Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  He wore a patch over his left eye, where his left eye had been. When she had asked to see his eye, he removed the patch and it was shocking because nothing but skin wrapped his face between his nose and ear, as though the eye itself had been a wound that had healed over with hardly a scar. He had told her in technical language as calmly as a doctor the information relative to his wounds: a nine-millimeter machine-gun bullet at maximum velocity hit his knee squarely. The bullet may have been defective, for it shattered, doing more damage. Parts of that bullet probably struck his left wrist. He was running at the time, stooped over. Another bullet hit his left leg just below the knee. Another bullet grazed his left eye and took away part of the temple; another bullet pierced his larynx.

  “I was lucky,” he’d whispered. “I’d done a stupid thing and they had me dead to rights.”

  “What was so stupid?”

  “It was strange,” he said.

  “What was strange?”

  “I almost think I knew where that machine gun was.” He looked at her and evidently saw her expression of concern. “Of course I didn’t really know where it was. But you get so tired,” he’d said, this in his former scratchy whisper. “You get so tired.”

  She stood now, watching him from the bay window of a parlorlike room they hardly ever used, feeling guilty of peeping because she had no real business in that dusty room. He was reading another book about the war, this one by a moderately liberal war correspondent. She had noticed that he carried around with him certain old magazines, which always seemed to be rather casually lying near him. She had picked them up and looked through them, finding immediately those pages he studied. Some were pictures of Hiroshima—a little girl whose back and arm grew bubbly and white. Another had a series of pictures of concentration camps. At Dachau or Belsen husky German girls threw sticklike corpses into a trench. He studied the charnel houses—now cities, even countries, it seemed, of the world. She had looked up from the pictures of Hiroshima and caught his eye. He looked away.

  “But we weren’t…” she began to say that time; his dark eye had turned toward her again and she had stopped.

  Someone had sent him the papers found on the body of the Japanese soldier who had shot him, and he kept these near him too, in that informal pile of magazines and pictures. Last fall he had sent the papers to David, who was at the University of Chicago, and David had gone to the Oriental Institute and got somebody to translate them. The soldier was Jotohei, or Superior Private, Ichiro Watanabe, twenty-two years old when he died. A letter among the papers was from his parents. They lived in Asakusa, a ward of Tokyo, and Wood had sent them the papers, with a note, but had heard nothing. In the spring the envelope came back. Written on it in English was a note saying that street hadn’t existed since the B-29 fire raid of March 10, 1945. Then Wood learned that eighty-three thousand people had died in that fire raid.

  “My little gesture,” he’d said to Henrietta.

  Now he sat there by the grapevine, in the high-backed old rocking chair, his artificial leg unlocked so the knee of it bent. He stopped reading to light his pipe. He was twenty-three years old, which seemed to her so young, a happy age to be. Twenty-three. When she was that age Wood was a year old, and she remembered those times. She was having babies, and it was so much fun. That was about it. They wanted the babies and they had the money and they loved to do what caused the babies. The world seemed such a wonderful place to make love and have babies in.

  And now, cursed every day by the news she could no longer ignore, the world was all pain and hatred and murder. It was stupid. The world was stupid. But people hurt just as much as they ever did. Wood had hurt just as much as she would have if they’d cut off her leg and poked out her eye and shot her in the throat.

  For a while after the war, in spite of everything, there had been hope, but now hatred had settled in all over the world again like a disease spawned in the war. If a good man tried to do something they assassinated him, like Gandhi, or somehow he died or was slandered, sacrificed to the universal stupidity.

  She was weeping, clenching her fists and weeping.

  Wood had spent quite a few months of those three years in Army and VA hospitals in Seattle, Chicago, and finally in Vermont. His mother had flown for the first time in her life to visit him in Seattle, a few months after his return on the Alaria to the States.

