A Place Apart (7 page)

“I'm renting out our house in Tierra del Fuego. I may even burn it to the ground,” he said. “Your play matters. It will matter more than graduation will next year. I'm going to make it the best production that school has ever put on.”

I interrupted him then. A question had risen in me that must have been lying in the bottom of my mind a long time. It floated free, perhaps because he had recently talked about being rich, or because, just now, he had spoken of the New Oxford public high school as
that
school, the way you talk about a place you don't like, or where you are an outsider. I asked, “Why don't you go to a private school?”

“There's always been a Todd in that school,” he said in a slow, cold way, as if I should have known the answer to my own question. “We keep our hand in,” he added. “But I want to talk about your play. The way it opens is right—those children, bored in their house on a rainy day, and their father dying a few blocks away, dying when he's still pretty young, like your father and mine were—and then the telephone ringing. It's the mother who isn't right yet. I've wondered if the mother ought to be there at all. Why not an aunt? Maybe an aunt the children have never met—someone who's been living abroad, in Sicily, or Paris. You want to keep that feeling of strangeness about everything, the way death is strange. All the crying people do just hides the surprise of it, a person disappearing forever …”

“I really miss my father,” I said suddenly, and I was afraid I might cry myself.

He got up very fast from his side of the booth and came to sit beside me.

“Listen! I'll miss him, too, if that makes you feel better.”

I started to laugh. I felt like a monster, considering what we were talking about. But there it was. I was happy, all at once, and everything seemed wonderful to me.

“All right … all right …” I said.

“And stop saying ‘all right,'” he commanded.

When we reached the corner where we usually went our separate ways, unless he was coming to visit me, Hugh stepped in front of me.

“Wait. Come to my house. All this time, and you've never seen it.”

So that's where we went, up the long hill, and then instead of continuing toward school, we turned left, toward the Matcha River, and walked into the fresh, sweet smell of the water. We passed a long driveway which led to a great stone house with shuttered windows.

“That used to be ours,” Hugh said, waving a hand at it. “But my mother sold it after my father died. The Todds once owned this entire hill. Look! See the three small windows on the top floor? Those were my rooms, up there right under the roof. My father read to me every night.”

“Papa read to me, too,” I said.

“One night, there was a big storm and it drowned out his voice, but while the rain beat down he drew a story for me with my crayons, and after each drawing was done, he'd pass it to me.”

“Do you still have them? The drawings?”

“They're lost,” he said. “And I've forgotten the story they told.”

We had nearly reached the river by then. And I saw a house unlike any other I had ever seen. The most amazing thing about it was the three balconies that hung right over the river. “That's the new house,” Hugh said. The remembering, eager sound was gone from his voice now, and he didn't seem much interested in his new house, which he'd brought me to see.

“It's beautiful,” I said.

“It's a freak,” he said, and then he told me it was a copy of an Italian villa—an architect back in the 1920's had built seven or eight such houses in various New England towns.

On one side, there was a huge garden and white painted iron benches with feet like the feet of animals, and there was a fountain, and near the house, a swimming pool. Where the garden ended, with trellises and climbing vines, a small wood began.

We walked in the front door, and we passed rooms that looked as though no one used them but were filled with a kind of furniture quiet, and a smell of wax everywhere. I thought of Ma's seashell and jar-cap ashtrays as I touched a heavy glass bowl where an amber pipe rested. In niches in the walls were Oriental statues which Hugh said were carved from different kinds of jade. Silky cloth embroidered with flowers covered great wing chairs. The rugs were like beds of flowers, too. And on the walls hung paintings of soldiers, and horses, and rivers bending through tall, slender trees. On a mantel, I saw a clock, and its face was made of tiny squares of blue and white china, and in each square I saw a different scene of people skating, or windmills, or a town square from long ago.

“It comes from Holland,” Hugh said. I could have looked at it forever.

We walked through French doors and stood on a stone terrace overlooking the swimming pool. There was no water in it. A few frogs jumped around a drain hole, and a black and orange butterfly wove back and forth across the pool like a shuttle on a loom.

