The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Read online

  His hair was sandy and surprisingly unkempt. His eyelashes were the longest, most doe-like I had ever seen on a man and he seemed self-conscious about this, because he was always touching them, almost primping. He dressed shabbily, in a brown suit that hung loose from his shoulders. Combined with his dusty army shoes and half-tied tie it made him look absent-minded, which was the very last thing Peter Sass ever was.

  He sat at his desk with his head in his hands moodily staring out at us, then, as if electricity had just switched on inside his chest, sprang to his feet and started marching up and down the nearest aisle.

  “Who’s your favorite author?” he demanded, stopping at the first desk.

  “Uh, Longfellow,” the boy stammered.

  “Who’s your favorite author?” he demanded, stopping at the second desk.

  “Eugene Field,” the girl said primly.

  “And you?”

  “Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

  “You?”

  “Maria Susanna Cummins.”

  “You?”

  “Samuel Clemens.”

  The teacher stared down at him.

  “Sawyer or Finn?”

  “Tom Sawyer.”

  That took care of the first aisle. He marched down my aisle next, where there were only four of us.

  “Who’s your favorite author?” he demanded, stopping at the first desk.

  A blonde boy sat there, new like me and very handsome—the girls had been pointing at him, nudging each other and giggling before the teacher came in.

  “Oscar Wilde,” he said in a voice of complete and utter boredom.

  Mr. Sass, obviously surprised, hesitated, then moved on to me.

  “Browning,” I said before he could even ask.

  “Mr. or Mrs.?”

  “Mrs. of course.” I wanted to stand up for myself right away.

  “Who’s your favorite?” he said to the student behind me.

  “Jack London.”

  “And you?”

  “Theodore Dreiser.”

  Mr. Sass returned to the chalk board, folded his hands behind his back, drew himself up straight like he was about to issue orders to his platoon.

  “This is a large class and we have permission from the principal to divide it into sections. One group will immediately transfer to Miss Gleason’s class while the ones I call out will remain here.”

  He walked down the aisle again, brandishing a ruler.

  “Stay,” he said to the boy who liked Wilde.

  “You too,” he said to the boy who liked London.

  “And you,” he said to the girl who liked Dreiser.

  My heart sank because he walked right past me toward the other aisle, but then he abruptly swiveled, came back to my desk.

  “And you.”

  This is what it became, just the four of us in that dark, drafty classroom hidden away under the eaves. How Peter arranged this no one knew. We heard that he worked very hard with his other classes, took a personal interest in every pupil, and I saw for myself how furious he would get when Lawrence, the blonde boy, made fun of them and called them dolts. Even with us he was strict, he would call roll and demand we answer, and then we had to stand up and salute the flag. After that he would relax, treat us as equals, and I think he saw our special class, coming at the end of a long day, as his reward for drilling the rules of grammar into future shop owners, druggists and clerks.

  We started with four but were soon down to two. The girl who read Dreiser, Ellen knew lots of names I had never heard before, not just American authors but ones in Europe. Though I was frightened of her for being so smart and she was frightened of me for already being married, we tried hard to be friends. Her parents had sent her there from a village even more remote than ours, but the room and board turned out to be so dear that she had to leave school and start work.

  The boy who liked Jack London was quick and very funny but his banker father wanted him to take business courses, not waste his time on novels and poetry, so he soon left as well. That left just two of us—and yet every day, the moment he stepped into the classroom, Peter would take out his attendance book and call roll.

  Lawrence was the other pupil, Lawrence Ridley Krutch. Like Ellen, his parents sent him into town to board since he lived so far away. He never talked about them or his home, seemed already done with that part of his life, and kept his eyes firmly on his future. His brilliant future. He made sure everyone knew it was going to be brilliant. For he was by far the smartest pupil in school and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. Unlike every other boy, sports held no interest for him and he was outspokenly contemptuous about the “clodhoppers” who played football and baseball.

  His hands were soft and delicate, not rough like the other boys’, and his eyes were a flirt’s, so lively and dancing. The girls adored him but he had no favorites, seemed happiest when five or six surrounded him in the hall and giggled at his jokes. He was very nice to me, I was the one girl he let be his confidante, I suppose because he thought of me as an experienced older woman. When I had trouble with mathematics he made sure he sat with me after class to go over every problem until I understood. When he learned I was an orphan he asked me all kinds of questions about what it had been like and no one had ever done that before.

  “Why didn’t you take down their names?” he asked. “The names of all the people who mistreated you.”

  “Their names? I’ve tried hard to forget them. Why would I want their names?”

  “For revenge,” he said—and then he shook his head in amazement, that I could be so innocent and naïve as to forgive them.

  I worried about him sometimes, the contempt he was too free in expressing, his carelessness toward life. He knew his future was bright, that his brains would carry him far from these hills, but for the time being he seemed in no hurry. Except for his weakness for sarcasm, he seemed perfectly content to be the smartest, handsomest boy for a hundred miles around.

