The Road Through the Wall

by Shirley Jackson

  The night that Hester Lucas left, the Donalds dined on baked beans and brown bread; the night that Frederica Terrel was out begging her sister from Miss Fielding and Mrs. Ransom-Jones, the Donalds ate ham and sweet potatoes. It was one of Mrs. Donald’s housekeeping shortcuts to plan solely in terms of foods traditionally associated: she never served bacon without eggs, corned beef without cabbage, pork chops without applesauce; if she had had occasion to serve ambrosia she would have made a point of getting nectar to go with it. Consequently, meals at the Donald house occurred with a sort of unerring accuracy, and inevitably the family conversation followed in the same vein, helped out by the fact that Mrs. Donald carried over her singleness of association into one adjective constant for one person (“poor Miss Fielding, dreadful Mrs. Byrne”) and one state of mind for one situation. Mrs. Merriam’s phone call about the horrid letters Virginia was writing to boys had caught Mrs. Donald in a mood of weary boredom, and dull stuff the letters had seemed ever since; the Williamses had moved while Mrs. Donald was washing her hair, and her recollection of that family remained in a state of wet, off-balance agitation, not unmixed with a hint of grey.

  James inherited this sober single-mindedness, but in him it was transformed into a vast restriction of his life to two or three plain ideas, the principal one being his position as a football player and his consequent value, one of the lesser his future as an architect or just possibly a great dramatic actor. 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 her mother and her older brother, flattering herself secretly with the thought that she was the cleverest person in the house.

  As the summer drew on, roast lamb and mint sauce had come up again on the Donald menu. Mr. Donald, who stared at the blue plates in front of him because they were as familiar as the faces of his family, but more serene, was lost somewhere in thought, and Mrs. Donald was in a condition of unusual suspense.

  “I declare,” she said insistently, “I don’t know what they’re thinking about, those people.”

  “Not up to us,” James said. “None of our business.”

  “It will positively ruin the neighborhood,” Mrs. Donald said. She craned her neck to see down the table, and then said to Virginia beside her, “Get Father’s plate, dear. He needs more lamb.”

  Virginia rose and walked to the other end of the table, giving Tod a spiteful poke as she walked by. He raised his head to look at her, his mouth full, and followed her with his eyes as she went to her mother again.

  “I wish you’d make Toddie eat like a human being,” she said.

  “Toddie,” Mrs. Donald said automatically, without turning her head.

  “If you don’t eat nicely you can leave the table.” Virginia returned her father’s full plate, circled wide around Tod to avoid the kick he had waiting for her, and sat down at her own place again, smoothing her skirt complacently.

  “We won’t be here forever anyway,” James said. He looked at his father significantly and added, “I hope.”

  “Father does the best he can, dear.” Mrs. Donald’s adjective for her husband was “helpless.” “If he can do anything about it we’ll be able to move soon enough.”

  “I’d like to live past the gates,” Virginia said.

  “Past the gates,” James mimicked in a falsetto. “Listen to the movie actress with a million dollars.”

  “What’s the matter?” Virginia said viciously. “Would it hurt your training to live decently?”

  “Children,” Mrs. Donald said. She rested her chin gracefully on her hand and smiled at Virginia. “I wouldn’t mind a big house with a couple of maids to do all the work.”

  “And a swimming pool and a tennis court,” Virginia said.

  “Anyway,” James said positively, “about the wall, it’s only a rumor, and they’re probably not going to do anything at all.”

  “Toddie,” Virginia said.

  “What?” Toddie spoke defensively, without looking up.

  “Must you smear your food all over your face?” Virginia made an elaborate display of disgust and said urgently, to her mother, “I just can’t eat with him, honestly.”

  “I don’t see how they could do it, anyway,” James went on reasonably, “it would cost too much, for one thing, without making the neighborhood any better.”

  “It would certainly ruin the neighborhood,” Mrs. Donald said. She raised her voice slightly with the inflection that meant she was talking to her husband, and said, “We’re wondering about the new road they say they’re putting in.”

  Mr. Donald looked at her and then down at his plate again, and Mrs. Donald said to Virginia, “We’ve got to think about clothes for you before school starts.”

  “I want a suit,” Virginia said. “I want a perfectly plain suit with a couple of ruffled blouses.”

  “And you really ought to have shoes,” Mrs. Donald said.

  “Toddie,” James said sternly across the table, “if you don’t stop playing with your food you can just leave the table.”

