The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Page 7

  After he climbed back up we lay quiet on the grass. Above us the maple leaves were layered atop each other like fans the breeze kept peeling back, so more sky became visible even in the few minutes we stared. I wondered if I should tell Peter about what the Steens had said at dinner, but they were so ridiculous, their accusations so wild and unfounded, it seemed that saying them out loud would only be making the danger more real than it actually was. In the end what did their accusations amount to? That ignorant bigots knew his name.

  As beautiful as it was there, Peter had not forgotten this was supposed to be a class. From his battered army bag he took out a slim, rose-colored volume.

  “A friend sent me this while I was in France. I carried it with me the whole time I was there. It became my talisman—my rabbit’s foot. There was one shell. Well, I won’t tell you what it did to us. But the first thing I did when I shook the mud off was check my pocket to see if it was still there.”

  He opened the book, then hesitated. What he was going to share with us seemed so important that he could not bring himself to begin.

  “Picture a girl, not much older than you Beth, standing on a hill above the coast looking out toward sea.”

  I nodded, closed my eyes, not because I had to in order to imagine, but because I thought this would encourage him to start.

  “Renascence,” he said quietly. “By Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  At first I was more conscious of his voice than I was the poem, he read so wonderfully, but then the words disappeared and all I was aware of was being inside the experience itself. The girl in the poem looks out at the wide view of ocean, sensing the islands and the horizon, and it is very simple that way until, in a stanza of magic, the sky presses down on her and forces her into the ground, so it is as if she is dead. She has to suffer all the pain of the world. “I saw and heard and knew at last,” she says, “the how and why of all things past.” When the pain finally eases, when she begins to sleep serenely for evermore, a torrent of rain bursts from the same sky that crushed her and washes her back to life. She embraces all the sights, smells and sounds of the world she had once taken for granted, all the beauty after all the pain, ruing the day she ever thought of life as trivial and small.

  Peter, reaching the last verse, closed the book and read by heart.

  “The world stands out on either side,

  No wider than the heart is wide

  Above the world is stretched the sky

  No higher than the soul is high

  The heart can push the sea and land

  Farther away on either hand

  The soul can split the sky in two

  And let the face of God shine through

  But East and West will pinch the heart

  That can not keep them pushed apart

  And she whose soul is flat—the sky

  Will cave in on her by and by.”

  I would need Miss Millay’s gift for words to describe what her words did to me. Never had I heard anything that made me feel that the author has seen so deeply into my heart. I knew what smallness did to the soul, how difficult it was to fight this off. I knew that hunger for beauty and how alone it could make you feel. I trembled, literally trembled, to find she knew this about me and so much more.

  Again! I felt like shouting but Peter had already moved on to read more poems. Ashes of Life one was called and When the Year Grows Old and then, as his gentle little finale, Afternoon on a Hill which made it seem like she was sitting there with us.

  “I will be the gladdest thing

  Under the sun!

  I will touch a hundred flowers

  And not pick one

  And when the lights begin to show

  Up from the town

  I will mark which must be mine

  And then start down.”

  Laying beside me on the grass, Lawrence seemed as moved as I was. “Tell us about her,” he said.

  Peter shrugged. “I don’t know much. She published her first poems when she was a student at Vassar College. She can’t be much more than twenty-five now. My friend in New York knows her slightly. Her new book of poems is coming out before Christmas.”

  When he read poetry Peter trusted us to understand and he seldom offered us any interpretations. He seemed too moved to bother trying to teach us, or perhaps, prompted by the poem, he decided that he needed to teach us something harder and the only way to do this was by changing the subject.

  Without any preliminary he started talking about his experience in France, something he had never done before. His regiment had been stationed west of a town called Romagne where the fighting was brutal. Night attacks mostly. Noise, blinding lights, poison gas. The wounded calling for their mothers. Hardly knowing which side was which.

  “I did well there,” he said honestly, without the slightest trace of bragging. “The boys respected me, not because of any of my virtues, but because they needed someone to look up to and there were no other candidates in sight. I found I could take the shelling better than most, which I put down to my complete lack of imagination. We had men in the division from all over the country—that’s why they called us Rainbow. Many were poor farm boys from the high plains or the Appalachians who had run away just for the adventure. They were sorry they had now, the trenches were so horrible. But they carried on without complaining and that’s why I came to love them.”

  He told us stories about several, giving us their names and hometowns and what brave, selfless deeds he had seen them perform and how far too often he had to crawl out of the trench to recover their bodies. They were in the famous fight for Chatillon Hill and half his platoon had perished climbing the slope. It was afterwards, lying exhausted with the survivors in a shell hole fifty yards from the German trench, that he saw something that haunted him still.

  “I don’t expect you to believe when I tell you this. At first it was nothing more definite than that cloud you see blowing in right above us, but then gradually it became more substantial, touching the earth, gaining strength seemingly from the corpses, coiling upwards and darkening. There was gas in the shell holes and fog and smoldering flares and all kinds of strange and terrible vapors, so it wasn’t unusual for the men to see visions. But what we saw that night was more real than anything we witnessed before.”

