Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  She looked at him wonderingly, no longer shy. “I know you’ve never been married, but you mean you’ve never slept with a girl?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “But surely you could have, Wood.”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “I mean, didn’t you want to?”

  “Yes, in one way.”

  “What way didn’t you?” She seemed nothing but curious.

  “I didn’t want to get the girl all…involved. It was because of the girl…”

  “Oh,” she said. Her hand rested lightly on his arm again, as if to detain him while she thought. “But it isn’t really that important, in that way, is it? I mean it doesn’t mean the end of the world, Wood. Two people are alive and warm, and it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  He groaned at his knowledge. Like a snake, it had pushed against the cloth, as if it owned him.

  “It’s just that I think,” she said in a low voice. “I think if it ever wasn’t. I mean, if I asked, and it wouldn’t…”

  “What?” he asked. His heels trembled lightly on the rug.

  “I mean if I asked someone, and they didn’t. Would you? Wouldn’t you?”

  She leaned toward him, on her knees, her black hair floating over his face. He breathed her, and his blood seemed to thicken in his lips; all his senses diffused in her warmth. All was moisture, the taste of water, and that gentle merging seemed to prove her right of insistence. When she was sure of him she touched the monstrous part of him, shyly, for reassurance, as if a small bird had landed and quickly flown. She removed herself and drew the curtains across the door, then turned out the light. She could be heard stepping out of her clothes—the slippery tick of silk.

  “Take off all your clothes,” she whispered from the dark.

  “I didn’t come here to…” he said.

  “Won’t you?”

  He wondered why Stefan did not seem to be hurt at all, why he wasn’t there at all. “Yes,” he said, and she was there, helping to make him naked.

  She was of a smoothness he could hardly believe, like eels, silken, like cool water. He could, was allowed, was welcomed against her smoothness. With shy delicacy she moved beneath him, he amazed that the hugeness of him could be so welcomed into her slender body. She sighed and pulled him into her, giving little warbles and mews of pleasure.

  She stiffened, suddenly. “Oh, wait, Wood! We forgot!”

  But it was too late. From the waist down he melted, as though his hips and thighs had turned to liquid and gallons of him poured upward into her.

  After a moment he pulled away, exhausted, empty, full of remorse.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “We forgot to use a rubber thing. And you came so quick. My goodness!”

  He moved off her and sat on the couch, his feet on the floor. She knelt beside him and put her arms around him. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said. “Dearest, my darling.” The words seemed out of a foreign language. They meant betrayal of her husband, whom she seemed to have forgotten entirely. “Oh, my big man,” she said with a kind of innocent, uncomplicated joy.

  Miraculously his sadness began to change, then was gone. He turned, seeming to fall lightly until they were in that position again. So easily. “Oh, oh, that’s right,” she cried softly. “This time it’ll be so much better, darling!”

  When she next fed Georgie he waited, a madman staring at the remains of a family, this bit of destruction he had caused. He lay naked, waiting for her.

  At dawn, after sleep, she said she was actually a little sore. The baby was quiet, and he took her again. Afterwards in the dismal light she held him in her thin arms and told him she loved him so much she was crazy, that she would do anything for him, anything in the world. She called him by so many names of endearment he had to stop listening, saying to himself that he must never come back to this place, never.

  But during the next week, leaning against his pack in the dust during ten-minute breaks, he felt her warble of pleasure in his ears, like a voice from childhood—from somewhere when touch was more important than breath. As soon as he could get a pass his feet carried him back, up the leaning wooden stairs, where she greeted him with smiles and kisses.

