Whipple's Castle (43 page)

“Heinz!”
Myrna screamed again.

Perkins had been sitting very still, watching all this with a distant, pensive expression, and finally Tucker said “Hey, Poik,” and motioned toward the dog. Perkins immediately jumped up. With what seemed to David to be just a little too much savagery, he grabbed the stick and wrestled the choking, snarling dog over onto his back. Heinz wouldn't let go; he still gargled and shook, and by what looked like sheer force got to his feet again. The stick was white with foam, and their wrestling didn't seem to be a game at all. The dog screamed through his white teeth, Perkins making the same kind of noises. Just when David began to think the two were in a fight to the death, when it seemed they could never stop, Perkins, with a triumphant yell, tore the stick out of Heinz's foaming mouth and tossed it on the floor behind him. Heinz didn't look for the stick, he stared at Perkins' hand, the whites gleaming all around his eyes, too much gum showing above his long teeth. Then he leapt, and Perkins gave him the hand, as if to say “Here, bite me!” In midair Heinz shut his mouth and passed right by. When he landed he cowered as if he had been whipped. With his thick tail tucked down tight he crawled into a corner, and for a long time he yelped softly, and clicked his teeth.

Myrna had gone back to the kitchen, and when she came back out, bearing a platter of lamb chops surrounded by browned potatoes, garnished with parsley, she didn't attempt again to tell him what Fomeau did with his empty beer cans.

Along with the lamb chops, which tasted more strongly of mutton than any he'd ever had before, they had the vegetable called lambs' quarters, which David found good enough—something like spinach, but it left a coating on the inside of the mouth like the tallow of venison. All the food seemed dark with flavor, and rich. Perkins and Myrna had a glass of yellowish wine, and David and Tucker had raw milk which came from the Warren farm.

“We're eating Alice,” Myrna said, wiping a little grease from her chin.

“Look,” Perkins said, “do we have to go into it?” Tucker, too, had stopped eating, and looked disgustedly at her mother.

“I raised Alice on a bottle,” Myrna said. “She used to come and bunt me all the time because she thought I was her mother. One time she bunted me so hard I sat on the butter.”

“Well, let's forget it for now, okay?” Perkins said. He looked at David. “Always we've got to have names for the animals, so I've got to butcher our goddam friends.”

“Alice B. Toklas,” Myrna said.

“The pig is Gertrude Stein,” Tucker said.

“And the rooster is Tristan Tzara, and I've got to cut his goddam head off tomorrow or the next day.”

“One horse is Ernest,” Tucker said.

“The gelding!” Perkins shouted, and laughed. He didn't mind this; later David found that Ernest Hemingway had publicly insulted Perkins, before Tucker was born, when he and Myma had lived in Paris.

“The other horse is called Other Horse,” Tucker said.

“They've all got names—all of them,” Perkins said, and began morosely to eat again. David wanted to ask what Forneau did with the empty beer cans, yet somehow he was almost afraid to know. And who was Alice B. Toklas, whose flesh they ate? Gertrude Stein—he had heard the name, but who was she, with her crumpled ears and bitter smell? It seemed this whole day had been too full of hints and shreds of information, so many small parts, with ominous larger parts unexplained, and that nearly everything had almost fit his preconceptions—his daydreams, even. They had so nearly fit his daydreams that this day had in it too many of the quick shifts of meaning, expected yet still too startling, of a nightmare.

When they had finished eating, and got up from the table, he was for a moment dizzy. As the lamp moved, and the walls and the tall highboy leaned in toward him, he wondered if it weren't a terrible error for him to have come away from his home, his room with all its comforting relics of his childhood, his brother and his sister, whom he understood so easily. The small wave of homesickness was physical; he tasted mutton. Then it went away. He would decide how to cope with whatever came.

