Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  The Town Square was deserted except for the green, red and blue Christmas lights strung from the lampposts, and other lights Strang through the blue spruce. The loudspeaker over the Town Hall doorway had gone dead except for an occasional amplified crack of static; Mrs. Box, the town clerk’s secretary, had gone home and left the phonograph amplifier on.

  In their apartment over Trask’s Pharmacy, across the hall from the Trasks themselves, Wayne Facieux and his mother looked at the tree Wayne had decorated. All the bulbs were blue, and the only other decorations Wayne had allowed this year were tin-foil icicles. He was pleased by the tree’s cool, luminous deliberateness, its ethereal, un-Christmas purity. The whole room, filled as it was with his mother’s tasteless gimcracks and cheap maple furniture, gleamed a stylish and original blue.

  Across the hall, Mr. and Mrs. Trask and Prudence sat before their bright, conventionally various tree. The radio softly gave them carols, but something was wrong, because for long moments none of them moved, and their eyes were too grave and bright. The dinner dishes had been done too quickly, and though it was their custom to open presents on Christmas Eve, and they had opened them, no tissue paper, paper bells and red ribbon were scattered about on the flowered carpet. Mrs. Trask, who had just finished picking everything up, sat with the crushed tissue in her lap, wondering, with anxiety she could not control, or keep from inflicting upon her husband and daughter, upon what dark battlefield, among armed and violent men, her son’s tender body lay in danger.

  Across the square, where the great houses stood on their wide lawns, Mr. Gordon Ward, Sr., stood before a bowl of eggnog and shook into its creamy surface the last drop from a bottle of bourbon. “Whoopee!” he cheered softly to himself. “Whoopee doopee doo, and a twenty-three scaroo!” He was a big man, as violently red-haired and green-eyed as his son—who was enjoying Christmas at Camp Blanding, Florida, and thus, presumably, not in trouble. The Burtons had dropped over from next door, and everybody, even Mrs. Ward, had about the same glow on. Screeches of laughter came from the living room, and he was about to carry the silver bowl triumphantly to their waiting appetites.

  A few blocks from the square, up Union Street, the Potters’ high white house glowed cheerfully, with red electric candles in all the front windows. In the living room was their wide-spreading tree, deep green and silver and red and blue. Lois and her parents sat in the handsome room before the lighted tree and a small fire of white birch logs. Her mother and father sipped dark sherry while they waited for the ceremonial Christmas visit of Sally De Oestris. Wood would be driving her around tonight, and Lois, looking bright and beautiful in a new knit dress, silk stockings and heels, waited for him.

  Out on the flats toward Northlee, at Sam Davis’ farm, Susie sat at the kitchen table, staring off into space somewhere above the sink. She had just come in from helping with the milking, having left her father as he lowered the heavy milk cans into the milk-house well. She could still smell the barn on her left shoulder, where she had pressed against the warm cows. Mrs. Gamer sat in her chair with her black afghan over her shoulders, knitting, and the radio on its single-board shelf played, and had played, so many Christmas carols Susie had stopped identifying each one. The tree was in the parlor, but it was too cold in there to sit.

  For long stretches she could forget about the scandal. People seemed to treat her about the same. The biggest change was leaving high school. Though she might have done that anyway, it seemed a direct result of what had happened that night. Most of the hurt was the betrayal. Before that Gordon had been so nice to her, and she’d really believed with all her heart, that first time she’d let him, that he loved her. And the second time, too, in his own house. But then he hadn’t even looked at her for a month, and the next time he asked her out that thing happened. He had planned it. She couldn’t seem to understand how anyone could lie like that. How could he have lied to her, straight to her face, when she had loved him? It made her into nothing.

  In that part of the Whipples’ barn that used to be the entrance to the horse stalls, and was now the garage, Wood jacked up the rear wheels of the car and put on the tire chains. David and Horace were just finishing up the shoveling, although the snow fell so thickly they’d have to do it all again, probably, after the presents in the morning. It would give them all good appetites for the turkey, anyway.

