Face on the Wall

by Jane Langton

  Mary wasn’t so sure about the teacher, who seemed damp with insecurity. She was given to speaking in italics. “The class is so excited! We could hardly wait. Right, class?”

  There was a pause—obviously the class was uninformed. Mary plunged in, saying how much she would enjoy telling them about the Greeks. (She would have to bone up in a hurry.)

  “Shall we introduce ourselves to Mrs. Kelly?” said Mrs. Rutledge. “We’ll start at the back. Cissie, will you begin?”

  The little fat girl whispered her name. “Speak up, Cissie,” said Mrs. Rutledge sharply.

  “Cissie Aufsesser,” murmured the little fat girl, looking down at her lap.

  Beverly Eckstein, Carrie Maxwell, Becca Smith, Julie Ingledinger, Amelia Patterson, the names went on and on. They ended with a pretty child in the first row. “Charlene Gast,” said Charlene.

  “Charlene is a champion swimmer,” said Mrs. Rutledge proudly, smiling at her.

  “Well, good for you, Charlene,” said Mary.

  Charlene was indeed a champion swimmer. Her bedroom in the house her parents rented from Annie Swann was a museum of medals and plastic trophies. She practiced obsessively, swimming laps for hours every day in the pool in the club her parents belonged to in Lexington. For Charlene the daily practice wasn’t a chore, it was a joy. Like most people who are good at something, she loved it with all her heart. Water was Charlene’s element. Last week she had beaten all the other young female swimmers from swimming clubs all over New England in the hundred-meter backstroke. Everyone knew she was headed for the Junior Olympics.

  She always won. Well, not always. Last year she had lost one event, and it had been so shattering that nine-year-old Charlene had vowed never to lose again. Since then her record had been perfect. Losing was out of the question. Prizes fell into her hands, medals were hung around her neck. And it wasn’t just swimming trophies, it was other things as well. Getting what she wanted had become a habit. After all, she and she alone was Charlene Gast.

  If her father, that ex-student of philosophy, had been paying attention, he would have identified his daughter’s mind-set as a case of solipsism, the belief that the self is the only reality. Charlene was a living, breathing solipsist. All other creatures in the world existed merely to serve her needs.

  On the day Mary Kelly walked into Mrs. Rutledge’s homeroom for the first time, Charlene was keeping a sharp eye on Alice Mooney. Alice owned something Charlene wanted, a princess doll. It was really dumb that Charlene couldn’t have one of her own, just because her stupid parents kept saying no.

  It was indeed a beautiful doll. Alice Mooney loved it. Her mother wasn’t a cleaning lady, as Charlene had told her parents, she was a dietitian at the Concord-Carlisle High School, but she could not normally pay $69.95 for a doll. “This is your only present, Alice,” she told her daughter as she handed her the big box on the morning of her birthday.

  “Oh, oh,” breathed Alice, tearing at the tissue paper. “Oh, thank you, thank you. I don’t want anything else, not ever.”

  She shouldn’t have taken the doll to school. That was her mistake. All the other girls in Mrs. Rutledge’s fifth grade envied her. They fingered the bouffant dress and touched the sparkling crown and stroked the silky hair. They watched as Alice tenderly removed the pretty little plastic slippers and put them on again.

  “Now, Alice,” said Mrs. Rutledge, “put away your doll. After recess, class, I’ll want your math homework. I hope you all worked hard. Report cards go out to your parents next week.”

  There was a scraping of metal chair legs on the floor, an orderly parade out the door, then an eager rush for the playground.

  Mrs. Rutledge was not on call that day for playground duty. Gratefully she beckoned to Mary Kelly, and together they headed for the coffee machine in the teachers’ room.

  Behind them, the classroom was no longer empty. Alice Mooney had crept back indoors. Holding her doll, she moved cautiously to the desk belonging to Julie Ingledinger. Julie was the best math student in the class. Her homework lay on top of her desk, ready to be turned in. Softly Alice put down her doll and picked up the piece of yellow paper.

  “I see you,” said Charlene, appearing out of nowhere.

