Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “I think you’ve got it a bit wrong,” Wood said. “Trying and ignoring are different.”

  “I know. Maybe I know. I’ve got a lot of nerve, anyway. Christ, here you are, a second lieutenant in the infantry, you’ve been down South for half a year. Who the hell am I? But what made you…made you able, for instance, to go see Susie Davis last winter and face up to her father. Jesus! Sam Davis! He’d suck woodpecker eggs!”

  “I felt responsible for Susie.”

  “Why? Did you lay her? Now, wait a minute. Don’t go all stern on me, Wood. Sure, it’s cruel and all that, but Susie’ll go out with anybody. I’ve seen her in Bruce Cotter’s car parked up by Scrotum Pond, for God’s sake. And Bruce Cotter’s no sparkling conversationalist.”

  “All right, David,” he said.

  “I mean, Bruce Cotter’s about the definition of anybody.”

  “Don’t say anything like that in front of Horace.”

  “See? That’s what I mean!” David shook his head in disbelief, then turned serious and shy. “That’s just what we mean about you, Wood.”

  He heard love and respect, as near as David could get to uttering those ideas, and because he understood the burden their brotherhood carried, of irony and history going back to all the indignity and self-protection of childhood, he was touched. David moved away from the porch across the lawn strewn with bright maple leaves, and jumped lightly over the barberry hedge, itself festooned with impaled leaves quivering in the dry October breeze.

  “So long!” he called back. He had neglected to say goodbye to anyone else, Wood noticed.

  “So long, Davy!”

  David waved, turned and strode lightly away, with a hop and a skip to kick flying a pile of leaves the wind had rolled up just for him, for the lightness and energy of what was left of his childhood.

  One evening the October air began to bite. The temperature fell into the twenties, and as the registers grew warm, the big house began to creak away its summer tensions. Horace brought in a pile of split hardwood logs for the big fireplace. He wouldn’t let Wood help with the furnace or with the fire, and even Harvey Whipple evidently decided not to unnerve Horace with remonstrations, or with directions about how to place the paper and kindling. Wood sat near his father’s oak table, drinking a glass of his father’s whiskey mixed with water. After starting the fire, Horace left them with, Wood suspected, a touch of discretion, and he wondered if his mother had anything to do with the setting of this scene of father and oldest son alone with their toddies before the baronial fire.

  They were alone, sipping their drinks as they watched the fire grow into its familiar limits. The massive owl’s-head andirons blinked through their reddish crystal eyes, and above the high mantle the heavy and ornate wood paneling glowed soft as old gunstocks. Lamps made circles of muted light in the high room, and they began to feel the fire’s benevolent push against the chill. Wood began to feel that inner dullness, or looseness, caused by the whiskey—perhaps also a benevolent force. He rarely drank hard stuff, and the reason seemed to be a voice that suggested—not a command, but evidently a powerful suggestion—that he keep ready, keep awake, that he might have need of the edge whiskey so subtly stole from him. It was a voice he could at times resent.

  His father lit a pipe, waved out his kitchen match and flicked it into the fire. “I always wondered why you didn’t start college,” his father said.

  “The colonel who was head of the OCS Board asked me that too. I told him I knew I was going in the service within a year anyway, and my heart wouldn’t have been in it. I can wait. Anyway, I’ll save some money in the Army.”

  “I always intended to pay your tuition, you know.”

  “I know that,” Wood said. When he looked at his father, his father turned his head back to the fire.

  “Maybe it’s that I hate to be a cripple. I wonder if you know. To ask people to wait on me.”

  “I think I understand,” Wood said. He did understand all that had been skipped, how his father had come right to the point.