  Sally De Oestris’ old Filipino chauffeur had died two years ago, and since then it had been Wood’s job to drive her around on Christmas Eve as she delivered presents to relatives, friends, old families she kept her eye on and poor families she kept her eye on—one of her kind, sarcastic, twinkly little ice-blue eyes. He’d fill the trunk and the back seat up with Sally’s packages, then help her—in fact lift her—into the front seat, hand her her canes and wait while she arranged her fur coat, her fancy pocket-book, her hat and veil, and they would be off on their rounds.

  When he got to her house this night, he had to bash through the bank the plow had raised, grind into her driveway and shovel a path from the car to her front entrance. All the lights in her house seemed to be on, and her uniformed maid, Sylvia Beaudette, a dark-haired young woman whose husband was in the Army Air Corps, was piling the packages in the front hall.

  “Merry Christmas, Sylvia,” Wood said.

  “Merry Christmas, Wood. Sally’ll be down in a minute, if the elevator works.” Sally’s elevator, a little seat that ran slowly up a slot in the stairwell, following the stairs, had never failed to work, as far as he knew, but nobody ever referred to it without this reservation.

  Sylvia, evidently under orders, went out toward the dining room and came back with a glass of sherry on a salver. He took it, and Sylvia took away the salver. The dark, imported cream sherry was Sally’s Christmas wine. No one knew how much of it she had left in her wine cellar, but it couldn’t be bought any more. Her custom was to send a bottle of it to the houses where she intended to disembark from the car.

  He sipped the smooth sherry and looked around at the trophies of Sally’s travels. A brilliant Japanese wall hanging in silk, of a stylized woman in a red kimono, hung on the wall to the left of the dining-room arch. The woman played a small three-stringed instrument with a pick half as big as the instrument itself. It had always fascinated him that the tiny teeth in her delicately pouting little mouth were black. It occurred to him that he had known these objects from Japan—the lacquer bowls and tables, Samurai swords and sake sets—since he was a child, and had never, and couldn’t quite even now, associate them with the bucktoothed little caricatures of men he might be fighting soon. A shiver came at this thought.

  A humming and clanking, such as an old cog railway might make, invaded the hall. It was the elevator, and soon, rounding the upper spiral of the stairs and descending slowly, came Sally, perched bright and glittering as a little bee queen. In a shimmery blue dress, twinkling and tinkling with bangles as bright as her bright blue eyes, she slowly descended.

  “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” she said in her deep voice. Her voice always astonished Wood, after not having heard it for a while, but after a few words he got used to it again. And every time he saw her she seemed a little smaller and more bent over, but just as bright and eager, always grinning in a fiercely pleased way, like the Cheshire cat in Tenniel’s illustration.

  Before they left, after he’d filled the car with packages, she gave him an A gas coupon. She rarely used her car any more, and when she did she hired a man to drive it. Her car was a 1937 Ford phaeton with a specially built, enclosed passenger compartment behind the open chauffeur’s seat, and a little nautical porthole on each side. Sally had explained once that she liked the 1937 Ford’s looks, and also its mechanical, rather than hydraulic, brakes. She was surprisingly technical-minded about things (although Wood disagreed about the Ford’s cable brakes). Once, when she’d volunteered that she’d flown in an open-cockpit airplane from Paris to London in 1920, he asked her what kind of plane it was, and she explained without hesitation that
it was a Bristol “Brisfit” two-seater fighter plane, and she’d sat in the gunner’s seat. The gun had been removed, but the pilot had shown her patches in the wings that covered German bullet holes.

  When they were cruising slowly down Bank Street in the quiet snow, with the tire chains gently thumping, Sally said, “I suppose you resent having to cart me around like this, but these little ceremonies are all we old women have left, you know.”

  “I don’t mind,” Wood said.

  “Maybe you don’t,” she said, turning to look at him. Her neck didn’t turn sideways, and if someone spoke to her from the side she had to move her whole body around. “We’ll stop in at the Potters’, and you won’t mind that,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve explained to the rest that I can’t get out of the car this year. This old body’s too hard to manipulate these days.”