  Peter, once Lawrence and I raised our arms and yelled “Present!”, lectured while pacing back and forth in front of the chalk board, rubbing his hand across his forehead like he was polishing off his thoughts before releasing them. He wrote on the board so vigorously the chalk was always snapping in his hand and it was my job to collect the pieces after class and line them up again in the tray.

  As I said, he talked to us as equals, though this was more for Lawrence’s sake than mine. I had to struggle to understand, I was so far behind. But I enjoyed having to struggle. All my life I had been surrounded by people who wanted to make life as small as they possibly could and now for the first time I was with a man trying to make life as large as it could be made. Often in the middle of his talk he would go to the window and point outside, showing us that this is where the world of ideas was, not here in this stuffy classroom. The more excited he grew about his subject, the softer his voice became—Lawrence and I were always leaning forward to hear.

  What he enjoyed talking about most was American literature. This was not some dead mummified thing in a textbook, he told us, it had not been buried with Washington Irving or Fenimore Cooper, but was going on right now out that window—why, it was coming into maturity as we spoke, entering the golden age everyone had been awaiting for so long. Edward Arlington Robinson, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost who was writing about these hills, even Booth Tarkington who should not be ignored. We should pay very careful attention to every word they wrote.

  He told us the best thing about American authors was their faith in progress and their believing that America was the best chance mankind ever had for achieving that progress, not just in material things but in basic human values like honor, respect, tolerance and mercy. American writers believed that men, even simple men, could be trusted to set things right in time. That had always been the American wager, he said, and if writers were sometimes disillusioned, it was only because reality had not yet caught up with the dream.

  He got excited, rubbed his forehead, ru
mpled his hair, moved to the window and pointed outside.

  “Right now, understand? Out there, out across the country, men and women not much older than you are creating the books that teachers will tell their students about in a hundred years time.”

  Listening to his passion, it was impossible not to believe that these authors and poets were writing right outside on the high school’s lawn. I had never heard anyone talk like this and while I always felt ignorant and naïve and very much behind, I felt this less so as the weeks went on. “He who believes in the potential of life must also believe in its realization and be predisposed to work for it,” Peter told us. I wrote that down on my tablet and all the way to the train station stared down at it and by the time I got there understood.

  He went out of his way to recommend books to us. He told me about Celia Thaxter who wrote beautifully about living on an island off the coast and then recommended Mary Austin who wrote about her early life in the Western desert land and her later years working at a settlement house in the New York slums. The Land of Little Rain the first one was called and No. 26 Jane Street was the name of the second. The library did not have either, but when I came to school that Monday there they were gift wrapped on my desk and Peter, trying hard not to grin, pretended he had no idea where they came from.

  Peter never said very much about himself, not in those first weeks. He had moved often since leaving the army. This was his fourth teaching position in two years and each move brought him further north toward the edge of things. He rented a house out by the river. He liked trout fishing and he had a gramophone collection with lots of Rosa Ponselle. Along with his books this was enough to keep him happy. He told us more than once that lonely as things were here he wanted to make it his home.

  The trains ran more irregularly in the afternoon and I often got home after dark. Alan would meet me at the station and carry my books. He held them in a strange way, at arm’s length like they might hurt. He seemed confused by them, puzzled that I could find so much meaning in things he had always been frightened of.

  “Your thirty days are up today,” he said once we reached home. “I’m glad you had the chance to try. Maybe some time in the future you can go back.”

  I knew I had to keep my temper. They did not seem his words and I knew where they were coming from.

  “Tomorrow I go back. It’s only Thursday.”

  “Well, I’ll need to ask Mother and Father about that.”

  “A wonderful idea. Let’s invite them for Sunday dinner.”

  It was important to call their bluff but I regretted it once they came. Mrs. Steen went on an inspection tour of the house, frowning at all the fixing up still needing to be done. The fact the walls were not yet wallpapered especially bothered her—in her view of things a woman who lived in a house with bare walls was equivalent to a woman who paraded around naked. She touched the plaster as if smearing it with something dirty from her fingertips and later I went around scrubbing every single spot she touched.

  We had a little comedy when dinner started. Alan went to a side chair, leaving the position of honor at the head of the table for his father, but I got there before he could, held the chair back and said loud as I could, “Alan? Why don’t you sit up here?”

  So. There was a mood. Mr. Steen speared some roast off the platter, then started in on his favorite topic—the fine work they were doing down in Washington, rounding up foreign agents, throwing radicals in jail, putting a good healthy scare into people. Attorney General Palmer deserved a medal for standing up for real Americanism. Why, he could do good work right up here if someone alerted him to the situation. There were teachers in the high school who were stirring things up, trying to change things, importing foreign thoughts. He heard there was a new teacher who acted as their ringleader, a Mr. Ass or Mr. Rump or something unmentionable like that.

  Alan, who had sat silently eating his turnips, now looked up.

  “Mr. Sass. Beth has him for English.”

