Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “You’ve evidently got a half-pint size,” he said.

  “Don’t laugh! God damn it, lunch is in twenty minutes!”

  “How about sticking the whole works in your pants?”

  “It shows. I tried. I can’t even walk without holding on to it.”

  The door suddenly opened. Hoppy grabbed for the towel, and Judson Gay appeared. He stood looking at them, and Hoppy stared up into his head in resignation.

  “Did I interrupt something?” Judson asked. His characteristic expression was of an irony so distinct that sometimes his nose appeared to be on a different side of his face than his mouth.

  “Tell him,” Hoppy said. “Tell them all.”

  “What?” Judson asked.

  “Hoppy got his pecker stuck in a milk bottle.”

  “What?” Judson said.

  “You didn’t have to be so crudely precise,” Hoppy said.

  “What?” Judson said.

  “Tell him again,” Hoppy said. “Tell everybody.”

  “Let’s see it,” Judson said. He whistled. “My God! It looks like a bottle of pickled pigs’ feet!”

  “That’s helpful as all hell,” Hoppy said. “Look, I’ve got to get it off! Think! Think!”

  They explained to Judson what had been tried already.

  “The radiator,” Judson said after much thought. “We’ll just tap it on the radiator.”

  “Agh!” Hoppy said. “The radiator! Good God!”

  “We’ll just tap it gently, until it cracks—”

  “No cracks! Forget it!”

  “Maybe Swivelhead could think of something,” David suggested.

  “I’d just as soon keep the number of witnesses down,” Hoppy said. “Sort of at a minimum.”

  Swivelhead was summoned.

  “Jesus!” he said. “What in hell did you go stick your dink in a h-p for?”

  “For the thrill of it,” Hoppy said.

  “You ever try slamming a window on it?”

  “A lot of help he’s going to be,” Hoppy said miserably.

  Nothing was any help, and at the last minute, out of real desperation, they went to the floor master, Mr. Cheevy, whom they’d tormented with pennies in his light socket. This was slightly degrading in many ways, and worst of all it proved that, seventeen or not, they were not as wise as the little man they had professed to despise. After one look he went to his bathroom and came back with a soaped tongue depressor. This he slid down into the bottle, letting in air, and the bottle slid off fairly easily.

  “You had created a vacuum,” he said, insultingly unsurprised by the whole business. He told no one, either, and of course they could never torment him again.

  In May, David took some tests given at the school by the Army, and was admitted to something called the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program. After graduation in June he would be in uniform. When he became eighteen he would go into the Army proper, but until then the Army would feed and clothe him and send him to college.

  One day during spring vacation he sat at home, at his desk below the head of the dusty De Oestris moose. His room seemed smaller after his absences, cluttered, half his possessions childish. The maple roll-top desk was full of toys such as bullet molds, knives; plans, half conceived, of odd gadgets, boats, airplanes. There were manuscripts, pretentious in their titles (“A History of the Underhammer Pistol”), that tapered off after a few pages from lack of research and real interest. Behind the desk were some embarrassingly bad paintings that ought to be destroyed.

  From a small drawer he took his revolver and spun the magazine, opened it upon the round, still-powerful faces of the primers, clicked it shut and put it back in its drawer. It was silver-plated—real, but decorated like a toy. The real guns were blued nearly black, or painted olive drab, and they fired in the real wars in Europe and in Asia. In A Farewell to Arms, Lieutenant Rinaldi kept toilet paper in his pistol holster. At first David had thought it was because he hated guns, but then it occurred to him—and this seemed a powerful insight still—that he kept the toilet paper to use as toilet paper, and the implied comment was so much more powerful than the direct one he’d first supposed. And beautiful Catherine Barkley. Would the war reveal to him a girl like that somewhere, somehow? Or was she real at all, that brave nurse? Were all girls somehow half there—pretty but rather stupid like Carol Oakes, in love with you but bland and plain like Mary Denney, beautiful and striking like Tucker Cross, but a slut at heart? No, how about Katie, who was so pretty and so alive? He was surprised by a surge of brotherly love for that lively sister. But surely there must be a girl out there for him, for him to be worthy of.

