A Solitary Blue (14 page)

“Really. I may be a dry old stick, but I'm not a fool,” the Professor told him. He got up from the table, spooned coffee from the can into the top of the coffeepot, and poured the boiling water through. Jeff washed his plate and poured a glass of milk.

“What was that about a boat? How could you get a boat?” The Professor asked in a normal voice.

“I had the money you were sending. It wasn't much of a boat, it only cost fifteen dollars. Plus five to tie it up at the dock. It was only a dinghy, not even painted.” Jeff remembered how it felt, once he'd learned how to handle it. He remembered going a little farther each day. “It took me time to get used to it, to be not as frightened. I explored the island the same way. There was a lot to see. And the day I left, I saw this great blue heron — have you seen one?” The Professor hadn't. “They're so beautiful and ugly — awkward — it flew over my head, right over. Because I'd disturbed it, but it landed not very far up at all, and it stayed there when I rowed away. It didn't mind me.”

“Where is the boat now?”

Jeff looked at his father: “I sank it.”

“You what?”

“I didn't want anyone else to — have it. I won't be going back there.”

The Professor, calmer now, thought. “You haven't played your guitar since you've been back. Have you?” It wasn't easy for the Professor to think about how to say to Jeff what he wanted to say. Not like it was easy for Jeff to see. But the Professor was doing it, trying as hard as he could, making himself. Because Jeff mattered to him, and Jeff saw
that
now, too, and saw that he could count on that. He could feel himself relaxing.

A memory that had been blocked away somewhere with other things Jeff didn't want to remember at all struck him like an unexpected wave. “You told me you sold a book.”

Now the Professor looked surprised.

“You did, in one of your notes, the last one. What happened to it?”

The Professor didn't know what to say. Jeff could see that. He didn't understand, now that he had remembered, why the Professor had had nothing further to say about the book since Jeff's return.

“Tell me,” Jeff asked. “Unless you don't want to.” Unless whatever the deal was had fallen through?

“No, I do want to; it's just — I thought you weren't interested, I thought — ”

“I'm sorry. I just forgot. You mean . . . you wrote a book — to be published?”

The Professor nodded.

Why did he look embarrassed, Jeff wondered.

“What kind of book is it?”

“It's a sort of history book, biography; it's due to come out next fall. I'm finishing up revisions now.”

“Is the university press going to publish it?”

“Actually” — the Professor looked even more uncomfortable — “it's not one of the academic presses, it's a regular publisher.”

“Is that . . . does that make a difference?”

“Evidently. It will be . . . more available to the general public.”

“It must be good,” Jeff said. “What's it about?”

“It's a series of short biographies. Just some people who have — caught my attention.”

“Can I read it?”

“I thought about that. I'd like you to wait until you're fifteen. I think — then you'll be old enough. Will you promise me that?”

“Sure. I promise. What's it called?”

“Earth's Honored Guests.
Not a very scholarly title. I don't know, I can't tell — the scholarship in the book is solid. I think they're afraid it'll be too scholarly. I don't know who would want to read it, but that's their business. I mean, they bought it — which means we have some extra money, and more when I get the revisions done and the second half of the advance. It gives us some leeway. Brother Thomas says.”

“Leeway for what? Aren't you proud?”

“I am proud, yes. Well, sometimes I am. It's pretty foreign country for me, Jeff. Leeway about you. About school. About what we're going to do about school. You can't possibly pass the year, they
told me that. So we have to decide what to do.”

Jeff began to feel frightened again. “It doesn't make any difference,” he said.

“And you sank the boat?” the Professor asked. “How do you sink a boat?”

“It was old. I pounded the oar on the floorboards; it wasn't strong at all, really. Then I swam to the dock.”

“I'll try to make it all right, Jeff,” the Professor said. “Whatever we decide to do.”

While January turned to February, and a week of warm weather was followed by sharp, sporadic storms of snow and sleet, the Professor didn't do anything about Jeff. Jeff stayed home and played on his guitar. Brother Thomas came around frequently, but if he had anything to say about Jeff, he kept it for the Professor. He brought Jeff a thick volume of songs, collected in England by a man named Childs. Jeff put the volume aside for later and went back to relearning the songs he had once been able to play well.

In mid-February, the Professor took Jeff for an appointment with the principal of the University School. Jeff sat silent while the two men talked — he had worn the gray flannels and blazer — and stared unseeing at the toes of his polished shoes. The Professor wanted to withdraw Jeff from the school, and the Principal agreed that that might be all for the best. He talked about academic pressures on a student of less than average ability, and he didn't look at Jeff. He suggested testing, to get a precise fix on just what the limits were, he suggested therapy because “socialization was well below norm.” The Professor didn't disagree. When they finally walked out of the office, down the hall, and out onto the icy brick front steps, Jeff said, “I'm sorry.”

“We'll see,” the Professor said. He didn't seem to be listening to Jeff. “We'll give it some time and then we'll see. Don't you worry, Jeff.” Jeff left his father alone to think it out. His father needed time to think things out.

They also went to visit Dr. Baker, who did a complete physical; then listened as the Professor recounted what Jeff had done. Jeff listened too, as if they were talking about somebody else.

“It sounds as if some counseling is in order,” Dr. Baker said. He smiled at Jeff as he spoke. Jeff didn't say anything.

I'd like to give it some time,” the Professor said. “I'm not
ruling the possibility out, but — I don't believe anyone can understand as well as I can what effect his mother could have had on him.”

The doctor laced his fingers together and said to the Professor, “It's not only his mother. He hasn't been primarily in her care, has he?”

