Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  But even as a baby he was coarse of feature, and had thick, strong wrists. He weighed twelve pounds at birth. “There’s a regular ploughboy for you,” old Dr. Bumham said. “You done yourself proud this time, Henrietta!”

  Horace finished his Wheaties and drank his orange juice. He jarred the table as he rose, and reached down quickly, with an apprehensive look, to steady it with his big hand. She wondered if he thought it might continue to tip, to roll as if in slow motion across the kitchen and crash into smithereens against the pot and pan cupboards. He held it down for a moment, his head bent.

  “We’ll take the ten o’clock bus,” she said. “We’ve got an hour before we have to leave.”

  Horace nodded, and went up the back stairs. She knew he chose the back stairs in order to avoid his father, who would now be up, sitting in his wheelchair, waiting for his morning coffee. It was true they had no words for each other.

  The new coffee was ready, so she poured two mugs and put them on a tray with sugar and milk, spoons and napkins.

  Harvey sat at his oak table before his ledgers and stock-market pages, tapping out numbers on his adding machine. His dark eyes gleamed above his soft white cheeks, and just for a moment she saw in his intensity the slim man who used to be his outward self.

  “Ah,” he said, peering at the coffee. She went to get a dining-room chair, and looked through the bars of its tall back as she carried it into the living room. As she sat down across from him, the heat from his floor register, dry heat with just a hint of coal fumes in it, fluttered her skirt around her legs.

  He sipped his coffee in a way he would once have detested—greedily, his red lips smacking over its heat. Suddenly she was irritated by his incarceration in that wounded body. She thought of the farm, where such freakishness was not tolerated in animals, and of her father in his gray dressings and obvious stumps. She was irritated by such accidents, by the way Harvey’s seemed to have hurt his children, and she wanted to ask him sarcastically if he was rich yet.

  He tapped away on the keys, and pulled the handle down to total his figures—a gesture too expert and common, like a worker in a factory doing some mechanical operation he hardly understood but was an expert at in a flashy, moronic way. If it had been her with that leg she would have had it amputated and said to hell with it. To carry such an incubus of pain around seemed needless, even willful. She didn’t care that much for parts that had gone wrong. Cut them off! Get rid of them! But she had read about a religion in which even the parings of fingernails were saved because they were part of one, and therefore sacred to the body’s unity. Yes, to lose a leg, a major part of one’s living body, a leg with all its complicated muscles and veins and nerves running all down its length in miraculous ways—even the little patterns of hair, and the jointed bones, and the foot that had been so swift and sure in all its levers. No, she could see how he clung to the parts of himself. But still, she would not. She made bargains and compromises quickly, stuck to them and never welshed.

  And she wouldn’t welsh now, though the memory of him as a man was powerful. There had been too long a time when he was a man, and she would not abandon him in any way now. Heat flowed from his register along her thighs, even up around the table’s edge to warm her elbows and arms.

  With another expert motion his white hand pulled down the lever. He peered at the result, tore off the paper tape and inserted it in a manila folder.

  “Humph!” he said, reaching for his coffee.

  “Are we getting rich?” she asked.

  He was wary, but took it mildly.

  “What else is there to do?” he said. “It’s going to cost money to send these kids to college. You’ll find all this isn’t just a game.”

  “David’s going to Dexter-Benham,” she said firmly.

  “Leah High School’s not that bad,” he said.

  “Leah High School is full of temporary teachers. A bunch of flibbertigibbets. There’s very little there for David.”

  “Maybe I’d like some toast,” he said.

  “All right. I’ll make you some toast. You ought to have a glass of orange juice too.”

  “Okay, Ma,” he said, but he knew she meant it about David; she was certain of that.

