Whipple's Castle (62 page)

Late in the summer the Whipples gathered in the great hall. There was Wood, tall and pale, his dark hair grown too long, leaning against the mantel with a slight angle to his hips that gave away his false leg. He wore a brown tweed suit for this semi-formal occasion, the celebration of his twenty-fourth birthday. The black eye patch was a shadow they had all grown used to, and his eye moved deep in the other socket, calmly surveying them all, or so they thought.

Peggy Mudd crossed the room in their sight, her faille dress rustling against her legs, hiding from them the trembling her decision had caused her, and kissed Wood upon the mouth. His hands came slowly to her waist, and he smiled. To her he seemed sadly pleased, an emotion that barred her from him as with iron. “Happy birthday,” she said. When he perceived her disappointment his face grew thoughtful and remote.

From across the room, a distance great enough to place him in a different and cooler light, David began to speak in mock-stentorian tones: “Ladies, gentlemen, squires, blood cousins, dames of quality…” He bowed toward Sally De Oestris who perched, blue and silver, upon her straight throne. “We have been summoned to celebrate the birthday of our brother Wood, an occasion of high rejoicing in this kingdom.”

“Oyez oyez!” cried Kate from above.

David read from a paper held before him in both hands: “‘Brother, son, cousin, in all ways dutiful, valorous and fair, hero wounded in the wars against the Black Evils, Cruelty and Pride, all hail!'” David nodded to Kate, who stood upon the landing in the solemn ecclesiastical glow of the stained glass. She began to recite:

 

“
First in his five wits he faultless was found;
In his five fingers the man never failed…
The fifth five the hero made use of,
I
find,
More than all were his Uberalness, love of his fellows,
His courtesy, chasteness, unchangeable ever,
And pity, all further traits passing. These five
In this hero more surely were set…
”

 

Her voice broke, and she turned, suddenly awkward, toward David. “I'm sorry, Davy! I can't finish!”

Everyone looked away from Kate, and then toward Wood, who frowned unhappily. The most powerful reasons they could think of for his unhappiness were not powerful enough.

“All right,” David said, “we'll shorten the ceremony somewhat.” He nodded to Peggy, who went to the old harmonium and took her seat upon its oak bench. The little chapel's round stained-glass window glowed dark blue and amber, and suddenly the hall's antique details—the false balcony, the various panels, sills and ornately carved and cabineted wood—all seemed to grow into deeper relief. As Peggy worked the wheezy pedals and began to play a thin and unfamiliar melody, all the pretentious ornamentations of the great hall gained authority. The song she played was ancient, bitter-sweet, as though composed for instruments with names like psaltery or dulcimer.

 

“
On earth, or far or near,
It seemed as if he ought
To be a prince
sans
peer
In fields where fierce men ought.

“
Of us this hero now
Will noble manners teach;
Who hear him will learn how
To utter loving speech.”

 

Wood didn't hear the words, but the sweet voice pierced him. It did not mean what his dreams meant, yet its clarity changed the world as forcefully as the dark shutter of his dreams. The soft wind of her throat, her slender hollow throat shaped by the delicate cords and muscles she so gracefully commanded. When she glanced at him he lost his breath. She was only human, yet she carved that music out of the air—no, took the ordinary air and made this lovely order. In its returns and predictions the melody bound him, but it was not his hands tied, no one's body cruelly tied. As in a dream he felt the presence of a force he could not understand or even attempt to define. It was not to murder; of course not, on the face of it. Peggy—Margaret. Margaret. She glanced at him again and smiled. It was not like a little while ago when she kissed him and waited for the response he knew ought to be given, that he could not then give.

A
Wandervoge!,
Sally had called her long ago, the Christmas she had come to live with them. That little bird had grown and changed. A German word again, from the language that meant to him cool rational insanity, or cool sane irrationality, whose harsh clean sounds stretched across his mind like steel cords. The language of the intellect.

 

“
Of us this hero now
Will noble manners teach;
Who hear him will learn how
To
utter loving speech.”

 

As Peggy sang the verse again he understood the words, and they all took note of his wry smile. They sang him happy birthday, and Henrietta brought in a chocolate cake with twenty-four candles burning and smoking like a small bonfire in her hands. Her face was a warm moon above the fires, and her thick lenses cast brighter ovals upon her eyelids. They noticed how her hair was turning gray. The children were grown up, now. Would this be the last summer all of them would spend in Leah?

