Face on the Wall

by Jane Langton

  To hogs transforms ’em, and the Sty receives.

  No more was seen the human form divine,

  Head, face and members bristle into swine …

  Homer, The Odyssey

  Chapter 10

  She reached a slimy place where large fat sea-snails were crawling about; and … a house built of the bones of human beings.…

  Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Mermaid”

  Only one of the supermarket scandal sheets was published in Boston, The Candid Courier. On the cover in enormous black type were the words SHARON SHUCKS SHEIK. The typeface on the inside pages was the same as that on the scrap of newsprint Mary had found on Annie’s table, the fragment about Pearl Small, who had disappeared.

  Mary flipped the pages and found a tiny masthead on the back of page one, which confessed to an office on Washington Street.

  That was easy. If she left within the hour she could park at Alewife, take the T to Park Street, walk a block or two, talk to the crummy people, and be back home by lunchtime.

  Washington was a street in transition. The department stores had moved out of town to the suburban malls, to be replaced by high-rise office buildings, little boutiques, and junky souvenir shops. Farther along the street, to the south, the old red-light district had insinuated itself back again after being cleaned up yet one more time.

  The office of the Courier was halfway between north and south, on the second floor, above a joke-goods store, in an old brick building. Mary paused on the sidewalk to look in the window at hilarious items like plastic dog turds and artificial vomit, and rubber masks of skulls and the living dead. One was especially villainous, a ghastly monster with its left eye hanging down its cheek.

  Upstairs the sign on the door was discreet and businesslike, as though the Courier were a respectable suburban weekly, reporting on church suppers and high-school sporting events. Mary was not fooled. Inside she would find a receptionist who looked like a whore and a bunch of sleazy thugs with three-day growths of beard.

  To her surprise there was only one occupant of the small room, a pink wholesome-looking young man in a trench coat that was a miracle of grommets, buckles, straps and flaps, leaning back in an old-fashioned office armchair. There were no girlie calendars on the wall, only a map of the world studded with pins in bright colors.

  “Good morning,” said the young man, springing to his feet, looking at her eagerly. “Can I help you in any way?”

  Mary held up her copy of the Courier. “There was a piece in your paper recently about a woman who disappeared, Pearl Small. She was a friend of mine. I’m trying to find out more about it.”

  The young man sank back into his chair. “Oh, God, I thought you were from the Globe. I’m expecting a response from The Boston Globe.” He gestured with a languid thumb at a file cabinet beside the window. “I don’t know any Pearl Small. Big stars, that’s all we keep on file.”

  “Well, have you got a collection of back issues? If I could go through them, I’ll bet I could find it.”

  He gestured at a heap on the corner of his desk, and picked up the phone.

  “Thanks.” Mary began leafing through the pile, while the editor of The Candid Courier dialed a number and began talking quickly. His voice was soft, but she couldn’t help overhearing. “Personnel Department? Oh, good morning. My name’s Jackson, George Jackson. I think you’ve recently received an application from me? I’m an experienced investigative reporter, but I’d like to add to my application that I’d be willing to accept a position as stringer in London or Paris, or, say, Barcelona. Of course I’m very busy, but I could take time off for an interview, if you—”

  There was a pause. Mary could hear a polite voice fending him off.

  “Well, I must say.” For a moment the eager young man seemed incapable of saying anything. Then he spoke up in a tone of grave indignation. “Well, then, I guess your loss is somebody else’s gain. I’ll have to try The New York Times.” Clashing down the phone, he stared angrily at Mary. “You’ve got to know somebody. Today it’s all buddy-buddy, you know what I mean?”

  “Right,” murmured Mary, flipping through the stack of recent issues of the scandal sheet, skimming the headlines—

  FELICIA FIGHTS FLAB

  WORLD’S HAPPIEST COUPLE?

  GUESS AGAIN!

  SIZZLING FLING ENDS IN RAPE CHARGE

  MURDER VICTIM?

  WHERE IS BATTERED WIFE?

  Mary slapped the page. “Here it is. Thank you. I’ll just make a few notes.”

