The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Page 3

  She worked for another hour, this time on the wall opposite the door, then, with her arms aching, decided it was time to allow herself a break. Jeannie had stocked the refrigerator with vitamin waters, organic lemonade and soy chocolate milk, but she ignored these and boiled tea water on the stove. She took the mug back to the parlor, cleared a spot amid the supplies, rummaged until she found the box she was looking for, sat herself down to read.

  Even with the improvement it was going to take forever to strip the walls. In the box was a powdered remover you mixed with water and applied to the wallpaper with rags or a sponge. The directions said to begin by “scoring” the paper, which she was reasonably sure meant scratching x’s that would allow the solution to penetrate. It must have been extraordinarily strong stuff, because the directions suggested wearing rubber gloves during application and covering your eyes. There were darker warnings below that—birth defects, in using this product, were known to occur, at least in California.

  Any combination of words and phrases could trip her up now, it didn’t take something as stark as “birth defects.” And what kind of defects were they talking about anyway? Physical defects? Mental defects? Moral defects? There was more than one kind, why didn’t they spell them out? Use this product and your baby might be born without arms. Use this product and your son might develop Asperger’s. Use this product, use it repeatedly, and your daughter might grow up not knowing right from wrong.

  She could blame herself for a lot of things, but not that— nineteen years ago she had not been stripping wallpaper with poison powders. Even now she was reluctant to use it. She went back out to the kitchen, filled a bucket, came back, shook some powder in, sloshed it around with a rag, then, after making a small x with her putty knife, wiped the slurry white of it across a small section of foyer wall. The directions said to wait fifteen minutes before scraping, so she worked along the ceiling first, then climbed back down the ladder to see if the stuff actually helped.

  It did and it didn’t. The treated paper was much softer, easier to scrape, only the smell was horrible, enough to make her gag. Dan had warned her that in the old days they used horsehair in plaster, and wetting it would bring out the smell—only there seemed to be goat hair mixed in, too, goat droppings, goat piss. The strips that came off were a soggy mess that immediately stuck to the floor, so she would end up having to scrape that, too, doubling the work.

  No shortcuts then—every inch she would peel by hand. She worked the rest of the afternoon, determined to finish the foyer before quitting, though it was late into the evening before the final strip came off. The scraps formed a dusty pyramid she kicked toward the door, too tired to do anything more. Her fingers and wrists were numb—her knuckles looked worked on by a grater. She went outside to the yard, found the hose Jeannie had told her about, took off her clothes, turned the faucet on full strength, then, bracing herself for the cold, blasted off the papery bits caught in her hair.

  Once she toweled off and dressed again, she walked back through the yard to the old stone wall. She was too late for the sunset—there wasn’t much left now except a purple-edged cloud. A cloud like that back in the Rockies would mean a thunderstorm—and soon, but here the air seemed too soft to support anything that flashy. To the south toward the village arced a pinkish seam that may have come from streetlights, but back the other way, toward the neighboring house and Canada, there were no lights showing whatsoever.

  She fixed hot dogs and corn muffins for dinner. The electricity worked now, but she found a kerosene lantern in the pantry and it felt more appropriate to use that. She busied herself upstairs arranging her clothes on the bedroom floor in some semblance of order, then slid the mattress farther away from the window so the moonlight wouldn’t wake her again. The layout of the rooms upstairs was even simpler than downstairs—two bedrooms and a small bathroom grouped around the lopsided craziness of the hall.

  She took the lamp, explored the bedroom next to hers, and immediately came upon another of the house’s secrets. There was a closet in the middle of the wall, and when she opened it, stuck in the lamp, she could see it ran the entire length of the house. She wasn’t sure, the light wasn’t quite strong enough, but it seemed to end in a small, Alice-in-Wonderland-type hole. Where could it lead? It would open out from the house, not back into the hall. Was there a shed there? Had there once been an attached barn? Why would anyone use a closet to exit the house? Her opening the door must have disturbed the air flow, because a soft panting sound started up at the tunnel’s far end. “Be still!” she commanded, in her best teacher’s voice, and immediately the sound stopped.