  In a month or so the uniform of his country’s Army would declare him a man, and he would leave boyhood, its humiliations, its accidents, his friends (like Ben, he thought; poor Ben, who still breathed and was fed by tube, forever a child). Are you out there? he whispered, meaning the girl, the world, something like a life, serious and meaningful unto death.

  22

  In the year 1944 a strange thing began to happen to Harvey Watson Whipple—an amelioration so gradual, so slow it was there working in his diseased bones without his knowledge. If he took a few less aspirin a week, how could he notice that? Or if he found it necessary to drink, later on, only one two-ounce ration of whiskey before he went to bed, had he ever measured his need in ounces? His healing was a forgetting, a slow fading of what once had been so positive a force. There were new drugs that may have had something to do with it, drugs developed because of the war, and the doctors at the clinic in Northlee had begun to use these in his prescriptions. Once, standing in the bathroom, he found that he had stood his left crutch against the wall by the medicine cabinet. Yes, there it was, and for a moment he felt a thrill almost of amputation, reached quickly for the crutch as though he might be falling, then realized that he had been standing not just upon his left leg. Ounces of weight—a delicate touch of the ball of the foot for balance—had been placed upon the right leg, yet there was no pain, only a certain achelike stiffness, or pressure, in the socket of his hip. Now, all at once, he took careful notice. In the massive leanings of his pain, which were still there, certain strengths that before had been ominous in their reserves and predictions, now waned. His pulse beat lighter in their surges, as though his heart were his own again, not part traitor.

  Careful, careful, he thought, afraid of the despair he had lived with so long; he wanted no redefinement of it. All this could be a nasty trick, a plot to renew his anguish. He told no one, which was a measure of his fear.

  He didn’t tell his wife, but of course she noticed. Long before he made his first experiments with his disused nerves and muscles, she noticed. Once she woke to find him sleeping on his stomach. Once he forgot to take his aspirin in the morning. One night they made love, the real way, not just her helping him, or having to be so careful.

  Finally he was ready to tell her, but of course she had seen changes, by then, not only in his mind but in the shape, the roundness and length, of the muscles in his atrophied leg. His thigh began to turn round again. No longer a shank of bone in a loose bag of fat, its surfaces returned, and the scars and tears and stitch marks arched, now, around the growing muscles they defined.

  One morning in late summer, a humid morning when all was finely misted as in an old painting, she woke to find him standing in front of the high window of their bedroom. He held one crutch by its handhold, using it as a cane. He took a step, and her hip tingled and stung in sympathy. He grimaced, but it was partly triumph. When he saw her watching him his face fell and he looked trapped, guilty. “Hanky,” he said. “Did you see me?”

  “I saw.”

  He sobbed, and took another step. “Nobody’ll ever understand,” he said. “I don’t care if they don’t. I don’t give a shit if you see me bawl. I do, Hanky, I do. But if this leg is going to even half-ass work again, I…” He turned to the window, and looked for a long time across the lawn and into the woods.

 
Horace sat at David’s desk, staring into the small drawer that held David’s revolver. Could he pick it up? That instrument was made for a hand, a hand like his own. Once wed to a hand, power in lines of force enlarged one man, made him master of all within range of that small glittering instrument. Miraculous, and dangerous too. It was necessary to have complete dominance over its parts, its springs, its cams and pressures. Now. Coolly, rationally, one’s brain runs one’s body. Reach down and pick it up.

  He jumped back, crying softly. Had it coiled and lashed at his hand? Hadn’t it waited coldly until he was too close, then jumped? Something had. No, now wait. Something can be nothing. Something can happen inside that seems to have happened outside.

  His new power waxed and waned, but he felt progress. When he went down cellar to take out clinkers, to get the furnace ready for fall, his magic was to die. All right, he said each time, I will die. But I will take certain ones with me. He had challenged them. Zoster was too wise, but Leverah was dead—or at least badly injured. The Herpes were little yappers he would someday catch, one by one in his hands of steel and wrench them apart, their little yapping mouths still talking as he flung their dismembered bodies through that space, heads rolling, arms tumbling, joints flying. But how he had tricked Leverah, in his room! He knew she was there, blue coals of eyes, hair like clamworms, brown rotten banana fingers. All right, he said, now! He’d jumped up and rushed to the window, his eyes bugged out. A flash of blood smeared the glass on the outside and then came the long dying echo of a witch’s scream as she fell, bleeding and burning. He felt no pity whatsoever, and his strength grew.

