Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Madness, of course. It was madness, yet Horace had always been reasonable. Wood had always been able to speak to reason in Horace, no matter how upset he was. Reason was there, and intelligence, no matter how small a flicker of it his fear allowed him to show.

  With the word he felt anger toward Horace’s monsters. If only they were real, he would smash them. If they were flesh and blood, like Gordon Ward and his satellites, he would take care of them, just as he had effectively ended that sort of torment by dealing with Junior Stevens. If only he could comer them as he had cornered Junior in the basement of the Community Building. There, in his wrath, he’d made Junior afraid for his life—an emotion Junior had never experienced before. If only he could exorcise these monsters as easily…

  Horace’s red hand had moved, quick as a boxer’s, and closed on Wood’s wrist. “Please don’t go, Wood!”

  “Horace!”

  “If you go I can’t stand it! It’s only you that keeps me!”

  “Come on, Horace. Be reasonable.”

  “Please!”

  “Horace. You know I have to go tomorrow. If I don’t go they’ll come and get me. I’m not a civilian any more. I can’t go where I please and do what I please. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Please!”

  The big hand had locked on. Wood felt the tingle of constriction in his fingers. He put his other hand on Horace’s, first as a calming gesture, then to try to peel those thick fingers from his painful wrist.

  “Horace, let go of my arm,” he said. Then he looked at Horace’s face and found no sign of reason. There was the flesh in the shape of a face—pores, mucous membrane, eyes that now seemed opaque. Now, for any gleam of recognition, it might have been the face of a horse, or a pig.

  “Let go!” he said to that dense flesh. “Let go of my arm!”

  No response, not even a tightening of the hand to show defiance of the order. He tried to pry Horace’s fingers from his wrist, and though he was strong enough to do it, Horace’s strength was unnatural. He was afraid he might break the fingers. They struggled silently. Horace’s other hand came over and locked on too, and for an unreal moment it seemed to Wood that he was a spectator at this vicious contest between the wrestling hands.

  The hands would not let him go, and suddenly they were every grasping needful human mess that wanted to, and somehow invariably did, lock onto him when he wanted to be free.

  “Let go!” he said. When he pried two fingers loose, eight others locked on harder. He could break, disjoint them—and he realized desperately that the only way to get loose was either to immobilize them one by one or to strike at the source of their strength.

  “Let go,” he said coldly. But the fingers wrapped him with insane strength. He began not to see clearly. The thing that had him would not let go. That force was too strong, and that was the end of it. The last choice had to come, came and was simultaneously acted upon. He hit the face and head of that other, unreasonable force, and each time it was like hammering nailed lumber apart. Little by little the strength ebbed, not in proportion to the force of the blows but, like nails coming out, bending into what held them, holding by their submerged friction until suddenly they let go and he was free. He raised his arms, looking at them free. The blood came back into his hand as it should, so that quickly he felt no more of the constriction or its effects, and he could move his fingers without that consciousness, with no unnatural feeling.

  Then he had to turn toward the object he had disarmed, and Horace came back. His face was lumpy and discolored already. A thin line of blood rimmed his lower lip, and his tongue came out and licked it off.

  “Horace!” Wood said. Yet he had known it was Horace. He tried to believe he hadn’t known in his madness that it was Horace.

  Horace stared at him with, it now seemed, the return of comprehension. So that’s how you really feel, Wood read in that stare. You too. Horace got to his feet, and the storm coat fell to the floor. He turned and went out of the room. He’d forgotten his glasses, but he seemed to see all right.

  He had the greatest power of anyone in the world to hurt Horace, and he had used it. No crime could be more monstrous than what he’d just done, and now Horace went back to those other monsters, somehow encompassing that betrayal.

  But now, below his horror at himself, he felt the shameful symptoms of exultation. He was evil, as evil as any of the rest. Tomorrow he would leave them all to their needs, and from tomorrow on he would never reveal anything to anyone. Susie Davis, Horace, Lois, Beady, Al, Peggy Mudd, his mother, all the rest. They would all be gone out of his regard, and he out of theirs. He would hide now until Leah was gone behind, and from then on he would hide within the business of the war.

