Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  “Kate?” he said.

  “Mmm,” she answered.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “I am grown-up.”

  “What are your aspirations?”

  She felt like saying something flippant, but then she thought: How cold we all are! “Let me think,” she said. What did she want? She wanted to deserve to be loved, for a start. But everyone who passed by them, on the walks and even in cars, gave a sneaky lie to this aspiration. They all looked at her too quickly, as though she hurt their eyes. Maybe she should give up. Suddenly she wanted to be talking to David. She wanted all this half-known business and its tensions gone, and to be with David, whose square hands and rugged muscles were so much the male counterparts of her own. She wished they were both in white shirts and faded dungarees, barefooted, walking along a sunlit beach. She could feel the warm clean sand between their toes.

  “How to foresee a life,” Wayne said. “I want to be a poet, and I’ve never, as far as I can remember, wanted to be anything else. There was a nasty rumor, projected by my mother, that I wanted to be an osteopath. Where that idea came from I’ll never know.”

  He was settling in for a long discussion of his aspirations, and suddenly Kate jumped up. “Let’s go out to the lake and see David,” she said. “Come on!”

  “What?” he said, making a face. In one lens of his glasses she discovered a fingerprint. How could he look through that fingerprint and not be bothered by it?

  Oh, she knew she was a flibbertigibbet; she’d never really amount to anything, and all she’d ever notice would be superficial things. Wayne’s white socks with that awful clock made of blue triangles—it was such a pretentious piece of artwork creeping up over his bony ankle. How could he not see that? And why did he want a ship’s steering wheel on his necktie? Why? He cared nothing about boats. He couldn’t even swim. Maybe his mother or an aunt had given him that tie. “Where did you get that tie?” she said.

  “What?” He was in the process of untangling his gangly legs, and he stopped, still sitting, to look up at her.

  “Did your mother give it to you?”

  “This tie?” He looked down at it. “No, I bought it last week.”

  “Why? Why that one?”

  “Because I needed a tie to wear to work.”

  “But why a ship’s wheel?”

  “Ship’s wheel?” He picked up his tie and looked at it. “Well, so that’s what it is,” he said, mildly interested. “I thought of symmetry, the wheel of existence, Yin and Yang—you know. But it’s a nautical thing, is it? Very interesting.”

  “It’s horrible!” she said.

  “Really? Why?”

  But if she told him why, she would have to tell him about all of his clothes—his suit, his socks, his shirt with the four-inch collar points—and he couldn’t afford to get new clothes. “I can’t understand how somebody with your sensitivity about other things—like The Quill, for instance—can be so blind about how you look.”

  “I never considered myself an esthetic object,” he said.

  “But don’t you care how you look?”

  “I put in a certain amount of time on it. Like shaving, or brushing my teeth. It’s a total bore, but I don’t want to get so ragged I attract attention. That’s an even bigger waste of time.”

  She supposed he was right. He dressed the way shoe clerks in Leah dressed. Her superficiality was clear. But why shouldn’t he have some pride in how he looked? Didn’t he think he was a good animal? Maybe he thought of himself as being all mind, and the rest didn’t matter. In that case part of what she wanted to be to him didn’t matter, either. That sounded stupid, silly; it was confusing, nervous-making. What she knew was that she couldn’t talk to Wayne about it.

  “Come on!” she said, helping him to his feet His hand was limp and warm. She had the car for the afternoon, and she pulled him across the grass toward the street. Before they could cross they heard the rattle of drums, and everybody stopped to locate that strange holiday sound. At the intersection by the Masonic block a town policeman had stopped cross traffic. Beyond him, bobbing in lines, were what looked like a company of white mushrooms. It was the helmets of the Legion Drum and Bugle Corps. Though Kate had seen them march before, and knew how precise they were in their maneuvers, seen down the files this way each man’s helmet bobbed according to his own way of walking.

