A Solitary Blue

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I don’t want to go there. Professor? I don’t have to, do I? Can she make me? I can’t.”

  The Professor’s eyes studied him. Jeff looked away, to the scrubby grass of the lawn. He didn’t want to hear what the Professor would say. For a long time, the Professor didn’t say anything. When he did speak, it took Jeff a minute to figure out that he hadn’t changed the subject. “Right after she left, I was miserable and ashamed. I just wanted her to come back. It was like that for a long time. But then, when I got used to it, I began to be afraid she would come back; just thinking of it scared me. Really scared me — it took courage just to answer the phone if it rang. In case it was her. I think I understand how you feel, Jeff.”

  Jeff appreciated that, but it didn’t answer his question “Can she make me go see her?”

  The Professor sighed. “Let me tell you what she wants; it’s much easier and much harder than what you think. She wants a divorce; she doesn’t say why. She wants custody of you.”

  “No!” Jeff couldn’t sit any more. But he couldn’t go too far away because then he couldn’t hear his father. “No, I won’t,” he said. He walked away, to where the lawn sloped down. “You can’t make me.”

  “I don’t want to make you, you know that.” His father’s voice spoke from behind him, patient, trustworthy. “Come back, sit down. I’ve talked to a lawyer, and they never guarantee, but at your age a court will listen to what you want. A judge will. The lawyer says he’s pretty sure of that. But she wants to divorce me, she wants it uncontested, for incompatibility.”

  Jeff was back, seated again. “That’s OK.”

  “Well,” the Professor said, “the lawyer doesn’t think so. He says that if it goes through uncontested she could make a strong appeal for custody, at least half the year.”

  “What can we do?” Jeff asked. He heard how small his voice was. He looked up at the sky, above the smooth line of marsh grass and the ragged line of trees. The sky was streaked with pastel clouds, yellow and orange and pink.

  “I can divorce her for desertion, or adultery if she contests that.”

  “You mean with Max?”

  “Only you’d have to be willing to testify against her, if she contested it. In court. And that seems like an awful lot to ask of you. She is your mother, after all.”

  Jeff looked at his feet. They were bare and brown. The soles had thick callouses. “But it’s true; why would she contest it?”

  “I don’t know.” The Professor sounded tired, really tired, and discouraged.

  Jeff’s attention focused on his father. “Professor, how long has this been going on?”

  “She wrote me in March, the first time.”

  “That’s five months ago, you should have told me.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. I was hoping not to have to. Maybe you’d better read her letter.”

  The Professor had kept Melody’s letters in a manila file folder. Jeff opened it. The first one — he had to read it twice, because on first reading he was thinking about Melody’s handwriting, the shapes of the letters and the way her sentences sounded, eager and happy, just the way her voice sounded.

  The first letter talked about how she had been surprised to read about his book and asked wouldn’t it be a good thing if they formalized the separation by getting divorced. She couldn’t possibly give up Jeff, she said, so she would ask for custody. “Unless you’ve changed radically, Horace, he’ll be better off with me. He needs affection and attention, and I know you don’t want to deprive him. Do you?”

  The second letter sounded like her feelings had been hurt. She said she didn’t think the Professor would go to a lawyer; but if he wanted to be that way he was lucky to be able to afford it; she said she missed Jeff and had become suspicious at not hearing from him. Was the Professor allowing her son to communicate with her?

  The third had a photograph clipped to it, the picture she had taken in the Charleston airport. “Did you ever see him look like that?” she asked. “Was he ever so happy when he was with you? Have you thought at all about Jeff in this or only about your own convenience?”

  Jeff looked at the photograph. The boy was so young, and his smile so broad it made even Jeff smile to look at him, and he knew better. “I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at his father. Everything Melody wrote, every word she used, showed how well she could guess what the Professor was like, how he would react — as if she could see him. That was her real talent, Jeff thought, for feeling what people were like; and he had, he could see, that same talent. But she was using it to get what she wanted from the Professor.

