A Solitary Blue

by Cynthia Voigt

  By the end of the afternoon, calloused as they were, his fingertips throbbed. He had learned, among other things, that he was much more limited than his instrument. He wanted to learn more chords, more songs, more strums — he wished the stores were open so he could rush out and buy a couple of instructional books.

  For Christmas dinner, Jeff roasted a chicken, made stuffing from a mix, cooked a package of frozen peas. He poured out a glass of white wine from the carafe in the refrigerator and called his father to dinner. They sat down in silence, and Jeff carved. The Professor couldn’t carve a chicken without hacking it into unrecognizable, unappetizing slabs; when the Professor carved, the chicken looked as if it had been torn apart by some inner explosion.

  “Not much of a Christmas dinner, is it,” the Professor said.

  Jeff was surprised. It had been years since he had thought about that. “We never do much for Christmas,” he reminded his father. “We never did.”

  “That’s true. But I wonder if we should have.”

  “I don’t see why,” Jeff told him. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “You know,” the Professor said, lifting a bit of breast meat to his mouth, “I don’t think I ever realized that there’s a lot of your mother in you.”

  Jeff didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for the tears yet again.

  “When she first loved me,” the Professor said, thoughtfully, without expression, “when she loved me, I felt as if — I had swallowed sunlight. Like the sun was rising inside me.”

  Jeff just stared at his father.

  “I’ve never felt so helpless, before or since. Happy, too.”

  “Then why did you get divorced?” Jeff asked.

  “We’re not divorced,” the Professor told him. “But what I mean to communicate to you — however clumsily — is that you should not be sorry to be like her. She had a way of knowing how I was feeling; I don’t know how she did that.” He returned his attention to his plate. Jeff watched him for a minute before lifting his own fork again.

  “You know, I never call you anything.” He didn’t look up.

  The calm voice answered: “Thomas noticed that, years ago. I’m not the Daddy type, or Pop — I can understand your difficulty.”

  Jeff looked up.

  “When you think of me, do you call me anything? More than just he.”

  “Yeah. Professor,” Jeff answered, with a grin.

  His father chewed. “Yes. That would do.”

  Jeff thought it might. “Yes, sir,” he said, then tried it out, “Yes, Professor.” Yes, that would do fine. “And Professor,” he said; his father lifted his eyes again, chewed without speaking, “The Martin is perfect. I can’t ever thank you enough.”

  “Good,” the Professor said. “That’s what I hoped. That it would be perfect, that is. Not that you would feel bound by everlasting gratitude.”

  Brother Thomas never came to see them on Christmas Day, because it was a holy day; instead, they had a special dinner on the day after Christmas. This year, he made them veal marengo, “A ragout, not a stew,” he told Jeff as he cut a veal roast up into chunks. “With mushrooms and tomatoes, a little wine and the peel of an orange. Why don’t you bring down that famous guitar of yours and give me a little musical background while I labor here?”

  Jeff hesitated. He’d never played for anybody. “I’m not very good,” he said.

  “I don’t mind, do you?”

  “Well,” Jeff said.

  “Do you want to be better? Do you plan to be?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then what’s the harm?”

  So Jeff brought the Martin down and played on it. Brother Thomas seemed to be listening at most with only half his attention, so Jeff forgot he had an audience. When it was time to set the table, Brother Thomas made his assessment: “You’re not very good now, but I’ll be surprised if you don’t turn out to be quite good. Do you want to call the Professor?”

  Jeff was pleasantly surprised. It turned out to be an evening of surprises, because Brother Thomas told them, as they sat full over empty plates, that he was going to England for a year to study at Oxford. He beamed at them, “Can you imagine it? The dreaming spires and me. Me and the dreaming spires.”

  “I’m very happy for you,” the Professor said. “You must be pleased to have won the grant.”

  “Pleased — that’s an understatement. This is Tommy Richardson from Peoria, whose father worked in an assembly line — the unsuccessful son, not the black sheep among the children, but certainly the maverick — you’ve been there, Horace, but I never thought I ever would.”

