Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  And the house was beautifully made; where mansard met corbel, where corbel met Byzantine dome, there were no cracks or leaks. All of its cypress had been cured for five years in an open-walled shed, and periodically turned and restacked by Negroes before it had been sent north. Other wood had come from Burma and Africa and India; some was so dense it wouldn’t float in water. Some had no perceptible grain at all, and was as smooth as yellow ivory.

  “I always wanted to own that house,” he said. “It’s sort of like owning the Taj Mahal.”

  Sally bent backwards from her hips, to laugh, and tapped her cane on the floor. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” she laughed, her deep voice always strange, coming from such a little woman. He wondered where the room was, inside her, to cause such a deep sound. “The Taj Mahal, Sterling Castle, the Shrine of the Three Buddhas in Nikko, the Medici Palace, Mount Vernon, and any Gothic cathedral seen through the wrong end of a telescope! That’s why I sold it to you—you’ve got the proper sense of self-glorification. I don’t care if you do get tired of it, or find it too expensive to heat. You’re too easily obsessed, anyway, and you’ll probably spin off somewhere else before you’re through.” She looked at him carefully. “I remember when you were a little boy. Your mother always said you had the shortest span of attention she’d ever seen, unless it was a sparrow.”

  She stood beside him as he sat before the unrolled papers, her head no higher than his. She had always reminded him of one of the objects she had brought home from her travels—a cloisonné” vase, a jeweled hummingbird, or one of the little sake cups that whistled when wine was poured into it. She might have been incorporated whole into the decorative panel of a Chinese lacquer cabinet. Or perhaps she had even more in common with the small, gold-chased Samurai sword that hung over the dining-room archway.

  “What does your wife think of it?” she asked, with some iron in her voice; she didn’t approve of his marriage.

  “She’ll be back from the hospital in three days,” he said.

  “With your son. What did you name him? Wood Spencer?” she said, raising her painted eyebrows. “You mean to say you haven’t told her about the house?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!” Sally laughed. “Well, it’s going to be a surprise for the likes of Henrietta Sleeper!”

  He felt resentment—the kind he always felt in the face of real authority. “You don’t really know her,” he said.

  “Ah, well,” she said with no resignation whatsoever in her voice, “I suppose things are changing more rapidly than an old woman like me can follow. In my day a Whipple didn’t marry a Sleeper from Switches Corners—unless he had to.”

  “Had to?” he said. “It took me three years to get her to say yes.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” she said. “And you the very hero of Leah? They tell me you can take a piece of wood and hit a round ball farther than anyone in three towns. Didn’t that impress her?” “I don’t know.”

  In spite of her sarcasm he was pleased that she knew about his skill at sports. “I don’t think that impresses her as much as I’d like it to.”

  Sally raised her eyebrows again and pursed her crinkly little lips. Then, after a moment she said abruptly, “I’ll have to meet this woman.”

  And their interview was over. “Take the plans with you—you’ll most likely find a few rooms in the plans you don’t even know are there. There’s a secret room I used to play in, but I won’t tell you where it is; it’s not in the plans. One of your children might find it someday.”

  That interview had taken place nearly twenty years ago, and Sally De Oestris still hobbled about on her cane—sometimes two of them, now. She was a little more bent in the middle somewhere—she didn’t seem to have any definable waist. Anyway, she got around a lot more easily than he did these days, and he was only forty-five. She must be very old. And he was never sure he’d found the secret room; he did find one that was fairly secret, but it might just have been a large closet that led off from another closet. There were so many different levels in the house it was almost impossible to discover extra space simply by measurement. By the time his fifty-foot tape traversed the width of the house it had been bent over too many short stairways, over balustrades and around too many angles. Maybe he hadn’t found it at all.

  Gradually, as if to prove to him that he was its captive, pain grew in his thigh, deep in the bone, like a hand turning a quiet and oily winch. He’d already had too many aspirin; he felt the beginnings of its aura, a kind of rigidity of the eyes, and knew that even one more would fill his head with tiny electric voices. The pain was, somehow, so personally administered that it seemed strange when it followed him precisely as he wheeled himself over to his desk. In the right-hand drawer was a bottle of P.M., which he took out and cradled in his lap for the return journey to the oak table.