  “Me!” his father said with wonder. “I just never will get over it. I don’t seem to have any…resources. You understand? This is a confession. What have I got to lose? You’ve got me beat all hollow. I never got into the last war because it ended before I got my commission. It’s in my mind like a worm, maybe more like a little jewel, a cyst, that I would have been damned good. I knew I was a leader—everybody did what I suggested. They followed me. I’m no good, sitting around stinking and thinking. Never been any good at that. What I’ve been is a man of action, and I’m not going to sit here and smile at myself with any goddam deprecation or modesty or whatever it is you’re supposed to do in such a case. I’ve got no medals to prove anything, only a bunch of trophies and cups saying I was a captain of sports. Games. But I can’t tell you how much I envy you. I envy you so much I can taste it. It’s like copper on my tongue. Your mother tells me I ought to grow up, and I suppose she’s right, as usual. I’m supposed to bow gracefully to rot. Shit, what I used to do was jump gracefully. I never bowed. I used to run up the trunks of trees. And then you come home on leave looking like a recruiting poster, bigger than life, and you find a drunken slob indulging himself in a messy little fit of self-pity. This is all by way of excuse, you understand. Or apology, I don’t know which.”

  “I do understand,” Wood said.

  “Yeah, but it’s an apology you’d never have to make. How do you think that feels stuffed in my craw?”

  “How do you know that? I’ve never been put in your position. How do you know I could stand it at all?”

  “I do know, and that’s what hurts. It’s why I’ve never been able to—Christ, since the accident—never been able to talk to my own son, nor you to me.”

  “We’re talking now,” Wood said, but his father shook his head, his white jowls moving.

  “Not really. No. I’m not big enough. I’m putting on a show, can’t you tell? Tough Harvey Whipple, bowed but unbent—what is it? A poem, ‘Out of the Night,’ is it? No, it had a Latin name to it. Bloody but unbowed. Christ! William Ernest Henley. Bunch of crap. I remember the goddam thing from college. See? I can’t stop talking, acting.”

  But then he did stop, and he did several little things in quick, mechanical succession, as if each were allotted a certain number of seconds. He took a drink, tapped out his pipe, lit a cigarette and adjusted himself in his chair.

  “But,” he said finally, “it’s a two-way street, isn’t it? Am I supposed to take all the blame for it?”

  “No, I realize—” Wood said.

  “As a matter of fact,” his father said quickly, “something very peculiar began to happen to you…to me…a long time ago. I’ve never been a man with any reticence. You know what I mean? Like right now. It’s go on or stop, even though I’m blabbing too much and I resent you for hearing it, and making any of your callow judgments of me. See, you can hear it. It creeps in. ‘Callow.’ You’re only nineteen. I resent that. I’m a typical Yankee blabbermouth and you keep your mouth shut and think too much. Christ, you were born looking around and making judgments. Even when I dumped crap out of your diapers you were watching me. When I spanked you, you gave me the feeling it was only my superior strength, power, that made you cry, not right or justice or shame—no matter what you’d done to deserve it. You always seemed to be ahead of me on morals. When I taught you something you were grateful. You weren’t like me at all. It was a nightmare. Here I was…am…a sinner, a hypocrite, a normal goddam puling, bragging specimen of humanity, and it looked like I had a son who was going to be everything I pretended to believe in. Every time I looked at you it knocked the shit out of my cynicism, and man, that hurt!”

  His father stopped, looked at him quickly, then finished his drink. “Shit,” he said in a calmer voice, “I can’t make anybody answer that. How about getting us another?”

  Wood took their glasses to the kitchen, thinking how he could answer his father. He should try to say something t
hat would make the man feel better, of course. But was that right, and wouldn’t his father see immediately, almost before he opened his mouth, that it was all happening again, that he was being given therapy, moral superiority? At least that was how his father would see it. What his father said was true. It was a nightmare; it was all upside down. The child was father to the man. What came first, the chicken or the egg? He couldn’t find much resentment toward his father, either. All was forgiven; the nightmare was that all was forgiven. And no attempt to recount his own sins would be anything but a kind device. He wondered how David and his father managed with hardly any words at all to be easy, to be all right with each other. Nothing seemed to hang over their heads, even when it came to shouting.

  He brought the drinks back to the living room.

  “Ah, thanks,” his father said. They were silent for a while, listening to the smooth breath of the fire.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Wood said finally.

