The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson.
Title: The Road Through the Wall.
Author: Shirley Jackson.
Genre: Fiction, literature, Gothic, social criticism, satire.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1948.
Summary: Pepper Street is a really nice, safe California neighborhood. The houses are tidy and the lawns are neatly mowed. Everyone knew the residents of Pepper Street were "nice" people-especially the residents themselves. Among the self-satisfied group are: Mrs Merriam, the sanctimonious shrew who was turning her husband into a nonentity and her daughter into a bigoted spinster; Mr Roberts, who found relief from the street's unending propriety in shoddy side-street amours; Miss Fielding, who considered it more important to boil an egg properly than to save a disturbed girl from destruction. It akes the gruesome act of a desperate boy who lives among them to pierce the shell of their complacency and force them to see their own ugliness, as a smug suburban neighborhood is breached by awful, unavoidable truths.
My rating: 7.5
My review:
♥ The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some people are automatically above suspicion. Mr. John Desmond and Mr. Bradley Ransom-Jones and Mr. Michael Roberts and Miss Susannah Fielding, all of whom lived on Pepper Street in a town called Cabrillo, California, thought of their invulnerability as justice; Mr. Myron Perlman and possibly Mr. William Byrne, also of Pepper Street, would have been optimistic if they thought of it as anything less than fate. no man owns a house because he really wants a house, any more than he marries because he favors monogamy, but all these men were married and most of them owned houses, and they regarded themselves as reasonable and unselfish and even, to themselves, as responsible. They all lived on Pepper Street because they were able to afford it, and none of them would have lived there if he had been able to afford living elsewhere, although Pepper Street was charming and fairly expensive and even comfortably isolated. The town of Cabrillo, in 1936, was fortunate in housing such people as Mr. Desmond and his family.
♥ Mr. and Mrs. Ransom-Jones and her sister lived on Pepper Street, probably, because like Mr. Desmond they were not rich enough to live in the style they coveted and not proud enough to live in opposition to it.
♥ Mr. Donald was another one who only rented his house; it had never occurred to him to build a house of his own, and so he spent all his life living in the patterns set out by other more enterprising men.
♥ It was called the wall, and the highway was called the highway, and the gates were called the gates. These stood at the head of Cortez Road, where the wall reached its own estate and became self-important, having more ground to circle than a city block. The gates were square piles of brick on either side of the street, with no bars between, nothing to indicate that they were a barrier, but they were an effective end to Pepper Street life. Beyond them lived the rich people, on a long curving road from which you could not see any house; beyond them was a neighborhood so exclusive that the streets had no names, the houses no numbers. The people who owned the wall lived there; so, although no one knew it very surely, did the people who owned some of the houses on Pepper Street, and the man who owned the bank that owned the house-for-rent. Mr. Byrne's employer lived there; so did Hallie Martin's future husband.
The sun shone cleverly on Pepper Street, but it shone more bravely still beyond the gates; when it rained on Pepper Street the people beyond the gates never got their feet wet; beyond the gates all the houses were marked "No Trespassing."
♥ The trees lining Pepper Street on either side, which the children called locusts and the parents regarded vaguely as peppers, had spent the spring through with tiny pink blossoms, meeting to make a bedroomish arch overhead for a month, and then, suddenly, turning green and leaved, abandoning the pink blossoms overnight, so that the street was rich with pink blossoms underfoot. For a few days the pink blossoms would be everywhere-in the gutters, on the lawns, tracked into pleasant living-rooms, lying on the tops of bags of groceries carried home-and then they would vanish, again overnight, and the trees would continue to be greener and greener until school started in the fall, and then the street would be full of leaves and the trees bare all winter, preparing new pinkness for the spring.
The pink blossoms were underfoot now on Pepper Street, which made middle June almost certain.
♥ Harriet sat down heavily on the bed and said aloud, "What shall I do?" not because it was meaningful to her, or because she was concerned about what to do-she knew now, without question, the eventual series of acts to be forced from her-but because "What-shall-I-do?" seemed the formation of sounds most likely to apply to a situation like this.
♥ The Perlmans' home was probably the wealthiest-looking on the block, although presumably the Desmonds had more money than the Perlmans, and Mrs. Merriam was vaguely noted for her "taste." The Perlmans' living-room was pale green and beige, and Mr. Perlman like to see a wood fire in the fireplace, although the Donalds had theirs stacked with imitation logs, and the Byrnes had a grate with a red light behind it. When Marilyn came into her living-room she was able to take a book from a bookcase; it was a limp-leather bound volume of Thackeray, but Harriet Merriam, after all, spent Saturday morning dusting the photograph album which lay on a side table to the Merriams' living-room, and the first secular book in the Byrne house was Pat's copy of Robinson Crusoe.
