“Of course we did!” his father said. “There was always a lot of yelling and screaming around our house, but when the chips were down, you goddam well knew your mother and I loved you!”
Was his father talking to Wood? “Maybe that isn’t it either,” David said.
“What? Well, what is it? Why? Was it Lois Potter giving him the old heave-ho?”
“I think he more or less gave her the old heave-ho,” David said, regretting his repetition of those words.
“What? He did?” His father looked at him with real curiosity. “Lois Potter? Why, she’s so pretty she’d give asthma to a brass monkey. You mean to say he broke it off?”
“That’s what I think. She cried on my shoulder about it, anyway. Once she got over the shock of the leg and eye, she wanted him back. I think she was telling the truth about it. Maybe she just felt guilty, I don’t know.” That had been a strange session, because at the same time he had been feeling genuinely sorry for Lois and patting her on the back, a sweet push of desire had come over him and he sneezed on her neck.
“I can’t figure anything,” his father said.
“Me either.”
“Try to find out, Dave, will you? Christ, sometimes I don’t think I have the right to feel so bad about it, I’m such a selfish son of a bitch. But I love that boy!” His father’s voice broke and he turned his head directly away from David—an awkward, strained position. It was all wrong. There must still be power in this thronelike center of the great hall. When he thought of home, no matter where he was, it was first the man sitting tensely here, powerful and exciting, and then the other rooms and towers, all held together by the father at his broad oak table. He could laugh at him, and sometimes even half despise him, but the power had always been there.
“All right,” he said. Not wanting to look at his father any longer, he turned to go.
“Oh, Dave,” his father said.
“Yes?” His father’s tone meant a change of subject.
“I meant to tell you about Ben Caswell.”
“What?”
His father turned the Free Press around on the table so he could see the short notice. After five years in a coma, Benjamin R. Caswell, twenty-one, had died of pneumonia.
“I guess it was a good thing,” his father said. “Their medical expenses must have been out of sight.”
“Good thing?” David said. He felt numb, really. He hadn’t thought—not a trace of a thought—of Ben for a long time. It was as if the dead friend had risen from the grave for a last look into his concern before passing away. It had happened, Ben’s accident, so long ago. So many things had happened since, things that Ben had never heard about.
“About Wood, Dave. We’ll get this straightened out,” his father said.
Those words haunted David up the stairs.
31
Kate sat in David’s big chair, waiting for him to come back. She smoked two of his cigarettes, trembling and then not trembling. For minutes at a time she thought neither of Wood nor of Gordon, but then she would have to come back to right now. She squirmed in sudden ghost pain, feeling things swimming inside her, where she was unprotected.
Last night when she’d come to her senses it was like coming up out of deep water, like a diver coming slowly back to the pressures and rules of another atmosphere. She was appalled at what she’d let him do. She hadn’t remembered opening her legs. She’d cried for shame. But even now, horrified as she was, she remembered that delicious melting. She moved, half in shame and half in luxury. Then shame bleared the room.
All Gordon had seemed to feel afterwards was a good-humored sort of pleasure. He even tried to kid her about it, saying how she’d have to marry him. “You’re used goods now, Kate,” he’d said. Then, quickly, he was tender. “Did I hurt you? I felt that little ring.”
“No,” she’d said coldly. She’d contemplated her new situation. She had been sexually used. Virginity did not seem a funny idea at all. How callous were the jokes she had once laughed at! While she lay there, confronting the enormity of what had happened to her, he took off the rest of his clothes. Of course it was a lie about his parents coming. In the firelight she saw his enormous penis shining. Then she was angry, nearly hysterical, and made him take her home.
He didn’t speak until they stopped in the Whipples’ driveway, then formally said again that he wanted to marry her, that he damned well would marry her, that he deliberately hadn’t “used” anything because he wouldn’t mind at all if he made her pregnant. He seemed so pleased at how he’d managed everything. She left him without answering and ran to the house.
And now, as if to show her how one didn’t lightly play with life, Wood had tried to kill himself. Everything was too serious and deadly. She could hardly get a breath. When David came back she ran to him and held onto him. “David, I’m so unhappy! I don’t know what to do!”
