The Road Through the Wall (15 page)

“All right,” Harriet said; it was settled, and they sat quietly together in a silence now companionable. “I was just thinking,” Harriet said finally, “what kind of people are going to live in this house.”

Marilyn looked over her shoulder at the house. “Couldn't be any worse than Helen Williams,” she said.

Sitting easily beside Marilyn, Harriet said, “I hear she's in San Francisco now and she goes around with any man.” It was not true, and Marilyn knew that as well as Harriet, but it seemed to both of them a completely justifiable (although almost meaningless) assumption.

“I didn't like her much,” Marilyn said. She added carefully, “You know who else I don't like much?”

“Who?” Harriet said, becoming at that moment an accomplice.

“Virginia Donald,” Marilyn said with finality. “I don't like her at all.”

“She's not much,” Harriet admitted. As a final recognition of bond with Marilyn she said, “I know something about
her
.”

“What?” Marilyn said.

“Promise?” Harriet asked, and Marilyn nodded expectantly. “She goes around with Chinks,” Harriet said.

Marilyn opened her mouth in horror, and for a minute Harriet was frightened. “You promised not to tell,” she said.

“I won't,” Marilyn said. “I promise
again
.”

•   •   •

It was the night before Hester was to leave; she was to get breakfast in the morning and then pack and go home and because there seemed to be no possible harm she could do, Mrs. Roberts let her come outdoors and join the neighborhood children at their nightly games. After strenuous prisoner's base and wild tap-the-finger, they had settled down on the Donalds' lawn to play some quieter game. When they saw Hester coming across the street to them, Pat Byrne said, “Let's make Hester play,” and they all laughed, and someone—probably Tod Donald—shouted, “Come on over and play, Hester.”

“That's just what I'm doing,” Hester said. With the children she was usually good-natured and amiable; it was only when she met adults, those mysterious creatures whose world she had invaded too soon, that Hester became menacing and ugly, as though it were necessary to her to establish, immediately, her status as an invader by right of superior ability. “What you kids playing?” she asked as she came on the lawn.

“You know how to play Tin-Tin?” Virginia, as hostess, asked her, and when Hester shook her head they explained raucously. Tin-Tin is probably as old as children; Hester recognized it as a game she had played under another name. Wherever children congregate they will probably have their own version of Tin-Tin, its elaborate ritual determined by the children and their fathers and their grandfathers operating individually on an immutable theme. Pepper Street's Tin-Tin was as nonsensical as most; the entire introductory ritual had lost its meaning and probably its accompanying dance:

It
: (starting at the head of a line of children sitting on the curb) Tin-Tin.

Victim
: Come in.

It:
How much tin do you want today? (In a sing-song pattern, as fast as possible.)

Victim:
Ten pounds (or) As much as will fit on the head of a pin (or) A hundred-and-fifty tons (or any idiot sum coming to mind).

After questioning every person in the line, and receiving an answer, “It” began again at the head, whispered some familiar word or name or nonsense syllable into the victim's ear, and began the new ritual:

It
: Tin-Tin.

Victim
: Come in.

It
: Where will I get the money for my tin?

To which the victim must answer with his secret name, and “It” might then continue questioning, asking any personal or outrageous or hilarious question, to all of which the victim must answer with his idiot name. The object was, of course, to make the victim laugh; as soon as he did, he yielded a forfeit, and the whole procedure filled some deep undefined need in neighborhood life never exactly equaled by prisoner's base or tag.

If “It” spent a reasonable length of time on one victim, with the rest clamoring for service, he abandoned the persecution, and the first resisting victim in each game became the next “It.” Virginia Donald was “It” at the moment, by virtue of an almost impregnable solemnity under the name of “Clark Gable.” When Hester came over and sat down at the end of the line Virginia had already begun with Harriet, who was first, and Hester said quietly to Tod, who sat next to her, “Where's your brother tonight?”

Tod had turned eagerly to Hester when she sat down, had waited shyly for her to speak to him, and now he said miserably, “He's out somewhere.”

“With some girl?” Hester asked. “He ever go out with girls much?”

