The Road Through the Wall

by Shirley Jackson

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Marilyn called into the front door, and without waiting for an answer she ran down the front steps and out on to the sidewalk of Pepper Street. The street was empty. The moving van was gone, the children had evaporated into their houses, the sun was coming down on the sidewalk and the street and the lawns and the houses—the pink flowers were gone by now—and on the unmistakable debris left at the Williams house. Marilyn ran quickly down the street, driven by a compelling urge to see Helen’s house from the inside, to be in there and out again before anyone saw her.

  She went through the half-open door without hesitation; even in moving away the Williams family had been as ramshackle as their furniture—Mrs. Williams had neglected to lock the doors in her haste to get to her new home; one window still had curtains. (“Sloppiest tenants I ever had,” the landlord confided to Miss Fielding that afternoon, when he came to see if Mrs. Williams had stolen the light bulbs.) Inside, Marilyn stood in the dim echoing air of a house still ringing with complaint; she looked into the living-room and saw that the sun never came there, she went down the long hall and knew that there had never been a carpet on the floor, she saw the still-dirty bathroom and the old grandmother’s room, which she supposed had been Helen’s, from the fifth on the floor, a calendar still hung in the kitchen, with the moving date circled. Marilyn looked into the refrigerator and found it warm and empty. On her way back down the hall she discovered a small memorandum book dropped into a corner, and she took it out into the sunlit doorway and opened it and found items like “call furnace man” and “black dress at cleaners thurs.” At the back of the book was a list of figures, identified occasionally, as “Helen spring coat $17.95.” That must be the red coat Helen has been wearing, Marilyn thought in surprise, so cheap. She had only seen it vaguely; it had been a warning sign of Helen’s approach, but now she remembered it, and it had looked cheap. The figures in the book totaled fifty-one dollars; Helen’s coat was the biggest item. Marilyn dropped the book back into the doorway, and thought, Mildred was a nice little girl, she was always nice.

  She came down to the sidewalk, and Tod Donald, riding his bike past in the street, braked to a stop and said loudly, “What are you doing, in other people’s houses?”

  “Oh, shut up, dopey,” Marilyn said, and walked on home.

  • • •

  The weather had to be very warm indeed before Mrs. Mack would venture outdoors. The children believed that she spent all day in her shack peering out at them through the boarded-up windows, putting spells on anyone who entered her yard or touched the battered apple trees. Mrs. Mack was allowed to continue on Pepper Street (although it would have been easy enough for Mr. Desmond or Mr. Roberts or even Mr. Perlman to get rid of her), because she had apparently always owned the little piece of land where she lived; and because she lived in a shack far back from the street, with the heavy apple trees in front and a hedge in front of these; and, finally, because she only ventured outdoors in the very warmest weather, and no one, as far as even rumor could discover, had ever been harmed by her spells, at least no one who lived on Pepper Street.

  The children called her a witch, and the parents called her an unfortunate old woman, and she looked like either one, with her hair in strings and her shoulders bent, and her perpetual whimpering mutter. If anyone passed her house while she was outside and neglected to speak to her the mutter would rise to an audible criticism, but Mrs. Desmond had been known to observe, and the parents believed her, that Mrs. Mack actually loved the Pepper Street children, and was a harmless old woman, very unfortunate. The day after Helen Williams moved away, Mrs. Mack came out. Mary Byrne, out picking roses from the side of their house nearest Mrs. Mack’s, came running into the kitchen to say to her mother that Mrs. Mack was on the front step of her shack in the sun, and Mrs. Byrne said absently, “Be nice to her, dear.”

  Peering through the line of rose bushed which were the boundary between the Byrne place and Mrs. Mack’s, Mary called, tentatively, “Isn’t it a lovely day, Mrs. Mack?” and the old woman, scowling around her, said, “Who’s calling me?” before she saw Mary waving through the rose bushes. Then she waved back and said, “Sally, are you out in the sunshine too?”