  The streamers of fog and gas furled themselves around an axle that was black and hard, so at first it was like watching a huge pole being erected in No Man’s Land from which swirled long skirts of shredded fabric the same dun color as the dead men’s tunics. The top third of the pole swelled, became fleshy—it seemed a huge mushroom or a grotesquely misshapen face.

  Next to him, the sentry raised his rifle ready to fire but Peter stopped him. What was there to shoot? The other soldiers, sensing that something was up, crawled to the lip of the hole and stared. These men, who could face down any German attack, now wore expressions of absolute horror. For the pole seemed to divide itself vertically into two and then two again and then another two, so there were soon more than a dozen, only they were no longer poles but the gigantic outlines of men. Not ordinary men. Devils.

  “I know what you’re thinking. That it was all an illusion, that we had been fighting in those trenches too long. And perhaps it was an illusion, but the illusion was a real one, which is not the contradiction it sounds. For the first time in my life I realized Evil, pure Evil, really exists in the world. Not a man there didn’t believe that this is what we were staring at—that the devil was emerging from hell and dividing himself up into a band of identical brothers. He was surprisingly like what you see in bad illustrations, he even had a long black cape, but it was his face that convinced you he was the real thing—never again do I want to see such a face. He, or rather they, seemed to be a bit confused by the lay of things, even devils couldn’t figure out No Man’s Land satisfactorily. But they soon got their bearings and started off.”

  “Off?” Lawrence said. He had listened to this as silently as I had and I coul
d tell he was just as moved.

  Peter nodded. “The twelve devils moved off in different directions, high stepping over the barbed wire. One turned and headed in the direction of Germany. One turned south toward Italy. One went toward Belgium and another toward England. One seemed perfectly content to stay there in France. One headed northeast toward Russia.”

  Lawrence forced himself to smile. “Well, at least none headed toward the good old U.S.A.”

  Peter closed his eyes. “Two did.”

  We were silent—for a long time we stayed silent. Peter’s story was so powerful it seemed to influence the weather or maybe it was the changing weather that darkened his mood. The puffy clouds hardened now, became mercury color trimmed with white. The wind swept around from the north and strengthened, so the canopy of leaves blew down onto our laps. The river changed, now that the sunlight had left it. It flowed faster, more purposely, as if it were carrying not just its water south, but everything about the valley that was beautiful and fragile and not tied down.

  Peter, seeing me shiver, leaned over and covered me with his jacket. We lingered for a few minutes yet, reluctant to let go the afternoon. They must have read the river like I did, that it was escaping, flowing toward the future, because the future is what they began talking about.

  Lawrence told us he had been admitted to Columbia University in New York to begin a special accelerated program in the spring. He did not bother being modest about this since, he explained, it was a perfect opportunity for a boy with his abilities and ambitions. He would not miss small town life at all—he was very funny about this, very sarcastic and mocking. As usual with Lawrence, the more he went on the handsomer he became. It was as if only sarcasm could fill his face with energy, make his beauty come to life.

  “Boobus Americanus!” he yelled toward town. “Sunday school yokels, Odd Fellows, the glorious commonwealth of morons! Goodbye to you all! Goodbye Philistines! Goodbye Boosters! Goodbye Klu Klux Krazies who reek of dung!” He waved his arm around. “Goodbye mills, goodbye cows, goodbye town!”

  Peter and I both laughed, though we wanted to shush him, he yelled so loud. Peter, when it was his turn, spoke more quietly. He was not sure yet, he had only been here a few months, but he was beginning to think this was as good a place as any to make a life. There were no book stores within a hundred miles, true, but other than that it had many of the qualities he had been looking for. He wanted to teach and be with his books and take walks in the hills and these seemed perfectly attainable goals. He was afraid Lawrence was over-valuing the rest of the world. Here where people needed each other they had to be more tolerant of differences, not less.

  He said it again, as if wanting to stamp it on the day and make it permanent.

  “I want to enjoy my books and teach and every once in a great while be blessed with students like you.”

  It was my turn after that, my turn to speak of my future, and while I could sense them watching me, waiting, I had nothing.

  “I need to go now,” I said. We all sprang up together and beat the leaves from each other’s shoulders. It was the happiest afternoon I had ever spent. I wanted to tell them that but felt too shy.

  We walked back up the railroad tracks and they waited with me for the train. The Indian Summer that had lasted so long was over now. The clouds lowered, the wind gusted, icy pellets blew down—and thus began the harshest, cruelest winter in a hundred years.

  Once again, as on the first wall, the spacing between lines tightened as the writing dropped toward the floor. Once again, as with the first wall, Vera was kneeling by the time she finished. It took more effort than reading a book, with the constant adjustments needed to make out the words—stepping close where the script was faded, stepping back again when her eyes began blurring things up. Her back hurt from stooping, her neck was sore from following the lines toward the top, and now her knees ached, too, so her whole body was involved. The ironic thing was that her fingers and wrists had toughened considerably; a week’s worth of scraping had burned all the soreness out, so she felt she could go on stripping wallpaper forever if that’s what it took.