  Jeff looked up; his father had been to Oxford? Brother Thomas had been a kid named Tommy, whose brothers and sisters did better than he did?

  “When do you leave?” the Professor asked.

  In a couple of weeks, which means I have to ask a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Could you two give a home to my stereo while I’m away? The books and pictures I’ll box, but the stereo — I’d like it to be used, it’s better if it’s in use.”

  “We could keep it in the living room.”

  “You could play it,” Brother Thomas said. “There’s room at the back of the kitchen, there, just as long as you keep the cover on when you’re cooking — it’s about the only room in the house with any space. Anyway, thanks. And then, if you’d come over during the summer . . .?”

  Jeff looked at the Professor. He didn’t want to make any plans for the summer. His father smiled, shaking his head. “We can’t possibly afford it, you know that. We can barely afford to live the way we do.”

  “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Horace,” Brother Thomas insisted. “Your salary isn’t that bad, your expenses can’t be that much. What’ve you got, a mortgage at least ten years old so the rates aren’t high — ”

  “But I had to borrow the down payment too, from the University. I’m still paying that off, as well. With interest. And then, there were bills Melody had run up, and she’d borrowed some money so she could make donations big enough to do some good. She wanted to. I’ve pretty near cleared those away now, but there’s the school, too, and living expenses. We don’t have any savings, Thomas. I’m really sorry, we just don’t have the money.”

  “I thought you didn’t have to pay for me,” Jeff asked.

  “That went out when you were in fourth grade.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeff said.

  “It didn’t make any real difference,” the Professor said.

  It wasn’t just the tuition, it was also uniforms, books, supplies, lab fees, Jeff knew. He felt bad, because his father’s money was being wasted. He wasn’t doing very well in school, C’s at the best; and somehow, over that first seventh grade semester, he had become a real nobody. He had gone from being nobody much to somebody nobody liked. He wasn’t disliked, exactly, he was just in the way. It used to be that he was sort of there, on the playground for a soccer game, or at his desk in the classroom. Nobody minded him being there, but nobody actually wanted him there. Now, they would just as soon not have him there; not because he was disliked, but because he was in the way. Like a fly in the room. You didn’t really mind the fly, you just waved it away. You didn’t notice when it had gone. Jeff didn’t think about school, except to dislike the careless tone of voice in which he was told to change his seat or that he wasn’t welcome in some game. “Move it, Greene,” one of the boys would say. Jeff never even bothered looking to see what boy it was. In classes, except that he seldom spoke because he heard faint sighs whenever the teacher called on him, it didn’t make any difference to him. It didn’t make any difference to him away from school. He had the guitar and now the Martin, he had his memory of Melody, and nothing could touch him.

  * * *

  Jeff wrote to his mother at the first of the month, January, February, March, April, May, and June. He gave up hoping for a response. He did get postcards from Brother Thomas occasion
ally, pictures of castles, or the pages of illustrated manuscripts, with an informative message and the signature scrawled at the bottom, BroT. But from Melody, nothing, not even after Christmas. Jeff didn’t let himself think about that. The stereo sat at the back of their kitchen and often poured out music, because Brother Thomas had also left his records for them to take care of. Jeff became familiar with names like Mozart and Handel, Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, Shostakovitch, with their music, in which melody — song — was only a part of it. Out of his allowance he bought himself a couple of records of people who played guitar and sang: Joan Baez who reminded him of Melody; Pete Seeger, many of whose songs were familiar to him; Judy Collins. By listening, he learned to mimic some of what they did on the guitar; the Martin could do anything he asked of it. It could do, he knew, more than he asked of it, more than he could yet ask.

  One day in May, Jeff finally asked his father whether he had any photographs of Melody.

  “No, I don’t,” the Professor said. “I never needed them — I never had any trouble remembering her.”

