A Solitary Blue (16 page)

“You going to get a dog to keep Jeff company?” Brother Thomas asked.

“And a red wagon too?” the Professor asked.

“Why would I need a red wagon?” Jeff asked.

“It's what every boy should have, a dog and a little red wagon,” the Professor told him.

“No thanks. Not that I'm ungrateful. But a dog would chase away the birds and the raccoons.”

“But,” Brother Thomas said, “it could pull you to school in your little red wagon.”

Jeff chuckled.

 

J
EFF KNEW what the Professor wanted from him in school, although the Professor never said anything about it. He wanted the same thing Jeff wanted, just for it to be OK. He didn't expect top grades. He didn't expect Jeff to get popular or play varsity sports or join activities. The Professor's classes didn't start until two weeks after Jeff's so the Professor was there every day when Jeff came home. “Everything OK?” he'd ask.

“OK,” Jeff would answer.

That was the truth. The school was pretty big, so a newcomer could be invisible among all the old friends. Everybody was new to the school, because in Crisfield grades eight through twelve were in one building, an old two-story brick with tall oaks beside the path to the main entrance. Jeff took six classes, five academic courses and mechanical drawing. He hadn't wanted to take mechanical drawing, he'd wanted to take home economics — after all, the way they lived, that would have been really useful to him, cooking and sewing. But the guidance counsellor told him he couldn't recommend home ec, not to a boy and new to the area, there was an unwritten policy. The main sport was football, which Jeff didn't play and didn't want to, so he took the regular PE class where he ran laps, played soccer, and did exercises with the other unathletic boys. He sat quiet in classes, moved quiet through the halls, ate quiet at the lunch table, and nobody paid any attention to him. Not that he wanted attention. He paid attention himself during classes, did his homework without any
trouble at all and made sure it was neat, answered questions when the teachers asked him, answered exactly what he knew they were asking to find out if he knew. The work wasn't hard. Jeff thought maybe that was because he'd done it the year before at the University School; but he couldn't remember much of anything about that.

The first night he spent alone in the house, Jeff expected to be uneasy. The Professor would stay up in Baltimore for two nights. Jeff rode his bike home and leaned it up against the wall by the back door. He entered the empty house, made himself a bologna sandwich, then wandered down to the dock, getting himself used to being alone. He'd promised the Professor not to go out in the boat when he was alone, which seemed fair enough. He sat on the end of the dock and looked around. Behind him, on the low rise of land that passed as a hill in this flat country, the house sat, its windows bright. Before him, the creek ran slowly, the long field of marshes swayed like waves under a breeze not strong enough to do more than rustle the leaves on the trees. A great blue paced its territory down to the west, toward the bay, where little waves rippled. In the opposite direction, the creek twisted up off to the east, going inland. The boat floated beside him, the dock was sturdy beneath him.

Unable to sit still, Jeff went back to the house and brought his guitar down. He hesitated, trying to decide what song to sing. Far up in the sky an osprey circled. Jeff ran the pick down across the strings — and the heron rose, complaining. Jeff watched it, the great wings spread out smoky blue, the long neck tucked in until the bird seemed full of dignity, full of ridiculous dignity, looking pompously ahead, the long legs held stiffly out behind him.

Jeff sat and played, song after song, until the mosquitos rose with the lowering sun to drive him inside. There he made a supper of steak and salad and baked potato. After he had washed up, he began on his homework, spreading the books and papers out over the kitchen table. The silence and solitude wrapped themselves around him.

As he was diagramming the last of a dozen sentences for English, the silence was shattered by a harsh, clanging sound: the telephone. Their telephone never rang, and Jeff knocked over his chair in his hurry to answer it. It was the Professor. “How is everything, OK?” he asked. “OK,” Jeff said. “Really, Professor — except
for the phone scaring me half to death. It's going to be OK.”

“I thought so, and Brother Thomas thought so too, but we thought we'd just call and check in.”

“Thanks,” Jeff said. Then he asked, “Is everything OK up there?”

“Everything's fine. I'll see you the day after tomorrow.”

“See you then. Thanks for calling.”

As the first weeks of school went by, Jeff worked out how things went in Crisfield. He learned to wear jeans to school. Most people wore jeans. It didn't matter what you wore for a shirt. Some people, girls especially, dressed up more, some always looked ratty, but if you wore jeans you didn't stand out. His homework papers, then quizzes and tests, kept coming back perfect. It wasn't because the school was easier than his old school, because it wasn't; and it wasn't that the other kids weren't smart enough, because they seemed smart enough. Maybe not like some of the brains, the really brainy kids up in Baltimore who planned to finish high school in two years and go straight into college — but smart enough, and most of them did their work. They were just regular kids, each one different, everybody a lot alike.

They hung around in packs, the girls in one pack, the boys in another. They didn't know anything about Jeff and didn't seem very interested, but by listening he learned about them, what they thought of themselves, what their fathers did, when they had parties, how they got along with their families. They thought Crisfield was a dull and dumpy little town, the boonies they called it. They liked to go up to the mall in Salisbury, where life was more exciting. They longed to have cars so they could get away. They liked the mechanical drawing teacher all right, they thought the science teacher was the best ever, they were awed by the elderly Latin teacher, a minister's wife who never raised her voice at a class but was so steely and strict nobody dared talk back or come unprepared. They thought the English teacher was a phony, the PE teacher a hero because he rode a Harley to school and was rumored to race it on the weekends. Jeff agreed with them, on the whole. If he hadn't, it wouldn't have made any difference.