We went inside again, and I went back to the clock. “It's so lovely,” I whispered.

“Poor little rich boy!” Hugh's voice suddenly boomed. “Here is the house of the poor little rich boy!” At that moment a door opened and a small woman came in and looked at us. She was wearing a long dress. Its color was a kind of buttery yellow, and the ruffle around the neck cast a pale-yellow glow on her face.

“Hello there, Hugh,” she said in a low, pleasant voice. “This is my friend Victoria, Mother,” he said.

She touched my hand with her small, cool one. I was suddenly aware that my shirt was sticking out of my jeans and I wanted, frantically, to stuff it back inside.

“How nice to meet you, Victoria,” she said. “Hugh has told me about you. I hear you are writing a fine play.”

I mumbled something and stepped back, wishing I could hide behind one of the big chairs. And I felt persecuted. That play again! I wished I'd never begun it. I glanced at Hugh, who was looking out the French doors, and I felt as if he had his hands against my shoulders and was shoving me along a road I didn't want to travel.

“Hugh, why don't you go and get some iced tea and put it on a tray and bring it out to the terrace. We can sit and chat a bit. By the way, your new passport arrived today. The picture of you is quite comical. You'll like it.” She smiled at Hugh's back, showing teeth that were faintly yellow like her dress. I was glad there was a touch of rust on her.

Hugh turned and looked at her, but he didn't speak. They stood like people acting a charade. I couldn't guess the words. Then someone else came in. He was a tall, thin man, wearing a suit that looked as if it had just come from the cleaner's. He had a thin mustache that grew down around his mouth like parentheses.

“This is my husband, Jeremy Howarth,” Hugh's mother said. “Jeremy, this is Victoria. Hugh? What is her last name?”

“Finch,” Hugh answered, hardly opening his mouth.

“What a pretty name,” remarked Mrs. Howarth, looking at the Dutch clock on the mantel, then at her wristwatch.

“We don't have time for tea, Mother,” Hugh said. “Victoria has to go home and practice her oboe.”

Jeremy let out a strange giggle. Mrs. Howarth smiled at me and shook her head. “My goodness! A playwright
and
an oboist! What an accomplished child! Isn't she, Jeremy?”

“She doesn't look like a child to me,” Jeremy muttered. “She looks like an engineer.”

Mrs. Howarth laughed gently, and turned to me, but before she could speak, Hugh grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the room. As we passed Jeremy, I realized he was terribly drunk and that he was clutching the back of a chair to keep himself upright.

I found myself in another large beautiful room. This one was lined with bookcases. A long desk sat in the middle of the floor, and there was nothing on it until I left my fingerprints in the wax.

“Oboe!” I exclaimed.

Hugh put a finger to his lips. “Sssh!” he hissed. Then he pointed silently to the painting of a small child which hung on the wall. I walked over to it while he watched me.

“That's me,” he said softly. “I was six.”

I put my hand toward the smiling face of little Hugh.

“Don't touch,” he said.

“I never knew anyone who had a painting of himself,” I said.

“Jeremy plans to have it bleached, scraped, and cut for a vest,” he said. I started to smile, but seeing the expression on Hugh's face, I stopped.

We went out into the garden then, and I followed Hugh down the slope to the wood. He gestured toward it. “Jeremy wants to sell off our wood to a developer,” he said. “It's the last piece of land we own around here that hasn't had something ugly done to it.”

I glanced back at the house. It looked so empty!

“What does an engineer look like?” I asked.

Hugh frowned but didn't answer my question. “Jeremy is drunk by noon every day,” he said. “And his brain, if he has one, is rotted out.” He told me that his mother had married Howarth eight months after his father's fatal accident, and that he and she had had a terrible fight about it, so terrible he had run away to Boston and gone to a club his father had belonged to, where they let him stay a week. Later, he found out a club official had telephoned his mother as soon as he'd showed up.

