Whipple's Castle (20 page)

She was afraid for him. This great house, in which they all lived like mice, not in its style, or with the money to impress its dark paneling and excessive spaces; it was no home to Horace. He was afraid of it. None of them really dominated its life, which seemed ancient, rich, made for De Oestrises. Of course Harvey's family was related, but his had been the poorer branch of the family, and they had all migrated to the cities to work for other people. All except Harvey. The Whipples and De Oestrises on that side had all moved away, and seldom came to Leah. And the only rich De Oestris left was Sally. Harvey's two brothers were in Boston and New York, and his sister lived in Pasadena, a continent away. But he had to live in this haunted castle and scheme like a miser while she worried about the plumbing freezing up, and saved scraps of hand soap, and Horace shivered with fear of the long hallways and the high ceilings occasionally hung with bats.

Before the accident Harvey used to amuse himself with the bats. He'd stand on a table, and as they swooped by he'd swat them out of the air with a rolled newspaper. Their mouse bodies would hit the wall and drop like little black cloths to the floor. They had weird, nasty little faces. God, you'd look at their evil little faces and think about them for days. David used to shoot them off the moldings with his BB gun, and at least there weren't too many left.

There were mice too, of a lineage older than theirs, no doubt. Old Tom had kept them in check pretty well—at least he made them somewhat more cautious, so they hadn't crossed the corner of your eye like dim motes as they fled from one comer to another. They would have to get another cat. She would feed the first stray that came along, hoping for a good mouser.

She had been putting away the silverware, and now hung the dishtowel on its bar. The soap was cooling, but it wasn't cool enough for a glass jar yet.

Horace stood in the dining-room doorway. She tried to look at him slowly, unstartled. He had put on the clothes she had asked him to wear—a white shirt and his dark green gabardine pants—so she wouldn't have to chide him about that and send him back to his room to change. His head drooped, and he looked very tired, stooped in the shoulders.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Sort of,” he said.

“Didn't you sleep well?” When she put her hand on his forehead he submitted stolidly, his eyes downcast. His head was hard, wooden beneath her hand.

“I guess so,” he said.

She knew better than to ask him what was the matter; he would say he didn't know. Once, just before Harvey's automobile accident—it must have been just about that time—Horace had tried to explain a nightmare. He must have been nine or ten, and he came screaming into their bedroom, which was then upstairs, next to his. He wanted to sleep with them, but they had both refused this. He cried and screamed and carried on about “the wires,” and Harvey finally had to pry his fingers loose from the headboard of their bed. They had to insist that Horace was too big to sleep with them, and Harvey carried him back to his own bed. They let him keep his door open, and agreed to leave theirs open, but this wasn't enough. He came back, this time stealthily, and crept in beside his father. Then they really had to insist. Harvey gave him a sharp spank on his bottom. “Dammit!” Harvey said. “You've got to sleep in your own bed!”

“The wires!” Horace said. “They come down the wires!”

“What comes down the wires?”

“They do! And then they watch when the tires roll down. But the wires! The wires! They don't go anyplace! It's me, mine! I want to sleep in here with you!” He cried and whimpered, but they simply could not approve.

“I'll make you more scared of me than you are of the wires!” Harvey finally said, and spanked him hard until he was sullen in his fear, and submitted. In the morning his bed was wet, but it wasn't urine. He'd curled up into a ball under the covers, and the dampness was his sweat. She'd felt terrible, but punished him with her disapproval. He was simply too old to sleep with them. She explained to him that children don't sleep with their parents, thinking all the time how unfair it must seem to a child that his parents could sleep together, warm and safe all night, every night, while a child had to sleep all alone in an empty bed in an empty room. He had never asked to sleep with them again.

“Do you want hot cereal or eggs?” she asked. “How about some nice scrambled eggs?”

He grimaced. He had once said that eggs were dead chickens. Sometimes he would eat the white, but never the yolk.

“Wheaties,” he said.

“That's all you ever have, Horace. Why don't you try something else for a change?”

