The Road Through the Wall

  Finally, next door to the Merriam home, defiantly on Cortez Road, was the house inhabited by the Martins, a stolid family who lived where they had to and held on to what they had; the house belonged to old Mr. Martin and his wife, grandparents to George and Hallie Martin, fourteen and nine years old, children whom Mrs. Merriam found regrettable; she would have preferred to keep her own fourteen-year-old, Harriet, far away from the Martin children, but this was almost impossible, since both Harriet and the Martins played communally with the other children in the neighborhood. Moreover—and this was one of Mrs. Merriam’s objections—the house next door was also the dwelling of young Mrs. Martin, mother to George and Hallie, who worked as a waitress somewhere downtown. The house itself was yellow, and ended with two apple trees by the back door; it was a step downward from the Merriam house, and certainly not fit to go around the corner on to Pepper Street.

  Because Cabrillo was perhaps thirty miles from San Francisco and was, in 1936, halfway between a suburban development and a collection of large private estates, and because Pepper Street was, in turn, on the borderline between these two, it possessed an enviable privacy; beyond the Martin house, and running along behind all the houses on the south side of Pepper Street, was a heavily wooded section, probably unexplored except by the Pepper Street children, which included a dried-up creek and ended far south in a golf course. Backing on the houses of the northern side of Pepper Street—that is, the Desmonds’ to the Perlmans’—was a row of apartment houses which in turn faced a main highway. Pepper Street was rarely troubled with invasions from this quarter, probably because the apartment houses and the people who lived in them and the cars traveling the highway were all intent in another direction, toward the center of town, with little concern about what went on in back of them. One of the apartment houses had stolen around the corner near the Desmond house to have an address on Cortez Road; it had even gone so far as to stretch a numbered awning out across the sidewalk, but people rarely went in or out that way, preferring the larger, double-awninged entrance on the highway. This apartment house, the Merriam house, and the Martin house were the only three places in the world to have addresses on Cortez Road. On the side of Cortez Road opposite these three was the wall.

  The wall was the limit of a large estate which had originally encompassed all the property around Pepper Street, and which had been sold off lot by lot. At present the wall ran down one side of Cortez, along the highway for a block, and then up the corresponding street on the other side; it was a thin high brick wall, taller than Mr. Donald, who was the tallest man on Pepper Street, and never scaled within the history of the neighborhood. 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.”

  In any case, at two-thirty in the afternoon, Pepper Street was very quiet and pleasant, with the California sunlight of early summer almost green coming through the trees, almost painful straight from the sky. 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. Mr. Ransom-Jones and Mr. Merriam and Mr. Desmond had all breakfasted in their homes by early morning sunlight before driving together to San Francisco, as they did every morning. Old Mr. Martin, who left before dawn for his greenhouses, regarded the warm weather as encouraging for the roots of growing things. Miss Fielding’s cat liked the weather, and so did little Caroline Desmond.

  It was the last day of school; fortunately the weather was to continue warm and fair until the end of summer, when school began again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mrs. Merriam came to her back window, which saw Miss Fielding’s house and Pepper Street beyond, and looked anxiously down Pepper Street. Mrs. Merriam’s clock had stopped; it was easier to look out the back window than go upstairs to the bedroom clock. Mrs. Merriam’s kitchen had a built-in electric clock (and a built-in dishwasher and a built-in refrigerator) but the electric clock had broken long ago, and when the refrigerator broke and the electrician came to fix it Mrs. Merriam could have him fix the clock. So that when the living-room clock stopped Mrs. Merriam was without the time downstairs.

  At quarter-past three Mrs. Merriam had gone back to her sewing, but she heard the children coming up Pepper Street. They came from Winslow Road, from the school, and they came past the vacant lots first and then down past the Ransom-Joneses on one side and the Perlmans on the other (Marilyn Perlman, however, was always home last, because she left the school a few minutes after everyone else, and walked home alone), and then they passed the Robertses and the Byrnes on one side and the Donalds on the other, and the Roberts boys dropped off, and Pat Byrne, and Tod Donald went home while Virginia Donald and Mary Byrne came along the street slowly with the girls, Harriet Merriam and Helen Williams, and the girls stood on the corner of Pepper and Cortez and talked while the boys went home to leave their jackets and receive from their mothers an apple or a piece of cake, or, in the case of Pat Byrne, a glass of milk and two graham crackers. Miss Fielding heard the children coming when they reached the Donalds’ house; she went inside with the cat, and lay down on the living-room couch. Mrs. Merriam, who was anxious, heard the children when they passed the house-for-rent, and from her back window saw Harriet coming down the street, carrying her books, along with the other girls, while the two Martin children, always the least enthusiastic and with the farthest to go, hesitated constantly—George outside the Desmond house till Johnny Desmond put his head out of the kitchen window and said, “Go on home, Martin,” and Hallie, who was only nine, around the group of girls on the corner, trying artfully to get a word into the conversation, until the group broke up and Hallie came tagging up Cortez Road with Harriet.

