A Solitary Blue (7 page)

Jeff couldn't tell her any. She forgave him that and simply played what she wanted. Her songs were mostly sad. “Where have all the flowers gone?” one asked, then, “Where have all the young men gone?” They had all gone to war and been destroyed so the song asked, “When will they ever learn?” She sang a song about a calf being taken to market, a song with a refrain in the voice of the uncaring winds: “Calves are easily bound and slaughtered, never knowing the reason why,” she sang; “But whoever treasures freedom, like the swallow must learn to fly.” She sang a song he rather liked, about a mine caving in, in Nova Scotia. She played the same thin strum on the guitar for that one that she had played for the others, but Jeff could hear in the song itself how the guitar might sound behind the melody line, how it should sound, strong and rhythmic: “For all their lives they dug a grave, two miles of earth for a marking stone, two miles of earth for a marking stone.”

The guitar didn't sound so good, but Melody's voice — low and sweet, holding onto the notes — poured over him. She sang as if she believed each and every word. Her eyes shone with sincerity and she curved over the instrument like a flower bending in the wind.

Jeff watched and listened, basking in his own feelings: of being with his own mother, who wrapped her love around him; of being — strange as it seemed — home, where he was welcome; of waking up to a world where his help was needed to right what was wrong; of lying on soft grass under trees hundreds of years old beside walls that his ancestors had built; of being logy with the perfumed heat of the day.

Melody had to go out to a party that night. She piled her hair on top of her head, put on a lacy blouse and a long patchwork skirt, and kissed Jeff goodnight. “I have to go,” she said. He didn't mind and said so. “See you in the morning,” she said, her hand lingering on the top of his head just as his eyes lingered on the place where she had been standing, long after she had gone out the door.

He sat with Gambo and the two aunts in a living room dominated by a big color television set. Gambo held the remote control box in her hand, and she turned the sound down so that she could talk with Jeff, who sat beside her on a satin-covered love seat. The
two aunts had straight-backed chairs drawn up close to the television screen.

“You're a Boudrault and you don't even know what that means,” Gambo said. “There's so much to tell you.” Jeff looked alert and concentrated on not being distracted by the moving figures on the screen at the corner of his vision. Gambo folded her hands on her lap. The large diamond ring she wore on her left hand glittered. On her right hand, a ring of small diamonds surrounded a flat green stone. Her eyes followed Jeff's glance.

“An heirloom.” She held out her right hand for Jeff to look more closely at the ring. “My great-grandmother's engagement ring, made to order here in Charleston. She loved jade. Her collection of jade figurines is in the bank now — the cost of insuring it is prohibitive, over sixty pieces, each exquisite. The goldsmith worked her initial into the setting, but you can only see that under a magnifying glass, the letter D. They say the goldsmith was in love with her. Of course, everybody was: she was a great beauty in her day. We had a portrait, but like so much else it has been lost to us. I never saw her. She died young, in childbirth, but this ring my grandmother left to my mother, my mother to me. Dolores, her name was Dolores. This other” — she held up her left hand — “was my engagement ring and I always wear it. But the jade is dearer to me as the years go on. He was killed, you know, in the First War, and I was left with my memories and the one child. Just as Melody's poor father was killed in the Second War. The Boudrault women have married young. They have not been fortunate in their marriages, not fortunate at all.” Her voice was dry, cracked like fine china after years of wear. She went on and on, until Jeff had a sense of family spreading out around them endlessly, and only an hour later, when she was lost in reminiscences, did he understand that the names she mentioned, the people she spoke of, were most of them long ago dead. The family spread not out and around, but back, back into time. At last, she looked at him and said, “I feel — as if I can pour myself into you, everything I've learned, everything I know, and you will take it on into your life.” Then she rose and withdrew from the room. The aunts — only they weren't aunts, Jeff remembered, but cousins from different branches of the family — remained where they were, staring into the television, chattering like birds to themselves. Jeff too went upstairs to bed.

In his room, he changed to pajamas, folding his clothes neatly
into the drawers, putting soiled socks and underwear away. He went down to the bathroom, peed, lowered the toilet seat, brushed his teeth, then washed his face so that he could have the pleasure of drying it on the thick, soft towel. The night was too warm for even a sheet.

There was something about the house and the women in it that made him feel contented, as if to be contented was something you actually did. He thought lazily that he would figure out what it was and lay back on the softness of the bed, under the dark air. But he fell asleep.

