A Place Apart (11 page)

“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 while 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.

Hugh placed his palms together as though he was praying, then he walked over to me. He'd grown a bit, I guess, not much, I was very conscious of the two inches I'd gained since the spring.

His skin was a lovely olive color.

“Dear Bird,” he said, and he kissed my cheek the way grownups have kissed me.

“I love the wallet,” I said. “It's beautiful.”

He took hold of my hand lightly, and I was startled.

“I thought of you all the time I was in Italy,” he said. “There was a little boat I rode that went from Bellagio and traveled up Lake Como, almost all the way into Switzerland, and it stopped at the villages at the feet of the great mountains. I wished you were along. What a wonderful time we could have had!”

“Didn't you have a wonderful time?” I asked. I heard the sharpness in my voice, and I couldn't think why it was there.

“I always went by myself,” he went on, not answering me, “and that's the way it was everywhere. Jeremy was learning about Italian wine, and my mother was keeping watch over him. They weren't interested in spending hours on seedy little boats.”

He let go of my hand. My palm was damp, but his had been cool. I looked at him. He wasn't really going to tell me anything. Whatever had happened, whatever he had felt about it, would stay buried in him. I would hear only what he chose to tell me.

The time he had talked about the story his father had drawn for him with crayons that night in his old house when the rain fell so heavily, I had understood him. And when we'd flung sticks and stones at rotten Harry in the woods, I had understood something—I'm not sure what—but something.

Yet, I was so glad to see him. Now the fun would begin! That's how he made me feel. That something unexpected and wonderful might happen. Any time. Any day.

CHAPTER SEVEN

One evening during the first week of school, I was sitting on my bed, staring at the books I'd gotten that day for the new term. The history book was used. I could tell it had gone through a lot of hands. There were mustaches drawn on every person in every picture, even on people who already had mustaches—even on the bowsprit of a nineteenth-century sailing ship. I picked up a thin volume of French short stories. It opened stiffly and smelled of new paper. I happened to glance up then at a poster Ma had had framed for me that hung on the wall over my bed. It was a reproduction of a painting called
The Peaceable Kingdom.
On the glass that covered it was a reflection of my room: the orange glow of my lamp, a shadowy face that was my face. I sat absolutely still, gazing at that other girl. If it was my room, and I was that girl, I thought, I'd be happy. I looked at my real room and at my real hands holding the little French book of tales, which was opened to a drawing of a windmill.
Moulin,
I whispered, and it was as though a spell had been broken.

I felt slightly dizzy and very puzzled. I looked up at the poster again. All I could see was a blurred reflection, and when I tried, in my imagination, to bring back the room and the girl I had seen, it was like grasping a wave in the sea. I heard the phone ring. Ma came to my door.

“Your friend is calling,” she said. “Not Elizabeth,” she added. She needn't have. I knew from her voice that it was Hugh.

He spoke to me quickly. It was like listening to a telegram. No jokes, no stories. The school newspaper would publish the first scene of my play, he said. I must come to the first meeting of the Drama Club, because the play would be discussed by its members. He had already met with two members, and there would be a good deal to talk about. His voice was as smooth and cold as the touch of marble. Make ten copies of the play, he ordered, nine for the Drama Club and one for the newspaper. The public library had a copying machine, he said.

“You sound like a telegram,” I said.

“What!” he said, and the word was like a shot.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I'll do it.”

And then he hung up.

I dropped the phone back on its cradle without looking, and it missed and fell to the floor, along with pencils and address book and a scratch pad. Everything lay there in a tangle, the phone buzzing like a June bug when you turn it on its back.