A Place Apart (4 page)

I liked Mr. Tate. Now and then he was too cute with us, just to show what a sport he was, but quite a few of the younger teachers were like that. He wasn't a real phony. He wasn't like Mel Mellers, who taught one two-hour class a week to all grades except the eleventh and twelfth. It was called the History of Social Ideas—or, maybe, the Social History of Ideas. Mel Mellers liked to pretend he didn't know any more than we did. One Friday morning he said, “Thomas Jefferson! What a name! Do you dig it!” I didn't dare look at Elizabeth.

Mel, as we were supposed to call him, had a beard you could have hidden three piccolos in. Man! he'd cry, he was really with
us!
Starting out in a world we'd never made! Once in a while, he'd mention his postgraduate work at Princeton. But Mr. Mellers, Mel, was a pal.

Mr. Tate wasn't. I felt he meant what he said. He'd read over what I'd written and mutter to himself, then stab the paper with his finger and say, “That's right … Now, here you've gone off … you're just filling in space, but not here. Keep at it!”

I told Elizabeth how much I liked writing that scene, how it made up for the torture of mathematics. We were sitting in an empty classroom during the lunch period.

“Can I read it?” she asked.

“It's not half done.”

“I'd like to see it anyhow.”

“I can't show it to you yet, Elizabeth.”

She put half a bar of chocolate on the desk I was sitting at. “Not even for that?” she asked, smiling.

“I can't. Really.”

“You make it sound very important.”

“No, no …” I exclaimed quickly. “It's that I'm scared to have anyone see it. Tate has to. But if I start showing it to you—or other people—”

“—Hugh Todd, you mean.”

“—then I won't finish it. You'll like it, or you won't like it, and then I'll start working on it with you in mind. Even if you didn't say a word, I'd be wondering what you thought. Do you see what I mean?”

I couldn't look at her. I was half lying. That means I
was
lying. I had already shown it to Hugh. I wanted to make it right for him. I couldn't have explained that to Elizabeth. I couldn't explain it to myself. It would have hurt her feelings if she had known. We were best friends. But between Hugh and me, there was something else. I couldn't get hold of what it was; what I told myself was that he had a real interest in me. I was someone different for him than I was for Ma, or even had been for Papa when he was alive. When I was with Hugh, I traveled a little distance from myself, and he and I watched and thought about the familiar Victoria Finch who began to seem somewhat unfamiliar.

After I'd first had the idea of writing a scene for English credit, I'd told Hugh about it on one of the afternoons he stopped by my house for a while. Now, when we were both in the lunchroom, he with some of the other juniors in his class, and me with Elizabeth, he'd look straight at me suddenly and I'd look back. We wouldn't smile, or wave, just look. I knew, at those moments, that we were thinking about the scene I was writing, what he had begun to call “our play.”

I loved to look at Hugh Todd. The whites of his eyes were the clearest I'd ever seen, and the irises were like dark violets. His hair was brown, and it formed dry little curls over his head. Sometimes I'd go deaf from looking at him, and I'd not hear what he was saying. There was that smallness of his that I never tired of thinking about, those neat perfect hands with clean, shaped fingernails—so unlike my hands, which were bony, the cuticles gnawed and the nails chipped.

When Hugh and I first became friends, I talked to Elizabeth about him, about the way he looked. She never said anything one way or another until, one day, after I had been going on and on, she suddenly burst out, “Tory! I'll tell you what Hugh Todd looks like to me! He looks like the tenor in a rat opera!”

I was speechless. We were cool to each other for a few days, but then we got over it. I had had to remind myself that it often happened that, when you had two friends, they couldn't stand each other.

Maybe if Elizabeth hadn't been my friend, she wouldn't have felt much of anything about Hugh. But for other people, it was as though he were off by himself in some place where liking or disliking just didn't count. He didn't seem to come to school so much as he seemed to visit it.

“I guess I know what you mean,” Elizabeth was saying. “But I hope you'll let me read your scene some time.”

“I probably won't finish it until the fall term,” I said. “Mr. Tate wants me to make it longer. And I will show it to you, Elizabeth. Really!”

