Whipple's Castle (7 page)

“So you paid the money back,” Harvey heard his voice say; again he'd trapped himself into some kind of act, dammit. He leaned back against the dull, not painful now so much as solid, or congealed, feeling in his hip and thigh, and saw the darkened plaster dome of the ceiling above the heavy paneling. His castle hall: the upper paneling stood out a foot away from the wall to imitate a balcony, and this effect always gave him the creepy feeling that someone, perhaps in hauberk and casque, might be standing there looking down at him.

“Yes,” Wood said, disapproving.

“You don't make that much, do you?” Wood had a job at Milledge & Cunningham, sweeping up after the cutters, and repairing things.

“I make thirty-two eighty a week,” Wood said, “with double time on Saturdays.”

“That's pretty good money, by God.”

“Al Coutermarsh said I wasn't supposed to tell anybody down there how much I got. I get more than some of the girls on the sewing machines.”

“I'll pay the money back!” Horace half shouted, half squeaked in his ragged, changing voice. It sounded like a yodel. They were all silent for a moment after this.

“Well, what did you do with the money you took?” Harvey asked, trying to be reasonably calm.

“I threw it away.”

“Why?”

Horace didn't answer.

“Why in hell did you throw it away?” Harvey felt himself changing, going out of himself. He became in his own mind the monster their irrationality caused him to be. “Look,” he said, turning his head like a turret to aim his eyes at Horace, “money isn't guilty. It isn't dirty. It isn't anything but the symbolic value of what it can buy. It doesn't breathe, think, eat, sleep or fart. Do you understand that?”

Horace didn't answer.

“Well, where did you throw it?”

“In the woods.”

“Oh, great! Holy Jesus, that's great! I still can't figure out why you robbed the lockers in the first place, and now you throw twenty-five bucks away in the woods! And where in hell do you think you're going to get twenty-five bucks to pay it back?”

“I'll get a job pretty soon,” Horace said in a low voice.

“Sure! In a glass factory, I suppose.”

“Harvey,” Henrietta said.

“Well, for God's sake, what the hell am I supposed to say? Here I am, a goddam cripple, trying to make enough goddam money so I can support this goddam family, and they're busy as squirrels, throwing it away in the woods!”

Kate came in with a big bowl of popcorn and several smaller bowls. “Here,” she said. “Fill your own. It's salted, buttered, and somewhat burned on the bottom. When are we going to get a decent stove?”

“You see what I mean? Three able-bodied boys and we can't even ran a woodstove! First we had to have a refrigerator, because the ice was too heavy, or too cold or something, and
now
…
” It was as though he had stopped listening to his own voice, or he had moved away, out of himself—perhaps to the fake balcony above, where he looked down at the fat white king jawing, jawing, saying what was nasty and always expected. How could he always believe that one more phrase, one more sentence, might turn his argument sound, triumph over his tone of voice by some logical point that always hovered just out of the reach of his mind? One more sentence, one more point, could totally vindicate him, but never quite did.

At last the voice that was not really his own subsided, and Wood was speaking.

“They were getting the money together so they could buy black-market gas coupons and liquor, and they were going to take her up to Donald Ramsey's father's camp, up on Back Lake, for a weekend. Seven of them. It was all over town.”

“She was nice to me!” Horace shouted.

“She's too goddam nice to all the boys,” Harvey said.

“It's just something you've heard,” Henrietta said sternly. “You don't know.”

“Well, I'm in no position to find out—dammit,” Harvey said, and David chuckled.

“What's so funny?” Wood said to David. “Do you think it's funny to treat some poor girl that way?”

‘That wasn't what I was laughing about,” David said. “I kind of like Susie, myself…”

“Well, you stay away from her,” Henrietta said, and David laughed.

“Listen,” David said. “I'm not laughing at poor Susie Davis. She's a very kind person and all that. Next time I laugh, please believe that I'm not laughing at Susie. All right?”

“Don't be facetious,” Wood said.

David turned, obviously trying to suppress more laughter, to Horace. He really seemed to be trying to be serious. “Look, Hoss, I mean it. I don't blame you a bit. I just can't help it!”

