The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (12 page)

He stepped away, then came back with a thick woolen sweater. I nodded. I heard his footsteps going up the stairs and so I did what he told me to, took off the rest of my clothes and put his sweater on, which was thick and scratchy and fell down below my hips. The stairs squeaked again. I looked shyly up and there coming down the stairs beside Peter was Lawrence, wearing the same kind of silky green robe, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and not looking happy at all.

“Why hello there, Beth.”

It did not seem like the Lawrence I knew, or rather it seemed like him but in an exaggerated form. His expression managed to be arrogant and coy and jealous and friendly all at once. He and Peter had brought blankets which they wrapped around me, then led me gently but firmly over to the couch. Peter left for a moment, then came back with a mug of tea. The two of them sat beside me in their matching robes, none of us saying anything but staring toward the fire, the only sound in the room being the crackle of its flames. I was confused, it combined with the cold to make me dizzy, and then when the blankets and tea did their work there was just the confusion. I remember seeing Lawrence’s school books on the table and thinking that they had not just been casually dropped but stood between bookends like they had been there a very long while.

“You need to sleep now,” Peter said. Never had I seen his eyes look kinder. He shooed Lawrence off the couch so there was room for me, then put his arms under my legs and lifted me around. I was exhausted, I must have fallen asleep before they disappeared upstairs, but I kept my eyes open just long enough to see Peter come back to the mantle and take the poems.

When I woke up it was still dark though the clock read seven. Christmas Eve. I rubbed at the frosty window and saw golden Venus. My clothes were draped over a chair by the fire and were warm when I put them on. Before leaving I walked around the room making sure to tiptoe. There were not as many books as I thought there would be, but almost every one was folded open and turned upside down as if they were all being read simultaneously. Other than that, there was not very much. Mementos of his time in France. A few French coins. A cheap plaster replica of a saint. Ivory cufflinks. A phrase book issued to officers. Medals, scattered across the bookcase with the lesser souvenirs.

I was lucky because the rollers had already been over the road and I was able to walk on the crust. The morning milk train had not yet left and the trainman waved me back toward the caboose. There was less snow on the tracks the further north we went and by the time we got to town there was hardly any snow at all. This frightened me, though I could not say why. That despite the blizzard it had not snowed here even a little.

When I climbed down from the caboose I saw Alan’s truck. He got out, walked around the front, held the door open. “I’ve been waiting here all night,” he said when I got in. “I knew you would come back and I didn’t want to miss you.”

He tried saying this tenderly, but it came out as an accusation. He looked colder, more exhausted than I did, but when I tried giving him his coat he wouldn’t take it.

“I knew you would come back, Beth.”

Three times he said this which could only mean he had been saying it to himself all night. We drove to the house without saying much more besides that. Mr. Steen’s automobile was parked out in front. Alan did not seem surprised to see it there. “Go in,” he said, again trying to sound gentle, but nervousness had him now and it came out rough.

Mr. and Mrs. Steen stood waiting in the back parlor, here against this wall where I can still sense their shapes. Mr. Steen had a new coat for Christmas made of fur and it seemed to shrink him, make him smaller, like an animal withdrawing into his pelt. Mrs. Steen had a new coat, too, and it was as thin and cheap as his was expensive and plush. And yet it seemed to enlarge her. She acted excited and not in a good way—never had I seen her eyes shine so bright. But enlarged is not the proper word. She looked bigger than that, more satisfied, as if she had swallowed hate for breakfast. She looked engorged.

Alan had walked me into the room but now he separated himself and stood with his parents against the wall so it seemed like I was facing a jury.

“Where were you last night?” Mr. Steen demanded, with no preliminary.

I was not afraid to stare them down.

“In town,” I answered. “I was trapped there by the snow.”

“What snow?” Alan and his father asked simultaneously. Mrs. Steen, for her part, stared toward the window and the brilliant blue sky.

“The blizzard. I couldn’t walk any further. Peter Sass took me in.”

Mr. Steen scratched his belly under his coat. “Why would he do that?”

I knew if I told them about the book they would not understand and if they did understand then they would hate me. I said nothing.