  In late 1946, when his prosthesis began to work for him and he could walk without crutches, and when most of the strength in his left hand had returned, he obtained a car through the VA—a 1946 Hudson with a hand clutch—and drove east from Chicago. That trip had taken months, because it led to many places, east, west and south. He spent three months, including Christmas of 1946, in Columbus, Ohio, with George Murchison, who had been a buck sergeant, then second lieutenant and platoon leader, then was badly wounded in the fourth week on Okinawa. Wood had intended to stop for a day or two, to keep a promise, but George, his wife and her parents, who lived in a big old stucco house, had all conspired to keep him there forever. George had been hit by shell fragments in both legs and in the head, and wore a titanium plate in his skull. He was a dark, short man who looked fierce. His sense of humor was gentle and generous, and he liked without apology to talk of what he called “big” things. The two of them spent most of their time limping about among the falling leaves, throwing rocks in the frog pond or sitting on the rail fence, watching the horses in the fields of the working farm next door.

  When it grew cold they sat in the second living room, George, his wife Bev, and Wood, in front of a ragged stone fireplace. Sometimes Bev’s mother and father would come in, although they had their own part of the big house. Bev’s father was a doctor who had a somehow engaging, ironic fondness for military titles. He called George “Lieutenant,” and Wood “Captain.” Bev was a warm, big girl with a very pretty face and trim, birdlike little legs. She brought them beer, apples, cheese and whatever else they wanted. She watched them play chess, and played darts better than either of them. In a strange and relaxing way that caused Wood to feel peaceful, he fell in love with Bev, or maybe it was with both of them, with the sight of Bev sitting on the arm of George’s chair, both of them seriously trying to make the same point, yet disagreeing vehemently about how to make it.

  George wanted Wood to go into business with him.

  “What kind of business?” Wood asked in his tremulous whisper.

  “Any kind. We’ve got to look around. In the spring we’ll case the whole area.”

  “I ought to go to college, I suppose,” Wood said.

  “What about Ohio State?” Bev said eagerly.

  “There’s a lot worse places than O.S.U.,” George said.

  Wood swallowed, trying to arrange his vocal cords, and whispered, “But I shouldn’t stay here. I’ve got errands to do.”

  George nodded, then shook his head. Wood had admitted to them that he intended to visit the families of Wilcox, Malins, Strecher, Forman, Hawkes, Dreher and Smith.

  “Why do you feel you have to do that?” George asked again.

  “I’m not sure,” Wood said.

  Bev’s eyes glistened. “My God, what a terrible thing to have to do. But it’s beautiful. I know how much it means to those people. It makes it all for something.”

  “Yes, that’s it. I feel responsible,” Wood said.

  “For what?” George said. “Christ, if any platoon leader did all he could to keep his men alive, it was you.”

  “I don’t mean personally responsible,” Wood said. “Maybe I don’t know what I mean. Maybe it’s my country that blotted them out. No, not really that, either.”

  George frowned at him. “That’s dangerous, Wood. That’s dangerous. I think you ought to gab more, like me, and get it out of your system. I don’t like you to think along those lines, buddy.”

  He left the Murchisons after Christmas. Each of his duty visits was a blow that shook him as badly as the last. He dreaded seeing the town signs come up, then the street signs t
hat led him to those houses empty of their sons. Parents, sometimes wives and children, found him on their doorstep. He was aware of the authority of his scars, his eye patch and obvious false leg—his credentials—how they all helped to raise up memory and regard. He did make those deaths seem more than a blotting out, and he was given gratitude.

  He grew sad and morose. He couldn’t eat. It was all fake and useless, even their emotion. What was he giving them? Why had he given himself this duty?

  Then to enter a town, its looming water tower printed with the fateful name, search out the street and house, and at the door the mother’s face as he tells her in his cracked, half-voiced whisper that he knew her son. “Herman? You knew Herman?” she says. The father gets up, folding his glasses, and reaches out the always bent, tentative hand, as though he might be touching the dead son.

  Once, while doing sixty-five miles an hour on a narrow Iowa highway, he considered driving into an approaching concrete bridge abutment. The smooth cement was like an empty page, and with the slightest easy movement of his arm he could make an end. Nothing. His whole body was suddenly at war with and against this idea. The engagement was in fact so inconclusive that he stopped on down the road and sat shaking and sweating for a long time.