  The editor-in-chief, who was also the entire staff of The Candid Courier, was not interested in Mary’s discovery. He jumped up and began moving the colored pins around on his map of the world. The pin for Bosnia went to the Gobi Desert, the one for South Africa to Tierra del Fuego, the pin for Jerusalem to Kamchatka. Jab, jab, jab.

  Mary read the part of the article that had been missing from the scrap on Annie’s table.

  … It is rumored that

  real estate is involved, a large parcel

  of land upon which Frederick Small

  intends to build a gold-plated housing

  development of million-dollar homes.

  The deal awaits the signature of the

  missing Mrs. Small.

  “Mr. Jackson,” said Mary, “where did you get this story?”

  “What?” He turned away from the map and looked vaguely at the folded page Mary held under his nose. “God, I don’t know. Somebody phoned it in. I’ve got these people out there”—he waved his arm at Washington Street, and, out of sight beyond the girlie theater across the way, the rest of the world, beginning with Boston Common and the Charles River—“they send in stuff.”

  “I see. Well, thank you.” Mary went out and closed the door gently, feeling sorry for George Jackson. The poor kid had aspirations for higher things. He wanted to interview heads of state. He wanted to race down a bomb-cratered road in an armored Jeep. Instead, he was here in Boston, on Washington Street above a joke-goods store, mired in shameless voyeurism and subpornograpbic trash, neck-deep in shucked sheiks and sizzling flings. Poor wretch.

  Mary glanced in the window of the joke-goods store on her way out. The gruesome drooping eye of the monster ogled her. Its ghastliness was exactly what she had expected to find upstairs in the office of the Courier. And perhaps she really had. Perhaps that pink-cheeked would-be foreign correspondent was actually a monster in the flesh.

  She turned away, shuddering. It was beginning to rain. On the way home the heavens opened. Lightning flashed. Mary had to pull the car to the side of the road, because the windshield wipers couldn’t handle the water sheeting down the glass.

  Chapter 11

  Brave soldier, here is danger!

  Brave soldier, here is death!

  Hans Christian Andersen,

  “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”

  “I’m afraid,” said Eddy. His hair was drenched. Rivulets of water poured down his cheeks. He struggled after his father up the difficult ascent behind the house. It was a long walk in the downpour to the top of Pine Hill.

  “It’s just a little rain.” Bob Gast had to shout to be heard above the thunder, which rumbled and crashed like lumber falling downstairs. The lightning was simultaneous. “We’ve come out to watch. I really want you to see this, Eddy.” There was a sharp splintering noise behind them, and Bob Gast jumped. Turning, he saw a split tree fall slowly, crashing through other trees, snapping the trunk of a big white pine.

  Eddy cowered against his father. He had to be dragged up the steep side of the underground reservoir at the top of the hill.

  “Here we are. Now we can see everything, Eddy. See? We can see everything from up here.” Gast gripped his son’s hand and braced himself on the battered grass, while the trees below them lashed to and fro, their branches snapping and crashing heavily to the forest floor.

  He did not look down at his terrified son. Clearing his throat, he shouted the words he had been rehearsing in his h
ead. “Okay, Eddy, now I want you to go over there and bring me my knife. I lost it right over there. See it over there, lying on the ground? Just go over there and get it for me, okay, Eddy? Just go get it and bring it here.”

  Eddy gaped up at his father. Gast had to give him a little shove. “Now, Eddy, you’ve got to be brave. Go ahead.”

  Eddy started forward toward the clearing at the crest of the hill. Around it the lightning struck down in a ring, once, twice, thrice. Soon it was a perpetual circle of white fire. Running on his short legs, Eddy stopped in the center and gazed around, turning to see it all, his small figure dwarfed by the broad landscape and the surrounding forest of storm-tossed trees. Thunder fell out of the sky and lightning danced in a ring of searing white light. Eddy was enchanted. He was no longer afraid. He could see that the thunder and lightning meant him no harm.

  “Eddy,” shouted his father. He was crying. “Eddy, come back.”