  For they were the souls of the enemies. He would be a victim no longer. A victim is worthless, hardly even pitiful. He knew that from plenty of experience. He’d pleaded with them, he’d pleaded with them, and pleading did no good. Even in Wood such despised helplessness had caused disgust. Wood had to get away from that person he had been. He understood. It was not Wood’s fault. Wood had taught him a lesson.

  Susie had recognized right off that he was no longer a victim, because she loved to have him near her. He was strong, now, and she knew he would protect her with his life.

  But the revolver lay crouched in its drawer, and he watched it. It was so quiet. Don’t be a sap! Guns aren’t alive, you jerk! They aren’t alive at all until you pull the trigger. Then they jump. But then they jump in your hand. That’s wrong. The revolver becomes you, part of you, and it sends its authority, which is yours, out in that line you choose, which is yours, and kills what you have directed it to kill.

  Several days later he got his hand on it, and nothing happened, so he picked it up. It seemed to give a satisfied little twitch as it snuggled into his hand. Later he found how to open it up. The shells came up out of their holes all at once, sort of as if the revolver vomited as he bent it. No hard feelings, though. Soon he kept it in his room, in the drawer of the table by his bed. When David came home on furlough from the Army he put it back, of course, then kept it near his bed again. He had made peace with Wood’s shotgun too; its black tubes and dark wood stood in the corner by his door.

  That was the Christmas neither Wood nor David came home, and Horace cut and dragged in and set up the tree. Horace! Peggy watched him proudly, and from the balcony handed him the angel. Kate steadied the stepladder. They were all proud of Horace. Sally De Oestris had to hire a man to drive her on her rounds that year, an old man who used to drive a taxi. Fortunately there was little snow, and she could get around well enough on her canes. Peggy went with her. Sally had taken a great notion to Peggy, and she worked at Sally’s house two or three days a week.

  Peggy hadn’t heard from her mother in six months, and there was no word from her at all that Christmas.

  Sally came hobbling out to the kitchen, where she found Henrietta alone. She tried to whisper, but her whispers were still somehow voiced and penetrating.

  “That woman’s abandoned her child,” Sally said, her little blue eyes flashing above her diamonds and silver, out of her wrinkles. Her hair was white-silver as the artificial snow beneath the tree, but in her seriousness she seemed to turn before Henrietta’s eyes from a decorative object into a stern, real person.

  “I know.”

  “Cheap bitch,” Sally said. “The girl’s well rid of her.”

  “She’ll be all right here with us,” Henrietta said.

  “She seems smart’s a whip. How smart is she?”

  “She gets good grades in school. Is that what you mean?”

  “How good?”

  “A’s and B’s. Like Kate.”

  “Tell me, now, Henrietta. I know her mother’s a stupid woman. I had her in to help once and I swear to God! And her father’s no genius either. Is she college material?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Oh, come on! I’m too old for that bloody sensitivity. God damn it, I know you didn’t go to college, so can it! We got over that years ago, didn’t we?”

  “I’m sorry,” Henrietta said, and she meant it. Her sudden defensiveness had surprised her. “I’m sorry, Sally,” she said.

  “Okay!”

  “Peggy’s smart, all right. She’s very smart.”

  “I’m going to put her through college, when the time comes. I saw Fred Pike about it a week ago Friday, and he’s setting it up. Now I don’t want the girl to know this just yet, but I do think she ought to know. It’s a dilemma. Don’t want gratitude, but if she can go to college I want her to take the college prep and not settle for some fiddle-faddle like secretarial studies or home ec. See what I mean?”

  “Yes, but I think you’ll have to suffer the gratitude. Mine too.”

  “Ah, yes,” Sally said. She sighed. “Yours I’ll suffer gladly. It’s just that I don’t want the girl beholden to me. It’s two years before she’d be going off, and I like to have her around, but not as any sort of ward, you know? Now maybe this is too much to ask, but I wonder if you could just give her the impression somehow that if she wants to go on with her education, she can?”

  “Great Expectations,” Henrietta said.