  At times, reading, she felt a tugging sensation, not just on her eyes, not just on her heart, but on every part of her still capable of responding to the world. Take me out of myself! In the middle of the wall she had made this appeal and almost immediately it had been answered. A different era. A different consciousness. Different wounds. The sensation of inhabiting these was addictive, her imagination wanted more and wanted it instantly, and it was only the fact she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast that made her decide to take a break.

  There was housekeeping to attend to. Strips of paper covered every inch of the parlor floor and she had to sweep this and take it outside to her little fire. The dishes, the few she had used, hadn’t been washed in two days. The lantern had to be refilled, but she knew how to do this from camping, and this time she brought the kerosene in with her so she could work deep into the night.

  She slid the ladder over to the next wall, took an appraising squint at things, decided to use the broadest scraper first. No words emerged from under the first piece she peeled, but this only made her smile. Beth and her indentations! But when she pried the next piece off there was nothing under that either, and nothing beneath the next one, nothing but bare plaster all the way across. Puzzled, she climbed down one step, chipped at the paper just enough to lift it back. Nothing. Nothing on that wall. Nothing, when she investigated, on the fourth wall either.

  She felt so disappointed that her shoulders literally sagged, but there was only one possible explanation. Beth must have begun her wallpapering on these two walls the very first day she started. She must have thought long and hard about writing on the plaster, the idea had tempted her and frightened her simultaneously, and her inner debate wasn’t resolved until she had the first half of the room, the first two walls, entirely papered. Then, not able to contain herself any longer, she began writing on the bare third wall and then the bare fourth—Vera’s first wall and second. Continuing on around the room would have meant stripping off the wallpaper she had already hung, and instead of doing that Beth would have taken her story to a room where the walls were still bare and inviting, which meant, logically, the next room down the hall. It was the only sequence that made sense.

  The next room down the hall. Vera had peeked in on her inspection trip, but this was the first time she had ever entered the room itself. It surprised her, it was so feminine and cozy, and she decided immediately that it must have been, not a den, but a sewing room, a place of refuge. The knotty pine paper darkened it terribly, but the floors were the lightest, most delicate looking in the house, with maple boards that had been milled and chevroned to form interlocking triangles, then polished to a jewelry box sheen a hundred years of traffic hadn’t managed to erase. It even smelled vaguely of wax, and brought back memories of her grandmother and Easters and brand-new shoes.

  Things grew shabbier higher up. A fan-shaped window had lost most of its glass, and the dampness streaming in found the lantern light and turned it plasma yellow. The molding, delicate as it was, hung down in strips, as if someone had gotten mad at it and yanked. And then of course the wallpaper, which seemed an even worse desecration here than in the front parlor.

  Which wall to start on was difficult to determine, but, using a book as her template, it made sense to try to the left of the door and work her way around to the right. She went back to the parlor for the ladder and tools, balanced her way up three steps, wiped the sweat from her forehead, shook the hair from her eyes, and started scraping.

  Almost immediately she came upon a word, which surprised her, since it was Beth’s habit to indent. Still, she didn’t think much of it—if anything, she was pleased to have located the writing so quickly—but that changed with the second word, revealed when her scraper got lucky and pried off a six-inch strip all at once. It wasn’t Beth’s handwriting, it was nowhere near as neat, and the ink was diffe
rent—ballpoint, and blue instead of black.

  I can’t

  The surprise came doubled—surprise at finding it, surprise that her first reaction was irritation. When she had first discovered Beth’s writing the effect had been of a woman stepping into the room and pronouncing the old-fashioned word out loud, credence, and now, having become used to that voice, comfortable with that voice, she was suddenly called upon to listen to another one that already seemed louder, more shrill. But almost immediately her curiosity took over. She dug away near the ceiling and found another word and then another, followed their prompts right across the top of the wall until she had the line entirely uncovered.

  I can’t tell a story like she can.

  The ink was thin and cheap-looking, recalling those plastic Bics she used when she was in middle school. With the pen held that high to write, there were places where the ink had dried up altogether, the letters becoming little more than cursive white scratches. Some letters were script and some were printed, but it was impossible to figure out what guided the logic, and the line itself slanted sideways like a ramp. It was slapdash, even drunken—the handwriting of someone who cared nothing for rules or consistency.

  Who had written it was more obvious than it had been with Beth. It could only be the woman who had lived in the house back in the Sixties, the one who stripped off the three layers of old wallpaper, then covered up everything with the knotty pine and wedding cake that had been on the walls ever since. In walking through the house, in exploring the overgrown garden or following the dead-end path out to the wall, Vera had sensed this woman’s presence much more strongly than she had any of the other owners, though this had never crystallized into a definite image, much less a name or personality.