Whipple's Castle (54 page)

 

Kate was a sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, where Wayne Facieux would be a senior next year. He'd left school for what would ordinarily have been his senior year to work in New York for what he called a “vanity press.” Interesting, illuminating and disgusting, he'd written. He was going to be in Leah this summer too because his mother had to have an operation at Northlee Hospital. He already had a job—one he hated, of course—selling shoes at Thom McAn. In spite of these things he was not at all discouraged, really. As a junior he'd won the
Atlantic Monthly
poetry contest for undergraduates, and he was working on a book of poems for submission to the Yale Younger Poets series.

He did not approve of Kate's joining Chi O, and in some ways she didn't either. They had charmed her practically to death, however, so she had joined, and sometimes now she felt rather as if she'd been had. There were two parts of college, the idea part and the social part, and she still wanted to believe they could be reconciled. Wayne said they couldn't. Maybe he was right, but she didn't want to give up some of the Greek things. In any case, this would be a summer to think hard about that.

This last year she had been on too many dates, and gone to too many parties. Her marks hadn't gone down, and that was depressing because she knew she wasn't doing what she should. She felt like a butterfly, something pretty to have around. She was very low on herself. In one of her courses she was supposed to have read
Anna Karenina,
but she'd read about a quarter of it, got the rest out of
Master Plots
and got an A on the exam. Such things ate into her ideal of college; it was the sophomore syndrome—that it was a racket. She saw the cheating going on around her, and she even whispered answers to a sister or two. The war veterans, most of them, were just as unserious as the nonveterans, just as fraternity gung ho too, it seemed. Many of them wore parts of their uniforms with insignia still attached just to brag about what heroes they were.

But she couldn't blame anybody for her frivolous sophomore year, so she came home that summer depressed, even noticeably quiet. Mainly she wanted to see Wayne, to see if his wonderful enthusiasm could bring her back. She still shivered at the thought of him, his intelligent face, his long wrists. She had missed him. And Davy would be back too. She wanted to have a long, long talk with Davy.

 

This was the first summer of what Harvey Whipple called “the Truman Depression,” and David had trouble finding a job that in any way pleased him. The Whipple cabin on Lake Cascom, however, was in bad repair, so David contracted with his father to repair it. It had been seldom used during the war and various sorts of disintegration had set in. The boathouse had been uprooted by ice and had fallen in, the dock had disappeared altogether, the roof leaked in several places, the gutters had filled with pine needles and rotted out, and the steps down to the lake were punky and dangerous.

David's greatest coup was to talk his father into advancing him $125 to buy a 1935 Ford pickup truck. All it needed was a clutch, and it only burned oil going downhill. For another $25 he had the clutch installed, and he had a going rig. He pounded out most of the dents, painted it with gray primer, and suddenly it was the jauntiest, most toylike little truck he'd ever seen. He envied no one, not even Gordon Ward with his milled-head, dual-carburetor Mercury.

The Ford was nice, and gave him a kind of freedom, but that was not his ideal vision of this summer. It was to be his Thoreauesque, or philosophical, or decisional summer. He would live at the cabin by himself, take a dip in the cold lake each morning, work himself hard at the clean carpentering, nailing and brush clearing. In Chicago he lived with a girl to whom he had lied about his age, saying that he was twenty-four, when he wouldn't even be twenty-two until December 5. She was twenty-four, and he was almost certain he was in love with her. Yet there was the lie, and his awful youth, which seemed so absurd after two and a half years in the Army. He felt that he was a fake, that Letty gave her sweet gifts of passion and comradeship to a child who used her in a masquerade.