  Alice’s hand jerked away from Julie’s paper. She stared in horror at Charlene.

  “I’ll tell,” said Charlene.

  “No, no,” whined Alice. “Oh, Charlene, please don’t tell.”

  “Your doll,” said Charlene. “I want your doll.”

  “My doll?” Alice’s face flushed. Her frightened eyes opened wider. She picked up her doll and hugged it to her chest. “My princess doll? Oh, no! Oh, no, no! Oh, please, Charlene!”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell.” Charlene turned as Mr. Orth walked into the room, looking for Mrs. Rutledge. “Oh, Mr. Orth!”

  Alice caught her arm, weeping. “Okay, it’s okay.”

  Mr. Orth looked at them. “What is it, Charlene?”

  Charlene grinned at him. “Nothing, Mr. Orth. Never mind. It’s okay.”

  “Well, all right. Oh, Charlene, congratulations on winning that swimming meet last week. We’re all so proud of you. Now it’s on to the state level, is that right?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Orth.”

  He was gone. Alice stroked her doll’s nylon hair and straightened her pretty crown, then handed her over to Charlene. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  Charlene hid the doll in her schoolbag. But at home she showed it proudly to her mother.

  “Why, Charlene,” said Roberta, “where did you get that lovely doll?”

  “Alice gave it to me. She has oodles of dolls.”

  “Why, what a generous gift!”

  Alice’s mother wasn’t so easily bamboozled. “Alice, dear,” she said, “where’s your princess doll? I’ve got a scrap of velvet left over from your dress. We’ll make her a royal cloak.”

  “Oh,” said Alice, her voice hollow. “I left her at school.”

  Next day she claimed to have forgotten again. The day after that she started to cry, and said she had lost it.

  “Oh, Alice, how could you?”

  Mrs. Mooney called the school. At once an announcement about the lost doll was made over the school intercom. Alice sat dumb and suffering, while everyone in the class turned to stare. Mary Kelly pitied the poor kid, she looked so desolate.

  The doll was never found.

  “Lord Fish,” cried the fisherman, gazing over the side of the boat, “I’m afraid my wife has another request.”

  The great fish appeared at once, and looked up mildly at the fisherman. “What is it now?”

  The fisherman was ashamed. “She is old and ugly, Lord Fish. She wants to be young again.”

  A cloud drifted across the sun and cast a shadow over the sea. “It is done,” said the fish, sinking beneath the waves.

  Chapter 13

  Then she took up Hansel with her rough hand, and shut him up in a little cage with a lattice-door, and although he screamed loudly it was of no use.

  The Brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel”

  There was a thump of feet on the porch steps. The door slammed. Mary was back. “So?” said Homer. “How did it go?”

  She tore off her coat and dumped it on a chair. “Oh, I don’t know. They’re nice kids.”

  “Was the great Judge Aufsesser there in all his judicial glory to meet his daughter’s new teacher?”

  “Oh, Homer, of course not.”

  Homer snickered. “What’s his daughter like?”

  “Very shy, I think. The star of the class is Charlene Gast. You know, from the family renting Annie’s house.”

  Homer swarmed together all the graded bluebooks and shaped them into a cube. He looked up at Mary gravely. “What do you know about that Flimnap character? I get the impression he’s there all the time. Is Annie getting involved again? I thought she’d sworn off men. I should think that last episode with Jack Whatshisname would have taught her a lesson. And Whoseywhatsis befo
re that, Burgess, the hotshot stockbroker.”

  “Homer, you haven’t even met Flimnap. He’s just a handyman around the place.”

  “Maybe he’s handy in the wrong way,” hinted Homer darkly.

  Mary changed the subject. She looked at Homer and said sweetly, “Oh, good, you’re finished with all those bluebooks. Now maybe you’ve got time to see that police chief in Southtown.”

  Homer was indignant. In a ridiculous falsetto he parodied his wife. “Hurry up, now, Homer. You’ve got to rescue a princess, find an enchanted frog, fall down a rabbit hole, and drive fifty miles down 128 to bawl out the chief of police.”

