Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  But she couldn’t blame anybody for her frivolous sophomore year, so she came home that summer depressed, even noticeably quiet. Mainly she wanted to see Wayne, to see if his wonderful enthusiasm could bring her back. She still shivered at the thought of him, his intelligent face, his long wrists. She had missed him. And Davy would be back too. She wanted to have a long, long talk with Davy.

  This was the first summer of what Harvey Whipple called “the Truman Depression,” and David had trouble finding a job that in any way pleased him. The Whipple cabin on Lake Cascom, however, was in bad repair, so David contracted with his father to repair it. It had been seldom used during the war and various sorts of disintegration had set in. The boathouse had been uprooted by ice and had fallen in, the dock had disappeared altogether, the roof leaked in several places, the gutters had filled with pine needles and rotted out, and the steps down to the lake were punky and dangerous.

  David’s greatest coup was to talk his father into advancing him $125 to buy a 1935 Ford pickup truck. All it needed was a clutch, and it only burned oil going downhill. For another $25 he had the clutch installed, and he had a going rig. He pounded out most of the dents, painted it with gray primer, and suddenly it was the jauntiest, most toylike little truck he’d ever seen. He envied no one, not even Gordon Ward with his milled-head, dual-carburetor Mercury.

  The Ford was nice, and gave him a kind of freedom, but that was not his ideal vision of this summer. It was to be his Thoreauesque, or philosophical, or decisional summer. He would live at the cabin by himself, take a dip in the cold lake each morning, work himself hard at the clean carpentering, nailing and brush clearing. In Chicago he lived with a girl to whom he had lied about his age, saying that he was twenty-four, when he wouldn’t even be twenty-two until December 5. She was twenty-four, and he was almost certain he was in love with her. Yet there was the lie, and his awful youth, which seemed so absurd after two and a half years in the Army. He felt that he was a fake, that Letty gave her sweet gifts of passion and comradeship to a child who used her in a masquerade.

  They lived on South Greenwood, in Mrs. Salamonsky’s Rooming House, where anything went—political, psychological, chemical. They had the old second-floor dining room, and shared the kitchen with the two Trotskyites, with the two homosexual communists, with the prim and quiet couple, she white, he Negro, who never went outside the building in each other’s company, and with the peculiar little Cuban who lived in what had been the pantry, who declared that if his grandmother became a communist he would cut her throat on the spot and pulled out a great switchblade knife to prove it. One girl was a periodical nymphomaniac, and sometimes in the night raunchy characters, even old bums, could be heard crooning her name in the alley, staring hopefully up at her window. The male Trotskyite was a recidivist Roman Catholic named Halloran, and the female Trotskyite was a beautifully statuesque Jewish kleptomaniac undergoing perpetual analysis by a Trotskyite analyst. They all lived together, somehow, in a kind of joyful clamor, the smell of marijuana mixing with liver and onions, garlic and toothpaste.

  But David wanted this summer out of Chicago, out of that city all gray and darker gray. Letty was going back to her family for the summer too, to conduct her annual campaign for funds. They were Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota, who couldn’t understand why she wanted to be a perpetual student. She already had a degree, the Ph.B. given at Chicago, and now she wanted a master’s in anthropology. She had to treat them carefully, but such was their respect for education they would most likely stake her for another year.

  David was more or less wandering around in the humanities division, taking courses here and there. He was vaguely depressed by college. He had odd urges to transfer to the University of Hawaii or the University of Paris, or to try to get on a whaling ship, or to marry Letty, learn some sort of a profession and live in San Francisco. When he was away from her he felt sadness and relief. At other times he yearned for her, the way she came back down the hall in his bathrobe, smelling of soap, to kneel on their bed—a box spring supported by textbooks—and make a tent over his face with her dark blond hair. Their two faces were so serious under that soft canopy.

