A Solitary Blue

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I mean, we’re kids, so we’re supposed to act like jerks; it’s OK for us. But it’s supposed to be a phase you pass through.” The bell rang and Jeff didn’t have to think of anything else to say.

  He went out crabbing that evening, while the Professor did some shopping so they’d have something for Brother Thomas to cook when he came down the next day. Jeff didn’t expect to catch anything, and he didn’t. In the cooler weather most of the crabs moved on south or buried themselves in the deep mud at the bottom of the bay. The herons and egrets too were growing scarce; only gulls remained in any numbers.

  Jeff sat back in the boat, which he hadn’t even untied from the dock, and let it rock under him. He didn’t even look at the strings hanging over the gunwales.

  He didn’t think Chappelle had said it had to be somebody you knew, but probably the man had and Jeff hadn’t registered it. He hadn’t registered it, even though he usually listened well and remembered accurately; so he hadn’t let it get into his head. Sometimes he did that, he knew; and then he would remember suddenly and wonder why he had forgotten. That was the way he was.

  Why hadn’t he ever done well in school before, if he was smart, and the Professor said he tested smart. The Professor didn’t actually say he was smart though, did he?

  If he was a ghost in the life he remembered, Jeff thought, he was also a ghost in his present life, just the same way. Except, in all the fourteen years, just a couple of times. With Melody that first summer he had felt alive. On the beach on the island. And when he played the guitar.

  Most of the time, he thought, he practiced not being anybody. If you weren’t anybody then nobody could — what? Hurt you or leave you behind? Make you unhappy? But then they couldn’t make you happy either, could they? If you played it safe, then you kept safe. Jeff figured he was pretty good at keeping safe — he didn’t even look in mirrors because he didn’t want to see Melody’s eyes. But one result of that was that Jeff didn’t know anything about himself. And he thought, sitting in the little boat, alone on the creek, alone with the creek and the sky and the marshes, that he might want to know more.

  But as soon as he thought that, he got scared that there wasn’t any more to know. As soon as he got scared, he thought that being scared was one of his problems. As soon as he thought about one of his problems, he got impatient with himself, irritated — and that felt better. The Professor, after all, had loved Melody and lost her and been hurt by her too, Jeff suddenly realized. Probably at least as badly as Jeff had been; and now he’d written a book, and before that he’d made friends with Brother Thomas, so the Professor survived. Hadn’t Melody said, meaning to criticize, that Jeff was like his father? Jeff hauled in the baited strings and climbed out of the boat. He hadn’t stopped thinking. But he was going to take it slow and quiet, this thinking about himself.

  Chappelle did act funny about Jeff for a couple of weeks, calling on him every day at the end of class to read off the exact assignment, paying exaggerated attention to whatever Jeff said in class. Then he seemed to forget about it. Thanksgiving came, and a short vacation from school, which Jeff and the Professor used to haul the boat out of the water and stock up on some food in case they got snowed in. “It’s always good to be safe,” the Professor said, placing cans of beans and soup in a row at the back of the shelf, lining up cans of ravioli, boxes of grits and oatmeal, as well as dry mixes for cornbread, biscuits, and milk.

  “As a general rule?” Jeff asked. This was, of course, something he had been thinking about.

  “As a general rule, well — I’m not the one to ask about that,” the Professor said. “If you mean, as I take it, a general rule for life. I’m awfully good at playing it safe and not good at all at taking risks.”

  “But you have,” Jeff pointed out.

  “Never by my own choice,” the Professor told him. He turned around to look at Jeff, who passed him more cans and boxes. “Always somebody else pushed me. Even my book; Brother Thomas is the one who pushed me into submitting it — the man is implacable, once he gets his teeth into an idea. I’m very grateful to him.”

  “I like him too,” Jeff said.

  And he did. All the more when, after Christmas vacation, on one of the days when the Professor stayed up in Baltimore, he picked up a brown manilla envelope from the mailbox. Brother Thomas had sent him some xeroxed copies of newspaper articles, he saw; also a note. The note read: “If I know the man you won’t have seen these. I thought you’d enjoy them. BroT.”

