Whipple's Castle (15 page)

He shivered, and stood up, turning his back on his little fire. Suddenly he was shaken by a profound emotion, at first unidentifiable. It was nostalgia, but for what? Loneliness, sad and terrible—but there seemed to be no object for this feeling. And then he realized the tears that threatened him were not caused by any hopeless love of any place or time he'd known. “I'm homesick,” he said out loud, knowing now that his nostalgia was for no time in the past, but for the future. The alarm clock on his desk ticked and moved; he couldn't hasten the hands around. He couldn't go to sleep, that child's trick of Christmas Eve. He could only exist in this indefinite limbo. Bored, immobile, nervous, he must wait for time to turn.

Wood and Lois Potter came out of the Strand and stood for a moment on the cleared sidewalk, the moisture of the theater clammy on their skin. The December night was so clear the stars seemed to hang as if embedded in a black quilt just above the elm trees of the square. The town decorations had been set up—red, green and blue bulbs strung through the low blue spruce, and red boards had been nailed around the lampposts to make them look like Christmas candles. From the loudspeaker above the middle door of the Town Hall came “Silent Night,” cold and dim, as if the orchestra that played it were miles away. All the people walked quickly away into the sharp cold, and those who were going to the second show had crowded, steamy and red-faced, into the right half of the lobby.

Lois put her furry mitten between his arm and his body and pressed his arm lightly against her as they walked toward Trask's Pharmacy, past the Town Hall and the green, slightly tilted statue of the Union soldier, past the old hotel and up the cement steps to the pharmacy. Red paper bells that folded out in honeycombs of tissue hung in the frosted windows.

They always stopped in Trask's after the movie, and long ago he had stopped bothering to suggest it. They would have a Coke, and speak to their friends, and then he would walk Lois the four blocks to her house, a high, white clapboard house, one of the oldest houses in Leah, where her mother and father would welcome him discreetly, trying not to show how pleased they were with him.

He steered Lois ahead of him through the big door, and she moved expertly at his direction. She was tall, slim and dark-haired—aristocratic-looking, with fine-grained skin that never seemed to be affected by the cold air. In fact she was more or less an aristocrat in Leah. She was related to the De Oestrises—as he was, for that matter. They were distant cousins.

They sat in a booth below a great glass amphora full of red liquid, and smelled the syrups of the soda counter and the peppery chemicals from the prescription counter at the rear. One other couple was there—Foster Greenwood and Jean Welch, whose relationship had always been touched with romantic sadness because she was Catholic and he was not, and their parents were against them. Sometimes Foster would have Bob Contois pick Jean up at her house, and deliver her to him downstreet. They had always been slightly sad, star-crossed. The booths were too small for more than one couple, so Wood and Lois sat in a booth across from them. Prudence Trask brought their Cokes in paper cones set in metal holders. As she put them down she nodded toward Foster and Jean, then shook her head. Jean had been crying, and Foster held her hands.

At the counter Beady Palmer and Donald Ramsey were talking. Everyone knew that since the Susie Davis scandal, Donald's girl, Marilyn Jackson, a sophomore, wouldn't go out with him.

Lois looked across her Coke and exaggeratedly pursed her lips around her straw—an expression of concern for Jean, and Wood nodded. In these circumstances they wouldn't interrupt. They exchanged glances with Prudence, who had gone back behind the counter.

“Oh, Wood,” Lois said softly. He nodded, and examined her long, thin nose, her perfectly symmetrical face, her almost garishly pretty eyes. In them green and brown mixed in bright splinters that flashed as she glanced up at him. She had always seemed just right for him, in every way. And then he thought: In every way outside of me. He was always pleased at the thought of the two of them, or at the vision of the two of them; he always seemed to be standing somewhere to the side, watching both the girl and the boy. Now, maybe because they sat next to Foster and Jean, who seemed mismatched in everything but their involvement with each other, he tried to bring himself back inside himself, and to look with his own eyes at this pretty girl everyone thought he was to marry. And who, he knew, felt herself so lucky to have him. Again he felt several feet away from where he sat.