♥ One day, at the noon recess, Helen and a group of friends, had found Marilyn reading in an empty classroom and sat down around her, and Helen said, "Perlman, we've been looking for you." (Thinking about it, on her own front porch behind the vines, thinking as she did almost daily, Marilyn remembered the sudden sickness, looking up from her book to see Helen and, cruelly, Harriet Merriam.) "We've been wondering," Helen said, looking at the other girls, who laughed, even Harriet, "we've been wondering about Christmas."
"What about it?" When Marilyn remembered herself in this scene, she saw herself as small and frightened and ugly; Harriet, on the other hand, remembered herself as dirty and fat and overbearing; and perhaps Helen Williams, if she thought of it, remembered herself as friendly and teasing.
..She stood up and gathered the other girls and led them out. Perhaps she stopped them outside the door, in a little group in the hall, perhaps she wrote it in a note and sent it around the schoolroom, perhaps it was nothing at all, but Marilyn was afraid of her, and when she wanted someone to die it was always Helen Williams.
♥ It was difficult for anyone as hearty as Mrs. Roberts to see a puny son at her dinner table and not be angry; Artie was already fourteen years old, and Mrs. Roberts honestly despaired of making a man of him. She and Mr. Roberts both spoke to him gently, when they remembered, because secretly they were both a little afraid that a boy who read books instead of playing baseball might someday turn on them with a dreadful sure knowledge that would cut away their confidence and their muscles and leave them insecure and frightened, their stronger son as weak as they.
♥ "Healthy kids," Mr. Roberts said. "Good to see."
They stood quietly in the half-darkness, smiling vaguely. Past them their own children and the children of their neighbors moved swiftly back and forth, following some ancient ritual of capture and pursuit, dance steps regulated as far as the placing of the feet. With a wild howl little Jamie Roberts made a capture in the gutter near his father, and Mr. Roberts took the pipe out of his mouth to say, "good boy, Jamie."
♥ James Donald privately regarded his younger brother as an imperfect copy of himself, and was as irritated by Tod as he might have been by any cruel, pointed parody. Much of James's athletic sense of good and evil was invested in Tod; Tod was inefficient and a bad sport, which was evil; he was smaller, and could not be struck, which was a delineation of good. Consequently, James never required himself to include any form of evil in his own personality; such things belonged naturally to Tod, and were accepted numbly by Tod as his portion.
Much more, however, of Tod's lack of independent existence was due to his sister Virginia, who was a year older than Tod and his contemporary in a narrower sense than James-she played with the same children, and she hated Tod as she hated everyone upon whom it was not necessary to intrude her ingratiating personality. Tod was used to having his sister ignore him before the other children, and to hearing her say, "Don't let Toddie play, he does everything wrong."
The other children followed Virginia's example, because she was tacitly assumed to know, being Tod's sister. If Virginia had called Tod names, or refused to play with him, he would have gained prestige as a participant in a family fight, but when she seemed to believe sincerely that he had never wholly existed, he was lost. If he had been able to do any single thing better than either his brother or sister, he might have won some small place in the neighborhood hierarchy, or perhaps even in school; as long as he was the patient, desperately-clinging minority of the family, he had to be content with the opinion his family were known to have of him.
♥ Mrs. Desmond always did embroidery while Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Merriam darkened socks and mended torn sweaters; it would have been incongruous for Mrs. Desmond, and her small delicate hands always so near Caroline's blond head, and her pale face so like Caroline's, to sit with great socks or spools of darning cotton on her lap. Mrs. Desmond brought her sewing in a lacquer box, and Caroline had a miniature lacquer box filled with her bright ribbons. Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Merriam had no objection to seeing their own sufficiently ladylike hands dealing competently with heavy mending, but either of them would have been faintly surprised at Mrs. Desmond's doing it; it was an unexplained aristocratic principle.
♥ What the golf course represented, actually, was a reminder that within the sphere which the people who lived on Pepper Street allowed themselves, there was a maximum and a minimum attainment; Mr. Desmond, for instance, belonged to this club and another in the city, and a further club in which he played squash, but before long Mr. Desmond intended to promote himself beyond the gates; John Junior and Caroline would grow up in a house not visible from the street; they might even have a tennis court and be called rich. Mr. Byrne, on the other hand, preferred bowling and performed every Saturday night with as select a group of men as those with whom Mr. Desmond played gold, although Mr. Byrne's friends lived without the gates and never planned to live within. To Mr. Byrne and his friends, Pepper Street was the ultimate goal and they reached it with as much satisfaction as Mr. Desmond would reach his home inside the gates and, eventually, his estate outside town. At present Mr. Byrne and Mr. Desmond met as equals and respectful acquaintances; eventually they would be as far apart as they had been when they started, although probably equally wealthy. Pat Byrne and Johnny Desmond would almost certainly meet at some expensive university, but all they would have in common would be the old times on Pepper Street and recollections of the creek, not the golf course.