After the first couple of days, Jeff didn't see so much of his mother, unless she took him with her to a meeting or to help with stuffing envelopes or distributing posters. But her presence marked the day for him. She knew, somehow, what he wanted her to do, or say, as if she could read his mind and know how he was feeling. It wasn't that Melody did exactly what he wanted to do, but that everything she did made him feel good, feel loved. It was as if she could see what he saw the way he saw it; as if they were close, even when they weren't actually together. Whenever they were together her eyes shone with affection and pride. He knew he was doing the right things for her, learning about discrimination and pollution, being no trouble to Miss Opal, who praised him for his personal neatness, good appetite, and gentlemanly manners. Gambo talked to him and talked to him, until Jeff had pieced together the names and events so that he could follow her conversation and ask her the questions she wanted to answer. The aunts seldom spoke, but he was conscious of their admiring and approving eyes. During the days he wandered around the historic parts of the city, or traveled by bus to scenic spots beyond its industrialized outer ring, to see plantations and gardens. He had, in the first days with Melody, spent all of his money, even the four dollars left from Brother Thomas's ten dollars when she had bought the most expensive possible bottle of local wine for him. However, he found that Gambo was more than happy to finance an expedition. If he told her at breakfast how much he needed, she would take out her black change purse and give him the dollars he asked for.

Jeff learned the songs Melody liked, until he could sing with her, and in the late afternoons or on evenings when she was at home, they sang together. She started to teach him how to play the guitar, then didn't have time, so gave him the books she had used. He spent
long hours with the instrument, conscious as he held it that she, too, had so held it. He placed his hands where she had placed hers and could almost feel the imprint her hands had left, warm beneath his own. His sense of contentment continued and became the tone of every day. He listened and learned.

Even Miss Opal had stories to tell him of growing up in the old city and the life of the black communities on the nearby islands. Miss Opal lived now in a public housing apartment with her grandson, Willum, whom she had raised since he was five, when his parents both moved up north to take better jobs. Willum was in high school and gave his grandmother a deal of trouble. Miss Opal didn't complain about Willum. This was the way men were, she seemed to say; you had to give a young man plenty of freedom. When the devil got into Willum, she prayed for him, and chuckled over the scrapes he got into and saw to it that he was punished too.

Miss Opal called him Jefferson, as did Gambo and the aunts. His mother called him Jeffie. He had asked her what he should call her, and she told him Melody, “because I'm your mother but I really want to be your friend.” Her name, Melody, sang within him, like the music he could sometimes win out of her guitar. The slow days passed. Jeff passed through them, a Boudrault in his own country. Their general history was his own history, too, the story of his own family was part of the history. His ancestors, all the Boudrault men, had stepped in their long boots where he stepped now or riding tall horses.

Jeff knew, when July turned to August and the long August weeks went by, that he would soon be going back to Baltimore, but even as the day of his return grew closer he could not imagine it. In his final week, he took to traveling farther out from the city. He rode the bus down around John's Island, then once all the way to the end of the southern line. The bus stopped at a crossroads, by a general store. Jeff got off and walked, heading away from the city, passing rickety houses up on cinder blocks, where clothes blew in a steady breeze, crossing between long fields of vegetables, walking under a tunnel of live oaks that arched over the roadway, where Spanish moss hung down like furry icicles. The trees were not tall and straight like the great northern oaks, but bent and convoluted. Their leaves grew small and thick. The hanging moss draped down from them, melancholy but not heavy.

Jeff walked on and on. He came at last to a broad marsh,
through which a narrow creek cut. Beyond it, a line of low trees, palms and pines, marked one of the sea islands.

If he had a boat, Jeff thought, he would like to go over and explore the island. It stretched as far as he could see beyond the marsh. It looked like a different world; it looked tropical.

It was late in the afternoon when he returned that day, but nobody questioned him, nobody criticized his dusty legs or long, unexplained absence. Melody had gone out to a cocktail party and would not be back until much later in the evening; he was in time for dinner, so Gambo and the aunts had not been disturbed. They did not even ask him where he had been, what he had been doing, as if whatever he had done, wherever, must — because he was himself — be as it should.

The next day Melody took him to the bus. She had exchanged his airline ticket for a bus ticket, saying that the Professor had no sense of money, that there were better uses for the extra dollars. Jeff's bus, which left Charleston at five in the evening, would take sixteen hours to make the journey to Baltimore. They stood beside the big Greyhound saying goodbye. With his eyes, Jeff drank in is mother's face. She held both of his hands in hers, and her beautiful grey eyes filled with tears. “You never met Max, and he wanted to meet you,” she said. Jeff didn't know what to say. “I've been so proud of you, Jeffie. And you've been happy, haven't you?”

Jeff agreed, although happy wasn't the word he would have chosen to express the wonder of the summer. The driver leaned down and urged Jeff into the bus. Melody wrapped her arms around him and kissed his hair. “You have money?” she asked him.

