Face on the Wall (4 page)

Bob's marriage had been another good move. Roberta was a brilliant and beautiful woman, almost a junior partner in the famous Boston law firm of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket. Within a year of their marriage they had been blessed with the birth of Charlene, that perfect child, who was now the prettiest and smartest kid in her fifth-grade class and a champion swimmer, headed for the Junior Olympics.

There was only one fly in the ointment, and that was their second child.

They had met other parents of Down's-syndrome kids who seemed to take it in stride, but the Gasts had been crushed from the beginning.

Roberta found it especially hard. Most of Eddy's care fell to her, because her hired nannies kept resigning. And his special schooling was hideously expensive. The greater part of Roberta's salary at Pouch, Heaviside and Spocket went for Eddy's care. The rest went to Weston Country Day, Charlene's private school.

“If only we didn't have to pay for Edward,” complained Roberta, “think how we could live. I told you what the doctor said. There's no reason he won't survive into old age. We'll be stuck with him all our lives.”

Bob looked soberly at his wife. He too was deeply regretful, hopelessly angry at fate, and dangerously apt to fly off the handle at his eight-year-old son. But in one withered chamber of his heart he felt a fatherly concern. “Well, he's kind of a sweet little kid, don't you think? He can't help being different.”

“That's easy for you to say—you don't have to take care of him half the time. Oh, Bob, I can't stand it. Do you know what he did yesterday? Remember, I had to take him to work with me because I couldn't get a sitter? He wet his pants right there in front of Dirk Sprocket.”

“My God.”

The conversation was nothing new. They had repeated it in different ways a thousand times.

“… then we will go to our work, and leave them alone, so they will not find the way home again, and we shall be freed from them.”

The Brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel”

Chapter 6

“I fear thee, ancient Mariner!

I fear thy skinny hand!

And thou art long, and lank, and brown,

As is the ribbed sea-sand.”

Coleridge,

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

H
e had an odd name, Flimnap O'Dougherty. “Flimnap?” said Annie. “Where have I heard that name before?”

“It's Icelandic,” explained Flimnap, grinning at her. “There are Flimnaps all over the place in Reykjavík.”

Did Irish-Icelandic people have big noses and lank brown hair? It didn't matter. Whatever Flimnap's origins, he seemed to know what he was doing. Working indoors, Annie could hear small thuds from outside as he moved his ladder, clicks and creaks as he opened and closed the windows. Mostly there was no noise at all. It was oddly exhilarating to work on her wall while Flimnap looked in from outside.

It turned out that he could do anything he set his hand to. When a truck arrived and tipped a load of cow manure down beside the vegetable garden, Annie called a halt to the priming of the window frames and sent Flimnap down the hill to dig it in.

The manure was supposed to be well rotted, but it wasn't. It was fresh and green and reeking. Would he object to a dirty job? For a moment Annie watched him drive his spade into the heap. He showed no reluctance. He was attacking it with a will, heaving up sloppy spadefuls, dumping them on last year's weedy dirt, forking them in.

Then Annie forgot about Flimnap and thought about Jack, who was coming out today. What would she say to him? She didn't know.

And then she forgot about Jack too, and bent her head to look at the books lying open on the table.

They were collections of folktales and nursery rhymes and picture stories for children.
Babar the King
lay on top of
The Arabian Nights.
The cherry nose of
Asterix the Gaul
glowed from a dog-eared paperback. And there were beautiful new books by Annie's fellow illustrators—the dazzling wild colors of Miguel Delgado's
Big Book of Clowns,
the clever simplicities of Jemima Field's ABC, the thick round bodies and crazy perspectives of
Gulliver's Travels
by Joseph Noakes, the spidery interlocking details of Margaret Chen's
Yellow River Folk Tales.

The books were her obsession. Since childhood, when she had sat beside her father on the sofa among a listening mass of siblings, she had stared at the pictures in the books while he read the stories aloud. She had fallen into the pictures, lived in them, loved them. Loved them too much, because one day bad girl Annie had scribbled all over the precious stories and the wonderful pictures, wanting to write them and draw them herself, and she had been spanked. Even now she couldn't just look at the books and turn the pages and look again. She had to scribble on them in a new way, she had to
use
them somehow.

One way was to distill them into her own picture books, to make new editions of
Jack and the Beanstalk
and
The Owl and the Pussy-cat.
They were compendiums of everything her eyes had wondered at—the thorny trees of Rackham, the purple seas of Wyeth, the bewitched line drawings of Bilibin and Shepard, Blegvad and Williams.