  10

  David sat in study hall, in his homeroom. The dry dusty air was too warm, and chalk smell and girls’ perfume, or powder, or whatever it was that surrounded them, smoothed away his resolve to finish a tense chart in French. The tenses of the verb avoir had to be looked up and then written down in the manner specified by old Mrs. Watson. He would have to do it, but he would do it with the sinking, lethargic feeling that not one of the words was being remembered by his brain. In and out; it was as if the information went no farther than the second knuckle of the index finger that pressed against his pen.

  The pen was new, and still interesting. The cap was brass, and it was a thick, hefty pen with a new way to suck up the ink. Sally De Oestris had given it to him for his birthday. Inside was the same sort of rubber tube, but instead of the little clip-like lever on the side, you pulled out a cylinder, then pushed it in to create air pressure around the rubber tube, which collapsed. As the pressure leaked out through a little porthole, the tube grew round again and sucked up the ink. This process was much more interesting than French verbs he didn’t even know how to pronounce. All they did in class was read and read and read Les Misdrables, and translate it into English. They never pronounced a word of French.

  The plunger of his pen came out slowly, as though it had great mass and momentum. Delayed by the physics of the atmosphere, it seemed to move with the calm dignity of natural law. The ink obediently moved in or out of the rubber bladder in the barrel, and the brass cap was as substantial as a part of a gun. He didn’t want to use this pen on the French conjugation chart, and when he made himself begin he found himself writing his name over and over in a bold hand. David Abbott Whipple. David Abbott Whipple. He wasn’t very satisfied with the Whipple; better to have been named just David Abbott. That was a name with a dark New England sort of ring to it. It was his grandmother’s maiden name—his mother’s mother’s name, but the best thing about it was that he didn’t know another person in Leah named Abbott.

  At the desk in front of him Mary Denney bent over her spiral notebook, her light brown hair frizzled over her white collar, her shoulders hunched studiously. She was a plain little girl, not ugly, just sort of standard. He’d never noticed her much until one time she sent him a note saying she loved him. That had been a funny feeling. He didn’t know how to answer, and it had more or less passed off into silence. Now, as though she knew he was looking at her, she turned and gave him a quick glance. It was a small shock, and the sweet danger of her face remained in his eyes like a flash of light. Her light skin, her upper lip that protruded perhaps a little too much, her brown eyes looking clearly into him just for that tiny moment—these stayed with him as she turned. He seemed to be feeling her back through the cloth of her dress—her lean little sides, hard with ribs, and her shoulder blades, clavicles, the round muscles of her arms, the soft places where her little breasts were rooted. Even Mary Denney had those impossibly pink little nipples there beneath the fragile cloth, sacred to see, like Kate’s he had seen once by accident in the bathroom. Though she was only Mary Denney, who was not too bright, who never talked very much at all, she was complete and terrible, like fainting, like an explosion.

  But not like Carol Oakes, who sat two desks away, diagonally so he could see the rich curve and weight of her breast where it rested inside her fuzzy sweater, and the taut lean of her waist.

  Think of something else, not of her thighs and the narrow waist leaning away above them, the miraculous strange swell of her hips around her dark secret entrance. Ten minutes till the bell would make him have to stand up and go to English class, and he’d better think of something else right away.

  There was Ben Caswell, with his skinny blue-white face and thin, metal-colored hair, the brightest boy in schoo
l, his best friend and worst enemy, doing his work perfectly as always. John Cotter sat dark and silent, motionlessly reading, and ahead of him was Michael Spinelli, who always got caught no matter what he did, who had been kicked out of school as recently as last week, who was at this moment bored into a coma. His long legs protruded slackly under Kenny Clark’s seat, and he stared blindly at the region of the door.

