Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  He had never spoken to her that way before, and her reaction surprised him. Her eyes glowed at him with pride, and she took his hands in hers. A little half-smile appeared on her lips for a moment. Then she turned sad again.

  “You’re always protecting somebody,” she said. “You even protect me. The only reason you came to get me tonight was to protect me, wasn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Yes it was. You knew I’d be unhappy if I didn’t see you, so you came.”

  “But I like to see you,” he said.

  “I’d let you do more than look. I’d let you see me all over.” She blushed and looked away.

  “Wait till I come back,” he said.

  “There’s nothing else I can do,” she said. “Is there? Is there anything else I can do? You’ll just tell me I’m only seventeen. Only seventeen! How long am I supposed to wait? There’s the boy I love, and he’s alive and warm, and I’m alive and warm, and I don’t want to wait for anything.” She spoke in a low, intense voice, with her head down, hiding herself and her words from all the other people.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and reached for her coat. Obediently she slid out of the booth, though she was still dark with embarrassment. He helped her on with her coat, and she went to say hello to Foster and Jean. As he put on his coat he nodded to Foster, then turned toward Susie. He couldn’t go to her booth because that would have been considered a flagrant insult to Lois, who was “pure.” Even if Lois understood his reasons, she could not avoid being hurt by the opinions of the others. It was a stupid and inflexible rule.

  Susie wouldn’t let him catch her eye, but as he looked at her, her face grew sad. She muttered an answer to Bruce Cotter’s question, and shook her head again and again. She had been smiling, but now she didn’t smile. Then she turned and looked straight at Wood and away, so quickly he hadn’t time to signal his recognition. But that look stayed with him for days, like an image cast into his optic nerves, so that he saw it sometimes reversed, like a negative in which Susie’s hurt face was black, her eyes in that darkness gleaming white and blind as pearls.

  14

  The night before Wood left, Horace began to tremble so violently at dinner he had to excuse himself from the table. They were having meat that night too—pot roast, which he liked—and yet he had to go upstairs and be sick. He came back down and sat shivering in front of the fire while the rest finished dinner. Wood wasn’t home—he was having dinner at the Potters’.

  Kate came out of the dining room first, pulled up another wicker stool and sat beside him. “Are you okay now, Horsie?” she said. “Did you have to vomit?”

  “Yes,” he said. He could taste it, like a mouthful of cold metal.

  “Ugh! I hate to vomit,” she said, and took hold of his arm. “I hope you feel better now.”

  “Yeah,” he said. She was small, though not so small as Peggy, yet she looked everything in the eye, like David. How could they be curious about what peered back at them?

  “Is it Wood going?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The fire warmed him on one side, but on his back a chill patch of sweat sucked cold into his skin. Flames quietly looped up around a maple log.

  When the rest came in he went upstairs and entered Wood’s room. This was against a rule they had made long ago about each other’s rooms, but he remembered Wood’s offer to exchange rooms, and this was his excuse. He had decided not to take Wood’s offer; that would have been horrible, because then Wood’s presence would be truly gone. He wanted the warm room to remain exactly as it was, smelling of Wood’s pipes and tobacco. The airplanes were already gone, but the pictures, the leather chair, the lamps and desk would remain. And Wood’s clothes would still hang in the closet; his boots and shoes and his pack frame and canvas pack bag would still be there. The mounted brook trout would still stiffly arch upon the birch plaque. His scouting sash with all the merit badges would still hang on its peg, with the fishing rods horizontally across the top of the peg rack. All these things were perfectly Wood’s, and he had used them and controlled them with his authority. His old pump shotgun stood in the corner, and even that weapon in Wood’s control seemed a just power.

  Yet how could anyone desire to own the agent of such power? Didn’t it come anyway, unbidden, from the dark fissures that were everywhere? If he could see in his mind the Herpes tear the living skin from a puppy, wasn’t he himself tearing the skin from that poor little animal? And if the monsters of his brain grew so powerful they owned his very room, wasn’t that his doing? David, and even Wood, owned weapons that killed; didn’t they then kill, maim, cause horrible pain, even when they merely fondled the black guns? No, maybe not really, but they did shoot and they did kill, because they wanted to. Even in Wood was that black desire.

