Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “Well…” He blushed. “Tits. They talk about them quite a lot.”

  “What else?”

  “The usual things.”

  “Look, Davy. If we can’t be honest—”

  “Well, you know them as well as I do,” he said, beginning to get angry.

  “What’s for down there?” she said, and now he really blushed. Though she was nervous herself, she felt triumphant over him.

  “There’s a million words for that,” he said. “But you probably know them as well as I do.”

  “No, maybe not. Girls don’t talk the way boys do. They’re different. They’re ashamed.”

  “All right. Cunt,” he said. “That’s the usual one. Can we change the subject now?”

  “My goodness. You’re all embarrassed,” she said.

  “Well, you’re a girl, after all. This whole conversation’s unnatural.” He took a sip of whiskey, and shook his head.

  “We don’t talk about boys’ parts like that. You know that? We just say he’s a real icky, he’s handsome. Like that. He’s sort of all one piece. Like Wayne—he’s not physical at all, really. Do you know what I mean, Davy? He doesn’t have to be.”

  “He’s not very physical. That I’ll agree.”

  “A girl doesn’t want some big, red, hairy boor of a muscle man like Gordon Ward, Davy.”

  “Well, some must.”

  “Maybe some, but not me.” She thought of Gordon Ward, him leaning over her and breathing on her. He wouldn’t let her go, and she began to suffocate. His big mouth latched onto her mouth and he forced her down against the greasy old seat cushions of his car. “Agh!”

  “You sick?”

  “I’m dizzy.” With Wayne it was all blues and golds, fuzzy like a cloud, and the delicate tipping of his interesting face, and the way his long white hands expressed his thoughts about the meaning of style, how it shouldn’t be garish. He meant something. Maybe he was kind of corny sometimes, but it went beyond all that too.

  “I can’t explain what I feel about Wayne, Davy.”

  “I can’t explain what Carol has, either.” Then David shook his head, as if to say “What the hell?” “I’ll tell you a secret, though, if you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

  She nodded.

  “I mean it. Will you?”

  “I promise, Davy.”

  “Because it’s really juvenile, and I know it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, sometimes I pretend my pillow is her. I hold it down next to me, around the middle. It’s like it’s full of electricity. And I’ve got a situation I think of—an imaginary situation. It’s in a jungle, and she’s…naked, lost, and I come swinging on a vine, like Tarzan. Only I’ll tell you a little secret about that jungle. It’s mine, and I had her taken there unconscious, and had all her clothes taken off just so I could come swinging in on that vine and land right beside her.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Sort of a loincloth, something like that.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Well, she’s scared, you know, but she just stands there, all naked, and I’m the boss. I can do anything I like with her.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “See? That’s kind of cruel, isn’t it?”

  “But she likes it. It’s such a strange situation she forgets all about not being supposed to, you see.”

  “You mean, you actually…?”

  “Well, it’s only imaginary,” he said. “Sometimes it’s other girls.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Other girls in my class. Some in other classes too.”

  “Who?”

  “What difference does it make?” he said. “Just about all of them.”

  “Any girls in my class?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, who?”

  “Well, Gussie Contois, for instance.”

  “Gussie Contois! My goodness! How was she?”

  “Oh, shut up!” he said, and began to laugh, leaning back against the wall. She laughed too, but a serious question remained.

  “But haven’t you ever been in love, Davy? I mean, wasn’t there ever one girl that meant everything in the world to you, so you wouldn’t go and think of seducing every girl in Leah High School?”

  “That’s funny. I used to, but not since…”

  “Not since what?”

  “Not since a couple of years ago.” He seemed embarrassed, and yet prideful. “I became a man, more or less. I mean I got so I could be a father.”

  “Oh,” she said. Now David seemed dangerously honest, and perhaps a little too composed. “That happened to me too,” she said as a kind of counterattack.

  “Really? You?” He was astonished.

  “Girls begin earlier than boys.”

  “That’s true,” he said, and now she had him at a disadvantage. But he said, “We’re growing up, Katie. We’re getting to be adults.” The way he said this, with a kind of worldly resignation, evened things up again.