  As tired as she was, the core knot of restlessness had its way with her—she woke up at midnight just as she had the first night. Once again, she went out onto the balcony over the porch. Again the shutter began flapping, but she expected that now, it was probably caused by her weight on the planks. With less mist, the moonlight was purer, and the house threw out shadows so fang-like and vicious they looked make-believe.

  The house enjoyed its distortions, but there was one that was genuine. Little motes of chartreuse danced up and down over the lawn, none of them managing to make it higher than the porch, but startling her all the same. Fireflies—it was late in the season for them—and they seemed bigger than the ones at home and many degrees brighter.

  She had an impulse to duck, watching them. It was odd, they were nowhere near her head, but she felt that she must immediately duck. One summer when Cassie was seven, the fireflies had been unusually thick, and they brought her outside to show her how to capture them in a jar. Cassie didn’t want to do this—she already hated any kind of cruelty to animals, even though they promised to immediately release them. Instead, she ran inside to her room, came back out again holding something hidden behind her back. When she had their attention, she brought it out, her tremendous surprise.

  A lite stick, a chemical lite stick she had been given on Halloween and had kept hidden in her bedroom ever since. She shook it back and forth now the way the instructions said, and when the light started glowing it was exactly the same chartreuse color as the fireflies. She held it out to them and waved it back and forth like she was conducting their dance, laughing in joy.

  The memory of Cassie’s lite stick came back to Vera so vividly it was almost staggering—again, she felt thankful for the railing. But it was cold and she felt more than dizziness centered in her stomach, so she wanted to lean over and clutch herself, clutch herself hard. She felt tears forming close to the surface ready to come spilling out—useless tears, sentimental tears, tears that weren’t deep enough to help. She didn’t let herself bend to them— she made the hard little grimace that was enough to hold them in. Later she could cry. Later when the tears came deeper. Later when they could do her some good.

  She changed strategy in the morning. With the foyer stripped, she had planned to start on the front parlor, but on her way there, walking down the hall, she decided to test the velvet wallpaper with a scraper to see if it would come off any easier than the knotty pine. Once she got going, it was impossible to stop, even though the velvet turned out to be a much tougher proposition. With the knotty pine paper, she could sometimes manage to scrape off four- or five-inch pieces and occasionally be rewarded with a foot-long peel. With the velvet, she was lucky to pry off an inch at a time, and it was all about niggling, chipping, trying not to curse.

  She put the radio on—the Quebec station with its soft j’adores and je t’aimes. After a while, she listened to the walls more than to the music, the coaxing sounds made by her scraper. Tinny scratches meant a stubborn spot; sandy whiskings meant a piece that could be lifted and peeled. With the foyer, she had worked from top to bottom, but here in the hall it was easier just to start in the middle and follow the path of least resistance. She began to think of the cleared areas as maps—here a map of Italy, here a map of Spain. I’ll take a break and come back and expand Italy, she told herself. After lunch I’ll double Spain. />
  She had thought her attitude might be more relaxed on the second day, but she had to work hard on not regarding the wallpaper as her enemy. To balance this, the walls became increasingly her friends. They were smooth underneath the paper and remarkably unblemished—their linen color was clean and inviting, of an era before cheap ugliness was born. Stripping the paper hurt her fingers, nails, and wrists, but the walls didn’t hurt at all, not by stinging, not by cutting, not by reminding. They were beautifully blank in that respect, therapeutically blank. They were doing exactly what she hoped.

  Of course the walls weren’t perfect in that respect. Just because they carried no memories didn’t mean memories didn’t come. At the worst moments, when her arms started aching and her forehead dripped sweat, she began wishing she had someone to help her, and that naturally led her to think about Cassie who was so good at any kind of work requiring delicacy and patience. Organization, too—she was a great organizer, with assembly lines her specialty. Baking cookies with the Girl Scouts? An assembly line, assigning each of her friends a different task. Puppies needing their baths? Mom to dip, Dan to lather, Cassie to rinse and dry, the squirming puppies passed hand to hand until they were immaculate.

