The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Read online

  Mrs. Hodgson said he asked about me but I gave this no credence.

  The handwriting was beautifully proportioned, flowing along with perfect naturalness, though it must have been wearying to hold a pen that high. The script part, the little decorations, flourishes and curls, was particularly graceful, and gave the impression a breeze was blowing the sentence across the wall. The o’s were round and open, almost prissy, but the t and i’s looked rebellious, the cross bars and dots drifting well to the right of where they should be. The first letter in Hodgson was wonderfully bold and exaggerated; Vera, staring at it, realized she had forgotten what a capital H in script even looked like.

  It was already ten now, time for her tea break, and she forced herself to go ahead with this. When she came back to the parlor and stared up again at the wall, she experienced a moment of very intense shyness, as if there were a person in the room after all, and, having spoken those first words to her, it was now her turn to say something back.

  She stepped back to appraise the wall from a distance. It was obvious that anyone writing on the wall would begin on the top left corner. They would have plenty of room that way, the window was well to the right, and the wide expanse of plaster would have suggested a blank sheet of paper or the empty page of a book. If that was the case, if her hunch was correct, then the sentence she uncovered would have occurred well down from the start. To expose the rest meant sliding the ladder over, putting it tight against the wall, reaching up as high as she could.

  In the top left corner was wedged the name Alan, which she uncovered all at once, the wallpaper being friendlier there, more supple. The rest of the sentence was easy, too, as was the line below that, then the line below that—lines she didn’t let herself read until she had six of them exposed.

  Alan has gone to the city with his lumber and planks. For five or six days he tells me. When you return I will have the paper on I promised when I kissed him goodbye. I had not kissed him in a long time and it is a long time since I have been alone. He is different than he used to be. Because of what he did? Because of what he did not do, could not do? He seemed surprised by my kiss. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to the light, stared down hard at me, then, just before he let go, nodded and I think maybe sobbed.

  Vera read this twice, three times, running her nails along the letters trying to scratch off the stubborn specks of paper that still adhered. Her reactions came so fast they were hard to separate. The feeling of the past coming alive beneath her hands—prying open a coffin couldn’t have given her the sensation in such strength—plus the impression that light had flooded into the room, a radiance that had been captured and released from a shroud. Who had written this, when, how, why? The questions jumped out at her all at once, but even faster came the realization that the only way to find answers was to uncover even more.

  She understood one thing immediately—she could not be the first person to read this. There was the top layer of knotty pine paper, the two nondescript layers beneath that or at least the flecked remains of that paper, then, on the bottom, the faded bits of papery peach that must have been original. That was the chronology, and all she had to do to understand it was reverse it, starting back when the house was new. Blank wall, words written on wall, paper pasted over words. New owners, lazy owners, paper pasted over paper. New owners, lazier owners, paper pasted over paper over paper. New owner, energetic owner, strip top layer, strip middle layer, strip bottom layer, uncover words, read words, cover them up again with the ugly knotty pine.

  The next strip she peeled was nearly her record when it came to length, but there was nothing beneath it except blank plaster, which disappointed her greatly. So it was just a brief, random message after all, little more than a doodle, written there on a whim. But she was wrong on this. Once she cleared another eight inches the writing surfaced again—the writer, whoever she was, enjoyed beginning her paragraphs with deep indentations.

  I was born on Christmas day in 1903 during the famous blizzard. I do not know the name of my father but Mrs. Hodgson once told me she thought he might be Selah Tompkins who worked with horses in the woods and was reckless and let a sled ride over him as everyone always knew it would. Mrs. H. sometimes seemed about to tell me who my mother was but always shook her head at the last moment. At the home there were four of us named Elizabeth so to avoid confusion one stayed Elizabeth, one became Liza, one became Lizzy, and I became Beth. Liza grew up and went down to the mills, Lizzy went to work for a preacher’s wife out in Indiana and I was the only one who stayed here. Elizabeth, who got to keep her name, ran away to Boston which meant running away to be bad.

  Reading as she scraped made Vera dizzy—her close vision blurred the letters up, smeared their blackness, giving her the disorienting sense they were an inky black pool and she was about to fall in. She went for her glasses, but they made it worse. The only way to proceed was to clear large sections off at a time, then and only then let herself read. Stripping would give her a goal, a focus— reading would be her break, her reward.

  She worked an hour, got the first two strips off, went out to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, came back and cleared three strips more. The words had waited patiently under the paper all those years, but now that they were exposed to light they seemed actively reaching out to her, demanding to be understood. Sensing this made her hurry and hurry made her clumsy. She scraped too hard—the blade skipped up and cut her finger, so her blood made a film over the writing which wiping only blended in deeper. She thought about using the stripping solution again or even trying the steamer, but worried they would be too harsh, too erasive.

  A thunderstorm came up in the afternoon, the hills concentrating the noise and doubling it, until the house shook with each clap. The rain brought the dark on early, forcing her to stop. By then, she had one wall entirely cleared. She was going to put the lights on to read, but then discovered the power had gone off, forcing her to search for the kerosene lamp.

