A Solitary Blue (18 page)

“You
are
high honor roll, every time.”

“I'm sorry.” Luckily, Phil thought that was funny, so Jeff, hearing how stupid it sounded, had a chance to say, “I'm repeating eighth grade — I don't know how I'll do next year.”

“You don't
mind
being high honor roll, do you?” Phil looked surprised.

“You know, I don't know.”

“Greene, you're unbelievable. I can't tell if you're a total fink or a really unusual guy.”

“Probably something in between,” Jeff said.

Jeff did have the chance to ask Phil if he'd like to go out in the boat, crabbing or something, once school let out. Phil knew where they lived, “on the old Mitchell place; they used it for hunting.” He said he'd call if his father took the chains off for a day. The Milsons sold some of their vegetables and all of their eggs in Salisbury during the summer, as well as having a roadside produce stand, so he was pretty busy. “I wouldn't mind a day off, I'll tell you,” Phil said. This was as they left school on the last day, when everybody burst out the doors, and some of them yelled aloud their joy. Jeff took his bike from the rack and rode home alone. He was satisfied, he thought, with the way he'd spent the year. He hadn't made any enemies and he might have made a friend. That made it a terrific year for him.

Brother Thomas spent two weeks with them that summer. He and Jeff learned how to bait and set out a trotline, then how to run it, the motor at its slowest speed, one of them steering while the other netted the crabs that clung to the pieces of bait as they rose to the surface. It took them most of the two weeks to get good enough at it, and it wasn't until the last week that they made the kind of haul Jeff read about, three bushels in two hours. They couldn't, of course, eat all those crabs. They culled out the very largest to cook and turned the rest loose, dumping the crabs overboard, like a living landslide. They were out in the bay that day, wearing just shorts. When the sun got too hot they slipped over the side to cool off, avoiding the translucent jellyfish who had arrived in mid-July to make swimming unpleasant. The jellies clustered near the surface of the dark water and clung with stringy formless tentacles to anything that caught them, the net, the line, a shoulder. Jeff had been stung often enough to learn that, while it hurt some, it only lasted for about half an hour.

That day was, he thought, just about perfect. Brother Thomas liked to sing, so they sang as they waited between runs down the trotline, and Brother Thomas taught Jeff the elements of harmony singing. They watched workboats run by single men or crews. They saw sailboats and motor yachts trailing fishing lines and a little red motor boat run by a solitary woman whose hair was a tangled mass of gray curls. She went up along the coast then turned into a dock that seemed unattached to any house. They went back home so baked by sunlight that Jeff felt as crusted with salt as a pretzel and was surprised not to see large salt flakes on his arms and legs.

One day, when they were downtown so Brother Thomas could soak up local color, Jeff was killing time wandering up and down the sidewalk by the town harbor, waiting to meet Brother Thomas for a Coke before driving home. Brother Thomas had gone into the fish market to get them some lobsters, “for a housegift, to go with that champagne I brought.” A woman came out of the little grocery store, carrying two huge bags. Jeff looked at her and thought he should offer to help her carry them. She looked old, but she didn't move as if she was old. He hesitated, inching towards her. She had leathery, tanned skin and wore a long skirt with a baggy blouse over it. Her hair was iron gray, and her eyes looked at him as if she was angry at him. Over her shoulder he saw Brother Thomas approaching, so he stepped aside without offering to take the bags. She walked on by him, but as she passed she said something that sounded like “manners of a chicken.”

Jeff felt her anger toward him, and he felt unaccountably shaky. Why should he be afraid, he asked himself. He didn't even know her. She couldn't possibly do anything to him. But he felt — inside himself, and he didn't lie to himself about it — as if she could, even though he knew she couldn't.

“Who's that?” Brother Thomas asked. “What did you say to her? I'm trying hard to imagine — I mean
you,
I've known you for years — what could you have said? Tell, Jeff, I'm going crazy with curiosity.” His humor masked genuine concern for Jeff, Jeff saw that.

“Not a word.” Jeff still felt quivery from the odd encounter. “Honest, I didn't do anything. I was even thinking about offering to carry her bags.”

They watched the woman go out on the dock, then climb down into a motor boat and rush off.

“That's the same red boat, isn't it,” Brother Thomas said. “Wait here.” He went into the grocery store and came out in a few minutes, carrying a bag of potato chips. “Well” — he justified the purchase — “I couldn't just go in and pump her for information. Her name's Abigail Tillerman, she's a widow, had three children, all of whom left home years ago. The youngest died in Vietnam — she might be a little crazy with solitude, at least that's what people say. That store is withering of neglect.”

“How'd you find out all that?”

But Brother Thomas was watching the now-empty water of the harbor. “When you think of all the lost souls in this world. What life does to people. Do you know what I mean?”

Jeff did, because he was one of them. “I guess,” he said.

“And that store — the woman in there was another one. But this Tillerman woman — at least her spirit wasn't broken, wouldn't you say?”

“I wouldn't like to meet her again,” Jeff said, “and not in a dark alley.” He'd need to be tougher than he ever could be, and it wasn't just this one old lady, it was most people in the world. Jeff felt as if he'd been keeping a secret from himself and had come around a dark inner corner to rediscover it. He felt shaky, but as if he'd learned something. Probably it was good for him. He thought it was. It wasn't good for him to get confident; just like he'd been confident about Melody. It was when you got confident you got taken by surprise and really banged around.

It was strange, he thought to himself a couple of weeks later, that he'd thought of Melody. It had been such a long time, since they lived in Baltimore that strange fall, that he'd even mentioned her name to himself. He had put her away and shut the drawer on her. The coincidence struck him because the Professor sat him down in the long summer twilight to talk about her. “Your mother has written me — about you.”

