Whipple's Castle (24 page)

“Hello, Wood,” she said. Her always startling quality was strength. She saw Horace hulking behind him, and she said, “Hello, Horace.”

Then he was startled again, because Horace pushed past him and lunged toward Peggy with a hoarse explosion of concern, like a deep cough or groan. It seemed primitive, troglodyte—the word came to his mind. Peggy was not startled at all, and put her dark hand on Horace's arm.

“Yes, yes,” she said, patting him, and Horace backed up and stood quietly.

“You're going to come and live with us,” Wood said. “We've come to get you and your things. Your mother's got a job in Worcester, Peggy, and she's going to send for you.”

A small, ironic grimace flickered across her face—or perhaps he'd misread it. She stepped back and let them into the little shack with its close smell of old food, damp clothes and kerosene. The lamp's orange light couldn't quite define the far corners of the room, but he did see the small Christmas tree glinting in that semidarkness, and he felt the presence of the oil pot burner—a push of heat against his side.

“We'll have fun!” Horace said in his cracked voice. “We're going to put up the tree!”

“Why do you want me?” she asked from the shadow.

“We want you to have Christmas with us,” Wood said.

“We love you!” Horace shouted, and Peggy started to cry. She sat down at the table and put her head on her arms. Horace went to her and put his hand on the back of her neck. Wood felt a surge of caution—would Horace hurt her neck? Horace patted the back of her neck, visibly moving her head. Her mouse-colored hair seemed to absorb the lamplight, giving no highlights. She wore an old dress of Kate's, with short, puffed sleeves. The way the thread gathered the faded cotton around her thin arm seemed to him unsubstantial, haphazard, like her whole life. He felt that perhaps they ought to take her to a doctor, first, to see if she would live.

“I'm all packed,” she said, getting up and rubbing her eyes in a businesslike manner. “I knew I'd have to go someplace else.” She put on her overshoes and coat, and picked up her school books and loose-leaf notebook.

“You know, then,” Wood said.

“My mother left me a note.” She went to the oil stove and turned it off, then settled herself to watch it until the flame in the pot died out. “My trunk's over there,” she said, pointing to the old tin trunk against the studs of the wall.

“You've got everything?” he asked.

“Everything that's mine,” she said. Again he thought he heard irony in her voice.

“I'll carry the trunk!” Horace said. “I got it. I'll carry it!” He picked it up by the handle, like a suitcase. Of course the old strap broke, and the trunk crunched to the floor like a safe, shaking the whole building. “The handle broke,” he said, looking from one of them to the other for judgment.

“It was old and rotten,” Peggy said. “You'll have to carry it around the middle.”

“All right!” Horace said, and picked it up in his arms. He went right out with it, and Wood followed him into the cool night, then turned just in time to see Peggy's face as she blew out the lamp. The orange light of the burning oil gave her face a high color, just for that second before she puffed the flame out, and her long, bony nose and dark eyebrows—the dark arches of her eyes—were defined by crisp black shadows, as were her wide lips and the cleft between chin and mouth. In that brilliant warm light her face was nearly handsome. Her lips formed an O, and then, in the immediate darkness, his eyes retained the image of her face. It seemed a moment struck with importance, as though he had seen a prediction of vivid form waiting in the young girl's bones.

In Leah, on Christmas Eve, it snowed all evening from the shuttered, windless dark. The hills seemed to close in, and the snow sifted down upon the four main roads that led from the town, softly crowding Leah in towards itself. Though the plow trucks were busy, with their distant rumbles and dimly flashing lights, they seemed insignificant and lonely in the measureless white. The Cascom River was frozen over, and it, too, built up with snow, except for black water splatting on black ice below the Cascom Woolen Mill dam. The train from Concord, called “the Peanut,” had stopped to let off passengers and mail, and now it huffed its way down the slow grade along the Cascom River toward the Connecticut River, where it would pass over a black iron bridge into Vermont. The passengers it had let off were mostly soldiers and sailors, and these took one look at the snow that hadn't even been cleared from the small parking area beside the station, shouldered their duffel bags and trudged off into the town, each taking his own azimuth across the white. The other passengers went quickly into the small waiting room and stood by the potbellied stove, thinking about what to do. Billy Grimes' taxi, the stationmaster informed them, was following the plows to Northlee with five people aboard, and wouldn't be back for at least an hour, if then, because Billy had mentioned going home to have the tree. “And so am I,” the stationmaster said, putting on his overcoat and galoshes. His car had been put up for the war, he added, or he'd give them a ride. And so they all trudged off, grunting and leaning, toward their destinations.

