A Solitary Blue

by Cynthia Voigt

  When the Professor walked back, Jeff could tell him from far off, because nobody else wore long pants or walked so slowly along the packed sand down by the water. Jeff always watched for the first glimpse of the Professor, because he always knew he might not return. “He doesn’t know anything about being a father,” Melody had told him, “so you can’t expect very much from him, Jeffie.”

  They ate sandwiches Jeff had made, then he could play in the water until it was midafternoon and they returned to the apartment to cool off. There, the Professor wrote notes.

  They ate dinners in restaurants, crab cakes and crab imperial and steamed crabs, and once, steamed lobsters. They both got sunburned, but not badly. One night, they went down to the boardwalk, and Jeff rode the roller coaster and the rocket — but it wasn’t fun anymore, so they came straight back to the apartment. It was different when Melody was sitting beside him, being scared and excited, laughing out loud when the car rolled down an incline, holding him within her arm. Every night Jeff indulged in the pleasures of watching television, because there was a television set that came with the apartment. At the end of the week, they packed up and went back to Baltimore. “It’ll be good to get back to work, won’t it?” the Professor asked Jeff. Jeff said yes.

  The year Jeff was in third grade, the housekeeper was named Tony and he was a sociology major who liked to have noise around him. He liked to tell the Professor what was wrong with the university when they sat at meals, he liked to listen to his radio while he did housework. And he liked to cook. He taught Jeff to help him and also taught him good recipes. Jeff did his homework after supper that year, because, as Tony said, since they didn’t have a TV, there was nothing else for him to do. The Professor worked before dinner and after, as usual.

  “I never thought they worked so much,” Tony said to Jeff. “I always figured professors had kind of an easy life. Not your old man. But he doesn’t publish, does he? I dunno, there must be more to life than this. Where is your mother, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff said.

  “I saw her a couple of times, my sophomore year. At rallies, across a crowded room. She was a good looker. She seemed sincere. Taste that spaghetti sauce and tell me what it needs, will you, kid?”

  It was Tony who, by forgetting to take Jeff down to the barber to keep his crewcut short, changed Jeff’s way of wearing his hair. Before then, it was cut off short and straight, like a mown field, and it would grow out slowly until it stuck out over his head like a puffball until the Professor would say, “Isn’t it about time to cut his hair?” But Tony didn’t get around to it, and Jeff’s hair grew until it lay long and flat on his head, like the Professor’s. But Jeff’s hair was dark, almost black, like Melody’s.

  When Jeff was in fourth grade, a boy named Andrew kept house for them because he had to or he couldn’t afford to go to the university. Andrew really wanted to live in a fraternity, he wanted to go to friends’ parties, he went to all the football games and basketball games and baseball games. What he did around the house, he did angrily, his face angry above the vacuum cleaner, his hands angry in the dishwater. That year, the Professor started going out every Thursday evening, to have dinner and then play Whist afterwards. If Andrew had something he wanted to do Thursday night, Jeff was old enough to be left alone. Andrew didn’t tell the Professor this, but he told Jeff. Jeff didn’t tell the Professor either, because he didn’t want to upset the Professor’s routine. When he was alone at night in the house, he just went up to his room with a book and sat on his bed reading until he heard someone come in. Then he turned off the light and fell asleep.

  The year Jeff was in fifth grade, they had a graduate student from the Physics Department, Ian, who had a thick beard and spent long hours in the lab, working on his thesis. At the beginning of each week, Ian put up a list of when he would be in the house. He took Friday and Saturday nights off and went to see his girl friend. He was going to be married in June, “Although why anybody gets married these days I don’t know. Given the statistics on divorce. What about your old man?” he asked Jeff. He sat with Jeff at the table, doing labs or problems, while Jeff did his homework. Jeff looked up at Ian. If he was teasing, Jeff was ready to show that he got the joke. He didn’t seem to be teasing, so Jeff looked serious. “Your father, for example; he’s easy to live with. Maybe he was just too old for her. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff said, although he thought he did know, maybe. He knew Melody’s complaints, anyway. He didn’t know about his father; his father never said anything, one way or the other.

