A Place Apart (6 page)

“Don't tell her,” I said hurriedly. The waitress had gone back to stand near the kitchen door. She was watching us. I saw Hugh's small, even teeth gleam in the dim light of the booth. “Please,” I said.

“Are you going to let waitresses push you around?” he asked, as if he was making a joke. He began to tip his cup of coffee slowly and I thought he was going to pour it out on the table.

“Hugh!” I begged, reaching toward his cup. He suddenly righted it. “I hate a mess,” he said in a tight voice. He grinned, and began to speak in an ordinary way. “I'd like to live in Italy, or the Outer Hebrides, or Martinique. I want to do what other people aren't doing,” he said.

“But what will you do, if you aren't going to school?”

“There are hundreds of programs I can get into. I can go to Florence and learn to cook, or join an archaeological dig in Anatolia, or study ceramics in Japan. The difference, one of them, between rich people and poor people is that the rich know how to get a free ride.”

It was the first time Hugh had said anything to me about his being rich. Two thoughts collided in my head—how great it was he spoke openly about it and how terrible it was for him to brag about it. “It's a big difference” is all that I said.

“Listen, Bird, what I really want to do someday—”

“Don't call me
Bird,”
I burst out. “I hate that. I'm taller than anyone in my class and that's bad enough. Ever since you started calling me Bird, whenever I look in the mirror, I see a stork.”

“Put a weight on your head and don't wear feathers,” he said; then he grinned and held his breath, and I started to laugh and forgot to ask him what he really wanted to do someday. I was so relieved that he was laughing, too, that I heaped up sugar in my nearly empty cup. I don't know why it is with me that relief always leads to sweet things to eat.

“You ought to learn to drink coffee black like they do in Italy,” Hugh said. “I'll be there this summer. My mother has rented a house on Lake Como. I've been there before, when I was little and my father was alive.”

I looked at him in surprise. “I didn't know your father was dead,” I said.

“My mother remarried,” he said.

“Then you have a stepfather.”

“You could call him that.”

I had told Hugh, when I first knew him, how my father had died. It often seemed to me that I had told him nearly everything about myself—I was so pleased to hear his voice saying, “Go on … go on …” in such an encouraging way that I felt I was giving him a present.

I told Elizabeth a lot, too, but with her, telling was a daily custom, and our conversations were like breathing. With Hugh, my life became a story and, it sometimes seemed, about someone I hardly knew.

“When did your father die?” I asked him.

He put down the spoon he'd been holding up to his eye like a monocle.

“He was in California on a business trip. He rented a car and was driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the road that goes along the ocean. He went over a cliff and was killed. Near a place called Half Moon Bay.”

I gasped. “Finish up your sugar,” he said. “I have to go.”

I took a quarter from my pocket. He waved the spoon. “It's on me,” he said, and put down some change the way I'd seen people do in movies. I had to make an effort to stop myself from counting it.

We walked together down Main Street. I was thinking how coldly he had spoken about his father and his stepfather. I was thinking how little you could know about another person, and that frightened me. It meant everyone was alone with their secrets.

I could feel him looking at me from time to time. At last he began to speak in a soft, kind voice.

“Listen, I've been thinking about your play. It could be the senior play next year. That gives you plenty of time. What you'll have to do is make it longer and larger. We have to involve as many seniors as we can in it. I can fake some jobs in scenery and lighting and costumes, but the cast must be bigger. Tate will help you. I'll help you. They almost always put on awful old comedies or worse musicals that they buy for a few dollars, things that give everyone a chance to turn around once on a stage before they go off and disappoint their parents for the rest of their lives. Since I've been in school, they've never put on a student's play. It will be a first. If you can finish it next January, that'll give me the spring. It doesn't have to be absolutely standard full length, that would be going too far, but—”

“Stop!” I cried. “I can't do it!”

“Yes, you can, Birdie. I mean, Victoria. You'll do it fine.”

