Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Henrietta looked for something of herself in Kate, her only daughter, and did find something—this self-confidence that bothered her because she couldn’t find much that was similar in their experiences. And so she felt Kate’s to be a little fraudulent, or at least mysterious. And how could one explain that perfection of skin and flesh? Clear and taut, stretched to its most youthful tenderness across her cheeks and hollows, every place on Kate was supple almost to breaking. Her hair was light brown like her father’s, though so fine it gleamed gold. Her small hands were so clean and natural, so negligently, unconsciously graceful they could startle a person into that memory of a time when the human race did seem more beautiful than any other thing in creation. That ridiculous young belief came back again for a moment as she looked at Kate.

  Henrietta knew she herself hadn’t been bad-looking when she was a girl—wasn’t now, for that matter, except for some iron in her dark hair, and the thick glasses that made her eyes seem as big as cows’ eyes. In fact, she’d been called pretty too, but it was a more human and imperfect kind of good looks she’d had. Harvey Whipple had to chase her, and in the end had to have her, but she never scared him the way she’d seen young boys scared right out of words by Kate.

  Now he was yelling again. Kate had touched him with her arm as she bent over to put his silver in order upon his napkin. Henrietta barely listened to the words. “Clumsy!” she heard, but it wasn’t really a definition; Kate was anything but clumsy. It was as if, in the force of Kate’s indifference, Harvey couldn’t think of anything apt to say.

  “Does it hurt to touch you anywhere?” Kate asked calmly, and this put out his rage entirely, for the moment.

  “Just be careful, will you?” he said. His eyes were shiny things like mouses’ eyes, but down in dark hollows, seeming to have lost all the little indicators—wrinkles, movements of his eyebrows—that used to let Henrietta understand him. Now there was only darkness there, and pale smooth skin everywhere else that spread smooth and white up underneath his brown hair.

  He watched, or seemed to watch, intently as Kate finished setting the table, but when Wood appeared in the archway he said immediately, as though he’d been thinking of this all the time, “Have you looked at the furnace lately? I mean within the last day or two?”

  “The fire’s all right,” Wood said. “It’s a cold night.”

  “Well, let’s not have it a cold night inside.”

  “There’s coal on it. Did you open the damper?” Wood went over to the two little chains just inside the archway and ran them up over their pulleys. From below came a dim clang. Then he ran them back again, and from below came a slightly different clang.

  “It’s open. You want me to build a fire in here?” Wood motioned with his head—leaned his head over in a rather haughty way toward the dining-room fireplace.

  First was the pause, while Harvey’s anger grew into his face, then into his voice. “God damn it! Don’t you pull that superior business with me! I pay for the goddam coal and the goddam food and wood and everything else that gets burned around here, and if I’m cold I’m going to ask why!”

  “Where’s Horace?” Kate asked immediately, as though her father’s shouting were something as loud, but harmless, as the sound of a train’s passing, and now that it had passed one could resume a normal voice.

  “God damn Horace!”

  “Well!” Kate said, raising her eyebrows in mock indignation.

  Wood had turned his back on his father even while he spoke, and had started into the living room.

  “Come back here!”

  Wood turned, half ignoring this command, and said in answer to Kate, “He went to his room.”

  “Was he upset?” Henrietta asked.

  “When isn’t he?” Kate said, but Henrietta noticed some worry in Kate. What had Kate done to him?

  David had slipped into the room sometime during the shouting—materialized as easily as he could disappear if he wanted—and he looked somewhat guilty too.

  “Let’s eat supper!” Harvey said.

  “You cursed him, of course,” Wood said.

  “That’s enough out of you!”

  “When he went out in this storm to get you your aspirin.”

  “Enough! Storm, shit! What storm? A little snow? And I don’t want any more sass from you! If I didn’t have this leg you’d be over my knee right now, eighteen years old or not! You may think you’re pretty big, but I’ll tell you what you are! You’re wet behind the ears! You’re just a goddam pup, and don’t forget it!”

