Whipple's Castle (6 page)

When the old lady died, and the Swede had gone back to Sweden, the house stood empty for ten years, really haunted then by the bats that fled over the blackberry thicket that was the lawn, through windows broken by awed little boys. And then, just before Wood was born, Harvey bought it, thirty acres and twenty or more rooms, for five thousand dollars.

After her aunt's death, Sally De Oestris had taken away the things like silver and china and linen, but all the high, solid furniture remained. Even the harmonium, which sat like a monument below its own stained-glass window, still worked; the tile roof and wide overhangs had protected the interior of the house in spite of broken windows. Harvey had come at night, with candles, before the electricity was connected, and wandered shivering with fear and pride through his dark castle.

The same architect had done Sally's father's house on Bank Street, which she still lived in, and she showed him the plans and letters the architect had left. She sat him down at her escritoire and moved her little gnome's body carefully, cane in one hand and a roll of thick yellow paper in the other, her round face crazed by twinkly little lines. She smiled nearly all the time, and her blue eyes were glittery.

“The man was more than eclectic,” she said in her deep, playful voice, “he was a regular pack rat. A nut, an absolute nut. Nutty as a fruit cake. He thought he was creating his masterpiece, but he was really trying to imitate the cathedral at Chartres.” She giggled as she moved away, leaving him to unroll the yellow papers, and slowly poured two glasses of sherry from a crystal decanter.

“He says in one of his letters he had a dream of the cathedral,” she said. “He certainly wasn't looking at a picture of it!”

It must have been a dream, she told him, in which strange lenses came across his mind—yes, something like lenses—to swell and wither the vision, leaving one area as blank as paper, while another bulged and squirmed like wall come alive. “Here, look,” she said, pointing to the front elevation. “Here are the three arched doors, the three arched windows above them, and then the great round window with its twelve sets of spheres and spheroids—'oblate and prolate shapes,' he calls them. They look like eggs, or eyes.” In her opinion, though this mad architect dreamed of Gothic, his imagination was essentially round—Romanesque and symmetrical. When he had conceived of one shape, his mind closed down upon his talent, and all he could do was to balance, in an utter void of inspiration, that shape with its mirror image. “He didn't know,” Sally said triumphantly, “that Gothic is the triumph of asymmetry! Maybe nobody knew.”

Another of the architect's troubles was that most of his raw material was wood, and another was that he built upon a steep, wooded hill in a small New Hampshire town among true Gothic structures made of pine and spruce that must have seemed to his eyes only the result of material and spiritual poverty. His wood was cypress, sent by railroad from Florida; his moldings and parquetry, wooden imbrications and crenelations were none of them of local manufacture. His mind was cluttered with the vocabulary of his age—with quoin and groin, pantile and pilaster, pediment and parquet, trefoil and quatrefoil, marquee, mullion and modil-lion.

When the house was finished he wrote at the bottom of the front elevation sheets:
With this house I
have cleaned my mind, so
to speak. All I know of grandeur, the glory of all the ages of my
art, has, as it were, been embodied here. This is the greatness of
our time, that we embrace all styles, all fashions, and make them
our own!

“But who's to say whether this madman's masterpiece is supremely ugly, or supremely beautiful?” Sally asked. “You're obviously in love with it. I live in this one, although I'll admit it isn't half as big or quite as nutty. One thing I'll say for yours, it never looks the same twice. When I walked more, I used to go up High Street and look at it once in a while. Sometimes in the rain it looked like a toad. Sometimes, when the sun hit it right, in the late afternoon, it looked like a city in Tibet. If you take it by levels, or strata, you might say, it can look like the Paris of Villon. But then you look again and you can almost hear a muezzin singing from one of those four ridiculous minarets. You could get lost in the damned pile, but you'll never get bored with it.”

And the house was beautifully made; where mansard met corbel, where corbel met Byzantine dome, there were no cracks or leaks. All of its cypress had been cured for five years in an open-walled shed, and periodically turned and restacked by Negroes before it had been sent north. Other wood had come from Burma and Africa and India; some was so dense it wouldn't float in water. Some had no perceptible grain at all, and was as smooth as yellow ivory.

