A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  Stanley was much taller than Hugh, and when he wasn’t sitting down, he leaned over himself like a rain-soaked cornstalk. Carl was just as tall, but he stood very straight. They looked around the living room, nodding and grinning, and the house seemed as small as Hansel and Gretel’s cottage.

  It was the middle of May but there was a chill in the air. It had rained all day, and through the window I could see the fresh dark-green leaves of the apple trees gleaming with wetness. Inside, the room was warmed by a little Swedish stove Ma had had installed. Ma stayed around for a while, opening the seam of a dress she was altering. The sound of the scissors ripping threads, and the smell of a log burning in the stove, the sense of being safe inside, made the evening feel like winter. After Ma went off to her room with a book, I made a big pot of cocoa and filled a bowl with potato chips. They were gone in two minutes. Then Stanley lit up a French cigarette from a pack he’d bought in Boston. It had a strong, pleasant smell. I picked up the pack and looked at the French words, and I had the feeling we’d all been transported to a foreign city.

  Hugh sat in a chair, but Stanley and Carl sprawled on the sofa. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to what they were saying—I was too interested in watching them, in hearing the sound of their voices, which rose and fell as they interrupted each other or talked at the same time. They laughed differently. Stanley brayed, and Carl shouted, “Hah! Hah!” and then bowed his head over his chest so the tail end of the laugh was muffled. Hugh would begin by smiling, then he would hold his breath as though the laughter were going backward.

  I could see how easy Carl and Stanley were together, but there was something different in their voices when either of them spoke to Hugh. It was a small difference, but it was there. It reminded me of how I felt when I was rattling on to someone I didn’t know well, and how, all at once, I’d feel the strangeness of that other person, and then my own strangeness, and my voice would falter and I’d get self-conscious.

  Stanley told us about all the poems and stories he had to turn down for the school paper some months, how a kind of plague of awful writing would sweep through the school like an epidemic. He’d have to write poems himself and sign them with names he dug up from thirty-year-old school rolls. If there was one thing he was looking forward to about being through with high school, it was not having to read some composition sent in by a seventh-grader about the planet Grock being invaded by lizardmen with overdeveloped brains.

  Carl remarked that he’d written that particular story, and Stanley said everyone wrote that story at least once, and anyhow, Carl hadn’t even been in New Oxford when he was in the seventh grade. Then Carl talked about how it was always expected of a tall black boy that he would play basketball, and how he, who was a tall black boy, had been determined to have nothing to do with sports of any kind. But one day, someone stuck a basketball in his hands, and he dribbled it a few feet and heaved it into the basket, and at that instant became captain.

  They spoke about music for a while, and Stanley said he’d heard that the three-man rock group that had been hired for the senior graduation party actually lived up on Mt. Crystal in a cave, and all of them slept on stone ledges wrapped up against the cold in their long beards, and that they were able to play the worst rock in the world because of some strange substance they drank which was their only nourishment. Carl said he liked songs from old-fashioned musical comedies. He stood up and suddenly began to sing “I’ll See You Again,” in a fluttery tenor voice, holding his hand over his heart as though he were making fun of it. I could see that Hugh was crazy about Carl singing that song. He was smiling and holding his breath so long I thought he’d pass out.

  For a while they talked about what they wanted to do with their lives. Stanley said he was going to be the editor of the only newspaper in a medium-sized town, and he was going to write editorials to tell his readers what they ought to think. Carl said that for a man who sneered at Grock and the lizardmen, Stanley was taking up the wrong profession. They both looked questioningly at Hugh.

  “I’m going to try to survive,” he said.

  We all stared at the stove for a moment, then Stanley said, “Well, man, that’s what we’re talking about!”

  I went out to the kitchen to get some cookies. When I came back, they were at it again, all interrupting each other, talking about what it would be like to be fifty, about war, about why human beings were so wild to kill each other, about life on other planets and whether the upper Amazon would be a resort area by the time they were all middle-aged, and about religion, and how long it would take for the polar ice caps to melt, and what was outside of the universe itself.

  Stanley ate a handful of cookies and remarked that he’d like to die while he was eating junk food—burgers and fries and fried clams—and that it drove his father crazy because his father was a great cook. Carl started talking about his troubles with mathematics, how it was a language he couldn’t learn. And I said that I couldn’t do an equation to save my life.

  They looked at me in astonishment as though they’d truly forgotten I was there. I was half sorry they’d realized I was there. I’d never heard boys talk together the way they’d been talking.

  I asked Stanley where he was going to college, and he told me Wisconsin. Carl said he was going to a university in New York and that he wanted to be an archaeologist. Hugh said he wasn’t going to go to college for a while. He was going to live in Italy, he thought. We all looked at him.

  “What are you going to do there?” asked Stanley.

  “Live with an Italian family, perhaps,” he replied. “I’ve been in school thirteen years.” I thought, I was eight months old when he started school. He said, “I want time off before they get me.”

  Stanley said, “Man, we’re already half gotten!”

  Hugh looked at me. “What about you, Victoria?” he asked. “Do you have secret plans?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “I hear you’re writing a really good play,” Stanley said.