“Hey, Katie,” he said. His arms surrounded her, holding her steady, her nose pressed against his musty old shirt. “Hey, hey, Kate, now. What’s the matter?”
She bawled against his chest, the noises coming out of her chest with pain, as though they were chunks of things. He patted her and patted her, crooning comforting sounds into her ear. Finally she could stop crying. She didn’t want to let him go, but she had to blow her drippy nose. She didn’t know how to tell him what she had to tell him.
“Is it Wood?” he said.
“Yes, but other things too, Davy. I feel so selfish! I should shut up.” She saw how worried he was. “How’s Wood?” she managed to ask.
“Well, Peggy’s taken over, I guess. But Katie—”
“How does he look, Davy?”
“He looks at Peggy—like he’s looking at a ghost.” David took hold of her at arm’s length and stared at her. “What else is it, Katie?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you!” She was trembling so much he shook her a little as if to jar her out of it. “Davy, everything’s mixed up. I feel like I’m being electrocuted or something.”
“Gordon Ward,” he said. His face grew cold, lumpy along his jaws.
“Yes, Davy, but—”
“What did the son of a bitch do to you?”
“I’ve got to tell somebody, Davy, and there isn’t anybody but you.”
“Okay,” he said, obviously trying to be calm. “Sit down and I’ll try not to act like your big brother.” Gently he sat her down in his easy chair again. He sat at his desk and gave her a cigarette. “I’m sorry, Katie. I’ve had a bad day too. Like a goddam nightmare. But we can talk, can’t we?”
“Yes, Davy,” she said gratefully.
“We could always talk, couldn’t we?” he said.
They were silent for a while.
“He asked me to marry him, for one thing,” she said finally.
“Katie, he’s charming and all that, when he wants to be.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“But he’s a shit.”
“I guess so.”
“Did he…?”
“Yes.” It seemed too important a thing to answer yes or no to, but there it was. You did it or you didn’t do it, and she had let Gordon do it. “But it was a combination of things, Davy!” She had to explain to him why it was so much an accident, because of everything that led up to it.
“Okay, tell me if you want to, Katie,” he said, and she knew she loved David and could trust him. She told him most of what had happened—the parts she could make words go around, with the words that were utterable in his presence.
“Are you sure he didn’t use anything?” David said sternly. She felt that he was trying to salvage that part of the damaged goods that was salvageable.
“I’m not sure of anything, Davy. I mean it. I was out of my mind. I couldn’t stop, you know? It felt so…like I was having a dream or something.”
“Did he pull out? Did he withdraw?”
“God, Davy. I wouldn’t know. I’m not even sure what that means. I’m sorry.”
“He
sure likes to get what he wants, doesn’t he? The son of a bitch is thinking all the time. If it would do any good I’d maim him a little.”
“I think I loved him, Davy. I thought about marrying him.”
He got all excited. “For God’s sake, don’t even think about that! Don’t even consider it! You could come to Chicago and we could take care of it. I mean it! By a real doctor too, no fly-by-night outfit.”
“God,” she said. She felt sick.
“You’re too valuable to give to Gordon Ward. He doesn’t even think the way you do, Katie. Listen to me! He’s not like us—not like you, I mean. He’s a different species or something from us. Just think of Wood and then think of him. Do you see what I mean? He’s cold. He’s like a fucking crocodile, Katie!”
Why, she thought, David has tears in his eyes. He has tears in his eyes, he means that so much.
“Oh, Davy, I love you,” she said. “There isn’t anybody in the world I love as much as you.”
He took her hand. “Katie, this isn’t the end of the world, you know. It was just the first time for you, and girls always have to be in love, or think they are. The only complication is if you get…” He had trouble with a word. “Pregnant. I can raise the money, though, easy. It’s three hundred bucks. Nobody’d ever know about it. You could fly out and back, from school, and nobody’d ever know you were gone.”
“I could meet Letty,” she said.
“That’s right!” He laughed. “You’re fine, Katie. Always look on the bright side. We’d have a great time.”