  There was a review (from Time magazine, Jeff noticed, impressed; more impressed when he read it and saw words like intelligent, readable, thought-provoking) and an interview from the Baltimore paper. It was the interview Jeff read three or four times. Because he didn’t know any of this stuff about his father.

  “Born in 1924,” he read, collecting the facts, “graduated from University of Chicago in 1943.” So the Professor had accelerated through school. “PhD., University of Chicago.” The Professor had told the reporter that he had studied political geography, because he wanted to travel, but had gone to work for Army Intelligence instead. He’d worked in Washington, analyzing information from aerial photographs of central Europe, mostly, because he knew about the countries. After the War, he’d read Philosophy at Oxford for a year, then taken the job at Baltimore. He guessed it had taken him fifteen years to write his book. He’d finished it two years earlier and a friend had bullied him into submitting it to a publisher. The Professor told the reporter that he thought that was an awfully long time to spend on one book, but he’d enjoyed the work so much he had been almost sorry when he finished with it. Yes, he said, he might write another, he had file cabinets filled with notes. At the end of the article, there was a paragraph of personal information: married in 1962, separated, lives with his teen-aged son. “A handsome, age-less man,” the reporter described the Professor, “whose eyes twinkle with dry humor . . . a thoroughly charming man, who weighs his words and is worth listening to.” The article closed with a quote from the Professor: “Some of my best work is in that book, which is, I take it, what a book should contain.”

  Jeff put down the papers. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t really know his father, not this way, not as this kind of man. He guessed he was pretty proud of the Professor, and thought he was going to have even more trouble now keeping his promise to the Professor. He went to his room and got the Martin, sat strumming on it, looking out over the winter brown marshes and winter clear creek water and winter gray skies. Good for the Professor, he thought.

  Jeff felt a little embarrassed, greeting his father after school the next day. He didn’t know why the Professor hadn’t told him about the review or the interview. Or about his life. He didn’t know why he himself hadn’t asked the Professor more about his life. Riding his bike back from school, arguing with himself whether or not he’d been a fool to take the bike on such a cold day, Jeff didn’t know what he was going to say to his father. What he finally said was, “Your eyes don’t twinkle.”

  The blue eyes, of course, did look bright and amused at that. “I agree,” the Professor said. “Am I to gather then that Brother Thomas has been in touch with you?”

  “I’m really impressed,” Jeff said.

  “Thank you. It’s probably as well he warned you, because I’m afraid the book is successful.”

  “That’s OK, Professor, I won’t hold it against you. How successful?”

  “British sales and a contract for a paperback edition. Is there anything you need money for?”

  “No,” Jeff said. Then he thought. “Don’t you want an electric typewriter?”

  “Yes, but I’ve got one on order. What about you? Schools? I don’t know, what do boys want these days?”

  “Just a dog and a little red wagon,” Jeff said. “But you aren’t serious, are you? You are, aren’t you. I want a Martin, and I have it. I want to live in a place where it’s beautiful, and we do. And a boat. I think getting rid of the money’s going to be yo
ur problem, Professor, not mine.”

  “I meant, we could move back to Baltimore, to one of those houses we couldn’t afford before.” His father’s face was expressionless.

  Jeff made his face expressionless too. “Is that what you’d like?” After all, it was the Professor who supported them, who had the work. Jeff carefully didn’t look out the window.

  “I asked you first.”

  “No, you didn’t. You suggested, you didn’t ask. I asked you first.”

  “But I want to hear what you want.”

  “Then you should have asked first,” Jeff insisted. This was crazy, like two little kids quarreling.

  “But . . . all right. The truth of the matter is — no, I don’t want to leave. But I always was a hermit. I don’t know about you . . . if you’re making friends, if there’s enough for you to do, if the school is good enough.”

  Jeff did get up from the table then. He walked to the glass door and looked out, across the marsh then down to the sweep of bay, larger now that the deciduous trees had shed their leaves. “I love it here,” he said, trying to say it as clear and true as he could.

