Whipple's Castle (16 page)

“Shh. Everybody does things like that.”

“But not
you.
Not Wood Whipple. God, sometimes I hate you. You're not even real sometimes. And then I think of you, no matter where I am. In school. Even during an exam, and I melt. Quickly she took his hand and put it on her breast. “Oh, God, I melt,” she whispered. “I'm melting all over.”

She moved against him, not rhythmically but as though she meant merely to shift position. He did this too, and in his eyes gold flashed. He saw whole mosaics of color. He could just stop himself from moving, moving against her.

Then they heard Jean cry out loud. “Oh no! Foster! You didn't!”

“Shh!” Foster said. “I'm sorry!”

“Oh no! No!” Jean sobbed.

Wood and Lois sat up. It was obviously not a private matter with Jean, whatever it was. She was disconsolate. “No, I don't believe it! I do believe it!”

“What's the matter?” Lois said. “Jeannie?”

“He did!” Jean cried.

“Did what?”

“You know what! Foster Greenwood!” She turned on the bridge lamp next to their couch and sat under it, her lipstick spread lightly all over the lower part of her face. Foster loomed over her, the same amount of lipstick on his pale jaws.

“Now what will I do?” Jean cried.

“What did you do?” Lois said to Foster, who looked away, shrugging his shoulders.

“I guess I couldn't help it.”

“He went all the way,” Jean said. “He said he wouldn't. Now I'll have a baby…” She cried into her hands.

“Wait a minute, Jeannie,” Wood said. “You don't always get one, you know.”

“I couldn't stop myself,” Foster said. “I guess I just lost my mind.”

“Are you sure you…?” Wood said.

“He did!” Jean said. “I asked him to stop. I said be careful, but he was just like a mad raving beast! I never saw you like that, Foster!”

“I lost my head, that's all.”

“Are you sure you…? Did you…come?” Wood said.

“I'm afraid so,” Foster said.

Jean sat beside him, trembling, frozen. “Now I'm not a virgin,” she said. “I can't confess that. I will not ever say that to Father Brangelli. I just couldn't!”

Suddenly Foster laughed. “What a mess!” he said. “What a mess! If you get pregnant! What a mess!”

“Lois!” Jean said. “Wood! You won't tell, will you?”

“Of course not,” Wood said. “But anyway, Jeannie, it isn't that terrible, is it?”

“If she gets pregnant?” Foster said, raising his eyebrows incredulously.

“Oh, oh!” Jean cried, and threw herself across his lap. “It's all my fault! I couldn't expect him to have all the self-control. It's really all my fault.”

“No, Jeannie,” Foster said. “It was my responsibility.” He looked at Wood. “Is there anything we can do about it now? To keep her from having a baby, I mean?” He looked at Lois, asking her too.

“It's kind of late to think about that,” Wood said.

“What about…?” Lois said. “Jeannie? Like in feminine hygiene, didn't it say…?” She went over to Jean, who got up, and they moved away from the boys, whispering.

“Oh, I don't know,” Jean said. “Miss Dube was pretty vague about that part.”

“Can you do anything?” Foster called across the room to them. Lois gave him a blank look, which made him wince, and then she and Jean left the room. Wood and Foster looked at each other and shrugged.

“I know about nothing on that subject, to tell the truth,” Foster said. “Even if I had a rubber I wouldn't have put it on, because I never intended to do it. You could have cut my left leg off and I wouldn't have given it a thought.”

They stared morosely at the furniture.

“It's sort of embarrassing,” Foster said. “I just couldn't stop. I tore the hell out of her panties. It was like…” He thought for a while. “I love her, you know,” he said finally.

“You're kind of young to get married,” Wood said.

Thanks,” Foster said. “Ow! And her family—a bunch of crazy harps. They think the Virgin Mary invented God. The time Jeannie took me to her house they looked at me like somebody'd laid a turd on the rug. If he knew I got her cherry he'd eat me up. Ow! Her old man. Look at that!” He held out his hands, and watched them tremble. “He's just a little banty rooster, but he'd eat me alive.” He stared sadly at the radio, which uttered faint little chirps. “It was worth it, though,” he said. “I'm going to do it again too, only next time I'll be prepared.”