  Jeff waited, but he didn’t add anything to that. Jeff wondered why Melody had said so confidently that the Professor would have pictures, but he didn’t ask.

  Melody’s name came up again at the end of the month, again over dinner, but this time because Gambo wrote a letter to the Professor saying, yes, of course they would have Jeff for the summer, asking when he would arrive. The Professor showed Jeff the letter, which was about two lines long and signed with an unfamiliar name, Mrs. Boudrault Melville. The handwriting looked old, thin and wobbly. It looked much older than Gambo did, and weak — as if she didn’t have the strength to close her O’s or lift the pen cleanly off the page to start a new word.

  “That can’t be her name,” Jeff said.

  “Her husband’s, she’s a widow. I believe her name is Eulalie. Melody called her ‘Gambo,’ and I never met her. Do you want to go.”

  “Yes. If it’s all right with you? Did you write and ask her?”

  “Well, I thought you’d want to, and I thought I’d waited long enough for them to contact us. I’ll get the plane tickets. Unless you want to take the bus?”

  “No,” Jeff said quickly. Then he thought. “Unless — it’s a lot cheaper, isn’t it?”

  “Not enough money to make any difference. I think, this time, I’ll ask the airline counter to hold the return ticket for you to pick up. Unless you mind that?”

  “Why should I? But Professor, how come you never met Gambo?”

  The Professor shrugged. Then he decided to answer, but kept his eyes on the bites of rice he lifted on his fork, kept his face expressionless. “We had a quiet wedding, so she didn’t come up for it. Then, Melody, when she visited her home, stayed for weeks and . . . somehow they were always inconvenient weeks. I taught summer courses in those days, we needed the money, and there was you to take care of. Gambo wasn’t used to children, not little children. And then . . .” His voice drifted away, and he picked up his knife to cut meat off his piece of chicken.

  “Professor, why did you two — separate? If it’s any of my business.” Jeff asked.

  “I guess it is,” the Professor said. Jeff knew he hadn’t offended his father. “But I don’t know how to explain it. Do you know what Tolstoy says?”

  Jeff just waited. The Professor knew perfectly well he had no idea what Tolstoy said.

  “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” the Professor told him.

  “That’s an answer?”

  The Professor chuckled. “I must admit,” he said.

  It was all right, Jeff knew. He knew he shared a sense of humor with his father. He hadn’t always known that, but he had learned it. And he was going to spend the summer with Melody.

  “I think,” the Professor said, arranging his utensils side by side on the plate, “that I was a continual disappointment to your mother. From the beginning. At the beginning, she wanted a particular engagement ring — something like what her grandmother has. I never saw it, but it sounds impressive.”

  “It is.”

  “I couldn’t afford that, of course, not with the down payment on this house, and she wanted a house, of course — and she didn’t want a small diamond. I explained it to her, and she said she understood. But she didn’t understand. And she understood less as time went on; she minded it, she was always disappointed. That’s the kind of disappointment I mean. And this house wasn’t what she wanted either.”

  Jeff heard that the Professor didn’t want to say any more about it, and since he didn’t want to make his father uncomfortable he didn’t ask any questions.

  “When do you think I can go down there?” he asked instead.

  “A couple of days after school lets out?”

  “Can I take the Martin?”

  And he was thinking Melody.

  CHAPTER 5JEFF WAITED patiently at the Charleston airport. He didn’t even mind the waiting, because it prolonged the pleasure of anticipation. He felt warm and eager, inside himself. He felt his own face smiling, and he couldn’t have stopped it if he’d wanted to. He hadn’t brought the Martin because it would have had to have its own seat and that was too expensive. But if that was all he had to give up for a summer with Melody, he didn’t mind.

  He couldn’t sit still. He walked around the waiting room. This time he had arrived during the evening commuter rush and the big room thronged with people. Jeff stood by the windows overlooking the field, looking out to the hot sky, looking back across the crowded room to the doors. He wanted to hug himself.