Mr. Steen’s bullying instincts took over now, making his chest and shoulders swell back up to their normal size.

“The Jew? The radical? The agitator?”

I stared him straight in the eye. “He took me in. I brought him a book as a gift.”

I could not help saying that, though I regretted it immediately—the hate in their eyes went deeper than anything I had seen so far.

“Tell the truth, Beth,” Alan said. He bowed his head, preparing himself for the worst.

Mr. Steen cut him off. “Oh, a book is it? A married woman visits a bachelor’s bedroom in the middle of the night to read him a book? A pretty name for it. A book!”

“Nothing happened.”

“You lie!”

I should have fought back harder, gone over and spat defiance right straight into his face, but I was still exhausted from fighting the snow. Weakness made me desperate and more than anything I needed someone’s help.

“Lawrence was there. He can tell you about it. Ask him.”

Alan looked puzzled. “That boy in your class? Lawrence?” He turned to his father. “There’s a boy in her class named Lawrence.” He tried remembering what I had said about him. “Very handsome. Very smart.”

Mr. Steen was slow to take this new fact in. I could see his brain working—he even rubbed his hand on his forehead to help it along.

He spoke very slowly and more to his wife than to me. “A school boy. At the teacher’s house. At midnight. A pretty schoolboy.”

He then did something I had never seen him do before—he put his arm around Mrs. Steen’s shoulders and drew her close. They talked too soft and fast for me to make out what they said. Alan was part of the conference, too, though he only ducked his chin toward them without speaking. After a long time their heads split apart again and Mr. Steen began buttoning up his coat.

“Stay here,” he said. “Mother Steen will keep you company.”

He took Alan’s arm and guided him out through the hall. A few seconds later we could hear Alan’s truck cough to life. Mrs. Steen was furious she had been left behind. She stared with enough intensity to pin me to the wall. “Don’t move!” her eyes commanded, and then I heard her spitting into the telephone out in the hall. When she returned she was almost beside herself from excitement. She paced back and forth across the floor muttering to herself the way she must have when speaking in tongues. The words oozed from her neck like they always did, only this time they seemed covered in gristle and blood.

“Just a good scare is it? Just a good scare? You’ll miss the fun you will. Stay here they say, watch the girl they say, no place for a woman. No place for a woman? No place? No other place. No other place! Just a good scare? We’ll have a party with just a good scare. Women aren’t invited, women can’t watch? Women can’t watch? We’ll watch our fill, the good Lord will watch with us.”

The angrier she grew the faster the words came out, to the point I could no longer understand. After a few minutes a horn sounded out on the road. She grabbed my wrist, not bothering to be gentle and pulled me after her outside. A black truck was waiting, shabbier than Alan’s, driven by a man I recognized as one of the roughest of Mr. Steen’s loggers, feared for the way he used his belly as a weapon during brawls. Mrs. Steen hurried over and issued her instructions, jabbing his stomach in emphasis. He nodded, got behind the wheel, and then Mrs. Steen grabbed me by the hair and forced me onto the back seat next to her.

Mr. Steen’s man drove east toward the village, which puzzled me, and I only became frightened when we reached the main road and swerved south. Mrs. Steen kept urging him to go faster. The road was clear but then we came to where the snow had fallen and he had to stop and put on chains. Mrs. Steen, if she noticed the snow, said nothing. While she waited for the man to finish she drummed her knuckles on the back of the seat and stared toward the steering wheel as if debating whether to take over. She cuffed him on the back of his neck because he drove too slow and cursed him when he skidded. For an hour we drove that way. We passed the high school. We came to the railroad tracks and the river and then suddenly I knew where we were heading.

Trucks had trampled down the snow and parked atop their own dirty tracks. A child’s shredded kite, forgotten in the summer, stuck out of the drifts like a yellow marker showing which way to walk. Mrs. Steen walked on one side of me and the driver on the other so there was no chance of my bolting. There was a band of birch trees, then an abrupt ridge, and it was not until we crested this that we could see the river. It was the color the deepest cold can take on without actually freezing—gray beyond gray, so it was impossible to look at without shuddering. There were icebergs, too, long swelling humps, and they bobbed up and down in the current like racing ponies.