  “You really do,” the Professor said. After a pause, “I don’t mind it myself,” he added.

  As spring approached, Jeff began preparing the boat. He scraped and repainted the bottom and had the motor overhauled. In late March he began to see ospreys. By mid-April, the trees started to produce new leaves. The egrets returned and, during May, the herons. Jeff saw his first heron of the season one sunny afternoon after school. The blue stood on the trunk of a tree that had fallen over into the creek, stood motionless and unaware. For a long time, Jeff watched it from the dock. The sun-warmed air smelled of moist earth, and somehow green, of growing things. Without moving, Jeff watched. The heron stood on stiff thin legs, its long neck tucked in, its flattened head still. Finally, Jeff couldn’t contain himself: “Hello,” he called down the creek. “Welcome back.”

  The bird didn’t even look toward him. It took off, raising itself awkwardly from the tree, and flew up the creek, squawking its resentment as it disappeared into treetops. Jeff laughed aloud.

  At school, he often joined Phil for lunch. Phil’s father was a farmer, so they didn’t get together outside of school — Phil had chores and had to help plow up the land, then plant it. He didn’t seem too curious about Jeff, but he seemed to like him all right. They talked about classes, mostly, although sometimes Phil made cracks about girls, and he asked Jeff what his father did, and if he had brothers and sisters, and how his mother liked living in the boonies. Jeff just said his mother lived in Charleston. “I wish my mother lived in Charleston,” Phil answered.

  Jeff liked Phil; he liked his sense of humor and the practical turn of his mind. Phil’s life was so normal, so practical — and Phil couldn’t see that. Phil figured, Jeff thought, that everyone was pretty much like him; he didn’t have the imagination or experience to see what differences there could be. He was a four-square, solid person, and Jeff liked that. They weren’t friends, exactly, but he wouldn’t mind being friends.

  Everything was going smoothly and Jeff slipped through the days, until Mr. Chappelle asked one day in class if Jeff’s father was the one who wrote the book. After that, people seemed to look at Jeff with more interest and give him a wider berth. Except Phil, who tackled the subject head on. “He wrote a book? What are you doing down here?”

  “We like it here.”

  “Does that mean he’s an egghead? Or you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are high honor roll, every time.”

  “I’m sorry.” Luckily, Phil thought that was funny, so Jeff, hearing how stupid it sounded, had a chance to say, “I’m repeating eighth grade — I don’t know how I’ll do next year.”

  “You don’t mind being high honor roll, do you?” Phil looked surprised.

  “You know, I don’t know.”

  “Greene, you’re unbelievable. I can’t tell if you’re a total fink or a really unusual guy.”

  “Probably something in between,” Jeff said.

  Jeff did have the chance to ask Phil if he’d like to go out in the boat, crabbing or something, once school let out. Phil knew where they lived, “on the old Mitchell place; they used it for hunting.” He said he’d call if his father took the chains off for a day. The Milsons sold some of their vegetables and all of their eggs in Salisbury during the summer, as well as having a roadside produce stand, so he was pretty busy. “I wouldn’t mind a day off, I’ll tell you,” Phil said. This was as they left school on the last day, when everybody burst out the doors, and some of them yelled aloud their joy. Jeff took his bike from the rack and rode home alone. He was satisfied, he thought, with the way he’d spent the year. He hadn’t made any enemies and he might have made a friend. That made it a terrific year for him.

  Brother Thomas spent two weeks with them that summer. He and Jeff learned how to bait and set out a trotline, then how to run it, the motor at its slowest speed, one of them steering while the other netted the crabs that clung to the pieces of bait as they rose to the surface. It took them most of the two weeks to get good enough at it, and it wasn’t until the last week that they made the kind of haul Jeff read about, three bushels in two hours. They couldn’t, of course, eat all those crabs. They culled out the very largest to cook and turned the rest loose, dumping the crabs overboard, like a living landslide. They were out in the bay that day, wearing just shorts. When the sun got too hot they slipped over the side to cool off, avoiding the translucent jellyfish who had arrived in mid-July to make swimming unpleasant. The jellies clustered near the surface of the dark water and clung with stringy formless tentacles to anything that caught them, the net, the line, a shoulder. Jeff had been stung often enough to learn that, while it hurt some, it only lasted for about half an hour.

