Face on the Wall

by Jane Langton

  Annie came down from the ladder and found him examining the sketches lying on the table. One was her drawing of an old Greek bard. He was supposed to be telling the story of Odysseus. His mouth was open, his arms were flung out, his whiskers were wild.

  “Santa Claus emerging from the bath?” said Flimnap, and Annie laughed. She watched as he turned to look up at the wall and sweep his pale eyes across it from left to right, taking in the five-part arcade and the ship on the horizon and her pencil sketch of Aesop with the tortoise lumbering along at his feet and the hare sleeping under a bush.

  Flimnap made no comment. Instead he pointed at the far end of the wall. “Who’s that supposed to be?”

  “What?” Annie looked. On the pure white plaster there were two small green blotches superimposed on an orange blob.

  It looked like a face. “It’s nothing,” said Annie, “just some sort of stain. Mildew or something.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Flimnap went out to his truck and came back with a can of shellac.

  Annie watched him coat the stain with a few strokes of his brush. She wanted to ask what he thought of her great project. Surely he could see how marvelous it was going to be But Flimnap O’Dougherty said nothing at all. Annie told herself she was not disappointed. He was one of those people without any interest in artistic things. Well, that was okay. Half the world was like that.

  But the truth was, she could have used a little praise.

  Chapter 7

  One of the stars fell, making a long fiery trail across the sky. “Now someone is dying,” said the little girl, for her old dead grandmother … had told her that when a star falls, a soul goes up to God.

  Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Match Girl”

  Homer Kelly had been Mary’s husband for a long time. He was a big man with a coarse gray beard and a rough head of hair like the thick fur of a dog. His impulsive enthusiasms had often led him into absurdities in the past, but half a lifetime with a sensible wife had mellowed him a little. So had his experience with violent criminals. At one time or another Homer had been half drowned, knocked senseless, threatened with edge tools, firearms, oncoming trucks, burning buildings, and explosive devices. Did danger build character? Who could tell? In middle age Homer Kelly was a more rational and sympathetic human being than he had been in his youth. One thing, however, was still an unchanging part of his makeup. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), his chromosomes still sported a mutant gene prompting unpredictable behavior, occasional silliness, and sometimes—rarely, erratically—a stroke of genius.

  Today Homer’s genius was out to lunch. “You must be out of your mind,” he said, staring at the dim photograph of Mary’s former student, the missing princess with the long golden hair. “She just walked out on her husband, I’ll bet, that’s all. High time, if he’s been beating her up. What’s this about a parcel? ‘It is rumored that a large parcel’—of what? A leg of lamb? A side of beef?”

  “No, no, Homer. It’s only the British who use the word ‘parcel’ like that. In this country it means a piece of land.”

  Homer held the scrap of newspaper to the light. “Look, if this isn’t the Boston Globe it must be one of those sensationalist rags they sell in supermarkets. You can’t believe a word they say. The editors, they sit around smoking cigars and making up headlines about aliens seducing rock stars. They’re fairy stories.”

  “But Pearl is real. She’s not a fairy story. And something’s happened to her.” Mary fixed Homer with a fierce blue eye. “Look, Homer, you’re not doing anything in particular right now except teaching a couple of graduate seminars and a freshman course and writing a couple of books. Couldn’t you just take the time to find out where she lives? I mean, where she disappeared from?”

  “I’m not doing anything in particular!” Homer groaned and thrust his hands into his hair. “That’s a joke, right? My light schedule? Which also includes, I might add, counseling inmates in the Concord prison once a week.”

  “Good heavens, Homer, when did that happen?”

  “This morning. They called me up.” Homer grinned at his wife. “What about you? You’re free as air. Why don’t you look into your old pal’s disappearance yourself? She’s your friend, not mine. You’re not doing one single thing beyond running the extension school and writing a history of women poets through the ages and grading a few hundred freshman papers and cooking a thousand meals.”