“I guess so,” Tod said. He turned away from Hester to watch Virginia moving down the line to him, and Hester said kindly, “He's pretty lucky to have a kid brother like you.”

“Tin-Tin,” Virginia said indifferently to her brother.

“Come in,” Tod said, and Virginia said, “How much tin you want?”

“Four-hundred-million-billion-quadrillion pounds,” Tod said, and no one heard him.

“Tin-Tin,” Virginia was saying to Hester.

“Come in,” Hester said.

“How much tin do you want today?” Virginia asked, giving the words her fullest singsong.

Hester hesitated, and Tod began “Million-billion . . .”

“Shut
up
,” Virginia said to Tod, and Hester said, “Enough to make a hat.”

Everyone laughed, and Virginia went back to the head of the line. She named Harriet “Crazy Cat,” and Harriet laughed on her first question. She named Art Roberts “Popeye,” and Art survived so long on “Popeye” that Virginia gave him up and went on, establishing him as “It” for the next game. She went along down the line, whispering, laughing herself to make others laugh, making desperately funny questions. There was a debate as to whether a grimace Mary Byrne was unable to control constituted a laugh. When Virginia came to Tod she named him perfunctorily “Hallie Martin,” and when Tod did not laugh, but only repeated his frightful name in a whisper, she gave him up after two or three questions and went on to Hester; everyone was waiting for this, and Virginia had been puzzling all down the line for a good name, excruciating questions. Perhaps the fact that Art Roberts's mother was on her front steps across the street, listening, and had heard Art win on “Popeye,” suggested the final name to Virginia; at any rate, she named Hester, secretly and with malice, “Art Roberts.”

Hester drew back and stared. She knew, as well as everyone in the neighborhood, that Art detested her, that he had begged his mother to send her away, that he called her, killingly, “Filthy Lucas.” Virginia knew, too, what Hester probably did not, Art Roberts's neighborhood boast that he had told his mother the story of Hester's runaway marriage, gleaned and enlarged from neighborhood gossip, was thus immediately instrumental in her dismissal.

“Where will I get the money for my tin?” Virginia asked slowly.

Hester was silent. Somehow, as she sat on the curb with the children around her and Mr. Desmond sauntering up the block on his evening walk and Mrs. Roberts on her front porch, it came to Hester that the evening was focusing on her; tomorrow night she would not be here, last night she had not been allowed to play, and in ten years, wherever she was, whatever she was doing to keep alive, these children would still be quietly growing, protected and sheltered with the strong houses of their parents and the quiet assumption that streets were made for them to sit on. It occurred, certainly, to Hester for the first time, that regardless of what she and Mrs. Roberts thought of one another, and whatever cruel vengeance operated between the Hesters and the Mrs. Robertses, Virginia Donald definitely and automatically thought of herself as superior. Mr. Desmond might be diplomatic and tolerant, Mrs. Ransom-Jones indifferent, James Donald awed and reluctant, although somehow accessible, but Virginia Donald stood calmly looking down on Hester, as she always had and always could.

Hester put her head back and said to Virginia Donald, and loud enough so Mrs. Roberts—who, after all, lived on Pepper Street with the rest of them—could hear, “Mike Roberts.”

It was against the rules of the game for “It” or anyone else to remind the victim of his true name; by changing her name Hester was definitely out, but Virginia knew that everyone in the game, and Mrs. Roberts, who was staring across the street, thought that she had given Hester that name. “
That's
not the name I gave you,” Virginia said emphatically.

“Mike Roberts,” Hester said.

“I didn't give her that name,” Virginia said to the other children in the quiet line, “I gave her another name than that.”

“Mike Roberts,” Hester said.

“Listen,” Virginia said, and Hester said, “Mike Roberts,” and began to laugh.

“Arthur. James,” Mrs. Roberts said clearly across the street. “Come home at once.”