  The words must have been written in such a light—if anything, the softness made the ink stand out more vividly, with more force. She set the lamp down on the top step of the ladder, and by moving it closer to the wall or back again she could illumine different paragraphs in a well-defined arc. Seen from a distance, the lines looked like a book, they were so neat and regular, and she realized that this had probably been Beth’s intention, to make it all resemble a book. Lines extended across the wall, stopped at the same right margin, then started up again precisely a half inch below, and so on in the same pattern all the way from the ceiling to the floor—and then over again, only this time one full strip over to the right. Between the regularity and neatness it was amazing how many lines fit in.

  They say I was a quiet child except when I had a friend and then I would pour my heart out. But I think there were never many friends. I remember when I was six, Independence Day came and they sent Mounties down from Canada in their red uniforms to march in the parade. I remember skating on the pond in our shoes since we had no skates. I remember dandelion necklaces we pretended were gold. Not much else beside this. They taught us always to sit with our hands folded, whether it was in class or at dinner or saying our prayers, and I knew even then what they really wanted us to do was hold in our thoughts, keep them small and tidy and confined. I could not do this very well. My thoughts made my hands tremble. Someone was always shouting “Don’t fidget!” at me and the more they yelled the more my hands wanted to explode.

  It was easier once I learned to read, things grew bigger. Later, Peter Sass teased me about this. “Did you starve in your orphanage?” he asked, with his amused little look that he never allowed to become harder. “Orphans are supposed to starve. Why, just think of Oliver Twist!”

  I almost starved I felt like saying. But it had nothing to do with food.

  Our books were Sleepy Hollow, Man Without a Country, Message to Garcia, The Queen of Sheba and Ned Buntline. That was for the boys. For girls they had Wide Wide World
and Quechee. They were about orphans and how they married rich men and we read them over and over again because they were the only books that told us how to act as orphans. I read faster than any of the girls or even the boys, but this only made everyone mad at me, they said I was becoming capricious, taking on airs. How can books do anything bad to you? I wanted to ask. It was an important question because inside them is where I lived.

  I was eleven when I left. The Hodgsons bid lowest for me and if you bid lowest the state had to hand you over. I was lucky since they were both very kind. They never had children of their own which was a pity. I helped Mrs. H. in the kitchen and caring for the house. She was so cheerful that this was easy for me, though the work could be hard. I helped Mr. Hodsgon, too, times when he had trouble getting hired men. Their farm was the highest in town, all the other hill farms had been abandoned, but he always swore he would be last to give up. I liked helping him mend walls, since he still used oxen and he let me slap their flanks and shout at them to get moving. He laughed when they just looked at me and refused to budge, as if saying “Who is this pigtailed little girl and why is she so bothered?”

  I loved seeing things from the distance. When we finished work I would stick my arms out and balance my way along the stone wall past the briars to the highest part. In July where the hills unfolded was like a huge green comforter rolling away toward Canada, with a giant hand underneath plumping it out. Looking at this blew my smallness away and I vowed never to let it back.

  I turned fifteen on Christmas the year the war commenced over in France. Mrs. H. wanted to have a talk but she knew it would distress me so she waited until the following week. It was snowing and we had stopped sewing to watch a deer try to hop her way through the drifted field.

  “Well,” Mrs. H. said when we both sat down. “You’re grown now and that means we need to be looking after your future. There are lots of things you could be doing and it’s up to you which one to choose. Not right away. Why you can stay with us as long as you want. But presently.”

  I could see it was hard for her, so I nodded, tried my best to smile.

  “You could go down and work in the mills, they treat their girls very well now, it’s not like it used to be.”

  She said this calmly but could not help frowning.

  “You could go out west like so many girls, Iowa or even Montana, they have special trains, and we would arrange for you to work for a respectable family.”

  She said this even more calmly but once again frowned.

  “Or for that matter you could stay right here and get married. Not right away of course. In time. There are so few young men left but we would find one.”

  She made her voice all bright, but once again her frown betrayed her. I did not give her an answer, because there was one thing I dreaded and finally had to ask.

  “What about school? Vacation is over tomorrow and I want to go back.”

  She looked at me and I read her look and turned away from it, we both turned away, since we knew how she had to answer and it was the first time she ever caused me pain.

  “School is over for you, Beth. Why it would be high school and you know we can’t afford to board you out. You’re the smartest pupil in class, they always tell us that, and we know how much you love reading. I was talking to the principal and he says you can come back in June and deliver the commencement and you’re the first girl they ever asked.”

  I tried keeping up. The library in town was six miles through the snow, but Mrs. H. would invent errands for me, parcels she wanted dropped at the various farms, since she knew they would give me something warm to drink and let me dry off by their fire. I tried keeping up in arithmetic and history but I could only carry so many books and there was so much I wanted to read just for pleasure. I had never read poetry before but now I read all I could. They had Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Sara Teasdale and Robert Service, though the librarian did not want me to read him since there was swearing in his poems. “Were you ever out in the Great Alone?” one of his best ones began and I kept saying that to myself over and over during the long walk back to the farm.