How she would love to live near David in Chicago. He and Letty would be there, secure in their love for each other, and she would go out to dinner with them sometimes, she and Letty like loving sisters. She would tell Letty about David as a little boy, about some of his foibles, about the secret paintings hidden behind his desk.
David had got up and gone to the window. “What’s that?” he said, listening intently, frozen for a moment into silence. He didn’t seem to breathe, yet he wasn’t all that excited.
“What’s what?” she said.
“Listen,” he said.
On the wind over Leah came a sound that was rare though familiar. It was the breathy moo that always dipped strangely into focus. Not the noon whistle—that had to be rejected first. It was now deep in the afternoon, and that windy, hoarse cow’s roar meant a fire somewhere. It rose and fell as the wind took it—the warm wind of this August afternoon. Then she began to try to count the number of short moos and long moos.
“It’s the fire whistle,” David said calmly, now that he had identified it. “I wonder where the fire is.” He came back to her and leaned his threadbare knee on the arm of the easy chair. “Anyway, Sis, take it easy. All this ‘pregnant’ talk is probably hysterical. It depends on whether you’re in a fertile period and all that, and who knows when that is? It only lasts for a day or two—I think, anyway—out of the whole month.” He picked something off her shoulder and held it up to the light. “You know we’ve got the same hair?”
“But it means so much to a girl, Davy. I didn’t think it would hit me like that. And then Wood did what he did.”
“I know,” he said, suddenly growing nervous. “And you know what I did this morning? I took Tom out in the woods and murdered the poor old bastard.”
“Oh, Davy!”
“I couldn’t even do that right,” he said. “Christ, he ran off with one ear hanging. The thing was, I thought I was doing him a favor, but then he found out I was trying to kill him. He looked right at me. I had to hunt him all morning, and he knew all the time who was coming after him. Uh!” He shuddered. “And you think you did something bad?”
“But you didn’t mean to…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence.
“I’m scared about what I meant to do,” he said. “Certain parts of it I remember with a creepy sort of pleasure.”
“But he had to be put away, Davy!”
“Sure. And I elected myself executioner. I won’t go into all the fraudulent reasons.” He shook himself. “Anyway, Katie, I think it’s fading out. Everything fades out, you know? Don’t you feel a little better now about last night?”
“Yes, I do.” She got up and tucked in her shirt, thinking how that must represent a kind of symbolic return to order—Wayne would say that. Like tucking in the mind.
The fire whistle continued its vaguely hysterical mooing. They both listened, trying to count the longs and shorts, but the wind blew some of the moos away off toward Vermont. She hoped no one was afraid because of that fire, wherever it was.
“Just talking to you about it helped an awful lot,” she said.
“I mean that about getting it taken care of, Katie, if anything happens. If you miss your period and all.”
She was so grateful that he should know how simple and human it was—she was—to have periods. It was natural, wasn’t it? Everything was only natural. It was really no terrible thing she’d done with Gordon. She felt she must tell this to David.
“Nobody was hurt. I mean, he didn’t hurt me. Maybe I made too much of the virgin bit.”
“That’s right, Katie.”
“And I loved it, Davy. I was out of my mind, I loved it so much.” She had to tell him how marvelous it was. “There was just this little tick of pain, that’s all, and then it was like I was all hollow and empty and he filled me.”
“Katie,” he said. He was upset, she could tell, and this gave her a funny feeling of power and pleasure. He stood there so trim and young in his raggedy old clothes. He had that authority she had always admired—a sort of authority over his limbs and all the parts of him. The scratches on his face and hands seemed very uncharacteristic, but these were peculiar times.
“It’s Wood we have to worry about now,” he said. “Maybe it’s too deep for us.”
“Yes. But thank you, Davy,” she said, and lost her breath. She kissed him on the cheek, turned and left him there in his room.
The wind belled Wood’s curtains and let them fall back to the sides of the windows like the skirts of dancers. But they hadn’t the reassuring rhythm of dancers, so they were always just a little startling, those flamboyant flourishes. The day had cleared and grown harshly bright in that dry wind. The checked pattern of the curtains had a slightly unpleasant, hallucinatory effect on Peggy; were those little checks upside down or not?
