Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “No,” he said, knowing she was right. “Someday—”

  “ ‘Someday my prince will come,’” she said, half singing the words, and laughed harshly. Then she put her hands over her face. “You’re making me look so stupidl You’d better go home, or pretty soon I’ll never be able to speak to you again.”

  She stood up, to show she really meant it. “And what did you tell Susie Davis last week when you went to her house? Did you tell her to be careful or something?” She went quickly to the hall closet and came back with his coat. “Sometimes you’re so damned irritating,” she said forgivingly.

  He kissed her, and she leaned against him. “Why should I feel this way about a boy?” she said. “Somebody please tell me.”

  “You’re so pretty,” he said.

  “So pretty you can hardly stand it.”

  “Now don’t get like that again,” he said, and tried to kiss her, but she turned her face away. His lips touched her ear, and it was cool and crisp. He ached down below; maybe the laughing, abandoned girl with no name would come to him tonight and relieve him of this care, this bottleneck. Lois kissed him and they said good night. He walked out into the clear frozen air, zero, windless. The snow cracked under his heels. Past several blocks of the muffled houses, late lights in odd windows, he came to High Street and climbed toward the huge house with its towers and domes. As he approached he saw, high up in Kate’s tower, a yellow light that hollowed the little room. He stopped, wondering if Kate had left the light on by mistake. But then a shadow grew up the wall and disappeared. It must be cold up there, but Kate, burning as she always was with some vivid project of her imagination, probably wouldn’t feel the cold at all. To be pretty-too pretty—and not give the time to self-protection…what did he fear for Kate? He was sad because they couldn’t talk, and he couldn’t warn her of the bandits and thieves, the gross appetites that would soon yawn for her.

  8

  When Kate came up the steep, narrow stairs—so steep they were almost a ladder—the trap door was open and the old bridge lamp was on. The electric heater was plugged in, and its copper eye glowed warmly in the chilly room. She put down her pillow, blanket and the basin and sat on the floor in front of the copper light. It was almost eleven. Horace was asleep in his room with the light on, and her mother and father had just gone to bed. Wood wasn’t home yet, and she considered his seeing the tower light when he came up High Street, but then decided that it didn’t really matter if he did. He might at first think she had left the light on by mistake, but if he came to the bottom of the stairs and heard any sort of noise, she was fairly sure he would go away and mind his own business.

  The only furniture in the room besides the lamp was a doll-sized bureau she had once brought up, with David’s help, from the old nursery. In the bottom drawer of this she had put the Mason jar of whiskey and two juice glasses. All right, she thought, here we go, three sheets to the wind! It was scary. What would this whiskey, this drug, do to her? Would she see with new sight? If she got terribly drunk, how would she get back down the stairs? She would have to sober off right here. With this thought, that she would be trapped by her addled brain on this high platform, she felt a twinge of vertigo, and put her palms flat on the varnished floor.

  But David would be here to help her, if that became absolutely necessary. She heard him on the stairs, and soon his head appeared at the trap door. “Wood isn’t home yet,” he said.

  “I don’t think he’d butt in, though, do you?”

  David hadn’t climbed the rest of the way in, and now his head seemed to be sitting on the floor like a flowerpot. He looked quizzically at her. His blond hair, she thought, was cut like hers would be if she were a boy. If she had been a boy she would have been just like David, and if he had been a girl he would have been just like her. This was something she intended to suggest to him, even though she knew it might make him angry, because no boy wanted to be considered a girl in any way at all.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. He tossed the seat cushion from his easy chair up onto the floor and climbed in. “Your cigarettes, madame.” He tossed the old pack of Chesterfields to her. “Your ashtray. Matches. I see you brought the emergency vomit basin.” He shut the trap door and placed his cushion on it. He wore his old sheepskin jacket that had dried blood and grease all around the cuffs, and in that dirty, rough old thing his hands and face seemed almost too clean and bright.

  “Wood wouldn’t approve of this experiment, though,” she said.

