Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “That’s what David says!”

  “David?” he said with distaste, his lip curling a little bit. “I doubt if we desire admittance to the same world.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. It did seem sometimes that David was only a boy running around with toys, like his guns.

  The teakettle in the kitchen began to whistle, so they moved back through the furniture. “That’s the bathroom,” he said, pointing to another door. “My mother’s room is over there, and now you’ve seen the limits of my cage.”

  He set the tea to steeping and they sat down.

  “I wonder,” he said, looking steadily into her eyes. “I wonder if you know what you are.”

  “What do you mean?” No boy but Wayne, except for David, maybe, had ever looked her straight in the eyes and spoken calmly.

  “You know you’re an extremely beautiful girl.”

  She would have resented that, but the way he said it—so calmly, with no cuteness or false sarcasm—took away her resentment. It was as though he were speaking to her about someone else, or about some objective quality she needn’t blush about. He seemed to be inviting her honest opinion.

  “All right, yes,” she said, but she did blush, and her ears felt warm.

  “A gift of the gods,” he said. “A gift of the gods.” He said this sadly, and rose to get the teacups and saucers from a cupboard. He poured the tea, and offered her sugar from the bowl. Each of his calm gestures seemed stranger and more grown-up than the last.

  “There must be something wrong with you,” he said. “Isn’t there some little defect somewhere?” She thought of the mole down there, and shivered. “You’re bright, you’re not narcissistic…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Narcissus so admired his reflection in the water he fell in and drowned.”

  “Sometimes I feel like a freak,” she said.

  “I’d ask you to be proud of it, but that might ruin you, Kate.” He stood up. “May I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a favor. Now don’t get all worried.”

  She was, suddenly, frightened, but it was exciting. “What is it?” she said quickly.

  “I’d like to comb your hair. Isn’t that rather silly. But I’d like very much to comb your hair. I have a beautiful ivory comb. Wait, I’ll show it to you.” He went through the other room and in a minute came back with a wide yellow comb, very old and crazed with tiny hairlike cracks. One end was a handle, turned and carved with squares and little egg shapes.

  “It’s so old,” she said. He picked it out of her fingers and moved behind her. It occurred to her that she hadn’t given him permission. The teeth were like little fingers at first, that didn’t seem to pull, but only to smooth. She wondered if he was using the toothed edge at all.

  “Ah,” he said. She felt him kneel behind her chair. “No, stand up,” he said, getting up himself. She obeyed, and he moved her chair away. This time the comb drew deeper. A snarled strand cracked like a small electric shock, so small she wasn’t sure she felt at all, it was such a small part of the massive gentle pull of the comb. Her chin rose, and the surface of her throat grew sensitive and at the same time languid. Each hair seemed to go deeper than her scalp. As he parted her hair it was like the cold slit of a knife, or a razor, and then the smoothness again. There was static, but those little snaps were nothing; they were like the tiniest little silverfish in a deep calm river. She loved to have her hair combed, and she began to feel all golden and ivory. The cups of dark tea grew darker, and incredibly round.

  “Beautiful,” he whispered.

  She could so easily forget where she was. She wondered why she didn’t simply forget. He seemed to be reaching with each long pull deep inside her, as though she were made all out of silk, and the comb had no teeth. She was endless, and the deep stroking was endless. Why not let him continue? Why want at all to think of not letting this go on? A boy was that close to her she felt his breath on her neck when he lifted—his hands on her and lifting—her hair from her nape. He bared her nape, and stroked her. Why shouldn’t she let him, when she wanted him to?

  “Ah,” he said. The teeth icily began at her brow and combed back and over where they more deeply purchased, almost but not quite brutally, the thicker hair and wrung it smooth. It was a dry wringing, with the sound almost of liquid. She placed her hands on the chair back to steady her body against that pull, and the wood was cool as glass.

