A Solitary Blue (24 page)

All of her attention turned onto him; and he already felt like he'd been battering at himself. He didn't need her to add to that. He looked briefly at his father, to remind himself what was at stake.

Her beautiful eyes looked into his, hurt, surprised. “How can you say that? To me. I'm your mother; doesn't that mean anything to you? I carried you inside me, under my heart. I'm the one who endured giving birth to you. I nursed you, took care of you. He doesn't love you the way I do. He can't, he doesn't have it in him.”

“I mean it, Melody. I don't love you. I really mean it.” Jeff kept his voice level.

Her eyes were wide and beautiful, drawing him in. “You're killing me,” she said. “Here,” and she drew one fist up under her heart and pressed the other hand against it.

“I'm sorry,” Jeff said.

“You owe me more than that. I'm your mother,” she said, angry now.

“I'm sorry,” Jeff said again.

She stared at him. He stared back at her. His shoulders hurt from holding them stiff. After a long time, tears poured out of her eyes. “You've made me very unhappy — you, Jeffie.” He nodded, expressionless. “I hope you're pleased, Horace,” she said.

“It's nothing to do with him,” Jeff reminded her, and she just walked out of the door. He heard a motor start.

Jeff didn't look at his father, who hadn't moved. “I'm sorry,” he said, yet again, but meaning something entirely different.

“Me too,” the Professor said. His eyes were now on the door, and he didn't really hear Jeff at all, Jeff guessed.

“I was bringing Dicey over too.”

The Professor did look at him then, like a man waking up,
and asked, “Were you? Well,” and a little humor was back in his eyes, Jeff thought, or hoped. “The best laid plans gang aft a-gley. Don't they? Another time, maybe.”

“I couldn't have picked a worse one. Anyway, she won't be back again.”

His father understood who he was talking about. “You can't predict what Melody will do,” he told Jeff. “I wonder what made her do this,” he said thoughtfully. “Are you OK, Jeff?”

“I'm fine,” Jeff lied. “I'm just glad it's over. How about you, are you OK?”

“I think so,” the Professor said, without confidence.

 

J
EFF WASN'T FINE, and he knew it. But the Professor didn't know it, which was the important thing.

Five days after Melody's visit, school started. During those days the subject of Melody didn't come up. In fact, both the Professor and Jeff avoided it. Jeff didn't see that there was anything left to say. What he was thinking — about himself and how he'd acted, about the Professor and what Jeff had guessed — he didn't see any reason to burden the Professor with that. Jeff knew he'd done what he really wanted to do, and he knew why, and he even thought it was the right thing. But he wasn't too pleased with himself, all the same.

On the first day of school, Phil came up to him smirking, his face so tan his grin looked like a TV advertisement for toothpaste. “I met your Mom. I'm still recovering. I mean, Jeff — ”

“How'd you do that?” Jeff asked. It was the end of lunch break and they sat outside, while people with new school clothes and deep summer tans made themselves reacquainted. Jeff figured Phil had made some mistake.

“I was covering for my sister at the stand, last Wednesday afternoon — and
to think I almost didn't do it. This dusty old car pulled up, the kind you expect fusty middle-aged people to ride around in, you know? And look at every tomato before they decide which to buy then try to argue down the price. And then buy exactly three ears of corn because she only eats one, and more than two is bad for his digestion. This car pulled up. I didn't pay any attention, except to notice that it had South Carolina plates, because we don't often see those. Then the legs emerged — and the rest of her. By then I was riveted to attention. And that voice. And those eyes — they're like yours only . . . not the same. I mean, she looks right into your eyes with hers. Wow.”

Jeff didn't want to talk about Melody.

“When she asked for
you,
I almost asked if she was your mother. She asked if I knew your address, as a matter of fact. I said you were in my class. She said I looked older than you. She couldn't remember the directions, which makes sense, I guess; we're so rural and she said she lives in the city — so I drew her a map. Is she still there? I'd sure like to see her again. She knows about pesticides and herbicides — she liked our tomatoes.”

Jeff just shook his head.

“I mean, what a great mother for anybody to have,” Phil went on. “Did she say she'd met me?”

Jeff shrugged. He guessed, in her way, Melody was something special.

“With women like that in the world, it makes you glad to be a man, doesn't it?”

That too, Jeff couldn't answer, because he judged himself to have acted like not much of a man in relation to Melody. He had acted the way he felt: scared, and cruel because he was scared. As far as he was concerned, nobody should ever be as cruel to anyone as he had been to Melody. There was no excuse. Phil drifted away from his unresponsive company, and Jeff continued his own thoughts. He'd do the same thing again and the same way if he couldn't do better, but he'd never kid himself about liking what he'd done.