♥ Pat lay on the grass on his back with one arm over his eyes, and Art sat up, his arms around his knees. They spoke only occasionally, without much regard to communication, in a sort of pleasant comfort that came partly from their great familiarity with one another, and mostly from the feeling of ground and grass under them and trees and sky overhead, with no houses to be seen. Pat twisted a blade of grass in his fingers, feeling it more tangible than food, than books; he saw the sky overhead as arched personally for him, and concerned in his immediate welfare; Art, on the other hand, liked the way the grass smelled, and the way the creek sides crowded closely against him, hiding him.
♥ Mr. Merriam looked up from his plate blankly, "More what?"
"Potatoes," Mrs. Merriam said patiently. Lately, since she and Harriet had been seeing more of one another, she would look significantly at Harriet when Mr. Merriam did something indicating his personal coarseness; frequently, in the long talks which Mrs. Merriam and Harriet had so often now, Mrs. Merriam would say, "Never marry a man who is inelegant, Harriet; I can tell you it brings nothing but sorrow." If Harriet tried to press her on the subject she would shake her head and smile sadly; only when she was angry did Mrs. Merriam permit herself to sink so low as to reproach her husband for not being daintily bred. Now, saying, "More potatoes," she looked at Harriet and smiled, and Harriet smiled back confusedly.
.."Apple pie," Mr. Merriam said. He looked around. "Am I the only one eating pie?"
"Harriet and I are not pie-eaters," Mrs. Merriam said delicately, and Harriet added virtuously, "I don't see how you can eat it." She would have eaten a piece of pie with enthusiasm, but artistic creation and delicate upbringing argued against it.
♥ Although they were legally father and son, John Junior had not, as so many adopted children do, grown to resemble his father in small subtle ways; he had taken none of his father's mannerisms, none of his tricks of dressing, not even many of his father's words. In some ways he was a sorrow to Mr. Desmond, who believed, and said often, that adoption was a two-way process. "The children should adopt the parents," he would say soberly, "as surely as the parents adopt the children." So that, sitting on opposite sides of the room, they were already two men-Johnny at nearly sixteen as large and broad-shouldered as his father-two men sitting of an evening talking. Mrs. Desmond stood in the doorway looking at them. She was proud of them both, and proud of small Caroline just put to bed for the night. When she thought of her family, beyond meals and clothes and table linen, she thought of them as a unit, the adopted son as permanent and beloved as the natural daughter, the father and mother kindly, loving parents.
♥ Mr. Desmond still looked humorous and tolerant; it was an old argument and he had every intention of giving in eventually, but first he must prove Johnny in a number of vehement arguments over a period of months, must find the boy manly and proud and strong-willed. Mr. Desmond admired strength in any form, and finding it in his adopted son was a sort of bonus to him, as though, beside the qualities of health and bodily perfection he had originally specified in the child to be adopted, he had been rewarded for his generosity to the child by unexpected good qualities: this strength, a quiet humor, Johnny's undefinable self-possession which sometimes awed Mr. Desmond. Some day Johnny would play all-American footfall, or great golf, or championships tennis; Mr. Desmond saw him happily as beloved of women (perhaps even already; there were the letters that had caused such a fuss recently, and who knew what else?), admired of men, his hand on his father's shoulder, his friends, broad-shouldered champion young men all, toasting Johnny's father, his adopted father.
♥ ..and her mother moved nervously in and out, directing the movers, entreating them to be gentle with certain favored remnants. The Williams furniture was embarrassingly shabby, and Mrs. Williams was obviously conscious of the eyes of her neighbors and their children; they saw her seldom enough as it was, without getting their last look at her by daylight, surrounded by the pitiful implements she used to live and eat and dress and sleep and sit and hold and bring her children up with.
..Marilyn watched, thinking of life without Helen Williams-maybe they were moving far away, far enough so that Helen would never be in school again-and realizing, as she saw the threadbare, unmatched furniture, that it has not been necessary to be afraid of Helen. If Helen dressed every morning for school, in front of that grimy dresser, ate breakfast at that slatternly table, then Marilyn had no need to run from her; no one whose life was bounded by things like that was invulnerable.
