Face on the Wall

by Jane Langton

  The bellboy grinned at Mary and led the way to the elevator. I can find my own way perfectly well, thought Mary, but as the bellboy pushed the button for the sixth floor, she felt for her billfold and extracted a dollar.

  “This way,” he said graciously, leading the way down the hall. “Uh-oh.” Outside the open door of Room 609 stood a cart laden with cleaning equipment and linen. “Could you please remove this stuff and do another room?” he said grandly to the chambermaid, who was reaching into the cart for a set of sheets.

  The chambermaid was a cheerful-looking woman with golden-brown skin and chubby cheeks. “Sure thing,” she said, putting back the sheets.

  “No, wait,” said Mary impulsively. She turned to the bellboy, thrust the dollar at him, and said, “Thank you. That’s fine.”

  He looked surprised, glanced at the dollar, which was apparently inadequate, took it, and vanished with a toss of his cowlick.

  Mary turned gratefully to the chambermaid and stretched out her hand. “Good afternoon. My name’s Mary Kelly. I’m from Boston.”

  The chambermaid beamed at her and shook hands. “Just call me Molly.”

  “Molly—?”

  “Marshall.”

  “Go right ahead with what you’re doing, Mrs. Marshall. I’m not staying in the hotel. I’m here to ask questions about a missing woman named Pearl Small, who stayed in this room a few days ago. I’m on assignment from the police department of Southtown, Massachusetts.”

  “No fooling?” Molly Marshall grinned and pushed the cart into Room 609.

  Mary followed, and looked around appreciatively. Room 609 matched the lobby. There were ridiculous chairs and a bed with a headboard of matched veneer. Through the bathroom door she could see the steel sink, a cone rising from the floor.

  Only one of the twin beds was unmade. Mrs. Marshall began pulling off the disordered sheets.

  Mary watched her, rejoicing in the fact that women everywhere could talk to each other. They had a common language in their daily tasks—the cooking of meals, the cleaning of houses, the changing of beds. And of course a lot of women had their pregnancies to talk about, their labor pains, the births of their children. Mary had not given birth herself, but she had heard innumerable stories. It was their shared experiences of housework and pain that bound women together, even professional women and important executives.

  “I’m so glad to have caught you,” said Mary, beaming at the chambermaid. Carefully, leaving nothing out, she explained her connection with Sergeant Kennebunk and the case of the missing woman named Pearl Small. “She had this room a week ago, a pretty woman with yellow hair. Do you remember her?”

  “Oh, sure, I remember. Usually I don’t see folks, but I saw her because she come in the first day she was here, while I was doing the room. When she see me, she say, Excuse me, and go away again.”

  Mary showed her the picture from the newspaper. “Is this the same woman?”

  The maid chuckled and shook her head. “Sorry, honey, I just don’t know. I only see her for a second or two. She had this long yellow hair hanging down her back, I remember that.”

  Mary asked her childish question: “With all that golden hair, did she look like a princess? You know, a princess in a fairy tale?”

  The chambermaid laughed. “Yellow hair don’t make no princess for black folks.”

  “No, of course not.” Mary glanced around the room. “How many people have used this room since she was here?”

  “Nobody. Empty since she left. This here hotel, don’t tell nobody, it’s half empty most of the time.”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Marshall, could you explain what you do in every room, I mean the whole routine you have to go through? Do you have a list?”

  “Oh, sure, we got a list. I’ll show you.” Mrs. Marshall turned to the big bureau. “First we puts down a clean doily, and we has to make sure the name of the hotel’s in the front, and then we puts out clean glasses with these here paper covers, and we makes sure the lampshades have the seam in the back, and then we got to check all the hotel cards and refill the booklet with writing paper, and look in the closet because sometimes they takes home the pants hangers, they’s got to be six, and we got to leave the thermostat cooling on low, and make sure the TV’s turned straight, and then there’s the beds.”

  “Isn’t this supposed to be a single room? Why does it have two beds?”

  “Oh, it’s a single all right. They’s just twin beds. Double rooms, they got two double beds.”