  She thought him funny, and they would lie in bed all morning, chuckling and laughing at each other’s remarks, none of which they could ever remember afterwards. The two homosexual communists would sometimes make coffee and knock on their door to bring them some. They treated him and Letty as if they were delightful pets, even though David was sometimes exasperated by their evasions of Lysenkoist doctrine, and would confuse them by making up false history complete with Russian-sounding names, ships bringing phosphates to Ciano’s legions, dates in the late thirties of deals, purges, treacheries. They could not cope, it seemed, with spurious facts. Letty would pinch him under the covers, and he would lose his exasperation and actually feel contrite.

  He wrote to Letty, feeling even more fake as he tried to be amusing, and her letter crossed his in the mails, saying North Dakota was sheer hell, and she loved him, loved him. He was frightened, and went back to the clean pine planks he was fashioning into stairs.

  25

  It was a blue and gold Sunday in June, and they were all spending it at the cabin. David had repaired the steps and rebuilt the dock, but nobody else would be staying overnight because he had ripped up half the floor of the living room.

  A cool breeze from the lake blew the bugs back toward the woods. Small waves splashed among the dark rocks. This was the piney, deep side of the lake, where the bottom fell quickly into cold springs among boulders, so the dock had to run parallel to the shore. Perch and bass cruised among the pilings, and deeper in the lake were salmon and lake trout. Across the blue water was the more populated shore, two miles away, and behind the shore fringe the round hills of the Cascom range rose up beyond pastures into darker spruce.

  The boards of the dock were still yellow and new, as were the stairs. Wood and Harvey sat on the bottom step, and Sally De Oestris was installed on a straight chair on the dock beside them. David, Kate, Horace and Peggy dove and splashed, in and out of the water, shivering and basking. Horace deliberately belly-flopped—a great spank and a sheet of water peeled out from under him, then huge waves. David could do a front somersault; they were both showing off. Henrietta was up on the bank, getting the food ready. She had split all the hot-dog buns, lit the fire David had set up in the outdoor fireplace and set the trestle table with the old, cracked, chipped and mismatched dishes, the worn and bent pot-metal silverware of the cabin.

  “Hey, Hank!” Harvey yelled. “You gonna swim?”

  She looked down at them, feeling old and soft. The youngsters were thrashing and laughing, all muscle and tendon—dynamos. She could barely remember the joy of mere movement. Compared to them she would look like an old mother seal. Her swimsuit was out of date too. She shook her head.

  “How about you?” she said. “You want to display your age?” “Well, maybe I will!” But he didn’t move. Wood looked on, smiling when a smile was called for. No one had dared ask him if he was going to swim or not, and she wondered what he felt about showing his leg and eye. They could get used to it; she wondered if he knew how easy it would be. He sat quietly, smoking a cigarette and looking on. David flexed his shoulder muscles and did his front somersault.

  But the two girls, who now stood together, laughing at something Sally had said—they gave her an ache in the heart. Kate was so beautiful it took her breath, and Peggy had…bloomed. She wasn’t the old Peggy at all. She had grown as tall as Kate. In repose, her face might suggest the kinship between this Peggy and the old funny little Peggy with the uncertain eyes and the thin mouth that didn’t know which way to quiver. Now all the little things had changed—her glance, the glint of humor. She acted as though she deserved to occupy the space she occupied. Maybe that was it. She was so dark, and the wide mouth could now afford to laugh and be generous. Dark, in a black swimsuit, a night to Kate’s day, but equal. She was no longer a satellite to Kat
e’s beauty. Water flowed over her almost olive skin, clean and flashing. Henrietta had seen both Horace and David look at Peggy with surprise and even consternation, as if she were a girl they hadn’t yet been introduced to.

  Sally watched too, grinning and crinkling and tapping her canes on the dock as if she were applauding all this energy and smoothness of skin. Horace roared, made a cross-eyed, tongue-out idiot face and slowly, stiffly fell over backward, to hit the water like a flat board. That must have hurt. He came up lunging and grinning, and both Kate and Peggy, in yellow and black, slim as birds, dove in neat arcs on either side of him. He grabbed them, one in each arm, and his grin of pleasure made Henrietta’s cheeks hurt. They ducked him, and as he came up blowing and sputtering, his bellow of mock outrage was so loud, so almost brutal it caused in her the surge of emergency. But of course it was all play. Horace was having the time of his life.

