The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (8 page)

“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, rumpled 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.

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.