A couple of the guys played in a band, a rock band they had formed; Jeff learned that. A couple of other guys, one from English, the other from science, struck him as more interesting than the rest.
He couldn't have said why, precisely. Phil Milson, in English, was pretty funny, without being a clown about it. They were talking about stories by then, and Phil usually had some unusual angle on a story, which the teacher didn't appreciate. But Phil was funny in a subtle way, which Chappelle, the teacher, didn't always get, Jeff suspected, along with most of the rest of the class. Then Andy Barrows in science always had questions and questions and questions, why and how. Listening to his questions and the answers he got, Jeff learned a lot more than the book taught. He wondered how Andy figured out what questions to ask. He didn't talk to either of those two, they had their own friends, but they made his school day more interesting.

The girls giggled and whispered, passed notes, combed their hair, talked about being too fat or too skinny. In class they were more serious, and they were always willing to try talking about what the teacher wanted — but Jeff wasn't much interested in girls. He had the feeling that they were pretending, looking around to see who noticed them. And there was something else, something secret, that they were always trying to get.

Jeff's first report card surprised him by being all A's. He brought it home for the Professor to sign. The Professor didn't seem surprised or particularly overwhelmed. “I guess that's good enough,” he said.

“It's OK,” Jeff said. He thought he knew what his father might be thinking, so he told him. “Even if it had been all F's I would have shown it to you.”

“I hope so. Do you like the school?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Is it easier?”

“Not really. At least, I don't think so. I don't know why my grades are so good.”

The Professor stared at him for a long time, making up his mind about something. They sat outside, on low chairs. Jeff ate an apple. “You've got a high IQ,” the Professor said. “Not genius or anything, but high. Of course, the relevance of IQ tests is under question, and their accuracy. But you've always tested at the top percentages in any standardized test.”

Jeff stopped chewing. “But — ”

“But what?”

“But — I don't know. The principal up at the University School said . . . and Melody told me. . . .”

“The principal hadn't read through your file, he just wanted you out because you were messing up his class averages. But what did Melody say?”

“She said I'd gotten her brains and you must be disappointed.”

“I don't know why she said that — it's not true,” the Professor said. “She's smart enough. I never thought she would have — I should have told you sooner. I'm sorry, Jeff.”

“I'll forgive you,” he told his father, who smiled back at him. “I don't mind. So I'm a classic underachiever?”

“Not this year.”

“How come I never did well in school before?”

“What do you think?” the Professor asked. Jeff didn't know the answer. “It might be worth thinking about,” his father said.

Jeff tried, off and on. He couldn't remember much from school, or before that, kindergarten, and before that the day care center. He remembered some of the teachers, some of the other kids, but not himself, Jeff Greene. It was almost as if he'd been a ghost in all those rooms, all those days, a ghost in his own life.

At the end of October, the Professor showed Jeff a copy of his book. He brought it out one night after dinner and put it on the table in front of Jeff. Jeff looked at it: a book,
Earth's Honored Guests,
with a picture on the cover of the outline of a man's head and shoulders, with a medal hanging down from where his shirt pocket would have been if more than the outline had been drawn. By Horace Greene. Jeff just stared at it.

“That's what I said too,” the Professor said.

Jeff sat there wishing he hadn't given his word to wait until he was fifteen to read the book. He turned it over and saw a photograph of the Professor. His hair shone white, his tie was slightly askew. “Horace Greene is a Professor of History at Baltimore University,” he read. Jeff turned the book over in his hands, feeling the weight of it.

“I'm really impressed,” he said.

The Professor's face was expressionless.

“C'mon, Professor,” Jeff insisted. He knew that that expressionless face was put on to hide something, and he was pretty sure he
could guess what. “Aren't you proud of yourself? Just a little bit? You can tell me.”

“Don't pick on me, please,” the Professor said, giving way and smiling. “Yes, I am — proud. I think it's an honest book. I'm just not very comfortable with having a book published. Maybe it will fade into immediate obscurity; I think I hope it will.”

Jeff handed the book back to his father. He didn't want to do that, he wanted to read it, right away; but he had given his word. He knew he'd better give it back, because if he didn't, he wasn't sure he'd be able to keep his promise.

They were assigned an essay in English, to write about conflict in a real character. Jeff decided to write about John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. He'd often visited the park in Charleston that was dominated by a statue of Calhoun.

When Chappelle finally returned the paper Jeff wrote, Jeff's grade was a perplexing A/F. Chappelle talked a little about all the essays, then read a couple aloud that he thought were good, then hauled one girl over the coals for not writing it herself. Then he called on Jeff. “Greene,” he said, his face serious under carroty hair, one hand on his narrow necktie. “Do you have any questions about your grade?”

Jeff shook his head.

“You should. I rather suspected you hadn't taken the trouble to write down the assignment. Do you write down assignments?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got this one written down?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you could trouble yourself to look it up?”

Jeff was suddenly nervous, even frightened. He didn't think he'd burst into tears and have to leave the room, but he remembered — he'd forgotten it for so long, he'd been stupid to forget it — that he was easy to break down. He read out the assignment nervously. “Write about conflict in someone real.” He remembered, it had been written on the board; he didn't think he'd have forgotten to copy down an assignment written on the board. But what if he had? “At least one thousand words,” he finished reading.

He could remember, as clearly as if it was still on the board, the assignment written out in Chappelle's irregular print. He could trust his memory, couldn't he?

“It was supposed to be somebody you knew, as well,” Chapelle said. “I'm presuming you didn't ever meet John Calhoun.”

His sarcasm was so clumsy it couldn't frighten Jeff. And Chappelle wasn't exactly angry, Jeff could tell, just super-patient and patronizing.

“You'd be right in that, sir,” he agreed. He heard a rustling of attention in the class around him.

“So the grade is fair, even generous,” Chappelle said.

Jeff breathed easy again. If that was all he'd done wrong that was OK. “I didn't question it,” he said.