Face on the Wall

by Jane Langton

  S. PEARL SMALL

  VANISHED

  uliar circumstances.

  are allegations of

  omestic violence.

  wice-widowed

  ederick Small

  es not answer

  hone calls.

  umored that

  large parcel

  There was no more. The rest of the page was gone.

  “Except what?” said Annie.

  “Except for the bruise on her cheek and a black eye. Oh my God, poor Princess! The bruises must have been his doing. Look, that’s what it says right here. ‘Allegations of domestic violence.’”

  Annie didn’t believe it. “She was a battered wife? From Harvard?”

  “Well, why not? Annie, when was this? Where’s the rest of the papert”?

  Annie fumbled with the sheets of newspaper under her jars of paint. “These are all from the Boston Globe. That one must be from another paper. The type is different.”

  “Have you got the rest of it around somewhere?”

  “No. I cleared everything out when I moved. All the old newspapers went to the dump. Except these. I wrapped dishes in these.”

  Mary looked again at the pink dots that were the printed face of Pearl Small. “Poor Princess, I wonder what could have happened? Tell you what.” Mary snatched up her coat. “I’m going to show this to Homer. Maybe he can do something.”

  Annie laughed. “Oh, poor Uncle Homer. I’ll bet he’s got enough to do. Every time I see him he looks more harassed. So long, Aunt Mary.”

  She stood in the doorway and watched Mary Kelly zoom away down the drive. Then she went back inside and gazed up at the emptiness of her wall. For a moment she thought about the battered wife, the princess with long golden hair. Maybe she was like the wife of that wicked monster Bluebeard, who killed wife after wife and stored their bodies in a forbidden room. Was Princess Pearl another victim? Was she stowed away in a dark chamber with the bloated remains of his earlier wives, that long succession of slaughtered women?

  Annie dragged a ladder to the far end of the room and told herself she had folktales on her mind. “Bluebeard” was just another story to put on her wall, along with “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” There were evil creatures in all those stories—wicked queens, wicked ogres, wicked fairies, wicked stepmothers, ravening wolves. Their common wickedness was dark and mythological, but surely it mimicked real life, in which ravening wolves abounded. Annie picked up her straightedge, put a pencil in her teeth, and got to work.

  By midmorning she had achieved the outline of the arcade. Six penciled columns rose on the wall, their center lines seven feet apart, their capitals still only a few ruled scrawls. Standing on a ladder with thumbtack, pencil and string, she traced five half-circles between them. Then, swiftly, she ran a line high on the wall between the columns, all the way across. It was the sea horizon.

  At last, standing back, she looked up at her morning’s work. Her fingers were trembling. She had imagined it so many times, she had sketched it so often on paper, hardly daring to think there would one day be a real succession of round arches marching across a thirty-five-foot stretch of wall. Now the two-dimensional surface fell away, revealing a deep space beyond the room, a kind of porch or gallery opening on a mock outdoors. The penciled lines were so light, no one else would notice them, but to Annie the essential framework was there. The wall had become a not-wall. It was framed in solid elements and poised in open air.

  There was a knock at the door. Simultaneously her new telephone rang. Annie froze, then picked up the phone, said, “Just a minute,” and went to the door.

  It was a stranger, a guy in a baseball cap. He was juggling three pebbles, tossing them up, catching them neatly, his eyes darting after them, not looking at Annie.

  She stared at him, too surprised to speak.

  “I was just wondering,” he said, pocketing the pebbles, “if you’d like somebody to paint your window frames.”

  “My window frames?” Annie couldn’t think. “Excuse me, there’s someone on the phone. Wait a minute.”

  “Annie?” said the powerful voice on the line.

  In spite of herself Annie felt a lurch of joy. “Jack?”

  “Annie, look, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Her old grievances came flooding back. Jack was one of her post-divorce boyfriends. He had walked out on her three years ago to move in with a girl named Gloria. She couldn’t forgive him. Warily, with her eyes on the stranger at the door, she said, “What is there to talk about?” The stranger had turned away. His jacket said WATERTOWN BRAKE AND MUFFLER.

  “A thousand things. God.” Jack grunted with disgust. “Look, I’ll be out on Friday, okay?”

  Say no. Hold out against him. “Well, okay,” said Annie.