♥ Helen's grandmother was brought out of the home with Lotus in her arms. Mildred was forced into a coat, and wearily, desolately, Mrs. Williams prepared to lead her family to the bus that would take them to their new home, a place darker, perhaps, and poorer, but where Mildred would grow up for another year or so, where the old grandmother would sit in her room and perhaps die, where Helen would continue as before, surrounded by new friends frightening a new Marilyn, and where Mrs. Williams would be able to come home every night after a shorter journey, sitting alone every evening in a new living-room, planning so they would not have to move into another home eventually, another home still darker.
♥ 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 filth 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.
♥ 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.
♥ A pounding upstairs indicated that the boys were up and quarreling. Mrs. Roberts went out to the foot of the stairs and called kindly (she was kinder to the boys at these times, waiting for her husband to enmesh himself, just as she was more impatient with them when she loved her husband best)..
♥ Although Marguerite Desmond rarely smiled, she had never spoken a harsh word to or about anyone in her life. She lived with Mr. Desmond for nineteen years, and in all that time had never raised her voice to him, or acted in any manner that was not genteel; she never treated her adopted son with anything less than perfect courtesy, and her attitude toward her neighbors was such as to set her apart in a lovely aristocratic isolation; she had never, to her knowledge, had a friend. In the few crises of her life, Mrs. Desmond had been collected and thoughtful; during the long uneventful years, serene. She was ungenerous because her family had been poor before she married Mr. Desmond, she was unsympathetic because no one had ever required any sensitivity of her, she was gracious because her mother before her had been gracious and because her daughter Caroline must in her turn learn to be womanly and ladylike. Mrs. Desmond was neither intelligent nor unintelligent, because thinking and all its allied attributes were completely outside her schedule for life; her values did not include mind, and nothing that she intended ever required more than money. It must not be concluded, however, that with all these aspects Mrs. Desmond did not sleep and eat, cook and clean, comb her hair and drive her car, like the other mothers on the block. The only thing that set Mrs. Desmond apart was that she never knowingly said, or did, or thought, an unkind thing. Like Mrs. Merriam, Mrs. Desmond slept in her private room, away from her husband, only Mrs. Desmond had Caroline by her bed. Liker Mrs. Roberts, Mrs. Desmond was fond of lobster; like Mrs. Byrne, she was excessively concerned about the cleanliness and general superiority of the food she served her family; like Mrs. Perlman, she did her own dusting and bedmaking, leaving the heavy scrubbing for a girl to do every morning; and, like Mrs. Ransom-Jones and Mrs. Merriam, Mrs. Desmond wore her long hair gathered in a knot at the back of her neck; Mrs. Merriam's hair was grey, Mrs. Ransom-Jones's hair was dark, but Mrs. Desmond's hair was pale yellow, almost white. Caroline's hair was the same color; together they made a pair of delicately shaded creatures, not quite colorful enough, without enough body, to mingle freely with the rest of the world.
♥ Mr. Desmond had invited them in from San Francisco, without introducing them first to his wife, because he obviously felt that a man who could play the piano and was blind, did not need an introduction anywhere but carried his calling card in his hands and his value in his face.
♥ He had no idea what he was looking for, or why it seemed that he might find it through Hester, but she had come with a good omen, Mrs. Roberts' arm around him, and her larg4r
gtrer-than-life eyes and mouth brought Tod back to her again and again with the conviction that here, somehow, he might gain back what he had lost by being born at all.
♥ With the children she was usually good-natured and amiable; it was only when she met adults, those mysterious creatures whose world she had invaded too soon, that Hester became menacing and ugly, as though it were necessary to her to establish, immediately, her status as an invader by right or superior ability.
♥ Here the grass was always dry, and mossy, and, since they were across the creek from the golf course, and far away from any houses on the Pepper Street side, Marilyn and Harriet could sit quietly and secretly, safe even from their friends. They had dug a hole in the center of this clearing, marked by a small stone at each corner, and lined it with rocks, spending a pleasant co-operative afternoon doing it, reverting to the completely informal mud-pie state of mind. Neither had been thinking particularly as they dug and grimied themselves, neither had worried about what she said or how she looked, and finally the hole in the ground was so special a symbol of their new and enduring friendship that they could not decide what to put in it. When one has created a thing exactly necessary; when a hiding place so accurate exists, the difficulty which arises is that the thing, containing itself, has room for nothing else. Even in a new friendship between maidens, there may be nothing worth hiding in a secret hole.