  “Do you like it?” he asked in a low voice. His breath was shaky and warm.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Doesn’t it feel good?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What does it feel like?” He sounded almost in pain, and the pleasure she gave him seemed wrong. But why should it be wrong? She loved him, she knew, and wasn’t that to want to give him pleasure? But this was getting to be wrong. His pleasure seemed to be what pulled and smoothed down through her skin, where each strand flowed down into her and divided in an immensely complicated and forbidden way, and touched and enclosed her. With the ivory comb he seemed to be touching her where he shouldn’t touch her at all, never, not now, because she was a child and shouldn’t be made to feel this.

  “What does it feel like?” he whispered.

  “It feels wrong,” she said.

  “Isn’t it a good feeling?”

  “Yes, in a way,” she said. She wondered if he were going to kiss her, to turn her around and put his mouth on her mouth. She would let him do things she shouldn’t let him do. No, she wouldn’t; there were places…things he was not supposed to do, but she wanted him to.

  “Yes,” he said, and then he said “No,” and slouched down into a chair and crossed his legs. Carefully he removed two strands of her hair from the comb and wound them around and around the carved yellow handle. “This is sheer madness,” he said. He seemed tired, and discouraged. In a sudden mood of pity and tenderness she bent over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she was embarrassed, and since he did nothing but stare morosely at the table, she said, “Well, I guess I’d better be going.”

  “Goodbye, Kate,” he said, so she merely left.

  She felt funny going down the long, grimy stairs. Furtive, somehow. At the bottom she would come out right next to the entrance to Trask’s, where another world of hers—the only one, really, the legitimate one—existed. She had never been up these long dark stairs before, with their yellowish, eggy smells, but now she had, and what had happened up there seemed enormous. She felt all loose, as though she had been taken apart and not grown back all the way together again. She felt bigger in odd places.

  She walked home in the balmy afternoon. Early evening, really, although the sun hadn’t yet gone down and it slid yellow over toward Vermont. “I am Catherine Mary Whipple,” she said out loud. “I’m fourteen years old, and I’m in the eighth grade of Leah Junior High School.” She wondered how that could not seem completely true on this warm spring afternoon.

  16

  David, who had been working every day after school and on Saturdays as a clerk in Trotevale’s Department Store, at twenty-five cents an hour, took over Wood’s job at Milledge & Cunningham. Here he worked Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons after school and all day Saturday, at fifty cents an hour. Because he couldn’t work as many hours as Wood had, and because of all the push trucks that needed repair, Al Coutermarsh hired Ben Caswell along with him.

  Mr. Hummington, the manager of Trotevale’s, never forgave him. Looking through his mauve-tinted glasses, Mr. Hummington said, “We offered you security. That job is strictly temporary. Money is far from everything.” His sentences tended to be in telegraphic form.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” David said later to Ben. He’d of course said nothing to Mr. Hummington. “Security! Can you imagine working in Trotevale’s all your life? In twenty years you could work up to thirty-five a week!” The whole idea was crazy, even a little frightening, as though perhaps Mr. Hummington’s evaluation of David Abbot Whipple were
right, that the war really meant nothing, and all he’d ever amount to was a clerk in a store. “Son of a bitch,” he said to Ben, who shrugged his shoulders.

  “Does it bother you that much?” Ben had said, and David smelled what one of his English teachers would have called “a pejorative analysis” of his character coming up, so he changed the subject.

  It was the war they usually spoke about—almost their only fairly neutral subject—because in many ways they were both in love with the war. To David, Ben didn’t look much like a war hero. He looked a great deal like his father, the mailman. In both of them, though, there was a kind of wheyish strength. They were both pale and thin, and they had a metallic hardness to their bodies, as though blood didn’t run in their veins at all, but some sort of indestructible colorless fluid. He could never think of either one of them getting a tan, or blushing, because the warmth of color never appeared on their faces.

  But the war was there, and its presence could be felt in Leah. One warm spring night not long after this, David stood on top of a crude tower made of pine logs. The tower was on top of Pike Hill, overlooking the town. He was armed, not with the antiaircraft gun he would have chosen, but with his Winchester .22 pump. He owned ten shells—just ten—each a little jewel of power. At home in his room, he would play with them, line them up on their primer ends and shake each one at his ear to hear the smokeless powder whisper from inside. Now they were where they belonged, inside his rifle. Identical, anonymous, one in the chamber and nine in the tubular magazine, they gave to his rifle the proper weight of danger.