  The high voice of command came wavering down the street: “Column leeeft, harch!” The voice was shrill, like a woman’s, and she couldn’t recognize whose it was. They always sang their commands in that strange falsetto. When the column turned to go down River Street toward the Legion Hall, their blue and gold satin uniforms caught the sunlight, and their brass instruments and insignia flashed. Even the sheen of leather gleamed, a block away. To the steady tattoo of the drums the column turned, and with a kind of ominous gaiety swung down River Street out of sight.

  “Hmm,” Wayne said. They crossed the street and got into the Whipples’ Chevrolet. “A perfect example of culture lag. Utterly perfect.”

  Kate drove around the square and took the road to the lake. The familiar hills and turns made her think of all her childhood trips to the cabin. She remembered her anticipation then, how she and David and Horace counted the miles by farms and trees and houses they had plotted by the car’s mileage meter. There was the gray, leaning barn that meant five miles to go. They called it the red barn because once, long before they were born, it had been red; now only a pale reddish tinge could be seen up under the eaves, and the rest was silvery wood. Its silo had twisted down and around upon itself like pickup sticks. Then it was gone past, and she guided the car on over the hills, all the miles known and remembered, until she came down the long hill to Lake Cascom.

  She drove through the tall pines along the gravel road down to the cabin. As she parked near David’s little truck by the shed, they heard the hollow rap of a mallet, and voices from the shore. They got out of the car, Kate leading, and went down to the dock.

  It was David and Gordon Ward, both of them rugged and dark of skin, Gordon’s red hair now brighter and more metallic than the bronze freckles on his shoulders. Gordon stood waist deep in the water to steady an upright pole, while David rode a higher, horizontal beam and pegged in the pole with a huge wooden mallet. Gordon’s sailboat rode at a mooring in the lake, its sail down and loosely draped over the boom. The air was fresh and glittery, and the clean blond wood fit its notch with precision.

  When David saw her he smiled, surprised to see her, then swung down off his beam on a curved arm, sure and light as a gibbon. “Katie!” He came toward her on the dock. His toes were evenly tanned, and the tops of his feet were dry, the even color of toast. He held out his hands to her. “So you came to see me,” he said, and tapped her shoulders lightly.

  Gordon swung up onto the dock, the bright water sliding from his legs. Both he and David were so vivid; each seemed to have his color scheme—Gordon bronze-red and David golden—as though each stood in a different light.

  She turned to Wayne, whose skin seemed in shadow. He leaned against the stair rail, prepared to be bored. The soles of his cheap black shoes were too thin at the edges where the stitching was; she felt embarrassed to be his sponsor here, and the guilt that sneaked in after that.

  David said hello to Wayne in a friendly enough fashion, then knelt at the edge of the dock and began to pull in a clothesline rope. His broad back seemed an acre of smooth muscle. He hauled in a net bag full of bottles of beer and straightened them out so they’d all stand upright on the dock. They would be much colder than the lake water because of the cold spring down there in the boulders. On hot days they used to swim down through the warm water to feel the caress of that chill stream. Sometimes big fish hovered as if at moorings deep between the rocks, breathing the cold water, their gills pale winking half-moons against their black sides.

  David opened four bottles with the bottle opener that was tied to the beer bag, and lowered t
he rest of the bottles back to their cold hollow. Wayne accepted a bottle, though he didn’t like beer and would hold it until it warmed in his hand. They sat on the stairs and on the dock, she and Wayne on the stairs, David and Gordon Indian-fashion on the dock. Gordon smiled at her, and his intense delight seemed at first too fierce, like the smile of a tiger about to eat her up. But nothing he said corresponded to his gaudy looks, and he was polite to Wayne. This without words, because they would have little to say to each other except hello. When their glances crossed, Gordon recognized the other’s presence, and she wondered if it had been the war that had changed Gordon and subdued him. Not so much subdued him as made him sensitive. Even his past scandals could now seem more romantic than merely sordid, and his dangerousness perhaps a little challenging. He was a friend of David’s, now. At that moment she decided to go out with him when he asked her to.