He shrugged and looked down, sullenly. But he was not a sullen boy; she knew he didn't want to be. When he cared too much he burst out with it, and his words were exactly his thoughts. He was the strongest-looking of her children, the most…what? Peasant-looking. The crudest-looking, anyway, of all her children, and it was strange that he should have to be the one who suffered most from things inside his head. She would have thought Kate or David more likely to suffer this way, but they didn't seem to—at least not so that their troubles became known.

As Horace ate his Wheaties at the kitchen table, she watched him surreptitiously, seeing him eat with no real appetite. He was tired. A tremendous weight of tiredness seemed to press his arms to the table, and he lowered his head to his spoon. Something pressed down upon his broad shoulders, making the strong body of her son listless and weak. She feared other things for him—the inevitable question of something physical—some tumor, or growth, or horrible thing in the brain. This thought was small, kept small, but it was the reason for going to the clinic today rather than to a mere optometrist in Leah. They were going to look very closely at more than his eyes.

Last June, when he'd broken the bone in his arm, Dr. Winston had looked him over carefully and made him do certain little test things with one eye closed and then the other, then both closed, and then both open, and tapped him here and there with a little rubber hammer. He told her he doubted very much if Horace had anything of that sort wrong with him at all.

“He's such a big, strapping boy,” Dr. Winston said. “His restraint hasn't caught up with his momentum.” That was Dr. Winston, though. Old Dr. Bumham could have told him that Horace had always had the same problems, even when he was a very little boy. She thought of the word “congenital.” There had been something peculiar about Horace at birth, and she had almost forgotten about it, then remembered it years later when his odd behavior became too remarkable to ignore. When she got home from the hospital with him, and had a chance to look him over carefully, she found a little raw scar on his coccyx, at the base of his spine. When she asked old Dr. Bumham what it was, he tried to put her off. He was a gruff, even impolite old man who hated like sin to lie. Finally he told her that Horace had been bom with a tail about two inches long. “Not prehensile,” he said. “It's more common than you'd think—especially in this town!” And he laughed at her concern. “No, Henrietta, it's fairly common. A slight case of atavism—look that up and it'll just worry you. Never mind. Anyway, the doctor just snips it off and forgets it.”

But even as a baby he was coarse of feature, and had thick, strong wrists. He weighed twelve pounds at birth. “There's a regular ploughboy for you,” old Dr. Bumham said. “You done yourself proud this time, Henrietta!”

Horace finished his Wheaties and drank his orange juice. He jarred the table as he rose, and reached down quickly, with an apprehensive look, to steady it with his big hand. She wondered if he thought it might continue to tip, to roll as if in slow motion across the kitchen and crash into smithereens against the pot and pan cupboards. He held it down for a moment, his head bent.

“We'll take the ten o'clock bus,” she said. “We've got an hour before we have to leave.”

Horace nodded, and went up the back stairs. She knew he chose the back stairs in order to avoid his father, who would now be up, sitting in his wheelchair, waiting for his morning coffee. It was true they had no words for each other.

The new coffee was ready, so she poured two mugs and put them on a tray with sugar and milk, spoons and napkins.

Harvey sat at his oak table before his ledgers and stock-market pages, tapping out numbers on his adding machine. His dark eyes gleamed above his soft white cheeks, and just for a moment she saw in his intensity the slim man who used to be his outward self.

“Ah,” he said, peering at the coffee. She went to get a dining-room chair, and looked through the bars of its tall back as she carried it into the living room. As she sat down across from him, the heat from his floor register, dry heat with just a hint of coal fumes in it, fluttered her skirt around her legs.

He sipped his coffee in a way he would once have detested—greedily, his red lips smacking over its heat. Suddenly she was irritated by his incarceration in that wounded body. She thought of the farm, where such freakishness was not tolerated in animals, and of her father in his gray dressings and obvious stumps. She was irritated by such accidents, by the way Harvey's seemed to have hurt his children, and she wanted to ask him sarcastically if he was rich yet.

He tapped away on the keys, and pulled the handle down to total his figures—a gesture too expert and common, like a worker in a factory doing some mechanical operation he hardly understood but was an expert at in a flashy, moronic way. If it had been her with that leg she would have had it amputated and said to hell with it. To carry such an incubus of pain around seemed needless, even willful. She didn't care that much for parts that had gone wrong. Cut them off! Get rid of them! But she had read about a religion in which even the parings of fingernails were saved because they were part of one, and therefore sacred to the body's unity. Yes, to lose a leg, a major part of one's living body, a leg with all its complicated muscles and veins and nerves running all down its length in miraculous ways—even the little patterns of hair, and the jointed bones, and the foot that had been so swift and sure in all its levers. No, she could see how he clung to the parts of himself. But still, she would not. She made bargains and compromises quickly, stuck to them and never welshed.