  “Oh, Homer—”

  “Well, never mind,” said Homer gruffly, getting up from his chair. “I already called him. He sounds like a jerk, but I’m supposed to go down there tomorrow. Today, for Christ’s sake—how did I get into this?—I’ve got to talk to those kids in the Concord prison.”

  “Oh, Homer, darling, thank you!” Mary threw her arms around him, and murmured into the shoulder of his coat, “Poor Princess, I know something terrible has happened to her. We’ve just got to track her down.”

  Being admitted to M.C.I. Concord was a lengthy affair. Homer had been through it all before, but he’d forgotten some of the details. You had to register in the lobby and wait at the heavy door while new inmates in chains arrived under guard.

  At last the big door ground heavily to one side to let Homer into the locked space called the trap. Under the supervision of a guard he had to take off his shoes, his jacket, his belt, his wristwatch, and empty his pockets before walking through a metal detector.

  “Hey,” he said, “I don’t remember all this. Did you always make people take all this stuff off?”

  “You’re lucky you’re not a woman,” said the officer, handing back his jacket. “Sometimes they got a wired bra, sets off the beeper.”

  Released from the trap, Homer walked past the isolation block and the chapel, then marched through J Building and into H, where the corridor was full of inmates waiting to enter the canteen. The library was locked, but when he knocked on the door the librarian opened it and said, “Your class is expecting you.”

  Homer was interested to see that the place looked like a normal library, with walls of cheerful-looking books, a blocked-off corner for the librarian, and sunshine falling through high windows. The room was empty. Homer looked left and right. “Where are they?”

  “The law library’s up there.” The librarian pointed to a second level at one side. There they were, looking down at Homer through a wire grille. He followed the librarian up the stairs and waited while she unlocked the door. Once he was inside she nodded goodbye, locked the door again, and went back downstairs.

  There were six of them sitting around a table, inmates in blue shirts looking up at him warily. Homer said, “Good morning,” and sat down. Then he beamed around the table, trying to put them at their ease. “Why don’t we start by introducing ourselves? My name’s Homer. I teach American literature, but I’ve got a law degree, so if I don’t know the answers to your questions, I should be able to find out.” He nodded at the good-looking kid with the earring. “You want to start?”

  “My name’s Fergie.” The kid leaned forward, his blue prison shirt bunched up around his shoulders. “Repeat offender, I got this parole violation. What I want to know is, how much of my hard-earned good time will they take away?”

  “Good time?”

  “Like I rake leaves, repair vehicles, get paid shit. They take off two and a half days a month from my sentence. Now they’re gonna put some of it back. It’s like I never did no work.”

  Homer didn’t know how much good time Fergie would lose. He said he’d find out.

  Gordie spoke up boldly. “Suppose, like, somebody has a lot of cash nobody knows about, do they have to, like, pay taxes on it?”

  I don’t want to hear about it, Homer wanted to say. “All income must be declared,” he said, knowing he sounded stuffy. “With confirmation from the source. Confirmation might be—uh—sort of difficult, if the income was improper or illegal in some way.” In other words, don’t bring it up at all, you dumb kid.

  “Shit,” said Gordie softly.

  “My name’s Hank,” said the thickset boy with red hair. “I just got in this place last week. I got money problems too. There’s this guy owes me money. Only now I’m here he thinks he don’t have to pay me.” Hank’s voice trembled with his sense of grievance. “See, while I was on the outside, he hired me to do something for him, so I did, only at that particular time I was out on bail, and then I got sentenced and they dumped me in here, so now this guy don’t want to pay me.”

  “Do you have the agreement in writing?” said Homer.

  “Nah, it was like, you know, a verbal agreement.”

  “Well, maybe you could try suing him in small-claims court. I could help with that.”

  “Nah, nah, I don’t wanta bring it up in court. Jesus!”

  “I see,” said Homer, who didn’t see. “Let me think about it.”

  “I’m Jimmy,” said the broad-shouldered young African-American, “and my wife, we’re getting a divorce, only she thinks I don’t need no money in prison, she can just take everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Right. I got this neighbor, he tells me she’s gonna take off with the car, the entertainment center, the twenty-eight-cubic-foot fridge, the king-size bed, the living-room suite. I bet she’s forging my name on checks. She done that before.”