  It had been Helen Williams’s great contribution to neighborhood lore, that a witch could not put spells on anyone if she didn’t know their name, and Mary said, comfortable in the knowledge that some unfamiliar Sally would get her spell, “How are you feeling?”

  “Better now,” Mrs. Mack said. “Better now.” No one knew any of Mrs. Mack’s history except that a friend had given her her dog, and that she was always ailing in some way. “Where’s your dog today?” Mary asked, to be as thorough and polite as she could, and Mrs. Mack nodded back, sage in the sunlight. “Indeed yes,” Mrs. Mack said. “Not nice people at all.”

  “Of course not, Mrs. Mack,” Mary said.

  “Don’t belong at all in a nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Mack said. “Glad to see the last of them.”

  “You mean the Williamses?” Mary stopped in her rose-gathering to listen.

  “This has always been a nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Mack said. She lifted a stick from the ground beside the step and began to make figures in the dirt. “I always liked living here.”

  Mary crossed herself wildly, gasped, “I guess I’ve picked enough of these old roses,” and fled indoors. “She was making charms in the dirt,” she told her mother breathlessly, “I could see her writing names.” For a minute the comfort of Mrs. Mack’s not knowing anyone’s name deserted her, and she said in terror, “She was looking right at me.”

  • • •

  Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself; he found himself doing one thing, and then he found himself doing another, and that, as he saw it, was the way one lived along, never deciding, never helping. When he found himself one afternoon walking down Pepper Street nearly at the Desmond driveway, and saw Mrs. Desmond backing the car out with Caroline beside her in the front seat, it never occurred to him to slip into the Desmond yard; and once there, when he saw the glass door from the Desmond terrace slightly open, his mind did not encompass the notion of stepping into the Desmond house, nor did it suggest to him, once in, that he had no right to be there.

  The glass door took him directly into the Desmond dining-room, and, since he had never been inside the Desmond house before, he first regarded the walls, and the ceilings, and the floor, before going on to a more intimate investigation. With the glass doors at his back, he stood coolly surveying what he could see of the house, estimating it, weighing it in his hand. The walls, for instance, were painted, not papered as in the Donald house; the table in the dining-room was long and slim. Tod went to the painted wall and felt it with his finger, leaving an almost imperceptible touch on the light paint. He bent over the table and saw his face reflected dimly in the polished wood. He looked at the chairs; they had light leather seats and graceful rising backs; the rug on the floor, barely pressed by the legs of the chairs and the table, was pale and smooth. Tod took hold of one of the chairs; it was unexpectedly heavy, and he had to use both hands to tip it over backward and examine the under part. When he put the chair back into place he caught sight of his face reflected in the silver coffee service on a side table. As he came closer to the coffee-pot his face became more distorted, elastic in the long coffee-pot; he looked back into the table and found his face there, back to the coffee-pot and found his face again. He ran his hand caressingly down the side of the coffee-pot, his fingers lingering as he turned away, to the doorway beyond which lay the living-room.

  Facing him as he entered the living-room was the wall of tall shrouded windows; because they were covered against the afternoon sunlight the great living-room was shadowy and cool. Far away, down the length of the room, the grand piano stood unvibrating, quiet. Tod, going past heavy armchairs and stiff embroidered chairs and small r
ound tables with curved feet and large flat tables with lamps on them, stood finally next to the piano, where he saw his face reflected in the sleek blackness. He put one elbow on the piano and looked down on the piano bench, and said, barely aloud, “She plays this. It’s their piano.”

  He thought of Mrs. Desmond, tall and pale in a long dress, sitting on the piano bench playing the piano, and he walked around and knelt one leg on the piano bench and pressed his fingers down on the keys, gently, but without sound. He kept his fingers down for a minute, looking at the way the keys slid smoothly together, the black keys fitting exactly into the white keys, each capable of independent movement, but tightly put together. Then he turned and went back down the living-room, stopping for a minute to look down at a chair which was dark red and big and comfortable, and had Mr. Desmond’s pipe in the ashtray next to it.