“I presume,” Kate said, “that the reason I don't understand any of this is because I'm a lady.”

“You're all sick,” Wood said disgustedly.

Harvey heard the words of these strangers who had once been his children. He had to face it: he was jealous of them all, and not just because they could all run and walk. He understood them and they didn't care enough to know it. Or perhaps it was just more convenient for them to live with a monster than with a real person.

They ate their popcorn and watched the fire ember down. Harvey was silent, and deep inside his insulting body was a small ember of resentment, because he knew they all thought he was doing quite well by them this evening (for him). No really major fits at all—just one minor sort of skirmish. Maybe old Crip was mellowing a bit, eh? For a second he wanted to grab the huge brass and steel poker out of its holder and slam it beautifully down across the oak table. That would wake them up a little! But he'd have to back up, turn, wheel himself to the fire, and he'd probably fall flat on his face, as he had once before. Of course that time they'd been really terrified to see his smashed, fat, sluglike body writhing horribly all over the hearth. There was a certain satisfaction in that memory. That had been a fit to remember. A fit of lasting interest, you might say.

But he did nothing. He tried a few pieces of popcorn, and the texture of it—yielding, cottony yet crisp—the taste of the salted butter, was painfully nostalgic of a time of hopefulness. Popcorn. The very name of the stuff was wrong for what he was now—as anachronistic as a continuing fondness for some frivolous food like Cracker Jack.

Outside the curved panes of the high bay window, the snow still fell, a bounteous, lovely, determined, unending fall. All his life he had loved the snow. He'd even liked to shovel it, to feel his shovel cut the cold, precise silence of it. He envied his sons the icy morning air, blue, white, cold enough to sear the nostrils, and the mist of crystals sifting off at each stroke of the light wooden shovels. And then in the afternoon maybe to take their langlauf skis up to the town reservoir, up a half-mile through the woods in back of the house, and ski down through the trees in snow so light and deep they'd never see their skis, just feel them flex through graceful, leaning turns.

Soon they could all make their excuses and go up to their rooms. Then poor Horace would have to go alone into his, where he was afraid of the dark. Horace was the only one who might have chosen to stay here in the monster's presence. Better the known than the unknown, perhaps. Perhaps. It all depended upon the known, however, and nobody knew this better than Harvey Watson Whipple.

 

Henrietta finished in the bathroom first, and lay on her back, staring up toward the ceiling. This was the front parlor, where they had to sleep now. A bathroom had been installed in the closet underneath the first landing of the stairs, and a window had been boarded and plastered over so there would be room for the head of the bed.

Was the ceiling there at all? Sometimes it was a cloud vaguely seen in the night sky, or a screen with all possible depths upon which she could project whatever had happened to her, or what might happen.

Her grandfather had an ax he had paid ten dollars for—a great deal of money in those days—and what had made the ax so expensive, she always remembered, and would always wonder why, was that it was made of
soft
steel. Why would anyone want steel to be soft? Soft steel. All her life, whenever she thought of steel, or even sometimes of trees, this little question hummed close to her mind and hummed away unanswered, and she knew she would never really look for the real answer.
Soft steel.
Once she had a dream in which the ax, smooth as pearl, double-bitted, with one edge thin and sharp for cutting, the other thick for splitting—the ax slid not to cut, not to split, for her flesh had opened with sinful joy before the sliding blade. She knew the significance of the dream—that was obvious enough—but there were so many other dreams she had forgotten completely, and this one had been dreamed more than twenty-five years ago. There must be more to it, something she couldn't understand. And perhaps she added to it, in her memories, for it seemed there had been special words she'd either dreamed or made up, new words to describe what parts of her flesh were so wonderfully affected.
Lilipits.
Sloppy down there between her
filipupets,
sliding like a bone's end in its round socket, in thin oil that came from nowhere, and yet was there. That was all, just the ax sliding beautifully, dangerously, into its welcome.