“I hate to write,” she said. “I got Tate to let me do a research paper on the history of New Oxford.” She started laughing. “It's got about five sentences of history. I've stretched them out like rubber bands.”

I was so relieved she'd given up the idea of seeing the scene that I told her about the first one I'd written and then thrown away.

“I just started to make up a dialogue one day. It was about a man slowly finding out that the murderer he's been tracking is himself. Tate said that was an old, old story, and there was no reason why it couldn't be written again. He just thought it would be a better plan if I wrote about something I knew. So I did.”

Elizabeth ate chocolate and said nothing. I don't know why I'm so contrary; I wanted her to ask me what I had written about. I made a face at her calm profile and instantly got into one of those tornado rages at myself which hit me at least once a week. By the time she turned to smile at me, a bit of chocolate sticking to her upper lip, the rage had gone, like hornets veering off in a wind.

“Well, I'm going to tell you,” I said, “at least, tell you what it's about. The scene takes place in Boston. It's a rainy day. The daughter is about to go and get the wishbone from the Thanksgiving turkey, which has been drying out in a kitchen cupboard. She has a wish to make. At that moment the shop teacher from the school where the girl's father is the principal knocks on the door. He comes into the living room and tells the family the father has died on the street of a heart attack.”

“That's almost what happened to you!” Elizabeth said.

“Tate says that's what's wrong with the scene. He says you can't simply write down what happened—unless you're a reporter. He says you have to burn out your personal feeling in some way. I don't know what he means. But I keep working on it, and it's getting longer, and Tate says I'm going in the right direction, whatever that is. He says I should think of it as a one-act play, not just a scene. And he asked me what wish the girl wanted to make … he says when I know what that wish is, the feeling of the scene will be right.”

“I don't like wishes,” Elizabeth said. I was about to ask her what she meant by that when Miss Edsey, the science teacher, walked into the room.

“I think you're in the wrong classroom, girls,” she said crisply.

“We wanted to talk by ourselves a minute, Miss Edsey,” Elizabeth said.

“I'm sure,” said Miss Edsey. “Yes, indeed.”

Just before Elizabeth and I parted in the corridor, she to geometry and I to my special math group, Elizabeth said, “Do you know what she thought we were talking about?”

“Love and sex and beauty,” I replied.

Elizabeth laughed. “Right!” she said. “They think we're always talking, and thinking, about love and sex—but not beauty.”

“It's all those books they read,” I said.

Last week, we'd been herded into the auditorium to see a movie about birth. There was a good deal of whispering and snickering at first. Soon it grew quiet. I could even hear the rustle of the nurse's uniform when her arm brushed the doctor's arm. I felt nearly as relieved and glad as the mother looked when they placed that wet little child on her belly, but at the same time I was thinking, Why don't they let me be?

The “blue hours” is what Elizabeth and I called the hygiene classes, which were taught either by Mr. Chartwell or Miss Battey. I noticed that in no other class did the teachers look at one so straight in the eye. In fact, I often got a stiff neck, sitting there, afraid to turn away for fear Miss Battey would think I had private thoughts of my own about the subject.

After that movie, Mr. Mellers had jumped up on the stage, a brave deed when you considered his weight, and had begun to talk about the beauty of human birth.

In my mind, it was something else, something that made my heart feel as if it were turning over. Elizabeth had whispered to me, “He looks so satisfied with himself—as if he'd laid an egg three times his own size.” I let out a screech of nervous laughter, and the teacher at the end of our row gave me a terrible threatening look as if I'd howled in church.

After all we'd heard in those classes, Elizabeth and I agreed we knew everything and nothing. Names for things. Water is H
₂
O. H
₂
O is water. But what
is
water? Elizabeth and I made up stories about round Mr. Mellers pursuing thin, stern Miss Edsey down the empty halls of school at night in the dark, Mr. Mellers shouting, “Beautiful!” and Miss Edsey replying, “Indeed.” We'd get sick, laughing. We had other conversations, full of silences, full of questions no one had answered for us, and which we couldn't answer.