There was no need for her to speak again. Art and Jamie were halfway across the street already, and as the other children rose and started quietly up or down the block, across the street, into their houses, anywhere away from Hester and the unmentionable thing she had said, the only voice was Tod Donald's, chanting insistently, “You lost, Hester, you laughed. Hey, everyone, she laughed.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It was dreadful; they moved in during a hot morning and everyone was there. Harriet Merriam and Marilyn Perlman walked arm in arm up and down the block, pretending not to watch; Virginia Donald, who associated pointedly with Mary Byrne of late, sat with Mary on the Byrnes' front lawn, and they giggled; most of the boys played a haphazard baseball game in the street, far enough away to be out of the way of the moving van—if you could call it that—close enough to see everything. Tod, alone, came near in order to say “Hello” to the driver, and got a glare and a “Get away from there, kid,” for his pains. Everyone was careful to seem unaware of the whole thing; until it had been assimilated and talked over with parents and finally decided upon in neighborhood grapevine conclave, no one dared say anything definite, even smile too broadly. It
might
be acceptable, after all.

The moving van was a truck, with open slatted sides and furniture heaped on it, not stowed carefully inside, as Pepper Street furniture tended to be in transit, but piled, as though careless people had gone through a previous home room by room, carrying out the furniture as they came to it, throwing it into the truck, and going back for more. Besides the driver, who sat sullenly in the front of the truck without moving, there was only a thin uneasy young man to help the girl who was carrying in most of the furniture. She was perhaps no older than Harriet or Virginia or Marilyn or Mary, she was certainly no taller than Art Roberts, she was busy and worried and seemed not to know that she was being watched by eyes her own age.

“
Please
try to hurry,” she said once to the thin young man. “They'll be here soon.”

The young man growled something, and the girl stopped for a minute and looked at him and then shrugged and went on tugging a table up the steps. She was not strong, apparently, but she was nearly as strong as the young man, and the furniture seemed to be mostly lightweight wicker chairs and tables; the beds were cots which came up in one folded piece, and such things as lamps and dressers and desks and bookcases seemed not to be there at all. All the furniture that went into the house-for-rent came out of the small truck, and most of it the girl carried in alone. Much of it was in bundles, apparently of clothes or tablecloths or curtains or tapestries, tied roughly together, which the girl hauled along the sidewalk, dragging dirt with them.

When all the furniture was out of the truck and inside the house, the driver got heavily down from the cab of the truck, and he and the young man stood on the sidewalk talking with the girl. They argued, the driver waved his big arms, and the young man stamped his foot, and the girl looked from one of them to the other, and finally, her shoulders tired, counted her money out to them. They went back together and got into the truck while the girl stood on the sidewalk looking from the truck to the house. As the truck started away, the young man leaned out and yelled something at the girl, which no one but her was able to hear, although she blushed darkly and turned away. Then, as the truck pulled off down the street, she looked up and for the first time seemed to realize that Harriet and Marilyn were close to her on the sidewalk, Virginia and Mary across the street, the boys quiet for a minute in their ball game, and Tod Donald at the curb. She looked at Harriet and Marilyn, who were closest, and ran her tongue over her lips nervously.

“They made me pay them nearly twice what they said they would,” she said. Harriet was embarrassed and looked away, but Marilyn said immediately, “That's a real dirty trick.”

“It certainly is,” the girl said. “It was too much in the first place.” She was, seen close up, definitely not a pretty girl; she wore heavy glasses and balancing heavy bands on her teeth, and her hair was cut across her forehead in an uneven overgrown bang. She was wearing a man's shirt and a pair of blue dungarees, and she looked very much as though she had been working hard all morning, at dusty, unrewarded work. When she spoke to Marilyn she blinked earnestly through her glasses.

“Is that
all
your furniture?” Tod said from the curb, and the girl turned around and looked at him for a minute; it was, everyone discovered eventually, one of her many nervous habits. She looked for a long time at everyone who spoke to her, recognizing and estimating the words and their source before daring to reply.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked finally, and Tod said insistently, “Do you live all by yourself?”—the question everyone wanted answered.

“My mother,” she said, “and my sister. They're coming in a little while.”

“Like Helen Williams,” Tod said, but Marilyn was asking, “Why did you have to move in all alone, then?”

“My mother had to bring my sister,” the girl said. “I always do all these things.” She stopped for a minute and looked at Marilyn, and then at the other children, one by one. “I never moved before, though,” she said. “I don't remember what happened the last time we moved.”

