A Solitary Blue (2 page)

That Melody had gone away didn't make any difference to Jeff at school. His father walked him over in the mornings anyway, and he went home by himself in the afternoons. He wasn't friends with the university children. The town kids never played with the university kids, because the children of professors weren't rich enough to have good toys, and besides, they were the geniuses of the class. Except Jeff, who didn't ask many questions, who did his homework neatly and handed it in on time, who sat quietly at his desk. Jeff was never a favorite with the teacher, or with the student assistants from the Education Department, but the town kids didn't like him even so, because he was a university kid. Jeff sat quiet and did his best to do exactly what the teacher said she wanted them to do. His papers were always perfect.

Sometimes Jeff wondered how everybody knew, right away, what kind of child you were. They all dressed in uniforms, gray flannel pants, white shirts, and blue jackets for the boys, with a red and blue striped tie. The girls wore gray pleated skirts and white blouses
and blue sweaters. Everybody looked alike, but just the same, everybody knew the difference.

That spring, after Melody left, the Professor found a student to live with them, a young man named Jackson. Jackson moved into the Professor's old study. For a month he did the shopping, vacuumed the house, saw to the laundry and meals. Jackson was thin, with long hair he tied at the back of his neck like George Washington and terrible pimples on his face that he tried to hide with a wispy blond beard. He almost never went out except to classes. He studied all the time, because he wanted to graduate
summa cum laude
and go right to graduate school without being drafted. At the beginning of May, he told Jeff he had exams and long papers coming up, so Jeff did the vacuuming and shopping and put fewer clothes into the laundry. Jeff wasn't tall enough to run the machines at the laundromat so Jackson still had to do that, and the cooking. Jackson cooked huge pots of stew that they could eat for two or three days in a row or spaghetti sauce or pot roasts you could warm up. The Professor didn't seem to mind, so neither did Jeff. But after Jackson had gone, the Professor told Jeff they'd have a better selection of possibilities in the fall.

“You could get a girl,” Jeff suggested quietly. Girls could cook, probably, at least as well as Melody. He thought a girl would clean the house to brightness.

“They tend to be unreliable,” the Professor answered.

During the summer, the Professor concentrated on his research and Jeff amused himself. “Thank God you can amuse yourself,” the Professor had often said. Jeff thought probably they wouldn't go to the beach for a week, the way they used to, because Melody wasn't there any more, but they did. They drove over to Ocean City on a Saturday morning and stayed in a one-bedroom apartment a block away from the water. Jeff played on the beach, digging, building castles, watching the people. The waves towered and crashed beyond him. In the mornings, the Professor took him across the highway to the beach and left him there while he went for a walk. “Stay out of the water until I come back,” the Professor told Jeff. “I will,” Jeff promised. He watched his father walk away down the beach to think, walking at the water's edge where there were fewer legs to step over. His father wore long khaki pants, even on the beach, and a cotton shirt; but he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt in the heat, and he took off his shoes and socks to go barefoot.

When the Professor walked back, Jeff could tell him from far off, because nobody else wore long pants or walked so slowly along the packed sand down by the water. Jeff always watched for the first glimpse of the Professor, because he always knew he might not return. “He doesn't know anything about being a father,” Melody had told him, “so you can't expect very much from him, Jeffie.”

They ate sandwiches Jeff had made, then he could play in the water until it was midafternoon and they returned to the apartment to cool off. There, the Professor wrote notes.

They ate dinners in restaurants, crab cakes and crab imperial and steamed crabs, and once, steamed lobsters. They both got sunburned, but not badly. One night, they went down to the boardwalk, and Jeff rode the roller coaster and the rocket — but it wasn't fun anymore, so they came straight back to the apartment. It was different when Melody was sitting beside him, being scared and excited, laughing out loud when the car rolled down an incline, holding him within her arm. Every night Jeff indulged in the pleasures of watching television, because there was a television set that came with the apartment. At the end of the week, they packed up and went back to Baltimore. “It'll be good to get back to work, won't it?” the Professor asked Jeff. Jeff said yes.