  “Oh, Homer, that’s not all. I’ve just been appointed Historian in Residence at a private school, Weston Country Day. I’ll be teaching fifth-graders about history.”

  “My God, how did that happen?”

  “They wrote me a letter. I was flattered. They said Judge Aufsesser’s daughter is in the class. I guess I was attracted by his fame.”

  “Judge Aufsesser won’t be in your class, you nitwit, just his daughter.”

  “I know, but maybe he’ll come to parents’ night or something.” Mary grinned foolishly.

  Homer sighed. “The truth is, we’re both doing too much. Neither of us has time to look for missing princesses with golden hair. Anyway, she’s probably been turned into a frog by now. It’s a job for a magician, not a couple of overworked scholars.” He glanced again at the picture of Pearl Small. “This isn’t from the Boston Globe, but the Globe might have run a story at the same time. Why don’t you call them? See if they have any record of her so-called disappearance. If they ever did a story on her, it would be in their file. Tell them to look under Frog.”

  Mary tried. She called the Globe. After a couple of misdirected tries she was connected to a librarian in the archives department.

  “Nope,” said the librarian, staring at her monitor and scrolling through the alphabet. “The name Pearl Small has never appeared in the Boston Globe.”

  “Try Frog,” murmured Mary, disappointed. “Try Princess. No, no, that’s fine. Well, thank you very much.”

  Mary put down the phone. She had an appointment with the heads of all the departments in the Harvard Extension School, and if she didn’t get going, she’d be late. She ran down the porch steps, jumped into her car, revved the engine, and charged up the hill.

  Homer had been right. The lurid story about the disappearance of Pearl Small had the melodramatic flair of the headlines in the supermarket rags, those sleazy periodicals that rejoiced in the torrid affairs, the aborted pregnancies, and the drunken brawls of film stars, sports stars, TV stars, hunks, and sex kittens. How did one get in touch with those editorial boards?

  The woods fled past, the dirt track gave way to a paved road. Mary told herself to stop at the supermarket on the way home—for oranges, broccoli, a roasting chicken, and a copy of every flamboyant journal in the store.

  Chapter 8

  “Why,” said he, “greed is the best, for if it were otherwise … I should never be jogging along through the world with six servants behind me.”

  Howard Pyle, “The Wonder Clock”

  Jack was a bigger presence than Annie remembered. He had gained weight, but he was still horribly good-looking. He had the kind of striking face that tells across a room.

  Annie let him gather her in a fond embrace. He tried to kiss her in the old way, but she had enough dignity to turn her head away. “No, Jack, don’t.”

  He let her go, and looked up at the house. “So this is your castle? Little Annie made it with her widdoo paintbwush, all by her widdoo self?”

  “Oh, shut up, Jack.”

  He was impressed, she could see that. Indoors he gaped around at her library, staring up at the windows, the high shelves of books. For an instant his cocksureness was shaken when he caught sight of the painted columns on her wall, but at once he dismissed them as Annie’s sort of thing, and sank into a chair. “Your dream house, is that it? Some dream. Must have cost you a bundle.” He turned and stared at her. “You’re famous. Best-selling kiddie books. I saw you on TV.”

  She shrugged. “You want a beer? I made sandwiches.”

&nbs
p; They sat at her table, and Jack poured out his resentment against his now ex-girlfriend, Gloria. “God, her high-flown nobility. Homelessness, Christ, she kept bringing people in off the street.”

  “Well, good for her,” murmured Annie.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Are you still an art director?” she said, changing the subject, although as a rejected lover she couldn’t help rejoicing in the downfall of Gloria. “Where is it? Oh, I remember. It’s that big publishing house in Charlestown.”

  “Art director, God.” Jack drained his beer, heaved himself up from the chair, walked heavily to the refrigerator, and helped himself to another bottle. “Whole department closed down. Bunch of shitheads anyhow. Matter of fact, I’m doing something else now. Insurance. I’m with Paul Revere.”

  “No kidding? Well, congratulations.”