  “Don’t you wonder?” Ian asked.

  Jeff shook his head. As long as the Professor’s life suited him, he would probably stay. “He’s afraid of changes,” Melody used to tell Jeff. “He’s a creature of routine. And he doesn’t know how hard it is on other people.” It wasn’t hard on Jeff, however; not nearly as hard as it would be if the Professor decided to leave too. So Jeff didn’t wonder, he just made sure that the Professor’s life was what the Professor wanted.

  The summer before sixth grade, sitting behind his father as they drove back from their week at Ocean City, Jeff asked who was going to housekeep for them that year. “Nobody,” the Professor said. “You’re old enough now, aren’t you?”

  Jeff could hear that his father wanted him to be old enough. “Yes,” he agreed. He looked at his father. The back of the Professor’s neck was sunburned, and so were his hands on the steering wheel. They got caught in two traffic jams, where the road narrowed to bridges to cross rivers.

  But the Professor didn’t mind. He turned around to Jeff. “It doesn’t make any difference what time we get there, does it.”

  “No,” Jeff agreed.

  That fall, one of the Professor’s Whist players became a friend. This friend came to their house to visit and do Greek with the Professor, so Jeff met him. He was a man in his forties, younger than the Professor, who taught Theology at the university. He was a Catholic Brother, Brother Thomas. “Doubting Thomas,” he introduced himself to Jeff, the first night he came to their house. Jeff wondered, without asking, what he meant. The brown eyes studied his face. “It was a joke,” Brother Thomas said, so Jeff smiled. “I had no idea you had a son, Horace. Well, I guess gossip said you did, but I’d forgotten.”

  Jeff shook his hand and looked at the man. He was round and short, his round head was bald except for a fringe of pale hair that ran around the base of his skull. Like the Professor, he wore big, square glasses. He wore a black suit, with the round white collar showing above his black shirt front. “You’re old for such a young son, aren’t you, Horace?”

  “I married late,” the Professor answered.

  “Ah,” Brother Thomas said. He had brought a bottle of wine with him. He insisted that the Professor let Jeff taste it. Jeff sat quiet at the table, working out how they wanted him to behave. He watched their eyes and listened carefully to their conversation. Brother Thomas’s eyes often rested on Jeff, but the man didn’t ask him questions so he didn’t volunteer anything. The Professor paid close attention to what Brother Thomas said, so Jeff deduced that he thought the man was interesting and wanted him to enjoy himself. Jeff took special care over the dinner, so that the brother would like the food, even if it was only hamburgers on rolls. He toasted the rolls and buttered them. He turned the hamburgers frequently, so that they would be cooked but not too thickly crusted. He chopped onions and sliced celery to add to the salad.

  “A man with your taste should have a decent set of wine glasses,” Brother Thomas said, holding up his glass. They were all sitting around the kitchen table after dinner. The Professor had moved his study back downstairs, and after three years the living room was filled with boxes of books and boxes of papers and boxes of old clothes. There was no place else in the house to sit.

  “I can’t afford to indulge my tastes,” the Professor said.

  “You could strike for a raise,” Brother Thomas suggested. “Carry placards, deliberat
ely teach untruths. Or how about a sitdown strike?” Jeff had never heard of anyone talk to his father in the easy, off-hand way Brother Thomas did. It looked like the Professor didn’t mind.

  It was from Brother Thomas that Jeff learned that some people thought the Professor did a good job at the university. “What do you think of your father, putting together the best history department in Baltimore, maybe even Maryland,” Brother Thomas said.

  “I think that’s good,” Jeff said. Brother Thomas winked at him.

  The Professor, however, denied it. “It’s nothing like first-rate.”

  “Academic reputations take a while to spread; there’s a five to ten year lag, you know that — or you should; you’re the historian.” Brother Thomas sounded very sure. “You watch, Horace, your reputation is catching up with you. The students you’ve dreamed of are lurking on your horizon.”

