A Place Apart

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

Winner of the
Paris Review's
Hadada Award

“The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

“One of America's most talented writers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Consistently excellent.”
—The New York Times

“Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.”
—School Library Journal

“Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox's brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott,
Newsweek

“Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —
The New Yorker

“As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox's prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn,
New York
magazine

“Fox's achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

“Fox has little of Roth's self-consciousness, less of Bellow's self-importance, and none of Updike's self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

“There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by
homage
or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb,
The Boston Review

“Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel,
BOMB

A Place Apart

National Book Award Winner

School Library Journal Best Book of the Year

New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year

Booklist Children's Reviewers Choice

New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

“Paula Fox has created another masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Fox writes with force, precision and a fund of sympathy.… The dialogue is so dead-on it stops you in your tracks and lingers long after.”
—School Library Journal
, starred review

“Victoria makes a truly wonderful heroine.…
A Place Apart
is a book apart—quiet-voiced, believable, and often very moving.” —
The New York Times Book Review

A Place Apart

Paula Fox

F
OR MY SISTER
, L
OUISE
M
ILES
,

AND FOR

A
LICE
B
ACH

We make ourselves a place apart

Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone really find us out.

Tis pity if the case require

(Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire

The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play

At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

Must speak and tell us where they are.

ROBERT FROST

CHAPTER ONE

Three years ago, when I was ten, I woke up one morning when it was still dark, thinking that if I could describe one entire day of my life to someone, that person would be able to tell me what on earth life was all about.

When my father died four days after last Thanksgiving, I knew there would never be anyone who could tell me anything. But lately, there's been a change. I've begun to feel that, with help and luck, I could find reasons for the strangeness of events. If someone would only point me in the right direction.

I told my Uncle Philip how perplexed I was and he said that perplexity was one of seven natural conditions of life.

“What are the other six?” I asked him.

“We are too perplexed to discover them,” he replied. I wanted to ask him how he knew there were seven conditions of life, but before I could speak, he said, “Victoria, you'll waste a good deal of time if you spend it looking for someone to explain everything to you.”

“Will I ever understand anything?” I asked him.

“In flashes,” he said. “A glimpse when you least expect it.”

He folded up his old green sweater and dropped it in his suitcase. “And in dreams,” he added.

“I had a dream last night,” I told him. “I dreamed I was a queen, and my crown was a circlet of those little brown pears you can buy in the market in the fall. And I was floating over land that was covered in mist.”

“Your dream means that what you must do is find your own country,” said Uncle Philip, and he shut his suitcase and set it upright on the floor.

“I wish you could stay a few more days,” I said. “Ma doesn't want you to go either.”

“I can't leave my business any longer,” he said. “Two weeks is a long time for me to be away.”

“And there's your cousin Jed, Tory,” my mother said as she walked into the small spare room Uncle Philip slept in when he came to help us fix up our house. Ma lit a cigarette and stared at us both through a smoke screen.

“Jed is all right, just bursting to finish school. Lois, why don't you throw those cigarettes out the window?”

“Our yard is not big enough to contain them,” Ma answered. Uncle Philip frowned at her. Ma said, “I'll really try to quit this year. Has Jed applied to any colleges yet?”

“He wants to go to Peru for a while,” Uncle Philip said. “He wants time off before he gets buried in college.”

“Maybe he had a dream that Peru is his country,” I said. Uncle Philip smiled and picked up his beret from the foot of the cot, and we all went out to the street, where his panel truck was parked. Ma and he walked with their arms around each other. Even though Uncle Philip is four years older than she, they looked almost like twins at that moment. Perhaps it was because they were feeling the same things—sorry to say goodbye. I was sorry to say goodbye to him, too, but there was something else I felt that I wouldn't have told him about. I was relieved.

Whenever I saw Uncle Philip, or Jed, I couldn't stop thinking of the terrible trouble that had come to both our families. My Aunt Ethel, Uncle Philip's wife, had died three years ago. And now my papa was dead, too.

Ma leaned against the side of the truck and Uncle Philip rested his hand on the door. I wondered if they had ever imagined, when they were children, that they'd grow up and have children of their own, but that the man and woman they had married and had those children with wouldn't be around to see what happened to them.

I wondered where I'd be ten years from this moment, and if I'd remember myself standing here thinking about that faraway future time. I shivered and Uncle Philip suddenly hugged me and said, “I'm off!”

We looked down the street until his truck had vanished from view, then we walked back up the narrow cement path to our house. We stood there a moment. The little houses on Autumn Street looked dingy and ramshackle. There weren't any people out on the sidewalk; there wasn't even a dog.

“It looks like snow,” Ma said.

“It always looks like snow here,” I said.

Ma clasped my arm. “We'll be all right,” she said. “Come on. Let's go inside. I'm freezing.” These days, Ma was always saying we'd be all right.

A month after my father died, when we were still in the old house in Boston, she had come to my room in the middle of the night and shaken me awake. I'd sat straight up in bed, my heart thumping. She'd turned on my bedside light and we had stared at each other, neither of us saying a word. I remember how terrible the feeling was that we weren't anywhere we had been before—and morning wasn't going to come, and we were in danger. Suddenly, Ma had said, “We'll be all right.” But that time she'd grabbed my hands and asked, “Won't we?” I don't remember what I said, if I said anything. One thing I knew though was when Ma started telling us we'd be all right, it meant she was feeling we wouldn't be.

That's why Uncle Philip had come to stay with us for two weeks. Two months ago, he'd helped us move into our little egg crate of a house in the village of New Oxford. He had come back to help Ma feel better, not just to take up what was left of the torn and muddy-looking linoleum that had once covered the entire floor of the house. I knew it was hard for him to leave his fabric store sixty miles away in Boston. It was a pretty place, full of beautiful material he imported from France and Italy and England. Ma said she had to ask him to leave it, that there were times when she couldn't even make up her mind whether to open or close a window. Then she knew she needed to see her brother.

“It won't always be like this,” she had told me just before she telephoned Uncle Philip, “I won't always be like this.”

I watched her while she spoke to him and I thought about our house in Boston. I began to imagine that she was really speaking to the people we used to be—only last year but a time that felt a century ago.