  It was almost two hours later and Jeff stood dreaming by the tall windows, half watching a jet taking off into a blood red sunset, the air shimmering behind the turbines, when he heard his name called. “Jeffie? Jeffie?” His heart beat fast. The sunlight within him seemed to explode. He turned around.

  She stood back from him and had a camera with which she took two quick pictures. Then she lowered it and smiled at him. “Oh Jeffie,” she said softly, and she hugged him tight. The camera hurt his breastbone, but he didn’t mind that. “Melody.” He said her name, breathing in her perfume at the same time. She was smaller than he remembered, more delicate.

  “You’re growing.” She smiled at him. Her eyes were just as he remembered, deep, steady gray, the dark eyelashes framing them, beautiful. But her hair —

  “Your hair,” he said.

  “Do you like it?”

  It was curled into a frizzy profusion, cut shorter so that it came just to her shoulders, and a layer of curly bangs covered her forehead. She stepped away and pirouetted around, so that he could see it from all sides. It rested around her head like a dark cloud. “Do you?” she asked, smiling into his eyes.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. Her laugh flowed over him, in the remembered way.

  “Are you glad to be back? But we have to hurry, Max is waiting and he hates to wait; you remember Max — it’s his car, but you never got to meet him, did you? We’re already late — I guess you know by now I’m always late. Do you mind terribly? Where’s your suitcase?”

  Jeff followed her out the door. She wore a sundress, blue this evening, gathered in at her slender waist, and she was tanned. But she wore sandals with heels this time, and when she walked there was a delicate clicking noise to mark every step. She tucked one hand under his arm and led him to the car. He opened the back door and put in his suitcase, then followed it. He had barely closed the door when the car started off.

  The man behind the wheel had mousy brown hair that hung around his collar. He had a long, skinny neck and his nose, in profile, bent sharply at the middle, as if it had changed its mind about which way it wanted to point. “Jeffie,” Melody said, turning sideways so she could see both of them, “this is Max, the man in my life.”

  Intense blue eyes studied Jeff in the rearview mirror.

  “How do you do?” Jeff said.

  “Don’t you see now, he could come with us,” Melody sai
d to Max. She explained to Jeff, “There’s a party over on Mt. Pleasant. Max? He’s perfectly presentable.”

  “I told you babe. We’ve had this all out; you aren going to try it on me again, are you? You don’t have to come with me, but I’ll need your camera if you don’t. It’s no skin off my teeth.”

  “All right,” Melody said, disappointed. “But we can stop and get Jeffie a hamburger, can’t we? So I can at least have a little time with him?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’m really sorry, Jeffie, but — and Max is hopeless with a camera, I have to go.”

  “That’s OK,” Jeff said. “I didn’t know you took pictures.”

  “I just started six months ago, or so. Max did an article on industrial pollution, and we wanted some pictures — so I got a camera. And then, it was so successful that I kept on with it. I even have a darkroom, down in the cellar; you’ll see. You’ll be proud of your old mother.” Melody smiled.

  “You’re not old,” Jeff said. He wondered if she was in love with Max, and he thought from the expression on her face when she looked at him that she was.

  They sat at a booth in a diner, Melody beside Max, the camera placed carefully on the seat beside Jeff, who faced them. Max had a long, narrow face, out of which his blue eyes shone. His eyes were sky blue and intense, as if some fire burned behind them. Jeff could feel a kind of power coming at him out of those eyes. He wasn’t comfortable.

  Melody went to the bathroom. Jeff watched her walk away and then turned his eyes back to those blue ones — they were like the eyes of an Old Testament prophet, he thought, somebody who had lived in the desert and gone a little bit crazy from talking with God.

  “How long you staying?” Max asked him.

  “The summer, I guess.”

  “I was out of town most of last summer,” Max said. It sounded like he was warning Jeff.

  Jeff didn’t know what he was supposed to say to that. “What business are you in?” he asked. He heard his voice cracking on the question.