The Road Through the Wall Read Online Free

in, but she slammed the door violently, and then walked miserably over to her desk, although she knew, had seen from the doorway, that it was open. The slant-top, which should have been securely locked, was dropped down to make the table surface, and Harriet’s small papers and notebooks lay as she kept them, mercilessly neat, put back in the pigeonholes, perhaps even put back more carefully than Harriet, who loved them, ever did. Harriet went to the bed and looked under the pillow; the key was there, where it belonged. Harriet sat down heavily on the bed and said aloud, “What shall I do?” not because it was meaningful to her, or because she was concerned about what to do—she knew now, without question, the eventual series of acts to be forced from her—but because “What-shall-I-do?” seemed the formation of sounds most likely to apply to a situation like this.
    From where she sat on the bed she could see out of the window which looked down on the corner of Pepper and Cortez; Hallie Martin, eating what seemed to be a doughnut, was rounding the corner, apparently bound for Helen’s. For a minute Harriet thought of calling to Hallie (“All is discovered”? “Burn the evidence”?), and then she said, “What shall I do?” again and got up and went over to the desk.
    She put her hand lovingly on top of it; it had been a present from her father, who probably supposed that her mother had a key to it, from long knowledge of her mother. Harriet sat down in the desk chair and picked up the letter she had begun last night; her mother had set it open in the center of the desk, the only thing left out of place. It was a letter to George Martin, and it was written on shiny pink paper, and it began, “Dearest George.” Helen set the style; it was the way love letters were written, she said, and sometimes Helen’s letters to Johnny Desmond began, “Dearest dearest Johnny.” Harriet had chosen George to write to because he was dull and unpopular and she felt vaguely that she had no right to aim any higher than the one boy no one else would have; if she understood this feeling at all, she thought of it as “George always liked
me
best.”
    Virginia Donald was writing to Art Roberts, and Mary Byrne was, cautiously, writing to her own brother. Hallie Martin carried the letters around, and Helen had written one for her to James Donald, who was seventeen and in third year high and the neighborhood hero. Hallie gave her letter to James Donald one evening when he came home at dinner time from football practice at the high school, and he read it while Hallie lurked excitedly on Helen’s front porch; and when James tore the letter up and dropped it in the gutter Hallie sneaked down and got the pieces and took them home. “They
always
do that,” Helen said wisely. “Men who don’t care, they’re callous.”
    Harriet looked down at the “Dearest George” on the pink paper, and read on, in her own writing, “Let’s run away and get married. I love you and I want to—” The letter ended there, because Harriet had not been able to think of what she wanted to do with George; Helen’s letters ended, “kiss you a thousand times,” but Harriet could not bring herself to write such a thing, at least partly because the thought of kissing George Martin’s dull face horrified her. She felt, although she had not confessed it to Helen, that she could possibly bear to kiss James Donald’s face, but then Hallie had already written to him. Harriet tore the letter up slowly and threw it into the wastebasket. It was written, it had been read, she had no doubt that her mother would remember the words, and it was unpleasant to look at.
    It was when she reached out for the other papers in the desk that she began to cry. She took down a notebook with “Poems” written on the front of it in pink and blue letters,