They lived on South Greenwood, in Mrs. Salamonsky's Rooming House, where anything went—political, psychological, chemical. They had the old second-floor dining room, and shared the kitchen with the two Trotskyites, with the two homosexual communists, with the prim and quiet couple, she white, he Negro, who never went outside the building in each other's company, and with the peculiar little Cuban who lived in what had been the pantry, who declared that if his grandmother became a communist he would cut her throat on the spot and pulled out a great switchblade knife to prove it. One girl was a periodical nymphomaniac, and sometimes in the night raunchy characters, even old bums, could be heard crooning her name in the alley, staring hopefully up at her window. The male Trotskyite was a recidivist Roman Catholic named Halloran, and the female Trotskyite was a beautifully statuesque Jewish kleptomaniac undergoing perpetual analysis by a Trotskyite analyst. They all lived together, somehow, in a kind of joyful clamor, the smell of marijuana mixing with liver and onions, garlic and toothpaste.

But David wanted this summer out of Chicago, out of that city all gray and darker gray. Letty was going back to her family for the summer too, to conduct her annual campaign for funds. They were Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota, who couldn't understand why she wanted to be a perpetual student. She already had a degree, the Ph.B. given at Chicago, and now she wanted a master's in anthropology. She had to treat them carefully, but such was their respect for education they would most likely stake her for another year.

David was more or less wandering around in the humanities division, taking courses here and there. He was vaguely depressed by college. He had odd urges to transfer to the University of Hawaii or the University of Paris, or to try to get on a whaling ship, or to marry Letty, learn some sort of a profession and live in San Francisco. When he was away from her he felt sadness and relief. At other times he yearned for her, the way she came back down the hall in his bathrobe, smelling of soap, to kneel on their bed—a box spring supported by textbooks—and make a tent over his face with her dark blond hair. Their two faces were so serious under that soft canopy.

She thought him funny, and they would lie in bed all morning, chuckling and laughing at each other's remarks, none of which they could ever remember afterwards. The two homosexual communists would sometimes make coffee and knock on their door to bring them some. They treated him and Letty as if they were delightful pets, even though David was sometimes exasperated by their evasions of Lysenkoist doctrine, and would confuse them by making up false history complete with Russian-sounding names, ships bringing phosphates to Ciano's legions, dates in the late thirties of deals, purges, treacheries. They could not cope, it seemed, with spurious facts. Letty would pinch him under the covers, and he would lose his exasperation and actually feel contrite.

He wrote to Letty, feeling even more fake as he tried to be amusing, and her letter crossed his in the mails, saying North Dakota was sheer hell, and she loved him, loved him. He was frightened, and went back to the clean pine planks he was fashioning into stairs.

It was a blue and gold Sunday in June, and they were all spending it at the cabin. David had repaired the steps and rebuilt the dock, but nobody else would be staying overnight because he had ripped up half the floor of the living room.

A cool breeze from the lake blew the bugs back toward the woods. Small waves splashed among the dark rocks. This was the piney, deep side of the lake, where the bottom fell quickly into cold springs among boulders, so the dock had to run parallel to the shore. Perch and bass cruised among the pilings, and deeper in the lake were salmon and lake trout. Across the blue water was the more populated shore, two miles away, and behind the shore fringe the round hills of the Cascom range rose up beyond pastures into darker spruce.

The boards of the dock were still yellow and new, as were the stairs. Wood and Harvey sat on the bottom step, and Sally De Oestris was installed on a straight chair on the dock beside them. David, Kate, Horace and Peggy dove and splashed, in and out of the water, shivering and basking. Horace deliberately belly-flopped—a great spank and a sheet of water peeled out from under him, then huge waves. David could do a front somersault; they were both showing off. Henrietta was up on the bank, getting the food ready. She had split all the hot-dog buns, lit the fire David had set up in the outdoor fireplace and set the trestle table with the old, cracked, chipped and mismatched dishes, the worn and bent pot-metal silverware of the cabin.

“Hey, Hank!” Harvey yelled. “You gonna swim?”

She looked down at them, feeling old and soft. The youngsters were thrashing and laughing, all muscle and tendon—dynamos. She could barely remember the joy of mere movement. Compared to them she would look like an old mother seal. Her swimsuit was out of date too. She shook her head.

“How about you?” she said. “You want to display your age?” “Well, maybe I will!” But he didn't move. Wood looked on, smiling when a smile was called for. No one had dared ask him if he was going to swim or not, and she wondered what he felt about showing his leg and eye. They could get used to it; she wondered if he knew how easy it would be. He sat quietly, smoking a cigarette and looking on. David flexed his shoulder muscles and did his front somersault.