  That day was, he thought, just about perfect. Brother Thomas liked to sing, so they sang as they waited between runs down the trotline, and Brother Thomas taught Jeff the elements of harmony singing. They watched workboats run by single men or crews. They saw sailboats and motor yachts trailing fishing lines and a little red motor boat run by a solitary woman whose hair was a tangled mass of gray curls. She went up along the coast then turned into a dock that seemed unattached to any house. They went back home so baked by sunlight that Jeff felt as crusted with salt as a pretzel and was surprised not to see large salt flakes on his arms and legs.

  One day, when they were downtown so Brother Thomas could soak up local color, Jeff was killing time wandering up and down the sidewalk by the town harbor, waiting to meet Brother Thomas for a Coke before driving home. Brother Thomas had gone into the fish market to get them some lobsters, “for a housegift, to go with that champagne I brought.” A woman came out of the little grocery store, carrying two huge bags. Jeff looked at her and thought he should offer to help her carry them. She looked old, but she didn’t move as if she was old. He hesitated, inching towards her. She had leathery, tanned skin and wore a long skirt with a baggy blouse over it. Her hair was iron gray, and her eyes looked at him as if she was angry at him. Over her shoulder he saw Brother Thomas approaching, so he stepped aside without offering to take the bags. She walked on by him, but as she passed she said something that sounded like “manners of a chicken.”

  Jeff felt her anger toward him, and he felt unaccountably shaky. Why should he be afraid, he asked himself. He didn’t even know her. She couldn’t possibly do anything to him. But he felt — inside himself, and he didn’t lie to himself about it — as if she could, even though he knew she couldn’t.

  “Who’s that?” Brother Thomas asked. “What did you say to her? I’m trying hard to imagine — I mean you, I’ve known you for years — what could you have said? Tell, Jeff, I’m going crazy with curiosity.” His humor masked genuine concern for Jeff, Jeff saw that.

  “Not a word.” Jeff still felt quivery from the odd encounter. “Honest, I didn’t do anything. I was even thinking about offering t
o carry her bags.”

  They watched the woman go out on the dock, then climb down into a motor boat and rush off.

  “That’s the same red boat, isn’t it,” Brother Thomas said. “Wait here.” He went into the grocery store and came out in a few minutes, carrying a bag of potato chips. “Well” — he justified the purchase — “I couldn’t just go in and pump her for information. Her name’s Abigail Tillerman, she’s a widow, had three children, all of whom left home years ago. The youngest died in Vietnam — she might be a little crazy with solitude, at least that’s what people say. That store is withering of neglect.”

  “How’d you find out all that?”

  But Brother Thomas was watching the now-empty water of the harbor. “When you think of all the lost souls in this world. What life does to people. Do you know what I mean?”

  Jeff did, because he was one of them. “I guess,” he said.

  “And that store — the woman in there was another one. But this Tillerman woman — at least her spirit wasn’t broken, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I wouldn’t like to meet her again,” Jeff said, “and not in a dark alley.” He’d need to be tougher than he ever could be, and it wasn’t just this one old lady, it was most people in the world. Jeff felt as if he’d been keeping a secret from himself and had come around a dark inner corner to rediscover it. He felt shaky, but as if he’d learned something. Probably it was good for him. He thought it was. It wasn’t good for him to get confident; just like he’d been confident about Melody. It was when you got confident you got taken by surprise and really banged around.

  It was strange, he thought to himself a couple of weeks later, that he’d thought of Melody. It had been such a long time, since they lived in Baltimore that strange fall, that he’d even mentioned her name to himself. He had put her away and shut the drawer on her. The coincidence struck him because the Professor sat him down in the long summer twilight to talk about her. “Your mother has written me — about you.”