  In the front row, where he had been placed for disciplinary reasons, big Junior Stevens, bully, stupe, occasional tormentor of Horace, sat growing bristles on the back of his red neck. He, like Mike Spinelli, never read, never did homework, never did anything in school that had to do with learning anything. Separated from Junior by the two necessary aisles was his lieutenant, Keith Joubert, whom David had once wrestled to the ground and anointed with half-frozen mud. That had been sheer necessity. When Keith and Junior got together they seemed to feel the need of a victim. Alone, they were polite enough. Their most famous mistake was the time they chose Ben Caswell, their theory being that the smartest and skinniest boy in school would be a pushover. Ben was rather frightening, as David could have told them from experience. Anyway, it was beautiful to watch Ben transform himself immediately into a pure murderous madman and butt Junior in the chin with his head. Junior bit his tongue, bled all over, vomited from trying to swallow his own blood, and couldn’t talk plainly for a week. Thereafter they let Ben Caswell alone.

  The bell. At the end of this long day, Christmas vacation would start. Now he could stand up without embarrassment, gather his English book and notebook and go toward another kind of boredom.

  Horace had not expected to be afraid of the examination. He was absolutely certain that the doctors would be trying to help him, that they would not hate him at all, in any way. And so he was surprised and frightened by the shock he felt as he followed his mother into the small waiting room. He began to tremble. His palms sweat so badly he had to keep wiping them on his shirt. Cold drops of sweat crawled down his sides, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  A nurse who didn’t quite look like a nurse—she looked more like a secretary who wore white—asked them to sit down, and they sat side by side on a cold, slippery couch with chrome legs and arms. Next to Horace a fragile floor lamp of turned wood, and a glass-topped table, stood ready to break. He kept his elbows rigidly to his sides, but tremors still came shaking down his arms and into his wrists. At the dentist’s or at the doctor’s he had never been this incontrollably nervous, even when he had been in pain. Pain he knew; he had grown up with it. But now they would be near his brain, at his eyes themselves. His mother had told him that it never hurt at all when she got her glasses, but she had been slightly evasive about that. Her eyes had moved away from his as she spoke.

  Perhaps she didn’t really believe him about what he had been able to see all of a sudden through the little gold-rimmed glasses. He had so many secrets anyway, maybe he didn’t deserve to be believed. He couldn’t tell anyone about Leverah and Zoster, or about any of the events of his nights, and yet he thought of them more and more during the daylight. Once they had been like dreams, forgotten soon after breakfast, but more and more the events of his days receded into thoughts and preparations for what would happen in the night. Now he dreaded any lessening of his concentration upon that ordeal. The examination might upset his balance, somehow, so that they would know where he’d been and what he’d done; they might so skillfully use his eyes against him.

  “Horace?” his mother said. The air reeked of an odor like hollowness, as though part of the air were gone, one of its chemical components breathed out of it. Neon, hydrogen, oxygen…

  “Horace?” She took his arm in her gloved hands. “You’re rigid,” she said. “You shouldn’t be this nervous.”

  “I can’t stop being nervous,” he said.

  “It’s just an examination.”

  “I know it,” he said. But he also knew that Leverah and Zoster were not real, and what good did that do? Reality was the shaking of his nerves, the stuttery little spasms in his arms. He would have to live through that first—except that he didn’t ever see another side to it. There never seemed to be another shore. Wood’s room was like an island inhabited by friends, but there was no far happy shore.

  The nurse, or the woman in white—she wore white shoes and stockings too, but had a corsage of little blue flowers as big as blueberries pinned to her blouse—came out of the door to the inner place and asked them to come in, smiling too briefly. Horace went first. He felt all wet, and had to sit in his own damp in a chair as machinelike as a dentist’s chair. The doctor, who was young and wore pinkish-rimmed glasses, sternly took his head and shoved it back against leather rests, just at the angle Horace knew would soon cause a pain in his neck. Immediately a muscle fought itself below his ear, and the pain began. When he tried to move, the doctor’s hands tightened, and his face grew stem. His eyes seemed to be looking through Horace’s head to the rests. The black holes where his whiskers grew turned in the hundreds oval, then round again.

  “There,” the doctor said. But when he took his hands away, Horace’s head moved with them. “Well,” the doctor said.