  18

  The summer lost its breath, and the maple leaves grew enormous about the house, so that only the four towers rose above the leaves for a view of the undulant green cloud that Leah had become. In only two months all the gray bones had fleshed out in green and darker green. Kate stood at her tower window and gazed across the soft town. From below the strata of leaves came the scything whirr of the lawn mower, a dry sound muted now by the rich grass. A hungry sound, as though those teeth were famished for all the moist green, and no matter how long they cut the swathes they were still bright and eager. She could almost see them down deep in there, Horace grimly leaning them forward, the steel blades coated by the mint-green blood of the dark grass. The heavy air was furry, velvety with the smells of summer, and from an eave paper wasps shot like bullets, out and away. Those coming in suddenly appeared, stopped, as though they had hit an invisible target, then turned to prove they were alive and had an intense purpose. They knew exactly what to do, and she was full of respect for their authority and knowledge. The summer was thick, night and day, with such insistent business. The robins’ stiff ceremonies were only jaunty and impertinent until you saw the cold knowing eye, and the colder green eyes of Tom the cat, watching from the top step.

  Wood was away, and they all felt incomplete. With her it was a slight breathlessness, as if she were about to call to someone who wasn’t there. Wood had always been there, or at least somewhere not too far. He was part of them, almost as if with all their arguing and fighting and independence they were one, really. One organism, and you couldn’t take a part away. Someone else had said that. Was it Peggy? But Peggy missed Wood so much, with such tender nervousness. She said she was writing him a letter, but she seemed to be having a hard time of it. She had a funny little habit of biting her lower lip when she sat down to write, as if that helped force the words off the end of her pen, or forced her hand to write, and her dark little face squinched down upon the task. Right now she was in her room, writing to Wood, but could she say what she wanted to say? Wood was Peggy’s hero. Once she had said, in a sudden outburst, that Wood was the best person in the world.

  Poor Peggy, she thought guiltily, to have only us. Several times she had found Peggy crumpled over, hiding her face. She had heard from her mother, from Worcester, and she missed her mother because she was her mother, but she didn’t want to go down there.

  “My mother’s a whore,” Peggy had said, shrugging her shoulders, tears on her face.

  “Peggy!” she’d said. They had been in Kate’s room, talking. Peggy suddenly straightened up, shrugged her shoulders bravely and said it.

  “Peggy!”

  “I don’t care. Everybody knows it. She brought men home and I was right in the other room.”

  “You heard them?” Kate’s immediate curiosity gave her a shiver of cold, because she really wanted to make Peggy tell what she had heard, and this made her feel cruel.

  “I heard them all right. It was awful. Sometimes they’d curse each other all the time and call each other nasty names, and all the time the bed was going up and down.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nasty things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just nasty things.” Peggy’s face turned dark and primitive, and Kate knew she wouldn’t say the words.

  But Kate had kept thinking about that, thinking of the man and woman snarling like beasts and all the while joined by each other’s flesh. At night she thought of it, and in the mornings before she got up she thought of it, when she lay soft and lazy in her bed. She wondered what Peggy had felt, what terrible fright and disgust. It was her own mother. But she would like to have known little Peggy’s feelings. One Sunday morning instead of getting up, she’d gone back to sleep and had a curious dream, a wrong sort o
f dream, but it hadn’t bothered her very much. In the dream she had put her arms around Peggy when Peggy was naked. Just that, the smooth skin, and Peggy didn’t seem to think it strange. It was curious because she had never been the type to want to pet other girls. She’d never had that kind of a crush. The dream remained as a slightly haunting little experience—interesting, as were so many of the things happening to her senses lately. She would wander through the dim servants’ quarters with their low ceilings and squat, varnished furniture, look out the small windows and want to cry because of the dingy, squalid feeling of the past. Today in such a mood she had climbed here to her tower and wiped cobwebs from the windows, opened them all and stood letting the thick summer air pass over her, holding her bare arms out as if to a lover. She was alone above the trees, in the open sky, but no one could see her, only birds and wasps. Swallows flew twisting on wings like bending little blades. Everything mounted and grew in the green heat.