  The Professor opened his mouth as if to say something, but just shook his head. Jeff sipped at the wine. It didn’t taste fruity to him, but thick, so that it left a coating across his tongue, and slightly bitter. He kept his face expressionless.

  “Look at the sign-ups for your courses,” Brother Thomas insisted. “Horace, you can add two and two. Honestly, Jeff, your father,” he said, but he said it fondly, as if the Professor amused him.

  Jeff looked at his father. He wondered if this was the way the Professor liked to be talked to, but he knew he himself couldn’t talk that way.

  “Time will tell,” was all the Professor said.

  “Time is telling,” Brother Thomas corrected him. “The other members of your department have even stopped trying to get your fired.”

  “Have they? That’s a blessing,” the Professor said.

  Brother Thomas chuckled. “I must admit I wondered if you handled their attempts at rebellion the way you did on purpose.”

  “I didn’t handle them at all. I knew it didn’t make any difference what they said.”

  The Professor sounded pleased, though. Jeff could hear that, and he offered Brother Thomas another hamburger.

  Jeff waited a couple of weeks before asking his father about Brother Thomas. “Who is he?”

  “A monk. A Christian Brother, that’s a teaching order,” the Professor said. “From the Catholic University; he teaches a Bible course for us.”

  “That’s not in your department. How did you meet him?”

  “He played Whist with us — then I wanted to study Greek and he wanted to freshen his up.”

  Jeff sat in surprised silence, wondering why his father needed to learn Greek, wondering how long this friendship had been going on. While he wondered, his father got up from the table and returned to his study. Jeff didn’t mind. As long as the Professor was doing what he wanted he would be content with Jeff. The hard thing was trying to figure out what he wanted, because he seldom asked for anything. Jeff washed the dishes, rinsed them, and placed them in a rack to dry. He took out the broom and swept the floor. The Professor liked things neat. All of their extra belongings they packed away into the unused living room, and the rest of the house they kept neat. After four years, Jeff was pretty good at figuring out what the Professsor might want, reading his reactions. It was pretty easy, after all, because mostly the Professor didn’t think things made any difference. He often said that. And in the same way, so he could give the teachers what they wanted to get, Jeff worked at school, listening carefully not only to instructions, but also to the teachers’ reactions.

  Occasionally that fall, Brother Thomas would come over to their house for supper. He always brought a bottle of wine with him. Early on, he brought four wine glasses, tall, stemmed crystal glasses, formed from what he called flashed glass, a layer of colored glass on top of a layer of clear. An intricate design had been cut through the outer colored layer, so the glasses shone like jewels. One was red, one blue, one yellow, one green, and the men would say what color they wanted as Jeff set the table. Brother Thomas liked to eat, so Jeff cooked some of the recipes Tony had left for him, like a chicken roasted with two pierced lemons tucked into the cavity so that the meat tasted slightly of lemon, and the juices made a sauce for rice. “The boy has a real hand for it,” Brother Thomas said to the Professor. “How did you get so lucky? He certainly didn’t get it from you — was his mother a good cook?”

  Jeff kept his eyes on his plate and his face still as he listened to what his father would answer.

  “No, she hated housework of any kind.”

  Nobody said anything else. Jeff turned the red glass around in his fingers.

  “Let’s take our coffee in and get to work,” the Professor suggested.

  “With pleasure. After I toast the cook.” Brother Thomas raised his glass to Jeff and the Professor did the same. Jeff tried to smile at Brother Thomas, but he saw how the man’s brown eyes studied him, and he did not know what the man was thinking. He did know, however, that Brother Thomas wouldn’t say anything. That much he had figured out, that although Brother Thomas had a lot of ideas, he kept them to himself. Jeff would have liked to hear some of them, but he didn’t ask.

