The Walnut Door Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1977 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1977, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080825

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  April / Blackwood Music: Three lines of lyrics from the song “Knocking Around the Zoo” by James Taylor (p. 81) reprinted from the album entitled James Taylor. Copyright © 1971 by Blackwood Music, Inc., and Country Road Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Galaxy Music Corp., N.Y., U.S. and Canadian Agents: Eight lines of lyrics by Henry Purcell (p. 4) reprinted from Come Let Us Drink, edited by Michael Hyman. Copyright © 1972 by Galliard Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  v5.4

  a

  For Margie and Dan Lang

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 1

  MOVERS carried in her things on the seventh of May. Elaine stood in the middle of the living room watching two strong guys heft the fragments of her tentative personality upstairs on their backs and in their arms.

  Her brass-framed bed, her butcher’s-block table, her little box of flat-bowled Chinese porcelain spoons. Her architectural drawing board. Her six terrariums. Her Cohasset Colonial rocking chair, which she had assembled herself from a kit. Her dulcimer—two strings missing. Her wok. Her big full photo album with her past stuck forever to the brown loose-leaf sheets with LePage’s Mucilage.

  She welcomed the need for a new album. The pictures were going to be all different in the new book. They were going to be snapshots of a person rocketing along in a straight line.

  One of the movers, a disapproving black man, spoke not a word to her. The other seemed to think he was Elliott Gould with muscles.

  “What’s this?”

  “An Appalachian dulcimer.”

  “Oooh, pahdonnay mwah.”

  He tucked the hourglass-shaped instrument under his arm like a banjo, strummed once, tuned the three surviving strings to intervals of fourths, and over tiny stainless-steel droplets of plinking sang with a sweet, trained voice:

  Tenor:

  “Since time so kind to us does prove,

  So kind to us does prove,

  Do not, my dear, refuse my love.”

  Falsetto:

  “What do you mean? . . Oh fie! . . nay what do you do?

  You’re the strangest man that e’er I knew:

  I must . . I must…. I can’t forbear,

  I can’t, I can’t forbear.”

  Tenor:

  “Lie still, lie still my dear.”

  “You don’t play it that way,” she said. “You lay it on your knees.”

  He said, “I don’t lay nothin from a kneelin position, modom.”

  His colleague said, “Move your ass, man.”

  All this simply passed over her as the shadow of a hawk’s wing, too swift to chill. She hardly noticed; she was tightly collected, like a ball of twine, around the future.

  Later Elliott Gould appeared in the doorway with a box of books. She half-turned away; she did not even want to look at that box. It was her carton of assorted false starts. Utopia or Oblivion, by Buckminster Fuller. The Collected Stories, by Flannery O’Connor. The Human Use of Human Beings, by Norbert Wiener. How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, by Ruth Stout. Middlemarch, by George Eliot. The I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken. Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. A Modern Herbal, by Mrs. M. Grieve, F.R.H.S. Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu. Poems, by Emily Dickinson. Women and Their Bodies, by the Boston Women’s Health Collective. The Future of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Little Disturbances of Man, by Grace Paley. How to Get a Job Overseas, by Curtis Casewit.

  The black man just then was out in the truck. Elliott Gould stood inside the door holding the heavy carton, his bulging upper arms flushed with the pulse of lucrative work.

  “I get through around four. Can I come over and play house?”

  He wasn’t bad-looking. Tee shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder holes and with a picture of Janis Joplin peeking out now from behind the book box. Those roseate arms of his, she guessed, had just a few too many six-packs of Bud in them to qualify as Michelangelesque; maybe you could say they were of the school of Rubens. He knew what he was up to, she thought, cutting off those sleeves. Then she realized with a start that both Elliott Gould and Janis Joplin were staring at her breasts.

  She crossed her arms. “Thanks, but no.”

  He s
hrugged, books and all. “No harm trying. Look, where do you want all this lineal communication?”

  “Right there in the corner.”

  He put the books down and straightened up. “Strange town,” he said, “wouldn’t you like me to show you some spots?”

  “Bug off, Buster. Before I tell your boss.”

  “I am the boss.”

  “That is beyond belief.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE didn’t mind. She was in a burrowing frame of mind. This cozy haven: two rooms and a kitchen on the second story of a cut-up old town house. The floors creaked and were hilly. The “feature” was a real fireplace with stained-oak paneling and three carved cherubs supporting the mantel. They looked to her like Henry Kissinger in various stages of getting sloshed. She had named them Henry Winkum, Henry Blinkum, and Henry Nod.