  Mrs. Merriam prevented herself from going to the door to meet Harriet; she sat in the long light living-room with the basket of sewing on the floor beside her, unaware that with her tall thin body silhouetted against the big window, and her narrow severe head bent slightly to the sewing, she looked bleak and menacing after the cheerful sunlight outside. She heard Harriet say, “’Bye, Hallie,” and come noisily up the front steps and open the door with a crash. Mrs. Merriam kept her eyes down on her sewing; Harriet would know she was offended. She heard Harriet’s steps in the hall, and then the hesitation that would be Harriet in the living-room doorway, recognizing that he
r mother was offended.

  “I’m home, Mother,” Harriet said. “No more school till September.” It was her nervous voice, trailing off at the end of the sentence with a little giggle. Harriet was a big girl, large-boned and stout, and Mrs. Merriam braided Harriet’s hair every morning and dressed her in bright colors. For the last year or so, from twelve to almost fourteen, Harriet had begun to speak awkwardly when she was uneasy, missing her words sometimes, and stammering. Mrs. Merriam thought of it as Harriet’s nervous voice, and it made her own voice even more precise.

  “I see you’re home,” Mrs. Merriam said. “That is, I heard you.”

  Harriet looked down at her large feet, in heavy-soled oxfords. “I’m sorry I slammed the door,” she said.

  “Of course you are,” Mrs. Merriam said. She leaned over and selected a spool of thread from the sewing-box beside her on the floor. “You always are, afterward.”

  Harriet waited for a minute, politely, and then said, “Can I go on down to Helen’s? They’re waiting for me. I just wanted to tell you I was home.”

  “You can go to Helen’s,” Mrs. Merriam said. She heard Harriet’s gusty sigh of relief, and added daintily, “but you may not.”

  “Why?”

  Mrs. Merriam tightened her mouth over her sewing. “I think you know what you’ve done, Harriet.”

  “Mother,” Harriet began, only what she finally said was, “M-m-m-mother,” and she stopped helplessly.

  “Please, Harriet,” Mrs. Merriam said. “There’s nothing to talk about. Go to your room.”

  “But—” Harriet began. Then she said, “Oh, Lord,” and started heavily up the stairs.

  “You might spend the time writing letters,” her mother said, raising her voice slightly.

  The word “letters” carried Harriet hastily up the stairs and into her room; if there had been a lock on the door she might have been able to lock herself in, but she slammed the door violently, and then walked miserably over to her desk, although she knew, had seen from the doorway, that it was open. The slant-top, which should have been securely locked, was dropped down to make the table surface, and Harriet’s small papers and notebooks lay as she kept them, mercilessly neat, put back in the pigeonholes, perhaps even put back more carefully than Harriet, who loved them, ever did. Harriet went to the bed and looked under the pillow; the key was there, where it belonged. 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.

  From where she sat on the bed she could see out of the window which looked down on the corner of Pepper and Cortez; Hallie Martin, eating what seemed to be a doughnut, was rounding the corner, apparently bound for Helen’s. For a minute Harriet thought of calling to Hallie (“All is discovered”? “Burn the evidence”?), and then she said, “What shall I do?” again and got up and went over to the desk.

  She put her hand lovingly on top of it; it had been a present from her father, who probably supposed that her mother had a key to it, from long knowledge of her mother. Harriet sat down in the desk chair and picked up the letter she had begun last night; her mother had set it open in the center of the desk, the only thing left out of place. It was a letter to George Martin, and it was written on shiny pink paper, and it began, “Dearest George.” Helen set the style; it was the way love letters were written, she said, and sometimes Helen’s letters to Johnny Desmond began, “Dearest dearest Johnny.” Harriet had chosen George to write to because he was dull and unpopular and she felt vaguely that she had no right to aim any higher than the one boy no one else would have; if she understood this feeling at all, she thought of it as “George always liked me best.”

