Whipple's Castle (69 page)

“I could meet Letty,” she said.

“That's right!” He laughed. “You're fine, Katie. Always look on the bright side. We'd have a great time.”

How she would love to live near David in Chicago. He and Letty would be there, secure in their love for each other, and she would go out to dinner with them sometimes, she and Letty like loving sisters. She would tell Letty about David as a little boy, about some of his foibles, about the secret paintings hidden behind his desk.

David had got up and gone to the window. “What's that?” he said, listening intently, frozen for a moment into silence. He didn't seem to breathe, yet he wasn't all that excited.

“What's what?” she said.

“Listen,” he said.

On the wind over Leah came a sound that was rare though familiar. It was the breathy moo that always dipped strangely into focus. Not the noon whistle—that had to be rejected first. It was now deep in the afternoon, and that windy, hoarse cow's roar meant a fire somewhere. It rose and fell as the wind took it—the warm wind of this August afternoon. Then she began to try to count the number of short moos and long moos.

“It's the fire whistle,” David said calmly, now that he had identified it. “I wonder where the fire is.” He came back to her and leaned his threadbare knee on the arm of the easy chair. “Anyway, Sis, take it easy. All this ‘pregnant' talk is probably hysterical. It depends on whether you're in a fertile period and all that, and who knows when that is? It only lasts for a day or two—I think, anyway—out of the whole month.” He picked something off her shoulder and held it up to the light. “You know we've got the same hair?”

“But it means so much to a girl, Davy. I didn't think it would hit me like that. And then Wood did what he did.”

“I know,” he said, suddenly growing nervous. “And you know what I did this morning? I took Tom out in the woods and murdered the poor old bastard.”

“Oh, Davy!”

“I couldn't even do that right,” he said. “Christ, he ran off with one ear hanging. The thing was, I thought I was doing him a favor, but then he found out I was trying to kill him. He looked right at me. I had to hunt him all morning, and he knew all the time who was coming after him. Uh!” He shuddered. “And you think you did something bad?”

“But you didn't
mean
to…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence.

“I'm scared about what I meant to do,” he said. “Certain parts of it I remember with a creepy sort of pleasure.”

“But he had to be put away, Davy!”

“Sure. And I elected myself executioner. I won't go into all the fraudulent reasons.” He shook himself. “Anyway, Katie, I think it's fading out. Everything fades out, you know? Don't you feel a little better now about last night?”

“Yes, I do.” She got up and tucked in her shirt, thinking how that must represent a kind of symbolic return to order—Wayne would say that. Like tucking in the mind.

The fire whistle continued its vaguely hysterical mooing. They both listened, trying to count the longs and shorts, but the wind blew some of the moos away off toward Vermont. She hoped no one was afraid because of that fire, wherever it was.

“Just talking to you about it helped an awful lot,” she said.

“I mean that about getting it taken care of, Katie, if anything happens. If you miss your period and all.”

She was so grateful that he should know how simple and human it was—she was—to have periods. It was natural, wasn't it? Everything was only natural. It was really no terrible thing she'd done with Gordon. She felt she must tell this to David.

“Nobody was hurt. I mean, he didn't hurt me. Maybe I made too much of the virgin bit.”

“That's right, Katie.”

“And I loved it, Davy. I was out of my mind, I loved it so much.” She had to tell him how marvelous it was. “There was just this little tick of pain, that's all, and then it was like I was all hollow and empty and he
filled
me.”

“Katie,” he said. He was upset, she could tell, and this gave her a funny feeling of power and pleasure. He stood there so trim and young in his raggedy old clothes. He had that authority she had always admired—a sort of authority over his limbs and all the parts of him. The scratches on his face and hands seemed very uncharacteristic, but these were peculiar times.

“It's Wood we have to worry about now,” he said. “Maybe it's too deep for us.”

“Yes. But thank you, Davy,” she said, and lost her breath. She kissed him on the cheek, turned and left him there in his room.

 

The wind belled Wood's curtains and let them fall back to the sides of the windows like the skirts of dancers. But they hadn't the reassuring rhythm of dancers, so they were always just a little startling, those flamboyant flourishes. The day had cleared and grown harshly bright in that dry wind. The checked pattern of the curtains had a slightly unpleasant, hallucinatory effect on Peggy; were those little checks upside down or not?

She would not ask Wood why he had done what he had done. She would be his nurse—efficient, observant, always present. Perhaps it really had been an accidental overdose, although Dr. Winston obviously didn't think so. She looked up and found Wood staring at her. He sat in his desk chair, keeping himself upright. At first he'd been tied upright with a bathrobe sash around his chest under his arms. The injection of picrotoxin was wearing off, and he seemed a little less jittery. He stared, and she looked straight back at that dark eye, looking for recognition. She found that he was looking at her and thinking about her, but he wasn't aware that her look asked for recognition. She was being studied by that consciousness that had tried to end itself, to end all its processes. Earlier, when he was still extremely groggy, Wood had mumbled, “Oh, God, I'm awake.”

It must have been a disappointment to him to wake into a world he never wanted to see again. He hadn't wanted to see daylight again. How could he want to leave, when all she wanted in the world was to be near him? There was no balance, no fairness in it. That he could want to end himself! Somehow she must get inside him and find out what was wrong. She must ask, and if that failed she would have to do something else. But she was still shy. She could not, even for the most urgent of reasons, get over that shyness. It was still like iron. When she made up declarations of love they appeared in her mind already mute and doomed. She could not even muster up a chiding anger; she had become his nurse, just his nurse.

His robe had fallen open across his chest, where the shining hairs were springy and alive against his skin. His bathrobe was maroon, warm as blood; his skin was too vivid against it, suggesting the parts of a wound. She began to shake, as if it had been she who had taken the injection of stimulant. He seemed to notice her trembling; a slight frown made lines on one side of his forehead. The string of his eye patch cut those lines off short, so the eyeless side remained clear as unmarked paper.