  Wood looked steadily at his father. “At least I’m getting out of here soon, but Horace can’t.”

  “You can get the hell out of here right now!” His white skin rippled at his cheeks; it moved in waves, like dough rising too fast. Henrietta got up.

  “Stop it,” she said. “Kate, help me bring in the food.”

  “Do you want me to pack up right now?” Wood said.

  “I don’t give a damn what you do. You’re lucky, that’s all.” This seemed milder, but then he began to think again, and his voice rose. “You’re spoiled! You’ve had it too easy! You’ve had everything nice and none of the work! It’s never hit you yet, so you think you’re so goddam superior!”

  “Do you want me—”

  “Wood, shut up!” Henrietta said. “I’m not going to hear any more of it!”

  Harvey began to speak, but she slapped her hand on the table, deliberately hard enough to make the silver jump and ring, and they were silent. She looked around at her family, seeing in each of them at that moment the qualities she disliked most: Kate’s indifference, David’s noncommitment, Wood’s intolerance, and her husband’s lack of the wit he once seemed to have. As if he thought a cripple’s witless noise could substitute for strength.

  “Now let’s get the food,” she said.

  Kate got up to help her, and this new thing changed them all. It was Sunday night, and they were having macaroni and cheese, so there wasn’t much to bring in. They took their places.

  Like all the downstairs rooms, the round dining room was so high the ceiling remained in semidarkness. Now that they were silent, the room grew away from them, high above the cut-glass chandelier that hung down from a long brass rod. The brown walls were paneled, framed, then higher panels began up in the gloom. But the tablecloth was white and close, and the tall chair backs, except for Harvey’s wheelchair, rose behind them just up to the edge of the light, where glints from the colored glass of the chandelier shone red and blue upon the dark, varnished knobs.

  For a while they ate in silence; only their forks clinked upon their plates. Then Harvey held his fork upright and said, “Did he say why he took the money?”

  “How much did he take?” Kate said.

  “He doesn’t know,” Wood said.

  “You talked to him?”

  Wood nodded. “Some.”

  “Why did he take it if he threw it away?” Harvey asked.

  All this in voices quite calm, though precarious.

  “He said he thought they shouldn’t have it.”

  “Jesus Christ, why? We’ve got a Communist in the family?”

  “It was what they were going to do with it,” Wood said.

  “So he went through all their lockers and took everybody’s money?”

  “Just some of them,” Wood said. “He heard them talking about what they were going to do. Something about Susie Davis.”

  “Sam Davis’ girl? Live out on the Northlee road? She’s got a bad rep,” Harvey said. “I’ve heard that.”

  “A bad what?” Kate said.

  David laughed and said, “She’s a hot sketch.”

  “Horace doesn’t think so,” Wood said.

  “So he heard them planning something about Susie Davis?”

  “I guess so. Chief Tuttle says he took about twenty-five dollars, in all. At least that’s what they said was missing.”

  “That’s a lot of goddam money,” Harvey said. But he seemed so mild abou
t it they all looked at him with surprise. Henrietta watched them reconsider their father, and in spite of all, she was pleased—just a spark of pleasure that he could stop shouting and surprise them.

  “How come Tuttle hasn’t come after me for it?”

  “I paid it back,” Wood said. He was visibly tense as he said this.

  Harvey stared at him, and seemed about to speak, but then he didn’t, and Henrietta felt her pulse in her temples. She grew short of breath. If only she could put words in Harvey’s mouth, now, when he needed the right ones. Strange how it was never too late. No, how it was always too late; but always there came a time when again, for a second or two, it was not too late.

  Through hallways he knew not with affection but as maps of his indignities, up stairwells where he had tripped and hurt himself, Horace heard their angry voices like the hard clangor of bells. Be silent, be easy, he would have said if he dared. He was so careful even of what he thought. Once, long ago, in a time that seemed a different place, all the children had been told the story of the man who would find the treasure, providing he didn’t think of a white bear. Now don’t think of the room you are in, he thought. Hide from thinking of it. Don’t think how it is exactly the same shape as Wood’s room, with the same three tall windows at the end, and the same high ceiling, and the same small fireplace—Wood’s warm as a friend who is alive, yours black and cold. In Wood’s room the warm person of his brother owned the walls and corners where the light of his attention dared to go; this chamber was owned by things that were hollow and mean.