  “Henrietta!” he called. In the echo the little singing voices cried lightly and were silent again. “Henrietta!” God, he hated to be waited on. He wanted some ice in a glass, but the pain told him calmly that he couldn’t make it to the kitchen and back. He took a swig of raw whiskey and followed its chemical burn to his stomach, feeling it hit his shocked pyloric valve. “Ah,” he said bitterly, “take that, take that crap,” as if his body were his enemy, in cahoots with the ponderous hand that punished him. His hip was burning now, lightly, on the surface of his skin only. Playful little flames stabbed and stroked him, then moved on. He took another swig, retched and tasted water brash—cheese-flavored, alcohol-flavored—a chemical taste that made him feel like an inanimate object; a drain, a cloacal pipe, a vessel full of used crankcase drippings. No vomiting or catharsis of any kind would help, so with a will he controlled his throat, and sat very quietly.

  They were coming down the curving staircase. Clump, clump, clump-clump. Saying nothing, but primed, no doubt, with artificial things to say. He didn’t turn around, but when they approached him in phalanx, from behind, he mumbled “Don’t make a wave. Don’t make a wave”—the line from the joke about the room in hell. Only David laughed, and he had a quick twinge of love and envy for the boy.

  “I’d like some ice in a tall glass, so I can take my medicine,” he said. “A few ounces of old Post-Mortem.”

  Kate went out to get it, while the others, he knew, maneuvered for those chairs, or places on davenport and settee, that were just barely oblique to his vision. The power of his glance dismayed them. Dismayed them. Where am I? he thought. Am I underneath this pile of goop, or has Harvey Watson Whipple become goop? You can’t think of yourself as being handsome and lithe for forty years, and then suddenly have to think of yourself as something so disgusting your children can’t bear to look at you. In your own mind you remain, even for five rotting years, a man, not a melting marshmallow. But only when you don’t have to read their eyes.

  “You want another log on the fire?” Wood said, and Harvey could hear disapproval in his son’s voice. All right, he thought, wait till you get pinned like a bug…

  “Yes,” he said. Wood strode out through the dining room.

  “Don’t make a wave,” David said, and laughed. Harvey wanted to look around at him and at least smile, but remembered the power of his glance. He stared into the embers of the fire and saw an animal’s head quivering in mute agony—a rhinoceros’s head. Then the lower jaw flaked off as an ember fell.

  “Kate’s going to make some popcorn,” Henrietta said. Wood came back with a piece of yellow birch and placed it carefully on the fire, obliterating the rest of the rhinoceros’s head, and the flames quickly licked off the loose shreds of golden bark. Wood stood in front of the fire, watching to see if it were all right, then turned, meeting Harvey’s eyes fleetingly, like a stranger, before he went back to his seat. Kate finally brought him a glass full of ice, and without meeting her eyes he poured some whiskey into it. She went back to the kitchen.

  They were all silent for a while, and then Wood said, “It’s still snowing hard.”

  In a while they heard popco
rn popping, a soft splutter from the kitchen, and the shuffle of the popcorn basket across the stove. Harvey turned to Wood, not knowing exactly what attitude to assume, so that what he said came out rather badly, he thought. “Would you like a drink? You’re going in the Army, so I suppose you’re old enough.”

  Wood began to say no; then Harvey could see the gears working. “Yes, thanks,” Wood said formally; he would have a social drink, and went out to get himself a glass. They both knew that Henrietta would approve of this. Harvey knew that David was the one who might have enjoyed drinking with him, but David was only fifteen, so the pretense that he didn’t drink would have to be kept up. He was quite sure David didn’t drink very much, but he knew he’d tried it. David was so much like him he’d be the first to try anything. But maybe that was a stupid idea. David looked like him all right, but in the last three years he’d grown away from all his children—or they from him. Kate was a girl, of course, and pretty as hell too; she’d have her problems. And Horace was—God knew what. Glandular, maybe. Where had he come from? He was just the kind of big, awkward person Harvey had always run circles around. No, not so much awkward as full of thoughts that got in his way and made him crash into things. You couldn’t think while you acted—you had to trust the cerebellum.