  “Sit up straight, Horace,” his mother said anxiously.

  “My neck hurts,” he said, feeling that he had no right to say it. For the moment his neck muscle did relax, and the feeling was sweet because he knew how short a time he had bought.

  The doctor pushed his head back against the rests. “Now, is that better?”

  The muscle coiled again, and he looked to his mother. “I don’t know why it hurts!”

  “Well we’ve got to find some sort of steady position,” the doctor said, “so we can get on with the examination.”

  The doctor moved the rests forward. Horace hoped as hard as he could that the muscle would stop fighting, and this embarrassment would end. The doctor seemed by his impatience to think it was his fault, but he couldn’t tell the doctor that he was all different parts—made of all different parts that did as they wanted, not as he wanted. Deep in the flesh and bone of his head, he had his own self with its reasonable desires, who desired to please and to make his mother calm. And for the moment, at least, nothing fought him openly. The doctor’s face faded from Horace’s left eye, and in his right all grew down into a tiny orange light. He looked out of his brain into the dark cave of his eyeball, through that tunnel into the little orange light that flickered like a weak flashlight in a basement, peering around in that cobwebby cave as though the doctor, grown small as a little boy, were lost and apprehensive in there.

  Then the light withdrew into daylight, and appeared, wavery and dim, at the tunnel of his other eye. After it had examined this entrance to his head, its flickering withdrew and the room came back clearly, though it had never quite gone out of sight. Its shapes and colors had hovered transparently before him all the time. One shape was now the doctor, who pivoted on his stool and moved a black machine around in front. Horace had noticed this complexity of black metal because it was attached to the chair, ready to work on whoever sat in the chair. As it came toward him he saw that it had a face of its own, black as an ape’s, with staring, yet curiously impersonal frosted eyes. The doctor, or it—some confident smooth force—moved the black face toward his own, too close for any face to be until it actually pressed against his own, and pressed as it disappeared and became two frosted eyes against his eyes, his head against the rests in back so that he was its absolute prisoner.

  He stared out through those other eyes, not his, and his flesh blended into its coldness—metal, but curved like a face inside out, not ungentle in its curves, but strong. Then he was it, and saw what it saw.

  At first it was like looking down two gun barrels, except the rifling was a series of disks rather than a long spiral. With a smooth click the left eye went blank. Only the right was allowed to see, and at first it didn’t really see, but was allowed only white light. Then came another click, and a knife-bright chart appeared. The doctor’s voice a
sked him, through the machine, to read the letters of the chart. With sudden pride he read them all, his voice clear, not quite his—it came from below but was his voice, clearly and authoritatively reading the tiniest letters in the very bottom line.

  The charts changed at the whim of the machine, became green and red, then changed and became tiny games with lines and colors, games he repeatedly solved with either eye. The machine helped him each time, and he grew calm behind it, or in it, or of it. It protected him, and grew warm. When it swung away, suddenly, its mass and warmth gone away, his own face was damply cold and naked, almost as if it had been skinned.

  “Now I’m going to put a little drop of this in each eye,” the doctor said. He reached for a little eyedropper, and held it out like a magician, to prove that it was only what it seemed.

  “What is it?” Horace asked.

  “It’s an eyedropper.”

  “I mean, what’s in it?” A twinge of insult; he was not that stupid.

  “It’s an anesthetic. It’s so you won’t feel it when I test the pressure.”

  The bald statement froze him. “What pressure?”

  “Horace,” his mother said.

  The doctor turned to her as though he’d given up trying to explain anything to someone as unreasonable as Horace. “It’s just the standard test for glaucoma. A routine thing.” He turned to Horace again. “I just put a little gauge against your eye—just for a moment, and it tells me if the pressure’s normal or not. Okay?”

  “What can I do about it?” Horace heard himself say. The doctor was startled, and so was he, but he could think of no way to apologize. He had done so well on the little visual games in the machine—he ought to get some credit for that.