  She had fallen for the place the moment the real-estate lady opened the door the previous Wednesday. The light in the main room had been a clear swimmable liquid—zip, she was snorkeling off Cinnamon Bay on St. Thomas during that crackbrain trip with Greg, winter before last. When she had got a little bit preggers. The fertilization of the need for change. Moving into the room, she made vague breast-stroke motions and said to the real-estate lady, “This is it.” The real-estate lady’s face was thin; her neck, tendinous; fat didn’t set in until somewhere below the fallen bosom. She was all tumbled down into rumphood. At the very moment when Elaine began to float in that buoyant light, the woman droned on about going to a class in something she called slimnastics. Every day, she said. The exercises only made her ravenous.

  Number One Change in the new life in the new setting: Elaine Quinlan would attract no more confessional crap from hopeless people. Such talk was pollution in the clear air of possibility. In the old life her eyes had been too “feminine.” No more. She would plate her eyeballs with chrome.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT would rebirth be like? Her self had been in labor for so very long. Would she come into the world for the second time headfirst? Would she have to be held up by the heels and spanked, so she could start bawling “Me! It’s me!” Would there be trauma? Only she would have changed; the world would not have been made good. Standing bewildered in the midden of her possessions dumped randomly around her by these two indifferent goons, she was not nearly so sure as she had been last Wednesday that these premises would cast a spell of magic over her. If she was enchanted, it was by the law of inertia. She thought of the job Greg had had two summers before, pacing jerkily back and forth in front of a movie theater dressed up as a mechanical toy, with a huge wind-up key sticking out of his back, moving his lips with metallic precision in sync with a recorded teaser for that week’s show being barfed from a loudspeaker in his stovepipe hat. Back and forth, back and forth, with joints on toggle pins. She watched him sometimes, amazed by the metronomic inevitability of his actions. He said he used to become hypnotized by the repetitious movements and became convinced that he was wound up, that he worked on a coil spring. Oh, damn his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  THE black man lowered to the living room floor her open box of kitchen utensils with the C. S. Bell Model 2 (2MC) hand grain grinder visible on top. Having set the box down, he looked at the gadget and slowly shook his head. She felt embarrassed. She hadn’t used the stupid thing for three years. Why had she kept it?

  She asked if he’d mind putting that box in the kitchen.

  He looked at her and, again, slowly shook his head. Meaning, apparently, yes, he did mind. But he moved the box.

  * * *

  —

  A HUGE head—there was a small pudding of a face in the middle of it—leaned away from the jamb.

  “Moving in?”

  As if by reflex, Elaine stepped toward the door, full of the need to block the path of anyone capable of a gloppy opener like that one. A whole body was now framed there: of a compact little lady in a mauve velvet bathrobe and fuzzy green slippers, her head grossly swollen by a mass of curlers bunched under a pink paisley scarf she was wearing, tied at the nape. The colors!

  “Where have you come from, dearie?”

  Elaine ignored the question and snappishly said, “Mind stepping back and letting the animals through?”

  With an “Oops, par’ me,” the lady stepped forward, right by Elaine, well into the room, and Elliott Gould loomed past with a sharp sound of inhaling.

  “Always wanted to see the second-floor-back,” the lady said, her fast black eyes shrewdly appraising Elaine’s belongings, then lightly dusting baseboards and windowsills. Her eyebrows did a brief waltz when her glance landed on the three Henrys. “We had such an offish genmun living in here before. A quick slammer. He kept a real fast door, I’m telling you. They said he worked at Kelly and Newhouse. The morticians? I’m so glad you’ve come. Seriously, honey”—she was very sweet, she wasn’t going to be satisfied with wiseass answers—“where’d you come from? I see the van has Ohio, Pennsy, and Jersey licenses.”

  Oh, God.

  At once Elaine wondered whether she had said it out loud. Her hopes for pause, for a sealed place, for modulation, were crashing around her.

  The black man was saying, “Where does this, uhn this…this…” He couldn’t bring himself to give a name to her Kovacs lamp: milk-glass globe on an overarching chrome arm.

  “In the bedroom…. I’ve come from Beantown.”

  The lady lowered her eyelids discreetly in the face of such an obvious lie. Then she looked straight at Elaine and said, “Look, honey, I’m getting in your hair. I’m Mary Calovatto. I live in the front. I…I picked a poor time…”

  “No no no. Be my guest. No. Truthfully. I’ve come from Philly.”

  “You can’t tell what to believe these days,” the lady said, a bit too openly pleased that Elaine’s guard had dropped for a moment. “What brought you to New Haven?”

  “I couldn’t really tell you.”

  “What work do you do?”

  “Christ, Mrs. uh—”

  “Calovatto.”

  “Calovatto.” Elaine could find nothing more to say.