  Like a fool he hadn’t turned on the light when he came in—a stupid fool tricked by his anger into thinking it would last. Now he didn’t dare move against the dark. If he turned his face out of his pillow and opened his eyes, the putty face of the madwoman would stare at him from the middle window, her eyes like blue coals, her fingers, brown as old bananas, reaching through the glass. If he moved his hand he would find that all this time it had been inside a wet mouth full of teeth like rusty nails, and a hot, slick tongue would lick along his palm before the teeth closed into his wrist. They were all cruel, and liked to laugh. Once he dreamed that they took a little puppy into the closet, all the time smirking and giggling. At first the puppy would wag his tail and be so confident they would pet him, and then with a quick snip and tear they flayed him alive, so that he ran skinless, in agony so great he couldn’t even whine, and they threw him into the fire. As he writhed, beads of hot grease jumped out like BBs upon his naked sides.

  In Wood’s room the stem voice of his brother would have shamed them, and made justice. In this room empty of reason and love, cruelty seeped out of cracks. Once he woke in the night, believing himself to be in Wood’s room, where he was warm and could so easily go to sleep with his head out of the covers, and breathe long breaths. How wonderful it was to be tired, wrapped all around by his brother’s rule! Then a cold hand had grabbed his ankle, and the madwoman had crept around on the drain gutter in triumph. Wood was dead. He had screamed until Wood was not dead, but shaking him awake, saying, “Horace! Horace! What’s the matter?”

  When he had stopped crying, his breath was still hydraulic and uncontrollable, but he said, “I dreamed you were dead!”

  “I’m not dead. Here I am,” Wood had said.

  “They killed you in the closet!”

  “You were dreaming. Just a nightmare. Now go on back to sleep.”

  But it wasn’t a nightmare, because it could happen anytime. He couldn’t not think of it asleep, he couldn’t not think of it awake.

  “I’ll stay here a few minutes,” Wood said that time.

  “How long? How long exactly?”

  “Ten minutes,” Wood had said. But he stayed twelve minutes, sitting on Horace’s bed, making the mattress slope down toward his strength. Twelve minutes the alarm clock ticked off like an eternity of rest; then, after Wood had left, the cold shapes washed back out of the crannies and he had to close himself up in the center of his bed, the smothering covers over his head, where he sometimes sweat so much he got into trouble with his mother, who thought he’d wet the bed a little.

  Now the snow, in an occasional swirl of wind, brushed against the glass, and in the middle of his back a circle of cold grew like the print of a dead hand. He must get up and turn on the light He had lived with the shapes for a long time, and knew some of the rules, some of the careful rituals he must follow if he were to make his way through their danger. One thing he must not do was to force them, for then they might not have time to get out of his way, and he might be touched by hair or claw. The madwoman was only at the window while he didn’t look, and if he did look, he must turn very slowly, so that she had time to crouch down below the sill. Sometimes there was a great, sometimes only a slight difference between seeing her crawly face in his mind, or in the flesh. If he looked, and knew he looked, and she was there, she would really be there.

  The fear was cumulative, and he couldn’t bear it much longer. How he had wished for a steady level of fear he might get used to! No, he had to move; how long had he been at their mercy? Had he slept? There was the hollow sense of loss, as though time had gone through him without his knowing it. No voices came up through the house. It was not the kind of fear that made him want to cry, because he knew they had no mercy. He could not pity himself now because the world in which he breathed, and his heart beat, had no pity. The fear was like pain, like a rock shot halfway through his chest. Shock, so that his very arms and legs, and his scrotum, wanted to retract into the center of him, to make their instinctive defense.