“You're like those adults I hate,” I said. “The ones who tell you everything is going to be fine, even when you're lying at their feet, blood pouring from a thousand wounds.” Yet I felt excited at the thought I could actually write a play, and I could suddenly visualize, a program with my name on it, and all the parents and teachers in the auditorium that would become a real theater for one night, and Hugh and me backstage, making sure everything was right.

“You're not wounded,” Hugh said. He touched my hair the way he sometimes did, his fingers never touching my face.

“I'll phone,” he called back over his shoulder as I turned down Autumn Street. I hoped he wouldn't that night, even though his phone call was always the high point of my day. We would have long, drifting conversations, and even the silences between us seemed full of thoughts. Sometimes Hugh would read me a poem he liked, or make up a story, then hang up just when he got to the dramatic part. Or else he would make fun of some of the people we both knew in school, and I'd have to laugh, even when I knew it was mean laughter. Hugh had a way of seeing what was ridiculous about a person. That's one reason I didn't like him to call me Birdie.

Autumn Street looked skimpy and stale to me that late May afternoon. I wished I was going to Lake Como in Italy, going anywhere that summer. I wanted to take in huge gulps of air and there wasn't enough of it. I felt sad, as though I was being left behind while everyone else went to a party. I longed to be like Hugh, to look out on the world the way he'd looked at me from his booth in the Mill, the way he'd watched Stanley and Carl when they came to my house. I wanted to feel the faraway amusement I knew he felt.

When I opened the door, Ma was playing the piano, dreamy soft playing, full of trills and long chords. She had on her old rough work blue jeans and a sweater that was much too big for her. A cigarette was burning in a little seashell she'd put on the music stand. I suddenly remembered the sweater. It had been Papa's. For a while, I stopped thinking about Hugh.

CHAPTER FOUR

Everything falls apart the last week of school. Exams are over; the books have been read; the problems done. The teachers don't really see you any more—they're looking toward their getaway, toward summer. One morning, a boy from my math class bounded into school, his hands high in the air, a huge pink balloon of bubble gum covering half his face, and he slid down the hall on the waxed floor all the way to the principal's office, where he let out a wild yell as the balloon suddenly flattened. Then he stood there, dreamily pulling the gum off his face, and afterward he drifted into some classroom, looking sleepy. We were all a little like that, wild and vague. It was as if we were stuck on a train between stations—we weren't one place or another. Even Mr. Mellers, our pal, kept his eyes glued on the wall clock instead of on us. Elizabeth and I passed notes to each other about Mel—about a summer camp, Camp Mellers, we invented, where every morning Mel's disciples gathered to hear him tell how he had invented nature and the galaxies, and all the damp little children lying on their mothers' tired bosoms. Elizabeth wrote that he had a special refrigerator hidden in a cave, and at night he went to the cave and ate mayonnaise sandwiches while his disciples thought he was up on a mountain getting the latest word from the universe.

In the afternoons when I left school, I could hear the orchestra rehearsing. Elizabeth told me the play was not going well; nobody had learned their lines, and Mr. Tate and Hugh Todd raged and shouted at the actors all through rehearsal.

“Does Hugh really shout?”

“In his own way,” she answered in that chilly voice she had when Hugh's name came up. “Actually, his voice drops down low and you can hardly hear what he's saying, or else he spits out insults. And you can hear those all right. Yesterday he called Frank Wilson a moron because Frank came into the auditorium to look for a book he thought he'd left there, and he asked him how he was able to find his way to school with such a tiny brain. Frank started to howl at him, and finally Tate just pushed Hugh right off the stage as if he were a little iron statue. But I suppose the play will be okay on graduation day. I hate to say it, but Hugh seems to know what he's doing. Even if he didn't, he'd get his own way. Rich kids always do.”