  “I’m not drunk any more,” she said, but then she leaned sideways and had to put a hand out quickly. “Oops!”

  “Take it easy.” He smiled at her.

  “You hold yours pretty well,” she said, and saw that this made him proud. He took a gentlemanly, or manly, sip.

  “You haven’t tried to throw yourself from the window, anyway,” he said.

  “You know, Davy, we can’t really tell each other the truth, can we?” This was sad, all of a sudden.

  “Cheer up,” he said. “We’re pretty honest.”

  “But if I can’t be honest with you, who can I be honest with? We’re brother and sister. You’re a boy, yes, but you’re my brother, so there isn’t any of that business between us.”

  “No. It’s been known to happen, though,” he said.

  “I can’t see it. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Me, either,” he said.

  “We must be very normal,” she said. “You know what I was going to tell you, Davy? I was going to say that if I’d been a boy I’d be just like you, and if you’d been a girl you’d be just like me. But I decided not to tell you because it might make you mad.”

  He thought for a while. “I’m not mad,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a girl. Anyway, I’m glad I’m not.”

  “I don’t blame you one bit,” she said. “It’s just awfully vague, being a girl. You can’t do anything but sort of wait around and gab and pretend, while the boys do everything.”

  “We do a lot of gabbing and pretending too,” David said. “Waiting around. Waiting around.” He yawned, and looked at his watch. “You know-ow,” he said as his jaws sprung from the mammoth yawn, “this whiskey isn’t driving either of us into hysterical fits of hilarity or anything.”

  “All it does is make me dizzy,” she said. “We haven’t actually drunk much of it.” David’s head still seemed to move sneakily sideways, now that she examined it closely again, and suddenly she realized that no effort of will could stop it. She was under another power, and with this knowledge she felt slightly sick. “Oh, God, I don’t want to vomit,” she said. “I hate to vomit.” Vomiting was like dying; that convulsive stretch had always frightened her. It seemed too final, as though her neck might split. But David’s head kept moving and being in the same place, moving and being back, even in between the tiniest of little blinks.

  “Stop your head,” she said. He smiled, but at first it had seemed reasonable to her.

  “Head is stopped,” he said, as if answering an order.

  “Oh, Davy! Everything’s going haywire. Don’t look!” She leaned over the basin, holding her hair out of the way with both hands, but nothing happened. “God, I’ll fall in it, next,” she said.

  “Come on, Katie,” David said, and touched her. “Let’s get down the stairs. Moving around might help. I know it helped me. Come on.”

  “Okay,” she said. A whisper of a belch fled past her t
eeth. “Ulg!” she heard from her throat, but it was nothing she had uttered.

  “We’ll go into the servants’ quarters and walk up and down. Nobody’ll hear us in there.”

  They made it down the stairs, David holding her by one armpit and more or less lowering her down, she thinking very deliberately which foot to put down next. Then she leaned against the cool woodwork while David went back to turn off the light and the copper heater. He came back lightly, quickly, and they slipped down the main upstairs hall and into the servants’ quarters, where everything was a little smaller and plainer, where the old musty red carpets sometimes made her sneeze. David took her arm and walked her up and down the hall between Peggy’s room and the hall door, back and forth until she stopped feeling like vomiting. Then she was very tired, and stopped to lean against the wallpaper, which felt grainy and warm against her forehead, like a book.

  “Thanks, Davy,” she said. “It was a great experiment.”

  “You all right now, Katie?”

  “Yup, yup. You go on to bed. I’ll be all right.”

  “In the morning you’ll have the flapping hoo-hoos,” he said, and turned to go. She turned her head and looked at him, one eye closed. He seemed to walk straight enough.

  “Thanks for your secrets, Davy,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” he answered. “Good night.”

  “Good night, good night,” she said, and he was gone. As the door closed at the end of the hall, her drunkenness changed again, and she wandered almost disembodied through the servants’ quarters, through the ghosts of servants. There was Peggy’s room, the bed made up neatly but nothing of Peggy’s in the little room to show that she had ever slept there. A room poor Peggy didn’t dare believe she could deserve.

