Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “Will you get me some wood, dear?” she said. “And call them for supper?”

  When he stood up she kept her hand on him, to guide him a little, and he knew it; she was afraid he would touch the stove.

  “You’ve got a bad bump on the back of your head. Where did that come from?”

  “I backed into a tree outside,” he said. He had long ago given up trying to explain his accidents in any rational way. He merely told the truth, or part of it.

  “But why would you back into a tree?” She did care, he knew; her voice grew breathy, and her large eyes moved back and forth as though asking him “Why?”

  He shrugged, wondering, now he thought of it, if he might have got that bump from the underside of his father’s table.

  “Oh, Horace,” she said, and turned away.

  He went out into the unheated shed to get the wood, an armful of split ash that he picked up all at once. He didn’t bother to pile it a stick at a time into his arm, and so he skinned his knuckles, trying to worm his hand through the splintery pile. He came back into the heat and let the wood rumble into the woodbox.

  “Don’t shut the cover!” his mother said quickly, and then he saw that the wood came over the top of the woodbox so that the cover wouldn’t have been able to close tight. But he wouldn’t have broken the hinges; he knew he wouldn’t have insisted that the cover close all the way.

  “I wouldn’t break it,” he said, feeling self-pity clog his voice.

  “I know you wouldn’t mean to, dear. I know that.” She turned her back to him and made precise adjustments of the pile of napkins and silverware.

  “Tell them to get ready,” his mother said.

  He went up the narrow back stairs that turned so that his shoulders rubbed the wallpaper. This part of the house was dark and narrow, made originally for servants. Sometimes they had a sort of servant, Peggy Mudd, a girl Kate’s age who lived most of the time with her mother in the old sugarhouse up in the woods. Sometimes Peggy stayed over with them, and Horace liked that, because he liked her very much. She was dark and bony, and his father said she was ugly as sin. He wished she were here now, so that he could knock on her door and ask her to get ready for supper, the way she usually knocked on his door and asked him to get ready for supper. She usually wore some dress he had seen on Kate, and on Peggy the dress would turn homely and easy.

  He went through the empty servants’ rooms, carefully turning on wall switches that let him go in light across a room or down the hall; then, at the end, he turned on one switch at the same time he snapped off another, so that they made the same sound, and his path was lighted but his back trail dark. This part of the house was unheated, and beneath the old red carpeting, the floors creaked as he walked.

  Then he came through a door into the part of the second floor where everything was larger, and the first door on the left was Kate’s. She was thirteen, barely, but he had never said to her, “You’re only thirteen, and I’m fourteen.” Her door was closed, and he knocked.

  “Who is it?” she said angrily from deep inside somewhere.

  “It’s Horace. Supper’s nearly ready.”

  “Don’t come in, Horsie! Do not enter!”

  “Well, supper’s nearly ready.”

  “Thanks for the great news. Now take a powder.”

  “I don’t care what you’re doing!” he shouted at the varnished door. She didn’t answer, and he went on to David’s door.

  He hit the door with his fist, once, and yelled, “Supper’s ready!”

  David, as usual, surprised him. The door opened immediately and David’s face was right next to his—on it a mock expression of horror and surprise.

  “A horse. My God, a horse!” David said. And then he made his voice small and strangled as he shouted this news. He sounded far away. “There’s a horse in the hall! Everybody! Believe me! Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Supper’s ready,” Horace said. He began to turn away, intending to go on to Wood’s room, but his eyes began to sting, and suddenly, hardly knowing that he was doing it, he swung his arm back violently in a raking blow aimed at David, at the door and everything in general. Not really aimed; David couldn’t be hit. His hand smashed into the doorframe, turned cold and dropped to his side.

  “Hey!” David said seriously. “What the hell’s the matter now?”

  “Shut up!” His hand began to hurt badly, but he wouldn’t try to flex it. He walked away, seeing pain in the form of little streaks of light, and beyond the pain he imagined David’s smooth, confident face, his superior, aristocratic nose and neat blond hair, his square chin that was delicate without being weak. He admired and sometimes feared David, the way a large animal might fear a smaller and more agile one. He could never keep David in focus, never knew quite what David’s face signified, or where his hands were.

  “Hey, Horse,” David said, coming up behind him. “Hey, old Hoss, now. Didn’t mean to get you all het up.”

  “Shut up. I hate you.” Horace still walked away.

  David said, “Aw, come on, now. Hey, Horace? Is the Whip going to eat with us?”

  Horace wouldn’t answer, and he heard David go back into his room.

  When he knocked on Wood’s door, Wood said “Come in,” in a formal, deep voice. Horace opened the door to find him sitting at his desk, reading. Wood was eighteen, and he looked up with a bland, polite expression on his dark, handsome face.

  “Come in, Horace,” he said. Along the side of the long room hung some black, wooden airplane models he had made for the armed services, and hadn’t yet given to the high-school shop teacher to send away. They would be used to teach servicemen aircraft identification. Wood had graduated from high school and was going into the Army anytime now.