  Wood returned with a small juice glass, and Harvey poured whiskey over the one ice cube Wood had put in it. Wood thanked him again, irritatingly, and sat down.

  “So you paid the money back,” Harvey heard his voice say; again he’d trapped himself into some kind of act, dammit. He leaned back against the dull, not painful now so much as solid, or congealed, feeling in his hip and thigh, and saw the darkened plaster dome of the ceiling above the heavy paneling. His castle hall: the upper paneling stood out a foot away from the wall to imitate a balcony, and this effect always gave him the creepy feeling that someone, perhaps in hauberk and casque, might be standing there looking down at him.

  “Yes,” Wood said, disapproving.

  “You don’t make that much, do you?” Wood had a job at Milledge & Cunningham, sweeping up after the cutters, and repairing things.

  “I make thirty-two eighty a week,” Wood said, “with double time on Saturdays.”

  “That’s pretty good money, by God.”

  “Al Coutermarsh said I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody down there how much I got. I get more than some of the girls on the sewing machines.”

  “I’ll pay the money back!” Horace half shouted, half squeaked in his ragged, changing voice. It sounded like a yodel. They were all silent for a moment after this.

  “Well, what did you do with the money you took?” Harvey asked, trying to be reasonably calm.

  “I threw it away.”

  “Why?”

  Horace didn’t answer.

  “Why in hell did you throw it away?” Harvey felt himself changing, going out of himself. He became in his own mind the monster their irrationality caused him to be. “Look,” he said, turning his head like a turret to aim his eyes at Horace, “money isn’t guilty. It isn’t dirty. It isn’t anything but the symbolic value of what it can buy. It doesn’t breathe, think, eat, sleep or fart. Do you understand that?”

  Horace didn’t answer.

  “Well, where did you throw it?”

  “In the woods.”

  “Oh, great! Holy Jesus, that’s great! I still can’t figure out why you robbed the lockers in the first place, and now you throw twenty-five bucks away in the woods! And where in hell do you think you’re going to get twenty-five bucks to pay it back?”

  “I’ll get a job pretty soon,” Horace said in a low voice.

  “Sure! In a glass factory, I suppose.”

  “Harvey,” Henrietta said.

  “Well, for God’s sake, what the hell am I supposed to say? Here I am, a goddam cripple, trying to make enough goddam money so I can support this goddam family, and they’re busy as squirrels, throwing it away in the woods!”

  Kate came in with a big bowl of popcorn and several smaller bowls. “Here,” she said. “Fill your own. It’s salted, buttered, and somewhat burned on the bottom. When are we going to get a decent stove?”

  “You see what I mean? Three able-bodied boys and we can’t even ran a woodstove! First we had to have a refrigerator, because the ice was too heavy, or too cold or something, and now…” It was as though he had stopped listening to his own voice, or he had moved away, out of himself—perhaps to the fake balcony above, where he looked down at the fat white king jawing, jawing, saying what was nasty and always expected. How could he always believe that one more phrase, one more sentence, might turn his argument sound, triumph over his tone of voice by some logical point that always hovered just out of the reach of his mind? One more sentence, one more point, could totally vindicate him, but never quite did.

  At last the voice that was not really his own subsided, and Wood was speaking.

  “They were getting the money together so they could buy black-market gas coupons and liquor, and they were going to take her up to Donald Ramsey’s father’s camp, up on Back Lake, for a weekend. Seven of them. It was all over town.”

  “She was nice to me!” Horace shouted.

  “She’s too goddam nice to all the boys,” Harvey said.

  “It’s just something you’ve heard,” Henrietta said sternly. “You don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m in no position to find out—dammit,” Harvey said, and David chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” Wood said to David. “Do you think it’s funny to treat some poor girl that way?”

  ‘That wasn’t what I was laughing about,” David said. “I kind of like Susie, myself…”

  “Well, you stay away from her,” Henrietta said, and David laughed.

  “Listen,” David said. “I’m not laughing at poor Susie Davis. She’s a very kind person and all that. Next time I laugh, please believe that I’m not laughing at Susie. All right?”