  Mary watched Mrs. Marshall pull the sheets off the unmade bed and float a clean one over it. “How do you know the other bed’s not been slept in? I mean, just because it’s made up, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t occupied”

  “That’s right. We got to check.” Mrs. Marshall reached over and lifted a corner of the spread on the other bed. “Well, look at that, it ain’t got no tuck. Somebody did sleep in it. See, we got our secret little tuck at the corner, and it ain’t there. I got to change this one too.”

  Mary looked reverently at the chambermaid, who was a fount of wisdom. “Do you think they were pretending that only one person spent the night? So she left her bed unmade, and “put the other one back together just so, only she didn’t know about the tuck?”

  “Well, I dunno.” Mrs. Marshall giggled. “Maybe she just got tired of sleeping in one bed, so she got up and tried the other one. I dunno.”

  Mary watched her gather up the sheets and shove them in the hamper attached to the cart. Then, while the chambermaid’s back was turned, Mary bent down with a sudden gesture and lifted something from the floor. It was a long blond hair.

  Chapter 29

  Rapunzel had beautiful long hair that shone like gold.

  The Brothers Grimm, “Rapunzel”

  Back home from Albany, walking into the small house on Fair Haven Bay, Mary said, “No, no, I’m not tired at all, just hungry.” At once she took a folded tissue out of her bag and showed the strand of yellow hair to Homer.

  She had coiled it in a ring. Homer looked at it, and said at once, “Dirty blond.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” Mary held it to the light. “Well, maybe you’re right. Surely Pearl’s hair was lighter than this. I told you, she was like—”

  “I know, I know, a fairy princess. Okay, then, her husband is lying. Pearl Small is still missing, and that postcard from Albany is a lie.”

  “Homer, there’s something else. There were two people in that hotel room.” Mary told him about the chambermaid’s special tuck at the corner of the sheet. “It’s a professional secret, so she always knows whether a bed’s been slept in or not.”

  “Well, fine, good for her, but the trouble is,” complained Homer, “we’re no further along. If the woman wasn’t Pearl Small, who was she? Do you suppose Small went to the trouble of hiring some woman with yellow hair to take a room in the hotel and send him a postcard?”

  “But what if the other person in the room was Small himself? Maybe he was the mysterious roommate. Maybe he was romantically mixed up with some blonde in Albany.” Mary uncoiled the strand of yellow hair and looked at it again. “Or maybe I’m wrong about the color of. Pearl’s hair. Maybe she was really there in that hotel, running away from her husband with a boyfriend.”

  “That’s what Chief McNutt thinks,” growled Homer. “I refuse to agree with McNutt. So tell me, if she ran away, why did she send her abandoned husband a meaningless postcard?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Homer. What’s for supper?”

  It was a joke. Homer looked blank. Mary laughed and went to the kitchen to wrestle with her pots and pans, thinking about the chambermaid in the Regency Hotel. After a long day’s work changing beds and rearranging doilies and scrubbing bathtubs, Mrs. Marshall too probably had to make supper for a hungry family.

  Next day Mary stopped off at Annie’s on her way to work. “Any more ghastly faces on the wall?”

  Annie unlocked the wheels of her scaffolding and rolled it sideways. “Well, yes, Aunt Mary
, there was another one yesterday.” She pointed to a freshly daubed patch on the empty plaster at the far right end of the wall.

  “Where’s your friend Flimnap?”

  Annie rattled the ladder into place and locked the wheels and began to climb up. “I don’t know. He’s been gone for a day or two. Maybe he’ll never come back.”

  Mary looked shrewdly at her niece. “Would that bother you?”

  Annie thought about it, and told the truth. “Yes, it would.”

  “Not very considerate of him,” murmured Mary, “to go off without telling you.”

  “I suppose not,” muttered Annie. Resolutely she stepped off the ladder onto the first platform, then climbed higher still.

  Mary abandoned the subject of Flimnap and gazed up at the wall. “My dear girl, it’s wonderful.”

  Annie’s tense face cleared. She looked at Mary and smiled. “Do you really think so?”

