A Solitary Blue: Chapters 1–3

Jason’s father said the department was a shambles and that was why they didn’t attract good students.

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 the car rolled down an incline, holding him within her arm.

“You could strike for a raise,” Brother Thomas suggested. “Carry placards, deliberately teach untruths. Or how about a sit-down strike?”

Then he started to cough, deep racking coughs of the kind he had suppressed most of the day.

I don’t know how long we’ll be on this passage, the syntax is strange.

The long solitary hours did go by quickly as Jeff read the story of unlikely heroes in another world, of magic and love, of battles against unremitting evil, the long, arduous journey, of friendship and betrayal.

The long solitary hours did go by quickly as Jeff read the story of unlikely heroes in another world, of magic and love, of battles against unremitting evil, the long, arduous journey, of friendship and betrayal.

Jeff debarked from the plane at Charleston as the sun was going down.

“The trouble with that,” Melody said, her voice serious and sad, “is that it’s bad for you. Bad for women to do that, bad for themselves, because it just perpetuates things. We have to fight for our self-respect, don’t we?”

They apologized, and after a few minutes Melody’s voice resumed its ordinary tones, lazy, full of subdued laughter.

He was too tired to look for his pajamas, too tired to see where he should put his clothes away. He turned off the bedside light and lay dazzled and bemused in the darkness before slipping into sleep.

All four windows were open, and the gauzy curtains hung still in the motionless air.

She looked up at him, and he was alarmed to see all the sentiment in her eyes. “You may kiss me,” she said, and he bent to kiss her cheek.

The street—with those courtyard-like lawns and narrow alleys leading off unexpectedly, with the houses opulent even when they had fallen into disrepair, with the sun-drenched air—the street seemed foreign to Jeff, ancient and mysterious.

Jeff looked down and across to where what seemed to be an aircraft carrier was moored, up river.

There are factories, refineries, too, up river, and they’ve killed the river.

Do you know what Captain John Smith said about the Chesapeake Bay? He said it teemed with fish, so all a man had to do was step into its water with his sword out, and fish would leap onto it and he could feast.

I even remember the first time ever I saw you. In the hospital—oh Jeffie, I’d never even suspected what it would be like. Having a baby. They tell you, but you never take it in. I thought I’d died and gone to hell, the pain—and the horrible bright lights and sterile box-walls with machines on them, and the nurses who didn’t care about what you were going through.

Then I knew that none of the pain mattered a whit, as long as you were the result of it. It was like ten Christmases all at once.

They ambled up streets and down alleys, through a church graveyard, and along a business street where they peered into the windows of antique shops.

They sat in dappled sunlight.

“Well, Jeffie, you don’t say very much and I really do want to hear what you have to say. I don’t want to pry into your secret thoughts, so I thought—if he’ll talk to me about the scenery, then I can hear what he has to say.”

I thought it might be worth something, if the stone was a ruby, and the dealer didn’t have any idea of what she had—she was just some old lady who didn’t know anything; she had no business being in business, I felt so sorry for her—So I bought it, on speculation.

She told him to wait there, she would go up and get her guitar then they would sit outdoors. “I’ll serenade you.”

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.

Her collection of jade figurines is in the bank now—the cost of insuring it is prohibitive, over sixty pieces, each exquisite.

In Baltimore, he was Jeff Greene, self-sufficient and reticent, no trouble at all, occupying his corner of the world.

A solitary blue heron stood at its edge, half-hidden in the pale marsh grass.

A clerical collar shone white around the man’s neck. Brother Thomas.

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.

His voice as he mimicked them was flat, monotonous.

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

They had always talked like this but he had never heard the undercurrent of joking before.

“Moral turpitude,” the Professor suggested.

“I always liked that, that and breach of fiduciary trust.”

“I always liked that, that and breach of fiduciary trust.”

At first, when he played it for too long a time, his fingertips would throb with pain and sometimes the tips would bleed. Then he learned how to use a flat pick and developed callouses on the tips of his left hand.

It was like guitar music, the plucking on strings, the tones reverberated out from the belly of the instrument, the one hand on the neck, the other on the strings; but it rang like church bells, quiet church bells.

Some of the pieces were slow, some in quicker rhythm, some were one simple clear line and others were dense progressions of chords.

He forced his eyes to wander over the rest of the audience rather than staying riveted to the figure on the stage.