“I slept most of the time,” he said. “I ordered my meals up to the room so I wouldn't have to see anyone. Then she came and got me. I had to come home. The thing to do is to get through this time—get through it until they can't tell you what to do any more.”

I heard a thrush sing. A slight breeze rose and died almost at once, and the late-afternoon sunlight, which lay across the garden and the house, was the color of Mrs. Howarth's dress.

Beneath a maple tree, Hugh stooped and picked up a small branch from the ground. He began to strip off the bark. “He drinks all the liquor in the house, and he fights with her about the hotels where she makes reservations for them. That's about all he does,” he said.

“It must be terrible for her,” I murmured, but I didn't mean it—Jeremy and Mrs. Howarth seemed like dolls to me, or actors in a movie that isn't interesting enough to make you forget they're only photographs of people.

“Not at all,” Hugh said snappishly, hitting the ground with his stick. “She's crazy about him. But I'll be leaving in a year, so I keep the peace. Come on. We'll go through the wood. It takes a little longer to get to your house, but you don't have an oboe to practice, so you don't care. Do you?” He didn't give me a chance to answer but stepped across a thatch of underbrush and in among the trees.

It was a little, musty, dark forest. There was a strong smell of damp and leaf mold in the air. We came to the edge of a pond. It was still and without reflections.

“Beaver pond,” Hugh said. “See where they've gnawed the trees?” I saw the marks of animal teeth on the tree trunks, and I touched the raw wood on a small oak. Hugh thrashed about a few feet away. When I looked at him, I saw he was holding a rotted log. He heaved it out into the center of the pond.

“That's rotten Harry,” he said. “I think we ought to teach him a lesson, don't you?”

He searched around quickly, found a stone, and flung it at the log.

“Take that, you devil!” he cried. Then he handed me a stick.

I threw it. “You no-good, disgusting Harry!” I shouted.

“Filthy wild pig!” he yelled, hitting the log with another stick. He made a little heap of missiles, and he moved fast, faster than I had ever seen him move, and his face and hands glimmered in the light that was like dusk there among the trees.

“Loathsome dog!” he suddenly screamed and threw a handful of stones at the log.

“Vile viper!” I called.

“Wicked, mean, evil Harry!”

“Fat, dirty hog!”

I was spattered with mud and laughing so hard I was staggering as I turned here and there, bending, and scrabbling at the earth to find objects to hurl.

“Hideous, horrible—” I began, when I realized, all at once, that mine was the only voice in the wood. I dropped the stones and sticks I was holding and looked behind me.

Hugh was leaning against a tree, a thoughtful look on his face. There was hardly any mud on him. I was scared. Something bad had happened, and I had been part of the badness. He saw me staring at him. He smiled.

“I got you going, didn't I?” he said in a light voice.

I felt something for him, at that moment, that was as close to dislike as a worshipper can get.

What were we doing in this little stale wood? Why had I jumped into his game without a thought?

“I'm going,” I said roughly. I started off to where I could see the trees thin out. Behind me, I could hear him following, twigs crackling beneath his feet, and my skin prickled and I rushed out into the open. I turned back. He was standing at the edge of the wood, his hands in his pockets, his face as blank as a plate.

He had already begun to turn away when he said, “Goodbye, Victoria.”

I ran down the hill to home.

Ma was shellacking an old kitchen chair when I walked into the living room. She asked me if I'd been trying to dig my way to China.

“Rich people are different,” I said to her.

She laughed and replied, “There was a well-known conversation about that subject between two famous writers. One said, ‘The rich are not like us,' and the other remarked, ‘Yes, they have money.'”

“I didn't mean just money,” I said.

“You're getting mud all over the floor,” she said. “What rich people are you talking about?”

I took off my muddy shoes, but I didn't answer her question. She was kneeling next to the chair, the paint-brush in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She looked kind to me, very kind. I'd never noticed that about the way she looked before.

“What does an engineer look like?” I asked her.

“Like anyone else,” she answered. “What a peculiar question! You must have had an interesting afternoon.”