A Solitary Blue Read Free

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 blousesand 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œThey 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