I had given up fighting with Elizabeth about Hugh. Anyhow, I really didn't know how to defend him. There was truth to what Elizabeth had said about rich kids. They don't expect anyone ever to say no to them. I remember a little girl who had stayed in the same hotel Papa and Ma and I had spent a week in one summer in Nova Scotia. She had been about three years old, pretty and plump, with golden hair. Once or twice, I'd read to her in the afternoons. I was eating a pear one day and she asked me for it—not a bite, the whole rest of the pear. And when I said she could have a bite, her little face got as hard as a pecan shell and she wouldn't speak to me for several days.

I suspected Hugh would look at me like a pecan shell if I ever really said no to him. And although I told myself it was crazy to care about someone you couldn't say
no
to, I liked that hardness in him, just the way I liked his snobbery.

When Elizabeth or my mother, or anyone else, said anything critical about Hugh, I would feel embarrassed and edgy, but terribly interested. Everything seemed true at the same time—all their faultfinding, and all that I felt for him. And no matter how harsh they were about him, I was glad to hear him being talked about at all. I would think about how I loved to look at him, how comic he could be, how joyful I felt when I said something that made him laugh, how important I felt when he was looking at me thoughtfully because he knew I was talking seriously.

I knew when I bored him, or when I was irritating to him. Sometimes, during our evening phone calls, I'd feel restless and run out of things to say, and I had the habit then of saying, “All right, all right …” Once I said it five times. And he'd imitate my voice; he'd mock me, and I knew he couldn't stand it. If I bit my knuckles or my nails because I was worried, he'd turn his head away as if I was doing something a little disgusting.

I saw him alone one more time before school ended. We went to the Mill. He seemed nervous and far away. I figured he was worried about how the play was going, so I asked him about it.

“I hate that play,” he said. “And Tate was stupid to have suggested it. Nobody is up to O'Neill. They haven't even learned their lines—they flop on the stage like dying fish. They don't care. I don't care.”

“Maybe it doesn't matter so much,” I said. “It's the graduation that counts.”

“Counts for what?” he asked morosely. “Half of them won't go to college, and the other half will stay in school for four or six or even eight years, buried in books, books, books … days and years of them. I want to read what I want to read. I don't want to be graded like beef—prime or scraps.”

He wasn't looking at me but staring up at the ceiling. I didn't know what to say or do. But suddenly his head came forward and he looked right at me. He made a little hut with his hand, cupping it on the table, his thumb and index finger making a door.

“Here's where we'll go,” he said. “This is our little house in Tierra del Fuego.”

He made the fingers of his other hand run toward the door of his hand. “That's us. We're coming home from the wild beach, and the breakers are crashing on the sand behind us. And we're going to have a wonderful lunch of Tierra del Fuego lobsters with melted butter made from the milk of the very small Tierra del Fuego cows. And then we'll have coffee that no one but us will ever taste, made from the beans of our coffee bushes, picked by the peons who work for us.”

I stared at the cave of his hand for what seemed like many minutes. I didn't know where Tierra del Fuego was. I didn't care. I only wanted to be there.

He lifted his hands from the table and dropped them to his lap. He started smiling, then he snapped his fingers. “Wake up, Victoria,” he said. “It was a dream.”

“I knew that,” I said.

“For a moment, you weren't sure,” he said, laughing.

I changed the subject. “When are you coming back from Italy?” I asked.

“Probably the middle of August,” he answered. “By then, you'll have finished the play.”

“I don't know about that. I'm going to try and get a job this summer.”

“You're too young to get any kind of job that matters.”

“I don't care about it mattering. I just want to make some money of my own. I'll be fourteen in the fall. There are lots of jobs I can get, clerk in a store, or checkout girl in a supermarket, or run a day camp for little kids—”

“Impresario,” he interrupted.

“I don't know what that is,” I said. “This is serious to me—getting work this summer.”

“You'd better find out what impresario means,” he said. “Because that's what I intend to be.” I could tell he was making fun of himself, but not quite.

“I'll finish those scenes when I can—”

“They're not scenes. You're writing a play—” he interrupted.

“It's not my whole life,” I said. “I don't even like to write.”