  Cassie would be a pro at wallpapering. During high school she had helped Dan in the summers—she was on her way to becoming a skilled carpenter if she managed to stay interested. In their town, very early, the divide became apparent between young people who would go on to college and those who would work as hairdressers and mechanics. Cassie had friends in both groups, which was hard; she was always trying to find a middle way between futures, and this led her to considering the military. She was too restless to sit in college for four years, at least right away, and she was too ambitious to join the other girls who had already dropped out.

  Two years in the National Guard, she decided—they had gone on a picnic and she was very solemn about breaking the news.

  Dan had been more surprised than she had been—he barely managed to control his grimace. “We’re very proud,” he mumbled.

  Cassie smiled, or tried to. “I’ll fight forest fires and help with floods,” she said. “I’ll do my two years, and then since I love animals I’ll apply to veterinary school at State.”

  She wasn’t the first in the family to be a soldier. Dan’s father fought on Okinawa, then entered Hiroshima three days after the bombing; he and Cassie, in his last years, had grown very close. Her dad, Cassie’s other grandfather, was drafted in the Fifties and sent to Germany. Elvis Presley was in his company, and bought all the men poodles they could give to their girlfriends. That was how his two years had gone—Lowenbrau, frauleins, and fun. He took Russian lessons, but only so he could say the words “I surrender” to the first Soviet soldier he encountered if invasion ever came.

  A joke, his army years. And now, in his granddaughter, the joke had turned serious.

  That was Cassie—organized and efficient. Dan, on the other hand, would be no help whatsoever when it came to stripping. He would storm in, roll his sleeves up, start hacking away at the paper, anxious to get it over with as fast as possible. Leaky pipes, sagging joists, flapping shutters—those were the kinds of repairs he enjoyed making. “I need a man’s job,” he would say, making sure he winked. And she wondered if maybe he was onto something there. She knew it was wrong to even think in those terms anymore, but there was something feminine about stripping wallpaper that appealed to her greatly. Not feminine in a girly-girly sense, but something deeper, so she too found what her friends said they found in taking up knitting, mending, or canning. Solace, or something close to it. Being in touch with the old ways and finding in them peace.

  I have wallpaper for comfort, she told herself. Dan has lies.

  Harsh of her, unfair, but it’s how she thought of things now. One second she would be concentrating on the latest, most stubborn piece of wallpaper, the boot of Italy or the north half of Britain, scraping away as if she didn’t have any other concern in life but that—concentrating, squinting, probing—and then suddenly the paper would lift off, and in the brief vacuum before she started on the next piece the thought would jump out at her seemingly from nowhere. My husband is held captive by lies.

  People had different ways to cope with pain, she understood that as well as anyone, and if Dan had decided to pop lies to get him through the months leading up to the trial, then fine, she almost envied him, and in any case they wouldn’t hold him forever, he was too smart for that, he had too much sense. For now, it helped him, words like “duty,” and “honor” and “patriotism,” and the gruffly unctuous types who swarmed around him with those and similar words always on their lips.

  Thinking of him made her feel guilty—she had kept her cell phone off ever since she arrived, and there was no other way he or Jeannie could contact her. Postcards and letters of course, the old ways, and she promised herself to write some when she had time. Her goal was to finish the white velvet half of the hall before the day was over, and by working straight through until dusk she managed everything but a final strip. She gathered up the scraps in her arms, carried them outside to the backyard, started a fire. Each scrap still held a residue of glue, so they burned very fast, and by the time she carried out another armload the first batch was already reduced to ashes.

  It was clear out, less humid. Crickets were noisy in the warmth, frogs croaked out in the meadow, but instead of the owls she had heard the first two nights came the warbly keen of coyotes.