  She hung up and went back to the stranger. “Look,” she told him, “I’m not going to bother with the window frames now. Too many other things to do first.”

  “Well, all right.” Smiling, he turned away. The pebbles reappeared. Annie could see them rising and falling above his head as he ambled down the walk, heading for the odd-looking vehicle parked in the driveway, a pickup truck with a wooden structure mounted on the back, a sort of gypsy caravan. A stovepipe stuck out of the roof.

  Impulsively she called after him, “How much would you charge?”

  A couple of bananas appeared from nowhere and soared into the air. He named a reasonable price.

  Annie laughed loudly and made up her mind. “Well, I don’t see why not. When do you want to start?”

  “Right now, if you’ve got the primer. The wood has to be primed first.”

  “Well, I could go out and buy some.” Annie looked uncertainly at her car.

  “I’ll wait.” He pulled a paper bag out of his pocket. “I’ll eat my lunch down the hill.”

  “Fine.” Annie went back inside, closed the door, and hurried into her bedroom. She combed her hair and pulled a jacket over her shirt and jeans. Then she went around the house locking doors against the juggling stranger.

  As she got into her car she could see him down the hill, sitting on the grass, which must still be damp from the gentle spring rain of yesterday. He was facing away from the house, eating his lunch.

  He was a traveling mountebank. Who could tell what he might magic away, if he managed to get inside? The new stainless-steel sink, the beautiful new stove, the CD player?

  With a flick of his clever fingers he might even—it was idiotic, but Annie couldn’t help glancing back over her shoulder at the north side of her house—he might even destroy her precious wall.

  And so the prince was hired as the Imperial Swineherd.

  Hans Christian Andersen, “The Swineherd”

  Chapter 5

  “Know then, my husband,” answered she, “we will lead them away, quite early in the morning, into the thickest part of the wood, and there make a fire, and give them each a little piece of bread.…”

  The Brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel”

  It was moving day for the Gasts. Bob and Roberta scurried around their Cambridge apartment, labeling cardboard boxes, ordering Charlene and Eddy to pack up their toys. “For heaven’s sake, Charlene,” said her mother, “your poor dolls. Be more careful. They cost a fortune. Why don’t you wrap them in tissue paper?”

  Charlene tumbled another flouncy doll on top of the others in the box. “These aren’t any good anyway,” she said, looking sullenly at her mother. “I wish I had a princess doll.”

  “Oh, Charlene,” said Roberta, “I’ve told you over and over again. Those dolls are just too expensive.”

  “Alice has one, and she’s really, really poor. Her mother’s a cleaning lady.”

  “Well, good for Alice.” Roberta plucked off the wall the antique mirror she had inherited from her mother. The surface was age-flecked and spotted. Oh, God, there were spidery wrinkles on her upper lip. She set the mirror down on the bed and sna
pped at Eddy, “Why don’t you throw out those old broken crayons?” But when he made protesting noises, she threw up her hands. “Well, okay, I don’t care. Keep them. What about the drawings? You don’t want to keep all those old drawings, do you, Eddy?”

  Eddy burst into tears and gathered them to his chest.

  Roberta shouted at him to shut up. Her husband looked up and said mildly, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roberta.”

  Robert Gast was a talented and clever man. He had been a summa at Princeton, majoring in philosophy. He had written a prizewinning dissertation on the metaphysics of ethics. His mother had wanted to know what philosophy was for. “Honestly, Bobby, what can you do with it? Why don’t you study something practical from now on?”

  And then she had financed two years at business school, where Bob did indeed learn useful lessons, like how to set up in business for himself. The result was his own company, Gast Estate Management, specializing in the development of large pieces of open land. Bob’s ideals as a land developer were high, having their source in the concept of the universe as a spiritual kingdom (Leibniz) or a city of God (St. Augustine). His method was simple. You put most of the land into conservation, but at the same time you guaranteed the owners a fair return by selling off a few expensive house lots around the edges.

  So far Bob’s commercial endeavors had not produced a city of God, but someday he fully intended to follow through on his noble plan. For now, the problem was finding the right sort of real estate in the first place—finding it, and then persuading the owners to work exclusively with Gast Estate Management. Just give him time. He was negotiating a promising deal right now.

  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”

  He 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.