Though she was frightened and unhappy about him now, memory told her, as it always seemed to do no matter what troubles she had at the moment, that she had come a long way toward Wood. When she was ten, he was fifteen; they had been separated by those five years from any sort of equality. She had been the little girl he was kind and friendly toward. He had always been the leader, not really named as such, but the power behind a zone of protection that had surrounded her all of her life. Ever since she could remember, she had lived in a world where there was an ultimate authority who could be trusted. Yes, and how peculiar it was for her to claim poverty and stupid drunkenness as her childhood environment when Wood had always been nearby. He was her environment too, wasn't he? The Whipples were her environment long before she came to live with them, and always that dark, quiet boy was there, the one person in the world she knew would never betray her. She had lain in her damp bed up in the sugarhouse, listening to the dangerous, stupid conversation between her mother and father or between her mother and other men, frightened half out of her wits by their crashing and thrashing because she didn't know what kept them at it. If they could say such crude things to each other and seem to hate each other, why didn't they keep away from each other? She really hadn't known until Wood explained it to her. Well, not really explained everything, she supposed, but at least he told her there was a reason, that it wasn't all pure madness. That was when she was nine or ten. What had been Wood's explanation? He had wiped off her tears with a rather dirty handkerchief—she remembered that. They were sitting on one of the porches of the Whipple house—he had been sitting there, that is. It was raining but warm. All that day in school she had been nervous, on the edge of whimpering, because of what had happened the night before. On the way home she'd seen him sitting there reading and come running across the lawn. His kindness made her cry. She asked him what made her mother have to do what she hated so much. “Don't you know, Peggy?” he said. He was fourteen or fifteen, yet even so she trusted him not to giggle or to evade any question. This seemed more of a miracle every year. She had known then, of course, that what she spoke of was wrong, dirty, sinful, giggle-making. She knew that much, maybe more, because now she couldn't remember the exact words of his explanation. He had made it something she could live with, though. What had he said? That there was a strong attraction between male and female. “Strong attraction”—she remembered that clearly. She'd already known that. But then he went on to say that even though her mother sounded as though she didn't like it, she did like it, very much; that it was only a kind of game to say the words that meant the opposite of what you felt. Good God! she thought now, the boy had actually said that to herl

It had to do with her shyness now—not just that incident, but all the times he had kept the world meaningful. He still did. If only she could get angry with him, or even make fun of him! Then she might get her tongue back. But he was invulnerable. He was too important.

She was getting so jittery herself she couldn't even think straight. There he sat. There he was, yet right in this room last night he had almost gone out of himself. She must keep him here—a crazy vision of herself holding him down, like a wrestler. She could get her arms around his waist and hold him down on the bed so he couldn't do anything. She could wrap her legs around him so he couldn't even move; she would hold him quiet and soft until her warmth melted into him and he was calm.

A knock on the door startled her so much the wind went out of her chest. It was Dr. Winston back again. As he came in he gave her a quizzical, smiling little look, half secretive. “How's your patient?” he said, putting his bag on the chair she'd been sitting in.

“I think he's better.”

“You'd know if he was better or not,” Dr. Winston said. “In any case, it's not the physical part I'm interested in now. The danger of the hypostatic pneumonia is over, to my thinking. He's young. Even if he is a little flabby from sitting on his butt all the time, he's pretty strong.” While he spoke he handled Wood—peered with the help of a little flashlight into his eye, then reached down into his bathrobe to thump his chest and squeeze his stomach. He didn't speak directly to Wood, or even ask him to do anything. “Will he talk to you?” he asked.

“I haven't asked him to,” Peggy said.

“Well, I'll do some straight talking. Are you listening, Wood?”

Wood nodded.

“Are you going to try this again? Because if you do it's going to be a little messy for me. Ordinarily I'd have to refer you to the psychiatrist at the clinic, and this business would be on your record. But there's something peculiar about you and all the other people around here. I've been around a long time, and I can smell it. This young lady here, for instance. She doesn't want you to go off and leave us, so I don't expect you will. I don't think you'd want to do that to your mother and father. There's too strong a current running around in this house. And I think I know you. I've known you for a long time, off and on all your life, and I know your war record. I don't know the details of whatever sort of hell you found yourself in last night. It must have been god-awful. But you're not the type to hurt other people that much, now that you can think about it. You're going to have to live with whatever it is. What I mean to say is you've got a duty toward the people who love you and want you alive. You're not free to commit suicide.”

Dr. Winston shut his thin lips and nodded once, as if to say “There.”

Wood glanced at him and then away. “All right,” he said wearily.

“All right,” Dr. Winston said. He packed his bag and strode out on his long legs. As he went through the door he instinctively ducked his head, though the door was much taller than he was. Before he shut the door he turned around with a look of exasperation, as though Wood's short answer had cut him off.

“Look!” he said. “As far as I'm concerned there's nothing morally wrong with suicide. You understand that? In the proper circumstances, who can say? And you know as well as I do that ‘duty' is a highly abused term, to say the least. I just want you to know I'm aware of that.”

“Yes,” Wood said, nodding his head.

“All right.” Dr. Winston shut the door.

Peggy turned back to Wood, to find him staring at her again. What was he seeing? She looked away. She wanted him to understand how much she loved him; he must see that. But maybe he didn't want that love all over him, piled on like chocolate sauce over a sundae. Maybe he wanted Lois Potter. Jealousy pierced her so sharply she almost said “Ow.”

“What are you looking at?” she said. Her words slowly went into his head; she could almost see them disappearing into his mind, and she waited, shivering, to see what happened.