But that night as he went to sleep, when the groaning old house had ceased to startle him with its deep complaints, and the pines sighing above his window had become merely pines in the wind, the houses and people and animals moved and changed places with each other. His revolver, so powerful it lived, rested in his suitcase beneath his bed. He had left his home, and in one long day ridden strange roads, seen the ewe hump and set her hooves under Lucifer's demonic penetration—Lucifer, who now prowled the darkness below, his brainless golden eyes shining like flashlights. And somewhere close by lay the young, smooth new girl he had held in his arms, her sides white, her hair black silk, her belly tender and forbidden; yet now was she forbidden, that he could think of her lying full naked up and down his body? Under the sheet. He thought for a moment of masturbating, dreaming of his entering her. She was like the sweet pain of his tooth when he worried it out a long time ago, when he was a little boy. But there were too many other things, things that he didn't understand, that hid in the dark places. He let the sweet, gumlike pain flicker over him and through him, deep little shocks along his bones, until he went to sleep.

That was his first day away from home, from his family's great house in Leah. He had been so tired he could not stay awake long enough to think about that day, and he had to leave all his questions circling in the air, out of order. But in his dreams they seemed to be answered, and answered wrong. He woke in the morning with a deep feeling of their having been answered, that he knew much more than he did. It seemed that he had known them all long ago—Lucifer, Heinz, Perkins, even Forneau, whom he'd never seen. And Myma too, long ago before all the crabbed emotions in the world swarmed across her face at once. And Tucker before she had lost the pure, straight dignity of a child.

In October, just as the leaves turned, when the last few tomatoes no one could possibly find a use for were overripe and rotting in the garden, Henrietta was pulling up cornstalks and putting them on the compost pile. She happened to see something brown moving down by the end of the driveway, past the barberry hedge. She looked again, squeezing her eyes, then pushed her glasses away from the always sensitive grooves they made in the bridge of her nose. There was a tall man, a soldier, and she wondered why he turned from the road and came walking up their driveway, a bulging canvas suitcase in his hand.

A soldier, she thought. What is that soldier coming here for? The day was bright, the light hard, and leaves blew past her eyes as she watched him. The maples were red and gold, and here came this soldier, out of place on their street. He waved. Suddenly she recognized him by his gesture as she hadn't by his face, and it was her child in the dangerous foreign clothing. Wood, her firstborn, who had shed all of his need for her, piece by piece, and now came back, big as a man in clothes she hadn't chosen for him. He set down his bag and came toward her over the grass, smiling, all blurred by her tears. Gold glinted from his uniform and from his hat, from the leaves, from the odd imperfect lenses of her tears.

“Goodness!” she said. “Wood?”

He reached her and put his arms around her, and for a moment she felt as if she had walked up to the side of a house. He was so unexpectedly big. The gold buttons and bars of his uniform jacket wavered and shone. She leaned back and her eyes focused again. His face was different. It was older and smoother and harder, more muscular and handsome. His chin was hardened by the even shadow of his shaven beard, and his throat was reddish and hard. She stared at the strange devices upon his chest; suddenly she recognized in gold the crossed rifles. Rifles. He wore the insignia of his new calling.

“Oh, come in,” she said. “Come in and see your father.” Wood had said something. What had he said? He looked down at her for a moment.

“I'll get my bag,” he said. She still held him, but now she remembered to let him go, and he strode away. She wiped her hands hard on her smock.

He came back to her and they walked toward the kitchen door. “I'm sorry I had to surprise you,” he said. “I tried to call but I couldn't get off the train until Boston, and then it didn't seem worth the money.”

“You wrote it might be next week.”

“Yeah, they…” His hesitation struck her with worry.

“They what?”

“They're just speeding things up a little.”

“Speeding up?”

“Well, not very much,” he said, and held the door for her. She didn't understand, but before she would ask him about it he must meet his father.

“Harvey!” she called as they came through the dining room. “Wood's home! Look who's here!”

As the wheelchair turned, his tortured white face came around, grimacing. “Oh,” he said. “You caught me at a…At a bad time hello Wood.” The words slurred. “Sorry,” he said. A glass half full of whiskey sat next to his adding machine. “So sorry, really. Don't feel good.” He tried to shake it off. “So he's a shavetail! I can see that. R.O.T.C., y'know.” An agonized expression, the teeth bared; he tried to shake it off, to be sober. “Don't do this often, Wood. Lieutenant. Honest. True, Hank? True? True? Feel better later. I mean it, so glad. Happy. Proud.”