  Let Wayne stay in his shadow; his desires seemed old, and he no longer had that careless style he once had. He was turning into a shoe clerk who wrote poetry, that was it. She thought suddenly of one of the clerks in Trotevale’s—a dark, handsome man with a touch of gray at his temples, who sang a popular song or two at any community occasion. He had a good tenor voice, and sang very well, with just the amount of skill that, in a movie, signified the winning of the amateur contest. All the rest of his life he was a clerk in Trotevale’s, a quiet and rather sweet man, having no force. No, surely Wayne was not like that. Perhaps he was just the opposite. But there was a mustiness about Wayne. He smelled somehow of old age, of toothbrush glasses and fussy pill bottles, and special preparations for the relief of gas or something. He might have worn a truss, a canvas and leather affair of straps and buckles, bitter with use. He was old at twenty; he couldn’t swim, couldn’t dance, couldn’t even drive a car. She had never seen him run. If he did, things would joggle and flap and his gold fountain pen would bounce out of his pocket, followed by the comb he kept in the breast pocket of his suit coat, followed by the other comb that was clipped like his pen to his shirt pocket, followed by God knew what other crap. She saw him full of tinny little things like the prizes from Cracker Jack boxes. He wasn’t, of course—but he was full of his little metaphors and judgments, as though life were a course in criticism, a lecture at which he took constant notes. Here he sat now, listening and judging, when it didn’t matter at all what anyone said. They were smooth and lively and young, beautiful as birds, and they basked here in the bright sunlight, next to the glittering clean water, having themselves, enjoying each other, tense with all their energy and possibilities. What did it matter what anyone said? David was speaking, his face shining with pleasure and goodwill. He could be speaking Portuguese, or Bantu, what did it matter?

  At four o’clock, when Kate and Wayne had left for Leah, Gordon and David went for a sail around Pine Island. After starting to drink beer, David couldn’t make himself go back to work on the boathouse, so they took a few bottles with them on Gordon’s boat. The wind was brisk, changing around from west to south to southeast, and they heeled and jibed and got wet. When they came into the lee of Pine Island they dropped sail and let the boat drift out toward the whitecaps as they opened the beer. The sun grew warm again and dried them, and the canvas deck grew warm to David’s skin. He leaned back against the mast and watched Gordon try to say something he evidently found a little difficult.

  “Davy? I’ve been wondering,” he said, looking at the hole in his bottle. He held the bottle up and sighted down into it with one green eye. “I know my history and all that around this town, but I wonder if you’d have any objection if I asked Kate to go out with me.”

  David had known this was coming. Gordon’s strange deference toward him had indicated it clearly enough. But still he had a chill. “I presume you wouldn’t arrange a gang bang,” he said.

  Gordon looked up with slit eyes, then decided to laugh. “Well, I guess I did bring it up,” he said ruefully. But the green eyes watched without rue. “You know better than that. That was high-school stuff, Dave.”

  David wondered what he did know better than. One thing was that he could not be the keeper of his sister’s virtue. She would have to know crueler shits than Gordon Ward in her lifetime.

  Yet he couldn’t help liking Gordon—or at least he never found him boring. That electric, somehow dangerous tension in Gordon, his rakehell straight look at anything, was a little like David’s own. If life presented itself to you, you looked at it. If, for instance, Candy Palmer shoved it in front of you, thinking you weren’t real, or dangerous, you didn’t hesitate. He thought suddenly of Lucifer the karakul, and his golden eye, and then of Ben Caswell, whom they still kept alive in Northlee Hospital. There was that skinny force in Ben that seemed more mind than muscle. Ben had looked squarely at hard things and never hesitated.

  The sun pressed against his skin and the boat rolled lightly on the water. Its buoyancy seemed slightly miraculous, although the beer was partly responsible for that. He wished he hadn’t begun to drink this afternoon; there should be a clarity of mind on a brisk day like this, and he shouldn’t brag to himself of a strength he knew to be strictly occasional.