  Virginia Donald was writing to Art Roberts, and Mary Byrne was, cautiously, writing to her own brother. Hallie Martin carried the letters around, and Helen had written one for her to James Donald, who was seventeen and in third year high and the neighborhood hero. Hallie gave her letter to James Donald one evening when he came home at dinner time from football practice at the high school, and he read it while Hallie lurked excitedly on Helen’s front porch; and when James tore the letter up and dropped it in the gutter Hallie sneaked down and got the pieces and took them home. “They always do that,” Helen said wisely. “Men who don’t care, they’re callous.”

  Harriet looked down at the “Dearest George” on the pink paper, and read on, in her own writing, “Let’s run away and get married. I love you and I want to—” The letter ended there, because Harriet had not been able to think of what she wanted to do with George; Helen’s letters ended, “kiss you a thousand times,” but Harriet could not bring herself to write such a thing, at least partly because the thought of kissing George Martin’s dull face horrified her. She felt, although she had not confessed it to Helen, that she could possibly bear to kiss James Donald’s face, but then Hallie had already written to him. Harriet tore the letter up slowly and threw it into the wastebasket. It was written, it had been read, she had no doubt that her mother would remember the words, and it was unpleasant to look at.

  It was when she reached out for the other papers in the desk that she began to cry. She took down a notebook with “Poems” written on the front of it in pink and blue letters, and turned the pages slowly, reading and trying to pretend that she was her mother reading. The notebook labeled “Moods” she put aside unopened; it was dedicated “To my unknown hero,” and perhaps if she did not read it now, her mother would not have read it earlier. There were more notebooks, one called “Me,” which was the start of an autobiography; one named “Daydreams.”

  • • •

  “Pat,” Mrs. Byrne said softly, “you’re not drinking your milk.”

  “I’ve got to hurry, Mother,” Pat said. He put the books down on the table and picked up the milk to drink it standing.

  Mrs. Byrne reached out one of her hands, chapped and red from much housework, and took the glass away from him. “That’s not the way my boy does,” she said. “Sit down, son.”

  Mary Byrne looked up from her crackers and milk. “For heaven’s sake sit down or get out,” she said. She was small and anemic and she had sinus trouble and she sniffled when she talked. Mr. and Mrs. Byrne both loved her dearly, but Pat was tall for his age and dark and almost handsome; both Pat and Mary were top of their classes in school, but Mary wore glasses and her hair straggled on her neck. “Golly,” Mary said, “other people are in as much of a hurry as you are.”

  “I’m going to the library,” Pat said. “Artie and me.”

  “You can drink your milk first,” Mrs. Byrne said. “Mary, finish before you go out.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Mary asked. She moved her chair to see what Mrs. Byrne was doing at the sink. Her brother poked her arm, and she turned.

  Pat gestured with his head at his mother, her back toward them, and took the folded papers out of one of his books. “Yours,” he mouthed at her.

  Mary’s letters were written on blue paper; she recognized them and picked them up, thinking from her brother’s clandestine attitude that she might risk a knowing grin, but his eyes were looking away and his mouth was turned in disgust. Mary Byrne added another brick to her hatred for her brother and said, “Thanks.” She put the letters in to the pocket of her dress and said, “’Bye, Mom,” as she left the kitchen. Pat watched her go out the door into the front hall and then he said quietly, “Mother?”

  “Pat darling,” said his mother without turning around.

  “Listen,” Pat said quickly, “I don’t want to be a tattletale, but you better stop Mary from writing letters to boys.”

  His mother turned, paring knife in her hand, and regarded him. “And what kind of letters is Mary writing to boys???
?

  Pat looked down at the table, at his hands moving nervously. “Letters,” he said, and wriggled. “You know.”

  “And how do you know?” his mother said.

  Pat’s face was red, and his voice went more and more quickly. “All the girls are doing it. It’s that Helen Williams. I just happened to see the letters.”

  “And what boys?”

  Pat stood up and picked up his books, but he said, “That’s the trouble. I don’t know what other boys.”

  “I’ll speak to Mary,” his mother said. “But you mind your own business after this.”

  “But it’s dirty,” Pat said.

  “I’m not worried,” his mother said. “I want you to be a gentleman. A real gentleman. Don’t go out without your jacket.”

  Pat hesitated and then said, “I didn’t mean to tell on her.”

  “That’s my fine fellow.” His mother put down the knife and came over to kiss him. “Now don’t get all interested in the library and forget to come home for dinner.”

  Mrs. Byrne had her potatoes pared and set on top of the stove, and the string beans cut and ready to start, when the phone rang. Drying her hands on her apron, Mrs. Byrne went into the hall and picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” she said, and the telephone said steadily, “Hello, this is Josephine Merriam. Harriet’s mother.”