Marion's Wall

  Marion’s Wall

  by Jack Finney

  1

  Dear Son:

  Just a quick note to say that if you and Jan feel sure you want an old Victorian, so called, I think you could do a lot worse: they’ve got a charm today’s penny-pinching architecture completely lacks. I lived in one during my own San Francisco days, and I write mostly to say that if in the course of your house-hunting you should find yourselves near a place called Buena Vista Hill, I wish you’d see if it’s still there, and let me know. It was in the last block at the southernmost end of Divisadero Street, Number 114, and was a fine old two-story frame building—I had the bottom apartment—with a gable roof, bay window, and a view of the city and Bay that would knock your eye out. I have fond memories of the place, and if you found one like it am sure you and Jan would be happy in it—happiness is often just a matter of making up your mind to be. Nuff sed!

  Not much news from here. Usual lousy Chicago February, though not too cold lately. Last Saturday…

  I was standing near the top of a six-foot ladder, my hair almost brushing the high ceiling, flexing my hands to work out the stiffness. My fingers made a soft popping sound against my palms, and I raised my hands to my ears, listening. Then I lifted each foot in turn and revolved it at the ankle. Jan was kneeling at the foot of my ladder lifting handfuls of wet shredded wallpaper into a cardboard Tide box and at the sound of my fingers she looked up. I said, “I’m doing a dance. Of joy. Because this is such fun. What the hell time is it?”

  “Eleven-ten.” She was wearing blue denims and a black turtleneck sweater. Jan has long dark hair—today it was tied back with a ribbon—she’s pale-skinned, and now without any make-up, in the hard daylight from the tall unshaded windows of the empty living room, she looked pale.

  “Eleven-ten, and we started at eight-thirty; nearly three hours so far. Goody. Hot dog. Son of a bitch. We’ll be at this all day right up till time to drive to the airport. All next weekend, too, probably.”

  “I thought it would just peel off with that thing.” She nodded at the wallpaper “remover” lying on top of my ladder, a shallow foot-square metal thing with a handle, a fog of wet-looking steam rising from its perforated faceplate. It was connected by a thin plastic hose to a chromed tank on the floor plugged to an electric outlet.

  “If you thought that, your vision of life has been corrupted. Outside of television commercials things never just peel right off.” I picked up the steamer, pressed it to the wall just under the ceiling, and began sliding it back and forth as though I were ironing the wallpaper. It was kind of fun, watching the paper darken from the moisture, but hard on the arms. I could feel flecks of wallpaper drying on my face and knew there were more lying on my hair, which is combed straight back but kind of springy, worn a little long like everyone else’s. My name is Nick Cheyney, incidentally, and I’m thirty; Jan’s twenty-seven. I’m fairly tall, skinny, my face has been described as “amiable,” and I wear metal-rimmed glasses. Today I was accoutered in dirty tan wash pants, a worn-out striped shirt frayed at the collar and torn at one shoulder, and sneakers of really record-breaking filth and raggedness over bare feet.

  Jan stood up and walked out to the kitchen with the filled carton on one hip. She came back with the empty carton and two mugs of coffee held by their handles in one hand. Of necessity she left the hall door open and our dog, Al, a tricolored basset—which means brown-white-and-black, not red-white-and-blue—walked in. As Jan crossed the room toward the window seat, eyes on the coffee mugs, Al sat down on some wet curls of wallpaper to watch the activity, and I didn’t betray him. I winked, and he opened his mouth to smile, tongue lolling. I was working with the scraper now, wet paper wrinkling into pennant-shaped strips to hang limply or drop to the floor. Jan sat down on the bay window seat, setting the mugs on the sill, turned and saw Al, who smiled in friendly fashion. “Out!” Jan pointed. “You know better than that! You’ll have wallpaper all over the house!” He looked at her closely, wondering if she meant for sure. “Out! In the kitchen! Or go on out and play; it’s a nice day.”

  Al stood up, looking to me for help. “He says you’re violating his civil rights.”

  “He hasn’t got any today. Go on now!”

  Al left reluctantly, Jan following to close the door. “Take it up with ACLU, Al!” I called. “I’ll testify.” Using both hands now, I worked the scraper up and down rapidly till the entire dampened area was clear. “There you are. First preview of layer number three.” The newly exposed paper was a pattern of brown latticework entwined with dark-green ivy. I climbed down, walked to the window seat, and picked up my mug. “Well? Where do you place it? Early Horrible? Late Atrocious?”