The eleventh and twelfth grades didn't have Mr. Mellers' classes in the History of Social Ideas, or the hygiene classes either. But everyone in the school knew him, and we all had to listen to him introduce special programs in assembly. I never said anything about old Mel to Hugh. I knew he'd have seen things about him that would make him look a hundred times more foolish than he already was to Elizabeth and me. Once Hugh went to work on him, I was afraid of the possibility that I wouldn't be able to sit through a Mellers class without exploding into laughter. I knew Hugh was above all that. Or, at least on the other side of it.

I was a few minutes early for class, so I sat down on my books, thinking about all the mistakes I was going to make in the next fifty-five minutes. A pair of green sneakers placed themselves in front of me, and I looked up at Frank Wilson.

“Want to go to the movies Saturday?”

I stood up, feeling at a disadvantage on the floor.

“I can't,” I said.

“Too busy with the Actor?” he asked in a mean, jeering voice.

The corridor suddenly filled up with people changing classes, and I turned into the math classroom, not bothering to answer Frank. What he said meant nothing to me, but the way he had said it made me feel fretful and, somehow, at fault. During math, I defended myself against algebra and Frank Wilson, and that day, I lost both battles and ended up talking to myself about the unfairness of everything. Couldn't anyone see that Hugh and I were friends? Yet even when I'd tried to explain to Elizabeth how glad I was to have a friend who was a boy, she'd said, “They're all like Martians.”

“They're not so different from us,” I'd argued.

“They are absolutely different from us,” she'd said with the conviction of teacher stating a principle of algebra.

So there was no one I could tell how proud I was to be Hugh's friend, how I felt
chosen.

I wasn't seeing as much of Hugh as I had been. He was busy with the graduation play,
Ah, Wilderness!
by Eugene O'Neill. But that afternoon, when I was walking down the long hill toward home, I happened to glance back once and there he was, two blocks behind me. I couldn't tell if he was looking at me or not. I stopped to wait for him. He stopped, too. I was puzzled. I kept on walking, then looked back. He hadn't turned off toward his home, and he was still about two blocks away. He was standing still, his arms straight and stiff at his side. I began to feel very uneasy. “Hugh!” I called.

He didn't move; he didn't call back. All at once he began to walk toward me rapidly. His face had no expression on it at all. When he was standing right in front of me, he opened his mouth and spoke in a flat, cold voice.

“Frank Wilson is a clown,” he said.

I felt heat rise in my face like a fever, and I stepped back, away from him.

“I saw you in the hall, sitting at his feet. I saw you talking with him. That kind of stuff doesn't suit you.”

“What kind of stuff are you talking about?” I cried, my voice loud and high the way it is when I'm nervous and frightened. Hugh looked around quickly. Only a car was driving by, and just as it passed us, the driver shifted gears with an awful grinding. I thought, Hugh worries about how he looks to other people, even to passing strangers. Then he took hold of my arm and pressed it and started to shake me back and forth. I could feel the strength of his hard little hand, and I was astonished that he had touched me at all.

“His father has been out of work for years, and his mother is a disgusting slob, and he's got three brothers who couldn't make it through the tenth grade,” Hugh said in a low voice. “He's not for you.”

I shook loose. I could feel tears in my eyes.

“Don't you tell me what to do! Don't you tell me what is or isn't for me!” I cried.

He put one finger against his lips. “Quietly, Victoria,” he said. Suddenly he smiled. He let go of my arm and pulled my hair gently.

“That's nice, that braid,” he said. “Your mother is good-looking. You're going to be, too. Right this minute, you look like a heron.”

“What difference does it make that Frank's father has been out of work? What kind of snob are you anyhow?” I said, but I wasn't shouting now. I didn't even feel angry, only weak. Nothing he'd said really surprised me. I'd always known he was a snob. The worst thing was that it was part of what I liked about him.

“I've got to get back to the rehearsal,” he said. “Come on, let's make up.” It was as though I'd started the whole thing. “Smile, my birdie,” he said.