  The room was growing cold. Without permission he lit the fire Wood had prepared, and pulled the leather chair up closer to the fireplace. As the kindling blazed up and the hardwood sticks began to catch, he stretched out his legs and grew drowsy and numb. The desk lamp glowed warm orange over Wood’s pipe rack and blotter and chair back. With the warm noises of the fire, Wood almost seemed to be somewhere in the room. He was coming; he would be home sooner or later, and this warm knowledge seeped into Horace’s muscles and blood. He breathed easily, letting Wood’s warmth fill all the spaces in him and around him.

  At ten-thirty Wood left the Potters’ and walked home through the melting night. Mr. and Mrs. Potter had been so proud of him, so solicitous, so sad and curious about his leaving for the Army, he had very little he could say at dinner. What could he say, anyway? He hadn’t been in the Army yet, knew nothing about it except through hearsay, and most of that information had struck him with the tinny sound of exaggeration. At the door Lois held onto him and cried a little, saying she would wait for him forever. He told her not to skip school in order to see him off on the train—an interruption of her vows he half meant to be cruel. Not cruel, really, but a sort of awakening of common sense. He had three or four months of training ahead of him, and he’d be back on furlough before going overseas. But her tears were real, and he experienced his usual mixture of pity and self-disgust. Lois wanted so badly to make him do something that would commit him irrevocably to her. She wanted this in all ways, and could barely keep from making sexual, copulatory motions against him as they’d stood in the foyer. Without motion at all, it was as though he felt the little nerve signals start through her body and then stop, way-layed by her embarrassment and restraint. As they’d kissed for the last time, her lips were soft, as they always were when she was near to crying. “I love you too,” he’d said.

  Now he felt free, relieved to be singular in the warm March night. Only a crusty fringe of damp snow—now really corned into soiled ice crystals—remained in certain depressions or behind houses and bushes. He smelled earth, strong for the first time.

  “How were the Potters?” his mother asked when he got home. She and his father were alone in the living room, and they both looked at him closely. He didn’t look directly at his father, but felt the dark eyes in the pale fat.

  “Fine,” he said. “They’re all fine.” His father still looked at him, and he turned toward the wheelchair to acknowledge this attention.

  “Have a drink,” his father said, the moon face struggling against all past animosities. Could he smile back at his father, he wondered? They ought to try—he ought to try.

  “Sure,” he said, noticing exactly the tonal break of his false eagerness.

  “Good. Get yourself some ice and a glass.” This time his father did more successfully look pleased; Wood’s counterfeit had been good enough. He went out to get a glass and some ice. “Get me some ice, too!” his father called.

  “Okay,” he answered. If they were to talk, they must use words constricted by their real voices. But it would be an attempt, at least.

  When he came back from the kitchen his father said “Thanks,” and he said “You’
re welcome,” and sat where his father could see him. His mother looked up from her book, glanced from one to the other through her thick lenses, then turned back to her book.

  “The nearest I ever got to the Army was R.O.T.C. in college,” his father said.

  An unanswerable statement.

  “Well, I’ll find out what it’s like, I guess,” Wood said.

  “And you’re on your way tomorrow.”

  “Yup.”

  They drank, saying other things Wood could not remember afterwards, because what they said were only those unrelated statements that are consciously composed. At eleven-thirty they said good night to each other like polite strangers. They did seem to be nothing but strangers, while they were polite. Only when they were saying unforgivable things to each other were they not. And Wood thought, of all the people he knew, his father was the strongest, the one who never asked him, even in the most hidden way, for guidance.