The year Jeff was in third grade, the housekeeper was named Tony and he was a sociology major who liked to have noise around him. He liked to tell the Professor what was wrong with the university when they sat at meals, he liked to listen to his radio while he did housework. And he liked to cook. He taught Jeff to help him and also taught him good recipes. Jeff did his homework after supper that year, because, as Tony said, since they didn't have a TV, there was nothing else for him to do. The Professor worked before dinner and after, as usual.

“I never thought they worked so much,” Tony said to Jeff. “I always figured professors had kind of an easy life. Not your old man. But he doesn't publish, does he? I dunno, there must be more to life than this. Where
is
your mother, anyway?”

“I don't know,” Jeff said.

“I saw her a couple of times, my sophomore year. At rallies, across a crowded room. She was a good looker. She seemed sincere. Taste that spaghetti sauce and tell me what it needs, will you, kid?”

It was Tony who, by forgetting to take Jeff down to the barber
to keep his crewcut short, changed Jeff's way of wearing his hair. Before then, it was cut off short and straight, like a mown field, and it would grow out slowly until it stuck out over his head like a puffball until the Professor would say, “Isn't it about time to cut his hair?” But Tony didn't get around to it, and Jeff's hair grew until it lay long and flat on his head, like the Professor's. But Jeff's hair was dark, almost black, like Melody's.

When Jeff was in fourth grade, a boy named Andrew kept house for them because he had to or he couldn't afford to go to the university. Andrew really wanted to live in a fraternity, he wanted to go to friends' parties, he went to all the football games and basketball games and baseball games. What he did around the house, he did angrily, his face angry above the vacuum cleaner, his hands angry in the dishwater. That year, the Professor started going out every Thursday evening, to have dinner and then play Whist afterwards. If Andrew had something he wanted to do Thursday night, Jeff was old enough to be left alone. Andrew didn't tell the Professor this, but he told Jeff. Jeff didn't tell the Professor either, because he didn't want to upset the Professor's routine. When he was alone at night in the house, he just went up to his room with a book and sat on his bed reading until he heard someone come in. Then he turned off the light and fell asleep.

The year Jeff was in fifth grade, they had a graduate student from the Physics Department, Ian, who had a thick beard and spent long hours in the lab, working on his thesis. At the beginning of each week, Ian put up a list of when he would be in the house. He took Friday and Saturday nights off and went to see his girl friend. He was going to be married in June, “Although why anybody gets married these days I don't know. Given the statistics on divorce. What about your old man?” he asked Jeff. He sat with Jeff at the table, doing labs or problems, while Jeff did his homework. Jeff looked up at Ian. If he was teasing, Jeff was ready to show that he got the joke. He didn't seem to be teasing, so Jeff looked serious. “Your father, for example; he's easy to live with. Maybe he was just too old for her. What do you think?”

“I don't know,” Jeff said, although he thought he did know, maybe. He knew Melody's complaints, anyway. He didn't know
about his father; his father never said anything, one way or the other.

“Don't you wonder?” Ian asked.

Jeff shook his head. As long as the Professor's life suited him, he would probably stay. “He's afraid of changes,” Melody used to tell Jeff. “He's a creature of routine. And he doesn't know how hard it is on other people.” It wasn't hard on Jeff, however; not nearly as hard as it would be if the Professor decided to leave too. So Jeff didn't wonder, he just made sure that the Professor's life was what the Professor wanted.

The summer before sixth grade, sitting behind his father as they drove back from their week at Ocean City, Jeff asked who was going to housekeep for them that year. “Nobody,” the Professor said. “You're old enough now, aren't you?”