  After he came home he’d sought out no one, but they had all come to do their duty by him. Lois Potter cried and was brave over his disfigurements, and he could see and understand how terribly upset she was over these new considerations. Al Couter-marsh had stopped by soon after he first came home, and although they were at ease with each other they had little to say. Foster Greenwood came too. He and Jean had finally married, and Foster told him how he was learning to be a Catholic. “I don’t know whether I ought to fake it or believe it,” Foster said.

  A rather subdued Gordon Ward came to see him too. Gordon had always had a presence that demanded attention, and he still had this. But he was more serious now, as though certain doubts hovered behind his eyes somewhere. He told Wood that the two wounds he’d got in Italy were “Beautiful. Timed just right. Beautiful blighties. I really had it lucky.” The new Gordon had something on his mind. “I know a lot of things happened a long time ago, Wood. We never got along and there were damn good reasons for it.”

  Wood nodded. Gordon sat on the porch rail, wearing Army suntan pants and a Dartmouth T-shirt. On one of his long, freckled arms a shiny burn scar smeared his freckles from elbow to wrist. His red hair stood like springs, coiled and flaming above the green eyes. He was such a flamboyant creature, Wood wondered if his unconventional behavior hadn’t been forced upon him, the way one felt a hush of expectation in the presence of a brightly colored snake. He had always caused nervousness, trepidation, just by his looks. Now, trying to look sincere and mature, he did project those qualities, but at this range it all began to seem synthetic.

  “I know, I know,” Gordon said. “Some lousy juvenile things happened back there. But I think we’ve all grown up, now. We’re older, and we’ve been through hell.”

  Wood thought of asking Gordon what changes occurred in that process, but didn’t ask. Gordon was not asking for forgiveness; his allusion to their old dislike of each other was merely something to say, perhaps the only thing Gordon could think of at that moment.

  “I guess you’re right,” Wood said.

  “Well, I’ve got to get going, I guess,” Gordon said. “Take care of yourself, now.”

  “Okay, Gordon.”

  Gordon jogged down the lawn and swung into the seat of his car, a sporty black 1939 Mercury convertible. He waved as he took off, and Wood could see relief on his big pale face.

  Everyone was coming home from college that summer. The summer before, David had worked in Pasadena, digging up streets, laying cable for the Pasadena Light and Power Company. Peggy and Sally De Oestris had taken the Mauretania to England, its first voyage after having been a troopship. In Southampton they hired a chauffeur-driven car and traveled, visiting those few old friends of Sally’s who were still alive. Sally still loved to travel, and she sat brightly on the jump seat of the Daimler, pointing out to Peggy the landmarks of her history as well as England’s.

  But this summer David was going to look for a job in Leah, and Sally had decided that she was too old to cope with “English food and French bacteria. In the old days,” she said, “when it came to food, I much preferred the French bacteria.”

  Peggy was a sophomore at Bennington, a school Sally had something vaguely official to do with. She had either been one of its founders or was a friend of one of them, Peggy wasn’t certain.

  Peggy’s mother hadn’t been heard from for more than three years. Her father had come home in 1946, looked at the rotting sugarhouse and gone away. She got a card from him a month later from Tucson, Arizona, where an Army buddy had given him a job. She hadn’t heard from him now for over a year, and though she felt slightly guilty about him—about both of them, because they were her family—they seemed more and more like distant relations, or maybe more like children she had once known who had moved away. Soon she would be nineteen, as old as her mother had been when she was born. She had changed so much even she could see the changes. That other Peggy Mudd who once lived in the sugarhouse seemed as distant as her parents. Sally De Oestris had more or less adopted her, and she lived at Sally’s house, helping in the summers. Sally paid her a salary, but it was really more like an allowance to a member of the family. Sylvia Beaudette, who had come back from Maine, was the real maid and cook for Sally.

