The Road Through the Wall (2 page)

PROLOGUE

The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some people are automatically above suspicion. Mr. John Desmond and Mr. Bradley Ransom-Jones and Mr. Michael Roberts and Miss Susannah Fielding, all of whom lived on Pepper Street in a town called Cabrillo, California, thought of their invulnerability as justice; Mr. Myron Perlman and possibly Mr. William Byrne, also of Pepper Street, would have been optimistic if they thought of it as anything less than fate. No man owns a house because he really wants a house, any more than he marries because he favors monogamy, but all these men were married and most of them owned houses, and they regarded themselves as reasonable and unselfish and even, to themselves, as responsible. They all lived on Pepper Street because they were able to afford it, and none of them would have lived there if he had been able to afford living elsewhere, although Pepper Street was charming and fairly expensive and even comfortably isolated. The town of Cabrillo, in 1936, was fortunate in housing such people as Mr. Desmond and his family.

The Desmonds had lived on Pepper Street longer than anyone else, because when Mr. Desmond was able to build his home (he rented the first house he lived in with his wife) he chose a good location in a neighborhood not yet developed but undeniably “nice.” The Desmond house was on the corner of Pepper Street and Cortez Road, facing Pepper Street, with a large garden to the side along Pepper Street and tall blank windows on the Cortez Road side. The tall windows belonged on the inside to the Desmond living-room where the family sat in the evenings, and the Venetian blinds were always closed after dark. When the Desmonds moved in, their daughter Caroline had not been born, and the hedge around the visible sides of the house was inches high. By the time Caroline was three, the hedge was waist high and required the services of a boy every Saturday to keep it trimmed. Beyond the hedge the Desmonds lived in a rambling modern-style house, richly jeweled with glass brick. They were the aristocracy of the neighborhood, and their house was the largest; their adopted son Johnny, who was fifteen years old, associated with boys whose families did not live on Pepper Street, but in neighborhoods where the Desmonds expected to live some day.

Next door to the Desmonds, on Pepper Street, was the orchard of apple trees which successfully hid the house of crazy old Mrs. Mack, and beyond that was the Byrne house where fourteen-year-old Pat Byrne and twelve-year-old Mary lived under Mrs. Byrne's rigid faith, and from which they issued every morning with faces glowing from hard soap. Their house was a recent regrettable pink stucco with the abortive front porch made of a mantel over the front door and a slight unreliable iron railing on either side of the one step, a front porch unhappily popular in late suburban developments. Mr. Byrne had not built this house, neither did he own it, but he paid the rent for it regularly.

Next door to the Byrnes were the Robertses. Mike Roberts had been a cavalry officer in 1917 and had felt ever since that life without his horse was restricting. His wife had helped the architect with the plans for their house, and it began with bravado and ended weakly with a flat ugly goldfish pond never finished in the back yard. In front it had a sweeping wide concrete porch upon which bougainvillea would not grow—although the Perlmans next door had it in profusion—and was thickly surrounded with bushes which were inadequate to disguise the fact that the roof was colonial, the windows modern, and the whole a gaudy yellow. The Roberts family had two children, Art and young Jamie. Art Roberts and Pat Byrne were free with one another's houses, and had once built a telephone of tin cans and pieces of string between their bedroom windows.

The Perlmans were the only Jewish family on Pepper Street, and lived sheltered under their masses of bougainvillea. They lived in a house which they rented, although it must have had the proper number of bedrooms and adequate closet space, since they never moved. The Perlmans' driveway was barely separated from the vacant lot next door by a grey picket fence; from their dining-room windows the Perlmans would survey the reaches of empty grass and shortcut paths which ended at Winslow Road, cutting north and south across Pepper Street's east and west. There was another vacant lot just across Pepper Street; it lay next to the Ransom-Jones house, which was then roughly across the street from the Perlmans'.

Mr. and Mrs. Ransom-Jones and her sister lived on Pepper Street, probably, because like Mr. Desmond they were not rich enough to live in the style they coveted and not proud enough to live in opposition to it. They devoted themselves, instead, to a garden which swept up from the sidewalk to the end of their lot, compensating for the tiny house, which might have been quaint and cottage-like, but was inadequate by Ransom-Jones standards. The Ransom-Jones garden, however, stretched so far that the house was almost hidden from its neighbors, and it was necessary for Mrs. Ransom-Jones to leave her front door and walk halfway down the stepping-stones before she could see the street. The Donalds were the Ransom-Jones's neighbors, pushed so far down the block by the garden that they were almost directly across the street from the Byrne house. Mr. Donald was another one who only rented his house; it had never occurred to him to build a house of his own, and so he spent all his life living in the patterns set out by other more enterprising men. His present house, which suited him and his family admirably, was made of bricks put together in a square, ample enough for Mr. and Mrs. Donald and their three children, and pretentious enough for Mr. Donald's wife and daughter to feel at home.

The one thorn in the side of the Donald women was the house-for-rent, which crowded them boorishly, in contrast to the Ransom-Jones garden; it went up for rent regularly and was never suitably tenanted during the Donalds' residence; one completely unsatisfactory family after another moved in and then out. Mrs. Donald suspected, and said publicly, that it was because the landlord rented it too cheaply for Pepper Street standards; it was a white elephant, she said, because it was badly planned and dreadfully dark. Someone obviously aiming at another effect than he got had intended it to be beautiful rather than comfortable; it was a thin greyish building with, blessedly, four thick trees crushed between itself and the Donald house, and a wall made of rough stones cemented together between itself and its other neighbor, Miss Fielding. The front of the house was also built of the same rough stones; Mrs. Donald had remarked accurately that it looked like a reform school.

Miss Fielding paid her rent and was never known to dislike her house and had probably never looked carefully at the outside of it. Pepper Street was one of the few neighborhoods where an old single woman like Miss Fielding could live alone in a house that suited her. By some architectural sleight-of-hand, Miss Fielding's house seemed to be set high above ground, as though she were living in a tree, or on a houseboat: there was a long flight of shallow steps shielded by a stone balustrade, and at the top the incredibly small house perched, with its small windows and door looking kittenishly down at the street. Miss Fielding had a little front porch with a continuation of the stone balustrade protecting it from falling down into the street, and the whole was colored white, with green frames around the windows and doors; it was on the front porch that Miss Fielding sat, day after day, with her cat—one of the Ransom-Jones's Angel's kittens—on her lap. The small space of ground in front of this house was bare earth, but her neighbors forgave Miss Fielding this on consideration of the steps, which were really too much, they thought, for a woman her age.

The Merriams had the corner of Pepper and Cortez opposite the Desmonds, but the Merriam house made no attempt to compete with the grandeur of the Desmond semi-modern. For one thing, the Merriams lived officially on Cortez Road, that being where their front door was. For another, Mr. Merriam, although he owned his house and would not live in a rented one, owned other houses at various places in the county, and lived in this one because it was the slowest to rent, and the least likely to sell. It had been built before the Desmond house by about ten years, and remodeled when Mrs. Merriam took it over; consequently it had the appearance of age which none of the other houses in the neighborhood had attained as yet. It was grey and weatherbeaten, and, since it had been modeled originally after someone's grandfather's manor-house, looked even older than it was.

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.