  “It’s not a play,” I said quickly. I felt a touch of fear, and I was surprised by it. Hugh must have talked about the scene to Stanley and that bothered me. So I explained it was just for English credit. Then Hugh suddenly stood up and said he’d forgotten that he had brought along a book he was making and he wanted to show it to us. He was going to illustrate it himself, he said, and have a printer his mother knew make a few copies. It was a book for tired children, a hateful alphabet book, he said, as he took some drawings out of his jacket pocket and spread them on the table near the lamp. We went over to look at them, and I passed close by an old pickle crock Ma and I had found in the house when we moved in and which she’d filled that morning with lilacs. I sniffed the scent of the flowers, and the wood smoke and the cocoa, and the joy I felt as I leaned over the table with those boys and looked down at Hugh’s work was like the billowing out of a sail when the wind takes it.

  A was for Airports, Airedales, Apologies, Actuarial Tables, Accountants. B was for Bratwurst, Beaches, Bel Canto, Bovines, Bathos. And there were drawings, odd little squiggles, neat and intricate. Stanley said the Airedale wasn’t quite right, but the one for Apologies was very good. And Hugh replied he was better at drawing abstract things than concrete ones. He sounded a bit proud of himself.

  After that, they got ready to go. I walked with them to the end of Autumn Street. Hugh whispered to me, “Your house is so nice. It’s like something from a Babar story.” I was glad that he hadn’t said that when Ma was around. She wouldn’t have understood; she would have thought he was being patronizing.

  When I left them and started back home, they all sang “I’ll See You Again,” and they sang me past the apple trees and all the way up to the path, and I thought, This is the best night of my life!

  The next morning at breakfast, Ma said, “That’s an elegant little cricket, that Hugh Todd.”

  “He’s not a bug,” I replied.

  “I don’t know that I really care much for
him,” she went on while she was cutting the sections of a grapefruit. I realized she was telling me not to care for him either. “I don’t like his smile,” she said. “It’s as though he’s watching himself in a mirror all the time.”

  “Ma, stop! He’s a friend of mine!”

  “I was telling you what I think.”

  “You were telling me what I ought to think.”

  Ma picked up her cup of coffee, drank too fast, choked, and looked at me with her eyes glittering.

  “And I didn’t ask you,” I muttered. I knew I’d better not say another word. But I wanted to fight. I knew it would be a different kind of fighting from what was usual between us. I felt anger that had an edge like a razor. Ma didn’t say any more. The sound of our spoons and knives striking plates was loud, and when I put butter on my toast, it crackled like a fire. I got more and more uneasy. Bad news was in the air.

  But on Monday morning I had good news. I had passed the math course. Just. It had been like climbing a ladder carrying two suitcases packed with rocks. That’s what I told Hugh that afternoon after school. “You’ll always pass, Birdie,” he said. “Let’s go have a cup of coffee at the Mill.”

  I told myself I couldn’t expect him to take my math troubles seriously, but I wished he wouldn’t call me Birdie. I suspected there was a private joke for him in it—maybe I did look like a bird. But I was happy he’d asked me to have coffee with him instead of a malted milk, and that he sounded so sure of himself, not nervous and boastful the way Frank Wilson had when he had asked me to go to the movies with him.

  The Mill was a steamy, narrow lunchroom on Main Street with a plastic turkey in the window that had been in it ever since I’d come to live in New Oxford. Right next to the lunchroom was an old movie house that had seen better days. On Saturdays, it showed cartoons and movies for little children. Hardly anyone went to it. Instead, people drove to the shopping centers scattered around the countryside where there were theaters built like buses or airplanes. Often, as I walked by that movie house, I thought of dusty curtains, and cartoons about cats and mice playing to the empty seats while a real cat took care of its kittens beneath the stage.

  “Coffee, please,” Hugh ordered in a sharp voice. He didn’t even look up at the waitress when she said, “Why—yes, sir!” But I did. She was staring at him, and her smile was angry. For a split second, I looked at Hugh sitting across from me in that booth. He was extracting a paper napkin from its metal container with extreme care, his mouth set, a frown wrinkling his brow. What I saw in that second was how he might appear to someone else, not me, and how old he looked, and I knew he would not change, really, and the strange thought came to me that he would never get bigger, only shrink. He smiled, and I saw him as I usually saw him.

  “Are you really going to go and live in Italy?” I asked.

  The waitress put down two cups of coffee in front of me. He drew one toward himself. “The saucer is dirty,” he remarked.

  “Don’t tell her,” I said hurriedly. The waitress had gone back to stand near the kitchen door. She was watching us. I saw Hugh’s small, even teeth gleam in the dim light of the booth. “Please,” I said.

  “Are you going to let waitresses push you around?” he asked, as if he was making a joke. He began to tip his cup of coffee slowly and I thought he was going to pour it out on the table.

  “Hugh!” I begged, reaching toward his cup. He suddenly righted it. “I hate a mess,” he said in a tight voice. He grinned, and began to speak in an ordinary way. “I’d like to live in Italy, or the Outer Hebrides, or Martinique. I want to do what other people aren’t doing,” he said.