  She walked around to the front of the house to hear better— in the darkness, she almost bumped into the car, the rental car she had parked there the first night and then forgotten. Jeannie had told her about a general store in the village, a library with free Internet, but she was too absorbed in her work to break away, and the thought of meeting anyone, engaging in small talk, did not appeal to her either.

  “Maybe I’ll take a break when I’m halfway done,” she had told Jeannie on the phone when they first made plans. “I’ll drive to some museums or state parks.”

  Even over the phone she could see Jeannie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Museums? Parks? Up there? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  There was enough beauty right there if she wanted it. Jeannie had stocked the pantry with another of her affectionate jokes— the cheap sangria they had pretended to like when they were teenagers. She poured some in her tea mug and brought it outside, laying down on the weeds near the dying remnants of the fire, her head propped against a rusty lawn chair that must have been new in 1960. By staring straight overhead she could make out the summer triangle: Vega, Altair and Cygnet the Swan, its neck pointing north, its wings flapping open toward lesser, fainter stars she didn’t have names for. They shone brighter than they did at home, which surprised her, since she always pictured Eastern skies lit garishly by shopping plazas and malls.

  There were no malls here—the stars, after her second mug of wine, seemed close enough to stroke. She taught an astronomy section in science, hosting star parties with a telescope so her students could take turns peering up at Saturn or Mars. She wondered where those boys and girls were now, the eighth graders she had last year, the seventh graders who would have her in the fall. It was only eight o’clock back home, she could picture them wrapped in towels at swimming pools or sitting on the grass in the twilight watching their dads play softball, talking among themselves about the coming year.

  You having Mrs. Savino next year for science? She’s nice, you’ll really like her as long as you do your work. You having Mrs. Savino next year for science? She so used to be nice, but she’s grumpy all the time now. You having Mrs. Savino next year for science? It was weird, really weird, but last year in fourth period she suddenly turned toward the blackboard, covered her face in her hands, and began like almost to sob.

  Two

  THE third day was much the same, as was the fourth and fifth, and her great discovery didn’t come until Saturday, with the very first piece she stripped from the wall.

 
She had finished both sides of the hall and was ready to shift her attention to the front parlor. To the left of the window was the obvious place to start—a protruding edge where two seams overlapped right there at face level. She had learned to look for these vulnerabilities, and so, not thinking much about it, she slid her putty knife under the seam, wedged further, then lifted.

  The piece came off easily enough, though it was disappointingly small. On the wall beneath it was something she thought at first was an insect, a petrified spider. She started scraping, then realized the spot didn’t protrude but was flush with the plaster. It looked like a stain, a calcified black stain, taking on a crescent shape before disappearing under paper she hadn’t yet scraped off.

  Careful Vera, she told herself, though she wasn’t sure what she was responding to or why caution came over her so fast. She put her face up close to the wall and squinted, making sure she only got paper and didn’t scratch the plaster underneath. More of the stain slowly became visible, enough so she finally understood what it was. The letter c written in black ink, India ink, with a precision and gracefulness that could only be from a different era.

  An initial? It was lower case, it couldn’t be meant for initials. It was partly hidden under a three-layer fragment—under, which meant it had to have been left there by whoever first papered the walls back in 1919. The ink was faded the same way the bottom layer of paper was, so it was reasonable to assume it had been applied just before the wallpaper and they had aged through the decades together.

  She rummaged through the supplies for a smaller putty knife that would work more delicately. To the right of the c was an r and an e. She put her cheek so tight to the wall that her vision couldn’t make out what came next, and only after uncovering the next five letters did she bring her head back and read.

  credence

  It was like someone’s voice spoke the word out loud—in the silence, she took the surprise of it straight into her heart. An old-fashioned word, one she had to think about for a moment before understanding. Credence. The last e wasn’t quite cleared yet; in scraping off its final loop, she came upon a period, so it was obvious, if she was going to uncover the entire sentence, she had to work back to the left.