Whipple's Castle (78 page)

“What's the cheapest one?” David asked. He smiled at Phil, the slightest edge of cruelty flickering like a knife in his mind. He thought of the possibilities. He wanted to laugh because Phil was all puckered up in distaste. The possibilities seemed enormously interesting.

“How about a plain old pine box, Phil? I always liked the shape of a good old coffin. Pardon me—casket. You know, the kind that's wider at the shoulders? I mean all these here are too round. They all look like Pullman cars—you know what I mean?”

“We've never carried anything like that. You want a metal interior lining to keep out—”

“To keep out what, Phil? Why do you want to keep anything out?”

“And a cement vault,” Phil said with no apparent expression. “The vault keeps the turf from sinking. The vault only costs a hundred and fifty dollars, and it's a good investment.”

Suddenly David was confused. The possibilities had come jumbling through his mind—all the old, sick undertaker jokes—and he could no longer entertain any of them. It was too late, of course, for poor Phil's approval, but he would not continue. He would not discuss investment, the etymology of the word. He would invest Horace's body in a vault that was, or was not, vaulted. He would place his deciding hand upon one of these streamlined, pompously decorated caskets, all of which, upon closer examination, resembled new Buicks. He would not—could not—invest his guilt within the soft satin interiors that looked so comfortable until he felt his own butt cold and dead down in there. The logic of that comfort nauseated him. He would rather take Horace into the woods and dig him a good, deep hole. He and Kate and Peggy would lower him down on ropes, and Wood would say the proper words over his empty brother while Harvey and Henrietta Whipple stood with bowed heads and understanding hearts. Just the family, who would understand why it had been necessary for Horace to blow Gordon Ward's head into fragments. Sometimes such things were just. But what a gruesome weight of his own murderous failure pressed down upon this vision.

He grew dizzy, and under the pretext of looking along the bottom of a fat casket lowered his head so the blood could return to it. Mainly he had to get out of here.

Phil took his arm in a surprisingly strong hand. “I'll show you what we can do,” he said, and led David out of the showroom, down a carpeted hallway and through a curtained arch. Soft organ music murmured from behind purple curtains, and on a dais in soft pastel lights was an open casket surrounded by cut flowers. The lights were peach-colored, warm as were all the colors of the room. Urns of pastel metal and pastel glass grew lush ferns in all the corners of the raised dais, and the sleeping head of a plump young man lay on a silken pillow at the very center of all the warmth. The still face, eyes closed and hair neatly combed, glowed as though lighted from within by real blood.

There were murmuring voices behind him, and Phil turned him toward the chairs at the rear of the little theater, where somberly dressed people stood muted or sat with heads bowed. The organ squeaked, high as the smallest mouse above the basal hum of its chords. The soft lights themselves, coming from hidden sources, seemed to press the sweet perfume into his nose and mouth. He looked at his own hand, and it was peach-colored, glowing as waimly as the cheek of the dead young man.

Standing at the rear of the room, among the live people, was someone he recognized—Mr. Caswell, the mailman. And next to him was Mrs. Caswell, short and bundled by her flesh. She was the main person, the one the others came toward with formal, dipping steps, to touch her hand and move their lips above her. He looked back to the center of the lights. Was that Ben there in the casket, silently glowing? They all glowed in this heady light, everybody. Even Mr. Caswell's ordinarily pale, skinny face seemed to have fleshed out in the numinous light.

“See?” Phil said in his ear. “Doesn't he look well? Do you see how it comforts them to see him for the last time looking well?”

God, it was Ben, his friend, once the friend he used to fight practically to the death, whose bony strength used to frighten him—strength that came, he always believed, from the ice-sharp will in the skinny body. Maybe it was that will that had kept him alive all these years in the hospital. He turned to Phil, who wouldn't let him go or let him turn. “Oh,” he said.

“Straighten your tie and go give your condolences to his mother,” Phil ordered. “Ben was your friend.”

David turned on him, suddenly furious beyond words. “Who the! How the!” he whispered, choking on the air in his throat. “Who the hell are you?”