  “Oh, well,” the Professor said, accepting the facts as he had been told them by Melody.

  “But — but she’s lying, I know she’s lying. She lies. She doesn’t mean it. She didn’t take any other pictures of me. You know you can’t trust her, Professor. Don’t let her get to you.”

  “What I want to know is, if you’re absolutely sure,” the Professor asked.

  “I am. Honest. I’m sure.”

  His father didn’t speak.

  “Don’t you believe me? You have to believe me. If you don’t believe me, then who will?”

  “It’s all right, I do. So — we’ll fight her. She says she knows I’ll be a gentleman, which really means she’s counting on that. As a weakness.”

  “Can we win?”

  “The lawyer thinks so, with your testimony. About Max. About — I told him I thought she’d never answered your letters that first year when you came back. I was correct in that, wasn’t I?”

  Jeff nodded. “Does she know where we live? I mean, these letters all came to the university.”

  “I didn’t tell her.”

  “Good.” Jeff picked up the photograph.

  “What are you doing? Don’t rip it up. I’d like to keep it, if you don’t want it.”

  “Is the lawyer sure?” Jeff gave the photograph to his father.

  “Pretty sure. I wouldn’t even have told you about it except — I never knew what Melody would do. When there’s something she wants, she’s unpredictable. It’ll take a long time, of course. The law always does. Don’t brood over it.”

  “I’ll try,” Jeff said. Even the Professor was scared of Melody. And what if she could make Jeff live with her?

  “You wouldn’t like to serenade me for a while, would you? I feel like — a glass of wine and some music — to soothe the savage beast.”

  So Jeff brought out his guitar, and they ignored the mosquitos while the sun set. After a while, Jeff felt better, and he thought his father did too.

  But Jeff couldn’t shake the vague, unsettled feeling. He didn’t think about Melody, he didn’t want to; but he was aware of her, without thinking about her, like clouds rising up at the horizon or footsteps behind you on a dark and solitary street. He didn’t mention her to the Professor. Carefully, he didn’t think about her. Carefully, he kept on with his usual life.

  A couple of days before school opened, when Jeff was sitting on the dock, playing the guitar and singing while he watched the little waves at high tide bouncing against the sides of the creek, Phil Milson came to join him. Phil’s hair was bleached white blond, and his skin tanned to coppery brown. “Would you believe this is the first day off my father’s given me? How’ve you been? I’m about ready for a vacation, aren’t you?”

  Jeff stood up awkwardly. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Keep playing, you sound good. Are you good?”

  Jeff shrugged, he didn’t know. “How’d you find us?”

  “This is a small town, I keep telling you. I told you I knew the place you’d bought. You’ve done a lot with it, and it’s not half bad now. What do you play, not rock, I can hear that. Country? Bluegrass?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff said. They settled themselves on the dock. A midmorning sun shone down hot.

  “Play me something. I already heard you so there’s nothing left to be modest about.”

  Jeff was glad to be able to look
at the guitar, rather than at the boy he didn’t know how to entertain. He strummed a few chords, thinking, then decided to play the song about the Springhill Mine Disaster. “Through all their lives they dug a grave, two miles of earth for a marking stone, two miles of earth for a marking stone.”

  “That’s folk,” Phil said, happy to have labelled it.

  “Now I know what I play,” Jeff joked.

  Phil grinned at him. “You been playing long? You look good too, you look like you know what you’re doing, but — I hate that kind of song. It’s depressing. I mean we all know we spend our lives digging our graves, but I’m not interested in writing songs about it.” They talked about that for a while, then about their courses, then Jeff asked about Phil’s summer, which had been consumed by backbreaking labor, Phil said. They decided to take the boat out. “Did you see my father?” Jeff asked.

  “No, I just followed the sound of music.”

  They went back to the house, had some juice and a couple of sandwiches, and introduced Phil to the Professor. In the boat, Phil asked, “Your mother’s still in Charleston?”