  He must try to think his way out. Sometimes memory, if harsh enough in its own right, could buy him time from the fangs and cold hands. He would remember when Unk was hit on Bank Street in front of the Primer house near the high school. He was with Unk, knowing Unk was only a dog, but Unk had always more or less dominated him. But he was still responsible because Unk was only a dog, and dogs couldn’t remember not to run straight across the street, directly in front of the cars that were always going too fast. Too fast!

  Unk wouldn’t pay any attention to him unless he wanted something, or wanted to be friendly. The only people he minded were his father, Wood, and especially David. Dogs were always aware of David. But Unk wouldn’t pay any more attention to Horace, if he didn’t want to, than he would to a butterfly.

  Unk was in front of him, and ran out! The car hit him like a baseball bat hits a hard ball. Unk flew down the street like a brown and white rug, like a rug partly rolled up. His big springer ears rolled out and wrapped around his head, his front legs came stiffly around, upside down. He bounced on the street, slid against the curb and rolled over his stiff legs onto the worn earth they were always trying to make grass grow on in front of the high school. His hind legs were loose, going any which way. Horace must have run after him, because he stood over him as Unk opened his mouth but couldn’t breathe. Unk’s brown eyes were wild with wanting air, white all around. His hind legs twitched like running, and loose gray dog stuff came out below his stumpy tail on the clean fur inside his legs. His front legs moved to crawl, but he couldn’t. The big brown freckles in his front legs proved he was Unk. Blood began to come out of his hind end all over the gray dog stuff and his white legs. Then he coughed just like a person, and blood came out of his mouth. It dripped off the end of his tongue like sweat did when he was hot. Then Unk screamed and choked when he tried to breathe, and the blood came out faster. His eyes were alive.

  Horace stood there, crying, until a warm body had him pressed close. He didn’t know then that it was Susie Davis who cuddled him, her warm soft front against his face. She smelled of violets. She led him home. She seemed to know all about him, who he was, everything. How did she know his name, or care to know it? He never thought to ask her what hers was, she seemed so vast in her warmth, such a power then. Wood told him later who she was. Then ever after he watched for her, and they said hello whenever they passed. She had seemed so big and strong in her kindness then
.

  Suddenly he was back among the cold ones, in his room. That knowledge came with a breath of ice along his spine.

  A mouth was at his ear, open, not breathing, waiting to trick him if he moved, yet he must turn his head against the chance of a scaly tongue in his ear, and the sudden stench of a cellar. He couldn’t do it; he must do it. From his throat came a humming whine, and he heard it as the command the innards of his chest made to his brain: move. It is no longer tolerable for us. We will die.

  Then came a real, light knock upon his door. So real he knew at once that it was the knock of someone alive. Oh yes. Yes, please.

  “Come in,” he said. A whimper because of pity, which had been permitted to return. It must be Wood, coming to give him a short reprieve from the dark.

  As the door opened and a wedge of light crossed him, he could turn and look, raising himself from the bed into the now undangerous air, which was cold on his damp chest. But it was not Wood who entered his room, it was David, and the dark forces, though they had temporarily retreated into their holes, watched.

  David turned on the wall switch, and in the light Horace gratefully closed his eyes. Then he had to watch his brother—a different sort of danger.

  “Hey, Hoss,” David said. “You all right?”

  David’s smooth face did betray some concern. Why was he here? Concern seemed to lie trapped behind David’s confidence, and it was almost obscene to Horace that David could hold things back, and look straight at anything. There wasn’t anything David couldn’t look at, and keep looking at if he chose. Nothing ever seemed to scare him. He could leave any time, no matter what they had ever been playing at, and go away complete, taking his confidence with him as though he needed no one. Horace, when he was younger, had had accidents in his pants rather than leave a happy game to find a toilet, but David never seemed to care very much what he was doing. He could always drift away, calm and neat.

  “Hey,” David said as he came up to the bed. “Hey, boy.”

  “Yeah,” Horace said, hearing the caution in his own voice.