  “But what will you do, if you aren’t going to school?”

  “There are hundreds of programs I can get into. I can go to Florence and learn to cook, or join an archaeological dig in Anatolia, or study ceramics in Japan. The difference, one of them, between rich people and poor people is that the rich know how to get a free ride.”

  It was the first time Hugh had said anything to me about his being rich. Two thoughts collided in my head—how great it was he spoke openly about it and how terrible it was for him to brag about it. “It’s a big difference” is all that I said.

  “Listen, Bird, what I really want to do someday—”

  “Don’t call me Bird,” I burst out. “I hate that. I’m taller than anyone in my class and that’s bad enough. Ever since you started calling me Bird, whenever I look in the mirror, I see a stork.”

  “Put a weight on your head and don’t wear feathers,” he said; then he grinned and held his breath, and I started to laugh and forgot to ask him what he really wanted to do someday. I was so relieved that he was laughing, too, that I heaped up sugar in my nearly empty cup. I don’t know why it is with me that relief always leads to sweet things to eat.

  “You ought to learn to drink coffee black like they do in Italy,” Hugh said. “I’ll be there this summer. My mother has rented a house on Lake Como. I’ve been there before, when I was little and my father was alive.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know your father was dead,” I said.

  “My mother remarried,” he said.

  “Then you have a stepfather.”

  “You could call him that.”

  I had told Hugh, when I first knew him, how my father had died. It often seemed to me that I had told him nearly everything about myself—I was so pleased to hear his voice saying, “Go on … go on …” in such an encouraging way that I felt I was giving him a present.

  I told Elizabeth a lot, too, but with her, telling was a daily custom, and our conversations were like breathing. With Hugh, my life became a story and, it sometimes seemed, about someone I hardly knew.

  “When did your father die?” I asked him.

  He put down the spoon he’d been holding up to his eye like a monocle.

  “He was in California on a business trip. He rented a car and was driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the road that goes along the ocean. He went over a cliff and was killed. Near a place called Half Moon Bay.”

  I gasped. “Finish up your sugar,” he said. “I have to go.”

  I took a quarter from my pocket. He waved the spoon. “It’s on me,” he said, and put down some change the way I’d seen people do in movies. I had to make an effort to stop myself from counting it.

  We walked together down Main Street. I was thinking how coldly he had spoken about his father and his stepfather. I was thinking how little you could know about another person, and that frightened me. It meant everyone was alone with their secrets.

  I could feel him looking at me from time to time. At last he began to speak in a soft, kind voice.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking about your play. It could be the senior play next year. That gives you plenty of time. What you’ll have to do is make it longer and larger. We have to involve as many seniors as we can in it. I can fake some jobs in scenery and lighting and costumes, but the cast must be bigger. Tate will help you. I’ll help you. They almost always put on awful old comedies or worse musicals that they buy for a few dollars, things that give everyone a chance to turn around once on a stage before they go off and disappoint their parents for the rest of their lives. Since I’ve been in school, they’ve never put on a student’s play. It will be a first. If you can finish it next January, that’ll give me the spring. It doesn’t have to be absolutely standard full length, that would be going too far, but—”

  “Stop!” I cried. “I can’t do it!”

  “Yes, you can, Birdie. I mean, Victoria. You’ll do it fine.”

  “You’re like those adults I hate,” I said. “The ones who tell you everything is going to be fine, even when you’re lying at their feet, blood pouring from a thousand wounds.” Yet I felt excited at the thought I could actually write a play, and I could suddenly visualize, a program with my name on it, and all the parents and teachers in the auditorium that would become a real theater for one night, and Hugh and me backstage, makin
g sure everything was right.

  “You’re not wounded,” Hugh said. He touched my hair the way he sometimes did, his fingers never touching my face.

  “I’ll phone,” he called back over his shoulder as I turned down Autumn Street. I hoped he wouldn’t that night, even though his phone call was always the high point of my day. We would have long, drifting conversations, and even the silences between us seemed full of thoughts. Sometimes Hugh would read me a poem he liked, or make up a story, then hang up just when he got to the dramatic part. Or else he would make fun of some of the people we both knew in school, and I’d have to laugh, even when I knew it was mean laughter. Hugh had a way of seeing what was ridiculous about a person. That’s one reason I didn’t like him to call me Birdie.

  Autumn Street looked skimpy and stale to me that late May afternoon. I wished I was going to Lake Como in Italy, going anywhere that summer. I wanted to take in huge gulps of air and there wasn’t enough of it. I felt sad, as though I was being left behind while everyone else went to a party. I longed to be like Hugh, to look out on the world the way he’d looked at me from his booth in the Mill, the way he’d watched Stanley and Carl when they came to my house. I wanted to feel the faraway amusement I knew he felt.

  When I opened the door, Ma was playing the piano, dreamy soft playing, full of trills and long chords. She had on her old rough work blue jeans and a sweater that was much too big for her. A cigarette was burning in a little seashell she’d put on the music stand. I suddenly remembered the sweater. It had been Papa’s. For a while, I stopped thinking about Hugh.