  He was alone on the tower. The only light was from above, from the stars, and the soft darkness came in on him from the sides, as though he stood on a submerged rock in a warm lake. If it hadn’t been for the war he might have been a little afraid. What nonhuman creatures might swim, with leathery flippers, out of the darkness to slide against his legs? But the war precluded such complicated, peacetime nightmares. The war was bright and official, like ballistics.

  His duties were official too, and he carried his loaded rifle—half toy, half deadly weapon—because one part of him, at least, could believe in the possibility of an enemy invasion of New Hampshire. Witness all that adult effort with huge logs, a ladder and platform of dressed lumber, even a telephone line strung up through the pines and birches of Pike Hill. From eight until eleven that night, when Ben would relieve him, he was the air-raid watcher. If he saw or heard an airplane, he was to write it down in a little book that hung by the telephone, and describe its course and whatever else he could determine about it. If something really suspicious occurred—a sky full of parachutes, perhaps, or the drone of a hundred black Heinkel transports crossing, as they did in the movies, a sky whose stars jerked ominously from side to side, he was to call Mr. Bemis, the Town Clerk, who was also chief airraid warden.

  What did happen that night was just outside the realm of any possibility he might have had in mind, and that may have been why it left him so emotionless. It was a very warm night, and the warmth gave it an odd depth and clarity, as though he could have heard someone talking over in Vermont. The dark pines below him seemed every so often to breathe out wind. He could hear them receiving the wind and moving with it, and then a slow gust would come folding up over him, gentle and warm as bath water. He leaned against the wooden rail and aimed his rifle at imaginary planes; he saw a meteor, and wished it were a burning Zero or Focke-Wulf. Below him, down the hill where the maples and elms began, the window lights of Leah were slowly going out.

  Then he must have decided to get the binoculars from the telephone box. He had his rifle in his right hand, and he must have cocked it fully, so that the hammer wouldn’t obscure the rear sight. He must have forgotten to set the hammer back on half cock.

  Later he remembered a sort of instantaneous precision to that accident. It started and it was over, and there didn’t seem to have been any middle part at all. There were sparks—the sky was full of sparks—but where was the explosion? He knew that he had been setting the rifle down, and then the explosion must have come, but it was like no shot he’d ever heard. It was more like one huge peal of a bell, a bell with no resonant aftertones to let him know that he had actually heard it, so that he wasn’t quite sure that he had heard it at all. And all those sparks. He’d never shot a .22 at night before, and hadn’t known how much fire came out with the bullet.

  He just stood there for a moment, aware that his side itched—in the ribs on his right side. It never occurred to him that he might have been shot, and in fact he wasn’t, but when he turned the flashlight on himself he found some interesting things. There was a burned hole about as big as a fifty-cent piece—only elongated somewhat—in his shirt. His undershirt was dark at that place but not bumed through, and the slight burn he received on his skin was no more than a vague red spot. He didn’t find out until later that night when he was alone in his room that the bullet had actually gone through the folds of his shirt and come out near the breast pocket. Still, he didn’t tremble, nor did his pulse increase because of that discovery. He did worry about his mother’s ever missing that shirt and undershirt, which he put in the trash can, but if she did she never said anything about it.

  When Ben came to relieve him—their DeMolay chapter had volunteered for this duty—they didn’t make much of the accident. He told Ben about it, and showed him the hole in his shirt, but then they looked back at the sky, and soon David left for home. They were acting out bigger and better possibilities, and to have made too much of this little scrape with reality would have been to change the subject.

