Free A Place Apart by Paula Fox Page B

got, the more things there seemed to be that people couldn’t talk about, couldn’t say. When I thought of myself as a little child, with Papa and Ma, it seemed to me I’d always said everything that came into my head. Maybe I hadn’t.
    I felt that Elizabeth and I went far away from our homes, our ordinary lives, on our bikes, and that we were like colonists in a country where everything was new. Sometimes, when I got back to my house, after our long rides, it looked so small and dull. I began to hate to clean my room—there didn’t seem any point to it, so I’d let things pile up until I had to climb over them to get to my bed, which I shared with books, shoes, and one or two records I couldn’t bother to put away.
    It seemed a long time ago that Ma and I had talked about old deserted houses and factories and how we felt the same way about their mystery.
    There was something new in Ma’s life. She’d met Lawrence Grady at Uncle Philip’s on one of her trips to Boston, and, I guess, she must have met him a few times after that, although I didn’t ask her.
    He looked a good deal older than my father would have been. Elizabeth was at my house once when he came for supper, and she said later that he looked nice. We both knew that nice didn’t mean much; it was like the X in an equation, just a variable.
    Mr. Grady didn’t pay much attention to me, and I was relieved at that. Ma tried to get him to. I could see her trying and I didn’t want her to. It turned out that he taught in a Boston college, John Milton’s poetry, Ma told me. I wondered if we’d ever get out of the school system, and I told Elizabeth I should have been an elementary-school dropout to break the grisly grip of education on the Finch family.
    When I looked at Ma looking at Lawrence Grady, she was like someone I hardly knew. He liked her to play the piano for him, and when she played, he’d sit near her and tap his foot on the floor. I wished he wouldn’t do that.
    Well. He was all right, I guess. Still, when he raced down Autumn Street in his little French car, which you could hear a mile away, and came to spend the evening, I really wanted to be some other place. I tried to explain my feelings to Elizabeth, but they didn’t come out right. I remember once that I told Mr. Tate that I knew what I meant but that I didn’t know how to say it. Mr. Tate had said, If you don’t know how to say it, you don’t know what you mean. I was glad Ma was so cheerful, but it was a distant gladness.
    The dead go away, then they come back stronger than ever. I had been looking in Ma’s closet to see if she had any broken-down shoes the little kids could wear for pretending they were grownups. I glanced up at the one shelf, and I saw an old tweed hat. I knew it was Papa’s even before I took it down. Ma was out shopping somewhere. I went and sat on her bed and looked at my father’s hat. I remembered it.
    He had worn it in all kinds of weather, snow and rain and even when the sun was shining on hot days. He’d worn it when we went for a walk one day and he asked me if I’d like to go and have lunch in a restaurant. I don’t think I’d eaten in a restaurant before that.
    He had taken me to a place out on a pier that stretched its length into Boston Bay. We sat by a window where I could look down at the water, and just before I wiggled into my seat, he waved his hat at it and then at me.
    The hat was softened with age, and there were stains around the inside—Papa’s sweat, I guess. I got up and put it on my head and went to look in Ma’s mirror. I looked like my father. I shivered, and snatched the hat off and buried my face in it a moment, then put it back on the shelf.
    Ma asked me, one morning, what I thought of Mr. Grady.
    â€œHe’s okay,” I replied.
    â€œThat doesn’t sound okay,” she said.
    â€œHe’s not Papa” I