Jeff shook his head.

“And I don't have any with me,” she wailed. “Oh, Jeffie, what a bad mother I've been.”

Jeff smiled at her. “No, you aren't, Melody,” he said. “It doesn't make any difference, I won't starve to death in a few hours.”

He had to climb onto the bus, then, and find a seat. By the time he was settled by a window she was gone.

Jeff sat alone, toward the back of the bus, beside the window. Few other people rode on it. The bus went west on the highway out of Charleston. Once they had left the city, they were traveling through a scrub pine forest and then, as they turned to head north, over flat land — flat fields, flat marshes, little flat ponds up against the
highway. Slowly, the late afternoon light faded into the golden shades of sunset.

Going from Charleston, which lay behind him, to Baltimore, which waited ahead, Jeff felt not so much that he was traveling as that he occupied one single place, which rested between the other two. He looked out the window.

It was not simply going from a warm to a colder climate, or from his mother to his father. It was also going from one self to another. In Charleston, he was Jeffie, Jefferson, Melody's son, the last in a long line of Boudrault men. In Baltimore, he was Jeff Greene, self-sufficient and reticent, no trouble at all, occupying his corner of the world. But he knew now how it felt to be loved, to be happy.

The bus rumbled on.

One of the small ponds came up into view. A solitary blue heron stood at its edge, half-hidden in the pale marsh grass. The heron's legs were like stilts under its clumsy body. Its dusky feathers hung shaggy, ungroomed. It was perfectly motionless. Its long beak pointed down from a head both unnoble and unbeautiful. Its beak aimed down into the still, dark water. The heron occupied its own insignificant corner of the landscape in a timeless, long-legged solitude.

The bus swept past the pond. After a while, the sun completed its setting and darkness came up beyond the windows, a darkness lit by the occasional farmhouse window, the occasional crossroads, the occasional sign, the occasional town.

Jeff sang Melody's songs to himself, under his breath, under the rumble of the motor. He thought that someday, maybe, he would have to choose between his parents, the two of them. At the thought, his heart beat painfully in anticipation: he knew who he would choose, he knew why, and he said her name.

 

J
EFF CLIMBED DOWN the steps of the bus. He didn't see the Professor. He had picked up his suitcase and stood looking dazedly around — before he caught the eye of a short, round man in a black suit, who was waving to attract his attention. A clerical collar shone white around the man's neck. Brother Thomas. Jeff's suitcase felt heavy.

“Welcome back, welcome home,” Brother Thomas said. “Your father asked me to meet you. You look taller than I remember; have you grown? And tan too; did you have a good time? The car's right outside, unless somebody's slashed the tires or removed the engine. Whatever made you take the bus back? How was the trip?”

Jeff tried to put an answering expression on his face. He followed the short figure through the waiting room and out to the street. He walked into a wall of heat, hesitated, then forced himself on. Brother Thomas put Jeff's suitcase in the trunk; Jeff collapsed weakly into the front seat. He had stopped being actively hungry some time in the middle of the night, but ever since then he had felt as if he was getting paler and paler. He knew he only had to wait until they got to the house to eat, but the closer that time came, the less he felt the strength to hold on that long. He leaned his head back against the car seat. He closed his eyes. He was thirsty, too, so thirsty his tongue felt twice as thick as usual.

“I can't sleep on buses either.” Brother Thomas spoke beside him. Jeff opened his eyes, turned his head. “Planes, I can, and trains and cars. But not buses. I don't know what it is. Do you feel all right?”

“Just hungry,” Jeff said.

“Didn't you get enough breakfast?”

Jeff smiled at that and shook his head.

“Did you get any breakfast?” Jeff shook his head. “Why not? But what about dinner last night, did you have dinner?” Jeff shook his head. “The bus must have stopped, they always do; why didn't
you get out and eat something?”

“I didn't have any money.”

Brother Thomas opened his mouth, then closed it. He pulled the little car out into traffic. Jeff closed his eyes again. The air steamed and smelled thick with exhaust fumes. The noise of traffic rang in his ears.

Brother Thomas pulled the car to a stop and Jeff opened his eyes. They were in the parking lot beside a small stucco building. Jeff wanted to protest that he really wanted to get home and eat, but he didn't have the strength. “Come on,” Brother Thomas urged him. Jeff obeyed.

Brother Thomas led him into a restaurant, where they sat at the counter to order eggs, sausages, fried potatoes, toast, juice and milk for Jeff, and a cup of coffee for Brother Thomas. Jeff gulped down a glass of water, then another. When the food came, he ate unhurriedly but with full attention. When he had finished, he could feel the energy being carried around his bloodstream. He turned to his host, whom he discovered staring at him. “Thanks,” Jeff said. “Really. I was hungrier than I thought.” He picked up his water glass and emptied it again.

