The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Page 5

  His parents decided that the wedding should be in August. The Hodgsons had left by then and so Alan’s maiden aunt walked me down the aisle, tsk-tsking with her tongue the entire way. It was only afterwards that I got to know Mr. Steen. Mr. H. always described him as a cross between President Taft and President Wilson—“lard topped with preacher.” And it is true, he is corpulent now, though in his younger days he had been a famous brawler and his face, solemn as it is, still bears scars. His skin is the color of old potato peels, his ears and nose are stuffed with briary red hair and his eyes always look frightened and confused without his meaning them to.

  He has a business that thrives, buying up land and abandoned farm houses, ripping them apart and having Alan cart the planks down to the city where they fetch a good price. When Mr. Steen was young he had gone for wild times to Quebec and he had the fixed belief that Sherbrooke was going to be the next Montreal. If you took a ruler and drew a line on a map from Sherbrooke to Boston it went right through town, thereby assuring him his eventual fortune.

  In the meantime he never worked very hard, but spent all his free time hating. He hates immigrants and Jews and Negroes and professors and Socialists and sissies and scientists and Democrats. None of these people demonstrate true Americanism in his opinion, Americanism being his favorite word. He could be nice enough, talking to me, almost too nice I thought at times, but when the hate comes over him his eyes harden, his neck stiffens, and his fat puffs up until he seems doubled. Where does this come from? I often wondered. His life had not been a bad one. It was like he plucked it out of the air, that was the frightening thing. Like hate had wafted in a cloud from another part of the country and, since it suited him, he reached up and pulled the cloud down.

  He has his cronies, the toughest of the loggers and teamsters who are in his employ. “My troopers,” he calls them. There are no Jews here to trouble or Negroes, so during the war they devoted most of their energy to harassing Frenchies. Young farm boys were crossing the line from Quebec to hide from conscription, they wanted no part of England’s fight, and Mr. Steen and his posse patrolled the back roads at night to capture them and send them back, almost always after beating them senseless.

  Mrs. Steen is rail thin, with black hair so beautifully silky it seems stolen and a chin that looks hacked out of bone-white flint. Her lips hardly move when she talks, the words seem to emerge half-formed from the bottom of her neck. She is a miser, her fingers enjoy the feel of money which she always turns in her fingers before pocketing. She bullies the minister in church, he goes around in constant fear of what she might demand, and she will not allow a book in her house except the Bible.

  She calls me “My little lamb” and all but purrs, but then she remembers that I had finished ninth grade and she had only gone through fourth and so she scowls and calls me “The professor” or “Little Miss Fancy Airs.” She hates me because I will not go to church on Sundays. I told her it was Alan’s one day off, our only time to walk in the woods together or go for a picnic, but this only made her angrier.

  Alan listens to everything his parents say, takes it very seriously and will not hear a word against them. They bully him mercilessly, are always comparing his lack of accomplishments to his father’s success. How he gave in on the house is a good example.

  We planned to purchase one of the old farmhouses and fix it up. We talked and talked about how we would do this, but his parents said no, that we must live closer to town, that only rough people still lived in the hills. I remember after the wedding when we finished the miserly round of sugarcake that was all Mrs. Steen would allow. “I have a surprise for you, Beth,” Alan said, turning away so as not to meet my eyes. “Mother and Father are building us a new house out by the creamery and it should be ready by autumn.”

  The spot they picked was three miles from town but Mr. Steen was convinced business would grow in that direction and then we would be in the center of things. The fields round about were owned by Judson Swearingen and they are wet and soggy most seasons, but there were three flat acres protected from the north wind by hills. The only neighbor lives with his daughter a half mile further on the road, old Asa Hogg who came back addled from the Civil War after all he had seen.

  We stayed with Alan’s parents while the house was being built. Mr. Steen would drive us out in his carriage to watch how things progressed. He was good with horses, he could calm the unruliest with a whisper, and except for the fact that he needed them for business he had no use for automobiles at all. He would bark instructions out to the workmen from the road, gesturing with the mallets of his fists. Mrs. Steen sat beside him with her head bowed praying. Praying for the house to be finished quickly? Praying for the rafters to collapse? It was going to be nicer than the house she had as a bride so she was jealous. Since her lips barely moved and her voice emerged from her neck, people in church thought she was speaking in tongues. It made me shiver and if no one was watching I covered up my ears.

  The house was finished in October. Alan did not tell me until we moved in, but some of the timbers had been salvaged from the Hodgsons’ farm when Mr. Steen tore it down. This made me sad but then I felt comforted and reassured, that those good people were still somehow with me. Alan painted the house red and put up a small barn and I was responsible for making everything pretty inside. I had my collection of books and Alan crafted a shelf for them which we put under the window here in the parlor. There were not very many. Mrs. H. had given me her Dickens and teachers in school felt sorry for me and sent textbooks and I had some poetry from the library they were otherwise going to discard. Not many books—and so I cherished every volume like old friends.