The Professor didn't answer that right away. “I understand,” he said at last. “I see what you must think — and you're correct, I understand that. I guess I'd like a little time, myself. Circumstances permit a little more freedom this year.” He looked at Jeff. “I would like to keep him out of school and have him repeat eighth grade next year. Somewhere else.”

“Jeff?” Dr. Baker asked. Jeff looked up at him. He had been thinking about the beach again and how the pelicans swooped low over the water, scooping up their prey with buckety beaks. “What do you think?”

“It doesn't make any difference to me.”

Dr. Baker studied him for a long time. Jeff kept his face expressionless and looked right back.

“I don't know, Dr. Greene. I can testify to his being run down, and it certainly doesn't sound as if he should go back to school — especially not if the year is already shot. I have to say that I think counseling is strongly indicated. But not urgent. Not at this point. But I'd have to have your word to get in touch with me if . . . I don't know, if there was any smallest sign of trouble. Or even lack of improvement.”

“You have my word. Thank you,” the Professor said. “I hope I've learned; I think I'm learning. We have a family friend who's much quicker than I am — Brother Thomas,” he said to Jeff's raised face. “You have my word,” he said to Dr. Baker.

The Professor didn't speak to Jeff again until they had arrived back home and Jeff was about to go up to his room to play the guitar. “I can't change, not really,” the Professor said.

“That's OK,” Jeff told him. He already knew that, and he liked that in his father.

“But even if we can't change me, I've been thinking, we might change this.” The Professor waved his hand around, indicating the hallway. Jeff didn't understand. “Would you mind moving?” the Professor asked him.

“No.”

So they became acquainted with a real estate agent, who carried a large zip case with her wherever she went, wrote everything down with a quick, nervous hand, and talked constantly, called the Professor, “Dr. Greene.” She drove them around to show them houses, in the city, in the suburbs. She advised them not to fix their house up. “I thought about that, Dr. Greene, and while it would cost you thousands just to have it painted inside and out, you wouldn't ever realize what you'd spent in the sales price. I think we should sell it as a bargain.” She drove them around in her big white car and walked them through other people's houses. She even showed them a mansion out in the western suburbs, built out of white stucco with a tall fence enclosing a garden and green hills rolling behind it.

“We can't afford it,” he said to his father.

“Hardly. A pity, except if you think about trying to keep the lawns mowed,” the Professor said.

“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. What he really liked about the property was the garden and the hillsides around.

It was at that point, in April, that they started looking farther afield. They drove out to the north, but that was being developed too rapidly; to the south, but Annapolis was too much like a city; and over the long Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore. As soon as he saw the flat landscape, the sky stretched out flat like a blanket overhead, the water appearing at unexpected places, Jeff breathed easier. The Professor had no Friday classes, so they spent weekends driving around, going farther south each time, to find something they could afford that still suited them. They spent nights in motels, where Jeff played his guitar and the Professor made notes on pages of books or wrote lecture notes. They spent days with real estate agents or just driving around towns. They saw houses they liked on land they didn't; land they liked with a house neither of them wanted to live in. It seemed that if they liked a town they could find nothing for sale in it, and if there were a lot of houses available they didn't like the town.

Until, deep in the western corner, an agent drove them down a dirt road to a little cabin that sat on high land — high for that part of the country. A one-room, red-shingled cabin that faced across a broad creek to marshes, that sat right on a point where the creek emptied into the Chesapeake Bay. The cabin was just one room, with a bathroom tacked onto the back; the whole front wall was plate glass doors that looked out over to where the creek flowed by, hurrying
into the bay, and where the level tops of marsh grasses were all you could see, except for a line of low trees at the distance. Mice and roaches scurried away as they entered the room. Spiders had made complex webs at the places where bare roof beams came together at the peak. A bunk bed, a stove and refrigerator, a chipped sink, a table, three chairs, two rollaway beds, a woodburning stove made out of thin tin and rusting through in many places, stacks of newspapers — the room was crowded. The walls were bare plywood, the floor plywood laid down in sheets. The air was damp and musty.

Jeff stood by the window, looking out, not listening. He went outside, leaving the two men inside, looking around and talking. He made his way down to the creek, down a five-foot muddy bank to a band of sand too narrow to lie down on. He had to force his way through honeysuckle vines and the branches of low wild cherry trees, so his approach was clumsy, noisy. As he slid to his feet, a great blue heron croaked loudly just off to his left and at the same time rose out and flew away — complaining — to land on the far side of the creek. From there, the bird stared at Jeff. Jeff stared back, not moving, except for the smile on his mouth. The bird decided Jeff was harmless and paced slowly upstream, its attention on the shallow water where prey might be found. The long stilty legs, the long curved neck, the awkward perfect body moved inland, away from Jeff. He watched it. He watched it not find anything to eat, watched it come to a rest and blend into the stillness of a dead tree that had fallen out into the creek.

The two men were still inside when Jeff rejoined them. The Professor looked at his face and said, “You like it.”

Jeff nodded. “I saw a blue heron.”

“They're common around here,” the agent said. “You-all birdwatchers?”

But the Professor remembered and understood what Jeff meant. “You take that as a sign from the gods?” Jeff nodded. “Well, I like it myself. Let's take a walk around and see. If you'll excuse us?” he said to the agent. The agent dusted off a wooden chair and sat down, ready to be patient.

Behind the cabin grew loblollies, wild cherries, holly, swamp oaks. The small area of lawn that circled the cabin was sparse and untended. Jeff and the Professor walked to the bank and looked down the creek to the bay. “There'll be mosquitoes,” the Professor
said. “There are only these three high acres in the property, it'll never be worth anything for development.”