It wasn't that he regretted it, it was just that he couldn't forget. The knowledge was always with him, wherever he happened to be. Nobody else knew. Nobody else could know. Jeff felt as if there was an invisible wall around him that separated him from everybody else. Because he had done to Melody just what she had done to him:
she had thought he loved her and he had told her he didn't. It was the truth, but that didn't make it any better or make him any better.

Except occasionally, when he saw Dicey in the hall, he didn't see the Tillermans, now that school was in session and their crabbing business closed for the season. He was still friendly with her and with Mina and with Phil and Andy. He still played the guitar and got straight A's. He even went to football games and to parties. But he didn't tell anybody, not even the Professor, what he was thinking. It wouldn't do any good, and it would be like asking for comfort. He didn't deserve comfort, or even sympathy.

He was responsible for what he had done, and that responsibility buzzed around his head like birds — like sea gulls in a flock, squabbling in midflight about some morsel of food, trying to grab it from whichever bird had it, attacking each other so greedily that the food fell into the water. He and only he had done that — that knowledge flapped inside his head. He couldn't undo it. He didn't even want to.

So he kept himself aloof, inside himself. When he remembered — waking up in the middle of the night — what he had said, how she had looked, what he had answered, shame washed over him like waves, and he buried his head under the pillow. He woke frequently at night that fall and would wander out from his bedroom to the kitchen. Hang on, he told himself, just hang on and it'll get easier.

He drank a glass of milk, looked out into the blankness of the night, and reminded himself that it was just what he deserved; it was fair enough. He had known what he was doing and he had done it. He thought, he hoped, that the vivid memory would eventually fade. He was young and in good shape: he didn't need eight hours of sleep every night. He would endure, like the Professor had, until his feelings faded a little.

He was sorry the Professor hadn't gotten to meet Dicey, and the Professor even mentioned that once, but not again. He also missed seeing the Tillermans, but that was just something he'd have to put up with. A part of some punishment, a part of the gulls quarreling and reminding him he wasn't to be trusted — like Melody. Not exactly like her, but enough. Phil and Andy were all wrapped up in talking about colleges that fall, and Jeff listened to their conversations,
adding in his opinion when he was asked. Jeff didn't think about colleges for himself.

One November day, when an icy rain sleeted down from the sky, making it chilly even inside the heated car, Jeff passed Sammy Tillerman riding on his bike, a sack of newspapers over his shoulder. The kid's yellow hair was pounded down over his ears by the rain. Jeff pulled the car over and waited for Sammy to ride up. He made Sammy put his bike into the back, and the two of them drove the rest of Sammy's paper route. Sammy was starting to grow. His legs, in soaked jeans, were getting longer and his feet looked big. He was going to be a big, muscular man, Jeff thought. He looked pretty strong, even shivering beside Jeff in the car.

Instead of taking Sammy straight home, Jeff took him to his own house and told him to take a hot shower while he put Sammy's clothes in the drier. He couldn't stand looking at Sammy so cold, even for the ten minutes extra it would have taken to drive him to his grandmother's house. Jeff made cocoa while Sammy called up to explain where he was. It was Maybeth he talked to, saying Jeff would bring him home in a little while. Jeff knew it was Maybeth without asking, because the pace of Sammy's conversation was slower than usual.

“She says hello to you,” Sammy reported. He wore one of Jeff's long-sleeved T-shirts while his clothes dried. “She's funny. She asked me if you were all right, because we haven't seen you, I guess. She didn't ask about me.”

“Well,” Jeff said. “That's interesting.”

Sammy stared at him, as if he'd said something pretty stupid. “But she's right, isn't she? I mean, she knows I'm all right, so she doesn't have to ask. They used to say she was stupid — retarded. Dicey never believed it, but I did. And she is, in some ways, anyway she acts it sometimes — sometimes it drives me crazy she's so slow.”

“Not me,” Jeff said.

“I used to think,” Sammy continued, sitting at the table, drinking cocoa slowly, “that she was going to end up like Momma. I used to think that was bad. Because of how Momma was. But Momma wasn't just one thing or another, she was more than one, all at the same time. And now I'm older, when I think about it I can understand her better. She's dead. She died.”

Jeff could see that Sammy was making himself say that. “I never knew her,” he said, because he thought he ought to say something,
and the Tillermans didn't like sympathy.