  He began to whistle softly and tonelessly as he went back through the dining-room into the kitchen, clean and breath-takingly white. He saw his face again in the toaster, but not on the kitchen table, although it was white and shone in the sunlight. Pretty dishes stood in a long row on a shelf along one side of the Desmond kitchen, yellow-trimmed dishtowels hung neatly on a rack. Tod took down one of the dishes, still whistling, and turned it over to see the back; the lettering there had been almost washed off, but he made out something that seemed to say “fine china.”

  There was a yellow square in the linoleum floor for every green one, a green one for every white one, a white one for every brown one. Caroline’s high chair stood back against the wall; it was white like everything else, and lined with yellow oilcloth. Caroline eats here, too, Tod thought. He looked around and assigned the chair next to the toaster to Mrs. Desmond, the one across to Mr. Desmond, the third to Johnny Desmond. Mrs. Desmond has to make the toast, he thought, Mr. Desmond probably likes toast.

  He came back again through the dining-room into the long hallway which ran through the whole house; he had realized vaguely that the Desmond house was all on one floor without any upstairs, but still it gave him a queer shock to open the first door past the dining-room and find it was Johnny Desmond’s bedroom; he knew it was Johnny’s because Johnny’s clothes were on the chair and in the closet, and a bookcase in the room held schoolbooks and adventure stories labeled “John Desmond Jr.” When he closed the door behind him he looked down at the doorway leading to the dining-room and said, “You can eat and then go to bed right next door.”

  The door across the hall took him into a handsome study, where there were deep red leather chairs and a long clear desk. “Old man Desmond,” Tod said, and closed the door without going in. On his way down the hall he found two bathrooms; the Donalds had two bathrooms, but they were on different floors.

  He was whistling again as he reached the last doors in the hall; his whistling was still very soft, but it had acquired a tune to which Tod knew the words: “There she goes, there she goes, all dressed up in her Sunday clothes.”

  There were three doors still unopened at the end of the hall; Tod opened the first door and then stood wide-eyed, his whistling checked for a minute before it began again. The room inside was Mrs. Desmond’s bedroom, and it was so pretty that even the presence of Mrs. Desmond would have been superfluous. The pale green curtains were moving gently at the window, and the mirrors all over the room showed the movements over and over again, a faint green stirring, so that the stillness of the pale green bedspread was a surprise and the straight immaculate walls seemed all that held the room steady, as though without their firmness the room of movement and pale green would flow softly within itself, moving on to the sea, where it wanted to be. The floor here had a yellow rug, shadowed with the movement from the windows; on the pale dressing table stood bottles of perfume, many-colored and catching reflections which were in turn lost in the tenderly moving depths of the mirrors. Tod stood in the doorway watching, still whistling, until he found power to move across the room and look at himself in the mirror beyond the perfume bottles; there he was, tangled in the stirring mirror; he watched himself for a long time. Behind him, reflected in the mirror, he saw Mrs. Desmond’s soft green bed, and Caroline’s small bed beside it; there was a long soft yellow chair, and on the dressing table next to him Caroline’s face was framed in gold. When he looked at the picture he saw his own face again, reflected sharply against Caroline’s.

  He picked up a perfume bottle and lifted out the top. The scent was overpoweringly sweet, and he poured some out into his hand before he stoppered the bottle and put it back. Then his hand smelled of the same overpowering sweetness, and with his hand up to his face he walked across the room and opened the door on one side of Mrs. Desmond’s bed; rows of Mrs. Desmond’s dresses hung there, pink and lavender and yellow and green and pale blue and grey; corresponding to them, on the other side of the closet, were Caroline’s dresses, pink and blue and yellow, and shoes on the floor, Mrs. Desmond’s narrow and arched, Caroline’s tiny and white. The perfume was in the dresses, on his hand, and it made him blink his eyes. Half-shutting the closet door behind him, he wormed his way in through Mrs. Desmond’s dresses and negligees until he reached the most hidden part of the closet, and he sat down on the floor, his perfumed hand over his face. There, far back in the closet in Mrs. Desmond’s room, he said, quite loudly, all the dirtiest words he knew, all the words he had heard his brother James ever use, all the words George Martin taught the kids secretly and knowingly. Since there were only three or four words really bad enough, he said them over and over.

