A Place Apart (13 page)

“You have to,” he said. “I've counted on it. I know just how it will be.”

I said nothing. I stared at Ma, who was sitting at the table reading something. She turned suddenly and looked at me, and then raised her eyebrows as though questioning me. I don't know how I looked, but she stood up and started to walk to me. I waved her back. Stammering, I asked the telephone who Tom Kyle was. I was really startled when Hugh spoke; I'd been convinced there was no one there. He replied as though there had been no argument between us. He told me the Kyles were from Boston, that they'd bought the old Cass farm and were fixing it up, and that Tom's father had an advertising agency in the city. Tom had gone to a private school. His mother had been a professional actress.

“What is she now?” I asked.

“A cripple,” he said. “She has rheumatoid arthritis. That's why they've moved out of Boston, to the country.”

I didn't see what Hugh's
why
connected; I just wished the Kyles had stayed in Boston. I couldn't ask the question that was like a thorn in my mind. Why had Hugh pointed at the chair next to him at the Drama Club meeting and waved Tom to it?

“Birdie?” He spoke softly now. “There's a terrific Marx Brothers' movie on the tube tonight. Do you want to watch it?”

“I've seen all their movies,” I said. “Years ago. My father loved them and took me when they showed a bunch of them in Boston.”

“I love them, too,” he said. “And I love your play. We'll talk about it tomorrow. All right? See, I can say ‘all right' just the way you do. Now I'm going to hang up because the movie is about to start.”

He hadn't believed what I'd said. He didn't believe I wouldn't write more for him. Or else he refused to believe it. But I felt a little better, just because I'd told him I wasn't going to.

“What's up?” Ma asked me.

“Nothing,” I said.

I looked out the living-room window. I saw the beam of Mr. Thames's flashlight poking beneath the hedge. Benny had gotten out again.

“Will you watch an old movie with me?” I asked Ma.

“Sure,” she said.

We went to her room, where our old television set sat on its stand in the corner, and we fixed up pillows and got on her bed. She kept her arm around my shoulders while we watched, and we laughed a good deal. By the time I went to bed, I felt almost calm, even though Tom Kyle's name kept floating through my mind, a worry I couldn't put a name to.

Hugh was waiting for me by the Congregational Church after school the next day. There was a certain expression on his face that I'd often seen before, and that I loved. It was a sweet look and it was humorous, too, as though he was thinking about something funny that he couldn't wait to tell me about. I suppose I'd thought, after the meeting in the Drama Club, when he'd deserted me, when I'd felt so mortified by myself, that it would be easy to be cool with him, that all at once I wouldn't trust him any more. But that's not the way it was—perhaps it never could be that way. Along with the new feeling I had about him, the caution I felt toward him, the old feelings were still there. He could still get me. If people were like numbers, they'd just be one thing—a seven or a twelve. But the only numbers they seemed to be like were variables. I knew I was smiling at him now, smiling at him in the old way because I was feeling about him in the old way.

“Listen!” he began, “remember the scene when Groucho thinks he's looking at his reflection in a mirror only it's Harpo dressed up to look like him?”

I laughed, remembering, and nodded.

“Let's do it!” he said. “Come on!”

He stood in front of me and slowly raised his eyebrows, and I raised mine.

He slowly stretched out his right arm. I did the same.

“Faster!” he whispered.

I saw his leg rise and I lifted mine, and he hopped and I did, and then he pretended he was wiping fog from the mirror and I did it right on time. He turned in a circle and I did, and he did it again, then walked away from me. I walked away from him, laughing. I finally turned back. He was gone.

I ran behind the church and into the cemetery. He wasn't there. He wasn't behind a tombstone. He was nowhere.

A squirrel darted across the grass and up a tree. Some of the tombstones were ancient and had fallen sideways. Green moss covered them like the stitches on an old needlepoint pillow Ma had on a chair in her bedroom. I stopped and began to read the engraving on a tombstone. A leaf drifted down from a maple tree and landed in my hair. I couldn't hear cars or voices, only a faint, sighing breeze way up in the top branches of the trees.