  “I don’t blame you.”

  More silence, and then his father said, “It’s funny how I don’t seem to be able to get rid of this jealousy. It’s competition, I suppose, which is overweening pride—in myself. Take Gordon Ward, for instance. I mean Gordon, Sr. Evidently Gordon, Jr., is quite a hero. Did you hear that?”

  Wood nodded. He’d read about it in the Leah Free Press.

  “Anyway, he’s getting some kind of big medal and a battlefield promotion. Gordon, Sr., called me up and banged my ear about it for three quarters of an hour. Christ, he knows more military shop talk now than Sergeant York. But I suppose some of his excitement was pure surprise. I always thought the boy would end up in the guardhouse. But proud? You ought to have heard him. I sat there, listening and saying ‘Ayuh,’ and ‘My, isn’t that fine,’ but all the time I was thinking: Well, I know a father ought to feel that way, because that’s what I’ve always heard and seen—but it still made me wonder. Now, I admire what you’ve done. You’re young to be an officer and so on. I admire you, and I give you the compliment of being jealous, but I could no more go and brag on you, as if I’d had anything to do with it, than I could run rabbits and bark at the moon. You understand?”

  “I guess so. It seems logical, anyway,” Wood said.

  “Sure, but it’s sick. Is that what you mean?”

  “People are proud of their flesh and blood, sort of, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, sure, but that always seemed kind of stupid to me. It’s only one half of the blood right at the start, anyway, unless you think of a woman as just a kind of incubator. And then don’t start looking back, or you’ll scare yourself to death. One of your greatgrandfathers was a brilliant man, a college president, and his son got senile at fifty and pissed his pants every three hours for the rest of his life. Or look at Peggy Mudd. How the hell could blood ever account for that girl? She’s got her father’s ugly puss, all right, but where’d she get that intelligence?”

  Wood shook his head. As he’d listened to his father he could remember very clearly the quick, slim man he used to be. His voice was lean, a little high, and the clipped, slightly breathless sharp phrases were still the same.

  He’d always been impatient, with his teammates and his children, but before the accident he would show it by a sudden stiff smile and a nervous turning away of his head, as though he didn’t want to see such awkwardness. The smile would be gone when he turned back to whatever clumsy human he had to teach. Whatever activity it was, he’d say “Here, let me show you,” and do it so perfectly, the various moves would blend into each other and disappear, and the example would be useless to the pupil. Casting a fly line, shooting, throwing a ball—whatever it was, his father seemed to flash into his stance, and then it was over; the fly floated lightly down upon the exact center of the rise, the clay bird turned to black dust, the ball appeared, stationary, in the pocket of the mitt. He was a leader, but no teacher. It was poor Horace who really suffered from this impatience. The rest were quick enough on their own, especially David, who was obviously his father’s favorite, who looked most like him too. Wood thought of asking him if he were jealous of David, then shied away from that. His father had chosen the subjects for his evening of confession, and it would be a touchy thing to tamper with. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  Then Wood was filled, overcome, drowned in the knowledge of his own coldness, presumption, intolerance. The words fell about him like the stern judgments of God. The child is father to the man! No, youth is selfish and intolerant. To forgive is to be indifferent, and youth wants away.

  His father sat there a prisoner of his pain and the soft, fat body he must despise. He looked like a melting snowman—if a snowman could quiver so precariously. His father had offered him a great deal, but he couldn’t use it. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Their history was too full of stalking, still-hunting, avoidance. They had no common jokes, no common ironies.

  What if he were to confess how he’d betrayed his friend Stefan? How would he begin? What tone would he assume? If this were a night for confession, why not try?