  They knew, both of them, that an airborne invasion of Leah was fairly unlikely. They both had National Geographic maps on the walls of their bedrooms, and followed the war with little glass-headed pins. Sumatra, Java—the Battle of the Java Sea had been a frightening affair, even to David, because the Japanese seemed so invincible—Singapore, Dieppe. Gabriel Heatter’s voice was as certain as God’s, and proclaimed doom to the Axis. They had been worried, but by the spring of 1943 they had few doubts about winning. They could forget the war for hours at a time, but they didn’t want to forget it. David was certain that it would be through the war that he would grow up, grow into a man who could have the experiences he wanted to have. How could he deserve the lovely girl he wanted until he had been to war and come back, like the heroes in the Saturday Evening Post? One had to have in one’s eye that virile gleam that looked across a peaceful garden and saw in memory the deaths of comrades. There didn’t seem to be any civilian love. “They’re either too gray or too grassy green,” sang the Andrews Sisters, and David believed it.

  They didn’t have to man the watchtower; it hadn’t been taken seriously for a long time, and David was sure Mr. Bemis had no desire to be waked up in the middle of the night. Mr. Bemis couldn’t say no to their patriotic gesture. He was a Mason, after all, and they were DeMolay. And this was a time when, upon the patriotic whim of Mr. Skelton, the whole high school might suddenly, in the middle of any even mildly appropriate day, have to march all around town behind the band, singing “God Bless America.”

  There was Eddie Kusacs too, to remind them that they should have been at war. Every once in a while—it could be a quiet school afternoon, and they’d be in study hall—there would suddenly appear outside the windows Eddie Kusacs’ great blue Marine F4U, its wicked radial engine screaming in their ears, its inverted gull wings wheeling down between the trees. Then up and back and around he’d come, lower than some of the school windows, as though he were following the cinder driveway down around in back to the boiler room. The huge airplane seemed to be going too fast and too slow at the same time—too fast for anything in Leah, too slow for the noise it made. After a few passes, during which they hardly breathed—David drank that sound; he was avid for that real noise—the airplane would come straight over the athletic field and drop a little yellow parachute about the size of a bushel basket. Then it was gone, flashing over a hill and out of sound, all that
power suddenly gone out of the air.

  But how real that airplane was, and how he wanted it! They would all be out of their desks and at the windows. Each time it happened he felt that he would never have to go back, that somehow his life had changed. When that violent machine hung in the air, he knew how inconsequential were the too familiar trees and streets of Leah. After it had gone, everything around him seemed tired; the dust in the sunlight of the brown study hall turned with a golden slowness. Then one of the teachers would go out and get the parachute, and they’d all file into the auditorium to hear what Eddie had written—usually best wishes to Mr. Skelton, Mrs. Watson and some of the other teachers, and come on, boys, join the Marines. And they’d all known Eddie. They’d known him when he came to school in a ‘35 Ford coupd, and here he was, godlike in his deadly blue Corsair.

  The war was close enough to them; he and Ben were sixteen, and they could join the Navy at seventeen. But what were they to do in the meantime? It seemed they were living in a sort of limbo, a place where nothing much mattered, where he couldn’t get hurt because he couldn’t believe this limbo to be a place where he was really mortal. This, he supposed, counted for his indifference to the tiny bullet that had so nearly entered his side. It was only a .22.

  If anyone had asked him who his best friend was that year, he would have said Ben Caswell, yet he wondered how much they really liked each other. He had friends he thought he liked better, but didn’t see as often. In some ways, he and Ben were too much alike. They were both rather independent, even a little bossy, so they were always a little irritated by each other. If David wanted to cross the street, or take a shortcut on his bike, chances were Ben wouldn’t, and neither of them would change his mind. Quite often they would go to the same place by different routes.

  Ben was tall and skinny and hard; he could knock a hole in you with his elbow, it seemed to David. His face was long and plain and slightly gray, like dishwater, and his hair, the color of gun metal, was flat and unhealthy-looking. He’d had undulant fever for a long time, back in the third and fourth grades, and David remembered him bringing his special milk to school in Mason jars. He was strong enough, though. David could get him down, mainly because he was a little more compact than Ben, and thus quicker, but he always got bruised in the process, and once he had Ben pinned he was afraid to let him up. It could be very boring just holding someone down.