  “Please be careful,” he said, then slowly frowned as he looked at Horace’s face. He tapped his pipe on the heel of his hand and let the ashes slide neatly into his big ashtray. “That money business bothering you?”

  Horace shook his head, then nodded. He loved Wood, and any expression of concern on Wood’s austere face made him want to cry. Wood was bigger than his father, and he never got excited or made wisecracks. He thought carefully and spoke slowly. It was Wood Horace cried out for sometimes in the night, and it was Wood who, coming with strength and justice into Horace’s room, could banish the dark shapes and let him be tired enough to sleep.

  Wood looked at him steadily for a moment, and then said “Sit down,” pointing to his deep easy chair.

  “Supper’s ready.”

  “Well, sit down for a minute anyway. Kate’s got to set the table, hasn’t she?”

  “She hasn’t set it yet.”

  “Is the Whip going to eat with us?”

  “I don’t know. I got the aspirin and he cursed me!” These words in a rush, with some tears.

  “I know,” Wood said.

  “I tripped over the elephant leg, and all David’s old marbles rolled out!”

  “Why do you trip all the time, though?” Wood asked the old question as though he really wanted to know. This time he really seemed as though he wanted to know, and because Horace wanted to tell Wood, but had no answer, he felt the skin of his face congeal, his jaw stiffen with pain. He looked; his eyes received Wood, the room, Wood’s trophies and pictures on the walls. His brother waited for an answer. “Uh,” Horace said. “I. Oh!”

  Wood waited calmly, but Horace couldn’t speak. He tried, but from his frozen jaw came only another plugged, inhuman sound: “Ough!”

  “They’ll forget all about the money,” Wood said. “You’ll grow up and it will all be a thing that happened when you were a kid.” Wood put his pipe in his circular rack and stood up, brushing off his sweater and straightening the open collar of his shirt. “Come on, we’ve got to wash up.”

  Horace went first. Wood, he knew, would follow to make sure he didn’t knock anything over. Horace still couldn’t speak, and for a crazy moment by the door he felt like reaching up with his painful hand and smashin
g the airplane model that hung so delicately on three black threads. But why? he asked himself. And who was he asking? He thought he knew who he was, but none of the others would be surprised at all if he broke Wood’s airplane.

  He had reached out for the doorknob with his hurt hand, which was still half numb, and it didn’t do what he had commanded it to do—turn the big brass knob and push open the door. But his body still moved into the opening it believed would be there, and when he struck the door it felt as though someone had with vicious force slammed it against his face. His knees buckled for an instant, and then he caught himself and stood dazed, his hands flat in protest against the door panels.

  Then he heard Wood’s exclamation: “Oh, God!”

  And heard in it, with the terrible precision of understanding he was always capable of, resignation and disgust that this had happened so often and so predictably. Disgust. He scrabbled at the doorknob and got the door open, then ran down the hall to his room. As he entered the dark room and fell on the bed, the black shapes washed backwards in the force of his emotion, back into the closets, under the desk and into the odd shadows on the paneling. But they were not really dismayed; they would wait, and later, when they saw him get up to turn on the light, they would come out again.

  Henrietta Whipple was forty years old. How old she looked, she had no idea. She had a son eighteen years old, two sons who were having growing pains and a daughter who had begun to menstruate—these seemed more a measure of her age than forty. Her life had been broken up into such different parts. First was her childhood on the farm at Switches Corners, which ended with the death of her grandfather, when everything fell apart in her family and her mother brought her into town. They lived here and there—in a tenement room, over a store. Her mother was sometimes a carder in the woolen mill, sometimes a waitress, and then, finally, housekeeper for a man she slept in bed with but wasn’t married to. That was while Henrietta was in high school. Her father she could barely remember as a man who sat in the overheated kitchen at the farm in Switches Corners, who smelled bad because he had bandages, and couldn’t heal. He’d fallen drunk into the pigpen and was partly eaten by the pigs. Part of an arm, part of a leg. When he died she was a stranger at his funeral, and only years later did she begin to remember little things about him, things he’d done for her when she was four and five years old. He made her a go-devil out of a wooden box and a sled runner, and she ran it down the crust through the buried kitchen garden, through the yellow stalks that stuck up through little round holes in the ice. Once he’d made her a willow whistle that blew like to pierce her eardrums, and a week later it was all dried up and split down past the hole.

  Another part of her life began when she quit high school at sixteen and went to work in order to get out of the house her mother lived in. She didn’t want to quit high school, but she had to get out of that house, and she would always do what she had to do. It was an awful time. Because she wanted to stay in high school so badly she would put up with nearly anything.

  They had lived with Harry Pedigree in his farmhouse on Back Hill, two miles out of town. He was always losing his cows when the TB inspector came, and the house was unpainted, nail-sprung, damp all the way through. It leaned. Harry Pedigree never changed his clothes, never paid his bills until the sheriff made him come to Petty Claims, where his foul mouth and shouting got him fined and talked about time and time again. His land was posted for taxes every year before he got around to redeeming it. He treated her mother like a breechy cow—like an animal that needed to be shown he was a man. Henrietta could still see his yellow teeth as he struck her mother; he seemed to want to hear the flat spank of his hand against her flesh.