  “Don’t be facetious,” Wood said.

  David turned, obviously trying to suppress more laughter, to Horace. He really seemed to be trying to be serious. “Look, Hoss, I mean it. I don’t blame you a bit. I just can’t help it!”

  “I presume,” Kate said, “that the reason I don’t understand any of this is because I’m a lady.”

  “You’re all sick,” Wood said disgustedly.

  Harvey heard the words of these strangers who had once been his children. He had to face it: he was jealous of them all, and not just because they could all run and walk. He understood them and they didn’t care enough to know it. Or perhaps it was just more convenient for them to live with a monster than with a real person.

  They ate their popcorn and watched the fire ember down. Harvey was silent, and deep inside his insulting body was a small ember of resentment, because he knew they all thought he was doing quite well by them this evening (for him). No really major fits at all—just one minor sort of skirmish. Maybe old Crip was mellowing a bit, eh? For a second he wanted to grab the huge brass and steel poker out of its holder and slam it beautifully down across the oak table. That would wake them up a little! But he’d have to back up, turn, wheel himself to the fire, and he’d probably fall flat on his face, as he had once before. Of course that time they’d been really terrified to see his smashed, fat, sluglike body writhing horribly all over the hearth. There was a certain satisfaction in that memory. That had been a fit to remember. A fit of lasting interest, you might say.

  But he did nothing. He tried a few pieces of popcorn, and the texture of it—yielding, cottony yet crisp—the taste of the salted butter, was painfully nostalgic of a time of hopefulness. Popcorn. The very name of the stuff was wrong for what he was now—as anachronistic as a continuing fondness for some frivolous food like Cracker Jack.

  Outside the curved panes of the high bay window, the snow still fell, a bounteous, lovely, determined, unending fall. All his life he had loved the snow. He’d even liked to shovel it, to feel his shovel cut the cold, precise silen
ce of it. He envied his sons the icy morning air, blue, white, cold enough to sear the nostrils, and the mist of crystals sifting off at each stroke of the light wooden shovels. And then in the afternoon maybe to take their langlauf skis up to the town reservoir, up a half-mile through the woods in back of the house, and ski down through the trees in snow so light and deep they’d never see their skis, just feel them flex through graceful, leaning turns.

  Soon they could all make their excuses and go up to their rooms. Then poor Horace would have to go alone into his, where he was afraid of the dark. Horace was the only one who might have chosen to stay here in the monster’s presence. Better the known than the unknown, perhaps. Perhaps. It all depended upon the known, however, and nobody knew this better than Harvey Watson Whipple.

  Henrietta finished in the bathroom first, and lay on her back, staring up toward the ceiling. This was the front parlor, where they had to sleep now. A bathroom had been installed in the closet underneath the first landing of the stairs, and a window had been boarded and plastered over so there would be room for the head of the bed.

  Was the ceiling there at all? Sometimes it was a cloud vaguely seen in the night sky, or a screen with all possible depths upon which she could project whatever had happened to her, or what might happen.

  Her grandfather had an ax he had paid ten dollars for—a great deal of money in those days—and what had made the ax so expensive, she always remembered, and would always wonder why, was that it was made of soft steel. Why would anyone want steel to be soft? Soft steel. All her life, whenever she thought of steel, or even sometimes of trees, this little question hummed close to her mind and hummed away unanswered, and she knew she would never really look for the real answer. Soft steel. Once she had a dream in which the ax, smooth as pearl, double-bitted, with one edge thin and sharp for cutting, the other thick for splitting—the ax slid not to cut, not to split, for her flesh had opened with sinful joy before the sliding blade. She knew the significance of the dream—that was obvious enough—but there were so many other dreams she had forgotten completely, and this one had been dreamed more than twenty-five years ago. There must be more to it, something she couldn’t understand. And perhaps she added to it, in her memories, for it seemed there had been special words she’d either dreamed or made up, new words to describe what parts of her flesh were so wonderfully affected. Lilipits. Sloppy down there between her filipupets, sliding like a bone’s end in its round socket, in thin oil that came from nowhere, and yet was there. That was all, just the ax sliding beautifully, dangerously, into its welcome.