Whipple's Castle (60 page)

When she came back with the tray they hesitated again, and she had the feeling they had been talking about her. Wood sat back with his legs stretched out toward the fire. His shirt was open at the neck, a blue shirt she remembered from the time before he went into the Army. His chin was down, and he stared into the fire; the eye patch was so immediately noticeable it seemed to hide both eyes. She wanted to take it off. She wouldn't mind what was underneath. There could be nothing about Wood that had to be kept from her sight or touch. That false leg, even inside the pants leg, looked too round, and the shoe didn't cover a real, tender foot. That was part of a statue, not part of Wood.

She poured him a mug of tea, and let him add rum from the bottle according to Sally's prescription. Then she did sit on the rug near him, as she had imagined herself sitting, looking up at Wood, the presence of him. She was not unhappy that Sally was there, because she would not have to think of things to say. He needed an ashtray, so she rose quickly, conscious of the added strength his presence somehow gave to her legs.

“Look,” Sally said, “I'm about to step out any day now. When I wake up in the morning I'm always just a little surprised.”

“So that makes you an expert on chills?” Wood said.

Sally grinned and shook her head. “Well, as chills go, that one's pretty cold, wouldn't you say? You're so young I doubt if you've really felt that one. I don't like to pull rank on you, Captain, but I've been through a long campaign myself.”

“Don't talk about dying,” Peggy said.

“All right, dear,” Sally said. “That suits me fine. How about getting us some sherry? For you and me, and we won't think about that subject. Sometimes I wish my brain had gone soft along with my skin and bones. Most of my generation's gone, and the only ones left spend most of their time in kiddyland. Through the looking glass.” As Peggy went to the sideboard for the sherry, Sally went on, intensely now, trying to convince Wood. “Don't think about such things—whatever they are! You've got most of your body left, and it's young! Think with your blood. You're a young man. Let your skin think for you!”

“I'm afraid of my skin's conclusions,” Wood said.

“Don't be facetious. Have you got some wounds you haven't told us about?”

“What sort of wounds?” Wood said, smiling.

“You're still being facetious, young man. I mean is there any physical reason why you can't act like a young man? Is there any physical reason for your
Weltschmerz?”

Peggy saw Wood's surprise at the word. “That sounds German,” he said. “What's it mean?”

“World sadness,” Peggy said quickly.

“World sadness,” Wood said, looking straight at her, his dark eye bright. He turned to Sally. “See how ignorant I am? You mean I'm sad about the world? No, wait, Sally. I hasten to assure you that you know about all the wounds I've got. Okay?”

“There's nothing progressive about any of them? Nothing with a bad prognosis?”

“Scout's honor and all that.”

“You don't know how much we've all been worrying. Peggy's talked with me about it before. And you don't know how much your mother worries. Whenever she looks at you something gruesome happens to her face—it looks like she's pressed up against a screen. Not pleasant to see.” She was still, waiting for his answer with her sherry glass poised at her lips as though she could not sip until he answered.

“I'm sorry,” Wood said.

“Because you remind me of someone, an old friend who had inoperable cancer and never told anyone about it. He seemed to find all our enthusiasms mildly amusing.”

Peggy had blushed when Sally mentioned her worrying about Wood, but neither of them had noticed. Now, with this casual mention of cancer and death, her heart fluttered, fearing for him.

“
Weltschmerz,
was it?” Wood said, musing.
“Weltschmerz,
huh? But I don't want to cause any worry. Maybe I ought to go away from Leah again.”

“No!” Peggy said. Her outburst embarrassed her. They both looked at her seriously. “I don't think that would do at all!” she said. She saw Wood immobilized in a strange city, in a room among thousands of anonymous rooms, sitting with his eye glazed, as she had found him in his car. They waited for her to continue. “I think you should stay with us. With the ones that love you.”

“Do you love him, Peggy?” Sally said.

“Of course! We all do!” Then she thought, how was this a lie? She did not love Wood “of course” and with them all in any collective way. She loved him more than anything, more than the whole world, and she had loved him since her memory began. “I want to stay with you and try to help you,” she said, forgetting to be embarrassed. No, it was as a doctor or a nurse that she could say these things. “You said you weren't all right and I know it. I saw you there in your car, and I've seen you when you were so unhappy!”