  Because his father would consider that cuckolding a triumph, and it was not a triumph. The world of smut was subtle and was everywhere. No one could be trusted with that knowledge. He’d gone back to Lenore whenever he could get a pass, and though Perrone and Quillen were suspicious, they never knew. Each time he’d curse himself and vow not to go on with it, but he knew where he was going and what he would do. She purred like a cat, and yowled softly in his ear. He couldn’t stop hearing that curving, modulant warble in his ear, day and night. He was out of his mind. He would betray helplessness, the most utter helplessness. Now the outfit had gone to Europe, Stefan, God help him, included; Lenore was back in Ohio. At infantry school at Fort Benning he’d received a letter from her every day. At every mail call the blue envelope he dreaded was pressed into his helpless hand. Sheets of blue paper, her round, sincere, half-literate handwriting, the t’s dotted with huge circles: Wood my darling my dearest lover I lay all night thru dreaming of you in my arms. He read each letter in a fit of self-disgust, even breaking into sweat. O Wood sweetheart do you think of “doing it” with me my handsome “beast.” O my goodness some of the things I say you could black mail me so burn this!

  And he would groan for pity. Pity for her, pity for himself. He never answered, and finally the letters stopped. No, it was a confession he would never make. She sent her pitiful letters out into nowhere. If he could treat any person that way he would take his sin, unalloyed and unabsolved, to the final judgment.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” his father said.

  “No, I guess I never have.”

  “We never talked,” his father said.

  There was a hint of sadness—his father’s kind, perhaps—a sort of cynical jauntiness, if that was possible. His father had given nothing up, really, and would give nothing up. Nothing would become so painful or so lost it couldn’t be mentioned. Wood stretched his own healthy legs toward the fire, calves and thighs pleasurably defining themselves. His father’s glass was empty, so he finished his and got up to make them another drink. “Maybe another of these will prime the pump,” he said.

  His father’s answering smile was knowing, grateful, and Wood yearned to do something for him. He wanted to touch him, but how did one comfort his father? He couldn’t figure out how to do it—he couldn’t feel how to do it. Something powerful gleamed from that face sick with corpulence. Memories of pride in his father stirred, were still there from long ago. Also fear, but more a sense of residing justice that might or might not have been a child’s standard delusion. He turned away, a glass in each hand, conscious of the breadth and strength of his own young body. He was his father’s son; he perceived that knowledge in the other person. Though he might never hear pride expressed, they would sit late, drink, and watch the embering fire they had in common.

  21

  Dark Hill Farm seemed dark for more reasons than the acres of spruce that surrounded the fields like black dwarv
es with their arms, even their dead arms, interlocked. The reluctant winter sun was pale as it came across the hill, and the house beneath its grove of pines was dim, lantern-lit. As the winter came on, the floorboards cracked underfoot, almost fractured in the cold. David had to get up before daylight, make his breakfast of cereal and milk by oil lamp, then walk a mile down the dim frozen road to wait with the other townies for the Dexter-Benham station wagon. He waited there by the Jaspers’ mailbox with Billy Warren, Harold Pittman and Howard Jasper, all of them cold, stamping, shivering as they waited. Howard Jasper was a freshman, and the other two were sophomores. Howard was small and fragile-looking; they were all scared by Al Roux, the driver, and hoped that if he were going to run the station wagon off the road he would do it before he picked them up, but Howard was often frightened into tears. Sometimes when they got to the academy Al Roux would run the car onto the football field and slew around, laughing past his cigarette and blowing ashes into the defroster fan. Poor Howard would grab David’s arm and hide his head in David’s side. Billy and Harold would grit their teeth and watch whatever was coming.

  After school it was again dark when they were let off, sometimes on cloudy days so dark David would have to stare above him at the faint radiance of the sky, following that in order to keep on the road. He was quite often afraid. Too many new and unsettling things were happening to him, and his life seemed to be a series of anxious waits for danger, real or not. He was ashamed because he was unable to destroy in his mind whatever evil shapes, animal or man or monster, lurked beneath the perpetual night of the spruce. He didn’t dare take his revolver to school with him because he had no certain place to hide it during those bright, official hours. In the daylight his fear dimmed, but always the dark hill waited, and at the end of the hill the presence of Lucifer transformed every shade of darkness, perceived only from the corners of his eyes, into a softly moving force.