Jeff could hear that his father wanted him to be old enough. “Yes,” he agreed. He looked at his father. The back of the Professor's neck was sunburned, and so were his hands on the steering wheel. They got caught in two traffic jams, where the road narrowed to bridges to cross rivers.

But the Professor didn't mind. He turned around to Jeff. “It doesn't make any difference what time we get there, does it.”

“No,” Jeff agreed.

That fall, one of the Professor's Whist players became a friend. This friend came to their house to visit and do Greek with the Professor, so Jeff met him. He was a man in his forties, younger than the Professor, who taught Theology at the university. He was a Catholic Brother, Brother Thomas. “Doubting Thomas,” he introduced himself to Jeff, the first night he came to their house. Jeff wondered, without asking, what he meant. The brown eyes studied his face. “It was a joke,” Brother Thomas said, so Jeff smiled. “I had no idea you had a son, Horace. Well, I guess gossip said you did, but I'd forgotten.”

Jeff shook his hand and looked at the man. He was round and short, his round head was bald except for a fringe of pale hair that ran around the base of his skull. Like the Professor, he wore big, square glasses. He wore a black suit, with the round white collar showing above his black shirt front. “You're old for such a young son, aren't you, Horace?”

“I married late,” the Professor answered.

“Ah,” Brother Thomas said. He had brought a bottle of wine with him. He insisted that the Professor let Jeff taste it. Jeff sat quiet at the table, working out how they wanted him to behave. He watched their eyes and listened carefully to their conversation. Brother Thomas's eyes often rested on Jeff, but the man didn't ask him questions so he didn't volunteer anything. The Professor paid close attention to what Brother Thomas said, so Jeff deduced that he thought the man was interesting and wanted him to enjoy himself. Jeff took special care over the dinner, so that the brother would like the food, even if it was only hamburgers on rolls. He toasted the rolls and buttered them. He turned the hamburgers frequently, so that they would be cooked but not too thickly crusted. He chopped onions and sliced celery to add to the salad.

“A man with your taste should have a decent set of wine glasses,” Brother Thomas said, holding up his glass. They were all sitting around the kitchen table after dinner. The Professor had moved his study back downstairs, and after three years the living room was filled with boxes of books and boxes of papers and boxes of old clothes. There was no place else in the house to sit.

“I can't afford to indulge my tastes,” the Professor said.

“You could strike for a raise,” Brother Thomas suggested. “Carry placards, deliberately teach untruths. Or how about a sitdown strike?” Jeff had never heard of anyone talk to his father in the easy, off-hand way Brother Thomas did. It looked like the Professor didn't mind.

It was from Brother Thomas that Jeff learned that some people thought the Professor did a good job at the university. “What do you think of your father, putting together the best history department in Baltimore, maybe even Maryland,” Brother Thomas said.

“I think that's good,” Jeff said. Brother Thomas winked at him.

The Professor, however, denied it. “It's nothing like first-rate.”

“Academic reputations take a while to spread; there's a five to ten year lag, you know that — or you should; you're the historian.” Brother Thomas sounded very sure. “You watch, Horace, your reputation is catching up with you. The students you've dreamed of are lurking on your horizon.”

The Professor opened his mouth as if to say something, but just shook his head. Jeff sipped at the wine. It didn't taste fruity to
him, but thick, so that it left a coating across his tongue, and slightly bitter. He kept his face expressionless.

“Look at the sign-ups for your courses,” Brother Thomas insisted. “Horace, you can add two and two. Honestly, Jeff, your father,” he said, but he said it fondly, as if the Professor amused him.

Jeff looked at his father. He wondered if this was the way the Professor liked to be talked to, but he knew he himself couldn't talk that way.

“Time will tell,” was all the Professor said.

“Time is telling,” Brother Thomas corrected him. “The other members of your department have even stopped trying to get your fired.”

“Have they? That's a blessing,” the Professor said.

Brother Thomas chuckled. “I must admit I wondered if you handled their attempts at rebellion the way you did on purpose.”