“Yes,” he said, staring at her in a way that was completely unself-conscious, the one eye bright, the other that patch of darkness, blankness, like night and day. “I said you were strong,” Wood said. He still stared at her. “You've been good for us all your life.”

Sally nodded. “That's true.”

But what did that mean? If they hadn't been talking about her, she felt she might have understood. She was silent, confused. She took a sip of her wine and could not look back up at them. She could feel Wood's attention, as strong as a touch. There were his shoes, one for a real foot, one not, and his cuffless Army trousers. She felt as though she bowed before him, perhaps gracefully, showing the part in her hair and her meek shoulders. I am thine to do with as you wish. As thee wish? But he must do something, or she would have to do it. She would follow him, hide in the back seat of his car, peer at him through windows and the cracks of doors. When he wasn't looking she would slip under his skin. Just sitting here at his feet she was so happy.

 

Wood's night dreams were worse than his daydreams; the horror was more intense and less justified by where he was and what he saw. He merely felt. He dreamed of himself with two legs and two eyes, never mutilated; but in his night dreams the horror was like air or water, and covered every neutral object. When he dreamed of sailing, horror slid from the white sails. The green sea hissed, the clouds grew into anvils.

Awake, the names of raids and massacres tolled in his mind. Every day this glut of murder presented itself to him, gaunt faces staring at him or at the sky. Their pain rose like a column of heat higher than the sun, and it was his flesh swooning, exulting in that force. Clearer visions inserted themselves as counterpoint: the kamikaze comes in low, comes on forever though hit again and again. Lines, loops, banks of steel flee out, hose out to bracket, strafe, miss, return. It is an ancient biplane as primitive to this time of war as a Model T, a construction of fabric and strut with a bomb strapped to its fuselage. The fire meets and holes it time and again, but slowly and intently it comes on. It is a bomb, the pilot a boy who has become his bomb. Even the great warships seem evanescent before this will. The lover of death comes to his love forever.

Or he dreamed, awake, of his own eye discarded like a damaged grape. They must have had places to put things like that—parts, bones, meat. Did they take them to the fantail of the
Maria
and send them to the sharks and crabs? He saw through that warped, discarded lens dimly, as through a pinhole, a glimmer revolving slowly as it descended through the fathoms. Fish drifted by, silver and black. When would the sudden pluck turn out that tiny light? On the bottom awaited the crab's slower embrace. And the leg, the foot; when the shark's jaws crushed the ankle, rolling the bones together, he felt that ghost pain and the relief, the dissolving into union with the cold jaws.

But his night dreams, real dreams, began in peace and beauty, the fields waving amber, and a brave row of poplars, skies warm with fleece upon the blue. Then a word, a glance from some sourceless eye, and all turned to writhing. The clouds coiled in spasms, and the slimness of the poplars was that their arms were cruelly tied. Or the clear blue water of a lake turned briny and green before his eyes, and the smeared surface hid the secret of his horror yet gave it all away. Honor was the meaning of that world and yet whatever forces moved there were so stupid and obvious that he had to feel contempt. Contempt and horror—were these parts of an equation? Perhaps he hadn't the will to try to solve it. Perhaps he knew the solution already, and it was not cure but destruction.

Wayne looked different after his year in New York. He seemed taller, older, sallower, and the dots of his shaved whiskers formed darker islands along his jaws. He seemed less pure, and the white streak in his hair, though she knew it was a thing he was born with, looked cosmetic, even garish—that word that had once been his favorite deprecation.

He listened even less than before. When Kate spoke, even in response to a question, a nervous, almost impatient look came over his face. Yet he wanted her company, and he liked to have her stop by at the end of the day when the clerks were totaling up the cash register. Then, usually, they would go to Trask's for coffee. She began to feel slightly official, Wayne's designated audience, object, and thus replaceable, or somehow interchangeable. But maybe that haunted most women.