  • • •

  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 live 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 wind or 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, inhabitated 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 did not know 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 he 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, had 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 in 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 and 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 paper 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 through 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, who saw their own familiar wall going down? Probably they felt the same way, and were apprehensive of the barbarian 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 in 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 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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sounds of the wall coming down stayed on Pepper Street for almost a week, and it seemed that dust from the old bricks filled every living-room on the block, even as far as the Ransom-Joneses. Mrs. Desmond and Mrs. Merriam were the principal sufferers, since Pepper Street ended between their two houses; after two days of changing Caroline into clean clothes three or four times a day and brushing visible dust off the toys, Mrs. Desmond admitted defeat and went with her daughter to a nearby summer resort to stay a week. The Merriams endured the dust but not the noise; Mrs. Merriam twice called the construction company whose name was on the “Men Working” sign, and was twice politely told to mind her own business. Mrs. Merriam’s temper was tarter than usual until the bricks were down and neatly stacked at the curb, and Mr. Merriam was kept posted by a nightly bulletin on the state of Mrs. Merriam’s headache. Farther down the block, toward the Donald and Byrne and Roberts houses, the complaints were less physical and more aesthetic; the idea that placid Pepper Street was being deformed by workmen and dirt and great foul machines was almost as bad as the prospect of being shortly on a direct road with the rest of the world.

  The children, of course, knew little of the discomfort of strange men and big machines; every morning while the bricks were coming down, they crowded together on the corner by the Merriam house—none of them allowed to cross Cortez Road for fear of falling bricks—and watched and commented eagerly on the process of the work; at one point it seemed that the wall itself was tottering all up and down Cortez Road, and Tod Donald called out across the street approximately at a man in tight corduroy pants, “Hey, looka that, the whole wall’s going to fall on you,” and the man turned and looked at the children and laughed.

  In the Martin house there was dismal foreboding. It seemed likely that tearing down the wall might mean disaster for old Mr. Martin. First of all, perhaps the dust would reach as far as his flowers, penetrate the sealed greenhouses, dirty the roses. Secondly, once the wall was broken into, the fields of the estate, the sacred enclosed place which harbored the main house, the garages, the tennis court and the terraced gardens as well as Mr. Martin’s greenhouses, would be exposed to intrusions from the outside world, perhaps small boys with stones, perhaps curious trespassers gathering flowers, perhaps all those people with large feet who trample down tiny growing things. More than that, even, came into Mr. Martin’s old mind. Now, with this madness of destruction—the disregarding abandoned battering tearing-apart of things permanent because they had been standing so long—what with tearing down walls and selling land, who could tell what would follow? The tennis court might go to make room for an apartment house, perhaps the terraced gardens might be cut into front yards, perhaps even the greenhouses might vanish. Mr. Martin sat apprehensively, in the evenings, thinking on flowers, the blossoms of which were not his preoccupation, seeing in his dreams the broken glass, the crushed roots. Mrs. Martin shook her head and kept the children away; her daughter-in-law, mother of George and Hallie, was more silent than usual, and avoided the room where the old man sat. George and Hallie went quietly around the old house, washing when they had to, coming to table when they were called; and the old people knew brick by brick as the wall was going.

  The wall began to bore the children after a few days. There was not much fun in standing across the street by the hour, daring an occasional comment, guessing which way the bricks were going t
o fall, knowing the watchful eyes from windows above to prevent their putting one foot off the legal curb. By about the third day they were back at their games, always ready for news of the wall but tired of bricks.

  Late one afternoon when all the children were playing in front of their usual place, the Donald house, Hallie Martin came softly out of her house and stood in front of it for a minute looking across the street. She had on her best dress—it was velveteen plaid, and too small for her—and she had put on her mother’s lipstick. She looked at the men working across the street and then back at her house. Her mother and grandfather were out, working at their respective jobs, and her grandmother was taking a nap; her brother George was with the other children. Daintily, Hallie put one foot into the street, and ran across. There were four or five men working on the wall; they were hot and irritable and covered with dust, and Hallie approached cautiously.

  One of the men grunted; none of them looked up.

  “Hello,” Hallie said. “It’s hot, isn’t it?”

  One of the men, brushing past Hallie, said with annoyance, “Get away from there, kid. Dangerous.”

  “I’m all right,” Hallie said. She smoothed her hair with her hand and said, looking with great nonchalance off into the distance, “Bet you sure wish you were having a nice cold soda right now.”

  One of the men, the one with the tight corduroy pants, looked at another and laughed. “Glass of beer,” he said.

  “Or a glass of beer,” Hallie said. “Bet you sure wish you had a nice cold glass of beer right now.”

  “You drink beer, kid?” the man in the tight corduroy pants asked Hallie.