♥ "Do you believe in reincarnation? ..Honest," Marilyn said after a short silence. "You know, reincarnation is where you used to be someone else once, before you were born this time."
..Marilyn had something she wanted to say, something burning in her mind to be told; perhaps the only reason she needed Harriet, or any friend, was to get this said, finally. "Lots of people," she began, "think that maybe once they were like Julius Caesar or Jo March before they were... well, born, this time. And then when those people died they turned into the ones they are now. Like for instance you might have been-" Looking at Harriet, Marilyn sought for a word. "-Becky Sharp, before you were Harriet Merriam."
..Marilyn frowned slightly. "I know who I was," she announced dramatically. Then, suddenly shy, as though Harriet were after all not the person to tell, as though she had come, unwilling and driven, too close to what she wanted to say, she turned quiet and sat looking down at the grass again, her wide ugly face pressed close against the fresh green.
"You mean," Harriet said slowly, considering, "you mean, I could be anything?" The sound of the wind moving through the trees, a distant shout from a golf course, seemed to bring her an echo of barbaric rites, clashing temple bells, perhaps from the distant, only-just remembered past; "I bet I was Egyptian," she said, carried away, "I always wanted to go to Egypt."
"I know," Marilyn whispered softly to the grass, "I remembered a long time ago."
Harriet was silent, smiling faintly, lost in her dim pagan temple.
♥ Federica turned back to Mrs. Ransom-Jones. "That's cheap, isn't it?" she said. "We'll be in the dark."
Mrs. Ransom-Jones, whose good face depended on a complete lack of interest in Frederica's family, said, "If you turn right at this corner and then left at the highway and go straight down for about three blocks you'll find Mr. Jowett's. In a little block of stores."
♥ Miss Fielding was old and sensed constantly, rather than knew sometimes with sharp clarity, the decay of her body around her, the gradual easing of tensions that had once been vital. Miss Fielding was interested in anything for a littler while, would rise from her chair to watch a cat crossing the road, but after the little while was over, Miss Fielding, in her chair, went back to searching the face of death.
..In her neat little house she was able to move comfortably with the steady pull of her body toward death; for more years than she could remember Miss Fielding had been following herself along a well-defined path, around the circle of hours that made a day, around the circle of days that made a year, around the circle of years that made Miss Fielding older and nearer to lying down for good. When she was forty-odd and had finally resigned any thoughts of new ways of life (perhaps at one time Miss Fielding had regarded marriage as she now regarded death, perhaps she had thought of a somewhat larger, more involved life), Miss Fielding had set out to make her world as clean and uneventful as a convalescent room; sometimes it seemed, even, that Miss Fielding's long convalescence from birth would culminate in sufficient strength for her to die without effort. The tiny house on Pepper Street was Miss Fielding's only home; there was no other room on earth where she could go and be recognized. She had no relatives, no friends except those people who passed her front door. A slight reliable flow of money, from a bank Miss Fielding had never seen, fed her and clothed her and kept her housed. Her little home was dark and well-fitted; Miss Fielding had gradually sold (not given away; there was no one she knew well enough to give things to) most of the furniture she had been encumbered with at the death of whoever had preceded Miss Fielding in this quiet life; and now, with her chair by a neat table, her narrow bed, her dresser where her clothes lay, hey two-burner stove, and her brush and comb, Miss Fielding waited for her time to be up. "Passing on," she called it.
When she died her things would dissolve neatly; the little money from the bank would stop automatically when its purpose was ended, her small residue of furniture would be sold and the money neatly applied to Miss Fielding's passing, the Pepper Street house would snap back to its original purpose as a dwelling for the living, and the pinpoint of consciousness of Miss Fielding which would be left would be in the minds of children and busy people, and would grow tinier and vanish in a reasonably short time. Some lives, ending as Miss Fielding's would, leave a grain of memory, like a grain of sand, in the depths of another mind, a grain of sand which is like the constant irritation under an oyster's shell, eventually to grow with coating after coating of disguising beauty into a pearl. Sometime this memory would be pried loose, in its rounded beauty, to stand by itself as an object of delight. Miss Fielding had no fears of ultimate survival, even in beauty. When she passed on, she would draw her every trailing mist of herself, effacing herself so completely that even after her death, even after her bones, which she could not help, were gone, she would be a bother to no one, would intrude on no mind.
♥ Tod Donald, seated at his family dinner table, knew already that he hated every part of it more than anything else in the world. He had time, every night at dinner, to hate things individually: the blue-patterned plates always seemingly set the same, although the chipped one was not always Tod's, but sometimes went to James on Mr. Donald; the cup by his mother's plate and the cup by his father's plate, and the straight glasses with daisies on them that sat by Tod and James and Virginia, full of milk. Tod even hated milk, when it was served in those glasses.