  Her mother seemed so old, such an old woman then, with her hair going gray and her belly sticking out as much in front as her behind did in back. Once Henrietta came home around ten at night and found them on the cot in the room off the kitchen, all their clothes on, her mother’s black shoes with the straps, rolled blue stockings, legs blue-white like skim milk on each side of the cot, and his suspenders around his legs, his cracked ankle-high shoes with hay stuck between the heels and soles. Going it, his white hind end pumping on her mother, who just lay there with her dress up, taking it, rolling like a bladder under him.

  She knew they did it, but knowing and seeing were different.

  Sometimes her mother would agree with Henrietta that they should go away from there. But finally it became too obvious that her mother would never go away, and so she quit high school and went to work at Milledge & Cunningham, running a sewing machine. She lived at her father’s cousin’s house in Leah, and had her own room that she paid for. That was another time in her life, and lasted three years, until she was laid off when the orders didn’t come in fast enough. She was nineteen.

  Then came another time in her life, when Harvey Whipple was always after her. All he wanted to do was lay her, but she wouldn’t, and then he began to take her to the Country Club, and he took her home with him, and he took her to the Winter Carnival at his college. Finally he had to have her, so he asked her to marry him. That’s when she surprised him: she told him straight out she’d marry him if he let her finish high school. By then his tongue was hanging so far out he’d have said yes to anything. She finished high school in one year, and that was a good thing, because by graduation time she was so big with Wood they wouldn’t let her attend classes.

  Henrietta laughed out loud, startling her husband. He had rolled his chair into the dining room to his place at the round table, and sat there reading his paper.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, looking around the paper at her. “If anything’s funny around here, for Christ’s sake tell me all about it.”

  “I was just thinking how big I was at high-school graduation. If it hadn’t been for the robe, they wouldn’t have let me go to it at all.”

  “You can tell Wood he graduated from high school twice,” he said. She looked at him quickly, hoping to see some of his old humor in his face, but he grimaced as though he were embarrassed to be caught.

  “Where in hell’s Kate?” he said.

  “I sent Horace up to tell her.”

  “Horace!”

  “You ought to be nicer to him.” As she spoke she watched Harvey carefully, expecting him to try to pump himself up into a rage. She didn’t care if he did, and sometimes she caught herself deliberately goading him. Like poking a snake. But this time, in spite of his guilt, he merely looked sad and thoughtful, and said nothing. It made her sad to see him without even enough energy to yell; she knew what it meant to him to be a cripple—or part of it, anyway—because he used to be a man nobody could beat. He had to win whatever game he played, and win it fair, even giving away points. He’d been captain of the town baseball team, and co-captain of the Old Timers basketball team. When he got the ball he always did the right thing with it, smooth and quick. He’d taught her to play tennis and golf. Now he could hardly walk ten yards on crutches, and his body he’d been so proud of was getting whiter and softer. She had admired him for wanting to win, even if it did sometimes get awfully harsh before the end of the game, because she liked to win too. But he couldn’t seem to win against his ruined leg.

  He’d made good money, although he always said he didn’t. Whatever money he made always sounded like a fortune to her, though, because she’d been brought up where there wasn’t much cash money around at all, where a quarter seemed as big as a saucer. Right after they were married he sold siding, and then he bought into the insurance agency. Even after that he made a lot of money refereeing basketball and hockey games all over the state and sometimes out of it. Now he went down to his office no more than once a week, and took only his rare commissions and interest as salary. What he couldn’t do best he hardly tried at all to do. He had to sit all day at home, and yell up a storm.

  Kate appeared in the kitchen doorway, a bundle of silverware wrapped in a dishtowel swinging from her hands. She hasn’t been through what I’ve been
through, Henrietta thought. Kate was impervious to what could hurt Horace, to what could turn David silent and Wood cold with disdain. She was spoiled by her advantages. Yet with this thought came tenderness. When, and how, did you admit that your daughter was out of the ordinary? Like those mothers who could raise a deaf child and never quite know it was deaf, she had raised this almost too beautiful child without being able, most of the time, at least, to recognize its difference. Once she had heard a woman say that Kate Whipple was too pretty. There was an awe of Kate she was afraid might hurt her in some way, and it came from boys, from teachers, from mothers, from everybody. It might hurt her character. In a way it seemed monstrous that her father’s rages made no impression upon Kate, that Kate felt her power too easily. She reminded Henrietta of the little bird called a water ouzel, that could hippity hop right under water in a brook and peck at its food with the white water pouring all over it, then hop out again dry as it hopped in. There were animals like that she’d read about—fish that lived among the poisonous stings of anemones and never got hurt, mosquitoes that were born and lived right in the throats of pitcher plants, and never got eaten.

  “Hi, Hank. Hi, Whip,” Kate said, letting the dishtowel unroll upon the table with a crash. She didn’t care if this might make her father yell, just went about the setting of the table with the calm, professional look of a waitress. He didn’t yell this time, but Kate wouldn’t have cared at all if he did.