  David came running up the stairs, dancing on tender feet. “Hey! HEY!” he said from sheer exuberance. “Hubba, hubba!” He went onto the screened porch of the cabin and came back with an inflated inner tube. “Forgot all about this,” he said. Suddenly calm, he stopped next to her and looked down at the stairs and dock.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well, what?” she asked him.

  “Here we are.”

  “We?” she said.

  “Why, we the Whipples,” he said, turning his bland, smooth face to her. He reminded her so much of Harvey—just to look at. A sort of smaller antelope, ready to nuzzle or to jump.

  “Yes, we’re all together again,” she said.

  “With certain changes,” he said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “The Whip looks great.”

  “He feels better, that’s for certain,” she said. They both looked down at him. He even had some color. He had his cane hooked in the right pocket of his print sport shirt (his Harry Truman shirt, she called it to aggravate him) and he was telling a story to Sally, who rumbled in preparation for the eruption at the end. Wood half smiled as he listened.

  “I’m going to put a rail down these stairs,” David said. That would be for their cripples. She looked at him and saw that he knew he had brought up the subject. Harvey had said once, “We ought to have an act, Wood and me—sort of soft shoe. ‘‘The Whipple Gimp,’ we could call it.” Wood had smiled.

  “For Sally too,” David said.

  “And me,” she said. “I’m not getting any younger.”

  David laughed and patted her on the shoulder. “You’re in great shape,” he said. They watched Kate and Peggy climb out of the water, legs flashing in the sun.

  “Peggy’s changed,” David said. “She’s got muscles now.”

  “She’s a lovely girl,” Henrietta said.

  David looked startled, then he said, “Yes. That’s right. That’s a good word for it.” He thought awhile. “She’s still got a kind of funny face, but it’s not homely any more.”

  The girls stood together, looking up, aware that they were being examined. David pointed at them, and they both giggled.

  “Come on, Davy!” Kate said. “Bring the inner tube!”

  “You know,” David said, “when Peggy tans up she’ll look like a Masai princess.”

  “Come on!” Kate yelled.

  “All of a sudden she’s built,” David said.

  “What?”

  “She’s built. Peggy. Meaning she had good bones all the time.”

  Henrietta looked at him closely. Something about his new regard of Peggy struck her as dangerous. “Don’t you hurt her, Davy,” she said.

  “What?” He laughed, surprised and even flattered. “Me? But why should I hurt her?”

  “Because you could,” she said.

  He laughed, partly embarrassed, still pleased. At least she had startled him out of his sophistication for a moment.

  “Maybe I could,” he said. There was some little-boy bragging in this; maybe that was what struck her as dangerous in him. He looked closely at the two girls, a speculative look. “But you know, I’ve got a girl, at Chicago. She’s in North Dakota right now.” This made him thoughtful, even a little sad. He sailed the inner tube down across the dock into the water, and Horace lunged after it, followed by the two girls. “Maybe you shouldn’t trust me,” he said. “I don’t know. But Peggy? That would be almost like incest, wouldn’t it? Peggy’s a member of the family.”

  “You are dangerous, Davy. I don’t mean to flatter you, either,” she said. “Please don’t get involved with Peggy. She’s changing a lot right now, and I think she’s still confused. We all mean too much to her still. It wouldn’t be fair if you used that.”

  He laughed again and patted her on the back. “You know, you’re not so dumb,” he said. “For a mother, I mean! Sorry! But I promise. Besides, Peggy’s been crazy about Wood since she was knee high to a mouse.”

  “But not in that way.”

