A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  No one paid me much attention that first morning except the teachers, who made a special effort to point out to me how much I had missed learning by skipping the fall semester. They weren’t unfriendly; they just pronounced their words very loudly when they spoke to me. I ate lunch in the cafeteria, which must have been a classroom in the past; there were still a few desks nailed to the floor.

  I played the time game with myself—tomorrow it would be easier; next week I wouldn’t remember how strange I felt today; next month it would be as if I’d always been in this school. But sitting there, alone, eating a dry, wizened hot dog and beans as hard as pebbles, I thought to myself, Only the present tense is real, the past and the future are just grammar.

  A tall, thin girl with short, dark, curly hair suddenly sat down next to me.

  “We’re in the same social-studies class,” she said. I nodded, my mouth full of beans. “My name is Elizabeth Marx.”

  “Victoria Finch,” I said.

  “Are you from around here?”

  “Now I am. I used to live in Boston.”

  “Oh. That little town to the east.”

  I nodded again.

  “In a week, you’ll feel better,” she said. “And in a month, you’ll feel you’ve always been here.”

  I said, “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Elizabeth Marx was right. In a month, the strangeness had worn off. I knew most of the other students in the freshman class, and the teachers no longer spoke to me as if I were deaf.

  In the shopping mall, Ma and I found a hardware store where we could buy window shades on sale. Everything in those shops and markets was on sale—television sets, shoes, furniture, and clothes. Ma and I put up the shades and felt private, and better. We painted the walls a kind of celery color Uncle Philip had picked out for us, and we had discovered oak floors after the linoleum had been ripped up, so we polished them and put down some small, bright rag rugs. The local piano tuner, who came to tune our upright, was a comedian. When he hit a chord to see what kind of condition the piano was in, he fell down on the floor shouting, “I’ve been killed!” But he got it into playing shape.

  Our living room was just about the size of my old bedroom in Boston, but I could barely recall how horrible it had looked when we had moved in. It was fresh and cheerful now, except it was always a little muddy near the front door, which opened right onto the front yard. We didn’t have enough closet space, so Uncle Philip drove over one weekend with an old wardrobe he had found in a Boston junk store. It just fit into my little bedroom; it was like having an extra room. I liked it especially because it had a big iron key that you could lock the door with. There was nothing we could do about the size of the kitchen, but Uncle Philip rescued it from eternal night by putting in a window over the sink so you could look out into the yard when you were washing the dishes. Ma took some money out of the bank and bought a new stove, but we just bought a new rubber stopper for the old lead sink. Ma said she didn’t dare trifle with the plumbing in the house. Every time we turned on the water, it sounded as if there were a pond full of croaking bullfrogs in the cellar.

  In the early spring, we had a yard sale, and the dining table went, along with a good many other things I had thought I wouldn’t be able to bear to part with. We made around $300 from the sale, and afterwards we had an especially good supper on trays in the living room. The house felt light and pleasant. It had stopped being a problem.

  Outside, in the light that was lengthening every day, I saw fat sweet buds on the four apple trees. We’d cleaned up the back yard so that Ma could plant a vegetable garden. We knew most of our neighbors now. One of them had told Ma there was a junior college just a few miles from New Oxford that offered extension courses for adults. Ma spent evenings looking through the college catalogue.

  “I’d like to earn a living,” she said. “I have to. But I’d especially like to be skilled at something.”

  “You take care of me,” I said.

  “That’s not going to be a lifetime job,” she said, smiling.

  I didn’t want to think about lifetimes.

  “I’ll take care of you,” I said. “Later.”

  “I don’t want to be taken care of,” she said, and she looked away from me at a table where my father’s picture sat in a silver frame. We didn’t have much to say to each other for the rest of the evening.

  The next morning, which was Saturday, I woke to hear the wind blowing wildly. I got dressed and drank some grapefruit juice and went to the living-room window. The branches of the apple trees were moving stiffly as the gusts hit them, and there was a kind of pale haze around them even though their buds were not fully opened. Beyond them, I could see Mt Crystal rising up like a volcano. It was the only real mountain in this part of the country, and the road that led to its peak was about five miles from the village. Forests of evergreens rode up its slopes, and the great rocks near the top glistened in the morning light. It was said to be over three thousand feet high. When I heard that, I gave up the idea of riding my bike to the top. Or to the bottom, for that matter.

  I was suddenly aware there were people on the street in front of our house. There was the postman, and Mr. Thames, the old man who lived across the street, and Mrs. O’Connor and her three children, all standing stock-still and staring off in the same direction.

  I ran out to see what they were looking at. And there in the sky was a great scarlet kite. It rose and fell like a bird, and I realized I was smiling, like the other people who were standing there, because the whole day seemed to be ringing like a bell, an early spring day, with a scarlet bird for a bell ringer. I could see a small figure standing on the hill at the end of Autumn Street. I walked toward the hill, and the small figure became a boy, his hands guiding the kite as though he were conducting an orchestra. Just as I began to climb the slope, the kite swooped, then fell straight to earth. The boy was winding up the string by the time I reached him. He glanced at me and kept on winding.