“Nothing's foolproof, though,” Wood said. “I read that.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Foster said, and then added in a smooth, thick voice, “I'll tell you somebody else who loved it too. While it was going on, Wood. I mean it. She grabbed me so hard you couldn't have pried her loose with a crowbar. Oh, Christ, I'm getting all horny again.” He untangled his legs, got up and turned away. “I guess I better join the Navy and get the hell out of this town.”

When Lois brought Jean back to them, Jean was very shy again, and quiet. She went up to Foster and took his big hand. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“The second show's going to be out soon,” Foster said. “I'd better get you home before an Irish posse gets after me.”

When they'd left, Lois tuned the radio in better. Johnny Mercer was singing “Sentimental Journey.” She came and sat next to him. “It's amazing,” she said.

“What's amazing?”

“They really did do it. Right over there.” Lois was trembling. “I'm afraid to touch you,” she said, and then added in a quick little mumbling voice, “I'd let you, you know that?”

“You shouldn't, Lois.”

“Have you ever done it, Wood?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Neither have I,” she said, and giggled nervously. “Of course you know that.”

“You're only seventeen,” he said.

“Old enough to join the Navy or the Marines,” she said, imitating Foster.

“But there are other things to think about. You know that,” he said. He felt the old resentment, just its signal from a long way off, that he should always have to be the one to serve caution.

“Oh, I know,” she said, and leaned back, sighing. She had washed her face, and now in the soft light she looked very young. A wave of love, like weakness, came over him, and he didn't move.

“Maybe after the war,” he said. “Think about after all this is over, and we're older.”

“It's never going to be over,” she said bitterly. “Whatever it is. ‘Victory.' That's all I ever hear. When's that going to be? Maybe you'll get killed. You!”

“I don't think I will,” he said.

She grabbed his arm hard and held it against her side. “You'd be just the one to do something too brave. I know. Listen, I know all about you. I know everything you do. I've got my spies that tell me everything.”

He laughed. “Who are your spies?”

“Never mind,” she said. She wasn't smiling. “You know what I wish I had the power to do? I'd make you lose your mind. Jeannie—how can she have so much power?”

Suddenly he felt close to tears. It was pity for her, and disgust with whatever defect in him that had caused such a confession. He waited, hoping that this feeling would go away. Maybe, he thought, it was because that girl who came to him in his dream was really himself, only a creature of his imagination, that he could forget about responsibility and just go to it. She had no name, no past, no future to be jeopardized. But then a foreign little voice said, “Maybe you're afraid, Wood Whipple.” What was that voice? Maybe he could not love Lois for her strangeness, her separateness, and if he became involved too closely he would no longer be free, and thus all his compulsive responsibility might be fraudulent.

“Lois?” he said. “Lois? We could lose our minds now…”

“I lost mine a long time ago,” she said.

“But if we don't,” he said, “you'll be grateful later on that we didn't. Who knows what's going to happen? You'll be so glad we didn't.”

She pushed his arm away and turned toward him, her face in the soft shadow of her hair. Her eyes gleamed out of this shadow. “It's just the other way around,” she said slowly and precisely. “It is just
opposite
to that.”

“No,” he said, knowing she was right. “Someday—”

“ ‘Someday my prince will come,'” she said, half singing the words, and laughed harshly. Then she put her hands over her face. “You're making me look so stupidl You'd better go home, or pretty soon I'll never be able to speak to you again.”

She stood up, to show she really meant it. “And what did you tell Susie Davis last week when you went to her house? Did you tell her to be careful or something?” She went quickly to the hall closet and came back with his coat. “Sometimes you're so damned irritating,” she said forgivingly.

He kissed her, and she leaned against him. “Why should I feel this way about a boy?” she said. “Somebody please tell me.”

“You're so pretty,” he said.

“So pretty you can hardly stand it.”