  Once she had been mean to Peggy—said something she couldn’t even remember, that made Peggy cry and run home. Home? That awful wet shack up in the woods. That was where Peggy slept now, on that old cot with no sheets, among oil fumes and sour clothes smells, and the smell of feet, the smell of poor people. Maybe her mother wasn’t even there, and Peggy slept alone in that grimy place. How could she stand it? Even here in this house Kate knew that a little eye of fear waited to wink at the back of her neck, because of the dark rooms yawning off the hallway. But why had she been mean to Peggy? She remembered only the tiny bite of pleasure it had given her. And then she felt terrible, and followed Peggy up through the woods, sneaked up and looked in the grayish window with the cracked pane and one pane filled with a flattened Campbell’s Pork and Beans can. Peggy lay face down on her cot, and there was a little line of dirt on her leg in back of her knee—little dots and dashes of dirt where the skin folded when you knelt.

  Now she felt so sorry for Peggy, who should have been in this neat room, she almost cried, then cut it off deliberately. If she were so damned sorry for Peggy she shouldn’t stand around drunken and stupid, she ought to do something about it. But what?

  “I am nice to Peggy,” she said, and switched off the light. The sudden darkness, even though she had caused it herself, took on the authority of an event, an accident not accidental—a black answer to her voice. The eye of fear winked, and she ran silently down the hall and out of the servants’ quarters. David had left one hall light on—the lamp on the marble-topped table. She went to her room, switched her lights on, came back to turn the hall lamp off, then ran softly back to her room.

  Now her own room seemed strange, juvenile. The chintz frills on her dressing table, Jonquil the teddy bear, the carefully arranged mirror system (closet door behind dressing-table minor, hand mirror for profiles), the pink bows around the lamp bases, the baby-blue glass kitty cat with red collar and silver bell. It seemed years since she had enjoyed this room. Tomorrow she would go to another style. To hell with Veronica Lake.

  She fell across her bed, partly as a dramatic gesture, but mostly from real weariness. Oh, God, she had to go to the bathroom, to enter the hall again in the witching hour; it was nearly three o’clock. She would have to. Click, she thought, click on the indifference to what is not clear, to what hides in puzzles and in the dark. Then it would be all right. It would be like David with dogs—he just held out his hand as if to say “Here, bite it if you want,” and they never did. All right, move.

  Later, when she lay in bed, her lights off, with no further reason not to enter sleep, she held sleep away. Or was she still under the power of another force? No, not really, but how could she be sure? Could she be sure in this darkness? She had been taken, under the influence of some powerful but harmless drug, by the impersonal hands of Punjab servants, eunuchs, Nubian slaves, to a dhow that sailed under warm foreign stars. They had prepared her, washed and anointed her naked body, and left her among the soft jungle ferns to wake. Would she be afraid to waken to the young god who came for her? Wayne? No. Wait a minute; this was David’s jungle, now borrowed, because it couldn’t be David. That would be a strange thing. That would be too weird, even in this warm trance, with the ferns like the fingers of hands smoothing her down. And yet David was a man now and could presumably make those brutish grinning motions she had seen dogs make, and do that on a girl. No, it would not be her who waited, afraid, grateful, a sacrifice to her brother. It would be Carol Oakes, with her rich auburn hair and full white breasts. She would wake before him. And now he lets fall his loincloth, and takes her all bare against him. He is inside her now, inside that soft white girl, his blood and skin deep in the dark middle of her. Then the business of the grinning dogs.

  It all seemed so unsafe, so precarious. Not as though all of them—Wood, Horace, Hank, Whip, David, Peggy—were deliberately irresponsible. It was a force, and they couldn’t stop it no matter how hard they tried. It was like a drug increasing tick by tick as they left the time of her childhood, the happy Christmases before her father’s accident, before the war that would now take Wood away, and maybe even David, and had taken Peggy’s father. Tomorrow she would wake up hours more dangerous, more primed, and just as unready to lose her safety.

