A Place Apart (3 page)

“That's a beautiful kite,” I shouted into the wind.

He had reached the kite by then, and he was examining it carefully. Then he picked it up and came toward me, the kite held before him like a shield. Buffeted by the wind, it rustled and snapped like something living.

“I made it myself,” he said. “When I finished it this morning, I meant to try it out even if a hurricane was blowing.” He looked straight up at the sky and smiled.

He was not a small child as I had, at first, thought. He must have been at least sixteen.

“Everyone on the street was watching you—and it,” I said.

“Were they?” he asked without interest. He looked at me closely for at least a minute. He had a calm expression on his face; I didn't fidget; I stood as still as a stone.

“You and your mother moved into the Ballard house down the street, didn't you?”

“How did you know?”

“Everybody knows everything in a place this size,” he said. “And your last name is a bird of some sort, sparrow? wren?”

“Finch,” I said. “My first name is Victoria. Some people call me Tory.”

“I'm Hugh Todd,” he said, “and I'll call you Victoria.”

He was standing next to me now. I saw that he was quite small. But there was a kind of trimness to him that made his height unimportant. And he was not wearing what most of the boys I knew wore. He had on shoes, not sneakers, and a tweed jacket, not a windbreaker.

“Do you live on Autumn Street?” I asked him.

“Oh no,” he said quickly, almost as though I'd insulted him. “My mother's house is up there.” He pointed toward the long hill that I walked up every day to get to school. I knew there were several estates there, near the little Matcha River, which flowed through New Oxford.

“I came down here to try out the kite because I've already lost three other kites in our river,” he said. For a second, I had the impression that he meant he owned the river. But then I knew that couldn't be true. No one can own a river. And when I thought of it later, it seemed strange to me that he had called his home his “mother's house,” yet spoken of the Matcha as “our river.”

“I'd like to make a kite,” I said. “But it looks so complicated.”

“I'll help you if you ever decide to try,” he said. We began to walk down the hill, but the wind was blowing my hair all over my face and I stumbled several times. Hugh Todd pushed a piece of kite string into my hand. “Here. Tie your hair up. Quick!”

I gathered up as much of my hair as I could and tied it with the string. By then, we had reached the sidewalk. “You always ought to wear a kite string,” he remarked, smiling.

I felt foolish, knowing he was really laughing at me, yet I was pleased, too. He put a finger to his forehead, said, “I'll be seeing you,” and walked away, looking straight ahead.

I asked my mother later if she had heard anything about the Todd family. She said she had but nothing much except they were one of the few really rich families in New Oxford, an old family, too, which probably had owned most of the village at a time when oxen still forded the Matcha River.

I told her I had met Hugh and that he'd known about us, known the name of the people who owned the house before we'd moved in.

“Then it's true about gossip in a small place, isn't it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But there's more to it than that. There's hardly anything more interesting than human lives.”

That night for the first time since Papa had died, I went to bed feeling really different, feeling there was something to look forward to, not just trudging through the days.

I thought about Hugh Todd, and I was sorry I was so much younger—and so much bigger—than he was. Still, there was something about meeting him on that hill that made me feel the way I had that moment when Ma told me we were moving to Autumn Street.

CHAPTER TWO

Spring came in days as light as a chain of brightly colored paper rings. New green leaves burst out on the trees around the little houses on Autumn Street and half hid their pinched roofs and tumbledown porches. And Hugh Todd, who now and then walked home with me after school, said it was the best season of the year in New Oxford. “It's the only time you aren't locked in by the hills and the mountain,” he said. “It's the time when you know you can get out.”

“You make it sound like jail,” I said. “Right now it's like a party the whole village is having.”

“Some party,” he said. “The guests are the old or the middling or the used-up. That's all there are in New Oxford.”

We were standing on a little bridge beneath which the Matcha River curled and mumbled on its course, parallel with Main Street. The water was the color of fishes, green and brown, and gold where the rays of sunlight struck it.

“Who are the used-up?” I asked, staring down at the water, hoping he would start one of his stories.

“They live in houses that look empty,” he said. “And they eat turnips for breakfast and listen all day to the peeling of old wallpaper.”

“And the middling?”

“They worry that people will think they're used up—so they trim everything, the grass around their houses, shelf paper, their hair, newspaper, wrapping paper, hedges, branches, thickets—”

I began to laugh.

“And the old don't worry about anything any more,” he went on. “They sit on stools and face west and don't move all day long.”

“Then who can come to the party?” I asked. I watched a little circle of twigs that was being carried on the river's back, and I was half asleep and contented, the way I always felt when Hugh described things to me. It didn't matter whether the things were imaginary or real. They always seemed true.

“Just you and me,” he answered.

It was what I had been thinking. Talking the way we were talking, or ambling slowly toward Autumn Street, or looking down at the river was what made the party for me, not only spring. It was becoming friends with Hugh.

One morning, there was a haze of white in our front yard. The apple trees had bloomed, and the air was filled with what looked like a great cloud of pink milkweed.

On my way to school, I passed places I hadn't noticed on the harsh days of winter when the sleet or snow had made me keep my head down and my eyes nearly closed against the cold.

Now I saw tall, narrow houses that looked haunted. I wondered if they were the ones where the middling lived. Once, when I looked up at a small round window, I saw a dog. He was motionless and I thought for an instant it was a painting of a dog. Then I saw him look down at me, actually stare at me! I laughed, but I felt embarrassed.

I passed a block where most of the houses had been abandoned, and the spring breeze stirred the slats of broken fences, and it blew through broken windows and rattled the old paper shades which people had once pulled up in the morning so they could see what the day was going to be like.

It was there that the hill that curved to school began and it took me past the rich section of New Oxford, where Hugh lived. There, the daffodils grew thickly everywhere, and the planting beds had been turned over so the dark earth showed. All along my way, I could hear the waters of the Matcha River, and the air was fragrant and cool as though the river had washed it.