Twenty yards back from the bank, in the flat spot where the three of us had our picnic in October, stood a group of ten or eleven men. My first reaction was laughable. I thought it was a ball game—that these men had decided on the coldest day of winter to play baseball. Then, when they dragged me closer, I saw they all wore parkas and gumboots, so I knew they were loggers, Mr. Steen’s men. They are driving something downriver I decided, logs or pulp, but the cold slowed my understanding and it was another few seconds before I saw things clear.

In the center of their ring, prone but with his arm up as if fending off blows, lay a naked man. Lawrence! He was wet and it made his whiteness even more startling, though the veins in his arm were as red as licorice. I could not understand why he should be wet and naked and cringing in the snow, my eyes could not accept what they were seeing. One of the men kicked his ribs and laughed and then another man took off his parka and threw it at him, not in charity but disdain. Lawrence fumbled desperately to pull it on—already the wetness was turning to ice.

I tried running to him, but Mrs. Steen grabbed my arm and yanked me back. Lawrence’s humiliation was not what I had been dragged there to witness. On the edge of the river stood another group of men, the roughest of Mr. Steen’s loggers plus Mr. Steen himself. There was someone in the middle of their ring and like Lawrence he was naked, though he was not lying down but standing tall and proud like he was at attention.

“Peter!” I yelled.

The driver shoved me sideways and Mrs. Steen clamped her hand over my mouth. Off to the left under a big pine, well apart from the two mobs, Alan stood by himself watching. I know he did not see me, not yet. Peter did not see me either, nor could he have heard my shout over the river’s roar. What frightened me was what lay draped over Peter’s shoulder—the dangled rope of the tree swing, the one we had seen on our picnic, the one Lawrence compared to a noose.

Responding to an abrupt gesture from Mr. Steen, two of the toughs grabbed the rope and forced it down over Peter’s head and shoulders, cinching it tight across his chest. His turn now, I suddenly realized. His turn after Lawrence’s, though I still did not understand for what. At Mr. Steen’s barked command, the men pulled Peter to the furthest edge of the bank, then positioned themselves behind him squatting on their heels.

I turned away so as not to see but Mrs. Steen anticipated this and by twisting my arm forced me to look. “Sodomite!” she hissed, pointing. Peter saw me now, I am certain he saw me, because he raised his hand just as the two men who had hold of him shoved him hard toward the river. The tree rope tightened on his chest and his feet came off the bank, swinging him sideways out over the current, then careening him back. He did not struggle to fight this—from first to last he did not struggle. He bounced off the lip of the bank and pendulumed back again, this time even further out, and as his full weight came against the rope it snapped apart right above him and he fell into the river with less splash than a stone would make but only a quick leaden sucking.

He rolled over like a log, rolled a second time, and I could see him trying still to raise his arm through the current. Mr. Steen and his men staggered over to the bank and stood there staring in cow-like stupidity, but I think even before my scream Alan must have started running. He forced his way through the snow to the bank and ran downstream trying to keep Peter in view, tugging off his jacket then his shirt. Where the bank steepened he must have made his decision because he dove into the river head first. We could see him splashing at the ice, trying to keep it from forcing him under, but the current would not let him go further out than he already was. The men finally started running—after Alan, not Peter. They could have saved themselves the bother. Far downstream, just where it seemed he would disappear after Peter around the first bend, we could see an exhausted Alan stagger alone through the shallows back to the bank.

“He’s saved!” a man yelled, one of the ring guarding Lawrence. Then, realizing his mistake, he kicked viciously at the snow. They seemed ashamed of themselves, this group, and now they were all taking off their parkas to cover Lawrence’s nakedness, warm him back to life. He was crying, sobbing, retching, though he could not have known yet about Peter.

Behind me, Mrs. Steen put her lips to my ear and whispered like she was stuffing hate in just as deep as hate would go.

“You saw nothing, understand? You were home with all of us, we baked a cake for Christmas, sang songs and didn’t once leave the house. Understand? Understand woman! You saw nothing, you were home with the three of us, we baked a currant cake for Christmas, sang carols, stayed in the house the whole livelong day.”