  The swarthy lips were pressed somewhat tightly together, forming little ciliated pleats of hurt. “I just—They don’t have a Welcome Wagon around here. I thought you’d—. There are things you should know.”

  Elaine, feeling brutish, did her best to look receptive.

  Mrs. Calovatto checked to make sure the movers were both out of earshot. “The janitor. You have to get your lock changed. The janitor—you can’t imagine him. The thing is, he has a master key. It’s routine they give him a master key.”

  “Thank you. And now—”

  “Oh, honey, don’t take it so hard. We all have to make a move once in a while.”

  The next thing Elaine knew, she was in the arms of this Mrs. Calovatto, picking up powerful whiffs of garlic as she caught her breath between sobs.

  * * *

  —

  “I JUST drove off,” she told Mary Calovatto over coffee in the Calovattos’ kitchen. On the wall facing Elaine there was a blue-toned litho of Jesus in a long nightgown, holding a shepherd’s crook. “I didn’t even tell him I was leaving. I took his MG—it was his father’s MG—and went to the bank and drew out five hundred dollars, and then I took off. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. Oooh, I felt bad. The top was all torn, so it had to be down. My hair was whipping around. When I got to the Lincoln Tunnel, they stopped me at the toll booth. All these photographers started taking pictures of me. Flash bulbs. Microphones. Like I was a pop star. They said I was the ten millionth car to go through the tunnel. A reporter asked me where I was going. I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ and burst into tears. I looked in the papers the next day, I bought early and late editions, but I never found the story. I didn’t guess the Times would carry it, bu
t I thought for sure it would be in the Daily News and the Post.”

  “What did you do with the car?”

  “Oh, shit, he activated his parents’ lawyers. Don’t worry, he got his heap back.”

  “But you got your things, too,” Mrs. Calovatto said with some satisfaction, dipping her mound of curlers toward the apartment next door.

  “You bet your butt I did. And some of his, too.”

  “What made you pick New Haven?”

  “God knows. Clean slate. I have a couple pretty good friends here.”

  “Yale?” Mrs. Calovatto looked as if she did not really want an answer to that question.

  “Sort of. One of them’s a researcher for a linguistics prof. One of them’s a graduate student. They’re not that good friends. I don’t have any really good friends.” Elaine tricked out a wan smile. “Except you.”

  For a second Mrs. Calovatto looked as if she might faint.

  * * *

  —

  FOR two days Elaine puttered around the apartment and went out for walks, to get the lay of the neighborhood. She had had no idea, rooting and tooting here and there with the real-estate lady, that she had landed in such a fine part of town. She walked round and round the wooded square; sycamores and oaks and maples and a few surviving elms were putting out their first yellow-green fists over a statue of Christopher Columbus, who held a globe in one hand and a navigator’s dividers in the other, and who was surprisingly thin; for some reason she had always pictured Columbus as a great tubful of pasta. The houses on the square were gems. Her eyes lighted on a concave mansard roof with patterned slate between its dormers and with an iron-work balustrade hemming in the aerials. A lazy dozing giant of yearning turned over in Elaine when she thought of the craftsmanship that had gone into that roof; she had used to lean over her drawing board, confident of her spatial taste, dreaming up dymaxion love nests, pyramids of expanded perception, environments open to universal loops. All those visions were slack in her now. She hated her half-heartedness. But a spirit of mischief perked up in her as she saw clues to envy and vanity in these houses with proud historic-district plaques by their front doors: one portico with modest Doric columns, the next with stately Ionian, a third with triumphant, down-putting Corinthian. What total culture! Besides all that Greek Revival, she ticked off an English Regency canopy porch, Art Deco windows, Queen Anne embroidered brickwork, a Norman turret, a New Orleans cast-iron balcony, and an Italian Renaissance church with a little dome like a glans at the top of its tower. Across the square from her apartment was a wing of a modern school building, designed with tact so that its low façade along the square carried out the motif of adjoining classical porches. She walked through the school grounds. There were ringing sounds of recess. Girls shrieked under a basketball hoop. Groups of boys conspired in satiny windbreakers with cursive hot-colored letters on the backs: Warheads, Shafters, Zuks. Attached to the school was a senior citizens’ center. Some elderly men, speaking thick Napoletano, were playing bocce on a court. She walked beyond into a zone of cobwebs and mildew. Houses wore tarpaper shingles. Autos parked on the street had American flags on their aerials; a stripped-down carcass of a car squatted in a rubbled lot. Men were gathered on a double-house stoop, laughing loud, in sleeveless undershirts, their tattoos exposed. Worn-out women were on another porch, inclining their heads to each other, whispering. A dog barked in every dooryard.