  Finally, taking care not to disarrange the dresses, he came wearily out of the closet, smoothing the dresses down before he closed the door on them. The perfume still on his hand was beginning to make him sick, and he rubbed his hand against a dark coat of Caroline’s, but the scent stayed. Holding his hand in back of him, he rapidly investigated the other doors; one was a third bathroom and the last was Caroline’s playroom, with small clean toys put neatly around the walls; a tiny chair and table, a doll bed and doll dresser; the doll herself asleep in a doll carriage beneath a yellow coverlet. Mrs. Desmond’s sewing-box was set prettily on a table in this room, next to a rocking chair, and Caroline’s smaller sewing-box was set next to her mother’s, with a smaller rocking chair alongside. Tod began to whistle again, and sat for a minute in the larger rocking chair.

  He went out through the same dining-room door he had used to come in, carefully not touching it, but slipping out sideways. In the garden, with the high Desmond hedge all around him, he crossed the driveway and went down to the end of the garden, where the lawn ended against flowering bushes and carefully trained lines of flowers in different colors. He sat down on the lawn and looked back at the Desmond house. He could see the glass doors, see into the dining-room, but not the hallway, not into the bedrooms.

  He sat there for a long time, and then lay down. The grass, close to his face, interested him, and he pulled up a blade of grass and held it close to his face, trying to look deep into the rich green, letting his eye move up to the pale green at the tip and down again, trying to see into the heart of its tightly curled length. Against the sky it was long and straight, but it moved a little because his hand was shaking; it was hard to hold it still enough to see into it. He twisted it around his finger, and it moved back to its straight stand; he tied it in a loose knot, and it eased back straight again. Tying it he had bruised it; it turned a darker green where it was hurt, and he dropped it back on to the lawn again, although he could still see it limp and dark against its living brothers. He reached over his head and pulled a yellow blossom off a bush; this, too, interested him, and he looked at it as closely as he had the grass. Its petals were precise and neat, so soft he could hardly feel them against his fingers; annoyed at its soft pliability, he crushed it flat with his fingers and rolled the petals cruelly, until the flower was a little damp ball and he dropped it.

  He must have fallen asleep; he was painfully aware suddenly of the perfume on his hand, und
er his face, when the realization of his face reflected in all those mirrors, shining distorted in the silver coffee-pot, superimposed on Caroline’s picture, frightened him; and he sat up just as Mrs. Desmond’s car turned into the driveway. Moving quickly, he went behind the garage, waiting there until the car was safely inside, pulsing tiredly in the building for a minute before it stopped. Then Mrs. Desmond and Caroline got out, and Mrs. Desmond said, “Do you have your teddy bear, darling?”

  Tod heard them walking toward the house; he began to edge around the side of the garage, but did not dare put his head out to watch them go into the house. When he heard a door close he looked tentatively around the corner of the garage, saw no one, and fled down the driveway to the street, turned toward his home, and began walking slowly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mrs. Roberts put the toast down emphatically in front of her husband, not looking at him. She was still angry at him from the night before; she had sat up in bed, late, telling him how he looked to other men, how he disgusted other women, and had turned, finally, her hair over her eyes and her voice tired, ready to forgive him, and had found him asleep. Overnight (she had not slept, at last, but sat in the bedroom chair smoking all night and, watching the sky get lighter outside, had planned in detail how to pack the boys and their clothes and take them to New York, where she would find a job, anything, and Mike would never see them again), her anger had subsided into a cool watchfulness; as the sun came into the bedroom windows in the morning she realized for the hundredth time that she could never get the boys away, and if she did, could never get a job in New York or anywhere else, and if she did, would have to come back to Mike anyway. Mike could not be threatened, or frightened, but he could be driven somehow into a position so extreme that he must humiliate himself to get back. Mrs. Roberts was willing to wait.