The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

The
Writing
on the
Wall

Souvenirs
(1981)

Vermont River
(1984)

The Man Who Loved Levittown
(1985)

Hyannis Boat and Other Stories
(1989)

Chekhov’s Sister
(1990)

Upland Stream
(1991)

The Wisest Man in America
(1995)

The Smithsonian Guide to Northern New England
(1995)

Wherever That Great Heart May Be
(1996)

North of Now
(1998)

One River More
(1998)

Small Mountains
(2000)

Morning
(2001)

This American River
(2002)

A Century of November
(2004)

Soccer Dad
(2008)

Yellowstone Autumn
(2009)

Hills Like White Hills
(2009)

On Admiration
(2010)

The
Writing
on the
Wall

a novel

W. D. WETHERELL

ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK

Copyright © 2012 by W. D. Wetherell

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-744-5

Printed in the United States of America

For Vasily Grossman

1905-1964

O
ne

HAUNTED
 house, haunted woman, haunted country, haunted hills.

The match was perfect enough to make Vera smile for the first time that summer, the first time all year. In the dark, stooping, she reached for the key her sister had left under the lilac closest to the porch. The moon found it before her hand did, a nickel with a silvery nose. The house groaned when she applied it to the lock, but halfheartedly, as if it were tired of scaring, having done it for so many years. A creaking floorboard under her shoe, a film of cobweb against her cheek, the garlic smell of wood rot, and then she was in, there was nothing the house could do but accept her, saving its scarier tricks for later.

Jeannie had told her where the switch was for electricity, but she had neglected to write it down, and she was too exhausted to search. Exhausted from decisions, not big ones, nothing major, but the dozens of minor ones needed to get herself onto the plane in Denver, fly across the continent, drive north three hours from Boston and find her way here. She could sleep now—for the first time in months her heart sent permission to her head. She groped her way down the entrance hall, found moonlight again, used it to climb steep stairs to the bedrooms. The largest had a mattress on the floor, a light cotton blanket, and, centered on the pillow, Jeannie’s welcoming little joke, a Snickers bar, the kind they always begged for as kids.

It was Jeannie’s vacation house—their “shack” they were calling it, Tom’s fixer-upper, a place they could go to when the pressures of the city got too great. Built in 1919, it had stood empty for the past sixteen years, taxes had gone unpaid, and the town was more than happy to sell it to them cheap. It was a forgotten kind of place, with no ski areas nearby to jack up prices, no pretty lakes, just a shallow stream running toward Canada which gave Tom visions of learning how to fish. Our “retreat” was the other term they used, without saying what they were retreating from, though Vera knew that the news of the world hit them hard. Terrorists wouldn’t find them there, even if they took New York— and in the meantime, Tom could do his fishing, Jeannie could have a garden, and anyone who needed solace more than luxury was welcome to borrow it anytime they wanted.

“You can have it for two weeks,” Jeannie told her when she called in June. “Three weeks. Right into August if that’s what you need. We won’t be able to get up there until after Paris and maybe not even then.”

“I’d like to stay thirty days,” Vera said. The precision was deliberate.

“There’s no furniture yet. The yard is a jungle, I haven’t touched the garden, and the vines look like they’re gobbling the house. But it’s interesting enough inside. Whoever built it must have had lots of birds-eye maple, because the floorboards, when we peeled the linoleum off, turned out to be gorgeous. Will Dan be coming?”

“No. Just me.”

“He must be busy with his contracting again, good for him.”

That was always Jeannie’s way, to supply the white lie herself.

“I can’t emphasize that enough,” she said, when the silence went on a little too long. “How much work it all needs. The worst is the walls. They’re plaster, original probably, but the wallpaper is straight from hell. The front rooms have something that resembles knotty pine, and whoever lived there in the Sixties put up something in the hall that looks like what wedding presents come wrapped in, this hideous white velvet with blood-colored veins. Stripping it off is going to be a major ordeal.”

“Let me help.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Let me do it.”

It surprised her, the quick and powerful way the asking surged through her throat.

“Strip the wallpaper?”

“I’m terrible with tools, but I’m sure I can do it.”

“It would take months.”

“I’ll work hard.”

“Uh, Vera? It isn’t easy.”

“I know what you’re thinking, that Dan is the carpenter and I’m just a teacher. But I’m not so klutzy I can’t strip wallpaper.”

“We’ve already talked to someone in town, an old French Canadian who does anything.”

Surprising, how much she needed Jeannie’s yes—enough so she brought out her most powerful argument, the one there was no refusing.

“It will do me good. To have something like that to focus on. It’s what I need right now. I’ll do a good job for you, I promise.”