  “That’s a beautiful kite,” I shouted into the wind.

  He had reached the kite by then, and he was examining it carefully. Then he picked it up and came toward me, the kite held before him like a shield. Buffeted by the wind, it rustled and snapped like something living.

  “I made it myself,” he said. “When I finished it this morning, I meant to try it out even if a hurricane was blowing.” He looked straight up at the sky and smiled.

  He was not a small child as I had, at first, thought. He must have been at least sixteen.

  “Everyone on the street was watching you—and it,” I said.

  “Were they?” he asked without interest. He looked at me closely for at least a minute. He had a calm expression on his face; I didn’t fidget; I stood as still as a stone.

  “You and your mother moved into the Ballard house down the street, didn’t you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Everybody knows everything in a place this size,” he said. “And your last name is a bird of some sort, sparrow? wren?”

  “Finch,” I said. “My first name is Victoria. Some people call me Tory.”

  “I’m Hugh Todd,” he said, “and I’ll call you Victoria.”

  He was standing next to me now. I saw that he was quite small. But there was a kind of trimness to him that made his height unimportant. And he was not wearing what most of the boys I knew wore. He had on shoes, not sneakers, and a tweed jacket, not a windbreaker.

  “Do you live on Autumn Street?” I asked him.

  “Oh no,” he said quickly, almost as though I’d insulted him. “My mother’s house is up there.” He pointed toward the long hill that I walked up every day to get to school. I knew there were several estates there, near the little Matcha River, which flowed through New Oxford.

  “I came down here to try out the kite because I’ve already lost three other kites in our river,” he said. For a second, I had the impression that he meant he owned the river. But then I knew that couldn’t be true.
No one can own a river. And when I thought of it later, it seemed strange to me that he had called his home his “mother’s house,” yet spoken of the Matcha as “our river.”

  “I’d like to make a kite,” I said. “But it looks so complicated.”

  “I’ll help you if you ever decide to try,” he said. We began to walk down the hill, but the wind was blowing my hair all over my face and I stumbled several times. Hugh Todd pushed a piece of kite string into my hand. “Here. Tie your hair up. Quick!”

  I gathered up as much of my hair as I could and tied it with the string. By then, we had reached the sidewalk. “You always ought to wear a kite string,” he remarked, smiling.

  I felt foolish, knowing he was really laughing at me, yet I was pleased, too. He put a finger to his forehead, said, “I’ll be seeing you,” and walked away, looking straight ahead.

  I asked my mother later if she had heard anything about the Todd family. She said she had but nothing much except they were one of the few really rich families in New Oxford, an old family, too, which probably had owned most of the village at a time when oxen still forded the Matcha River.

  I told her I had met Hugh and that he’d known about us, known the name of the people who owned the house before we’d moved in.

  “Then it’s true about gossip in a small place, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But there’s more to it than that. There’s hardly anything more interesting than human lives.”

  That night for the first time since Papa had died, I went to bed feeling really different, feeling there was something to look forward to, not just trudging through the days.

  I thought about Hugh Todd, and I was sorry I was so much younger—and so much bigger—than he was. Still, there was something about meeting him on that hill that made me feel the way I had that moment when Ma told me we were moving to Autumn Street.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Spring came in days as light as a chain of brightly colored paper rings. New green leaves burst out on the trees around the little houses on Autumn Street and half hid their pinched roofs and tumbledown porches. And Hugh Todd, who now and then walked home with me after school, said it was the best season of the year in New Oxford. “It’s the only time you aren’t locked in by the hills and the mountain,” he said. “It’s the time when you know you can get out.”

  “You make it sound like jail,” I said. “Right now it’s like a party the whole village is having.”

  “Some party,” he said. “The guests are the old or the middling or the used-up. That’s all there are in New Oxford.”

  We were standing on a little bridge beneath which the Matcha River curled and mumbled on its course, parallel with Main Street. The water was the color of fishes, green and brown, and gold where the rays of sunlight struck it.

  “Who are the used-up?” I asked, staring down at the water, hoping he would start one of his stories.

  “They live in houses that look empty,” he said. “And they eat turnips for breakfast and listen all day to the peeling of old wallpaper.”

  “And the middling?”

  “They worry that people will think they’re used up—so they trim everything, the grass around their houses, shelf paper, their hair, newspaper, wrapping paper, hedges, branches, thickets—”

  I began to laugh.

  “And the old don’t worry about anything any more,” he went on. “They sit on stools and face west and don’t move all day long.”

  “Then who can come to the party?” I asked. I watched a little circle of twigs that was being carried on the river’s back, and I was half asleep and contented, the way I always felt when Hugh described things to me. It didn’t matter whether the things were imaginary or real. They always seemed true.

  “Just you and me,” he answered.

  It was what I had been thinking. Talking the way we were talking, or ambling slowly toward Autumn Street, or looking down at the river was what made the party for me, not only spring. It was becoming friends with Hugh.

  One morning, there was a haze of white in our front yard. The apple trees had bloomed, and the air was filled with what looked like a great cloud of pink milkweed.