“I always wanted to own that house,” he said. “It's sort of like owning the Taj Mahal.”

Sally bent backwards from her hips, to laugh, and tapped her cane on the floor. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” she laughed, her deep voice always strange, coming from such a little woman. He wondered where the room was, inside her, to cause such a deep sound. “The Taj Mahal, Sterling Castle, the Shrine of the Three Buddhas in Nikko, the Medici Palace, Mount Vernon, and any Gothic cathedral seen through the wrong end of a telescope! That's why I sold it to you—you've got the proper sense of self-glorification. I don't care if you do get tired of it, or find it too expensive to heat. You're too easily obsessed, anyway, and you'll probably spin off somewhere else before you're through.” She looked at him carefully. “I remember when you were a little boy. Your mother always said you had the shortest span of attention she'd ever seen, unless it was a sparrow.”

She stood beside him as he sat before the unrolled papers, her head no higher than his. She had always reminded him of one of the objects she had brought home from her travels—a cloisonné” vase, a jeweled hummingbird, or one of the little sake cups that whistled when wine was poured into it. She might have been incorporated whole into the decorative panel of a Chinese lacquer cabinet. Or perhaps she had even more in common with the small, gold-chased Samurai sword that hung over the dining-room archway.

“What does your wife think of it?” she asked, with some iron in her voice; she didn't approve of his marriage.

“She'll be back from the hospital in three days,” he said.

“With your son. What did you name him? Wood Spencer?” she said, raising her painted eyebrows. “You mean to say you haven't told her about the house?”

“Not yet.”

“Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!” Sally laughed. “Well, it's going to be a surprise for the likes of Henrietta Sleeper!”

He felt resentment—the kind he always felt in the face of real authority. “You don't really know her,” he said.

“Ah, well,” she said with no resignation whatsoever in her voice, “I suppose things are changing more rapidly than an old woman like me can follow. In my day a Whipple didn't marry a Sleeper from Switches Corners—unless he had to.”

“Had to?” he said. “It took me three years to get her to say yes.”

“Tsk, tsk,” she said. “And you the very hero of Leah? They tell me you can take a piece of wood and hit a round ball farther than anyone in three towns. Didn't that impress her?” “I don't know.”

In spite of her sarcasm he was pleased that she knew about his skill at sports. “I don't think that impresses her as much as I'd like it to.”

Sally raised her eyebrows again and pursed her crinkly little lips. Then, after a moment she said abruptly, “I'll have to meet this woman.”

And their interview was over. “Take the plans with you—you'll most likely find a few rooms in the plans you don't even know are there. There's a secret room I used to play in, but I won't tell you where it is; it's not in the plans. One of your children might find it someday.”

That interview had taken place nearly twenty years ago, and Sally De Oestris still hobbled about on her cane—sometimes two of them, now. She was a little more bent in the middle somewhere—she didn't seem to have any definable waist. Anyway, she got around a lot more easily than he did these days, and he was only forty-five. She must be very old. And he was never sure he'd found the secret room; he did find one that was fairly secret, but it might just have been a large closet that led off from another closet. There were so many different levels in the house it was almost impossible to discover extra space simply by measurement. By the time his fifty-foot tape traversed the width of the house it had been bent over too many short stairways, over balustrades and around too many angles. Maybe he hadn't found it at all.

Gradually, as if to prove to him that he was its captive, pain grew in his thigh, deep in the bone, like a hand turning a quiet and oily winch. He'd already had too many aspirin; he felt the beginnings of its aura, a kind of rigidity of the eyes, and knew that even one more would fill his head with tiny electric voices. The pain was, somehow, so personally administered that it seemed strange when it followed him precisely as he wheeled himself over to his desk. In the right-hand drawer was a bottle of P.M., which he took out and cradled in his lap for the return journey to the oak table.