He turned his face away with a jerk, as if from a blow. Wood took a step toward him and stopped. “Dad,” he said.

“See you later. Don't feel good. You understand. Hanky, wheel the guts out of here, will you?”

Something made her look to Wood, and he nodded, serious and concerned. She wheeled Harvey into their bedroom and shut the door behind them. He raised himself from his wheelchair, shaking and sweating, then awkwardly rolled over onto the bed. She loosened his shirt and pants and took the pencils, pen and matches from his shirt pocket. “Do you want something over you?” she asked him.

His eyes were open, staring at her with an intensity she first thought was rage, or vindictiveness. She braced, waiting, but nothing else happened. He stared. Whatever words moiled in his head didn't come out. He stared for a while, then blinked several times before his plump white hand gestured for hers. She let the hand take hers, conscious of her calloused hard hand, a rock in the soft white.

“Does he remember me?” Harvey asked.

“We all remember you,” she said.

“I don't…Don't humor me. Don't mean wormy dog shit I am now. Inside ‘n out. He rember? Remember. Taught him how to shoot?”

“Go to sleep and you'll be all right at suppertime,” she said.

“God damn it,” he said. “Pile of shit.”

“Of course we all remember,” she said. “Now go to sleep.”

Soon he was sleeping, his red lips open slightly. In the corner of his mouth a bubble of spit trembled in each heavy breath.

She came out, shutting the door quietly. Wood wasn't there; of course he wouldn't have taken a chance of hearing what they'd said. She stood in the high room Harvey loved so much—or used to, until it had become his prison. The curving staircase, light flowing across the vast dustiness of the air, the omate false balcony so high up she could trick her eyes into believing it was a real balcony in some great Gothic hall. The stained-glass window on the landing beamed its rich colors down through the balustrade to the parquet floor and dark wall paneling: green on brown, red on oak. The parlor, now their bedroom, had been Harvey's gun and trophy room, where antlers bristled yellow on the walls, and rifles, shotguns, nets, fishing rods—all his gear and tackle-were displayed on racks and in glassed cabinets. Now they had all been put away in an attic storeroom. Harvey had loved his gun room so much he used to stand in the doorway, just looking at it. He'd even go around on the porch and look in at it through the tall windows, an expression of surprise and wonder on his face. The things he liked had never lost their wonder, then. His Orvis fly rods, his Packard phaeton, his sailboat, his castle, his incredibly obedient reflexes. How he had enjoyed them all.

And yet there should be something left. Were the things of his times of triumph all there were? And had she been merely another of his pretty toys—smooth, well made, obedient protoplasm?

She pitied him; she loved the man, but back inside somewhere, somewhere in her feelings for him, was that judgment: grow up. We must all grow old and brittle and useless at children's games. That is one of the rules we were born to, and we accept our pleasures, knowing that we must pay when the time comes.

But then she thought of Wood, who couldn't live his own life even at nineteen. Nineteen, and they made him wear a uniform decorated with their murderous symbols. They. They were only men, and had no right. They had no right to set the children to killing each other. All the armies were made of children. The pilots were children, and the sailors, all of them flattered into thinking they were men and then having to go out and die real deaths. Most of them had no idea of the meaning of the pain they inflicted or would have to suffer, no idea of that iron on the tongue. Stupid, stupid! Wood was coming down the stairs, and she turned away, her tears blurring and refracting the afternoon sunlight that fell so richly across the room.

 

Peggy had choir practice after school. They were going to sing for Thanksgiving in the school auditorium before vacation, in the Town Hall the day of Town Meeting, and at the Thanksgiving services in the Congregational Church. They didn't have to practice “God Bless America” or “Goin' Over Jordan” so much as the Bach chorales. For an encore (except in the church) they had “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' “and “That Old Black Magic.” She wouldn't get home—back to the Whipples' house—until just before supper, so Kate would have set the table and done all the things Peggy usually helped with.