The Town Square was deserted except for the green, red and blue Christmas lights strung from the lampposts, and other lights Strang through the blue spruce. The loudspeaker over the Town Hall doorway had gone dead except for an occasional amplified crack of static; Mrs. Box, the town clerk's secretary, had gone home and left the phonograph amplifier on.

In their apartment over Trask's Pharmacy, across the hall from the Trasks themselves, Wayne Facieux and his mother looked at the tree Wayne had decorated. All the bulbs were blue, and the only other decorations Wayne had allowed this year were tin-foil icicles. He was pleased by the tree's cool, luminous deliberateness, its ethereal, un-Christmas purity. The whole room, filled as it was with his mother's tasteless gimcracks and cheap maple furniture, gleamed a stylish and original blue.

Across the hall, Mr. and Mrs. Trask and Prudence sat before their bright, conventionally various tree. The radio softly gave them carols, but something was wrong, because for long moments none of them moved, and their eyes were too grave and bright. The dinner dishes had been done too quickly, and though it was their custom to open presents on Christmas Eve, and they had opened them, no tissue paper, paper bells and red ribbon were scattered about on the flowered carpet. Mrs. Trask, who had just finished picking everything up, sat with the crushed tissue in her lap, wondering, with anxiety she could not control, or keep from inflicting upon her husband and daughter, upon what dark battlefield, among armed and violent men, her son's tender body lay in danger.

Across the square, where the great houses stood on their wide lawns, Mr. Gordon Ward, Sr., stood before a bowl of eggnog and shook into its creamy surface the last drop from a bottle of bourbon. “Whoopee!” he cheered softly to himself. “Whoopee doopee doo, and a twenty-three scaroo!” He was a big man, as violently red-haired and green-eyed as his son—who was enjoying Christmas at Camp Blanding, Florida, and thus, presumably, not in trouble. The Burtons had dropped over from next door, and everybody, even Mrs. Ward, had about the same glow on. Screeches of laughter came from the living room, and he was about to carry the silver bowl triumphantly to their waiting appetites.

A few blocks from the square, up Union Street, the Potters' high white house glowed cheerfully, with red electric candles in all the front windows. In the living room was their wide-spreading tree, deep green and silver and red and blue. Lois and her parents sat in the handsome room before the lighted tree and a small fire of white birch logs. Her mother and father sipped dark sherry while they waited for the ceremonial Christmas visit of Sally De Oestris. Wood would be driving her around tonight, and Lois, looking bright and beautiful in a new knit dress, silk stockings and heels, waited for him.

Out on the flats toward Northlee, at Sam Davis' farm, Susie sat at the kitchen table, staring off into space somewhere above the sink. She had just come in from helping with the milking, having left her father as he lowered the heavy milk cans into the milk-house well. She could still smell the barn on her left shoulder, where she had pressed against the warm cows. Mrs. Gamer sat in her chair with her black afghan over her shoulders, knitting, and the radio on its single-board shelf played, and had played, so many Christmas carols Susie had stopped identifying each one. The tree was in the parlor, but it was too cold in there to sit.

For long stretches she could forget about the scandal. People seemed to treat her about the same. The biggest change was leaving high school. Though she might have done that anyway, it seemed a direct result of what had happened that night. Most of the hurt was the betrayal. Before that Gordon had been so nice to her, and she'd really believed with all her heart, that first time she'd let him, that he loved her. And the second time, too, in his own house. But then he hadn't even looked at her for a month, and the next time he asked her out that thing happened. He had planned it. She couldn't seem to understand how anyone could lie like that. How could he have lied to her, straight to her face, when she had loved him? It made her into nothing.