  On my way to school, I passed places I hadn’t noticed on the harsh days of winter when the sleet or snow had made me keep my head down and my eyes nearly closed against the cold.

  Now I saw tall, narrow houses that looked haunted. I wondered if they were the ones where the middling lived. Once, when I looked up at a small round window, I saw a dog. He was motionless and I thought for an instant it was a painting of a dog. Then I saw him look down at me, actually stare at me! I laughed, but I felt embarrassed.

  I passed a block where most of the houses had been abandoned, and the spring breeze stirred the slats of broken fences, and it blew through broken windows and rattled the old paper shades which people had once pulled up in the morning so they could see what the day was going to be like.

  It was there that the hill that curved to school began and it took me past the rich section of New Oxford, where Hugh lived. There, the daffodils grew thickly everywhere, and the planting beds had been turned over so the dark earth showed. All along my way, I could hear the waters of the Matcha River, and the air was fragrant and cool as though the river had washed it.

  Often, I was lost in thinking about the places I had passed and would be surprised to find myself in front of the school, to see those dark brick walls rising up, and to hear the voices of the boys and girls calling and shouting and laughing until the first bell made everything quiet. There was a mystery about those houses I looked at every morning, and they made me feel a kind of longing I didn’t understand.

  I tried to tell Ma about it.

  “Perhaps it’s the mystery of lives,” she said. “I have it, too, once in a while. Last week, while I was in Boston to try and get Papa’s insurance policy straightened out, I passed a very old deserted factory. I looked up at those big dark windows, all cracked and dusty, and I wanted to go inside and wander around by myself. I wanted to know what it had been like there, who the people were who’d worked there maybe eighty years ago, what they had talked about as they worked alongside each other, those men and women and, probably, children. What had a spring day felt like to them inside that dusty darkness? Is that what you feel?”

  “I think so,” I answered. I told her about the dog that had looked down at me from the window. Ma laughed and told me she and Papa had had a dog, Ace, when they were first married. “He used to stare at people when we took him for his walks. It was terribly comical. It always rattled them so. We’d found him wandering in the street with a string tied around his neck. And he stared at us in that way he had. So we had to take him in.”

  “What happened to Ace?”

  “He died,” she said.

  I was silent, thinking of Ace, thinking of Papa.

  “He wasn’t a young dog, Tory.” She stuck a plastic cigarette in her mouth. It was supposed to help her cut down on the real thing. “Ugh!” she said, and lit a real cigarette.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me then. “I mean, really?”

  I told her I missed Papa, that I would forget he was dead, then suddenly, as though someone had struck me a terrible blow across the back, I would remember. Ordinary things made me miss him, too, when I saw people coming out on their porches after supper to see what the night sky looked like, or when old Mr. Thames across the street went looking for his cat with a flashlight. “Even when I’m laughing at something really funny,” I said, “Papa is suddenly in my mind, as though he heard me.” I hadn’t known, I said, that there were so many ways of missing another person.

  She got up and started collecting our supper dishes. I was supposed to do that, but when I stood, she waved me away and said, “Put your feet up and have a cigar.”

  Later, she went and played some old songs on the piano, songs that had been popular when she was a girl, and she sang along with her playing, making up words when she
forgot them. Her light voice was like good lemonade, slightly tart and cool.

  Just before I went to bed, I asked her a question that had been in my mind for a long time.

  “What about Papa’s ashes?”

  “They’re still at the funeral parlor,” she said. “I haven’t been able to go and get them. Tory, I don’t even know what I’d do with them. They’re ashes, not Papa.”

  I strained to think how he could have become just a handful of something, gray and weightless, without motion.

  Ma put her hand on my arm. I looked at her fingers, the strong clean nails, the skin reddish from all the painting and carpentering she’d been doing. “Will you play some more?” I asked her. She nodded. I fell asleep, listening to her playing her songs while my thoughts grew paler and thinner, until they were like the little moon jellies that drifted around in Cape Cod Bay.

  I was all right.

  Mostly because of Hugh. At first I’d just watched him. Then one day I stopped feeling alone. I wasn’t a watcher any more, I’d gotten interested. That interest didn’t stop me from missing Papa, but it tugged at me every morning, and got me out of bed fast, and up the hill to school because, that day, I might see Hugh and spend some time with him.

  I wasn’t doing too badly in school. All French verbs gave me some trouble. And math was a nightmare for me—especially those problems that went: if your granny was flying a broomstick upstream at 60 miles an hour, and the current was traveling downstream at 22 miles an hour, how many people were in the rowboat?

  “You have a profound mistrust of the variable X,” the math teacher said, and put me in what the school called an enrichment class, but which I knew—and everyone else who was in it knew—was for math dodoes.

  There were a few people I liked, but didn’t think much about, and there were a few I didn’t like. And there was my close friend, Elizabeth Marx. She was not in my enrichment class; she could square and cube two numbers while I was still adding them up on my fingers. She could play the cello, too. Now and then I stayed after school so I could watch the orchestra rehearse. I didn’t really listen. What I liked was to see Elizabeth sitting on the stage, her left foot turned slightly out, her head bent so gravely, the cello between her knees shining like the hindquarters of a chestnut horse.