Jeannie was six years younger—she’d never had to beg her before. Quickly, almost too quickly, she reversed course and said yes. Why of course she could help, that would be wonderful. They could leave scrapers for her and putty knives and stripping solution and a stepladder and a big garbage can to put scraps in and rubber gloves and bandages in case she nicked herself and plenty of food and wine, and it would all be ready for her when she arrived, she could go right to work.

“You won’t have to worry about a thing while you’re there.

Really—not a thing. It’s grunt work though, really messy. How strong are your wrists?”

“Once I finish I can hang the new wallpaper. Have you picked any out?”

“After stripping? That’s double the work.”

“Downstairs then. You can hire your Frenchman to do upstairs.”

“There’s a website with old Victorian wallpaper and we found a soft peach color that complements the floor. Tom’s doing the math on how much we need. But we’ll order it and have it waiting with everything else.”

“Thank you, Jeannie. Jeannie? Really, thank you.”

“You know how much aggravation you’ll be saving us? I’ll send you directions. Basically, you drive north on the interstate, then fall off the map. Don’t argue with me, but we insist on paying for your flight ... That merger I told you about? It’s back on again, so I have to be going.”

She said goodbye abruptly, without asking about Cassie, and the absence of that kept Vera holding the phone for a long minute after she hung up. “She’s well, thanks,” she said to the mouthpiece. As well as can be expected. If she can stand thirty days then so can I.

Maybe that’s what the chocolate on the pillow was for—an apology, a gesture of support. Certainly Jeannie had kept her promise about supplies. In the darkness, boxes and cartons made a maze she had to thread her way through before going upstairs. She glanced at the walls on the way up, traced her hand along the paper, but it was too dark to really see. Beside the candy was a penlight she used to find the bathroom; after undressing, she fell against the mattress as if she’d been pushed. Two layers of exhaustion worked on her, and the upper one, the one that came from the flight and long drive, was wonderfully smothering, the way it kept the bottom layer from having its way. She fell asleep quickly, dreamed of silly things, then, well before dawn, woke up to moonlight touching her face.

It burned, that was the odd thing, white as it was. She lay there until it touched her throat, then, restless, wrapped the cotton blanket around her shoulders and ventured carefully out into the hall. The walls weren’t square and reliable, but slanted at unexpected angles, like baffles, keeping her from walking straight more than a few steps at a time. One turn brought her to a door with frosted glass in the upper panels. A closet, she decided, but when she opened it she came to a pool of moonlight so dense and liquid she stepped back in alarm.

There she found a little balcony, a platform big enough for a single chair, set above the porch just below. Someone must have built it to have a quiet spot where they could be alone over the hubbub of visitors, and this pleased her, to have discovered one of the house’s secrets so quickly. The railing was wobbly and rotted, but it gave her enough confidence to take the three steps needed to peer down.

The ground mist rose into the moonlight, and toward the top were milky tongues that licked in toward the house. Back home the mist hardly ever rose above the sage, but here it seemed brewed from an enormous kettle, smelling of greenness and the lightest spice of fir. An enormous pine tree fronted the porch, but the fog hid its trunk and only the needles were visible, like pins holding the mist up. Jeannie had told her about the wild pea vines, and it was true, they climbed the porch and coiled around the railings, not eating the house so much as holding it ready to eat, shifting and turning it to just the right angle.

She could hear Tom’s trout stream across the road, a purposeful rushing, and an owl, very distant, calling to a hoarser one that roosted much closer. She shivered as she listened, her new kind of shivering that had nothing to do with the damp. In March, she had been hurled out from the world by a single phone call and she wasn’t down yet. Even on the flight east, after she had said goodbye to Dan, taken her seat, closed her eyes during takeoff. The plane didn’t need to climb, she was already up there, and the entire flight had seemed a gradual downward slant, and yet never did she land. Even landing it didn’t land. Even in Boston she wasn’t down. And now here she was, climbing porches in the moonlight, on the way up again, her landing further off than ever.

She had spent the flight staring out the window, though her neighbors, absorbed in the movie, glanced sideways at her and frowned. It was an exceptionally clear day, the view should have been wonderful, and yet it was marred by something it took her most of the flight to understand. The land below looked tired and old—there was a graying agent in the air creating the effect of an exhausted giant sleeping with its mouth open; the lakes, its eyes, rheumy and clouded; the highway, its lips, crusted over with spittle; its hands, the valleys, listless and pale. The longer she stared, the more coma-like the effect seemed, and it made her angry, enough so she wanted to ring a bell or trip an alarm. “Wake up Detroit!” she wanted to shout, when the pilot mentioned it was under them. “Wake up Syracuse!” The pilot came back on to warn of turbulence, but the only thing shaking was her heart.