The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson Page B

the afternoon sunlight the great living-room was shadowy and cool. Far away, down the length of the room, the grand piano stood unvibrating, quiet. Tod, going past heavy armchairs and stiff embroidered chairs and small round tables with curved feet and large flat tables with lamps on them, stood finally next to the piano, where he saw his face reflected in the sleek blackness. He put one elbow on the piano and looked down on the piano bench, and said, barely aloud, “
She
plays this. It’s their piano.”
    He thought of Mrs. Desmond, tall and pale in a long dress, sitting on the piano bench playing the piano, and he walked around and knelt one leg on the piano bench and pressed his fingers down on the keys, gently, but without sound. He kept his fingers down for a minute, looking at the way the keys slid smoothly together, the black keys fitting exactly into the white keys, each capable of independent movement, but tightly put together. Then he turned and went back down the living-room, stopping for a minute to look down at a chair which was dark red and big and comfortable, and had Mr. Desmond’s pipe in the ashtray next to it.
    He began to whistle softly and tonelessly as he went back through the dining-room into the kitchen, clean and breath-takingly white. He saw his face again in the toaster, but not on the kitchen table, although it was white and shone in the sunlight. Pretty dishes stood in a long row on a shelf along one side of the Desmond kitchen, yellow-trimmed dishtowels hung neatly on a rack. Tod took down one of the dishes, still whistling, and turned it over to see the back; the lettering there had been almost washed off, but he made out something that seemed to say “fine china.”
    There was a yellow square in the linoleum floor for every green one, a green one for every white one, a white one for every brown one. Caroline’s high chair stood back against the wall; it was white like everything else, and lined with yellow oilcloth. Caroline eats here, too, Tod thought. He looked around and assigned the chair next to the toaster to Mrs. Desmond, the one across to Mr. Desmond, the third to Johnny Desmond. Mrs. Desmond has to make the toast, he thought, Mr. Desmond probably likes toast.
    He came back again through the dining-room into the long hallway which ran through the whole house; he had realized vaguely that the Desmond house was all on one floor without any upstairs, but still it gave him a queer shock to open the first door past the dining-room and find it was Johnny Desmond’s bedroom; he knew it was Johnny’s because Johnny’s clothes were on the chair and in the closet, and a bookcase in the room held schoolbooks and adventure stories labeled “John Desmond Jr.” When he closed the door behind him he looked down at the doorway leading to the dining-room and said, “You can eat and then go to bed right next door.”
    The door across the hall took him into a handsome study, where there were deep red leather chairs and a long clear desk. “Old man Desmond,” Tod said, and closed the door without going in. On his way down the hall he found two bathrooms; the Donalds had two bathrooms, but they were on different floors.
    He was whistling again as he reached the last doors in the hall; his whistling was still very soft, but it had acquired a tune to which Tod knew the words: “There she goes, there she goes, all dressed up in her Sunday clothes.”
    There were three doors still unopened at the end of the hall; Tod opened the first door and then stood wide-eyed, his whistling checked for a minute before it began again. The room inside was Mrs. Desmond’s bedroom, and it was so pretty that even the presence of Mrs. Desmond would have been superfluous. The pale green curtains were moving gently at the window, and the mirrors all over the room showed the movements over and over again, a faint green stirring, so that the stillness of the pale