But the two girls, who now stood together, laughing at something Sally had said—they gave her an ache in the heart. Kate was so beautiful it took her breath, and Peggy had…bloomed. She wasn't the old Peggy at all. She had grown as tall as Kate. In repose, her face might suggest the kinship between this Peggy and the old funny little Peggy with the uncertain eyes and the thin mouth that didn't know which way to quiver. Now all the little things had changed—her glance, the glint of humor. She acted as though she deserved to occupy the space she occupied. Maybe that was it. She was so dark, and the wide mouth could now afford to laugh and be generous. Dark, in a black swimsuit, a night to Kate's day, but equal. She was no longer a satellite to Kate's beauty. Water flowed over her almost olive skin, clean and flashing. Henrietta had seen both Horace and David look at Peggy with surprise and even consternation, as if she were a girl they hadn't yet been introduced to.

Sally watched too, grinning and crinkling and tapping her canes on the dock as if she were applauding all this energy and smoothness of skin. Horace roared, made a cross-eyed, tongue-out idiot face and slowly, stiffly fell over backward, to hit the water like a flat board. That must have hurt. He came up lunging and grinning, and both Kate and Peggy, in yellow and black, slim as birds, dove in neat arcs on either side of him. He grabbed them, one in each arm, and his grin of pleasure made Henrietta's cheeks hurt. They ducked him, and as he came up blowing and sputtering, his bellow of mock outrage was so loud, so almost brutal it caused in her the surge of emergency. But of course it was all play. Horace was having the time of his life.

David came running up the stairs, dancing on tender feet. “Hey! HEY!” he said from sheer exuberance. “Hubba, hubba!” He went onto the screened porch of the cabin and came back with an inflated inner tube. “Forgot all about this,” he said. Suddenly calm, he stopped next to her and looked down at the stairs and dock.

“Well,” he said.

“Well, what?” she asked him.

“Here we are.”

“We?” she said.

“Why, we the Whipples,” he said, turning his bland, smooth face to her. He reminded her so much of Harvey—just to look at. A sort of smaller antelope, ready to nuzzle or to jump.

“Yes, we're all together again,” she said.

“With certain changes,” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“The Whip looks great.”

“He feels better, that's for certain,” she said. They both looked down at him. He even had some color. He had his cane hooked in the right pocket of his print sport shirt (his Harry Truman shirt, she called it to aggravate him) and he was telling a story to Sally, who rumbled in preparation for the eruption at the end. Wood half smiled as he listened.

“I'm going to put a rail down these stairs,” David said. That would be for their cripples. She looked at him and saw that he knew he had brought up the subject. Harvey had said once, “We ought to have an act, Wood and me—sort of soft shoe. ‘‘The Whipple Gimp,' we could call it.” Wood had smiled.

“For Sally too,” David said.

“And me,” she said. “I'm not getting any younger.”

David laughed and patted her on the shoulder. “You're in great shape,” he said. They watched Kate and Peggy climb out of the water, legs flashing in the sun.

“Peggy's changed,” David said. “She's got muscles now.”

“She's a lovely girl,” Henrietta said.

David looked startled, then he said, “Yes. That's right. That's a good word for it.” He thought awhile. “She's still got a kind of funny face, but it's not homely any more.”

The girls stood together, looking up, aware that they were being examined. David pointed at them, and they both giggled.

“Come on, Davy!” Kate said. “Bring the inner tube!”

“You know,” David said, “when Peggy tans up she'll look like a Masai princess.”

“Come
on!”
Kate yelled.

“All of a sudden she's built,” David said.

“What?”

“She's built. Peggy. Meaning she had good bones all the time.”

Henrietta looked at him closely. Something about his new regard of Peggy struck her as dangerous. “Don't you hurt her, Davy,” she said.

“What?” He laughed, surprised and even flattered. “Me? But why should I hurt her?”

“Because you could,” she said.