  But the changes she saw in herself, physical and otherwise, were always contrasted with those shadowy yesterdays. Most of the girls she knew at college were what they’d always been, and even their wonderment and involvement with all the new ideas were more an evolution than not. She saw that she would never be quite like them, that the Peggy Mudd who now argued so vehemently about T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, or Henry Wallace’s enlightened capitalism, or The Prophet, or “This Is My Beloved” had once as a child, listening in the smelly dark, wondered if her mother knew anything about birth control or venereal disease. That other girl had learned at twelve to gauge with mortal precision, against fire and disaster, the subtle degrees of drunkenness and irresponsibility.

  And always was the knowledge that she might have gone the way of those other children, those waifs of the woods slums.

  Horace had commuted to Northlee College for a year and then stopped. He said he wasn’t interested. He had taken over from Sam Davis the janitorship of his father’s two tenements, and even his father had to admit that he did a good job. There had been a third tenement too, but his father had sold it at a profit and was more interested in the stock market now than in owning real estate. He’d gone back to selling insurance too and had reopened his agency office in the Turtle Block on the square.

  Sam Davis had lost one job after another. Now, Horace knew, Susie gave him enough money so he could spend his days in Futzie Petrosky’s Tavern. All he really wanted to be, he said, was a farmer, but he couldn’t work for another man. Sometimes he’d come home when Horace was there, and go on for hours, friendly, drunken, dangerous, about what a good man Horace’s father was, and how someday he was going to get Gordon Ward—Sr. and Jr. both—and wouldn’t he let all kinds of cats out of the bag, and how good a farmer he’d been but the dirty bastards cheated him out of everything. He’d sometimes stop, bang his beer bottle on the table, cant his bristly gray head and smile broadly at Horace, teeth yellow, brown, missing. Horace thought him mad. He’d tell one story twice in a row. Of course, he was always drunk. He had beer for breakfast and beer for lunch. He couldn’t do anything without having a beer first. If Susie had any harder stuff she had to leave it in Candy Palmer’s apartment, because she said her father went off his rocker altogether on the hard stuff. He got violent, she said. He was too violent as it was, with his stories of dark plots, of vicious men out to get him, and how he would get his revenge. Horace was constantly worried about Susie, even though she had been doing very we
ll for nearly a year. Seldom did he find her drunk or sick. Very seldom.

  Kate was a sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, where Wayne Facieux would be a senior next year. He’d left school for what would ordinarily have been his senior year to work in New York for what he called a “vanity press.” Interesting, illuminating and disgusting, he’d written. He was going to be in Leah this summer too because his mother had to have an operation at Northlee Hospital. He already had a job—one he hated, of course—selling shoes at Thom McAn. In spite of these things he was not at all discouraged, really. As a junior he’d won the Atlantic Monthly poetry contest for undergraduates, and he was working on a book of poems for submission to the Yale Younger Poets series.

  He did not approve of Kate’s joining Chi O, and in some ways she didn’t either. They had charmed her practically to death, however, so she had joined, and sometimes now she felt rather as if she’d been had. There were two parts of college, the idea part and the social part, and she still wanted to believe they could be reconciled. Wayne said they couldn’t. Maybe he was right, but she didn’t want to give up some of the Greek things. In any case, this would be a summer to think hard about that.

  This last year she had been on too many dates, and gone to too many parties. Her marks hadn’t gone down, and that was depressing because she knew she wasn’t doing what she should. She felt like a butterfly, something pretty to have around. She was very low on herself. In one of her courses she was supposed to have read Anna Karenina, but she’d read about a quarter of it, got the rest out of Master Plots and got an A on the exam. Such things ate into her ideal of college; it was the sophomore syndrome—that it was a racket. She saw the cheating going on around her, and she even whispered answers to a sister or two. The war veterans, most of them, were just as unserious as the nonveterans, just as fraternity gung ho too, it seemed. Many of them wore parts of their uniforms with insignia still attached just to brag about what heroes they were.