“Shame,” said the just, unctuous voice.

David tore his arm loose, or was at the last moment let loose, and walked in slow motion toward the quiet group, toward the toothy murmurs of the old man who now leaned over Mrs. Caswell. He waited in line, knowing none of these old people with their soft colors and brittle hair, the women all fat and stooped. When it was his turn, Mrs. Caswell looked up, surprised, and smiled sadly at him. “Why, it's David Whipple!” she said breathily. There were no tears in her wrinkled, powdery eyes, and suddenly David was on Ben's side, overcome with grief for Ben. The skinny enemy and friend rode his freakish giraffe of a bike down High Street on the way to school again. David squeezed her white-gloved hand, and she said, “Oh! My arthritis, David!” He let go her hand and saw her count, calculate his tears. “David was Ben's oldest friend,” she said to the others. Which was probably true. “Go up and see him, David,” she said. “He looks so well. It's really a blessing. It's really a blessing. And David, tell your mother how sorry we are about her loss.”

When he shook Mr. Caswell's bony hand, as if in shy agreement they avoided each other's eyes.

David approached the dais and cast his eyes upon the young waxen stranger. It was not the Ben who meant power and will, but an older, softer person who had somehow been corrupted by the compromising years. David was not moved; he would never let this soft, glowing imitation take Ben's place in his memory.

He went home. At supper, unaware, he took meat upon his plate and stared down at the pale red juices. His intent to eat of the murdered flesh twisted in his throat until he had to leave the table.

 

The Whipples survived the week of the funerals. Wood and David attended Gordon Ward's funeral at the Congregational Church. After the ceremony he was bome by the Legion to his grave, the Drum and Bugle Corps bravely executing the slow march in their blue and silver finery. Keith Joubert played taps in the bright, windy day, the silver echoes flying on the wind across the cemetery, around the white church and across the square. Mrs. Ward was either frozen or brave; her husband and her friends surrounded her whenever she had to stand. Harvey did not attend. That afternoon Wood spoke to Gordon, Sr., and later that evening Gordon, Sr., called Harvey on the telephone. They spoke for more than half an hour, and afterward Harvey found it possible to speak to his family again.

They all attended Horace's funeral, again at the Congregational Church, Reverend Bledsoe officiating. The pallbearers were David, Wood, John Cotter, Foster Greenwood, Robert Paquette, and Joseph Foss, friends of David's and Wood's. After the church ceremony they carried Horace past Gordon's fresh grave, the slit turf still clearly outlined, to the Whipple plot where people of other centuries, grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles were buried. Horace seemed a strange addition to that ancient company, none of whom he had ever known. Sally De Oestris didn't walk the hundred yards to the grave, and when the last prayer was over, Peggy picked her up at the church.

They found themselves—Harvey, Henrietta, Wood, David, Kate, Peggy and Sally—in the great hall of the Whipples' house. They were all alive, dry-eyed, and in each was the tiny guilt-flutter of relief. Waves of sorrow, that ebb tide, would wash over each of them at unexpected moments. The mother's breast would suffer the ghost thumps of another's need. They would close their eyes and be imperiled by visions of Horace as a child crying in pain and embarrassment, such as the time he walked toward them holding his arm above the place where it should not have bent. Henrietta would see his red, roaring face in the hallway, at the cellar door. She would jump to keep his ghost from tearing off hinges. But the tide of memory could only recede.

The sunlight fell through the high, arched windows in sedate, rather misty columns. The parquet floor, the oriental rugs, the heavy furniture—everything seemed to proclaim its substantiality. Henrietta, feeling the sweet ache of tiredness in her legs, sat down with the rest of them for a moment before seeing to the kitchen. She had nothing to see to there, but it was her place to keep track of. They were all silent for a while.

“So,” Harvey said at last, and they nodded, or at least breathed an easy breath of assent. They were all still alive. Though death might be the next welcome (Sally thought this, and looked at the young people for better news), all their own complications of fear and desire still operated on this bright September day. Already they had begun to look to themselves and to each other for signs and portents.