Horace felt them all going away, all but him. Wood was somehow gone already. Wood was frightened; he felt it. He knew all the symptoms. Wood took no joy in this birthday party. Kate had gone to the Blue Moon and other places with Gordon Ward, and David instead of Wood saw Susie Davis. Were they all mad? David! All this mouthing of smooth words. David had tried to teach him how to drive, but everything he said was cruel and apprehensive.
The clutch, the clutch!
he said, nervous and cold, and the truck bucked and stalled, bucked and stalled as though each wheel were as independent as the leg of a wild horse. He hated the truck. He didn't want to become its brain, its intelligence. David was so smooth and skillful with it.

Peggy kissed Wood; she was grown-up and had left herself behind—how was that? She wanted Wood to be grown-up with her. She was after something, out of herself, too old to be Peggy any more. Susie said she loved him, but she went out with—David! Look at him, so smooth and sure of himself. He hadn't died of fear a thousand times; he did not deserve! He would never marry her and make her happy. All he wanted was that part of her down there. The brown room darkened. She liked it or she wouldn't let him do it to her. But how could she give herself away to such cheap lust? He had followed them. He knew. Hiding in the pines, waiting for them to return to the cabin, his bike behind the woodpile at midnight. Through the screen he heard them thrashing, and cried inside himself, cold and silent. So cheap and so dangerous! David caused her loose laughter, said things that made her laugh. That clever brother. They were all gone away now, all of them, driven by their new desires, joining or being pursued by evil. Kate trying to be all smooth and confident with Gordon Ward, laughing with him, not caring who he was or what he had done. What had made them turn? He looked at their faces that were firmed by these alien certainties. They knew what they wanted, now, and that knowing must be a terrible forgetfulness.

Wood blew out all the candles in one breath, and they gave a cheer.

Harvey didn't want to look at Wood, at his son. Dammit, things began to go fairly well for a change and it was always somebody else's troubles that weighed you down like a wet blanket. He thought of his money. He tried to think of his money—more money than any of them suspected, by God! Even Hanky had no idea. Those lovely zeroes. Zero, zero, zero, zero! In fact, one, five, zero, zero, zero, zero—and that didn't count real property. Had he taken chances!

He must try again to get Wood interested in the stock market. Wood had the disability check each month, for a good, even sort of ballast, and he had quite a bit in War Bonds. War Bonds, for Christ's sake! What a terrible waste of capital! Somehow he had to get to Wood and convince him. What a time they'd have together, the New York
Times
between them. Right here at this table, Wood's intelligence and his, father and son, saying to each other with calm equality those words they would both instantly understand.

He looked at his son's face—part face.
Gueules casstes—
what was that memory? No, what would an eye missing be called? No more binocular vision there, although what about Wiley Post? Famous flyer, but then he did crash. When was that? Will Rogers was with him. Stop procrastinating and look at your son. He looked.

Screw that noble sadness. Hadn't it been going on for too long a time?

He accepted a piece of cake. “Thank you!” he said, and turned toward Wood. “Many happy returns, as they say!”

“Thanks,” Wood said.

Oh, Jesus, how was he going to break through? All he could do was talk, talk, talk against that impeccable, infuriating calm.

Henrietta, having cut the cake, sat back in the straight chair she rather resentfully knew to be hers, or to be generally considered hers. She had seen the others avoid it. She was not ready to consider herself an institution, like Sally, who always sat in a particular chair, just so, so she could see everybody without moving her stiffened and compressed little spine. No, she was not ready to exist as some sort of predictable adjunct to this family. She loved them—why else would she wait on them, and cry bitter tears over their wounds—but she was herself; she was hard. The whole town didn't like her sudden opinions. She was never a part of its social structure at all, and because she didn't care, they didn't like her one bit. It had been a long, long time since Harvey, for business reasons, had hinted that she might give the ladies of the town, their charities, their study groups, their asinine fashion shows, a little of her time. She could never smile at stupidity, she could never flatter. She was considered a dangerous radical.