  15

  One end of a small room called the teachers’ lounge—a place where Kate had never seen a teacher lounge—had been set aside as The Quill office, with an old desk, a typewriter, a tall green filing cabinet and a cork bulletin board. Wayne Facieux had placed the filing cabinet out from the wall so that it formed a room divider. This, he explained, would give the editors of The Quill some smattering of privacy in case any teacher ever did have time to come in and lounge. One reason no teacher ever came there, Kate supposed, was that Mr. Skelton’s office was right across the hall, and all doors were left open. Two Morris chairs and a maple table surrounded by straight chairs, and several metal ashtrays that stood on their own pedestals, were all the furniture in the lounge part. Long ago, by the looks of them, someone had hung some white faille curtains across the big institutional window at the end, and these looked out of place there, almost like filmy women’s clothes. Everything was dusty in this room, and she wondered if it wasn’t the pupils themselves, constantly sitting and rubbing and handling all the other furniture and objects in the school, that kept it reasonably dusted. Certainly Mr. Grand, the janitor, could be seen doing little except distributing chalk and erasers and emptying wastebaskets as he walked about with a flickering, hazy sort of smile on his face—this generally attributed to drink. David had shown her an actual revolver he’d bought from Mr. Grand for two dollars and fifty cents when Mr. Grand needed money for his liquor. That’s what David had said, anyway. The revolver was David’s secret, and she’d really felt complimented when he confided in her about it.

  Mr. Grand never came into the lounge at all, so the editors emptied their wastebasket into Mr. Skelton’s secretary’s waste-basket. His secretary was Mrs. Jarvis, a great big old lady who was supposed to have been there much longer than Mr. Skelton. When she went home they had to go home too. She would appear in the doorway—mountains and valleys of pleated, tucked and belted cloth, her hair like icy snow way up on top of her head, smile down at them and tell them that their labors in the vineyards of literature must cease for that day. Then, as they put things straight, she locked the principal’s office and ushered them out the front door. This always happened about five o’clock, so they had about an hour and a half after school to work on The Quill.

  Their advisor was Miss Palmer, who thought Wayne was a genius, so she didn’t advise much; she mostly said “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “Isn’t that beautiful!” Which was good, in a way, because Wayne had changed The Quill considerably during his editorship. He was awfully hard on girls who wrote stories about how a fluffy little chick feels when it first pecks its way out of its shell and views the great, wide, wonderful world. He could be positively mean. He’d put Carol Oakes into tears over her poem about the sun falling, falling, to the forest floor. The first thing he’d changed last fall, when he’d become editor in chief, was the cover, which had always had the same drawing of a quill pen on it.

  “If we’re going to have a silly, stereotyped name like The Quill, all we can do is try to use it as best we can,” he said. Now his covers were different every issue. His first one was a caricature of a porcupine, and that was the one he was proudest of. The issue they were working on now would have a cover with one big rose on it. “The thorns,” Wayne said. �
�That’s our motif—beauty with a sting in it.”

  This afternoon Kate was typing on stencil some of Wayne’s poems. She wasn’t officially an editor yet, because she wouldn’t be in ninth grade until the fall. She had turned fourteen, though, and Wayne called her his “editorial assistant.”

  Wayne sat across from her with several piles of manuscripts, alternately groaning and sighing judiciously. “My God,” he said, dropping his hand upon a pile of notebook paper. He resumed his reading. “Hmm. Listen to this: ‘The sun stank up the sky like a big greasy fried egg.’ Hmm. Some talent there. A squeak of talent. That is, providing the inelegance of that simile is altogether deliberate. Hmm.”