  They had better than that. Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona I read again and again. Elizabeth Barrett Browning I read because we shared first names, then because I loved her books more than anyone’s. Aurora Leigh was about a girl growing up in Florence and marrying her cousin Romney who does not want her to be a poet since women do not have the brains and courage needed to write poetry. She leaves him and moves to London where I liked the story best, Aurora living by herself writing poetry.

  No one had checked this out in years. None of the books I read had been checked out in years. It was as if books were deliberately left in the library to rot while everyone went off to the moving pictures and it was only me in the world who still cared for them. Sometimes when I took them off the shelves I imagined them sighing in happiness and relief, finding someone whose fingers and eyes would make them live.

  On those journeys back home I became adept at reading while I walked and sometimes had a hundred pages finished by the time I turned up the Hodgsons’ road. My arms would ache from holding the book out straight and I would probably have tripped two or three times and scratched my face on overhanging limbs, but I would have enough read that I could put the book down and help Mrs. H. get supper without being desperate to know what happened next.

  Five months after our conversation about leaving school we had our second talk. I had not forgotten about the choices lined out for me, but I was no closer to deciding which was best than I had been the first time.

  Her expression was graver this time. She started off with the biggest news first.

  “Mr. H. and I are giving up the farm. His heart just won’t take it, all the work there is, and my lumbago doesn’t like winter better than it ever has. My brother lives in Ohio and that’s where we’ll be moving. George Steen is giving us something for the land, enough for rail fare anyway. That leaves you Beth to think about.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said quickly, though the words were even more hollow than they sounded.

  “Alan Steen you must surely know. Wasn’t he just ahead of you in school? I saw him yesterday when I went to town and he’s usually so bashful and quiet, but he surprised me since we had a nice long talk.”

  Mrs. Hodsgon said he asked about me but I gave this no credence. I never saw him speak to a girl in school let alone me. He played baseball but stood at the bottom of the class and never opened a book without wincing. He was gentle with the smaller pupils, he never let anyone bully them, and other than that I knew very little about him.

  He is six feet tall, with boyish features, and his friends tease him cruelly about his ears. He slumps too much, being so tall, but when he finally looks at you his eyes are friendly and sympathetic. And his hair is oatmeal colored, with lots of brown sugar mixed in. He is strong, he has always been strong if you talk just about muscles. Once at school the shed caved in from the snow and he went outside and lifted the beam on his shoulders until the men could come brace it back up.

  He started visiting the farm now, pretending it was to talk to Mr. Hodsgon. I remember being astonished that he could talk so easily. Most of it was about his parents who he worshipped. He was temporarily angry with his father because he wanted to go join the Canadians and fight against the Kaiser and his father said no, but I never heard him say anything else against him.

  Mr. Hodgson did not think very highly of George Steen. He was said to be the richest man in town, but what did that mean up here? “He’s got his head an inch further out of the mud than the rest of us,” Mr. H. said. “An inch—and he thinks it’s a mile.”

  When commencement night came Mrs. Hodsgon made a dress for me from muslin she found in her trunk. She tried her best, she looked startled and puzzled when she first saw it on me, but I loved it since I never had white to wear or anything so soft. I worked hard on my speech, I delivered it in a clear, strong voice, but it dissatisfied me terribly. It was ab
out our futures and how bright they were, but when I looked down at the six graduates waiting to receive their diplomas, saw how dull and hopeless they looked, I knew it was all platitudes and I had chosen the wrong thing to say.

  They were all going on to high school but not me. The Hodgsons were leaving for Ohio in July. My dress I would never wear again. I hate self-pity more than I do anything, but it was hard and I turned rudely away from people who congratulated me on my speech and tried not to cry. But that was only half how I felt. There was a tent set up and paper lanterns and banjo music and I saw the older boys staring at me in a way they never had before and for the first time ever I felt pretty and feeling this made me dizzy and I wanted to feel it even more.

  That was one of those June evenings when the locust trees blossom even beyond what they manage normally, and the creamy tassels looked like decorations hung from the branches especially for us. They were the same color as my dress—I remember that, too. Behind the school was a grove of hemlock and we all knew that if you ducked your head and pushed through the branches you came to a secret path that led down to a soft little wildflower meadow where no one could see you. After a while people stopped congratulating me and I was alone. I could hear fiddle music starting and I was still feeling dizzy, only this time it was from the perfume of the locust blossoms which was overwhelming

  Without really thinking about it, I began walking toward the hemlock grove, and without ever hearing him, I noticed Alan Steen walking right behind me. We came to the secret passage and stopped side by side. We still did not talk, though I could feel his eyes on my shoulders and the back of my hair. I knew that if I ducked through the branches and pulled the briars apart and walked down to the meadow he would follow after me, shy as he was. It did not seem just a meadow, it seemed like my future, and I was tired of always waiting for the future, always being frightened of it. That is why when Alan, getting up his courage before I did, stepped through the trees, held the branches back, reached his hand out, I took it, held it hard. I was fifteen and a half years old.