getting married,” I said. “I guess it’s not up to me.” My voice rose as if I was asking a question.

  “No. It isn’t,” she said. “But I care about the way you feel.”

  I would have to live at home three more years. At home! How would Lawrence Grady fit his big self into our little house? Maybe I would be the one, not Elizabeth, to drop out of school and get a job waiting on tables in Province-town. Did they have restaurants there in the winter?

  “Is he going to move in with us?”

  “No. We’ll have to find a bigger place. We’ve been talking about it—”

  “—Is that why you went to Marblehead? To look for a place?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  She looked out at the sea. “I didn’t know how to. I don’t know how to even now. That’s why I just said it.”

  “His breakfasts are sacred,” I muttered.

  Ma pretended she hadn’t heard that. “We’ve decided to look in Boston,” she said. “You and I can go to school there as well as in New Oxford.”

  “I’ll have to leave Elizabeth,” I said, thinking about leaving Hugh. But Hugh himself was going to be leaving in another year. I felt I’d been suddenly dropped back into that empty landscape of my first weeks in New Oxford, and then further back, to those terrible days in our old house in Boston when Ma and I had seemed to drift around like dry leaves. And then I went back years, back to a round kitchen table, and in the middle of it a big glass bowl of floating island, and Papa lifting out the meringues with a spoon and piling my plate with them. I wanted, suddenly, to see Hugh standing in front of me. I wanted to grab his arm and hold on to it so he wouldn’t disappear into the future the way Papa had disappeared into the past.

  “It won’t be until next summer, Tory,” Ma said. “Not until you finish the tenth grade.”

  I knew then the whole thing had been decided. I couldn’t lie to myself, tell myself that Ma didn’t care about me, but I wished I didn’t know that she did. The truth was—there was nothing I could do to change anything.

  “Maybe I’ll get used to it,” I said. But I knew I wouldn’t. My mother, my father, me. We were set forever in a picture in my mind. There was a new picture now. I wasn’t in it. I could feel my mother looking at me. Once, I looked back at her. I knew she was worried; I could see the frown lines in her face. The boy with the harmonica had disappeared. The star had moved. It seemed hours ago that I had imagined it attached to Ma’s forehead.

  “Let’s go back to the inn,” I said. “I want to finish Wuthering Heights.”

  She nodded, and we began to walk slowly back. Neither of us spoke. Now and then I had trouble bre
athing. It was as if there was a lump of feeling lodged in my throat. The sense of something unfinished between us was hard for me to bear. I wanted to speak, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Just before we went to bed, I startled myself with an explosion of words.

  “Ma. It’s not been a year since Papa died,” I said. I was looking out the window at the dark sea, my back to her.

  “I know that,” she said.

  “Well … it seems so soon for you to get—” but I couldn’t say the word “married.” It was her fault I felt so embarrassed and angry!

  “Look at me,” she demanded.

  I turned reluctantly. She was sitting on her bed, staring at me.

  “I can’t answer you. I can’t help what you feel,” she said. “My life could have turned out differently. I might never have married again. Or not for a few years. I don’t know … But what happened is that I met Lawrence. I know him and I like him. It’s not the way I felt about Papa. It can’t be that way again. Maybe it is too soon. Maybe it’s the wrong thing to do. We’ll have to see. It’s not really you who’s taking the chance. Lawrence and I are. Now, come to bed, dear Tory. We have an early bus to catch.”

  There was nothing more I could say. I stayed awake a long time.

  We left Edgewater the next morning and went to Uncle Philip’s apartment in Boston, where we were to spend two days, one of which was my birthday.

  Uncle Philip had made me a devil’s-food cake. It had a ribbon tied to it and a water pistol tied to the ribbon so I could defend it. Elizabeth came, too. I suppose Ma and Uncle Philip had arranged that even before we went to Edgewater. Though I was glad to see her, I felt as if everything was being done behind my back.

  My mother gave me a gold chain that had belonged to her mother. Uncle Philip gave me three short novels by Joseph Conrad, Jed gave me a scarf, and Elizabeth gave me a Mexican mirror. The frame was a tin sunburst, and it was just big enough to see your face in.

  I looked into it. There I was, Victoria Finch, fourteen years old. For a moment, my father’s old tweed hat, the ghost of it, floated just over my head; then it sailed away and I was alone in the mirror. I looked strange to myself, like someone I didn’t really know.

  Lawrence Grady arrived later, and he brought me a canvas bag I could use for traveling. I wondered what he had in mind. I watched him closely, as though by doing so I could find out what I really felt about him. I knew my mother was watching me watch him.

  Perhaps I could have liked him if he and my mother—Suddenly he took my arm and led me off to a corner of Uncle Philip’s living room.

  “Do you mind a lot?” he asked me.

  I thought, They must each carry a telephone in their pockets. How did he know she’d told me?

  “I mind a little,” I said carefully. We stared at each other.

  “I don’t blame you for minding,” he said. “I’d mind, too, if I were you.”

  I looked down at the street, at the cars, full of people who were not having this painful conversation.

  “I think we can all get along. I want to,” he said.

  All this understanding! A lot of good it does. Even dentists tell you they’re sorry.

  “I guess so,” was all I could say.

  Lawrence Grady drove us back to New Oxford. I half listened from the back seat to their murmurs. I watched Ma lean toward him. I heard them laugh. I felt something I hadn’t expected—a kind of cool apartness from them both. It was all settled. My canvas bag was next to me on the seat. I’d use it someday.

  A neighbor who had been keeping an eye on the house while we were gone had left our mail on the table. I found a card from Hugh. It was from New York City, a photograph of the Empire State Building. Hugh had written only: The play’s the thing. I didn’t care about that. I just cared that he was back, not far away.