  He felt relieved.

  “That pleased you, didn’t it?” she said. “I don’t have to imagine you’d rather fool with Lois Potter (my, isn’t she getting to be a beauty?) than a seventy-year-old bag of bones like Sally De Oestris.”

  It was hard to see through the windshield and the constantly clogging wipers, but few other cars were out, so he didn’t have to worry about them. He got stuck once down on Water Street, where one of Sally’s poor families lived in a railroad tenement, but with a little shoveling got out again. Finally, after two hours, after explaining to everyone who wanted to give him a drink that Sally was out in the car, and after her friends, relatives and the people she kept an eye on had come out in the snow to greet her and kiss her through the car window, they had made all the calls except for the Potters’.

  “It’s quite a night,” Sally said. “It’s a night for a sleigh. I remember when we used sleighs all winter, nearly, when they didn’t plow the snow at all.”

  “They didn’t?”

  “They rolled it down flat and hard. They used six-horse teams, and great rollers weighed down with cut granite blocks. That was exciting. I used to ride up on one of those rigs with Mr. Jason Campbell, captain-elect of the Cascom River Volunteer Fire Company.”

  The snow melted on the hood of the car, and the heater fan buzzed as they came back around the square. The Christmas lights were dim in the falling snow, and only one lane had been plowed on any street.

  Mr. Potter had shoveled a two-shovel-wide corridor for Sally, and Wood crunched into the bank as far as he could, climbed around and repaired the corridor with his shovel before lifting Sally out. Mr. Potter, calling “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” came out to guide Sally and her canes. Wood followed with the packages, his overshoes full of snow, and they all entered the suddenly warm, dim and cheerful house. Lois, her eyes bright, came and took the packages out of his arms so he could take off his coat and overshoes.

  “Merry Christmas, Wood,” she said shyly and softly. She came back to hang up his coat. As she turned, her soft black hair swirled, her slim legs flashed silk, and she was so pretty and dressed up, his legs grew weak. No, the weakness was because this lovely girl had made herself up just for his unworthy eyes.

  They turned and entered the living room. Sally was enthroned in the sort of high, straight chair she found most comfortable, and Mr. Potter held her fur coat, melting crystals of snow gleaming on the long, dark tippets of fur. They had been laughing and chattering. “A white Christmas!” Mrs. Potter had just said. But now they turned, and were silent as they looked at Wood and Lois. Lois put her arm through his, and he felt her tremble. Sally’s bright gaze narrowed as she smiled, and just perceptibly she nodded. Upon Mr. Potter’s long, affable face was an expression almost of pain. But it was Mrs. Potter’s face his eyes found and then jumped away from. She smiled, a speculative, encompassing smile, prideful and dark. He read everything in her naked face. She saw her virgin daughter with a man.

  Peggy sat on a wicker stool next to the fireplace and stared at the lighted tree. The Whipples’ tree was the grandest of all. At the very top, a delicate silver angel with real blond hair and a brilliant gold halo stood just below the ceiling, singing from a hymn book that was a real little leather-bound book, with real words in it. They were in a foreign language, though, and the letters were all so full of curlicues and bows she hadn’t been able to read them. The angel had gone on the tree at the very last, and she had been the one to stand at the top of the stairs and hand it to Wood. He had stood on the stepladder, and she had put the fragile angel into his strong hand. He’d just been able to reach the top, and he stretched so far his shirt came out of his pants and she’d caught a glimpse of the blue band of his shorts. When he finally crimped the angel’s wire holder with his fingers, to make it stand straight, he looked down at her and smiled so warm and triumphant a smile—just to her, because he and she had been the only ones to handle the angel—she became warm herself, and so happy she could name her happiness. Then she smiled, in turn, down at Horace, who had been allowed to steady the ladder. She felt part of them all, being in that chain of warm regard.