“I don't want to go there. Professor? I don't have to, do I? Can she make me? I
can't.
”

The Professor's eyes studied him. Jeff looked away, to the scrubby grass of the lawn. He didn't want to hear what the Professor would say. For a long time, the Professor didn't say anything. When he did speak, it took Jeff a minute to figure out that he hadn't changed the subject. “Right after she left, I was miserable and
ashamed. I just wanted her to come back. It was like that for a long time. But then, when I got used to it, I began to be afraid she
would
come back; just thinking of it scared me. Really scared me — it took courage just to answer the phone if it rang. In case it was her. I think I understand how you feel, Jeff.”

Jeff appreciated that, but it didn't answer his question “Can she make me go see her?”

The Professor sighed. “Let me tell you what she wants; it's much easier and much harder than what you think. She wants a divorce; she doesn't say why. She wants custody of you.”

“No!” Jeff couldn't sit any more. But he couldn't go too far away because then he couldn't hear his father. “No, I won't,” he said. He walked away, to where the lawn sloped down. “You can't make me.”

“I don't want to make you, you know that.” His father's voice spoke from behind him, patient, trustworthy. “Come back, sit down. I've talked to a lawyer, and they never guarantee, but at your age a court will listen to what you want. A judge will. The lawyer says he's pretty sure of that. But she wants to divorce me, she wants it uncontested, for incompatibility.”

Jeff was back, seated again. “That's OK.”

“Well,” the Professor said, “the lawyer doesn't think so. He says that if it goes through uncontested she could make a strong appeal for custody, at least half the year.”

“What can we do?” Jeff asked. He heard how small his voice was. He looked up at the sky, above the smooth line of marsh grass and the ragged line of trees. The sky was streaked with pastel clouds, yellow and orange and pink.

“I can divorce her for desertion, or adultery if she contests that.”

“You mean with Max?”

“Only you'd have to be willing to testify against her, if she contested it. In court. And that seems like an awful lot to ask of you. She is your mother, after all.”

Jeff looked at his feet. They were bare and brown. The soles had thick callouses. “But it's true; why would she contest it?”

“I don't know.” The Professor sounded tired, really tired, and discouraged.

Jeff's attention focused on his father. “Professor, how long has this been going on?”

“She wrote me in March, the first time.”

“That's five months ago, you should have told me.”

“I didn't want to worry you. I was hoping not to have to. Maybe you'd better read her letter.”

The Professor had kept Melody's letters in a manila file folder. Jeff opened it. The first one — he had to read it twice, because on first reading he was thinking about Melody's handwriting, the shapes of the letters and the way her sentences sounded, eager and happy, just the way her voice sounded.

The first letter talked about how she had been surprised to read about his book and asked wouldn't it be a good thing if they formalized the separation by getting divorced. She couldn't possibly give up Jeff, she said, so she would ask for custody. “Unless you've changed radically, Horace, he'll be better off with me. He needs affection and attention, and I know you don't want to deprive him. Do you?”

The second letter sounded like her feelings had been hurt. She said she didn't think the Professor would go to a lawyer; but if he wanted to be that way he was lucky to be able to afford it; she said she missed Jeff and had become suspicious at not hearing from him. Was the Professor allowing her son to communicate with her?

The third had a photograph clipped to it, the picture she had taken in the Charleston airport. “Did you ever see him look like that?” she asked. “Was he ever so happy when he was with you? Have you thought at all about Jeff in this or only about your own convenience?”

Jeff looked at the photograph. The boy was so young, and his smile so broad it made even Jeff smile to look at him, and he knew better. “I'm sorry,” he said, not looking at his father. Everything Melody wrote, every word she used, showed how well she could guess what the Professor was like, how he would react — as if she could see him. That was her real talent, Jeff thought, for feeling what people were like; and he had, he could see, that same talent. But she was using it to get what she wanted from the Professor.

“Oh, well,” the Professor said, accepting the facts as he had been told them by Melody.

“But — but she's lying, I know she's lying. She
lies.
She doesn't mean it. She didn't take any other pictures of me. You know you can't trust her, Professor. Don't let her get to you.”

“What I want to know is, if you're absolutely sure,” the Professor asked.

“I am. Honest. I'm sure.”

His father didn't speak.

“Don't you believe me? You have to believe me. If you don't believe me, then who will?”

“It's all right, I do. So — we'll fight her. She says she knows I'll be a gentleman, which really means she's counting on that. As a weakness.”

“Can we win?”

“The lawyer thinks so, with your testimony. About Max. About — I told him I thought she'd never answered your letters that first year when you came back. I was correct in that, wasn't I?”

Jeff nodded. “Does she know where we live? I mean, these letters all came to the university.”

“I didn't tell her.”

“Good.” Jeff picked up the photograph.

“What are you doing? Don't rip it up. I'd like to keep it, if you don't want it.”

“Is the lawyer sure?” Jeff gave the photograph to his father.

“Pretty sure. I wouldn't even have told you about it except — I never knew what Melody would do. When there's something she wants, she's unpredictable. It'll take a long time, of course. The law always does. Don't brood over it.”

“I'll try,” Jeff said. Even the Professor was scared of Melody. And what if she could make Jeff live with her?

“You wouldn't like to serenade me for a while, would you? I feel like — a glass of wine and some music — to soothe the savage beast.”

So Jeff brought out his guitar, and they ignored the mosquitos while the sun set. After a while, Jeff felt better, and he thought his father did too.