Letitia Cass, 1834–1865,
I read. There was something written in Latin, too, but it was half buried. She must have been a member of the family which had owned the house Tom Kyle had moved into.

I sat under a tree for a while, thinking about the people buried all around me who had once been breathing in the October air, expecting this and hoping for that, and worrying sometimes, the way I was worrying.

I felt quiet and sad and confused. Hugh hadn't mentioned the play. It was as though he had decided everything was settled. I would have to go against him; I would have to settle my own part of it.

Hugh's jokes weren't like other people's. You were really allowed to see only half of a joke. The rest of it was buried in him, like the Latin words on the Cass tombstone. His disappearing the way he had was just like the way he would suddenly hang up the phone when he was in the middle of a story. It wasn't funny to me now. I felt I wouldn't find him ever again.

I picked up my books and walked out of the cemetery. I would have liked to stay there a long time with the squirrel and the trees and the old graves.

On Main Street, a few people were heading toward the library, carrying their books and wearing the library expression, pensive and dreamy. Others shopped in the bakery and the grocery store, and the usual gang was hanging around beneath the marquee of the movie house. As I passed by the Mill, I glanced in as I always did, just because Hugh and I had had good times there.

When I saw Tom Kyle and Hugh sitting in the booth, talking, I quickened my step. I told myself I didn't want Hugh to see me, but a second later I realized I didn't want Hugh to know I'd seen him. Why would that matter? Why did I feel so embarrassed? Oh, if only I could stop thinking!

Frank Wilson suddenly stepped out from the group of boys near the boarded-up old box office of the movie.

“Vicky, how about a Coke?” he asked.

He was grinning at me and looking crooked, the way I'd seen boys look when there are a gang of them together. I hated it, hated that grin. My heart turned over when I thought of how serious Hugh could be, how seriously he would ask me to have coffee with him, not kicking up the dust and shaking his head like a rooster, like Frank Wilson, for the whole barnyard to see and admire.

“I have to go home,” I said. Frank looked as angry as I felt. For a minute, I was tempted to change my mind, to walk into the Mill, where Hugh would see me with a friend of my own. I remembered how he had jeered at Frank, and I knew he would jeer at both of us.

All Frank had done was to ask me for a Coke and call me Vicky. He couldn't know I hated that nickname. We hadn't exchanged more than twenty words in a year, yet here we were glaring at each other like mortal enemies.

“I have a lot of homework, Frank,” I said, trying to sound friendly, but not too friendly. He shrugged and turned away. I wished again I'd taken him up on his offer. I walked to Autumn Street, wondering how I could find my way home and carry books when I felt I was being pulled apart like taffy. But my feet carried me. My feet didn't have thoughts. At least, I hoped they didn't.

We went to Boston for the weekend. Ma had to find out about equivalency tests and a refresher course in organic chemistry for her nursing career. I spent most of the time with Uncle Philip during the days. Lawrence came to supper both nights we were there. I noticed how every time he caught me staring at him, he'd look quickly away. I felt as though I was winning a peculiar contest. Yet I didn't feel like a winner.

I spent all of Saturday with Uncle Philip in his shop and watched customers. Some people made a beeline for a certain bolt of cloth, and you would have thought from their intent expressions that they were deciding their fates. Other people walked around dreamily, touching this piece of cloth or that, and then left without buying anything.

When we walked home at the end of the day, Uncle Philip kept my arm under his. He was holding it too tightly—I wanted to pull away from him. These days, grownups seemed dense and heavy to me, and when they began to talk to me, even Ma, I couldn't help sighing, because I wanted to get away from them—even if what they were saying was interesting.

“What's on your mind?” Uncle Philip asked. “Did you ever find your country? Remember the dream you had? About the crown of pears? I have the feeling you're not very cheery these days.”

It would be simple to say I had a cold coming on. It would be impossible to explain why I was so bothered. How does everyone walk around and go about their lives with all these complicated things going on in their head? Perhaps I was especially confused. Not everybody goes to pieces when they can't find a left shoe the way I had in Jed's old room this morning. I had opened my mouth and simply howled silently until I found the shoe underneath the piled-up bedclothes.