  Now it was Christmas Eve. The concert had been called off because of the snow, and instead the choir was to sing on the evening of the twenty-seventh in the Congregational Church. Wood hadn’t come back with Sally De Oestris, David and Horace were still out shoveling snow, and Kate and Mrs. Whipple, with elaborate kindness and goodwill, had shooed her out of the kitchen and told her to go entertain Mr. Whipple. “He likes you, you know,” Mrs. Whipple said.

  She knew that was true. Mr. Whipple tended to yell a lot, and he pretended to start arguments with her, but she could see he didn’t mean it in a bad way. He sat at his big table, drinking sherry. Mrs. Whipple had already told him twice not to drink it all before Sally De Oestris arrived.

  “She’s a good old bitch, and she’ll understand,” he’d answered.

  Now he looked at her mock-fiercely and said, “So you’re going to sing in the choir, eh?”

  “Yup,” she said, consciously impudent.

  “All those yowling adenoids! Thank God I don’t have to hear it!”

  “You ought to come hear us. We’re doing Handel’s Messiah.”

  “Oh, God!” he said, “spare us poor sinners!”

  Henrietta stood at the sink, where she and Kate were finishing up the last few odds and ends of pans, dishes and silverware. In a way she looked forward to Sally De Oestris’ annual visit, although she hadn’t liked Sally at all when she and Harvey were first married. She had sensed immediately that she was being patronized and “understood,” that Sally was speaking to her as if to a hill farm girl. Of course she had always realized that Harvey belonged to a different class—she’d known that long before she seriously considered marrying him, when she began to learn the different vocabulary. But ever since she was a little girl she’d had a strange streak in her that made her quite unlike Sally’s idea of a hill farm girl. She read odd books, and she was something of a scholar.

  Harvey and Sally might laugh when she pronounced Dostoevsky “Dostóyvsky,” but she had never heard anyone pronounce the name, even in high school. They knew how to pronounce the man’s name, but she had read not only Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, which they both vaguely allowed they’d read long ago in college, she’d read The Idiot and Notes from Underground. And she’d read all kinds of books. She’d read Ruskin and Cardinal Newman, Jerome K. Jerome, Stephen Leacock, Sir James Frazer and Bret Harte. She had no system, at first, only a dictionary and her curiosity. She read A Tramp Abroad as eagerly as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and that as eagerly as Anthony Adverse. If books on economics and forestry and ornithology came to her hand, she took them home and read them. The two ladies who ran the Leah Public Library thought she was quite odd, but they would let her, at the ages of twelve and thirteen, take twice as many books home as they would the other children.

  She still read a lot, but with a certain knowledge of categories now. She knew the difference between Reader’s Digest and The Atlantic, or The Virginian and The American. It made her a little sad, this new kno
wledge, because she no longer read with that sense of unpredictable discovery.

  Her politics were not Harvey’s at all. She voted for Roosevelt in 1932, and she had in 1936 and 1940, and she would again too, if he ran for a fourth term. This drove Harvey mad, because he couldn’t change her mind. And after Sally De Oestris had bumped into certain hard areas of knowledge and opinion in her, their attitudes toward each other changed very quickly. Sally was an odd character too—a rich girl who hadn’t done what was expected of her, who had taken her freedom literally. She’d had lovers and never married. One of them had been a general in a revolution, and Sally had stood beside him and seen him order the death of a president. Later the general himself was taken and shot, and Sally took refuge in the American embassy. All this had happened before Henrietta was born, but she went to the college library in Northlee and found a history of those events. She found the general’s name there, and with a sense of real shock, because she thought she’d believed Sally, found her name in a footnote: “…a wealthy American girl, Sally Destrous[?], friend of General Aranpo.” Sally had told her about it with all the manifestations of truth Henrietta had always recognized and respected. It was simply the subject matter that could not, for all of Sally’s authority, pass into Henrietta’s mind as truth. And yet there it was. Sally Destrous; it could have been no one else, and she was shocked more by the discovery of her real disbelief than she was by the truth of the story.