Face on the Wall (42 page)

Authors: Jane Langton

Of course not all of the stories were disasters. A few had happy endings, if you could call them that. Goose girls were transformed into princesses and youngest sons triumphed. But the other dramatis personaeâmiscellaneous ogres, witches, elder brothers, and wicked kingsâwere beheaded or burned at the stake or drowned in the river in a sack.

In the case of the unlucky Gast family, it was the ax, the stake, and the sack.

Robert Gast was tried for murder, convicted and incarcerated in Walpole State Penitentiary. His wife was convicted of conspiracy and confined to the women's prison in Framingham. Their daughter Charlene was placed in a foster home, but then Judge Aufsesser got on her case and had her removed to a school for juvenile offenders.

Mary Kelly happened to be at Annie's when the last of the Gasts possessions left the house. She watched the camelback sofa go into the moving van along with the elegant side chairs. The dangling bobbles of the chandelier caught the sunlight for an instant before blinking out in the dark interior of the van. The last thing to be removed from the house was the splendid mirror that had so often stared back at the anxious face of Roberta Gast. It went out of the house on the head of one of the moving men, reflecting only the pure unsullied sky.

The fisherman launched his boat at the height of the tempest. Bolts of lightning clove the air, shattering the prow of his little craft, splitting the very oars he clutched in his hands. In terror he cried, “Lord Fish, Lord Fish! What shall I do? My wife wants to rule the heavens!”

Solemnly the great fish spoke to the fisherman in the crash of the thunder, in the echo rumbling in the surrounding hills, in the wind lashing the dark trees, in the harsh screams of the ravens in the skyâ“Go home, my friend. Everything shall now be once more as it was in the beginning.”

Sadly the fisherman rowed his wrecked boat to the shore and limped back to his wife. He found her in their miserable hovel, weeping.

The Wall

THE FIRST SPAN OF ANNIE'S ARCADE

Two Whites look down from the roundelsâon the left, E. B. White, author of
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte's Web;
on the right, T. H. White, who wrote
The Sword in the Stone.
In the scene below, the boy Wart, who will one day be King Arthur, flourishes the famous sword.

On the left, the Homeric bard stands with upraised arms, reciting Homer's epic poem
The Odyssey.
On the Mediterranean horizon sails the ship of. Odysseus (copied from a Greek vase painting).

In the circle Scheherazade tells one of her thousand and one tales to the sultan, leaving the story unfinished so that he will spare her life for another day.

Aesop, the teller of animal fables, looks down at the sleeping hare, which has just been overtaken by the tortoise in their famous race.

THE SECOND SPAN

At left, Beatrix Potter appears in her old age as an active countrywoman.

On the right, Hans Christian Andersen releases the living nightingale with one hand and holds the wind-up bird in the other, from his story “The Emperor's Nightingale.” Above his head is a scene from his “Story of a Mother,” Death carrying away a little child. In the circle a boy proclaims what no one else has dared to say, that the Emperor's new clothes do not exist.

On the sea horizon a fisherman hooks an enchanted fish, from the tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife,” by the Brothers Grimm.

The strange creatures with paper faces are the Ugly-Wuglies, from
The Enchanted Castle,
by E. Nesbit. The children in her story have made them from walking sticks and hats and coats, and are dismayed when they come alive. Edith Nesbit herself appears in the roundel above.

THE THIRD SPAN

Mark Twain holds forth at left, telling the story of Tom Sawyer, who appears in the central circle, lost in the cave with Becky Thatcher. The Mediterranean has become the Mississippi. Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the runaway slave, drift down the river on their raft.

Mother Goose flies above.

The Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob, appear at right. Above them are Hansel and Gretel and the wicked witch. Crouching at the bottom, the wolf gobbles up Little Red Riding Hood.

In the roundel at upper right is Arthur Ransome, author of a series of books about the sailing adventures of two families of children.

THE FOURTH SPAN

Lewis Carroll reads to young Alice Liddell the tale he has made up for her and her sisters,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Laura Ingalls Wilder examines the brand-new town of DeSmet in Dakota Territory, from one of her stories about her pioneer childhood,
By the Shores of Silver Lake.

The boy in the wheelchair is Colin, who is restored to health in Frances Hodgson Burnett's
The Secret Garden.
She appears above.

The left part of the water horizon is now an English river, in Kenneth Grahame's
Wind in the Willows.
Rat and Mole set off on a boating picnic.

On the right the river has become Lake Windemere, in one of Arthur Ransome's idyllic stories. The little boats belong to the
Swallows and Amazons.

THE FIFTH SPAN

Robert Louis Stevenson stands at left, his hand on the shoulder of swashbuckling pirate Long John Silver, who steals the show in
Treasure Island.

Beside him, Cinderella goes to the ball in her pumpkin coach.

On the right, leaning against the column, nonsense poet Edward Lear holds in his arms his cat, Foss. At left above, his Owl and Pussy-cat go to sea in their beautiful pea-green boat.

Opposite them is “Toomai of the Elephants,” from the story by Rudyard Kipling in
The Jungle Book.
Kipling himself appears above.

The empty circle in the middle is the space where the face on the wall appears again and yet again.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for the permission to reprint selections from
The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
by Jakob Ludwig Karl and Wilhelm Karl Grimm. Copyright Â© 1944 by Pantheon Books, Inc., and renewed 1972 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

This edition published in 2012 by
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