  We stood tasting our coffee, staring up at the wall. “I don’t know exactly: the Thirties?”

  “Oh God. Is that all? If we have to work our way layer by layer back to 1882 or whenever, this place’ll be a foot larger all the way around, time we’re finished. And we’ll be in our sunset years.”

  “I know, but it’s interesting. To see what other people lived with. Most of them long dead, I suppose. You know something? Now, don’t bother teasing me about it, because I know it’s obvious, but—”

  “If these wallpapers could only talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably bore the hell out of us. Mumbling away about the good old days. If I know these walls, and believe me I do, they’d never shut up.”

  “With you around they wouldn’t get a word in. Oh, I wish I knew who’d lived here, Nick! What woman picked out that ivy pattern? It’s not bad, you know. What did she look like, and who lay on a couch in this room staring up at the paper, counting how often the design was repeated. I wish there were some way to know.” She sipped her coffee.

  “There is, for a certain sensitive few of us.” I closed my eyes. “It was a big fat lady. With mean piglike eyes. Stark naked, her obscene tattoos writhing in the gaslight, she killed her husband in this very room.”

  “She may have started a tradition. Let’s see what the next layer looks like.”

  “No, that’s cheating. You have to take one layer off completely, all around the room, before you can look at the next. Same principle—honored by all men, ignored by all women—as a box of candy. You have to finish the top layer before—”

  “Oh, come on; say yes to life.” She set her mug on the sill.

  “Okay.” I had a couple more gulps of coffee, then climbed the ladder and began soaking the new ivy-patterned strip I’d just uncovered, slowly sliding the metal steam box back and forth till the white portions of the pattern were nearly indistinguishable from the green of the leaves. A corner of the paper dropped loose and peeled down an inch of its own soggy weight. I set the steamer down, took the corner, and with a steady gentle pull drew it down, slowly exposing a pink-and-green pattern of roses and leaves on a white background. “Okay, what’s this? Colonial? Elizabethan? Chaucerian?”

  “I don’t know, Nick, I’m really no expert. I’ve only read about it a little. Maybe it’s from the Twenties. I’d say the Twent—”

  She stopped because, still carefully drawing the dampened paper downward, I’d suddenly exposed three small arcs several inches apart. Each was an inch or so high, and of a red much brighter than anything in the pattern itself. I peeled on down to the bottom of the dampened area, the paper tore off in my hands, and I dropped it to the floor, then rubbed my thumb across the tops of the small red arcs. The red smudged, and I looked at my thumb, then at Jan. “Lipstick.”

  “Well, peel off some more, see what it is!”

  Directly below the layer I’d just exposed, I soaked through another foot-high strip, the height of the steamer plate. Here the ivy-patterned paper was still covered by the layer before it, but I worked till I�
�d soaked both layers through. I began tugging them loose, carefully working with the scraper blade between wall and wet paper, and was able to loosen and peel both together. “Two layers at once; the gods are sleeping.” Jan didn’t answer; she stood motionless, watching as there was gradually exposed a foot-high letter M scrawled gracefully across the rose-patterned wallpaper in bright lipstick. “M for murder? Mopery? Merde?”

  “Nick, keep going!”

  Leaning out to the right from the side of the ladder, supporting the weight of the steamer with both hands, I soaked a double layer of paper beside the big M as far as I could reach. Again with help from the scraper blade both layers peeled, and the red M was the initial letter of a yard-long Marion lipsticked across the wall under the high old ceiling.

  Neither of us spoke now. As I scrambled down the ladder we glanced at each other, grinning with excitement. Jan helping, I dragged the ladder to the right, its legs shuddering across the bare wood floor, and trotted up again. And when I’d peeled down the next few feet of the adjoining wallpaper, Jan and I read Marion Marsh in a six-foot length of slanted red foot-high script. Just beyond the h of Marsh the fireplace chimney jutted from the wall, the paper ending at the bricks, and I climbed down to pull the ladder back to the left. “It’s a will! Written on the wall! And we’re the heirs. The first people to discover it. She’s left a million—”

  “Nick, shut up and hurry up. Or I’ll die.”