  When Wood had gone, and David had gone, who would care for Horace, and who would talk to her? They had all kept a precarious balance among themselves. The Whipples. Her mother had to take care of her father. For years she had had no deeper energy than that. To take even one of them away would be like amputating a leg or an arm. The house would grow like a monster, too big, too hollow and cold. How much she had depended upon Wood’s honor and duty, even when she joined David in smiling at him! Now she knew how much. She herself had somehow lost her neatness and her independence when her periods began, and now that messy schedule tied her to all women and told her of her common fate.

  To sleep. Could she sleep with nothing but this small fear for her reward? Nothing moved now; her mind was clear once more, yet still she was in thrall. Deep in the register the coal fire shifted with a clink and a sigh of ashes, and the great hollow house slept into the dawn.

  9

  One morning that week Horace awoke feverish; all night he had hidden beneath the covers, and now he lay in a cold trough of his own sweat. They could get to him easily enough through the blankets and sheets, and he knew it was totally irrational to think that the bedclothes protected him in any way. But it was also irrational to think such monsters existed in their flesh and scales in the first place. Irrational or not, they did exist; he could tell by the fluttering of his heart and the ice in the hollow of his back. It had only been recently that they had begun to have names, and to speak to him rather than to each other about him. The banana-fingered woman was Leverah. Though he never heard her voice as an actual sound, he knew when she spoke, and understood. Their cold voices echoed without sounding first. “Look! Look!” Leverah had commanded in the night. But he could still disobey.

  Now it was daylight. A gray winter day. Tiny cracks of light crept down the interstices of his covers to his eyes. A dreary day that would come with its hesitant light to the walls of the house and stop, leaving off at the windows so the house still ruled i
ts inner places. A cold day with the sky one chilly gray cloud. It was a particular day, he remembered now—it was the day his mother would take him on the bus to Northlee and have his eyes examined for glasses so he would be able to see all the tiny distant things again, and read the writing on the blackboard without having to sit in the front row in sight of everyone—even then squinting and pondering the chalky fragments of words upon the board.

  Strange how he could see Leverah so clearly, even to the whiskers of her mustache, all down the length of his room—this without looking at her. It was another proof he didn’t need that she was of his mind. Or rather a proof he couldn’t use. The geometry of his fear was beyond his power to solve, but there must be a system to it, a way to make syllogisms out of it. Once in plain geometry Mr. Collins said they were using a system based upon logic rather than measurement. He would need an even more complicated system, and there must be one somewhere, either invented or waiting for invention, to solve Leverah and the others—the scaled ones, the hairless ones. There must be a solution, because he had never been told that he must die, and if he couldn’t solve it he would not be able to go on living. Some night he would die of fear; their coldness and cruelty would enter his body like frost, and he would die.

  He was not afraid so much of real bullies, though they did sometimes come after him, or waylay him—Keith Joubert, Junior Stevens and that bunch. With them he feared more what they might make him do to them. He couldn’t trust his strength because he broke even what he didn’t want to break, and hurt those he loved. He saw Mabel Andrews’ tooth lying in the water fountain, her very tooth, forever broken from her, a jewel not ever again to be part of her prettiness, and her howling, gapped face turned toward him, a reflection of his brutishness.

  When they heard him think this, they smiled and moved stiff as puppets from his darkest closet. Now they dared him even in daylight. If only he had the warning system he had planned in such desperate detail. He would have a little contact switch on the end of a cord connected to a dry cell beneath his bed. Lamp cord would lead from it, beneath his door, beneath the hall carpet down to Wood’s room. When they had him immobilized he would ring for Wood to come and banish them. He never dared suggest this to Wood, because in Wood’s presence he was out of danger, and therefore somewhat ashamed of his fear. His whole life, his whole metabolism changed when Wood was there; his brain worked differently, his heart beat slower, and each breath seemed to take more oxygen from the air. Then, too, they had implied that they were his secret alone, that there was some certain danger not only to him but to his family if his knowledge of them were to be shared.