  Homer made a note. “Well, that’s no problem. We can do something about that.”

  “Ferris, my name’s Ferris,” said the kid with the harelip. “They give me a lousy public defender, like he really messed up, I didn’t do nothing, I’m innocent, but he wasn’t no help.”

  This too was fairly straightforward. “Well, the first thing would be an examination of the court records. I’d have to see if anything improper was said or done. I doubt incompetence on the part of your counsel is enough to call for a retrial. Have you got a transcript? No? I’ll see if I can get one.”

  “My case is rather complex,” said the fat middle-aged man with thick glasses. “Barkley Pendleton Haywall’s my name, and I’ve been reading the literature.” He nodded at the law books lining the walls. “There are several very interesting precedents to my case, all tending to the view that it has been mishandled. The first was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus Hemelman, in 1976, in which the judge concluded—”

  There were impatient shufflings of feet under the table. Hank, Fergie, Gordie, and Ferris all grimaced as Barkley went on talking. His sentence was for child molestation. His fellow inmates were not repelled by theft, drug dealing, assault, rape, or even murder, but they were disgusted by Barkley’s crime. He was a skinner, the lowest of the low. They looked at him with loathing, and edged their chairs away.

  Barkley didn’t seem to notice. He was completely wrapped up in the ramifications of the seven other cases in which the molested children had been older or younger, and more submissive or more combative. There was also the important question of whether they had actually been penetrated or merely handled.

  “Jesus,” whispered Gordie, nudging Ferris. “Yuck,” said Ferris. “Christ,” muttered Hank, shuddering. “Gawd,” said Fergie, making a noise like vomiting.

  Chapter 14

  Then the mother took the little boy and chopped him in pieces, put him into the pan and made him into black-puddings.

  The Brothers Grimm, “The Juniper Tree”

  Annie drifted out of her bedroom just before sunrise, while the house was still wrapped in dusk. The chairs and tables were still there, and the white keys of the piano. After the long night of unconsciousness and dreams she was happy to see that her perfect house existed still. It had not been blown away in some mighty readjustment of the world. Her painted wall was still there too, flowing through the room like a river.

  Annie picked up her chalk and waded into the river
up to her knees. By the time she had finished sketching the outlines of Hans Christian Andersen, complete with his tall top hat, it was ten o’clock. She stopped and came down the ladder and leaned against the kitchen counter to have breakfast. With her coffee cup in her hand, she turned around to gloat at her wall.

  At once she saw the stain, a new unwanted addition to her procession of majestic figures.

  This time it was not an accident, not an accumulation of mildew and damp. It was a face, a blank face surrounded by an aureole of yellow hair. Drips of red paint streamed down from the face like drops of blood.

  Annie’s happiness turned to dread. What the hell was going on? Someone was invading her wall, encroaching on her enchanted territory. While she was sleeping someone had come in silently and used her own brushes and her own jars of paint. She recognized the chrome yellow, the alizarin crimson. But when she climbed the scaffolding to look at her jars and her can of brushes they looked the same as always. Was one of the brushes wet? No, all of them were clean and dry.

  Annie climbed down the ladder again and walked back to the place where the new face had appeared, thinking about her artistic friends. Last week she had invited a lot of them to a housewarming party. They had all seen her wall. Any one of them could have played this trick on her. Of course they couldn’t all draw as cleverly as this. Perry Chestnut was a potter, Minnie Peck a sculptor, and Henrietta Willsey a minimalist poet. Wallace Feather specialized in whole-body casts, Henry Coombs constructed big things he called installations, and Trudy Tuck made fancy candles she insisted were works of art. And yet—

  “Oh, no, my God.” It was Flimnap, staring up at the new face. He had come in silently, carrying a garden fork.

  Annie didn’t have to tell him what to do. He got to work at once, unlocking the wheels of the scaffolding, rolling it along the wall, locking the wheels again, and climbing up to eliminate the blank white face, the mop of yellow hair, the drops of blood.