  Working fast, peeling the wallpaper down in yard-long, foot-high strips, I exposed a second line of script centered under the first: lived here, it said. The line below that was near the middle of the wall, within Jan’s reach, and as I moved the steamer she worked the scraper, eyes snapping with excitement. June, it said, followed by 14, and as my steamer grated against the projecting brick of the chimney Jan was working off the wet paper to reveal a 1, then a 9, then the entire date, 1926. The line below that, Jan’s hands following my steamer so closely its mist curled over her fingers, said, Read it. And the final line, just above the baseboard—we knelt side by side, fingers flying to uncover it—said, and weep!

  Sitting back on our heels, we stared up. From ceiling to floor the immense red script covered half a wall nearly eleven feet high and some twelve feet horizontally, and now Jan read it aloud in entirety: “Marion Marsh lived here, June 14, 1926. Read it and weep!” She clutched my arm. “I will weep if we don’t find out who she was! Nick, I have to know, I absolutely have got to know.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, and stood, still staring at that enormous scrawl of writing. “I’d give something to know, all right. Maybe Dad knows; we’ll ask him tonight. Look at that. Must have taken a couple tubes of lipstick.”

  “At least.” Jan stood. “It’s a very distinctive handwriting. You get the feeling of an interesting person.”

  “I’ll bet she was that, all right. Well, what do we do about it before I peel it off? Take a picture, maybe? I’ve got film in the camera.”

  “Oh, no, let’s leave it! For the housewarming, at least. It’ll make a marvelous conversation piece.”

  ” ‘Conversation piece.’ ” I began dragging the ladder around the fireplace. “Sometimes I wonder what the conversation is really like when folks gather ‘round the conversation pieces. ‘Hey, is that ice bucket really your mother-in-law’s skull?’ ‘Yep, made it myself. Just before she passed on.’ ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ End of conversation. ‘Don’t tell me that life-size panorama of Lincoln’s War Cabinet is entirely made out of feathers?’ ‘Sure as hell is. Took three nuthatches for Stanton’s eyebrows alone.’ ‘You don’t say!’ End of conversation. And there’ll be even less talk about this, Kiddo. What’s there to say? The odds are that no one in the world knows who Marion Marsh was any more; that writing is probably all that’s left of her. And we’ll never find out any more than this.”

  But we did. For the rest of the day except for a fifteen-minute sandwich lunch in the kitchen—Al, tidy soul that he is, kindly disposing of my crusts—we peeled wallpaper, watching for more writing to appear. None did, and by four-thirty the room was stripped to the rose-patterned paper on all four walls and in the window-seat bay. Once more, then, we stood looking at the wall to the left of the fireplace: Marion Marsh lived here, June 74, 7926. Read it and weep! we read again. Then I changed clothes to drive to the airport.

  This was early March but it had been a warm sun-filled day after nearly a week of rain, and all I wore over an open-necked sport shirt was a light sleeveless sweater. The car was parked at the curb down in front of the house, wheels toed in; we’re on a hill. The car is the best thing I own: a forty-six-year-old Packard roadster I’d bought half restored before I was married, finishing the job myself; gray body and wheels with navy-blue striping. It ran beautifully, and we used it regularly, our only car.

  Today the black canvas top was down, the finish dirt-slashed after the rains, and I stepped up on the running board, slid over the door top, higher than the roofs of some of today’s so-called cars, and dropped onto the black-leather seat, glancing up at our windows.

  Jan was at the window seat, and she lifted an arm to wave, a little limply, shoulders drooping. She was tired, of course, and had the living room to sweep, dinner to get, and—biggest job of all—get dressed for company. Jan is a shy girl, not so good at meetings with anyone but old and trusted friends. And while she’d met and liked my dad, it had been nearly four years. It helped her poise when she managed to feel she looked her best, so I knew she’d fuss and worry about what to wear.

  Driving down the Divisadero hill I felt pretty good: still excited about the writing on the wall; pleased with the day’s work; looking forward to seeing my dad. Things were looking up in general, I thought. Jan and I had been married six years, and while we were happy, we had our problems sometimes; what couple doesn’t after a while? But we had our new apartment now, the best we’d ever had. There was plenty of work to be done on it yet, including installing some new bathroom fixtures, which the landlord would pay for if I’d put them in. But I liked doing things like that, even removing wallpaper, and so did Jan. We felt busy and full of plans these days, a good feeling. Sometimes I think most everyone needs a new start every once in a while.