“Now don't get like that again,” he said, and tried to kiss her, but she turned her face away. His lips touched her ear, and it was cool and crisp. He ached down below; maybe the laughing, abandoned girl with no name would come to him tonight and relieve him of this care, this bottleneck. Lois kissed him and they said good night. He walked out into the clear frozen air, zero, windless. The snow cracked under his heels. Past several blocks of the muffled houses, late lights in odd windows, he came to High Street and climbed toward the huge house with its towers and domes. As he approached he saw, high up in Kate's tower, a yellow light that hollowed the little room. He stopped, wondering if Kate had left the light on by mistake. But then a shadow grew up the wall and disappeared. It must be cold up there, but Kate, burning as she always was with some vivid project of her imagination, probably wouldn't feel the cold at all. To be pretty-too pretty—and not give the time to self-protection…what did he fear for Kate? He was sad because they couldn't talk, and he couldn't warn her of the bandits and thieves, the gross appetites that would soon yawn for her.

When Kate came up the steep, narrow stairs—so steep they were almost a ladder—the trap door was open and the old bridge lamp was on. The electric heater was plugged in, and its copper eye glowed warmly in the chilly room. She put down her pillow, blanket and the basin and sat on the floor in front of the copper light. It was almost eleven. Horace was asleep in his room with the light on, and her mother and father had just gone to bed. Wood wasn't home yet, and she considered his seeing the tower light when he came up High Street, but then decided that it didn't really matter if he did. He might at first think she had left the light on by mistake, but if he came to the bottom of the stairs and heard any sort of noise, she was fairly sure he would go away and mind his own business.

The only furniture in the room besides the lamp was a doll-sized bureau she had once brought up, with David's help, from the old nursery. In the bottom drawer of this she had put the Mason jar of whiskey and two juice glasses. All right, she thought, here we go, three sheets to the wind! It was scary. What would this whiskey, this drug, do to her? Would she see with new sight? If she got terribly drunk, how would she get back down the stairs? She would have to sober off right here. With this thought, that she would be trapped by her addled brain on this high platform, she felt a twinge of vertigo, and put her palms flat on the varnished floor.

But David would be here to help her, if that became absolutely necessary. She heard him on the stairs, and soon his head appeared at the trap door. “Wood isn't home yet,” he said.

“I don't think he'd butt in, though, do you?”

David hadn't climbed the rest of the way in, and now his head seemed to be sitting on the floor like a flowerpot. He looked quizzically at her. His blond hair, she thought, was cut like hers would be if she were a boy. If she had been a boy she would have been just like David, and if he had been a girl he would have been just like her. This was something she intended to suggest to him, even though she knew it might make him angry, because no boy wanted to be considered a girl in any way at all.

“I guess you're right,” he said. He tossed the seat cushion from his easy chair up onto the floor and climbed in. “Your cigarettes, madame.” He tossed the old pack of Chesterfields to her. “Your ashtray. Matches. I see you brought the emergency vomit basin.” He shut the trap door and placed his cushion on it. He wore his old sheepskin jacket that had dried blood and grease all around the cuffs, and in that dirty, rough old thing his hands and face seemed almost too clean and bright.

“Wood wouldn't approve of this experiment, though,” she said.

“Well, it's more or less in controlled circumstances. He might approve of that part.”

“He's all right, though.”

“Wood the Good,” David said, smiling.

“I don't really know him very well, Davy. You know that?”

“Do you know anybody better?”

“You, Davy.”

“Really?” he said. “You think so?” He didn't seem to be offended by this; he just sat there, wondering.

She lit one of the cigarettes and blew the smoke out of her mouth.

“Don't you inhale?” he said. “You know what F. P. Adams calls women who smoke but don't inhale? He calls them ‘phoofs,' or something like that.”

“I don't smoke in public,” she said, which seemed to be the answer to that.

“I don't know anybody very well,” he said, frowning. “Not that it bothers me too much. Hey, how about the experiment? You got your stolen booze up here?”

“I'm kind of scared,” she admitted, but she reached over and got the Mason jar and juice glasses out of the dolls' bureau. Her hands were shaking. “I'm going to spill a little,” she said as she pried open the wire clasp. “You want to pour?” He poured two glasses, spilling a little. Fumes filled the little room.