“I stayed with my aunt when we moved,” Marilyn said.

“I don't have any aunt,” the girl said.

Virginia Donald was coming across the street, with Mary following timidly. Gradually the whole group of children was drawing in, the boys abandoning any pretense of a game and coming slowly closer, and the girl standing in the center with Marilyn and Harriet next to her.

“What's your name?” asked Virginia from the middle of the street.

“Frederica Helena Terrel,” the girl said. “Frederica Helena Terrel,” she said it again, and then a third time, “Frederica Helena Terrel.”

“Frederica Helena Terrel,” Virginia said. She came close to the girl and looked her up and down insolently. “Fred-er-ic-a Hel-en-a Ter-rel.”

The girl began to blush again, as she had when the truck driver yelled at her, and Virginia said, “What's your sister's name?”

“Beverley Jean Terrel,” Frederica said. She looked at Marilyn, and Marilyn started to say something and then closed her mouth when Virginia went on, “And what's your mother's name?”

“
Mrs
. Terrel,” Frederica said.

Virginia laughed shortly; it was because she had nothing else to say, but it sounded menacing and unkind.

Suddenly, appallingly, Marilyn said what she had to say. She had never spoken to Virginia before, or to either Roberts boy, or to the Byrne children. Since she and Harriet had been friends they had talked to each other, but suddenly Marilyn, in the group of children for the first time in her life, found herself outside of a familiar situation; she was one of a group of spectators, watching and participating tacitly in the torment of an outsider by a Virginia Donald or a Helen Williams.

“You shut your fat mouth,” Marilyn said to Virginia. “You just shut up for once in your life and try to act decent.”

Pat Byrne made motions of fainting on the sidewalk, but the look on his face was pleased. Virginia opened her mouth and then obviously could not remember the words she wanted to use, looked at Mary Byrne, who looked away, and then at Harriet, who said weakly, “Marilyn, don't start a fight.”

“You can go ahead and fight if you want to,” Frederica said unexpectedly. “I've got to go indoors and get the furniture arranged before they come.”

She went in through the door of her house before anyone could speak. Then Virginia gave Marilyn a cold look that swept up and down, gestured to Mary Byrne, and walked back across the street. The boys melted away, and Tod chased after one or another of them, calling frantically, “Hey, wait.”

Harriet and Marilyn, arm in arm, started off toward Marilyn's house.

“I'm glad,” Marilyn said as they walked.

“That Virginia's a
terribly
mean girl,” Harriet said. “Did I tell you what she does?”

•   •   •

When Harriet and Marilyn went to the creek they went to a different spot than the one the boys favored; instead of climbing down to the old creek bed and sitting in the faintly damp grass at the bottom they went a few hundred feet past the fallen log to a place on the bank where the trees lining the creek circled out to make a little clearing. Here the grass was always dry, and mossy, and, since they were across the creek from the golf course, and far away from any houses on the Pepper Street side, Marilyn and Harriet could sit quietly and secretly, safe even from their friends. They had dug a hole in the center of this clearing, marked by a small stone at each corner, and lined it with rocks, spending a pleasant co-operative afternoon doing it, reverting to the completely informal mud-pie state of mind. Neither had been thinking particularly as they dug and grimied themselves, neither had worried about what she said or how she looked, and finally the hole in the ground was so special a symbol of their new and enduring friendship that they could not decide what to put in it. When one has created a thing exactly necessary; when a hiding place so accurate exists, the difficulty which arises is that the thing, containing itself, has room for nothing else. Even in a new friendship between maidens, there may be nothing worth hiding in a secret place.

Harriet wanted to make the hole a time-capsule site. “A tin box,” she said, “and we each of us put in whatever we like best, that is, of just what
we
think and write and all that. Not even other people's poems we like,” Harriet added, thinking of what her mother would say if she knew about the secret hiding place. “We don't
have
to put stuff in, of course,” she went on, “but maybe things like—” she stopped helplessly.

“We could put in things like pictures of people,” Marilyn said dreamily, “and souvenirs, and . . . like memories, and things.”