  The lightning dimmed and moved away. The thunder grumbled softly. The rain diminished and stopped. Slowly Eddy trotted back out of the ring of fire, his mind alight. Water streamed from his wet hair, it poured down his cheeks and ran into his open mouth. It tasted of tears and the pure water of heaven.

  Next day Eddy knocked on the south door of Annie’s house. Flimnap, who had been staining Annie’s cabinets, let him in. He greeted Eddy cheerfully and helped him take off his jacket.

  Annie turned away from painting Scheherazade on the first division of her wall and greeted him warmly. “Well, hello there, Eddy.”

  Eddy said nothing. He stared up at the wall, gazing at the big figure of Aesop and the little ship on the horizon, and in the foreground the hare and the tortoise. He was suddenly excited. “Whassat?” he said, pointing at the wall.

  Annie explained. She told him about the race between the hare and the tortoise, and about the ship full of men who were trying to get home after winning a war. It was not enough. He wanted to know about the boy with the sword. “Whassat? Whassat?”

  Annie was pleased. Here at last was someone who appreciated her wall. She sat down beside Eddy on the sofa and told him about the sword that was stuck in a rock until the future king of England came along and pulled it out. He wanted more. She showed him her own picture book of Jack and the Beanstalk, and he was charmed. “Whassat?” he said, putting his finger on the speaking harp. “Whassat?” He stared wide-eyed at the giant, towering over jack, and Annie growled, “Fee, fi, fo, fum!”

  “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” echoed Flimnap, grinning at Eddy.

  “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” shouted Eddy.

  Flimnap was finished with Annie’s cabinets, and he went away. But Annie went on and on. She couldn’t stop. There was so much to tell Eddy, so much to show him—all of Hans Christian Andersen and Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter and Babar and Dr. Seuss. The boy was hungry for stories. But then Annie looked at her watch and called a halt. No more today. She had to get back to work.

  She tried a diversion. “Here, Eddy, why don’t you draw too?” She made a place for him at her table with sheets of drawing paper and a collection of colored pens. “Look, aren’t they pretty? Red and blue, and, see here, silver and gold.”

  At once he grasped the pens and, without hesitation, began to draw. Annie watched him bend his small bullet head over the paper and pick up the silver pen. He seemed content.

  For the next two hours she sketched the story of Scheherazade, and forgot about Eddy. When she finally came down the ladder, stiff and sore, he was still working on the same piece of paper.

  She looked at it in surprise. “Why, Eddy, that’s really good. Where did you learn to draw like that?” It was a portrait of yesterday’s storm, with silvery spears of rain and golden shafts of lightning.

  “For you,” said Eddy, thrusting it at her.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Annie, really meaning it. After Eddy went home she tacked it up on the kitchen wall, where it shimmered and glowed.

  When Flimnap came in, he admired it too. “My God,” he said, “did you do that?”

  “I wish I had. It’s Eddy’s. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  After that Eddy came every day. No one came with him. No one came to get him. There was no sign of his parents, or of his sister Charlene.

  “Whassat?” he wanted to know. “Whassat, Annie, whassat?” One day he was the first to notice a blotch on the far right end of the wall. “Hey,” he said, “lookit, whassat?”

  Annie looked. On the blank white plaster beneath the fifth arched opening of her painted gallery there was another orange stain, with two greenish blobs like cartoon eyes, surrounded by a smear of sulphur yellow.

  “It’s a stain,” said Annie doubtfully. “It’s just a stain.” But she was alarmed. Would her whole wall be spoiled by damp and mildew? Where was Flimnap? Once again he would know what to do.

  By this time Flimnap was a fixture at Annie’s house. He slept in the gypsy caravan mounted on the back of his truck, and he took his meals there too, using whatever cooking apparatus was connected to the stovepipe that stuck out of the roof.

  Annie was grateful for his readiness to turn his hand to anything. Do this, she said, do that, and he did it. What if she were to say, Kiss me, Flimnap! Would he obey like a good servant? Sometimes Annie imagined it, but she wasn’t about to try. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help noticing the nimble grace of Flimnap’s lanky body and the deftness of his narrow hands. What, she wondered, did he think of Annie Swann? Most of the time he was respectful and amusing, but a little remote. Perhaps he liked pretty cuties who sat with their legs crossed coyly, not big busty women who laughed loudly and sat with their legs wide apart and their feet planted firmly on the floor.