One warm Sunday they sat on the grass of the square. Wayne was wearing a horrible light blue suit, white socks with a blue clock, and a gun-metal necktie with an orange ship's wheel embroidered on it. He didn't care at all about clothes, but the effect he gave was of a hick who did care. She experienced her usual guilt for making this judgment, but of course a little guilt couldn't alter it. In a way it was his arrogance that caused him to look so awkwardly formal on a warm summer day.

“Kate?” he said.

“Mmm,” she answered.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I am grown-up.”

“What are your aspirations?”

She felt like saying something flippant, but then she thought: How cold we all are! “Let me think,” she said. What did she want? She wanted to deserve to be loved, for a start. But everyone who passed by them, on the walks and even in cars, gave a sneaky lie to this aspiration. They all looked at her too quickly, as though she hurt their eyes. Maybe she should give up. Suddenly she wanted to be talking to David. She wanted all this half-known business and its tensions gone, and to be with David, whose square hands and rugged muscles were so much the male counterparts of her own. She wished they were both in white shirts and faded dungarees, barefooted, walking along a sunlit beach. She could feel the warm clean sand between their toes.

“How to foresee a life,” Wayne said. “I want to be a poet, and I've never, as far as I can remember, wanted to be anything else. There was a nasty rumor, projected by my mother, that I wanted to be an osteopath. Where that idea came from I'll never know.”

He was settling in for a long discussion of his aspirations, and suddenly Kate jumped up. “Let's go out to the lake and see David,” she said. “Come on!”

“What?” he said, making a face. In one lens of his glasses she discovered a fingerprint. How could he look through that fingerprint and not be bothered by it?

Oh, she knew she was a flibbertigibbet; she'd never really amount to anything, and all she'd ever notice would be superficial things. Wayne's white socks with that awful clock made of blue triangles—it was such a pretentious piece of artwork creeping up over his bony ankle. How could he not see that? And why did he want a ship's steering wheel on his necktie? Why? He cared nothing about boats. He couldn't even swim. Maybe his mother or an aunt had given him that tie. “Where did you get that tie?” she said.

“What?” He was in the process of untangling his gangly legs, and he stopped, still sitting, to look up at her.

“Did your mother give it to you?”

“This tie?” He looked down at it. “No, I bought it last week.”

“Why? Why that one?”

“Because I needed a tie to wear to work.”

“But why a ship's wheel?”

“Ship's wheel?” He picked up his tie and looked at it. “Well, so that's what it is,” he said, mildly interested. “I thought of symmetry, the wheel of existence, Yin and Yang—you know. But it's a nautical thing, is it? Very interesting.”

“It's horrible!” she said.

“Really? Why?”

But if she told him why, she would have to tell him about all of his clothes—his suit, his socks, his shirt with the four-inch collar points—and he couldn't afford to get new clothes. “I can't understand how somebody with your sensitivity about other things—like
The Quill,
for instance—can be so blind about how you look.”

“I never considered myself an esthetic object,” he said.

“But don't you care how you look?”

“I put in a certain amount of time on it. Like shaving, or brushing my teeth. It's a total bore, but I don't want to get so ragged I attract attention. That's an even bigger waste of time.”

She supposed he was right. He dressed the way shoe clerks in Leah dressed. Her superficiality was clear. But why shouldn't he have
some
pride in how he looked? Didn't he think he was a good animal? Maybe he thought of himself as being all mind, and the rest didn't matter. In that case part of what she wanted to be to him didn't matter, either. That sounded stupid, silly; it was confusing, nervous-making. What she knew was that she couldn't talk to Wayne about it.

“Come on!” she said, helping him to his feet His hand was limp and warm. She had the car for the afternoon, and she pulled him across the grass toward the street. Before they could cross they heard the rattle of drums, and everybody stopped to locate that strange holiday sound. At the intersection by the Masonic block a town policeman had stopped cross traffic. Beyond him, bobbing in lines, were what looked like a company of white mushrooms. It was the helmets of the Legion Drum and Bugle Corps. Though Kate had seen them march before, and knew how precise they were in their maneuvers, seen down the files this way each man's helmet bobbed according to his own way of walking.