  But the summer was passing, moving of its own momentum toward its end, and she felt this with sadness; she longed for and yet dreaded something undefined that could only be in the future. She had begun to notice a slight acceleration in time. Things happened too surely, as if on a barbarous schedule no one could control. The war went on, one violent, cruel battle after another. Wood, who had only just gone, it seemed, was now at Fort Benning, Georgia, being made into an officer. She could see Leah changing too, so fast she could see it. Troop trains came through Leah, full of Canadian soldiers who carried rifles with little tea-caddylike things wrapped around the trigger parts. As the train stopped, the soldiers stamped out onto the platform, formed lines and drilled, the sergeants screaming hysterically. They stamped and turned and postured like stiff wooden soldiers for five minutes, then marched back onto the train again, to go south, to go overseas to kill and to be killed. Prudence Trask’s brother John was dead, and in the second-story window above the pharmacy they had changed the blue star on the service flag to gold. Mrs. Trask was now a gold-star mother, the mother of a dead boy. The new ball-bearing factory had brought in hundreds of strangers, and the dances at The Blue Moon had become drunken and dangerous. A girl in the sophomore class, Marcia Warwick, was pregnant, and wouldn’t be coming back to school in the fall. There were rumors of trench mouth and even worse things. David made a dollar an hour, now—that child David, who was as much a child as she was—making a dollar an hour. Everybody had too much money to show, dollars and dollars packed into their wallets.

  Her father’s tenements were all full, and he was always excited or morose; his good news seemed at once to make him sad, and he sat all day in his counting house, the living room, which he sometimes called the great hall, mumbling, yelling or staring around him like a visitor in a museum. Sometimes his staring didn’t mean he was unhappy. He’d say, “How do you like this bloody castle of mine, Princess? Some place, huh?” This would be most likely in the late afternoon when he had a drink of whiskey in his hand. Or he’d kid with Peggy, whom he seemed to like better than anybody else, and she’d smile and blush. But most of the time he scribbled and mumbled.

  It was hard to remember that other man who’d been their father. When she was eight or nine all of them seemed to bounce around, all of the Whipples. He never sat still for very long; in fact she could hardly remember that man sitting down at all. They had the great big open car then—a Packard—with running boards almost as high as her waist. They’d go for rides, all of them in the big red car, and people would wave and shout as the Whipples went by, all of the Whipples laughing and singing as they rode through Leah in the late summer light. They sat high above all the other cars, and they could hear the engine working inside the long red hood, slow and lazy. It was the only car like it in town, and her father was very fond of it. On Saturdays he’d wash it and simonize it, and if it wasn’t raining they’d all go on the ride around town that always seemed triumphal, as though their father had just conquered the town, or become king.

  That was the car he’d been driving when the people in the Ford came out of a side road and hit him. For a month after that the Packard had been more or less on display down at Hayes’s garage, buckled and rusting, with the maple blossoms falling all over the seats and hood, and the glass slivers on the floor. Then it disappeared; where had that big car gone? She had never seen another one like it.

  Horrible things happened, even to your own family, to change life forever. She knew that from the past. And now the war, and all the boys and men going where it was even more dangerous. She wasn’t as frightened as Horace, but it was still bad. The war mixed with all of the future to make the future so ominous. “What will become of us?” she said to the summer air. How flamboyant, she thought. What a gesture! Again she opened her arms as if to a dangerous and irresistible lover. Suddenly the world changed, and she was no longer acting. Pain changed the color of the leaves to orange, and she almost fainted, was almost sick enough to vomit. It was like being nailed. Her arm above the elbow, in the tenderest soft place, writhed and burned, and the black wasp fell to the sill, its white face jerking and nodding. She jumped back and held her arm with her other hand as if in a tourniquet to stop the pain. It was so horrible, so unasked for. It was betrayal, because she had only wished them well. She would not moan or cry, but her eyes filled with bitter tears.