  I nodded. “He’s the best teacher there.”

  Mr. Steen stared over at me—the scars seemed to coil upwards from his cheeks to his eyes, narrowing them into purple slits.

  “He’s a Democrat,” he said, spitting out the word.

  “No,” I said calmly. “He hates Wilson and worships Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “He’s a radical.”

  “No. He was an officer in the Rainbow Division and fought in France.”

  “He’s a New Yorker.”

  “He was born in Bemidji, Minnesota where it’s even colder than here.”

  “A Jew.”

  “The son of a Presbyterian minister.”

  “I bet he thinks we’re descended from apes.”

  I was going to say something terrible but before I could someone interrupted.

  “He’s a bachelor!”

  Mrs. Steen said this, or, in her manner, croaked the words out her neck. She made it sound like the worst accusation yet. By this point I just wanted to laugh at them and I had to busy myself with the rest of dinner or perhaps I would have. When I came back from the kitchen Mr. Steen had switched his venom to an easier target. A librarian two towns over was stirring things up, handing out radical literature, giving young people dangerous ideas. When I asked him what sort of radical literature he frowned mysteriously, as if that was for him to know and me to guess. I asked again and this time he mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  “I think it’s time me and my boys went over and paid her a visit,” he said darkly. “Just a little visit by real Americans to show her what’s up, give her a good healthy scare.”

  Mrs. Steen must have worried he had gone too far—she wiggled her eyes back and forth as a warning and he changed the subject with a coarse laugh.

  “I nearly wet my pants laughing today, the sight I saw.”

  Alan knew his cue. “What sight was that, Father?”

  “Francine Toliver climbing over a fence. Why she must weigh three hundred pounds just counting her bottom.”

  It was the worst dinner I ever sat through and when his parents left Alan and I had our first real quarrel.

  “Someone saw you walking out with him,” he said. This was lying in bed with the lights out long after I thought he had fallen asleep.

  “With who?”

  “Your Mr. Sass.”

  “It’s a long way to the train station, Alan. He helps me carry my books just as you do once I get home.”

  “Like Mother says, he’s a bachelor. People will get the wrong impression. I don’t want you seeing him outside class.”

  “Is that your idea or your parents’?”

  He took so long to answer I thought he had fallen asleep again.

  “I have ideas, Beth. They may not come as quick as yours do, but they’re there just the same.”

  Autumn had been rainy and cold but the following week it turned warm again and the sun slanting through the leaves felt like a gift the sky was laying against your face. Indian Summer people said—it will not last long. On Tuesday I was sitting on a bench outside school, alone with my lunch as usual, when someone called down to me from a fourth-floor window.

  “Stay right there, we’re coming down for you!”

  It was Peter and Lawrence who between them had decided it was far too nice to have class indoors. We walked downhill past the match factory which was empty and derelict, then, after passing the abandoned clothespin factory and climbing a fence or two, came at last to the railroad tracks that ran along the river.

  It was breezy, the wind streaked the water, but if anything it felt even warmer than back at school. Lawrence tried catching the maple leaves as they fell but had a hard time, they swerved so at the last second. Peter tried and did much better. In a short time he had a bouquet which he handed me with a courtly flourish. He took my hand, then, acting a bit bashful, as if this were too bold of him, reached for Lawrence’s hand, too, so we walked three abreast on the bed of cinders that flanked the tracks.

  We stopped
where the trees opened into a meadow set high above the river’s surface. You could tell from the way the bank was worn that it was a favorite spot for picnickers and fishermen. Someone daring had shimmied up a tree and hung a hempen rope for a swing. It was a tall silver maple leaning from the bank, so the rope dangled a good way out. You could easily picture children playing on it in summer, reaching with a forked branch to tug the rope back to the bank, grabbing hold of it and laughing as they launched themselves over the water to land with a mighty splash. The end of the rope swing, the part that dangled over the river, was tied into two thick knots. Lawrence, pointing, said something strange.

  “It looks like a noose, like a hangman’s noose.”

  It cast a pall and he seemed to know it because right away, jumping up on a stump for a stage, he started in with his impressions of all the teachers. Peter tried not to laugh but in the end it was too much for him, especially his Miss Crabapple, and he applauded even louder than I did.

  When Lawrence finished, Peter tried persuading him to go down the river bank with him to search for pike sunning in the shallows, but Lawrence was timid when it came to things like that so Peter went by himself. It was a steep, perilous climb down and Lawrence and I were certain he was going to tumble in, but at last he made it and lay there on the last narrow shelf with his arm extended out over the water as far as it would go. He was as still as a heron, concentrating, and then suddenly his hand dipped and came back out holding a silver minnow! He lifted it above his head as if it were a real trophy, then lobbed it as far out into the river as he could.

  He is showing off again, I decided, and who else could that be for but me? It made me feel girlish, seeing that. With the sun shining down on him, outdoors, he gave off even more authority and strength than he did in his classroom and I wondered at myself that I had ever thought of him as homely.