  “Well, it’s more or less in controlled circumstances. He might approve of that part.”

  “He’s all right, though.”

  “Wood the Good,” David said, smiling.

  “I don’t really know him very well, Davy. You know that?”

  “Do you know anybody better?”

  “You, Davy.”

  “Really?” he said. “You think so?” He didn’t seem to be offended by this; he just sat there, wondering.

  She lit one of the cigarettes and blew the smoke out of her mouth.

  “Don’t you inhale?” he said. “You know what F. P. Adams calls women who smoke but don’t inhale? He calls them ‘phoofs,’ or something like that.”

  “I don’t smoke in public,” she said, which seemed to be the answer to that.

  “I don’t know anybody very well,” he said, frowning. “Not that it bothers me too much. Hey, how about the experiment? You got your stolen booze up here?”

  “I’m kind of scared,” she admitted, but she reached over and got the Mason jar and juice glasses out of the dolls’ bureau. Her hands were shaking. “I’m going to spill a little,” she said as she pried open the wire clasp. “You want to pour?” He poured two glasses, spilling a little. Fumes filled the little room.

  “Don’t light a match,” he said.

  “Really?” She looked up at him, startled, and saw that he was kidding. “Don’t do that, Davy. I’m nervous enough already.” She showed him her cigarette. “I thought for a second we’d be blown to kingdom come.”

  “This’ll just blow the back of your head off,” he said. “Cheers!” He took a little sip, grimaced and shivered.

  She put her mouth on the little glass, and it burned her lips. It smelled awful. “I wish it tasted better. I hate it,” she said. It was sweetish, and as she tried to swallow, it seemed to eat her, to go right through the membranes of her throat and come out of her skin. “Agh!”

  “It won’t work until you’ve had at least a glass of it,” David said. “Mark where the V basin is, just in case, and toss it down.”

  She did, and the chemicals boiled and burned inside her. Fumes even came out her nose. Finally she got a breath. “It’s real, anyway,” she said. “Now that’s what I call real.” She felt older, all of a sudden. A moment, or a year, or a whole age seemed to go click, and she had passed a marker of some kind. “I can feel it already,” she said. “Can you feel it, Davy?” She took her first long breath, and the air itself tasted sweetly chemical.

  “Just the taste,” he said.

  “It’s supposed to make you different, I know.” She felt different, but she wasn’t sure it was the alcohol. “Should I have some more yet?”

  He poured her another glass. “I’ll just nurse this first one along,” he said, “in case you decide to throw yourself from the window.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “Well, let me know if you decide to, so I can grab you by the foot or something.” He laughed, took another sip and shivered again. “We ought to put the cover on the jar when we aren’t pouring, so the alcohol won’t evaporate.” He did this.

  Her cigarette tasted bad, so she put it out. When she moved her leg, the joint of her knee seemed to be full of molasses, and yet it was a lazy, pleasant feeling. Her elbows felt that way too. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to feel good,” she said.

  “Don’t drink too fast or you’ll get sick right away,” David said. He sat across from her, perched on his cushion, looki
ng at her interestedly.

  “Oh me, oh my, oh me, oh my!” she said. “I can feel it, Davy. It’s creeping all through my bones and up my nerves. Wow! The room looks different already.”

  “You know that alcohol is really a depressant?” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A depressant. It depresses you, I guess.”

  “It’s not depressing me. I feel sort of good, except for the puky taste in my mouth.”

  “What I think it does,” he said, “is depress your modesty or embarrassment or something like that, so you act freer. Something like that, anyway. Mr. Collins told us that in general science. He used another word for what it depresses, but I can’t remember it.”

  “I wonder if it’s depressing my modesty. I don’t feel like doing a striptease, or anything,” she said.

  “Not in front of me, maybe, but—”

  “Ridiculous!” She giggled, hearing the funny sounds come from her own head. “I still don’t know if I’m just thinking myself into feeling funny, though.”

  “That stuff you’re drinking is the real McCoy, Katie. It’s got to have some effect.”