  “Ah, but she wasn’t this way then.” They watched Peggy climb out of the water and pull down her black suit. Her waist was narrow. She was shy of her hips, and reached for her towel with a turning, feminine bend of the knees. She looked at Wood; they both saw that.

  After the hot dogs and potato salad they all sat around, Wood and Harvey drinking beer out of cans, Sally and Henrietta out of jelly glasses. David and Kate sat on the dock in the afternoon sun, dangling their feet in the water, and Horace lay stretched out on his stomach, peering down through the interstices of the boards at the perch that hung among the boulders. Every once in a while he would creep like a big reddish lizard to a better crack, his glasses almost touching the boards.

  David lay back, his hands protecting his eyes from the sun, and Kate lifted his head to put a towel underneath it.

  “There,” she said.

  “You take good care of me, Sis,” he said. He liked that caring touch of her hands, and raised his fingers to look at her. Sunlight haloed her head, and a flash of sun blinded him.

  “What’s Chicago like, Davy?”

  “It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s a nuthouse.”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes.”

  “I mean, is it serious? Are you learning a lot?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “No.”

  “Neither is U.N.H.,” she said. He heard the sadness in her voice, and risked a glance at her, but the sun blinded him again. In his shut eyes he saw the outline of her head and neck, graceful in light blue against black, flashing blue and green, yellow and black and blue in the middle of his head.

  “You can’t look at the sun,” she said.

  “But I’m your brother,” he said, and she laughed and hit him on the shoulder. It hurt.

  “Ow!” he said. “If I wasn’t blind I’d tickle you to death.”

  “Come on, Davy! I want to be serious!”

  “All right.”

  “Tell me about that place where you live.”

  “Mrs. Salamonsky’s Madhouse?”

  “And you have a mistress.”

  “That’s a funny word. I never thought of it that way.” He liked the word in a way, and was then repelled by it.

  “But you do,” Kate said. “You actually live with this girl. That’s what you said. What I want to know is do you love her very much? Is it good?”

  “It’s good, I guess.” He was a little ashamed of his romantic sadness.

  “But is she nice? What does she look like?”

  “She’s pretty. I think so, anyway. She’s handsome—a little blonder than you, and maybe an inch shorter. Is that the kind of details you want?”

  “Does she love you very much?”

  “I…” He began to say that he thought so. Did she love him very much? Yes, she did. Yes. “I think…I’m afraid she really does.”

  “You’re afraid because you don’t love her?”

  “No, I think I do.”

  “You can’t even mention the word ‘love.’ You c
an’t even say it!”

  “I love you, kiddo,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up.” She was silent for a while. The water licked the bottoms of his feet, cool little kisses from the lake.

  Finally Kate said, “Can’t you be serious, Davy? I really need to find out some things. Honest, I’m not just prying, I mean it. About boys and girls. I don’t mean birds and bees stuff, either. I know all that. But I’m having problems, Davy.”

  “What kind?” he said quickly. A hard pang of concern, maybe even jealousy, startled and confused him. He rose up on his elbow and looked at her. He didn’t even care if she saw his concern. Her valuable self, his Katie out among the predators. There were her delicate lashes, her grave, gray-blue eyes. None of the wolves and foxes was a millionth-part worthy of her. “What kind of problems?” he asked. She was very serious, and her eyes stared soberly into his.

  “It’s mostly about Wayne,” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “Well, I don’t think I understand him. I mean what he wants from me. What he wants me for.”

  “What do you mean?” Through his mind passed that gangling, unmanly creature named Wayne Facieux, skunkheaded, supercilious and dangerous, probably queer, and a vision of Kate being used by Wayne and his flitty friends, if he had any, in strange, vile communal rites of sodomy and degradation. He grew cool with anger.

  “No, David. Take it easy,” she said. “You don’t have to get all upset! But you are, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, all right, I’m upset.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be. It’s nothing like you think.”

  “How do you know what I think?” He couldn’t keep a self-belittling anger out of his voice.

  “You know,” she said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. He’s never…made love to me. That’s a euphemism.”