  So it was probably just kindness, the way he took such care of her safety. Her ladder, he said, was shaky. He would make a scaffolding with a platform on top and wheels underneath, so she could roll the whole thing easily from left to right.

  “But won’t it be unsteady?” said Annie. “Won’t it roll out from under me?”

  “No, no. There’ll be locks on the wheels.” On the next sunny morning, he set up a rented table saw and drill press on the lawn, along with a pile of four-by-fours from the lumberyard and a set of wheels. The saw screamed, the drill press buzzed and whined. Then Flimnap took the pieces indoors and bolted them together, attaching the wheels and fastening the ladder to a rail so she could move it from side to side.

  “Show me how the brakes work,” said Annie.

  “You just flip down these tabs,” he said. “See? It won’t budge. And then, when you want to move it, you flip them up again.”

  Annie flipped the wheel tabs up and trundled the scaffolding sideways. “That’s great,” she said, beaming at him. “It rolls like anything.”

  From then on her work was much more comfortable. Sitting on the edge of the platform, she was at just the right height to work on the middle level of the wall. For the top there was a clever second platform near the ceiling, twelve feet above the floor.

  Now, when she showed Flimnap the second appearance of an ugly blotch on her wall, he was not dismayed. “I’ll use sealer this time,” he said. And within the hour the stain was gone.

  Chapter 12

  “So, Homer, you’ve got to talk to the police in Southtown. That’s where Pearl lived. Find out if her husband’s still there. His name’s Small, Frederick Small. See if there are any charges against him. You know, like wife-battering. Find out who called The Candid Courier with information about Pearl.”

  “Oh, no,” groaned Homer, “you’re not back on that princess stuff again?” He made a pathetic face and waved a hand at the top of his desk. “Look at this!” A tippy pile of bluebooks landed on the floor with a slam.

  “Oh, Homer, it’s all right. I’m just saying do it when you have time. Just whenever you have time.”

  “Time! Why don’t you talk to the police department in Southtown? Go over there yourself and have a cozy chat.” Homer rolled his eyes at the ceiling and whirled around in his c
hair, knocking the rest of the bluebooks to the floor.

  “Me? Oh, Homer, I can’t do anything this week, nothing at all. And right now I’ve got to get over there to Weston Country Day and teach some kind of history to all those little girls in the fifth grade. What an idiot I was to agree to be a so-called Historian in Residence! How could I have been such a fool?”

  Homer looked at her balefully. “Because you’re sweet on Judge Aufsesser.”

  “Oh, Homer, don’t be ridiculous.”

  When Mary walked into the private girls’ school called Weston Country Day, she was greeted by the nervous headmistress, who shot up from her desk, clasped her hand, and propelled her down the hall to the fifth grade that was to be her headquarters.

  “Mrs. Rutledge’s class is so talented,” said the headmistress. “Charlene Gast is a champion swimmer, and Judge Aufsesser’s daughter is in the class, and many of the others have very influential parents. Of course they are all a little high-strung, naturally, like thoroughbred racehorses. Perhaps you could be a steadying influenced?”

  “I’ll do my best. Did you say Charlene Gast?”

  “Yes, do you know her? Such a brilliant child!”

  “No, I don’t really know her. My niece does.”

  “Right this way. We’re all so pleased you’ll be teaching about the Greeks. It fits right in with our theme for the year.”

  “The Greeks! Oh, well, all right. The Greeks it is.”

  They walked into Mrs. Rutledge’s homeroom without knocking, and Mary was at once confronted by eighteen pairs of eyes. Eighteen sets of parents were paying twelve thousand dollars a year so that their ten-year-old daughters could be exposed to teachers like Mrs. Rutledge and protected from the imperfections of the public school system.

  Mary grinned cheerfully as she was introduced, and most of the little girls smiled back. Which one was Judge Aufsesser’s daughter? They looked like good kids.