“Tory?” Uncle Philip waited. “It's not like you to be so silent,” he said. Then he spoke softly into my ear. “Can I help? Sometimes just talking—”

“Why can't things be simple!” I burst out. “Why is everything so snarled up?”

He held my arm tighter, but he didn't say a word. We walked into the hall of his apartment, and he threw his beret up on the closet shelf. “Some things are simple—or simpler than others,” he said.

“Like what?” I asked. “A fried egg?”

“Even a fried egg isn't so simple when you really try to understand it,” he said. “I wonder if you mean clear, not misty and uncertain? Is that what you mean?”

“I don't know,” I said miserably.

Uncle Philip leaned forward and kissed my forehead.

“I hope that's clear,” he said.

After supper, I sat at Jed's desk. It was too small and my knees bumped up against it. I opened my French grammar book.
S'asseoir,
I read. I took up my pen and began the conjugation. I suddenly realized my jaw was clenched. But gradually, and for the first time, as far as I can remember, I found that I liked doing my homework. What I had to do was simple—and clear. It was not trying to understand a face full of hidden thoughts and feelings; it was plain, and I knew just what I had to do.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lawrence had a lot of paper work to do, so Ma and I took the bus home Sunday afternoon. I found a note that had been slipped under our door. It was from Hugh.

“Dear Finch,” it began. A new name!

Here's the solution. Let the father's death come in the second act. You'll have to write a whole new first act, poor girl! And if you insist on keeping the mother in the play, make her have a violent fight with the father and that will make her reaction more interesting when she hears of his death. How about December 20 as a deadline? I watched you go into the cemetery and sit beneath a tree, Bird, the day we did the Marx Brothers. What were you dreaming about all by yourself there? Do you like old tombstones? I do.

“Shut the door, Tory. That's a cold wind blowing. Tory? What's the matter? You look stricken!”

I sat down right then and began to tell Ma about the play. Every time she tried to ask me a question, I just raised my voice. As I went along like an express train, I discovered that by talking about one part of what troubles you, you can drown out the other part. I told Ma the Drama Club was counting on me—what a lie! I told her I didn't know how to go about changing what I'd written, or adding anything on to it. I said I wanted to get out of the whole thing but didn't know how. When my voice stopped, I could hear its echo ringing through the little house. Why had I been shouting?

“Let's go to the kitchen and make scrambled eggs and toast for supper,” Ma said. I followed her, dazed by the tale that I'd patched together with bits of truth. I felt locked into a trouble that had no way out.

I stood guard over the toaster, which sometimes burned up a slice of bread in a minute, and I watched Ma beat up eggs, knowing she'd think of a way—she always had.

After the table was set, we sat down and Ma began to talk.

“Years ago,” she said, “before I met Papa, I had a friend named Zachary, called Zack. His father was a union official and he was a nice man. He had a terrible failing. He gambled on everything, cards, horses, sports. He finally lost his job because of his gambling, and the family had no savings, just a little house in a Boston suburb, and that had a stiff mortgage on it. All the kids had to go to work and Zack, who was the oldest, had to leave college and find a job. They had so little money to spare that Zack had to walk into Boston if he couldn't hitch a ride. He allowed himself $1.50 for a bus ride home at the end of the day, and for lunch. That meant he could have a hot dog and a cup of coffee. Zack smoked cigars. He loved cigars. On the day I'm telling you about, he couldn't get a ride, and so he walked to the business section of the city. He hadn't had a cigar in weeks. As he was walking, he began to dream about a good job and a paycheck. He imagined himself cashing the check, walking into a tobacco store and buying two really fine cigars. He was so caught up, he didn't notice the distance he was covering. He was no longer a young man with a gambling father and no money. He was Zachary, the connoisseur of fine tobacco! At some point, he saw a tobacco store. He walked into it, bought two sixty-cent cigars, went back to the sidewalk, lit one of them, and with the first puff, the dream burst. There he was with two expensive cigars and thirty cents. When he told me about it, he was still amazed he could have imagined himself right into that real store where he had handed over his real money.”