  Together they looked at the great garden of folktales and children’s stories that was blossoming on Annie’s wall. In the foreground there were lifesize figures of the tellers of the tales. The Homeric bard was crowned with laurel, Beatrix Potter wore an old garden hat. Their stories teemed around them. Annie had finished the first two openings of her five-part arcade, and now she was beginning the third.

  Mary pointed to a pair of pink legs sticking out of the mouth of a big gray wolf. “It’s not Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “Of course it is. It’s the original story by Charles Perrault. The wolf gobbles her up, and that’s the end of her.”

  “Oh, really? You mean the wolf just pats his tummy and belches and that’s the end of the story? I didn’t know that. Well, I never believed in that hunter anyway, slitting open the wolf so neatly and extracting Red Riding Hood and Grandma.” Mary pulled on her coat and said goodbye.

  No sooner was she gone than Annie had another visitor. “Whassat?”

  She turned around carefully on the top shelf of the scaffolding and looked down, startled. There was Eddy Gast, back again, pointing up at the Mole and the Water Rat from Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. “Whassat, Annie? Whassat?”

  “Oh, Eddy, how did you get in? I thought I locked the door. Now, look, Eddy, dear, I’m going to Boston, and you mustn’t come in while I’m gone. I’ll lock everything up. I’ll be back late this afternoon. Then you can come.”

  Eddy held up a sheet of Annie’s best watercolor paper. “I made it for you.”

  “Oh, good, dear. Just leave it on the table and I’ll look at it later.” Annie opened the door for him, then locked it firmly. Five minutes later she left by the front door, locked it carefully behind her, and went to her car.

  Eddy trotted home obediently. His father met him at the door. He had watched Annie disappear down the driveway. “Where’s Annie going?” he asked Eddy.

  “Boston,” said Eddy, proud to know the answer. “Annie’s going to Boston.”

  Chapter 30

  “This man is not my son, I drive him forth, and command you to take him out into the forest and kill him.”

  The Brothers Grimm, “The Three Languages”

  But he couldn’t wait for Annie to come home. Eddy loved Annie’s wall. He had seen her lock the door, but he came back anyway to look through the glass. To his surprise he found the door ajar, and the screen propped open with a stick.

  Gladly he walked in. Was Annie home again from Boston? But no one welcomed him. No one said, Hello, Eddy! and offered him a big piece of paper and a paintbox. Flimnap wasn’t there either, Flimnap who found gumdrops in Eddy’s ears, who could catch a ball in his mouth and carry Eddy high in the air on his funny bike.

  He was alone in Annie’s magical house. There on the table was the new picture he had drawn for Annie, and high on the wall her new animals glowed at him—two funny ones in a boat. He had to come closer. He had to see. He would be so careful! He mustn’t hurt anything that belonged to Annie.

  Carefully Eddy went to the ladder and climbed up to the place where Annie sat to work on her pictures. The ladder was shaky. When he got to his feet on the platform, he had to throw out his short arms for balance, because the scaffolding was rolling sideways. Then it stopped. He looked up. The new animals were higher still.

  Grasping the second ladder, Eddy went up slowly, setting both feet on every rung. He put his knees on the upper board and crawled forward until it was safe to stand up. Then he moved cautiously to the right, with the board shifting beneath his feet, and stopped in front of the little river scene. There before him was a big mouse standing up in a boat and holding a pair of oars, and another funny animal with glasses perched on his long snout. It was the Water Rat and the Mole from The Wind in the Willows, and it was the last wondrous vision of Eddy’s life.

  Charlene saw everything. She heard the thundering racket and Eddy’s cry, she felt the vibration as his body struck the tile floor, she witnessed the final blow. Then there was no sound but weeping, and the rasping voice of a crow in the faraway field, caw-caw, caw-caw. The shutter of Cissie Aufsesser’s camera had made no sound at all as it opened and closed. Nor was there a sudden flash of light, because the brilliant sunshine of midday flooded the room from Annie’s four tall windows.

  Charlene put the camera in her pocket and said, “I’ll tell.”

  Only then did her father turn around, his shoulders shaking with sobs, and see his daughter standing in the doorway.