  The workmen left a mess inside and it was many weeks before I had things straightened and cleaned. The kitchen was too big but Alan found a wide silver stove that made it cozier. I ordered a beautiful paper from the Sears and Roebuck book but I procrastinated pasting it up since I loved the bare walls just as they were. The plaster was cream colored and so smooth you could not resist running your hands along them. They gave you the feeling that they could be anything you wanted them to be, that they were just waiting for your command. Mr. Steen hired his roughnecks to build the house but for plastering the walls he sent for a gentle Italian man, Mr. Cipporino, who lived three towns south and was a master of his craft.

  “Ah Beth!” he would sigh as I sat watching him work. I knew that it was not me he was sighing for, but someone he had left years ago in Italy. “Ah, mia Beth!”—and then, turning back to the wall, he would smooth his artist’s hands across the plaster to make it perfect.

  Mrs. Steen hated the walls, she always complained how bare and ugly they looked without paper and when was I going to decently cover them? Never, if it was up to me. Not until I understood what their smoothness was asking of me, what they wanted me to make them.

  I would have liked the house more if I was not bothered by a feeling that grew stronger toward winter. What had I done to deserve something so nice? I knew about housework, I could clean and scrub all day long, and yet my labor had not earned the house and for that matter neither had Alan’s. I had no one I could talk to about this. Alan could be strong at night in our room, so strong and loving in the light from our candle, and yet this would fade once dawn came and he would be timid and uncertain, letting his parents boss him or even his friends. I loved winter more than summer because in winter the nights were longer and the longer the nights lasted the longer he was mine.

  A baby was supposed to come that spring, we both knew what was expected, and when it did not I had no one to ask questions of and I was left alone to suffer everyone’s whispers and stares. It was then that my idea formed, though really I had clung to it all along. I know it was Decoration Day before I got up the nerve to ask.

  We sat on the porch waiting to go into town. When I was little there would be a parade with all the G.A.R. veterans but now only poor Asa Hogg was left. Alan was going to drive him to town and hold him steady while he laid a
wreath on the monument. I knew we would not have time alone later so I decided to ask now.

  “I will put the garden in tomorrow,” I said, not knowing how else to start. “I think blueberries will do well here, so we need to find out about cuttings.”

  Alan, who sat with his chair propped back against the railing the way he liked, grunted out a yes. A merganser splashing in the stream across the road held his attention.

  “We have the house nearly done now,” I said. “We shall have a family, but it may not be for some time yet.”

  The merganser paddled off and it was only then that he looked at me.

  “What was that, Beth?”

  If I was going to ask, it had to be all in one rush.

  “I wrote the principal at the high school and he said I could matriculate in September, though I may have to work harder than the others to catch up. I’m ahead in reading and not that far behind in numbers. I might be able to graduate in a year and a half if I work hard. Then I could be of help to you in business and when we have children I can teach them at home even before they go to school.”

  Alan shook his head as I knew he would. “Please?” I said, and hated myself immediately since it was so nearly like begging.

  “In September?”

  “The garden will be done then, you’ll be going on your trips to the city so I’ll often be alone. It isn’t hard to get there. I can ride Bonnie to the train station and take the local.”

  This time he really thought about it, I could tell by the serious way he squinted into the sun. He did not want to hurt me and yet it was difficult for him to say yes and so he ended up saying what I knew he would all along.

  “I’ll ask Mother and Father what they think of your notion and if they say yes then you can.”

  We collected Asa Hogg in the buggy and drove him to town. During the ceremony I could see Alan whispering to his parents but it was impossible to tell anything from their expressions. They drove off immediately afterwards but we stayed on for the picnic and ball game. We got home in the dark and I went in ahead with the lantern while Alan unhitched the horse.

  I knew right away something was different, the violated sensation was waiting for me the second I crossed the threshold and by instinct I ran straight into the parlor to my books. They were gone, every last one of them. The Dickens, the textbooks, the poetry. There was no sign of them, the bookcase was gone, too, and in its place, for an insult, was a huge brass spittoon.

  Alan came in now and I turned on him all my fury.

  “Your parents did this. Your father. No, your mother.”

  “Beth—”

  “I am going to high school in September. You can agree with this or not but I am going and no power on earth can stop me.”

  “Of course you can go. Of course, Beth. Why, it’s a swell idea. You can give it thirty days to see if you like it or whether it’s too hard.” He nodded, proud of himself for coming up with a compromise. “Thirty days seems perfectly reasonable.”

  “I will graduate head of the class,” I said, not bragging, but like a statement of fact I had to make, not to him, not even to his parents, but to myself.

  I took the spittoon and carried it out to the porch, determined to throw it in the stream. There on the lawn, deliberately trampled, was one of the poetry books the librarian had given me. I picked it up, wiped the mud from the covers, held it close to my breast and took from it, not the comfort I usually found, not the escape, not the friendship, but courage.

  Vera stooped to read the last paragraph, and for the last line, tucked well down into the dusty corner, she had to kneel. The words were spaced closer together the nearer the floor they dropped. The girl, Beth, had obviously been very determined to fit in as much as she could. The script that had started off so neat and prim changed toward the bottom. The ink was blacker, as if she had pressed harder on the pen; the dots on the i’s and the crosses on the t’s had drifted right from the beginning, but now they often blew over into the next sentence.