  “They’re getting divorced.”

  “How come you’re with him not her? I thought women always got the kids.” There was nothing subtle about Phil.

  “She left home when I was in second grade,” Jeff told him. He didn’t look at Phil when he said that. He didn’t really want to talk about it, but he didn’t want to sound unfriendly.

  “She walked out on you? Women are something else, aren’t they? They don’t play by the same rules. You ever think about that?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, I agree; it’s too depressing to think about.”

  In ninth grade, he discovered, people began to pair off, to talk about dates and steadies. Jeff wasn’t interested in girls, but decided that since he’d had good luck with Phil he’d try to be friendly with Andy Barrows as well. Pretty soon the three of them were hanging around together a lot. They suited one another. Phil refused to be serious, and Andy was always serious, so no matter what they did things were pretty lively.

  Sometimes they went out fishing or crabbing, and once they tried tonging for oysters. Sometimes they just hung around at Andy’s house in town, up in his room where his mother and sisters couldn’t get at them, Jeff playing his guitar and listening to the other two quarreling about the tax advantages given to farmers or the relative importance of theoretical and practical physics. “What do you think, Jeff?” one or the other would ask him, and he’d tell them.

  Phil went to parties and on dates and decided he was in love with someone for a couple of weeks before he decided he was in love with someone else.

  Andy had a crush on one of his older sister’s classmates, which they teased him about. “Well, she might get to like me, when I’m older; age difference doesn’t matter so much when you’ve grown up,” he told them.

  Jeff suspected that Andy didn’t really care, except he didn’t want to be freaky. What Andy was really interested in was science. He read science books and science magazines, he often skipped other assignments to work on science and was surprised when the teachers of his other courses yelled at him about that. He was smart enough to see how odd that made him, and he was frightened of being too odd, Jeff saw, because he was afraid of being laughed at. Jeff could sympathize with that.

  A girl named Carol Sutter put notes on Jeff’s desk in math class and tried to get him to talk to her in the library and cafeteria and stared at him in the halls. But he didn’t talk about that. He felt sorry for her and embarrassed for her. She was pretty, he guessed; she had long blonde hair that she wore loose down her back and big, violet-blue eyes. A lot of the boys liked her, and Jeff wished she would like one of them back. Phil found one of the notes before Jeff did. “You’re the cutest boy in the whole school.” It wasn’t signed, they never were, but Phil recognized the handwriting.

  “Greene, you’re wasting opportunities,” he said. “Do you know how many guys would kill for this?”

  “Oh, well,” Jeff said.

  “You ought to take her out, or something. Why not?”

  “I don’t like her.”

  “So what? She likes you.”

  Jeff shrugged.

  “That’s weird, really weird, Greene. But I forgive you. I’m glad you decided you wanted to be friends with me, whatever weird things you say,” Phil told him. “You’ll outgrow this phase.”

  Jeff was stopped in his tracks by that. Was that what had happened? Had he, in fact, chosen his friends? And not the other way around?

  For Christmas that year his father gave him a book, his book. They also had a tree they’d decorated, and Jeff sat beside it in his pajamas, with the book on his lap. “It’s OK for me to read it now, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to,” the Professor said.

  “Professor — you made me promise not to until I was fifteen. And then you didn’t give me one for my birthday. What do you mean I didn’t want to read it?”

  “I’m sorry,” his father said.

  “No, that’s OK,” Jeff tried to reassure him, tried to keep his eyes off the book, which by then he wanted to read so badly he wanted to end the conversation and get started.

  “I never know how to communicate,” the Professor said.

  The Professor looked half asleep. Jeff had no idea from his face what he was thinking. “Hey,” he said, “that’s not true. That sounds like the kind of thing Melody would say, the way she does. Has she been — ?”

  The Professor looked up. “Now I think of it, yes. You’d think I’d learn.”