“I wish I could eat like that and not put on weight,” Brother Thomas said. “You do look better. Less like a cooked noodle. Did you have a good time?”

“Yes. I've got a bottle of wine for you. In my suitcase. My mother” — his heart lifted at the word and at the memory — “helped me pick it out.”

“Ready to go?” Brother Thomas put a five dollar bill down on top of the check.

“I'll ask the Professor to pay you back. I'm sorry,” Jeff said.

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Brother Thomas said. They went back to the car. “He really wanted to meet you, your father. In fact, we were going to have dinner at the airport tonight, when your plane came in, all of us. There's a pretty good restaurant out at the airport. But he had a faculty meeting this morning.” Jeff shrugged. Brother Thomas, his face blotched by the heat, beads of moisture on the bald top of his head, didn't say anything else about it. “Was your mother as beautiful as ever?”

“She really is,” Jeff said. His words were caught up in a terrific yawn.

“You can tell us all about it, tonight,” Brother Thomas promised
him. He made sure Jeff got into the unlocked house then drove off, waving aside Jeff's thanks.

In the narrow hallway, then in his own small room, unpacking his bag, Jeff had a strange sense of disappointment. It wasn't because the Professor hadn't been there to meet him; maybe it was because summer was over, or because the house was so — dark and small. Jeff fell onto the bed in his underwear and fell asleep. Heat lay over him like a wet woolen blanket.

When he awoke, it was late afternoon and his body was bathed in sweat. For a long moment, he did not quite know where he was. Then he opened his eyes. The cracked and yellowed paint on the ceiling, the cramped room, the window framed by limp curtains and itself framing a view over rooftops to the flat surfaces of distant buildings, the sulfurous sky — he sat up in bed. Everything looked dingy, although it looked also as if it had been recently cleaned. Jeff felt the little house pressing close around him.

He went to take a shower. From downstairs, he heard noises. In the shower, which he ran cool, he concentrated on folding close in around himself the remembered contentment of the summer, like armor against — he couldn't name it, but it threatened him. He summoned up Melody's image, he summoned up her voice; to himself he sang her song about the calf being taken to market and the swallow soaring above.

Jeff dried off, stepped back into his underpants, and went to put on a shirt and a pair of shorts. He combed his hair in front of the mirror. Glancing into the glass, he caught his own eyes: gray, a smoky gray circle rimmed with darker gray at the outside, faint darker gray lines radiating out from the pupil; the eyes were circled by thick dark eyelashes; they were large eyes, a rounded almond shape. He stared at them, his glance going from one to the other mirrored eye, surprised.

These were his mother's eyes. His eyebrows did not arch over them, as his mother's did, but were straight. His hair lay flat on his head; his mouth was broader, thinner than Melody's. But the shape of the face — he almost traced it in the mirror with his finger — the straight, narrow nose, the chin, was very like hers. He looked back into his own eyes, a gray so deep that it did not ever change colors. They were like hers, they were hers. He felt almost as if he could convince himself that he was looking at Melody, that she
was with him now. He hugged the idea to himself and went downstairs.

The Professor sat in the kitchen, and Brother Thomas stood at the sink, peeling potatoes. The back door stood open. Both windows were open. They were trying to relieve some of the heat that poured out of the oven. Jeff smelled roasting beef.

The Professor studied him for a moment with mild blue eyes behind big glasses. Jeff studied his father. Finally Jeff said, “It's hot.”

“That it is,” the Professor agreed. His face was flushed and not tanned. “Did you enjoy your summer?”

“Yes,” Jeff answered. “Did you?”

“Yes,” the Professor said. Jeff sat down. Brother Thomas continued peeling potatoes, then he put them in a saucepan to parboil. He turned around to face the two at the table.

“Is that all you have to say?” he asked them. “Well, I've got questions. You two may be incurious by nature, but I'm not. Shall we open Jeff's wine?”

When they each had a tall glass of wine, Brother Thomas proposed a toast, “To Jeff on his return.” He tasted the wine solemnly. “Your father had a quiet summer,” he told Jeff. “Work, work, work. Drone, drone, drone. Buzz, buzz, buzz.” He looked at the Professor as he said this, his expression friendly.

Jeff's father didn't seem to mind the teasing. “And Jack is a dull boy,” he said.

Brother Thomas smiled. “Well, you didn't say anything. ‘Did you have a nice time? Yes, how about you? Yes.'” His voice as he mimicked them was flat, monotonous. “For all he knows you spent the summer in and out of jail.”