Often, I was lost in thinking about the places I had passed and would be surprised to find myself in front of the school, to see those dark brick walls rising up, and to hear the voices of the boys and girls calling and shouting and laughing until the first bell made everything quiet. There was a mystery about those houses I looked at every morning, and they made me feel a kind of longing I didn't understand.

I tried to tell Ma about it.

“Perhaps it's the mystery of lives,” she said. “I have it, too, once in a while. Last week, while I was in Boston to try and get Papa's insurance policy straightened out, I passed a very old deserted factory. I looked up at those big dark windows, all cracked and dusty, and I wanted to go inside and wander around by myself. I wanted to know what it had been like there, who the people were who'd worked there maybe eighty years ago, what they had talked about as they worked alongside each other, those men and women and, probably, children. What had a spring day felt like to them inside that dusty darkness? Is that what you feel?”

“I think so,” I answered. I told her about the dog that had looked down at me from the window. Ma laughed and told me she and Papa had had a dog, Ace, when they were first married. “He used to stare at people when we took him for his walks. It was terribly comical. It always rattled them so. We'd found him wandering in the street with a string tied around his neck. And he stared at us in that way he had. So we had to take him in.”

“What happened to Ace?”

“He died,” she said.

I was silent, thinking of Ace, thinking of Papa.

“He wasn't a young dog, Tory.” She stuck a plastic cigarette in her mouth. It was supposed to help her cut down on the real thing. “Ugh!” she said, and lit a real cigarette.

“Are you all right?” she asked me then. “I mean, really?”

I told her I missed Papa, that I would forget he was dead, then suddenly, as though someone had struck me a terrible blow across the back, I would remember. Ordinary things made me miss him, too, when I saw people coming out on their porches after supper to see what the night sky looked like, or when old Mr. Thames across the street went looking for his cat with a flashlight. “Even when I'm laughing at something really funny,” I said, “Papa is suddenly in my mind, as though he heard me.” I hadn't known, I said, that there were so many ways of missing another person.

She got up and started collecting our supper dishes. I was supposed to do that, but when I stood, she waved me away and said, “Put your feet up and have a cigar.”

Later, she went and played some old songs on the piano, songs that had been popular when she was a girl, and she sang along with her playing, making up words when she forgot them. Her light voice was like good lemonade, slightly tart and cool.

Just before I went to bed, I asked her a question that had been in my mind for a long time.

“What about Papa's ashes?”

“They're still at the funeral parlor,” she said. “I haven't been able to go and get them. Tory, I don't even know what I'd do with them. They're ashes, not Papa.”

I strained to think how he could have become just a handful of something, gray and weightless, without motion.

Ma put her hand on my arm. I looked at her fingers, the strong clean nails, the skin reddish from all the painting and carpentering she'd been doing. “Will you play some more?” I asked her. She nodded. I fell asleep, listening to her playing her songs while my thoughts grew paler and thinner, until they were like the little moon jellies that drifted around in Cape Cod Bay.

I was all right.

Mostly because of Hugh. At first I'd just watched him. Then one day I stopped feeling alone. I wasn't a watcher any more, I'd gotten interested. That interest didn't stop me from missing Papa, but it tugged at me every morning, and got me out of bed fast, and up the hill to school because, that day, I might see Hugh and spend some time with him.

I wasn't doing too badly in school. All French verbs gave me some trouble. And math was a nightmare for me—especially those problems that went: if your granny was flying a broomstick upstream at 60 miles an hour, and the current was traveling downstream at 22 miles an hour, how many people were in the rowboat?

“You have a profound mistrust of the variable X,” the math teacher said, and put me in what the school called an enrichment class, but which I knew—and everyone else who was in it knew—was for math dodoes.

There were a few people I liked, but didn't think much about, and there were a few I didn't like. And there was my close friend, Elizabeth Marx. She was not in my enrichment class; she could square and cube two numbers while I was still adding them up on my fingers. She could play the cello, too. Now and then I stayed after school so I could watch the orchestra rehearse. I didn't really listen. What I liked was to see Elizabeth sitting on the stage, her left foot turned slightly out, her head bent so gravely, the cello between her knees shining like the hindquarters of a chestnut horse.

A sophomore named Frank Wilson, thin and tall and red-headed, seemed to take a big interest in me, and I hated that. All I had to see were his sandy eyelashes and I got mad. Elizabeth said if someone likes you and you don't like them, they can irritate you to death! Once, Frank left a malted milk for me in my locker, and it leaked all over my gym clothes. When I caught up with him, he said, “I broke the world record getting to the drugstore to buy you that in my lunch hour.” I was speechless, so I just handed him the leaky carton and turned on my heel, but not before I'd seen a silly smile on his face. Elizabeth said, “Well—he got your attention. That's what he wants.”

But it was Hugh Todd who had my attention. I had never thought as much about another human being as I thought about him. It was because of Hugh that I began to enlarge a scene for a play I'd written in my English class. He ran the school theater club, and he had acted in every play the school had put on since he'd been in the fifth grade. The last two years, he'd directed the senior play for graduation. I knew some of the students called him “the Actor.” He was good at what he did, and I suppose that was why certain things about him that might have bothered people didn't bother them. After all, he was the Actor, so if he wore whipcords instead of blue jeans, and if he looked bored when people talked about basketball, or if he seemed, at times, to have just a touch of a British accent, like one drop of color in a bowl of water, well—he was different, and good at being different.

Mr. Tate, my English teacher, had us read plays that spring, and when I showed him the ten-page scene I'd written, he said, “It's interesting. I mean that. People often say interesting when they mean boring. I don't. This work of yours really interests me.”