  In the winter a flu ran through the University School, and Jeff caught it. He spent two days in bed, unable to eat, listening to the sound of his father’s typewriter in the silent house. Tickety-tick. Tickety-tick. Outside, a gray Baltimore snow fell steadily. Jeff studied the ceiling of his room and kept alert for the first signs of nausea or diarrhea, so that he could be sure to make it to the bathroom. At mealtimes, his father came to the door and asked if he wanted anything. “No, thank you,” Jeff said, trying to sound better than he felt, so that the Professor wouldn’t be disturbed. He hadn’t been really sick for such a long time that he had forgotten how terrible it felt.

  On the third day, a Friday, he went back to school, but when he got home in the afternoon and tried to climb the stairs to get to bed, he felt so dizzy he couldn’t make his legs move. He rested on the stairs for a while, until he could get to the kitchen and sit in a chair. He was terribly thirsty so he poured himself a glass of ice water, which he guzzled down. For a couple of seconds he felt wonderful. Then he started to cough, deep racking coughs of the kind he had suppressed most of the day. Between the coughing and the dizziness, he threw up in the sink, the water he’d just drunk as well as the little lunch he had eaten. Then he felt better, so he cleaned out the sink.

  Jeff made soup for supper and cheese sandwiches toasted in the broiler, and he was careful not to eat much so that he would be able to wash the dishes and get up to his bedroom without his father noticing. He kept his coughing down as much as he could. His ears rang and his body alternated between being too hot and being overrun with chills. He wondered, as he lifted his soup spoon, if his hands were shaking, because it felt as if they were; but, when he looked to check, he could see that they weren’t. In bed, he fell asleep without even taking off his clothes.

  The next morning he couldn’t get out of bed. His teeth chatered and his chest ached and his hair lay cold and wet across his forehead, at his neck, all around his head. He woke himself up, coughing, then drifted off again. Late in the morning, the Professor looked into his room. When he opened the door he awoke Jeff from a shallow sleep. Jeff tried to sit up, but he didn’t want to raise his head from the pillow, because then he would feel dizzy, and when he felt dizzy he felt sick.

  “I’m going to see Brother Thomas,” the Professor said. “I don’t know how long we’ll be on this passage, the syntax is strange. We’re almost out of milk and coffee,” he said. Then, about to leave, he asked, “Jeff? You look pale, or is that the light. Is there something wrong?”

  Jeff had to say yes.

  The Professor came in then and stood looking down at Jeff. He hesitated, then rested a hand on Jeff’s forehead. His hand felt cool and dry. “What’s your temperature?” the Professor asked. “I thought you were over that flu.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeff said.

  “Where’s the thermometer?”

  “We don’t have one.
I’m sorry.”

  The Professor left the room. The door was open, so Jeff heard him going down the stairs before he slipped back into uneasy sleep.

  The next thing he heard was Brother Thomas asking him to wake up. Obediently, he opened his eyes. Brother Thomas put a thermometer into his mouth. The Professor stood tall behind him in a blue cardigan sweater. “Who’s his doctor?” Brother Thomas asked. The Professor shook his head helplessly. Jeff had to take the thermometer out of his mouth to cough, but he put it right back in when he was through. The two men listened to him. “What do you mean you don’t know,” Brother Thomas asked the Professor. He sounded cross; Jeff hoped he wasn’t going to get Brother Thomas angry at the Professor. “Jeff, do you know your doctor’s name?” Jeff shook his head.

  “When’s the last time you saw him?” Jeff shrugged; it was too long ago, he was too tired. “It’ll be on the school records,” Brother Thomas said. His worried brown eyes were fixed on Jeff.

  “Today’s Saturday,” the Professor said. “The school’s closed.”

  “Who would remember the doctor?”

  “His mother might. I guess.”

  “Can you get in touch with her?”

  “I haven’t heard from her in four years,” the Professor pointed out.

  “It’s all right,” Jeff said. He coughed again, then added, “I had flu this week. Just a relapse. I’m sorry.”

  Brother Thomas read the thermometer. “One hundred four. And this is still morning, Horace. Have you got any aspirin?”