  Jack sat down with his beer and looked at her slyly. It was at once apparent why he was there. “How’s your portfolio, by the way? Have you got a policy for personal injury? Suppose somebody slips and falls on that big stone in front of your door, they could take everything, every cent. And listen, Annie, how much fire insurance have you got on this place? Oh my God, is that all? Jesus, Annie.”

  Partly because she was persuaded by his dire predictions and partly to get rid of him, Annie signed up for a huge personal-injury policy and a hefty increase in fire insurance.

  She stood up, hoping he would take the hint and go away. Jack got to his feet, but instead of leaving he threw his arms around her in their old movie embrace. It was a private joke. He bent her backward and bowed over her like Rudolph Valentino.

  “No, Jack,” she said, pushing him back and struggling to stand up.

  “Annie, Annie, I made a mistake.” He clutched her. “I was a fool. Come back to me, Annie. I want you, I need you.”

  “No, no.” But she was weakening. Triumphantly Jack heaved her off the floor. Her big feet dangled. She swore, “Oh, goddamnit, Jack,” but her fingers stopped pushing at him and her head lolled back. The doorbell rang.

  The spell was broken. Annie burst out of Jack’s arms and ran to the door. “Shit,” said Jack.

  It was Flimnap O’Dougherty. His cheery face looked at Annie, not seeming to notice the glowering presence of Jack behind her. “Sorry, I forgot my wrench. It’s in the bathroom.”

  “Well, come on in,” said Annie, trying to catch her breath.

  He glided past her, dodged into the bathroom, and came out again, flourishing the wrench. “Thanks,” he said, and was gone.

  “Okay, Jack,” said Annie, “out with you. Come on. I mean it.”

  Jack’s voice deepened. “You don’t mean it, Annie. You know you don’t.” He came closer and reached out.

  She backed away. “No, Jack, stop.”

  The doorbell rang again. Once more it was O’Dougherty, apologizing. “I forgot to tell you I can’t come Monday after all. But I could come tomorrow afternoon, how about that?”

  Annie laughed. If Jack was Rudolph Valentino, Flimnap was Stan Laurel, the earnest simpleton. “Fine. Bring along your derby hat.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She closed the door, but when she opened it again for Jack, O’Dougherty was still there in the driveway, tinkering with his truck.

  Jack hurled himself into his car and drove violently forward, narrowly missing O’Dougherty, who skipped out of the way. Jack’s horn blared, and he lunged down the driveway.

  Flimnap too was leaving. He slapped down the hood of his truck, climbed into the cab, nodded mildly at Annie, and drove away.

  She went indoors to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was frowsy, her eyes were wild.

  Had there been a wrench in here this morning? No, surely not, or she would have noticed it. The wrench was an excuse to come back. Flimnap had brought it in just now, and then pretended to find it.

  Unless of course it was an enchanted wrench. Flimnap the prestidigitator had simply plucked it out of the air.

  Chapter 9

  Fred Small had been out on the road again, searching for Pearl’s brother, because Pearl’s goddamned brother had tripped him up that day and then plunged down the stairs and cleared out. Where the hell was he? God, he had to be someplace. The man was dangerous, he was a loose cannon.

  It was the first day of spring. For the last week Fred had been looking for the son of a bitch, but so far without success.

  In the meantime, there was something else he had to do, and this time it was no problem, except that right now his hands were shaking. Small sat at a table in his bedroom, bowed over a piece of paper. Sunlight poured through the window and lay on the bed like a cloth. Looking up, he could see in the distance the towers of his failed sand-and-gravel company, and he frowned. Then he reminded himself that before long the towers would be obscured by twenty or thirty large and impressive houses. At this moment he could almost see them looming up here and there along the Pig Road, ghostly shapes outlined in air. Soon they would actually occupy the land, lining the curving drive that had been laid out on paper so cleverly by his friend the developer, maximizing the number of lots.