  Gordon said, “I’m not screwing around with Susie Davis anymore, Dave. I haven’t seen her since the time we hosed off old Sam.”

  David shrugged. He’d told Gordon about what had happened that night with Candy Palmer, and right in the middle of the telling began to wish he hadn’t. But he had to tell somebody, for some powerful reason, and Gordon had been highly pleased by the story. Pleased too, David suspected, to have something sordid on him—that was why he wished he hadn’t told Gordon. Even his words and phrases came back shamefully. How he had the little monkey girl’s briers off too, and the words he used to describe Candy’s parts. In retrospect the telling of that tale seemed a fit of degradation. He should have made love to the little monkey girl, as tenderly and thoroughly as he could, taken her funny little maidenhead, soothed her until she saw stars, and told no one. Half violent, half chickenshit might be a more accurate summation of his character.

  One thing he was not going to tell Gordon was that he was taking Susie to the hog wrastle at the Grange Hall in Summerslee Saturday night. His plan was to bring her back by way of the cabin. Now he wished he hadn’t made that date, because in his mind Susie began to grow large, powerfully female. With deep uterine authority she seemed to envelop him and his life in warm folds of silk. At other times—this morning in the shower when he washed his hard body and its tight rubbery male parts—he knew that when he first touched her with naked intent she would shrink back softly into a mere girl, and he would have the power. But she waxed and waned, dangerous and then desirable. Right now in this clear light his plan seemed foolhardy.

  “What do you say, Dave? Would it make you too nervous? I…” Gordon hesitated, and looked at him warily. “I mean I know how you feel about Kate. Little sister and all that. But my intentions are strictly honorable—in this case.” He grinned, tentatively.

  “That’s her business, isn’t it?” David said.

  “I was considering your point of view, friend.”

  “I haven’t figured that out.” No, he hadn’t figured that out. “Look,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what I think about it. You’re no worse than most people—if that’s what you want me to say. You’re a bit of a shit and so am I. Why the hell should you ask my permission?”

  Gordon smiled. “What if I asked her to marry me?”

  “You?”

  “See what I mean?” Gordon laughed, this time. “You’re not prejudiced—you just wouldn’t want your sister to marry one!”

  David felt himself blush.

  Gordon called her that night, as she suspected he would. When her mother called her to the telephone she knew whose voice it would be but not what tone or method the gaudy, reddish boy would adopt for her benefit. She knew it would be highly planned, whatever method it was. She was curious and a little excited as she took the telephone from her mother’s hand.<
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  “It’s Gordon Ward and he wants you,” her mother said, surprised. Although Kate took the telephone smoothly, with no real instant of hesitation in order to discover her mother’s attitude beyond surprise, she felt the darkness of her mother’s thoughts.

  “Hi, Kate,” Gordon said. “Hey, would you like to go to the Blue Moon Saturday night?”

  “Oh. Well,” she said, stalling; she blushed because of that little lie. “Let’s see.” Another lie. “All right, Gordon.”

  “Good! Great! I’ll pick you up around seven-thirty, okay?”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Now, how about going sailing tomorrow? Supposed to be bright and windy. I could pick you up around eleven, we could have lunch at our cabin and sail across the lake and back. Stop in and see Davy at work on his beloved boathouse.”

  “Well” she said. She felt his force. Already he seemed a little too strong, a little out of control. Out of her control. She felt the tiniest bite of fear. She had answered in such a hesitant way. “Well,” she’d said, and that meant she had no clear right to say no.

  “All right,” she said again, and again he was inordinately pleased. Did he think he had soothed her with the promise of visiting David? Or even bribed her, somehow? How calculated had been that suggestion?

  “See you tomorrow then, Katie. Eleven sharp.” He paused. “Hey, good night,” he said.

  Ah. She heard that unusual diminuendo in his voice. Awe, and even a Gordonish sort of tenderness. Yes, she heard it plain.

  “Good night, Gordon,” she said.