  “Oh, my Lord Fish,” said the fisherman, calling to him above the rumble of thunder, “my wife is still unhappy.”

  The great fish gazed up at him from the water and said softly, “But she is rich and young and beautiful. Is that not enough?”

  “I am sorry, Lord Fish, but she wants to be Queen of the land.”

  The fish looked at him gravely, and murmured, “Go home. It shall be as she desires.” And then he sank down into the deepest part of the sea.

  Part Two

  Wipe, wipe your eyes, and shake your head,

  And cry, “Alas! Tom Thumb is dead!”

  —“The History of Tom Thumb”

  Chapter 31

  Annie lugged her books from the car to the front door. She had to set them down on the broad stone step in order to unlock the door and push it open. Then she transferred the books to the hall table, hung up her coat, and dodged into the laundry, where she took the wet towels out of the washing machine and shoved them into the dryer.

  It was a routine job, postponing for a moment the discovery that her life had taken a new and disastrous turn. Not until she picked up the books and carried them into the living room did she see what had happened. At once her arms went limp, and the books fell to the floor.

  In the general wreckage of collapsed ladders, fallen boards, and smashed jars of paint she did not at first see Eddy, because his small body was obscured by her big plastic tarp. But when she came closer, cursing, there he was, and she cried, “Eddy, oh, Eddy,” and fell to her knees beside him.

  It was clear that he was dead. His small round head was flattened against the tile floor in an ooze of blood. Annie wrenched herself around and stared at the French door. It was open, it was wide open, swinging a little in the cool spring breeze. But she had locked the door, she had locked it!

  But there it was, wide open, and Bob Gast was running into the room, followed by three men in uniform. When he saw Annie, he shouted at her, “Get away from my son. You killed him, you bitch, you killed him.”

  Annie opened her mouth to protest, but she had no voice.

  “Move out of the way, miss,” said the sergeant in charge, coming closer and looking down at Eddy. “This is your house?”

  “Yes.” Shaking, Annie stood up, stumbling over the fallen ladder. One of the uniformed officers took her arm and drew her out of the way, beyond the big littered table. There was something unfamiliar on the table. It was Eddy’s new picture, the one he had given her that morning, saying, I made it for you.

  Annie picked it up. It was a portrait of herself. Ther
e she was in her denim workshirt with every button glowing like a pearl, and her face—her face—Annie put the picture down and began to cry.

  The sergeant stared at the wrecked scaffolding and ignored her. “He’s laying on top of all this mess. Wheels on the apparatus, must’ve rolled. Look; see, the wheels aren’t locked.” He looked up at the painted wall and spoke to Annie. “This is your work?”

  Annie mopped her sleeve over her face and looked up too. There, high above the place where Eddy’s body lay on the floor, were the new figures she had painted that morning, Rat and Mole in their boat on the river. Eddy had climbed the ladder to see them, trusting the scaffolding to hold him, but it had not.

  The sergeant turned to Bob Gast. “What was the youngster doing here? Why wasn’t he at home?”

  “Ask her,” said Gast angrily. “She taught him to climb that shaky ladder and bounce around on those narrow boards.” His voice mounted in fury. “He was always over here. He could come in anytime. She went away and left the door open. She killed him. It’s her fault. She killed my little son.”

  Annie pulled herself together and spoke up, her voice sounding shrill in her own ears. “But I locked the door before I left. I did, I swear I did. I always lock the door when I go out. I lock both doors.”

  “Then how come it’s open?” Gast was shouting now. He pointed at the door. “You went away and left it open so my innocent little son could come in, and so of course he did, and of course he climbed the ladder, and you hadn’t even locked those goddamn wheels, so the thing rolled right out from under him.” Gast whirled around to the detective sergeant, who was looking at him mournfully. “What do you call it? There’s a legal term for it, ‘attractive nuisance.’ She enticed Eddy over here day after day, and she didn’t do a damn thing to protect him, my poor helpless little boy. She’s no better than a murderer.” He was crying now. He turned back to Annie. “I’ll sue you. I’ll sue you for every cent you’ve got. You murdered my little son.”