He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.
..It was one of Tod's duties to appear regularly at the dinner table, since a place was set for him and a potato cooked in his name. He was expected to receive food, participate in Christmas, sleep, and keep his clothes under his family roof; his mother's bright head at the top of the table would turn inquiringly to either side before she started carving, counting her family in a small gesture of grace which assured her that the food so energetically cooked would be used. If Tod were absent he would be punished.
♥ And Virginia, who might have inherited something from her father, sat nightly at the dinner table estimating the balance of power as it shifted back and forth between their mother and her older brother, flattering herself secretly with the thought that she was the cleverest person in the house.
♥ Life on Pepper Street was peaceful and easy because its responsibilities lay elsewhere; its very paving had been laid down by men now far away, planned by someone in an office building even Mr. Desmond had not seen. Like those who lived directly in contact with the ground, like the people who had, more or less long ago, been ancestors to everyone on Pepper Street, their lives were quietly governed for them by a mysterious faraway force. The sky, which was close but uncontrollable, had been an immediate power to the forefathers of Mr. Desmond or Mr. Byrne, as had the earthworm, which might or might not belong to them, and then, finally, the other unseen governors: the prices in a distant town, regulated by minds and hungers in a town even farther away, all the possessions which depended on someone in another place, someone who controlled words and paper and ink, who could by the changing of a word on paper influence the very texture of the ground.
On Pepper Street, inhabited by descendants of farmers, people were accustomed to thinking of themselves as owners, but even the very chair on which Mr. Desmond sat in the evenings belonged to him only on sufferance; it had belonged first to someone who made it, in turn governed by someone who planned it, and Mr. Desmond, although he had not known it, had chosen it because it had been presented to him as completely choosable. He might have taken one of several others, differing in style or color, he might have done without a chair, but ultimately the one chair be bought was completely controlled because Mr. Desmond wanted a chair, and if he wanted a chair, had to buy one, and if he were going to buy one, and to buy one that existed, and if it existed at all... and so on.
It was on the same principle that Mr. Desmond had a house, that he had a street in front of his house. Mr. Desmond would not have bought or built a house on a site where it was impossible to have electricity, but then someone he did not know had declared that electricity was possible in the first place. Mr. Desmond lived on the patience of all the people who did not kill him. He ate what foods he was allowed to buy. He regarded himself as an owner, as a taxpayer, as a responsible citizen, and so did Mr. Byrne and Mr. Roberts and Mr. Perlman and Mr. Ransom-Jones, and they sent their children to schools dictated and run by people they had never seen, and they slept at night between sheets made by hands they would never shake. They had nothing to say about how soon their houses would begin to rot, when the sheets might tear.
When they could do so without embarrassment they called themselves upright American citizens, and they looked around Pepper Street with its neatness and the highway beyond the gates and the wall, and they possessed it with statements like "good place to live," and "when I decide to move." Consequently any change made on Pepper Street was beyond their control, and it was not even thought necessary to notify them in advance, although such a change might affect them more intimately than anyone else in the world. One morning, a severely thoughtful man, a business man like Mr. Desmond, and a cross old lady in a paneled living-room, from the depths of their own private unowned lives, made a decision with the words and papers so necessary for momentous decisions, and never consulted Mr. Desmond or Mr. Ransom-Jones, never thought of asking Tod Donald, who was the one most terribly changed by it all.
Part of the wall was to come down. A breach was to be made in the northern boundary of the world. Barbarian hordes were to be unleashed on Pepper Street. A change was going to come about without anyone's consent. In ten years the people now living on Pepper Street could come back and not know the old place, it would be so changed. The plans of the man, whoever he was, were to extend Pepper Street though the estate hidden behind the wall, and run it directly across to meet the corresponding street on the other side of the estate. The old lady who owned the estate, who sat in the paneled living-room, chose to sell the little pocket of land thus excluded to another man, unknown to the first, for a new apartment building. Thus, instead of the wall running from the gates to the highway, there would be a wall running to Pepper Street and then along the new street on the estate side to meet the wall which ran down the other side, a smaller square than before, and, in the end so cut off, new houses. And the people who lived on the corresponding street, whose saw their own familiar wall going down? Probably they felt the same way, and were apprehensive of the barbaric hordes from Pepper Street. The really comfortable people would be the ones who moved into the new apartment house which was to go up in the empty space; to them nothing was different.