  She thought him handsome. His thin neck rose up out of the large open collar of his white shirt, then widened perceptibly just below his long, aristocratic ears. His dark hair, always worn long, partially covered the bows of his gold-rimmed glasses. Above his forehead, through the heavy dark hair, a narrow streak of white went up and over the top of his head. This was a strange natural mark that distinguished him from everyone else—the reason David and others sometimes called him “Skunkhead.”

  No one ever picked on Wayne, except to call him insulting names, and she sometimes wondered why they didn’t torment him more, because Wayne made no concessions to the way they thought a boy should act. “You are simply being vulgar,” he would say to them, give a haughty toss of his head and stride away on some business or other he considered important.

  She turned back to her typing.

  Eld, coin-silver, gilt-medallion form,

  The deep fish drops through his fadings

  Down where flesh is wafer to bright

  Teeth…

  Wayne came around and stood behind her, reading his poem over her shoulder.

  “You don’t, probably, see an admitted influence here. Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be brutally candid.” He put a thin, cool finger through her hair and lightly touched her ear. “Ah, Veronica,” he said. Sometimes he told her she looked like Veronica Lake. “No, let’s put it this way,” he’d said once, “Veronica Lake is privileged to resemble our Kate Whipple.”

  He drew his finger down to her shoulder, touched her lightly, and abruptly went back to his side of the desk. She shivered. There he sat, once more completely absorbed in his reading. She typed some more.

  Waves no more the bright air push;

  Hushed in iron deep the bleak teeth

  Grind

  Upon the needful bodies of the fish.

  Oh! Dark Prince of fathoms down!

  Where mariners dream from blind

  White eyes,

  Allow me power to look…

  And then return!

  She shivered again, full of admiration. Wayne’s thin wrist and hand rested across the disordered manuscripts, and his white skin was clean. But iron, she thought, given a dark princely iron value by the depths of his mind. He seemed ten times stronger than any other boy. No, he didn’t even live in the same world as they. He was David’s age, yet she couldn’t conceive of him zooming around on a bike. He walked, always fast, always intently not quite there, always unconscious of himself, always with his big leather briefcase swinging. Sometimes his gestures, even his walk, were delicately girlish, and when he crossed his legs he never put his ankle on his knee, but crossed them completely.

  Oh! There is fair vision yet

  In such rueless dark

  Where freak cracked forms must pulse neon

  And sign their bones in that bleak dark!

  Give me to look!

  As far as she could understand it, the poet wanted, in a sort of gruesomely cruel way, to look straight at a kind of hell. She thought of poor Horace, who always tried not to look, but was always finding monsters in every comer. As for herself, she didn’t want to look at such things either, but she wanted to be near Wayne, and to listen to him. She had a real crush on him, all right. She felt unworthy, because she couldn’t write or say anything half as serious or clever as he could. She knew she was pretty, but using this seemed the worst sort of cheating, and it made her even more unworthy. At least she could work hard on The Quill, and do more typing than any of the other editors.

  Carol Oakes was supposed to be an editor, but she never did anything any more, and Mary Denney ran around a lot, supposedly getting advertisements and looking for new material, but actually the same old advertisements appeared in each issue—Trask’s Pharmacy, Trotevale’s Department Store, the Thorn McAn Shoe Store and the rest.

  But even all this extra work was cheating, wasn’t it? The only real qualifications one needed for Wayne’s company—the company of wit and style and charm—were wit and style and charm. She could make a joke once in a while, but that was about it.

  Oh well, back to work. Maybe Wayne would walk her home. If he didn’t, she would think of an excuse to walk down street with him.

  At five Mrs. Jarvis, in her kindly but ponderous fashion, shooed them out of the school. Mary Denney had come in just before, and the three of them stood on the front steps, looking at the four big piles of scrap iron for the war effort—one for each of the senior-high classes. The junior-class pile was much bigger than the others, mainly because of Junior Stevens’ grandfather’s farm truck, which Junior could drive. Also, Junior seemed to know where every old rusted cultivator or hay rake had been abandoned long ago. If this was a redeeming quality it was Junior’s only one. He was a dull brute of a farm boy, and an imitator of Gordon Ward’s. Ugh.