“She was a lot like Maybeth, I think,” Sammy said. “I was too little to really know.”

“If she was like Maybeth, I would have liked her,” Jeff said.

“Yeah.”

“Liked who?” the Professor asked. He had come out from his study. “I heard voices. Is there enough cocoa for me? This is miserable weather.” He sat down with them, and Jeff introduced Sammy, then explained why Sammy's clothes were in the drier. Sammy told the Professor about his paper route, and how much money it brought in. He boasted a little. Then he said, his hazel eyes mischievous, “James'll be jealous I met you. Won't he?” he asked Jeff.

“Why should he?” the Professor wondered.

“Because of your book.”

“How old is James?”

“Eleven.”

“That's too young to read my book.”

“He's smart,” Sammy explained.

“But it doesn't have anything to do with being smart,” the Professor said, a little surprised.

Sammy sat back and grinned. “Good-o. Wait'll I tell James you said that. It'll serve him right.”

“Serve him right for what? Being smart?”

Sammy squirmed in his seat. He didn't want to answer that question.

“But I didn't even let Jeff read it until he was fifteen, and he's smart too.”

“Is that true?” Sammy asked Jeff. Jeff nodded. “Why?” Sammy asked the Professor.

“Because there's more to it than just brains, or just being able to read the words. You have to be able to read the ideas, too.”

Sammy studied the Professor. “Could James meet you? He'd like that.”

“I might like it too,” the Professor said. His eyes, full of humor, met Jeff's.

As Jeff drove Sammy home, the boy asked him, “Is that what fathers are like?”

“I guess so. What do you mean?”

“I never had one,” Sammy said. “Mine left before I was even
born. I never wanted one, but yours has thought about things. He's really steady, isn't he? Mine wasn't — he couldn't have been, and Gram met him and she said so too. I guess, maybe, they're all just different. Do you think?'

“I think,” Jeff said. He didn't go inside to say hello to anyone, just dropped Sammy off in the yard and waited while he unloaded his bike.

“Thanks a lot,” Sammy said.

“Any time,” Jeff told him. He ought to bring James over, he thought, because the Professor would like talking with him. He wondered what the Tillermans' father had been like. He guessed a man could walk out as easily as a woman. He guessed he was sorry he'd met up with Sammy, because he knew now how different remembering was from being there, being with them.

Melody didn't try to get in touch with Jeff or, he thought, the Professor. He couldn't be positive about his father, who was perfectly capable of keeping a secret. But he thought, watching him, that the Professor kept on in his usual way. He thought also that the Professor would tell him this time, rather than trying to keep it secret. Sometimes Jeff worried over Melody and almost wished she would get in touch just so he would know if he'd really hurt her. Most of the time, he was just relieved not to have to deal with her, or think about her — he had enough trouble living with his own sense of guilt. He had bad days, when he despised himself and guilt gnawed at his heart; he had not-so-bad days, when he felt responsibility buzzing around his head like flies. He was managing, he reassured himself, getting through the bad days all right, trying to measure if they were growing easier.

All that winter, Phil and Andy were preoccupied with the future: where they were going to apply to college, what they were going to study, what jobs they wanted to have when they were through with school. Even the Professor started to talk colleges. Jeff, feeling that he couldn't make any decisions, tried to put the whole subject off. “Have you thought about it at all?” the Professor asked him.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know what I want to do or study, I don't have any plans or ambitions. It seems like a waste of time.”

“What, college?”

“Thinking about it. Thinking ahead, maybe.”

“Why?”

Jeff shrugged. He didn't want to answer. His father couldn't guess, and Jeff didn't want to tell him about how much energy, and work, it took to make it through every day. His father would worry and feel responsible, if he ever did guess.

“Jeff, you know I don't like to pester you or nag at you, but — ”

Jeff waited.

“But I'm afraid I'm losing touch with you.”

“No, you aren't,” Jeff said. “I'm not. I wouldn't let you.”

“Maybe not, but I'm getting the feeling — the way I got it that fall before we moved. I'm trying to learn from experience — what kind of an historian would I be if I didn't? I get the feeling something is worrying you, and I thought maybe it was college.”

“I'm not worried about college,” Jeff told his father. His father wouldn't ever guess what it was, because his mind didn't work that way. “Honest. If you really want to talk about it, I will.” There was just the one thing he wasn't going to talk to his father about. In a way, it was for the Professor's sake he had done it. The Professor had needed him to do it. If the Professor could forget about Melody then that was the best thing for him.