Eventually a third man broadened Pepper Street by taking down the locust trees, and a fourth man changed its name to Something Avenue, but this was much later, late enough to astound the people in the new apartment house, who came back to their turn and found it hard to recognize the old neighborhood. Eventually, of course, it was more and more degraded, and the Desmond house became an old home, cut up into apartments and then into rooms, with the garden overgrown or built up; but by then the apartment house was out of date and not fashionable, and Pepper Street or Something Avenue had gone down in the world, too far to be revisited.
At any rate, one morning Pepper Street was stupefied into submission, as though it had a choice, by the arrival of a tractor, a gang of men in blue workshirts, and the sudden sound of physical work on the wall. The children were there, of course, standing as close as possible around the inviting tractor, asking questions, estimating among themselves the probable aim of the workmen, the age of the tractor, what they would find inside the wall. Mrs. Merriam on her front porch, which offered the best view of the work, paused in her aimless housework to wonder at the men's broad shoulders; Mrs. Desmond drew the shades on that side of the house and kept Caroline indoors that afternoon.
It was the destruction of the wall which put the first wedge into the Pepper Street security, and that security was so fragile that, once jarred, it shivered into fragments in a matter of weeks. That night for the first time Mr. Desmond thought practically of moving; careful examination of his bank account assured him that he was not ready to go beyond the gates at present without a cautious economy of home and life that would almost nullify the good effects of moving. Borrowing money was an aversion of Mr. Desmond's, but any removal not beyond the gates would be a step backwards.
Mr. and Mrs. Ransom-Jones discussed the advisability of a high and firm hedge around their garden, and Mr. Byrne found serious fault with the planning of the unknown man whom he might criticize although he would never influence or meet him. The most outrageous estimates in the neighborhood would have the road finished by the end of the summer.
It may be a matter of some importance to note that on the other side, the corresponding street, a Mr. Honeywell was driven by seeing his side of the wall come down into committing himself on paper to the purchase of a modest estate beyond the gates; he had been debating for so long that his wife and children had begun to despair. His children subsequently met Johnny Desmond at a country-club dance and discovered that for years they had been near neighbors. Also on that other street a new family, recently moved in, complained to the family which had sold them the house that they had not been warned of the new road coming; the son of this new family later on walked to high school every morning with Mary Byrne. Mrs. Mack's old dog was generally supposed to be the father of eventual puppies on the other street. The workmen, who made all this possible, were family men and earned their money by their work just as Mr. Desmond did.
♥ In the quiet late late evening, the sun long down and the stars shining correctly outside the window, Miss Fielding rocked slowly back and forth in her chair.
♥ It was probably that everyone on Pepper Street knew that Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were, oddly, friends, but it is certain that no one was particularly interested in it. Both Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were so exactly the sort of people who want to hide, that the neighborhood was only thankful to have them hiding together, instead of intruding their modesty on busier people. Every so often one or another of the Pepper Street inhabitants, glancing out of a window in the later evening, or a child coming home later than usual, would notice Mr. Donald walking toward Miss Fielding's little house, and possibly even see him, a half-hour or so later, coming back home, the lights in Miss Fielding's house out behind him, his own house completely incurious about his absence.
Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were obviously two of a kind. When they sat in Miss Fielding's little room, Miss Fielding sat with her hands on the arms of her rocking chair, rocking back and forth, as though she were alone; Mr. Donald sat back in the old-fashioned chair with his head against the antimacassar, his eyes closed as though he were asleep. When they talked it was because both of them were given to talking to themselves.
♥ "Spare the rod and spoil the church," Mr. Donald said suddenly. They frequently interrupted one another, or talked both at once, as though all that were necessary was to make a companionable noise. "Everybody worrying, everybody moving so fast, all going to church, all hitting each other, all worrying."
♥ "It used to be much warmer then," Mr. Donald went on. "Sometimes it's so cold now in the summer I wonder about it. Even in the summer. ..I wish I knew why it happens," Mr. Donald said. He leaned forward, preparatory to standing up. "Why it's so much colder now in the summer." He looked directly at Miss Fielding, who turned her wrinkled old eyes to look at him.
"Why yes," Miss Fielding said. "I expect we're all older than we were."
♥ "I can't play with you any more, is all," she said.
"Why not?" Marilyn was puzzled, and she screwed her face up so that Harriet could not bear to look at her, but looked instead loftily into space.
"My mother says it's not suitable," Harriet said. "My mother says to tell you that people of my class are always nice to everybody in spite of their religion or their background, but that we have to set standards. Standards," Harriet repeated; it was a solid word in the midst of confusion. "So," Harriet went on rapidly, "I can't talk to you any more or play with you or come up here or go to the library. My mother says so."