The other way of using the old stories was to put them on her wall. Annie sat at the newspaper-covered table and made greedy lists. She crossed out
Treasure Island
and
The Enchanted Castle
, then put them back and added more.

When a car drove up outside, she thought,
Jack!
and ran to the door.

But it wasn't Jack. There were two cars in the driveway and a giant moving van. Of course, it was her new tenants. They were moving in.

“Welcome,” said Annie politely, as Robert Gast climbed out of a big Ford Bronco and grinned at her. Roberta Gast came forward too, emerging from a bright-blue Mazda convertible with daughter Charlene and the little boy named Eddy.

Flimnap O'Dougherty appeared suddenly, coming up from the vegetable garden, his manure pitching all done. Annie introduced him to the Gasts—mother, father, Eddy, and Charlene.

Flimnap nodded courteously and Bob said, “How do you do?” and shook his hand.

Charlene wrinkled her nose and said, “Pee-yoo, you stink.”

Her father was shocked. “Charlene!”

“It's all right,” said Flimnap. “She's right. It's cow manure.” He paused, then said, “I stink, therefore I am.”

Annie burst out laughing. Bob Gast laughed too. Roberta didn't get it.

O'Dougherty vanished. Annie too made herself scarce. Sharing a house was going to call for tact, even though their two sets of living quarters were separated by an insulated wall and a workshop. The Gasts should be able to come and go without interference. So should she. It wouldn't be difficult. Her front door was on the north, theirs on the south.

Afterward, when the moving vans lumbered down the driveway, Annie wondered about the Gasts' two cars. When the realtor had brought them to look at the house they had been driving an aged Chevy. She had been charmed by their simplicity, their enthusiasm, their apparent poverty, and at the realtor's suggestion she had cut the rent in half.

Where was the old Chevy now, with its pitted chromium and missing hubcaps, its cracked windshield and dented side?

Then Annie forgot about the Gasts and climbed her shaky ladder with a jar of thin ocher paint in one hand. Clinging to the ladder with toes and shins, she leaned forward and began washing color on the wall, relieving the awful whiteness of the bare plaster. The ladder wobbled. Soon the background color was done and she scrambled down, picked up a narrow brush and climbed up again. Carefully, with her hand moving surely and slowly, she began tracing the hull of a vessel over the light pencil marks beneath the ocher paint.
With beating heart Ulysses spreads his sails.
Quickly the craft took shape, floating on the horizon, which in this part of the wall was the Adriatic Sea. Farther to the right it would become the Mississippi River, and then Lake Windemere, and the coast of Coromandel.

There was a noise behind her. Looking over her shoulder, Annie saw Flimnap working on the latch of the French door. “Kind of loose,” he said, holding up a screwdriver.

“Well, good,” said Annie, smiling, turning back to the wall. She had known Flimnap for less than two days, but already she could see two distinct sides to his character. On the one hand he was skillful with tools and handy with a paintbrush, on the other there was a gossamer insubstantiality about him, a sort of comic playfulness. Beside the solidity of Robert Gast he seemed a flimsier order of being. He was clever, anybody could see that, and yet oddly dyslexic at the same time. Yesterday, when she had asked him to design a simple cupboard, he had not been able to handle a pencil.

Annie came down from the ladder and found him examining the sketches lying on the table. One was her drawing of an old Greek bard. He was supposed to be telling the story of Odysseus. His mouth was open, his arms were flung out, his whiskers were wild.

“Santa Claus emerging from the bath?” said Flimnap, and Annie laughed. She watched as he turned to look up at the wall and sweep his pale eyes across it from left to right, taking in the five-part arcade and the ship on the horizon and her pencil sketch of Aesop with the tortoise lumbering along at his feet and the hare sleeping under a bush.

Flimnap made no comment. Instead he pointed at the far end of the wall. “Who's that supposed to be?”

“What?” Annie looked. On the pure white plaster there were two small green blotches superimposed on an orange blob.

It looked like a face. “It's nothing,” said Annie, “just some sort of stain. Mildew or something.”

“I'll take care of it.” Flimnap went out to his truck and came back with a can of shellac.

Annie watched him coat the stain with a few strokes of his brush. She wanted to ask what he thought of her great project. Surely he could see how marvelous it was going to be But Flimnap O'Dougherty said nothing at all. Annie told herself she was not disappointed. He was one of those people without any interest in artistic things. Well, that was okay. Half the world was like that.

But the truth was, she could have used a little praise.

Chapter 7