The Road Through the Wall (18 page)

•   •   •

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 or 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.

Mrs. Donald, who was gracious and youthful at almost forty, and regarded herself as something more than a housewife, chose, like her daughter, to save her ingratiating side for worthy adherents; at home she was vague and discontented, although she never forgot to dress prettily for her family and herself and to put on fresh lipstick before sitting down at table. She looked irresistibly like Virginia; a little older, her hair short and curly instead of long and straight, her whole naïve childishness a deliberate denial of the years of experience she had had and Virginia was still entitled to; they might, under some circumstances, be taken for sisters.

James and Virginia, with their mother, did most of the talking at dinner; Mr. Donald dined doggedly, as though compelled to sit down with his jailors but not to be courteous to them; Tod moved softly and constantly, eating quickly, trying not to be noticed. Virginia and James spoke boldly in their own house, soothingly to their mother, and James, who was in unceasing training, permitted himself a delicacy of appetite lovingly administered to by his mother and sister.

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.

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.