  “‘Old Post-Mortem,’ Dad called it,” she said. “What does that mean, Davy?”

  “After death. In detective stories it means to examine the corpse after death, to see what it died of.”

  “That’s a great name.”

  “Maybe they call it ‘P.M.,’ meaning afternoon, like you should start drinking it in the afternoon. I don’t know.”

  “Dad doesn’t start till around five.”

  “I think you’re sobering off,” David said, and poured some more of the whiskey into their juice glasses. Its very color, amber, seemed official and powerful. Adult. Not anything like the primary colors of childhood.

  “I’m kind of filled up already,” she said. The whiskey seemed to sit, steaming, right at the brim of her throat.

  “Well, it ought to be working. You’ve had maybe four ounces.”

  She went to lean back against the wall, and bumped her head on the window sill. “Owl That’s dangerous. I didn’t know the wall was that close. Now I am a little scared.” She remembered that she had taken several sips without really thinking that it was whiskey, that ominous, experimental stuff. The brimming in her throat had gone down, and she was conscious of her spine, long and pearly, comfortable now in the warmth of her blood. Her whole lazy body was so friendly, so dependable and valuable. But then came a shiver, because she had bumped her head, hadn’t she? Or had that really happened with enough importance to have really happened? She felt no pain; it seemed cancelable, theoretical, that she had bumped her head on the sill.

  “I’m scared, Davy. But not really,” she said. He looked at her calmly. “I’m in the grip of it. It’s in my inside, holding onto me.”

  He nodded, and his bright face receded without moving, so that the room turned without turning into a huge hall, with a twenty-foot ceiling. Only David and the copper heater and she stayed the same size.

  “Oh!” she said, and put her glass down carefully—her tiny glass.

  “Do I look funny or something?” David asked. They were little children, sitting huddled and small in the great high room, with the frost creeping up the tall windows pane by pane.

  “My tower,” she said, looking up into its vastness. The rafters came together at the center of the peak, like the hub of a wheel big as the sky.

  “Sally calls these things minarets,” David said.

  “No, they’re not minarets. They’re square,” she said, impressed by her logic. “Do you ever go into yours, Davy?”

  “Sometimes I shoot crows—shoot at crows, I mean—out the windows. I used to, I mean, when I could get CBs. Shorts make too much noise. And I can’t even get shorts any more. You’ve got to go into the service to get ammunition these days.”

  “You?” Little David, who seemed her age.

  “I’ll be sixteen next week,” he said. “In a year I could join the Navy. Maybe by then they’ll be taking seventeen-year-olds in the Army, who knows?”

  “Oh, a year.” But as she said it, a year changed from forever to a very short time, no time at all.

  “Wood, for instance,” David said seriously. “He’s just eighteen, and—”

  “How can Wood go, Davy?”

  “There’s a war on,” he said, and she saw him brace proudly, braggingly, to show her that he was a man. “Look at everybody we know who’s gone into it. Peggy’s father—”

  “But he’s grown-up.”

  “Gordon Ward, Eddie Kusacs-”

  “Ugh. Gordon Ward. I hate him.” The tower room had sneakily returned to its proper size. “Anyway, he’s pretty old.”

  “Wood’s age,” David admitted.

  “Did you ever know him very well, Davy?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I think he kind of liked me, for some reason.”

  She reached down for her glass and spilled it onto the blanket, all of it. The whiskey ran lightly over the fuzz, as though it spurned the blanket, and then all at once it was sucked into the cloth.

  “That’s going to smell,” David said. “What’ll we do about that?”

  “Oh, what the hell,” she said. “If we’re going to get drunk. I can leave this old blanket up here—Hank won’t notice it’s gone.”

  “You’re feeling it, all right. Maybe you’re getting too brave.”

  “I’ve always been pretty brave,” she said. What the hell? It was true. David sat there pretending to be so calm, so neatly self-sufficient, and she wanted to use her bravery on him, to crack him open a little. Not to hurt him, but why should he sit there being so observant, and her like a little bug on a pin? A pug on a bin? Strange.