“On what charges?” the Professor asked.

“I don't know, Horace, inciting to riot, being a public nuisance, you know, your everyday criminal charges. Murder and mayhem.”

Jeff looked at the two men, surprised, amused. They had always talked like this but he had never heard the undercurrent of joking before. He had changed, he thought, Melody had changed him. His hearing the joking was because of her, his enjoyment of their conversation was because of her.

“Moral turpitude,” the Professor suggested. “I always liked that, that and breach of fiduciary trust.”

Jeff tasted his wine and remembered something. “I spent the change. But I'll pay you back,” he told Brother Thomas.

“Don't worry. What did you spend it on? Or, how did you like the South?”

“I liked it fine,” Jeff said. “Gambo's house is — old and big.” He looked around his own kitchen, seeing the smallness of it, the black places where white porcelain on the stove and sink had chipped away, the yellowed paint on the walls and cupboards, the musty brown linoleum floor. He thought, looking at the Formica table and the slightly rusted stainless steel tubing of the chairs they sat on, of Gambo's dining room, with its long, polished table, its high windows, the china and silver set out on lacy mats.

“You look like sleeping beauty, waking up,” Brother Thomas said.

Jeff flushed, and smiled. He didn't look at his father. “It's all so old and beautiful. Even though it's hot, it's not hot in the same way, because of the trees and grass and the bricks and the breezes off the harbor.” He couldn't explain how the large airy rooms made him feel.

“And who is Gambo?” Brother Thomas asked. “No, first, why did you take it into your head to come back by bus? I gather” — he turned to look at the Professor, who nodded agreement — “that you refused to fly.”

Jeff didn't know what to say. “It doesn't cost as much,” he explained to his father. The pale blue eyes behind glasses showed no expression. “And we could walk to the bus station. She doesn't have any money, not very much, I think.” The eyes flickered, then returned to expressionlessness.

An uncomfortable silence occupied them. Jeff looked at Brother Thomas, who was staring at the Professor, and the man's brown eyes looked surprised, but he didn't say anything. Jeff knew he had said something wrong; he'd forgotten the rules for this house. He couldn't be sure what was wrong about it, except that something was. But he wasn't going to tell on Melody.

“Gambo's my great-grandmother,” he said, to change the subject. “She's a Boudrault, that's an old family; she knows all about her ancestors. She told me about them. It's her house, down on the Battery — that's the old part of the city. I guess” — he decided to say the words boldly — “my mother lived there when she was growing up.” He looked at his father.

“I never met Gambo,” the Professor told Brother Thomas. “Melody” — he looked at Jeff as he said her name — “used to go down in the summers for a long visit, but I never went. I gathered that Gambo's always lived in Charleston, a rather wealthy family, something of a southern belle. She must be pretty old now, although I think she was married young — not that old really, if her husband died in 1918, not at all old for a great-grandmother. In her seventies? Jeff, do you know?” Jeff shook his head.

“She doesn't look as old as the aunts,” he offered.

“The aunts? What aunts?” Brother Thomas asked.

Jeff tried to explain about the aunts who were really cousins, and then about the mornings and how the air was sweet and fresh. He talked about the shaded streets of the city and the outlying plantations, restored so you could see what life had been like. They ate roast beef and oven-roasted potatoes, and the two men finished the bottle of wine. Brother Thomas asked Jeff questions and Jeff answered them.

“What did you do all day?” Brother Thomas asked. Jeff told him. “What did you like best?” Brother Thomas asked. “I liked it being so beautiful,” Jeff answered. “I like playing the guitar.” He didn't mention other things he had liked, the fluttering attentions of the aunts, his great-grandmother's way of telling him and telling him that he was a Boudrault of Charleston, Melody kissing him goodnight.

“Are you going back next summer?” Brother Thomas asked.

Yes, Jeff wanted to answer, wanted to be able to answer with confidence. But “I don't know,” he said.

“You never can tell with Melody,” the Professor told Brother Thomas, his eyes on Jeff.

Jeff didn't argue, but he knew what he knew.

Jeff wrote his thank-you note to Gambo right away, and after a week, when school had opened and he had something he could write about, he wrote a letter to Melody. He made it as interesting as he could — telling her about his classes and teachers, especially that there were no women teachers because he thought that would interest her. He thought he might get an answer after a week, and for the last two weeks of September he waited impatiently every day to get home and look at the mail. The Professor usually got home first, because he had scheduled all of his classes in the morning that year, to clear away the afternoon and evenings for work, he said. But in the
pile of magazines and advertising on the kitchen table there was never a letter for Jeff.