He imagined that Foster and Jean had no such problem. Foster was very tall, the center on the basketball team, and Jean was very short, so short it was awkward for them to dance together. When they walked together Foster would reach down and put his hand on the side of her neck. In fact Jean was so short she had a kind of midget look about her, or maybe even a dwarf look. She seemed almost to belong in another scale, especially when she stood next to Foster. She was always very sweet and even-tempered, and it did not seem strange to see her crying so silently and sadly. She had a freckled, Irish, kid-sister sort of face, and light brown hair that always looked as though it hadn't been out of curlers for the proper number of hours. Now she and Foster, by their whispering and sighs, still signaled to be left alone.

Beady, who hadn't spoken to Wood since his outburst at Milledge & Cunningham, had glanced over at him once or twice and looked away without admitting recognition. Wood knew he could have made up with Beady anytime, but had hesitated because he knew Beady felt guilty about it, and would feel better if he broke the silence himself. But now the silence had progressed too far, and Wood decided to do something about it Monday morning.

Beady swung around and went to the jukebox, put a coin in it, and as the arms and cams inside the glass chose his record he cocked his head like a dog, trying to see it all through his strange eyes. The song he had chosen was “That Old Black Magic.” Once it began, he turned and went back to his stool, seeming to pay no more attention to it.

Jean had wiped her eyes with a paper napkin, and now looked up, abstractedly, and tapped her fingers on the table to the rhythm of the song. Foster hummed along.

 

That old black magic's got me in its spell,

That old black magic that you weave so well…

 

They were coming out of it, coming into public again. But aware, Wood thought, even in their sadness, of the dramatic value of their predicament. For just a moment he felt jealous of their intensity. It seemed to him that all of his strongest feelings were a kind of resigned disgust at the way people acted—or sometimes anger, or pity.

“Where were you?” Lois said to him. She tapped him, quickly, on the hand with her sharp fingernail.

“Thinking, I guess.”

“About?”

“Nothing.”

“Sorry I asked.”

“No, I can hardly remember what it was,” he said.

“The Army?”

“No.”

“I just think about you not being around,” she said. “And me at college. College? Unh!”

“Don't you want to go?” he asked.

“I guess I have to. All Potters go to college, just like all Whipples—that don't get drafted, that is.” Her eyes seemed to dim for a moment. “I wish we…” She shook her head, forbidding herself to go on.

“What do you wish, Lois?”

“Never mind.”

Foster turned toward them. “You heard from the draft yet, Wood?”

“Not yet.”

“Greetings!” Foster said, and made a surprised face. Jean laughed, and they all looked at her at once, which made her shy.

“I'm just waiting around,” Wood said.

“I hope they wait till after Christmas, anyway,” Lois said. She reached across and put both hands on his arm, holding it down on the table.

Jean poked Foster in the chest and said, “This jerk's been trying to enlist.”

“You're not going to finish high school?” Wood asked him.

“They'd give me a diploma anyway,” Foster said. “Anyway, all I want to be is a Navy pilot, and now I find out I'm too tall. You can't be over six-four. All they want is a bunch of shrimps.”

“You can't fit in an airplane,” Jean said. She turned to Lois, pleased. “So he's not going to. He's going to graduate with his class in June. Aren't you, Foster?”

“I don't know. There's a war on out there.”

“But you're only seventeen,” Jean said. Foster frowned at her, and she ducked her head slightly.

“Old enough to join the Navy or the Marines,” Foster said. This fact kept him from being more irritated by Jean's remark.

“That's true,” Lois said, shaking her head. “My goodness, we've all…grown up!” She looked at Wood, still shaking her head. “We're men and women, aren't we.”

Wood thought of Susie Davis, the big little girl, still soft with baby fat. Again, her having been known by all that raw sex, those brawling, howling red boys, seemed a part of the war.

“Where are you?” Lois asked him. “Where are you, Wood?”

He shook his head. “Just thinking.”

“About?” Her hand came toward his, like a darting bird, and her cool finger tapped his hand, seeming to leave a little frozen spot just behind his knuckle. “Let's go to my house,” she said, including Foster and Jean. “We can play the phonograph or something.”