  “Tell me a secret, Davy.”

  “What secret?” He smiled at her, a big-brother smile.

  “Tell me about your secret love life. I know you’ve got a crush on Carol Oakes.”

  “Me?” He blushed a little. She saw that!

  “What do you see in her, anyway? She’s sort of rabbity. Sort of…mousery. All she has are those two big things in front.” This shook him a little.

  “This experiment’s on you, not me,” he said.

  “I can tell by the way you danced with her. You didn’t dare squeeze her. I could tell.” She heard herself laughing, and listened carefully, interestedly.

  “If you’re going to laugh, laugh,” David said.

  “Fime gonna what?”

  “Laugh.”

  “Don’t change the subject. If you tell me exactly what you see in Carol Oakes, I’ll tell you all about Wayne Facieux.”

  “Wayne Facieux?” he said incredulously, which she resented. “That meatball? That creep?”

  “He’s sensitive—”

  “He’s sort of a girl, if you ask me.”

  Now she saw that he really had a crush on Carol Oakes, who was dull and totally unworthy of him. Carol Oakes never said anything except to answer somebody else. She just washed herself carefully and brushed her hair and came to school to write the usual answers in nice round, soft, gooey handwriting. It was ridiculous. All she had was that fabulous set of jugs. But Wayne, with his pale thin arms, and bones sticking out behind his ears, and the slight, distinguished stoop to his shoulders, and his gold-rimmed glasses—rimmed only around the tops. Among the other boys, he was delicate, like a prince. He used big words unashamedly, and wrote poetry for The Quill. “Garish,” he said quite often. “That’s really garish.” About him a whole atmosphere moved, of culture and wit. He liked to talk to girls, and he had recommended her to be an editor of The Quill next year, when she would be in senior high.

  “What do you see in him, anyway?” David asked. She blinked, and each time her eyes opened, his face had moved an inch to the left. It seemed a nasty trick on his part.

  “All right!” she said, feeling anger. “I’ll tell you! There’s something sneaky about all you boys. You’re bullies, and you’re always trying to take advantage of a girl. You moon aro
und, maybe, but once you get hold! Sneaky and smirky, and when you get a girl like Susie Davis the way you want her, you all…pile on…and then make your dirty jokes about her, and tell all about it as if you’re great and she’s just a piece of—”

  “Hey! Whoa, Katie!”

  “Whoa? What am I, some kind of a horse?”

  “We already got a Horse.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Now, in her anger, the room grew intolerably small, and she was a big red creature, heated and cramped; her head pressed the ceiling and in a gulp she breathed all the air there was. “Oh!” she said.

  “Don’t get all upset, Katie,” David said.

  “Upset!”

  “Yeah, huh?”

  Then she was calmer, and David wasn’t so bad. “Davy, I don’t necessarily mean you, you know. But I suppose you’re more or less the same as all of them.” Oh, what the hell, she thought. “But all girls do is talk about boys. That’s all we think about, do you know that? You don’t have to settle for a little cuddlebunny like Carol Oakes, do you know that?”

  “I’m not ‘settling’ for her, Katie. I hardly even talk to her. She’s just-”

  “A body.”

  “I guess so. Nice body,” he said seriously. “To tell the truth, it’s her waist I like, for some reason, not the most obvious parts. She gets me.”

  She laughed, resenting this dissection of a girl. “What do boys talk about when they talk about girls? Things like that?”

  “Yes. You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Nobody’s going to talk about me like that!”

  “Well, you’re pretty all over. You kind of stun them, if you want to know the truth.”

  “A freak.”

  “That doesn’t please you, does it?” he said.

  “It gets tiresome. I can’t know anybody. Really.” But she wondered how much it did displease her. She liked her body. She liked to look at herself in the mirror on her closet door. She had to admit that.

  “What words do they use?” she said.

  “Words?” he pretended to ask.

  “You know what I mean. What words do they use for parts of girls? Come on, tell me.”