  Vera got back up and touched the wall again, as she had many times while reading. The words seemed warm, or at least she fooled her fingers into sensing warmth. If she closed her eyes, concentrated, she could feel the shallow, all but imperceptible, gouges left by the nib of Beth’s pen.

  She would have liked to uncover more, starting on the wall to the right, but she was too tired now, not only her wrists but her understanding. Taking the putty knife she peeled back a strip near the top, just to assure herself there were indeed more words. Who had written them was plain enough now, the girl had gone to great lengths to explain. What it was meant to be wasn’t as clear, but it appeared to be an explanation or confession. Why she had done it was harder to guess, though with patience, with more wall cleared, perhaps that would become obvious as well. Some of her motives were understandable enough. The feeling of having something cooped up inside demanding its way out. The comfort of confiding in the future. Wanting to put words down just to find out if they made any sense. Anyone could understand this, really anyone, you didn’t need matching pain of your own.

  That night, for the first time since arriving, Vera slept without waking up for her midnight vigil. She took a walk around the house in the morning, trying to see it all from Beth’s point of view, how it must have looked in 1920. The lilac near the kitchen seemed ancient, it was so high and tangled, and she remembered reading that in the old days wives would plant them near a window just to enjoy their perfume. Some of the shade trees must have been a hundred years old, too, they were so high and rotten. When she walked around to the front she could look up the road to the small gray farmhouse—Asa Hogg’s place, the addled one, the man who had seen too much of war. She walked across the grass, trying to imagine discovering a favorite book trampled in the mud—then, guessing, decided that right there must be the spot, halfway between the porch and the road near a lichen-covered flagstone sunk well down into the grass.

  Too much had been added or subtracted over the years to make the yard look original. All the debris, the rusty swing set, the corroded lawn chairs, seemed to be from the Fifties or Sixties, and it overwhelmed anything earlier. Looking back at the hills or even up at the sky gave Vera a better, purer sense of it—what it must have been like to be young and spirited in a land that was emptying out.

  When she went back inside, before starting on the next wall, she searched through the last lines from the night before. Reading, she had been taken out of herself, her absorption had come as a relief, and yet the old danger still persisted, of tripping back to the present on a random phrase. She found it now, Alan’s compromise—“Thirty days seems perfectly reasonable.” It was as if she had put the words there herself, they fit so ironically. Thirty days, the length of Cassie’s sentence. Thirty days for smiling. Thirty days in an army stockade for smiling at the wrong time, the wrong place. Thirty days for Cassie to prove herself in prison. Thirty perfectly reasonable days for Vera and her walls.

  As before, the only way to escape this was to busy herself working. The parlor was perfectly square, which meant this next wall was the same breadth as the first, which meant a day’s worth of scraping. It was both easier and harder, knowing what was hidden underneath. Impatience made her hurry, always fighting down the temptation to just hack the wallpaper away, regardless of what it did to the plaster, but at the same time the writing made things easier, since the words seemed actively helping her, demanding their way out, pressuring up on the strips of paper while she pulled. By late afternoon she had the entire wall uncovered, and there was still enough sunlight filtering through the window that she could read without needing the lantern.

  The distance to school never bothered me. Our town does not have enough pupils for a high school of its own and neither does the next town so it meant going three towns south to where the first big railroad bridge crosses the river and all roads meet. Alan had a truck now for business and he would drive me to the station where I would wait for the morning milk train. There w
ere no cars for passengers but the trainmen were friendly and would let students ride in the caboose. It was thirty minutes ride and then I would walk the rest of the way uphill another twenty-five minutes. This was fine, since I still remembered how to read as I walked and it was while trudging up and down those steep sidewalks that I did much of my work.

  On the first day, not knowing any better, I wore my best frock. This made the other girls decide I was rich and stuck-up, though I felt like a bumpkin compared to them. But when I climbed up the marble staircase, found the locker assigned to me and went to my first class I was almost bursting from happiness and nervousness combined, since it was by far the bravest thing I had ever done.

  My first class turned out to be disappointing. I found a desk near the front and the boy behind me, when the door opened and the teacher came in, poked me in the shoulder. “Miss Crabapple,” he whispered and for the rest of the class I thought that was her name. She had a sour frown, sour eyes, sour wrinkles and she made us sit with our hands folded so it was like I was seven again and back at the county home.

  That was history. Mathematics was better and then came lunch which I ate alone under a tree and then it was time for English composition. The classroom was on the fourth floor off in a corner so it seemed exiled from the rest of the school, a secret room or garret that made me feel like Aurora Leigh living in London writing her poems. I felt a pleasant sense of anticipation even before the door opened and the teacher walked in.

  He was a young man, not that much older than the seniors, but he gave off an immediate air of authority and command—it was only later we found out he had been an officer in the Great War. He was handsome in the way men are who can force away their homeliness by sheer will power. You did not notice his big nose or over-large head or bad complexion—his blue eyes and spirited way of staring blinded you to the rest. You sensed that his face was not the barrier or shield that most people’s are and you were looking directly in to who he was, who he really was, with no excuses. Likeable is the handiest way to describe this. Likeable but with an edge.