  “What? Oh yes. Well, how about it? Talk it over with Harvey. ‘Course if you don’t want to go along with my little white lie, or whatever it is, that’s all right. I’m an old woman, is all, probably ready to kick the bucket, and that’s the reason I give for asking.”

  “We’ll see, then,” Henrietta said, and Sally tapped her affectionately on the hip with one of her canes.

  Peggy had been helping decorate the tree, but just before this conversation had begun, she’d gone to her room to get her presents for the Whipples out from under her bed. She’d just knelt by the floor register and reached for the tissue-wrapped boxes, and she heard every word as clearly as if she’d been standing beside them.

  It was the goodwill, that wave of warmth come up with the kitchen smells and warm dry air from the range. First that about her mother—hard but true; they had a right to say what they’d said, and she shouldn’t resent it. Then their concern for her, bringing tears. She put her face on the bed. How had the Whipples happened to be here, and Sally De Oestris? Why should they take her in? So many kids lived in shacks in the woods, and came to school hungry too, with that beat-up look about the eyes, and constant toothaches. She used to recognize them, and they her, and feel that none of them really belonged in school or would be there very long. Sixteen was when you quit school—it was a fact nobody thought much about.

  She felt gawky and rawboned, and she knew her eyes were red. She’d grown taller, into an awkward bony thing. She’d begun to have arguments with people when she disagreed with them. She’d begun to have opinions, even to look things up in the encyclopedia, and to read the newspapers and magazines. She’d begun to feel that she wasn’t really a nice person—as if this research were a form of cheating. She’d had an argument with Mr. Whipple about Roosevelt and Dewey and he’d got so mad he whacked his cane down across his table and roared at her how the President was a dictator worse than Hitl
er. That was because he’d got Donald Nelson and Harold Ickes mixed up, and she’d corrected him.

  And now to hear Sally and Mrs. Whipple talk of her with no reference to this hardness that had come over her, this snottiness she couldn’t seem to control sometimes. She had to deserve whatever concern anyone had for her. What other right could she possibly have for being here, for living in this house? She could not deserve their kindness, yet they gave it anyway. And even after her argument with Mr. Whipple—right afterwards, with the echoes still flying—he’d asked her in the nicest way to get him another cup of coffee, as though nothing had happened.

  Then, beyond what warmth of gratitude she’d felt as she listened to their power and concern, she thought of the gift itself. She had never thought of going to college. People like her didn’t go to college, period. It was odd if they finished high school. She had been planning to major in the secretarial course. But now the possibilities scarily opened out. Now she could be anything. She could be anything. She knew she would never get married, and now she could learn things beyond the mere information and mechanical skills of high school. In college you learned how to make a profession out of your knowledge. She could be a teacher, a scientist, she could take Latin two more years if she wanted, and it would help her, not just be something she liked. Her whole future now opened out in warm colors, something to anticipate with fear and joy.

  Then shut, with a chill shiver. She had forgotten the war, forgotten that Wood was in constant danger. Her father too. Even David was now in the real Army, training down in the South. She could not look ahead at all, not beyond Wood’s safe return. They were all trapped to right here and right now. Again her essential selfishness had appeared, a little cold selfish thing like a snake, that made her say me, me, that slithered its cold head in and out of her mind, not under her control.

  That Christmas, after the presents were opened, they were all silent, all at once, thinking of Wood. So many men and boys were overseas, or gone from Leah. Bertram Mudd was somewhere in the Pacific, and so was Wood. David was in the Army in the South, and so was John Cotter. Keith Joubert was in Europe. Donald Ramsey was in the Marines. Michael Spinelli was in a submarine. Gordon Ward had been wounded again in Italy. Eddie Kusacs was dead, still sitting inside his Marine fighter plane, deep in the Pacific Ocean; he’d crashed trying to land on his carrier and slid off over the side, leaving his wings, so he sank like a stone. Sylvia Beaudette’s husband, Phil, was dead, missing over Germany but seen to explode, his “Flying Fortress” blowing up like one bomb, and she’d gone home to Maine to live with her parents. Others were dead, or missing, or wounded so badly they couldn’t come home. The war was being won, but what consolation was that when all the hostages, the boys who ought not to have to die, were off in deadly foreign places? It was the winter for death.