Foster and Jean, who had no place to go that wasn't dangerous, were happy with this idea. As they paid Prudence and left, Beady stared away, into the syrup pumps. Wood wondered what he saw, what fragments of light from the silvery spouts came into his brain. Monday he would have to make up with Beady.

They walked through the clear night on the shoveled sidewalks, between high banks of snow, the compressed snow beneath their feet hard and white as marble. Foster and Jean walked silently behind.

Wood thought how once, a year or two ago, this would have been exciting, because they would turn the lights down, and dance, and eventually each couple would retire into the darkness to mumble privately and neck—a funny word; it made him think of swans and ostriches. He did enjoy (what a word!) feeling Lois' pretty body next to him. When they kissed she seemed almost to lose consciousness, and he wondered how far she would really go. They had discussed this once, and had decided not to go all the way; that later, when they were older, or engaged (if they
were
to marry, and he knew that he was responsible for that “if” in their agreement), they would. So he always went home from these sessions with a dull but almost intolerable ache in his testicles, and he would dream, not usually that night but the next, not of Lois but of some cheap faceless girl who shamelessly raised her skirt and invited him to take her standing up. He came as she laughed raucously, and he woke up, still seeing fragments of red lipstick and wide white teeth. There was no shame to this dream, only a kind of sadness because it was a dream of no one, with no love.

Yet he did believe that love existed. Foster and Jean were in love. They burned and froze in each other's sight. And Lois was in love with him—but he was in love with no one.

At the Potters' house Lois' mother and father greeted them pleasantly. A tall, wrinkled, friendly couple, worrying through their smiles, they soon retired to some other room in order to leave the young people alone. Wood rolled up the oriental rug in front of the embering living-room fireplace, and they danced to records. Lois had taught him to do all the popular steps, and he dutifully jitterbugged and fox-trotted. “String of Pearls,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “If I Loved You”—it was something she liked very much to do. She hummed in his ear, and her dark hair, always clean and sweet smelling, touched his face. He seemed to feel her white bones twist in her sweet flesh. When they kissed she seemed so open and generous, he was sad that he didn't love her as much as he should.

Sometimes when he was alone in his room he would try to daydream of Lois, naked in his bed with him, but she always turned into that Lois Potter who had an address, parents, relatives, a class at school, possessions—a kind of social entity instead of a needful girl. She reminded him of responsibilities, and without the warmth and softness of her real presence she couldn't excite him the way the anonymous girl could.

After they had danced for a while Foster and Jean retired to a couch in a dark corner, and soon after that Lois turned off the phonograph and switched on the radio, low, to the long-distance station that came on in the night. First Wood sat beside her on the davenport, and then they lay down together. Lois moaned as they kissed.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you so much.” She kissed his eyes and pulled his head against her. She was close to crying, and her lips grew soft as fleece, and silky. “I don't
want
you to go away. I want to…get married and sleep with you every night and have babies. You just don't have any idea how much I love you, do you?” Anger began, a hard, almost querulous edge. “I know you don't!” she whispered. “You don't know!”

“Yes, I love you, Lois,” he said. “You've always been my girl.”

“Yes, I'm your girl. But I'm more yours than you are mine. That's what makes me cry.”

“That's not true,” he whispered, knowing she recognized the lie; they always had to ignore it, or she would grow sad and tears would start. She pushed him up and got her arms under his sweater, hugging him as hard as she could. She spoke softly into his ear. “Sometimes I think when all this started it was like a devil or something got into me. I remember when we used to play together like a couple of boys. Remember? Five or six years ago? Remember my costume, with the big handlebar mustache, when I was the Duke of Venice and all that? I mean I always wanted to marry Wood Whipple someday, but I never cried over it. Sometimes I'd decide I didn't even like you, and I wasn't going to marry you after all. But damn you, you never really did anything nasty, or ugly, or mean enough so I could stop loving you. You always had the advantage. You're so much better than I ever was. I'm nasty sometimes, and I lie, and I used to steal things—”