  The airport is always crowded but it wasn’t bad this time of day and year, and the plane was on time. We were home by six-thirty, talking all the way back to the city catching up on the news. There wasn’t much: we keep in fairly close touch with a letter every couple of weeks or so and an evening phone call once in a while. We get along pretty well, my dad and I; my mother is dead.

  When we turned into our block it was dusk at ground level but still plenty of daylight in the sky. We could see the white-and-pastel city spread out below our hill, every building sharp in the rain-washed air. A beginning fog was moving onto the Bay and the orange lights of the Bay Bridge were on. It was a nice time to arrive. My dad got out, hatless, his tie still over one shoulder from the top-down drive, and stood in the street staring up at the house, as I got his bag from the trunk. Our living-room windows were dark but I thought I could see the blur of Jan’s face. It always interested her how much alike my father and I were, and she’d be comparing us again: same height, and he just as skinny as I am. He’s bald, and his face is thirty-odd years older than mine, but it’s the same face, and I’m Nick junior. He’s intelligent, and has the look in the eye of a humorous man. When I glanced at him now, closing the car trunk, picking up his bag, he nodded at the house. “Good to see it again.” Then he shook his head. “And strange.”

  The house, like all the others on that side of the street, sits high on a ridge with a long flight of concrete stairs before you even reach the wooden stairs to the porch. Halfway up them, our middle window rattled, Jan leaned out to call down to us, and Dad grinned and waved. On the porch I was glad to set his bag down for a moment, and we stood looking out over the city at the Bay, fogging over very fast now. “Last time I stood here,” my dad said, “you could still see a few sailing ships anchored o
ut there.” He turned to look at the lower-apartment windows beside us, but they were curtained, people living there, and he couldn’t peek in at his old apartment.

  Looking good in an orange dress, Jan stood waiting at the top of the inside stairs with Al, who began barking as soon as the lower door opened. I shushed him, threatening to hand him over to the vivisectionists, and he looked down at me alertly, ears coming up, wondering whether “vivisection” was something to eat. Dad spoke to him, and Al recognized a friend, and said so with his tail; all he’d wanted was to show whose house this was in case the arriving stranger had any doubts. When we were halfway up, Jan came hurrying impulsively down to meet Dad, feeling shy—I saw her face flush—but her eyes were excited. Dad puts people at ease; I’ve seen it all my life. He slid an arm around Jan’s waist, kissing her, greeted her, and walked her on up the stairs; I reached up and pinched her. He likes Jan, genuinely, and I was sure she felt fine, now. “I simply can’t wait to ask you!” I heard her saying. “Do you know—” She turned on the landing to see me waggling a hand—Don’t say it!—and cut herself short.

  “Know what?” He stood smiling at her, then reached down to pat Al.

  “Whether the building looks the same. How does it seem to be back in it?”

  “Looks as though I’d just left it last month. It may seem foolish to fly out here for only one evening just to see it again. But it’s worth it, believe me. Especially with you two in it now. Amazing that you should be here.”

  I’d set my father’s bag down under the hall hatrack, and now I sidled past them and into the living room. Jan was saying, “Well, we looked it up and fell in love with it on sight. And when we learned the top apartment was empty…” She shrugged, smiling.

  “Come on in here,” I called. “Get the view before I turn on the lights.” They came in and walked to the bay windows. The street lamps had come on, faintly illuminating the room, and we could see the city, lighted too now, spread out before us from the uneven mountaintop horizon far ahead down to the shores of the Bay. Nick senior and Jan stood at the windows; I was just behind them. “Furniture’s stored in the basement till we finish the room,” I said conversationally, and Jan flicked a glance at me, detecting the false casualness of a planned-in-advance remark. “We’re still peeling the old wallpaper off; hell of a job.” Staring out at the enormous view, comparing it, I suppose, with the way it had been once, my dad didn’t answer, and I walked back to the wall switch beside the hall doorway. For a moment I hesitated, looking at his back, wondering if I should do this. Then I flipped on the overhead chandelier, and Dad and Jan turned, squinting in the new glare. “And look what we uncovered this morning,” I said casually, and his head turned to follow my gesture.