  Small looked down again at the curlicues and scrawls on his piece of paper. They still weren’t right. He couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, that big generous upright hand with its looped I’s and tightly closed a’s. Pearl’s signature should not look cramped. It should seem quick and unstudied. Absently he watched the jerky movement of his pen, thinking at the same time about the two irons he had in the fire. “Irons in the fire,” it was a blacksmith’s term. When the irons glowed red, the smith took them out of the fire and hammered them into shape.

  The first of Small’s irons was heating up, the second was growing cold.

  Iron number one was the development of Pearl’s land. Now that her stubborn resistance was no longer a factor he could at last get started. Pearl had inherited the place from her uncle the pig farmer—the house and ninety-nine acres of land.

  No, watch it, the slant still isn’t quite right. Small took a firmer grip on his pen.

  He had tried to make her see it as a bonanza, prime real estate, ripe for intelligent development. Especially with Meadow-lark Estates going up next door, setting a high tone for a neighborhood that had once been a rural slum, with third-rate malls and sleazy discount stores and pig farms like her Uncle Charley’s. But poor old misguided Pearl, she’d insisted on seeing her ninety-nine acres as some sort of natural paradise, a haven for wildlife. Small’s pen trembled as he remembered the look on Pearl’s face when she reached down and touched the soil under her feet, compacted by the hooves of a thousand pigs.

  Come on, Fred, be careful, don’t let the letters run downhill.

  She had talked wildly about the trees she was planting, pines and birches, mountain laurel and hemlocks. Pheasants would find cover in her shrubbery, Pearl said. Rabbits and foxes and deer would hide in her woodland. She had shown him the red-tailed hawk perched on the very top of the tallest of his gravel-sorting towers. “Someday,” she had said dreamily, “that hawk’s descendants will perch in my white-oak trees.” Goddamnit, Pearl! Why couldn’t you see the opportunity? Why couldn’t you get it through your thick head?

  But she didn’t see. No matter what he said to her, no matter what he did to her—and he’d done plenty—no matter how many times he showed her the developer’s figures, she still didn’t get it, she just sulked and turned her head away. She was stupid, that was the trouble.

  Well, it was no longer a problem. Pearl was out of the picture. He could go right ahead. Any day now he’d pull that red-hot iron out of the fire and strike it a mighty blow.

  Unfortunately, the second iron was rapidly growing cold. His sand-and-gravel company was on its last legs. It had already been in trouble on the day he ran into Pearl for the first time. There she had been on the other side of his chain-link fence, a pretty girl with yellow wisps of hair peeking out from under her kerchi
ef. She had been planting trees along the southern edge of her property—a lovely girl with yellow hair and ninety-nine acres of land!

  Pearl had wanted to know at once how long the conveyor belts and sorting bins and rusty towers were going to remain right there beside her wilderness, her wildlife refuge, her bird sanctuary.

  “Oh, not long at all,” he had told her, enchanted by her fairytale prettiness. “I’m selling out. It’s all coming down, everything, even the asphalt plant.”

  The truth was, Fred Small had no choice. He merely leased the land on which his sorting towers stood, with their crushers for six-inch boulders, their hoppers for pea-sized and half-inch gravel, their screening decks and belt-driven conveyors. The owner of the land wanted to sell. And anyway the site was exhausted. The ground had been scraped clean of sandy topsoil. Sooner or later Fred would have to dismantle all the rigs and move them to New Hampshire, even the asphalt plant, which had at last begun to break even.

  It would cost millions. All the more reason to carry through with the development of the old pig farm! Couldn’t Pearl see that? Then, for an instant, Small’s hand stopped its exercise in penmanship on the paper in front of him. He remembered something he had read a thousand years ago, a story about sailors turned into swine. Maybe all the pigs in Southtown had been human once. Now the poor creatures were long gone, turned into sides of bacon and a thousand miles of sausage.

  Before long their old stomping ground would be turned into house lots, exclusive pieces of real estate. No ghostly pigs would ever snuffle around those stately homes.

  Instant her circling wand the Goddess waves,