  School would begin in a week and a half. The mornings were still hot, but the light had a different, thinner weight, and some of the trees along Main Street had lost their leaves.

  My scenes were in an envelope on the shelf of my wardrobe. After spending hours on chores I could have done in ten minutes, I finally got enough courage to look at what I’d written. I rushed into my room and flung open the wardrobe door.

  There was Ma, sitting on the floor among a lot of old sneakers, puffing away on a cigarette.

  I never saw anyone look so embarrassed.

  I didn’t say a word.

  She crawled out on the floor. “It’s the first one since I threw away the pack before we went to Edgewater,” she said. “I found it in a drawer when I was cleaning out—”

  “Why didn’t you use your own closet?” I asked, my voice stuffed with the wild laughter that was rising up in me.

  “I don’t know.”

  I took down the scenes and went into the living room. Ma was sitting there, still looking mortified.

  “Honestly, Tory …”

  I could see how wonderful it can be to be in the right.

  “Is that your play?” she asked weakly.

  “I thought I’d better look at it.”

  “Why don’t you read it to me?”

  So I did. At first, I couldn’t understand much of what I was reading. I was too surprised that I’d managed to put down so many words. After I finished, Ma said, “It’s pretty good. How are you going to end it?”

  “That’s what I’ve got to figure out before school starts.”

  “I think the problem with it is that the father’s death is the event, and that happens right away.”

  “When I started writing, I just wanted to describe how that felt. How someone’s life can stop—” I could hardly believe we were talking so quietly about what we were really talking about—Papa.

  “Then the story has to be about how the living keep on living.”

  “But—is that a story?”

  “It’s one of the main stories,” Ma said.

  That afternoon, Elizabeth rode over on her bike. We stood for a while among the apple trees.

  “Mom doesn’t even look up when I walk into the room,” she told me. “That’s not what I wanted either.”

  I told her about Lawrence and Ma getting married next year.

  “I don’t like him much,” I said. “I don’t hate him either. He gave me that traveling bag for my birthday with something in mind.”

  Elizabeth laughed and said, “I wondered about that.”

  “We’ll have to move to Boston,” I said, looking at her.

  “I’ll come to visit you,” Elizabeth said. “We’re friends.”

  We walked down Autumn Street to the big hill. After we’d climbed it, we sat down on the ground, leaning against each other’s back.

  I could see most of New Oxford from there, and Mt. Crystal, and I even glimpsed the cars, where the sunlight glinted off them, on the main route to Boston. Little children lurched about in the grass, or leaned against their sleepy mothers, whose books and magazines had fallen to the ground, and two dogs chased each other in wide circles. I always thought of the hill as belonging to Hugh. I kicked at some candy wrappers.

  “I feel so different,” I said at last.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s almost a year since my father died.”

  “It’s almost two weeks since Mom went crazy.”

  “Let’s go to the bakery and get some doughnuts and take a long ride,” I said.

  The bakery was out of sugar doughnuts and there was nothing else we wanted. So we got on our bikes and we rode where we felt like riding until the lights began to go on in the houses and you could barely see the tangled fall asters in the gardens. We didn’t talk at all. Sometimes Elizabeth rode ahead, and sometimes I did. I left her off at her house and went on home.

  Ma said she’d been getting a little worried, it was so late. I told her how Elizabeth and I had ridden about twelve miles without saying a word to each other.

  “Since you haven’t exercised your vocal cords for so long, how about reading to me whil
e I fix supper?” she suggested.

  I read her “Kaa’s Hunting” from The Jungle Books. It had been my father’s favorite chapter and it was mine, too.

  I went back to school on the day after Labor Day. Everyone looked changed, even Frank Wilson, who stomped down the hall toward me, grinning. He’d grown a wispy little mustache and he had gotten much bigger. The bottoms of his blue jeans were just above his ankles, and his big bony wrists stuck out of his shirtsleeves.

  “How’s everything?” he asked.

  I’d been looking for Hugh ever since I walked into school, and Frank was in my way. I wanted to get past him, even though I heard and recognized something in his voice that hadn’t been in it in the spring—interest in me, not teasing.

  “Fine,” I said, looking over his shoulder.

  “Wait a minute. Talk to me … what’d you do all summer?”

  “I worked for a while and then I went away for a week with my mother.”

  “I was in Maine, working in a lumber camp,” he said, and he touched his mustache. I had an impulse to ask him if he’d found it in the woods. I thought I glimpsed Hugh among the milling kids at the end of the hall. “See you later,” I said to Frank and circled around him. He looked puzzled and uncertain, and I didn’t care.

  If Hugh had been where I thought I’d seen him, he’d disappeared by the time I got there. Suddenly I was sure he was still in Italy, and I’d never see him or hear from him again. Then I went to my old locker. Inside it, on the bottom, was a bunch of old math papers and a sweater I had thought I’d lost. And hanging from a hook was a package. The paper that covered it was beautiful, a dark leaf-green with flowers like lilies-of-the-valley printed on it. I opened it and found a leather wallet that was the color of a caramel. Little gold letters on the rim spelled out, Firenze, and there was a note tucked into it. Saluti e complimenti, it read in Hugh’s handwriting.

  On my way home that afternoon, just as I passed the Congregational Church, I saw him.

  He was standing just in front of the glass-fronted board where the times of service and the topics of sermons are printed. We stared at each other across the unmowed yellowing grass. Then he pointed to the bulletin board and smiled. I walked toward him. On the board was the message that Reverend Jeffers was going to preach the following Sunday: The Many Faces of Love.