  The light was on in his room, and Horace was asleep in the chair before a nearly dead fire, shivering in his sleep. Wood stood looking down at his unfortunate brother, at the coarse blond hair and the thick shoulders of the boy. Horace shivered and whimpered, his long legs drawn up against his body until he seemed to be crouched and hiding in the chair, yet his arms fell slackly and helplessly over the arms, palms up. The thick skin of his forehead was damp. Again his lip quivered in a silent whimper. His glasses had fallen off, and Wood picked them up and put them in his desk. He put some kindling on the fire, fanned it to make it flame up quickly, then got his old storm coat out of the closet and put it over Horace. Horace skipped a breath in his sleep.

  Wood sat at his desk and filled a pipe. Horace still slept, but as the coat warmed him his face turned slack, and his legs slowly stretched out again. Wood decided to let him sleep awhile; he looked absolutely exhausted. As long as Horace slept, a shaming voice told him, he wouldn’t have to face those problems of Horace’s that had no solution. Horace was afraid of darkness, still air, and surrounded places—the ordinary hollows all men had to live in. He was afraid of what might wait around corners and behind doors. The boy’s whole world was turned inside out, because the walls and gates men made to protect themselves from the wild were to Horace the places where all horrors lived. But it wasn’t really men that Horace feared, if Wood understood him, it was the creatures he imagined, as though he had abstracted what was evil in man, and made fleshed creatures out of qualities. He had even heard Horace mutter names, weird names for these creatures.

  But he wondered why Horace found it necessary to make this substitution; certainly he had never found it necessary. Last night he’d been looking at an old American Mercury, the October issue, and in it he found this item:

  QUESTION

  I.H. writes: A. contends that the period of pregnancy in a Japanese woman is six months. B. says all races are alike—even the Nips. Who is right?

  ANSWER

  B. In spite of evidence to the contrary, the Japs belong to the human race and the gestation period is 280 days.

  What evidence to the contrary? he had immediately asked himself. Just because they enjoyed rapine and, say, burying people alive, or placing a pistol to the back of a bound prisoner’s head, as he’d seen in the newsreels, and touching off a round?

  Beady had asked him the other day “What is mung?” and explained: “You take an eight-month-pregnant Jap, tie its legs together and get four husky buck niggers to beat it on the belly with baseball bats for five hours. Untie the rope and what comes out is mung.”

  Yet there were those prints of Sally’s, by Hiroshige, and by others whose names he had forgotten, but had known so well in childhood. Those misty landscapes had taken him in, and even now they reminded him of childhood, order and nostalgia. Would he march across those graceful, moonlike bridges, through that mist? Dreamlike, he would fight in Sally’s parlor, fading through mossy green and the deep veiled blues of air and delicate mountains. Then would come the sudden bite of gunfire. Planes would roar across that air, smelling of cordite and gasoline. He could hardly believe it—as though Eddie Kusacs, who occasionally buzzed Leah in his Marine F4U Corsair, roared through Sally’s parlor and set the china and silver rattling in their shelves, and the kakemono shaking on the walls.

  First was the terror, as if he had been led into a trap, and awaited ambush. Horace didn’t move; not even a finger. He looked out of his head through slits, his eyelashes down upon his hiding eyes like brush. No, he was in Wood’s room, which was illegal, but a safe place. A scrape and a creak—what was that noise?

  Then Wood’s back obscured the fire as he bent to poke it. Wood was there, and he was safe. Someone had put a warm coat over him, and it must have been Wood. Wood had taken his storm coat and put it over him to keep him warm, and now his muscles fell loose, and he relaxed all over. His skin tingled with a great lazy feeling near to pain. He almost didn’t have to pretend to be asleep, because he had no need at all to move. Even to open his eyes further—a fraction of a millimeter further—would have been an effort of delicious pain. He lay warm, descending not into sleep but into utter safety. The fire pressed gently against his face, and his legs seemed to glow in it below the storm coat. His hands lay wide apart down somewhere toward the floor, but he didn’t care because no matter how extreme their positions, even with palms open, they were safe now.