  Jeff opened the cover of the book and turned the blank first page. He read the title, turned the page, read the copyright information — he had no idea of what he’d find in this book, how it would read, what its subject was. He saw the dedication: for my son.

  He put his fingers on the page. He stared and stared at the words, especially at the one word, son. “Professor,” he said, “I’m honored.”

  The Professor didn’t answer. “She knows we don’t live in Baltimore, she knows we moved.”

  “It’s OK, it’s going to be OK. Trust me; I’m your son, it says so right here.” He pointed his finger at the word. “She can’t make me live with her. She doesn’t even want me to, I bet. There’s something, and if she thinks I won’t tell the truth she’s making a big mistake about me.”

  “But — she’s your mother.”

  “So what?”

  He wouldn’t choose Melody, not now. He knew that, but he tried to think about why: he’d liked her being beautiful and the sound of her voice, but he didn’t trust her and he didn’t like the way she talked about need. He suspected that it made her feel good to feel sorry for people. She was dangerous, the way she pulled at your emotions. No, he wouldn’t choose her now.

  Jeff continued to be satisfied with his two chosen friends at school. They even, at the end of the year and a couple of times over the summer, went to a few parties, where Jeff would play his guitar and sing or jam with some other people who played. Jeff and Andy got along all right at parties, but it was Phil who really fit in, dragging the other two along with him. Jeff even learned how to dance and put his arm around a girl and how to kiss one, although he never took a date and always arranged it so he didn’t have to take anyone home. He figured he was still learning how to have friends, and he wasn’t interested in having a girl friend. So he kept his distance clear. There was no sense in hurting anyone’s feelings. There were enough hurt feelings in the world without him adding to that.

  By the time tenth grade began, the Professor was well into another book. “Like the first,” he told Jeff. He wouldn’t let Jeff read it in manuscript. “What if you don’t like it?”

  Jeff didn’t pester his father. He was taking driver’s ed and would get his license by the middle of October. He didn’t mind school, he liked the way he’d gotten along so far, and he kept his eye out for anybody else he might choose for a friend. One girl, an e
ighth grader, kept catching his eye in the hall — a mature-looking black girl with a ringing laugh and lively, intelligent eyes. Wilhemina Smiths; he found out her name. Everybody knew her already, even though she was just an eighth grader. “A real fireball,” they said. Jeff thought she looked strong, inside and out, and he thought to himself that he wouldn’t call her a real fireball, but a real person.

  Except for the permanent uneasiness of what Melody might do, he felt pretty good. She had sent him a note. Why would she do that? How stupid did she think he was? And she’d enclosed it in a letter to the Professor. He knew why she’d sent it that way, instead of sending it separately. The letter accused his father of being unnaturally cruel to her and trying to get back at her by using Jeff and being selfish and having no sympathy for what she’d been through. The note to Jeff was short. It said she missed him, he knew that, and if he was allowed to see the note, which she doubted, she’d know that if he answered it.

  Jeff didn’t believe a word of it and didn’t answer. It didn’t make any difference what Melody got up to now, because she didn’t matter to him any more. He had locked her out of his mind and out of his life. She could no longer get through to him, to make him feel the way she used to. He just wanted to forget about her and the way she played on his feelings — the same way she used to play on the guitar, he thought, remembering for a minute. He knew now just how badly she had played the guitar.

  CHAPTER 9SOPHOMORES on high honor roll didn’t have to go to the study hall for their free periods, so Jeff had the last period of the day entirely free. He liked to spend it outside, sitting on a low wall by the bicycle racks, playing his guitar and working out songs. When the bell rang to end school, he would watch the kids emerge from the double doors, hurrying out and talking. Then he would either join up with Phil or Andy for the afternoon or just say, “See you,” before getting on his bike and going home. Some days the Professor came and picked him up. On those days, Jeff drove the car and the Professor rode beside him, because Jeff had his learner’s permit. The afternoons were slow, easy hours, and Jeff savored them, whatever happened in them.