“Henrietta!” he called. In the echo the little singing voices cried lightly and were silent again. “Henrietta!” God, he hated to be waited on. He wanted some ice in a glass, but the pain told him calmly that he couldn't make it to the kitchen and back. He took a swig of raw whiskey and followed its chemical burn to his stomach, feeling it hit his shocked pyloric valve. “Ah,” he said bitterly, “take that, take that crap,” as if his body were his enemy, in cahoots with the ponderous hand that punished him. His hip was burning now, lightly, on the surface of his skin only. Playful little flames stabbed and stroked him, then moved on. He took another swig, retched and tasted water brash—cheese-flavored, alcohol-flavored—a chemical taste that made him feel like an inanimate object; a drain, a cloacal pipe, a vessel full of used crankcase drippings. No vomiting or catharsis of any kind would help, so with a will he controlled his throat, and sat very quietly.

They were coming down the curving staircase. Clump, clump, clump-clump. Saying nothing, but primed, no doubt, with artificial things to say. He didn't turn around, but when they approached him in phalanx, from behind, he mumbled “Don't make a wave. Don't make a wave”—the line from the joke about the room in hell. Only David laughed, and he had a quick twinge of love and envy for the boy.

“I'd like some ice in a tall glass, so I can take my medicine,” he said. “A few ounces of old Post-Mortem.”

Kate went out to get it, while the others, he knew, maneuvered for those chairs, or places on davenport and settee, that were just barely oblique to his vision. The power of his glance dismayed them. Dismayed them. Where am
I
? he thought. Am I underneath this pile of goop, or has Harvey Watson Whipple
become
goop? You can't think of yourself as being handsome and lithe for forty years, and then suddenly have to think of yourself as something so disgusting your children can't bear to look at you. In your own mind you remain, even for five rotting years, a man, not a melting marshmallow. But only when you don't have to read their eyes.

“You want another log on the fire?” Wood said, and Harvey could hear disapproval in his son's voice. All right, he thought, wait till you get pinned like a bug…

“Yes,” he said. Wood strode out through the dining room.

“Don't make a wave,” David said, and laughed. Harvey wanted to look around at him and at least smile, but remembered the power of his glance. He stared into the embers of the fire and saw an animal's head quivering in mute agony—a rhinoceros's head. Then the lower jaw flaked off as an ember fell.

“Kate's going to make some popcorn,” Henrietta said. Wood came back with a piece of yellow birch and placed it carefully on the fire, obliterating the rest of the rhinoceros's head, and the flames quickly licked off the loose shreds of golden bark. Wood stood in front of the fire, watching to see if it were all right, then turned, meeting Harvey's eyes fleetingly, like a stranger, before he went back to his seat. Kate finally brought him a glass full of ice, and without meeting her eyes he poured some whiskey into it. She went back to the kitchen.

They were all silent for a while, and then Wood said, “It's still snowing hard.”

In a while they heard popcorn popping, a soft splutter from the kitchen, and the shuffle of the popcorn basket across the stove. Harvey turned to Wood, not knowing exactly what attitude to assume, so that what he said came out rather badly, he thought. “Would you like a drink? You're going in the Army, so I suppose you're old enough.”

Wood began to say no; then Harvey could see the gears working. “Yes, thanks,” Wood said formally; he would have a social drink, and went out to get himself a glass. They both knew that Henrietta would approve of this. Harvey knew that David was the one who might have enjoyed drinking with him, but David was only fifteen, so the pretense that he didn't drink would have to be kept up. He was quite sure David didn't drink very much, but he knew he'd tried it. David was so much like him he'd be the first to try anything. But maybe that was a stupid idea. David
looked
like him all right, but in the last three years he'd grown away from all his children—or they from him. Kate was a girl, of course, and pretty as hell too; she'd have her problems. And Horace was—God knew what. Glandular, maybe. Where had he come from? He was just the kind of big, awkward person Harvey had always run circles around. No, not so much awkward as full of thoughts that got in his way and made him crash into things. You couldn't think while you acted—you had to trust the cerebellum.

Wood returned with a small juice glass, and Harvey poured whiskey over the one ice cube Wood had put in it. Wood thanked him again, irritatingly, and sat down.