She would not ask Wood why he had done what he had done. She would be his nurse—efficient, observant, always present. Perhaps it really had been an accidental overdose, although Dr. Winston obviously didn’t think so. She looked up and found Wood staring at her. He sat in his desk chair, keeping himself upright. At first he’d been tied upright with a bathrobe sash around his chest under his arms. The injection of picrotoxin was wearing off, and he seemed a little less jittery. He stared, and she looked straight back at that dark eye, looking for recognition. She found that he was looking at her and thinking about her, but he wasn’t aware that her look asked for recognition. She was being studied by that consciousness that had tried to end itself, to end all its processes. Earlier, when he was still extremely groggy, Wood had mumbled, “Oh, God, I’m awake.”
It must have been a disappointment to him to wake into a world he never wanted to see again. He hadn’t wanted to see daylight again. How could he want to leave, when all she wanted in the world was to be near him? There was no balance, no fairness in it. That he could want to end himself! Somehow she must get inside him and find out what was wrong. She must ask, and if that failed she would have to do something else. But she was still shy. She could not, even for the most urgent of reasons, get over that shyness. It was still like iron. When she made up declarations of love they appeared in her mind already mute and doomed. She could not even muster up a chiding anger; she had become his nurse, just his nurse.
His robe had fallen open across his chest, where the shining hairs were springy and alive against his skin. His bathrobe was maroon, warm as blood; his skin was too vivid agai
nst it, suggesting the parts of a wound. She began to shake, as if it had been she who had taken the injection of stimulant. He seemed to notice her trembling; a slight frown made lines on one side of his forehead. The string of his eye patch cut those lines off short, so the eyeless side remained clear as unmarked paper.
Though she was frightened and unhappy about him now, memory told her, as it always seemed to do no matter what troubles she had at the moment, that she had come a long way toward Wood. When she was ten, he was fifteen; they had been separated by those five years from any sort of equality. She had been the little girl he was kind and friendly toward. He had always been the leader, not really named as such, but the power behind a zone of protection that had surrounded her all of her life. Ever since she could remember, she had lived in a world where there was an ultimate authority who could be trusted. Yes, and how peculiar it was for her to claim poverty and stupid drunkenness as her childhood environment when Wood had always been nearby. He was her environment too, wasn’t he? The Whipples were her environment long before she came to live with them, and always that dark, quiet boy was there, the one person in the world she knew would never betray her. She had lain in her damp bed up in the sugarhouse, listening to the dangerous, stupid conversation between her mother and father or between her mother and other men, frightened half out of her wits by their crashing and thrashing because she didn’t know what kept them at it. If they could say such crude things to each other and seem to hate each other, why didn’t they keep away from each other? She really hadn’t known until Wood explained it to her. Well, not really explained everything, she supposed, but at least he told her there was a reason, that it wasn’t all pure madness. That was when she was nine or ten. What had been Wood’s explanation? He had wiped off her tears with a rather dirty handkerchief—she remembered that. They were sitting on one of the porches of the Whipple house—he had been sitting there, that is. It was raining but warm. All that day in school she had been nervous, on the edge of whimpering, because of what had happened the night before. On the way home she’d seen him sitting there reading and come running across the lawn. His kindness made her cry. She asked him what made her mother have to do what she hated so much. “Don’t you know, Peggy?” he said. He was fourteen or fifteen, yet even so she trusted him not to giggle or to evade any question. This seemed more of a miracle every year. She had known then, of course, that what she spoke of was wrong, dirty, sinful, giggle-making. She knew that much, maybe more, because now she couldn’t remember the exact words of his explanation. He had made it something she could live with, though. What had he said? That there was a strong attraction between male and female. “Strong attraction”—she remembered that clearly. She’d already known that. But then he went on to say that even though her mother sounded as though she didn’t like it, she did like it, very much; that it was only a kind of game to say the words that meant the opposite of what you felt. Good God! she thought now, the boy had actually said that to herl
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