  It was a warm day, with the new leaves green as lettuce, and the hard rusty iron seemed rather brutal itself the way it was piled among the hedges and young grass.

  Without having to give a reason, she began walking down-street with Mary and Wayne. Mary lived on the way, and she left them where she had to turn off, on Union Street. When they reached the square, Kate remembered that she had no money at all, so she couldn’t go to Trask’s as an excuse for this walk. She would leave Wayne there at the door to the stairs that led up to the apartments, then merely walk around the square and back home. But when they reached the sidewalk opposite the stairs Wayne said rather offhandedly, “Come up and I’ll make you a cup of tea.” •

  She considered this. To go up to the place where he lived. She would see his desk, his room, where he washed his face, where he slept. Up the dark stairs were those rooms she had never seen.

  “All right,” she said. She was trembling, and her knees were a little weak as she climbed the long flight of wooden stairs. A smell of varnish and old cooking was in the hall, a smell that seemed as yellowish-brownish as the painted walls and moldings.

  Wayne unlocked his door and moved her inside. “Here are our sumptuous quarters,” he said. His hand slid around the doorframe and found a wall switch. They had entered a small kitchen-dining room. The overhead-light globe contained two moths and various flies, whose shadows fell upon the maple dinette table, where salt and pepper shakers and a sugar bowl stood centered upon a crocheted mat. Dimly, through a doorway, were the somnolent slits of dropped Venetian blinds. The fat curve of an antimacassar predicted an overstuffed chair. The ceilings were very low, and the air was rich with the same varnishy smell of the hall. It all seemed very strange and exotic, and her heart was beating hard.

  Wayne pulled out a kitchen chair and waved her to it, then quickly filled a teakettle and put it on the gas stove to boil. “There,” he said. “As you can see, the place is sordid. Mother’s taste in such matters is not mine, and I await the hour of my escape.”

  “Your father?” she asked.

  “A good question. Yes, there generally is one of them around, isn’t there?” He seemed completely unaffected by this question, his face calm. He leaned negligently against the counter. “I can barely remember him. Sometimes I don’t think I actually remember him at all. I might be remembering the milkman or some other man who had to come to wherever we were living.”

  “But where’s your mother?” Kate said.

  “She works late today.�
�

  “Oh.” She was alone with him in his apartment, and that was even more exciting.

  “In any case, according to my mother he departed without warning. I sometimes wonder if there weren’t warnings the poor old girl didn’t happen to notice, but that’s neither here nor there.” He got down a brown teapot and spooned some black tea from a canister.

  “We hardly ever have tea at home,” she said.

  He shrugged and peered at the kettle. “It whistles when the water boils. Come, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

  The living room, with its low ceiling, was so stuffed with furniture it seemed more a storage place than a room to live in. But she was used to the high ceilings of the castle (“Veronica of the High Castle,” he’d called her). The wallpaper was alternate green and white vertical stripes, each about six inches wide, which gave her the feeling of being inside a Christmas box.

  They skipped one door that must have been his mother’s bedroom, and he opened another door. “My inner sanctum,” he said. This room was different. The bed was a mattress that lay right on the floor, although it was neatly made up. Across one wall was a bookcase made of red bricks with boards running across them, and against the opposite wall was a kitchen table obviously used as a desk because there were papers and books and pencils on it. The one picture in the room, she recognized—the yellow-green portrait of a young man by Van Gogh.

  “My ivory tower,” he said.

  In one way, at least, she was sorry for him. He had no friends. But who in Leah would he want for a friend? “Aren’t you lonely sometimes?” she asked him.

  He looked down at her and smiled benignly. “My feeling is that I’m in prison,” he said. “My brain is imprisoned in this…adolescent body. At least I know that in two or three years I’ll be able to go out of these doldrums into the real world.”