Ten years have passed. It is the day before Christmas, 1958, and again the survivors are returning to Whipple Castle. Henrietta has been busy for a week, opening and airing rooms, making beds, planning food and drink for the whole complicated operation. Sylvia Beaudette has been helping, but it is still quite a job, because the survivors have been multiplying. Cribs and bassinets have been brought from the various attics and set up in the old nursery, and in the process Henrietta has grown sad. Those dusty teeth marks in the enamel are messages from her youth, signals across time from her babies. Time passes. To the young it seems so right that old people are old, because the young want to grow up. But they will leam—are learning now, in fact. Wood is thirty-four, David thirty-two, Peggy and Kate both twenty-nine. She and Harvey are so old it doesn't matter any more. Imagine moaning that you aren't still in your twenties! In David's last letter he spent at least a page sighing about age and rot.

Sally died in her sleep last year, at the age of eighty-two.

Christmas comes around just the same, and somehow the lights of Christmas reawaken the child magic, if only for moments. When Henrietta takes the strings of light bulbs from the box, the little bulbs swing down and hit each other with hard
ticks,
and she remembers all the years of tiny fright they might break. The little wire question-mark hangers for the decorations—has it been a whole year since she's untangled them? A year is a moment, a blink of the eyes, and here you are again.

Outside it is gray, cold, with light veils of snow driven by the wind. She goes to stand in the parlor they never use, where it is chilly because the heat vents are nearly closed. It was from here she used to look at Wood when he was in that period of retirement ten years ago, when he sat quietly on the porch, studying his abominations. Now the cold boards seem to move as the snow swirls across.

The mad powers have been at war again, strutting and posing like brainless cocks, and will go to war again. She sighs because, among other things, the most powerful man in the world is a general. But there will be this Christmas anyway. One takes the seasons as they come.

She hears running feet, and manages to brace herself before Billy grabs her around the leg. “Hey, Grandma!” he says. He is six, brown-haired, with bright black eyes. He gives the impression that he owns her, owns the house and everything in it. “I know where the presents are,” he says.

She is about to tell him to stay out of the presents when she realizes the spirit in which he has confessed this knowledge. This will be their secret. His sister, who is eight, presumably doesn't know, nor do his baby cousins.

Peggy comes in after him, and he ignores her. His mother is as unremarkable to him as the sun. She takes his hand and pulls him toward the door. “Come on,” she says, and he doesn't object.

“Don't tell anybody,” he says to Henrietta, ignoring the indignity of his forced removal.

“You and your secrets,” Peggy says, smiling wryly. She is seven months pregnant; Billy has explained this to Henrietta in remarkably technical terms. He is still a little confused about Daddy's seed, because he has a window-box garden at home and he knows about seeds. A thoughtful look crossed his face when he came to that term. He doesn't like vagueness, or secrets that aren't his, and soon he will demand clarification.

Henrietta follows them out of the chilly room and shuts the door. Here in the hall are warmth and voices. She remembers Peggy Mudd, the little woods waif who came to them so long ago, who has repaid them a thousand times for whatever they gave her then. It has been their luck. She knows why Harvey let Bertram Mudd live there in the sugarhouse (she can admit that knowledge to herself now), and it is all so ironic that Harvey's infidelity in some way brought Peggy to them—Peggy who took Wood from his limbo; they all saw it happen. Wood is now doing his residency in internal medicine at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, studying, he has confessed to Henrietta, the coinage of his obsessions. Because of the hospital's location he has also become an authority on razor slashes, bottle cuts, stab wounds, contusions and other symptoms of human intercourse. Reality has substituted for his visions, and since it is only reality, he can put it in its place.

It is when he looks at his wife that his face evens out, smooths down, and he smiles.

Sally, who is eight, spies her in the hall and comes to take her hand. Sally is blond, with dark brown eyes and something of Wood's squareness in the bones of her face. “Come on, Gram,” she says. “What are you standing here for?” Her level gaze and general sophistication are marred by a missing front tooth, a latecomer that has been much discussed, especially by Sally herself. The tooth is known to be up there in the gum, growing, she assures everyone.