This made her smile, as she did not when their wit descended (or ascended?) to imitations of Eleanor Roosevelt (Rosenfeld). “Maay Daay,” they would half snarl, and seeing her, stop, frozen by an audience that ruined their joke unforgivably. “Did you hear? Harry Truman died on the way to Eleanor's funeral!” Somehow she heard them all—across aisles, through walls, over hedges.

And they all knew her story, from whence she came to this castle. She thought of the time she'd flown all the way across the country to see Wood, shortly after the war, when she sat enclosed in the airplane among all those people who had been made by their adventure important and dramatic. She'd looked down to see the lights of whole cities glimmering on the earth below. What was Henrietta Sleeper doing in that Olympian company? After all these years away from Switches Corners, that ghost place in the woods that was even then doomed, gray birch in the cellar holes, she asked herself that self-acknowledging question. Yes, she was herself still, a visitor to these half-strangers. When I die, she thought, hearing the words, I will die like a cat; I will go off by myself to a private place. She spoke to herself, for no one else's ear: I will die as I once lived—alone—not because I have to but because I want to. Because I want to.

But in the kitchen Tom the cat, as if to refute her simile, lay emaciated in his washtub, on the soiled burlap, obviously dying. David was going to take him to the vet's and have him put to sleep. He was an old cat, and the magic had gone out of him. He had cancer in several places—in his belly, in his bowels—and he suffered, not always in silence. Last night they had heard his miniature roar, as though agony were another tomcat he warned away.

She listened above the murmur of their talk. A shout of Sally's laughter made Wood smile. Tom was quiet, as far as she could tell. He often slept these days with his head up; he couldn't find a way to the flexible and languorous cat ease that once let him dream, even while draped over the splintery stove wood. Now there was no more stove wood, and the kitchen had grown cold and white. In the cellar the oil burner rumbled at its own urgings. No one went down there for weeks at a time.

Wood tried on his new sweater, and smoked his new pipe. Sally had given him a Japanese print, of carpenters ripsawing a huge beam, with Fuji in the distance.

“It's work,” he said. “It's beautiful work. The sawing.” He seemed to dream himself into the landscape. They were all quiet while he looked at it. He turned to them with an almost embarrassed smile. “It's beautiful, Sally.”

“Glad you like it,” Sally said.

“My God!” Kate said to David. “How can you drink beer and eat chocolate cake at the same time?”

“Actually, I do them separately,” David said. Kate punched him affectionately on the arm as she went by him, taking her fork and plate to the kitchen.

Horace wasn't having any cake. He wasn't hungry, he said. Henrietta looked at him more closely than she had for some time. She had been so preoccupied with Wood's melancholy she hadn't had much time to worry about Horace. He was still Horace, always that tangle in the back of her mind. Poor Horace, all in snarls, pulling against himself like a jammed knot. He wouldn't even consider going to college. She had talked Harvey into keeping the one tenement, against what he called his better judgment, so Horace would have that job, at least. As long as Susie Davis lived there, Horace would take care of it. She wondered about that relationship, always skirting the idea, somehow.

Horace's crude face contained much force. He ground his teeth, and the bristles glinted along his jaw. He was a man now, wasn't he? And suddenly she let the idea come plain in her mind. Did that woman take her child in…what? There must be a word that contained the drama and fear she either felt, or felt that she must feel. All right, did she, Susie Davis, copulate with Horace? Had she taught the boy what to do and taken him…again, where? What? What about it? Susie was considered by the town to be a loose woman. There was the possibility of disease, or of her becoming pregnant. What a mess! But then, hadn't she been good for Horace? She had helped him over certain childish fears. Miraculously, he no longer seemed afraid of the dark. That woman. But weren't they both women, Susie and herself? Was it jealousy? Whose job was it to help the child? Why hadn't she ever considered going to see Susie, even perhaps to thank her for what she'd done? Yes, she should do that. Of course she should. She shuddered. She could see two women facing each other; from one had come this child, labor and blood and kaput, the flesh distended, the shaved pubes, the cord, the wet placenta—all the gross intimacy of the begun life. That could not be forgotten, ever, no matter how big and old the child became. The other knowledge was how that child groaned upon the other woman, flesh of her flesh ascending toward the darkness of that other womb.