“I don't have any pictures of people,” Harriet said reluctantly. “Except my family, that is.”

“I don't really have many pictures either,” Marilyn said.

The hole in the ground stayed empty for nearly a week, a long time in a fast-moving summer. Several times Harriet and Marilyn came to their secret place, with their library books and the notebook each had taken to carrying, and their candy bars and ice cream cones, and they sat for long afternoons on the grass, talking deeply, and opening the grass cover of the secret hiding place to make sure that no one had disturbed it, and that the sides hadn't fallen in. Hidden by the trees, and certain they had not been followed, they told one another about their pasts, their futures, and their talents. One afternoon Marilyn said, lying with her head on her arms, looking off into the grass by her face, “Do you believe in reincarnation?” and Harriet said, looking up from
The Girl Scouts at Rocky Ledge
, “You mean, like turning into wolves?” and when Marilyn said scornfully, “Wolves!” Harriet fumbled with her book and then said pettishly, “You and your big ideas!”

“Honest,” Marilyn said after a short silence. “You know, reincarnation is where you used to be someone else once, before you were born this time.”

Harriet listened, interested. “Like what?” she asked.

Marilyn had something she wanted to say, something burning in her mind to be told; perhaps the only reason she needed Harriet, or any friend, was to get this said, finally. “Lots of people,” she began, “think that maybe once they were like Julius Caesar or Jo March before they were . . . well, born, this time. And then when those people died they turned into the ones they are now. Like for instance you might have been—” Looking at Harriet, Marilyn sought for a word. “—Becky Sharp, before you were Harriet Merriam.”

“Or Jo March,” Harriet supplied, fascinated.

“Maybe we both knew each other once before,” Marilyn said. “See? That's why we're friends now.”

“Maybe you were Amy,” Harriet said.

Marilyn frowned slightly. “I
know
who I was,” she announced dramatically. Then, suddenly shy, as though Harriet were after all not the person to tell, as though she had come, unwilling and driven, too close to what she wanted to say, she turned quiet and sat looking down at the grass again, her wide ugly face pressed close against the fresh green.

“You mean,” Harriet said slowly, considering, “you mean, I could be
any
thing?” The sound of the wind moving through the trees, a distant shout from the golf course, seemed to bring her an echo of barbaric rites, clashing temple bells, perhaps from the distant, only-just-remembered past; “I bet I was Egyptian,” she said, carried away, “I
always
wanted to go to Egypt.”

“I know,” Marilyn whispered softly to the grass, “I remembered a long time ago.”

Harriet was silent, smiling faintly, lost in her dim pagan temple. “I think about it all the time now,” Marilyn said, “I remember lots.” Uneasy and reluctant, she stopped again, and then said, “I remember all the time, I lie in bed and think about it.”

“Well,
what
, for heaven's sake?” Harriet said. “I told
you
.”

“I
remember
,” Marilyn said emphatically. “I really do.” Her voice became softer, as though she were describing a scene familiar and lovely. “There's a very very
very
blue sky, and the hills and grass are so green they almost hurt your eyes and the road is white and it curves around the hill and there are flowers and trees and everything is so
soft-looking
, and far away beyond the hill you can see where the road leads into a little town. . . . I can see the town, too,” she added, never looking at Harriet. “It has little houses with low roofs and a bridge over a little river and all the houses are white and they have brown wood trimmings and there's a village green in the center of the town. . . .” She was quiet, and Harriet waited breathlessly. “Then,” Marilyn said, her voice stronger and filled with longing, “there's a little covered wagon that comes down the road and inside they're all talking and laughing and singing. . . . There's Pantaloon, and Rhodomont, and Scaramouche, and Pierrot, and—” She stopped again. “And Harlequin,” she said into the grass, and then began to speak very fast. “And I'm standing on top of the hill waiting for them and when I see them coming and he is standing in front beside the man who is driving—I forgot to tell you, they have an old white donkey pulling the wagon—and he is waving and calling me, and I run down the hill as fast as anything, I can feel how fast I'm running and my feet just touching the ground and the wind in my face blowing my hair back and I'm running. . . .” She stopped again; her words patently had no more power to carry her meaning.