 

In that part of the Whipples' barn that used to be the entrance to the horse stalls, and was now the garage, Wood jacked up the rear wheels of the car and put on the tire chains. David and Horace were just finishing up the shoveling, although the snow fell so thickly they'd have to do it all again, probably, after the presents in the morning. It would give them all good appetites for the turkey, anyway.

Sally De Oestris' old Filipino chauffeur had died two years ago, and since then it had been Wood's job to drive her around on Christmas Eve as she delivered presents to relatives, friends, old families she kept her eye on and poor families she kept her eye on—one of her kind, sarcastic, twinkly little ice-blue eyes. He'd fill the trunk and the back seat up with Sally's packages, then help her—in fact lift her—into the front seat, hand her her canes and wait while she arranged her fur coat, her fancy pocket-book, her hat and veil, and they would be off on their rounds.

When he got to her house this night, he had to bash through the bank the plow had raised, grind into her driveway and shovel a path from the car to her front entrance. All the lights in her house seemed to be on, and her uniformed maid, Sylvia Beaudette, a dark-haired young woman whose husband was in the Army Air Corps, was piling the packages in the front hall.

“Merry Christmas, Sylvia,” Wood said.

“Merry Christmas, Wood. Sally'll be down in a minute, if the elevator works.” Sally's elevator, a little seat that ran slowly up a slot in the stairwell, following the stairs, had never failed to work, as far as he knew, but nobody ever referred to it without this reservation.

Sylvia, evidently under orders, went out toward the dining room and came back with a glass of sherry on a salver. He took it, and Sylvia took away the salver. The dark, imported cream sherry was Sally's Christmas wine. No one knew how much of it she had left in her wine cellar, but it couldn't be bought any more. Her custom was to send a bottle of it to the houses where she intended to disembark from the car.

He sipped the smooth sherry and looked around at the trophies of Sally's travels. A brilliant Japanese wall hanging in silk, of a stylized woman in a red kimono, hung on the wall to the left of the dining-room arch. The woman played a small three-stringed instrument with a pick half as big as the instrument itself. It had always fascinated him that the tiny teeth in her delicately pouting little mouth were black. It occurred to him that he had known these objects from Japan—the lacquer bowls and tables, Samurai swords and sake sets—since he was a child, and had never, and couldn't quite even now, associate them with the bucktoothed little caricatures of men he might be fighting soon. A shiver came at this thought.

A humming and clanking, such as an old cog railway might make, invaded the hall. It was the elevator, and soon, rounding the upper spiral of the stairs and descending slowly, came Sally, perched bright and glittering as a little bee queen. In a shimmery blue dress, twinkling and tinkling with bangles as bright as her bright blue eyes, she slowly descended.

“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” she said in her deep voice. Her voice always astonished Wood, after not having heard it for a while, but after a few words he got used to it again. And every time he saw her she seemed a little smaller and more bent over, but just as bright and eager, always grinning in a fiercely pleased way, like the Cheshire cat in Tenniel's illustration.

Before they left, after he'd filled the car with packages, she gave him an A gas coupon. She rarely used her car any more, and when she did she hired a man to drive it. Her car was a 1937 Ford phaeton with a specially built, enclosed passenger compartment behind the open chauffeur's seat, and a little nautical porthole on each side. Sally had explained once that she liked the 1937 Ford's looks, and also its mechanical, rather than hydraulic, brakes. She was surprisingly technical-minded about things (although Wood disagreed about the Ford's cable brakes). Once, when she'd volunteered that she'd flown in an open-cockpit airplane from Paris to London in 1920, he asked her what kind of plane it was, and she explained without hesitation that it was a Bristol “Brisfit” two-seater fighter plane, and she'd sat in the gunner's seat. The gun had been removed, but the pilot had shown her patches in the wings that covered German bullet holes.

When they were cruising slowly down Bank Street in the quiet snow, with the tire chains gently thumping, Sally said, “I suppose you resent having to cart me around like this, but these little ceremonies are all we old women have left, you know.”