The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (7 page)

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 were 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.

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.