She thought often, too, why she liked sex so much when she had seen so much of it as a girl, when it was so smelly and ugly she had almost desperately divided her daydreams into categories, and left sex blank—though she had left a space for it because she knew that it had to be. She dreamed of a nice house and nice clothes and a strong, handsome man she never had to take to bed during the dream. They never even kissed, just stood near each other in lovely rooms, gazing at each other. Now she wondered wherever she had got that idea about wordless understanding; had she ever done such a thing with any person? In any case, whatever happened between her and Harvey Whipple had been nothing like that. She never cared where they lived; this huge house was something his vanity needed, not hers.

He began to come out of the bathroom, wheezing a little, the leather grommets and packings of his crutches cracking like to break.
Bang
went one crutch against the door, then a moment of intense silence before he managed to pull the light cord. In darkness he lurched toward the bed, breathing hard, and let himself come down backwards upon it. His crutches fell together to the carpet, and the mattress changed its pressures as he leaned forward to help his leg into bed.

“Is the pain bad?” she asked.

“I took so many goddam aspirin my ears are ringing, but the pain's not so bad.”

“I hope it isn't bad.” The way she said it, she knew she'd given away her tenderness. They both held their breath for a moment.

“It's not the stupid pain that bothers me, anyway,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“It's the…It's hard to do what I want to do, that's all.” Then, surprising her a little, as he always could if he cared to, he chuckled and put his hand on her belly, then pulled up her nightgown and put his hand on her bare skin. His hand was warm from the hot water.

“We used to be a couple of rocks,” he said. “Weren't we? Hard as a couple of goddam rocks.”

“Yes. That's true.”

“We used to wrestle all over the place. Right off the goddam bed.”

“Sometimes I used to end up with shoes under me, and that wasn't comfortable.”

“You never said anything about that!” Suddenly he laughed, pure and clear, and then stopped too quickly.

Although she wanted to, she wouldn't dare touch him. She knew how much he was bothered, not by the pain or by the idea of a useless leg; it was his softness, now, where he had been as tight as a green apple. She didn't care; it made no difference to her, but that would not satisfy him. After so many years of sleeping with him, that kind of physical beauty didn't matter, as though the man who slept with her was more the essence of him, and was not dependent upon good looks or moonbeams. But that would never help him at all.

The leg was ugly, bluish and darkened into red, with indentations where they shouldn't be, and streaks of bony pallor in it. She didn't seem to care. He knew she didn't care, but it didn't help his feelings at all to know it. A man was too conscious of what he was, of the picture he made. Even when he was deep in her he was still whole, still himself, but she was not. No, she was like…gas; like the sun, diffused and yet in the center so molten it was hotter by far than burning, and everything melted there and became her and him all at once for a long time until she knew it was coming, when the sudden ice began to mount in him, and mount, more ice than the universe, and he stopped being able to breathe at all until in one cataclysm so awful it could never, ever possibly be repeated, the ice flowed into the very center of the sun.

And then she was herself, quenched, turned inside out, the way she wanted to be, and would be until he withdrew, cruelly, selfishly pulled away from her and turned her back into thinking and having parts and limbs, while he lay enclosed in himself, enclosed in his selfish sleep. Which she forgave before she breathed, before she thought of anything but the sorrow of his growing lightness and departure. And she knew, forgiving him, that it hadn't been anything like that to him. Oh yes, it was good. Yes, it was great. That was a good one, he might mumble, but she suspected that he had been thinking of her as Woman. Not even her, far less the losing of himself as himself. He was Harvey Whipple, and she was Woman, who, as was his right to expect, had before him lain back and taken. Oh, great honor! But she forgave him that.

“Tingalingaling,” he said. “My goddam ears are ringing.” His hand on her bare skin was dead to what it felt, she knew. Sometimes they tried, but now it was so much more than just the pain. He was beginning to see himself as a cripple, and even deep inside, where she knew he tried to protect what he used to be, he had begun to lose the idea of Harvey Whipple the God-given answer to women. Harvey Whipple the great stud and servicer of females, the great bull-deliverer of their allowances of pleasurable moans. Now he had begun to see, deep in there, what he saw in the mirror.