Marilyn still had the apple, and looking at it in her hand Harriet said, "And furthermore my mother hopes you won't ever try to tell anyone I was your friend."
"I see," Marilyn says. She swallowed the bite of apple in her mouth and asked meekly, "Is that all your mother said?"
Suddenly Harriet realized that she had no words to use to go any further, whatever she tried to say now would only be the same words over again. She had used up, so quickly, all that her mother had spread over so long a time, so Harrier finished icily, "Isn't that enough?"
"Sure," Marilyn said. She put the apple down on the ground and began pulling out handfuls of grass to drop on it.
When the apple was covered Harriet thought miserably that she had not done any of it right. She would have liked to start over from the beginning, make it mean more.
♥ Text of two manuscripts found at the creek, late in the summer, by Tod Donald:
In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.
I will be a famous actress or maybe a painter and everyone will be afraid of me and do what I say.
♥ "Always be polite," Miss Tyler said. She looked at Harriet and said, "You'll never be pretty, of course, but you can practice great fascination. The pretty ones always fade, always." Harriet tried to say something, somethign self-contained, but Miss Tyler went on hurriedly, "Take me, for instance, you wouldn't think now that I was so pretty once. .. You're lucky, you won't ever be pretty."
Harriet knew already that this would keep her heartsick for months, perhaps the rest of her life, and she said quickly, "I'm losing weight right now."
"It isn't that you're so fat," Miss Tyler said critically. "You just don't have the air of a pretty woman. All your life, for instance, you'll walk like you're fat, whether you are or not."
♥ Nothing that someone said had any purpose; they were waiting for something, for an act on someone's part that would clarify the situation. No one could do anything at all until the occasion was identified-either it was a great climactic festival over nothing, in which case they would all go quietly home, or else it was an emergency, a crisis, a tragedy, in which case they were all called upon to act together as human beings, to be men and women in a community, the men out on dangerous business, the women waiting, going to the window, wringing their hands.
..The prevailing mood was one of keen excitement; no one there really wanted Caroline Desmond safe at home, although Mrs. Perlman said crooningly behind Marilyn, "The poor, poor woman," and Mrs. Donald said again, "If we'd only known in time." Pleasure was in the feeling that the terrors of the night, the jungle, had come close to their safe lighted homes, touched them nearly, and departed, leaving every family safe but one; an acute physical pleasure like a pain, which made them all regard Mr. Desmond greedily, and then turn their eyes away with guilt.
♥ She was horribly dirty; no one had ever seen Caroline as dirty as she was then, with mud all over her yellow dress and yellow socks and, of course, Pat understood perfectly, what was all over her head must be blood, unconvincing as it looked in the flashlight. It was absolutely unthinkable at the creek, not twenty feet from the fallen log Pat could walk across, and the really dreadful thing, lying right there next to her as though it might be hers was the rock with blood on it; part of the creek, belonging to it, a rock which had probably been sitting there as long as Pat had been coming to the creek, a rock he might have stepped over or lifted with his two hands. Even though Pat had never noticed the rock particularly before, it should have been left alone.
♥ The policeman looked like a doctor, like a dentist, like the man at the movie theatre who wanted to know how old you were before he let you in fore half-price. Except that he wore a uniform fascinatingly official, he looked at you in the same way, as though he knew things about you he was not going to tell and yet was going to hurt you anyway, of his own accord, whether you wanted him to or not, like the dentist. Or as though there were no way of getting out of it, and he knew best anyway, like the doctor. Or as though he hated everybody who was legally under twelve, the way the man at the movies looked.
♥ Harriet Merriam woke up the next morning with a recollection of disaster. Looking around her sunny room with her head still on the pillow, she searched for the source of the flat dead feeling inside her, the knowledge of disaster. Something had happened. She remembered slowly; standing in the street she remembered clearly, and coming home alone to bed in the darkness, and, before that, the people in the street, and Mr. Desmond. Mr. Desmond was part of it, she remembered then, and at last it came to her: he was standing laughing in the kitchen when she went by, following Miss Tyler into the house to hear....fat.
The ugly, the sickening word came back to her, spoken in Miss Tyler's small voice: fat. Harriet looked down at herself under the bedclothes; she was a gross, a revolting series of huge mountains, a fat fat fat girl.
She turned her head from side to side on the pillow, her eyes shut so as not to see herself. You'll always be fat, she thought, never pretty, never charming, never dainty. In an ecstasy of shame she searched for every pretty word she knew; she would never be any of them.