  He would not think, he would just feel, as though he were a baby again. He was a baby that was warm and could not fall—the center of gravity where there was no gravity, the center of the world where there was no weather, the center of all of the world’s love and attention where there was no fear. He could not afford to waste such time in sleep.

  Wood was aware that Horace was not asleep. Because he seemed to be resting, he let him hide his consciousness for a long time. But it was getting late, and Horace had to go to school tomorrow. “Horace?” he said.

  “Yes?” Horace said immediately.

  “It’s getting pretty late.”

  “You’re not mad at me for being here?”

  “No.”

  Then an expression of anguish flashed across Horace’s face and was gone. His face regained its usual guarded, almost beaten look, as if he were about to duck.

  “You’re going away tomorrow,” Horace said, his voice thick.

  “I’ll write you letters,” Wood said. “Would you like that?”

  Horace shrugged off the letters. “Sure,” he said.

  “You know I’ve got to go,” Wood said. “The war won’t last forever, Horace. I’ll be back. Besides, I’ll be home on furlough after basic training.” That’s what he had told Lois, and his mother. It hadn’t seemed to reassure anyone very much, but it was all he could think of to say. The reason he was being drafted was, presumably, to have him shoot enemy soldiers—who could shoot back—and somebody was bound to get killed.

  Horace began to tremble, and his forehead was wet. That was fear; Wood knew he was looking at fear, at the pallor of it. The boy’s face had turned leaden, as though he were suffering from shock. “Oh, oh,” Horace said. “I’m shivering.”

  “Are you all right, Horace?”

  “You can’t go,” Horace said. “You’ll have to tell them.”

  “Horace?”

  “You can tell them,” Horace said in the higher register of his changing voice. “It’s out of the question.”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t out of the question, Horace.” Wood smiled, but he was worried by the certainty he heard in that childish voice. Horace’s blond bristles were so thick, his starved skin so tough yet defenseless. A victim, Wood thought; that skin was meant to be hurt. There was the long scar above his ear, that had taken fourteen stitches. A bicycle accident. That was the time he’d come down Pike Hill and his coaster brake burned out. He’d dislocated or cracked his shoulder then too and had to walk around for weeks with a wooden flying buttress coming from his waist to hold his arm out at the right angle. He’d crossed the Jenkins’ lawn, hit their decorative windm
ill and demolished it. Scars upon scars. He would never, never understand why Horace was so foolhardy about what was real, and so frightened of what was not.

  “Don’t be silly, now, Horace. You know I’ve got to go. I’ve been drafted. We’ve been through all this before.”

  “I’ve tried everything,” Horace said desperately. “Wood, I’ve tried. Everything you told me. But nothing works. I can’t stand it!” Crying sounds came through his words.

  “Come on, now,” Wood said.

  “I don’t care any more because why should I care? I’m going to die anyway. I know it. I almost died already.”

  “Horace, for God’s sake,” he said, trying to sound calm.

  Horace seemed to be in a state of rebellion now; prideless, with no dignity, what had he left to lose?

  “I don’t care!” Horace cried. “I can’t help myself any more! I can’t even remember all their rules!”

  “Whose rules?”

  “Their rules! Them!” Horace looked ravaged. His big lips were gummy, and a patch of watery snot shone below his nostrils. “You’ve never laughed at me before!”

  “I’m not now. I’m not laughing at you, Horace.”

  “I’m dead.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m as good as dead! They aren’t kidding!” Horace stuttered and hiccuped. A thin whine underlay his breath.

  “You’ve got Mother and Father to take care of you.”

  “They threw me away! They couldn’t stand to look at me!”

  “That’s not true. You know very well that Mother and Father love you.”

  “You don’t know! I’m just a bother!

  Wood thought of the little boy he’d known once, whose escapades were sometimes serious, sometimes funny. Now, in this new growth, with Horace nearly as big as he was, there was no possible lightness at all. A man agonized in that chair, and the ghosts of childhood were still in control.