And she wouldn't welsh now, though the memory of him as a man was powerful. There had been too long a time when he was a man, and she would not abandon him in any way now. Heat flowed from his register along her thighs, even up around the table's edge to warm her elbows and arms.

With another expert motion his white hand pulled down the lever. He peered at the result, tore off the paper tape and inserted it in a manila folder.

“Humph!” he said, reaching for his coffee.

“Are we getting rich?” she asked.

He was wary, but took it mildly.

“What else is there to do?” he said. “It's going to cost money to send these kids to college. You'll find all this isn't just a game.”

“David's going to Dexter-Benham,” she said firmly.

“Leah High School's not that bad,” he said.

“Leah High School is full of temporary teachers. A bunch of flibbertigibbets. There's very little there for David.”

“Maybe I'd like some toast,” he said.

“All right. I'll make you some toast. You ought to have a glass of orange juice too.”

“Okay, Ma,” he said, but he knew she meant it about David; she was certain of that.

David sat in study hall, in his homeroom. The dry dusty air was too warm, and chalk smell and girls' perfume, or powder, or whatever it was that surrounded them, smoothed away his resolve to finish a tense chart in French. The tenses of the verb
avoir
had to be looked up and then written down in the manner specified by old Mrs. Watson. He would have to do it, but he would do it with the sinking, lethargic feeling that not one of the words was being remembered by his brain. In and out; it was as if the information went no farther than the second knuckle of the index finger that pressed against his pen.

The pen was new, and still interesting. The cap was brass, and it was a thick, hefty pen with a new way to suck up the ink. Sally De Oestris had given it to him for his birthday. Inside was the same sort of rubber tube, but instead of the little clip-like lever on the side, you pulled out a cylinder, then pushed it in to create air pressure around the rubber tube, which collapsed. As the pressure leaked out through a little porthole, the tube grew round again and sucked up the ink. This process was much more interesting than French verbs he didn't even know how to pronounce. All they did in class was read and read and read
Les
Misdrables,
and translate it into English. They never pronounced a word of French.

The plunger of his pen came out slowly, as though it had great mass and momentum. Delayed by the physics of the atmosphere, it seemed to move with the calm dignity of natural law. The ink obediently moved in or out of the rubber bladder in the barrel, and the brass cap was as substantial as a part of a gun. He didn't want to use this pen on the French conjugation chart, and when he made himself begin he found himself writing his name over and over in a bold hand. David Abbott Whipple. David Abbott Whipple. He wasn't very satisfied with the Whipple; better to have been named just David Abbott. That was a name with a dark New England sort of ring to it. It was his grandmother's maiden name—his mother's mother's name, but the best thing about it was that he didn't know another person in Leah named Abbott.

At the desk in front of him Mary Denney bent over her spiral notebook, her light brown hair frizzled over her white collar, her shoulders hunched studiously. She was a plain little girl, not ugly, just sort of standard. He'd never noticed her much until one time she sent him a note saying she loved him. That had been a funny feeling. He didn't know how to answer, and it had more or less passed off into silence. Now, as though she knew he was looking at her, she turned and gave him a quick glance. It was a small shock, and the sweet danger of her face remained in his eyes like a flash of light. Her light skin, her upper lip that protruded perhaps a little too much, her brown eyes looking clearly into him just for that tiny moment—these stayed with him as she turned. He seemed to be feeling her back through the cloth of her dress—her lean little sides, hard with ribs, and her shoulder blades, clavicles, the round muscles of her arms, the soft places where her little breasts were rooted. Even Mary Denney had those impossibly pink little nipples there beneath the fragile cloth, sacred to see, like Kate's he had seen once by accident in the bathroom. Though she was only Mary Denney, who was not too bright, who never talked very much at all, she was complete and terrible, like fainting, like an explosion.