  Harvey Watson Whipple. He signed upon the receipt the crisp signature that never seemed to change. All that remained of him and his power and hope were the legal things, things of paper. He was making money, but he had nothing to buy. He had heard of misers who wanted nothing but the money; they couldn’t bear to spend it, because it was the heavy gold or the crisp official green they wanted. If only he could find their secret. He wanted…things! But the things he wanted he could no longer want. How could he own them with the firm, manly caress of his hands when he had no hope? Each day he spent in this slug of a body, his life was shortened by more than a day. He knew what the actuaries would say about that. He dreamed of running, of sailing before the wind toward a harbor where he would find good food and drink, and love he was worthy of because of his strength. Now all that was gone, could he believe it?

  I can’t believe it.

  Memory is worse than oblivion. Sure. Believe it. He remembered when his young wife was dark golden, her hair black as a crow’s wing, and light as that day’s August wind coming down the lake toward camp. How old were they that good year? He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three. Wood was a year old, and her belly was smooth again, with only the silvery little stretch marks slanting V-like from her hipbones. In the lake was that little no-class sloop Harry Thibodeau built for him, and it rode easy beside the dock—lapstraked, white, green canvas over the foredeck. Let’s take a jar of martinis and sail up the lake and come back with the spinnaker (a half-spinnaker, really; and as for the gin and vermouth, he knew a driver on the Canada run. He knew everything there was to know, then).

  Aunt Mary Watson was alive then to mind the baby, who would always be a baby, just a cute little fella, always new, a new idea, just their baby.

  When they grow up, you grow old.

  They were skimming back down the lake under spinnaker and sail, centerboard up, cutting in the dusk, the yellow sun just gone. She leaned back against him, and felt him, and they stopped at the deep end of Pine Island, tied up on a root and slid into the cool water. They helped each other off with their knit cotton bathing suits. The lovely ache of a hard-on in cool water, scrotum hard as walnuts, and her cool cold skin, cool lips hot inside. A rubbery rub and then the always miraculous oil. God, the invisible unoily oil. Welcome. No. More than welcome, “You’re in me,” she said.

  Oh, God. He watched his death so soon.

  How would he go? Heart? Cancer? Flu? Anything could take him out now. A hangnail. Everybody died, didn’t he know that all the time? He must have known it in his twenties, in his thirties. He must have known it and yet he joked about it. He remembered the jokes. Croak. Kick the bucket. He knew it all the tim
e, and that what was him would turn alive in the ground another way. It was all so logical, so right, so instinctively right. By other instincts than his would he boil—try not to remember that.

  But weren’t there people not bothered by…death? He couldn’t even think of that word without breathlessness, fear in his hollow. No, not him. He was all there was of him!

  What about Sally? She was over seventy, for God’s sake! Did she wake up at four in the morning with black nothing leaning over her, eye to eye? Maybe some lived for a purpose, died for a purpose. What purpose? All men died. If you were going to die, what was the purpose? For your children? Shit, they had to live their own lives and die their own deaths. That was their problem. Not that he was indifferent. No, he wasn’t. It was all terrible.

  Oh, God, he needed some medicine. He needed the drink he hated the taste of. He’d rather taste a blueberry warmed by the sun on top of Cascom Mountain. One firm blueberry pierced by his white teeth, and the acidy blue taste that meant lakes and mountains down and away, boats on the lakes, trees, gray granite, grouse, deer.

  What about religion, buddy? You desperate?

  He’d never had any, and that was the truth. He was an American; he wasn’t haunted by anything but Nothing. Ancestors? That all washed out long ago, buddy. Some kind of a lemur, scared of snakes and cats but thought he’d live forever. Now cursed with predilection. Some of the more recent ones were human, and they had their scary solutions too. Scary because so obviously impossible to believe. Genealogies, Bibles—they were the property of certain idle aunts, all dead now, their spidery findings stored in attics or cellars.

  He always said he’d never commit suicide. He wasn’t the type, nope. Maybe he still wasn’t. Christ, you don’t cut your throat to cure a canker sore. But what was the use of living, when you had to die? He’d heard that question before, but couldn’t remember the answer. Funny he couldn’t remember the answer. Very funny.