Whipple's Castle Read online

  “You all right?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t know exactly what.”

  “Well, never mind then.” No, he didn’t mean that; David might go away. “I’ve got a pain in my side.” But David looked steadily at him, and seemed to see this lie.

  “I’m sorry I kidded you,” David said. He went to the mantel and leaned his back against it, his elbows propped so that his square hands hung relaxed and strong on each side of his chest. They showed no fear, no worry; they were dry and clean. It never seemed that David did a thing out of any need, or with any sense of danger.

  “You hurt your hand on the doorframe,” David said.

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Except you were sort of aiming at me.”

  “I didn’t hit you,” Horace said.

  “You only hit things you don’t want to hit, Hoss.”

  “Never mind!” What a weak, stupid thing to say, Horace knew. He thought: I’m really stronger than he is; I can lift more, but when I lift it too high it comes down on me.

  “Comes down on you?” David asked, and Horace realized he’d said that part aloud. David came over toward him.

  “Hey, I don’t want to screw you up all the time, Horace.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  Someone else was at the door: Kate stood there in dungarees and a white sweat shirt, looking in.

  “Horsie?” she said.

  “Another guilty one,” David said. “What did you do to old Hoss?”

  “Button your lip,” she said mildly, not even looking at David. She came up to Horace’s bed and sat beside him. “I was changing my clothes, Horsie. That’s why I said keep out.”

  But he thought: Then why didn’t you say you were changing your clothes? I didn’t want to see you undressed.

  “I wouldn’t come barging in on you,” he said, knowing that he’d gone over the edge of self-pity, and couldn’t speak again.

  “You wouldn’t mean to,” Kate said. She put her hand on his arm and he pulled away. “Don’t be skittish, Horace. We all love you. Don’t we, Davy?”

  “Love the bejesus out of you, Hoss,” David said. “We got to stand firm against the Monster.”

  “Your father,” Kate said.

  “Our father who art,” David said.

  “He doesn’t scare me. He doesn’t mean anything when he yells.” They seemed to have forgotten Horace, except that Kate’s hand had captured his arm. He tried to pull it away, tentatively, but she squeezed and held on, as though she held a dog or a baby, paying no attention to its random wiggles. He couldn’t speak, so he couldn’t get away.

  “Whipple the Cripple,” David said.

  “I don’t think it’s right to say that,” Kate said, still mildly. Horace wouldn’t have dared say that name, much less contradict David about it; that would be asking for the full force of David’s sarcasm, and that would only lead to violence—his own ineffectual violence. Don’t ask me to move, he would think, imploring anyone who teased him: Don’t make me answer in the only way I can.

  “It’s what they call him,” David said. “He knows it too.” “He’s your father. ‘Honor thy mother and father,’” Kate said.

  “Oh, sure. I honor him by keeping out of his way.”

  “You’re just a child,” Kate said.

  “And you’re my little sister.” David looked at her for a moment, and then said, “Hey, I saw Beggs down street today, and he said you were the prettiest girl in the eighth grade.”

  “Beggs can go to hell!” Suddenly Kate was really angry, even though she knew David had said this in order to upset her, and Horace could see her trying to take it in an easy way. But she couldn’t manage it. David smiled at her, but Horace couldn’t tell—couldn’t ever tell—whether David’s smile was cruel or not.

  “H. Beggs, Jr., can go to hell,” David said matter-of-factly, as though he were making a note of it.

  “I’m sick—bored—with all that stuff,” Kate said.

  “You can’t help it, little sister, if you’re a freak.” David said that, but he really admired her; Horace could see him looking her over proudly, appraising whatever it was that made her so pretty.

  “You’re a freak too!” Horace said, surprising himself. David thought this over, his eyebrows raised evenly above his calm eyes.

  “How so, old Hoss?”

  “Because you think you’re so grown-up already.”

  “Maybe,” David said.

  “I know I’m a freak,” Horace said.

  “Everybody in this family’s a freak,” David said, “except maybe Wood and Hank.”

  Wood came into the room, and as he moved through the door with his solid step, David and Kate seemed all at once to shrink back, shrink down in size and force and become children again.

  Kate said, seeming to be serious, “Wood, are you a freak too?”

  “Nobody’s a freak,” Wood said. “It isn’t a word you should use about people.”

  “Why not?” Horace asked, protected, he thought, by his own obvious freakishness.

  “Say what’s different about somebody, if you have to, but his differences aren’t all of him.”

  Horace had seen David, at other times when Wood had made such statements, grin sardonically and try to catch Kate’s eye. If he were behind Wood, where Wood couldn’t see him, he’d put his hands together in front of his face, like an angel praying, and look up at heaven.

  “What about David?” Kate said. “Horace and I say he’s a freak.”

  Wood looked down at her tolerantly, like a father in a movie. “David’s very young,” he said.

  “That’s what the Crip said about you, old gray-haired brother,” David said. “So you’ve got two years on me, and maybe thirty pounds. Anyway, I’ve changed my mind. I say we’re all freaks except Hank.”

  “Maybe she’s a freak too,” Kate said thoughtfully.

  “You’re talking about your mother,” Wood said. His handsome face had turned genuinely stern and disapproving. His shoulders had squared. “Just how is your mother a freak?”

  “I don’t know. I just think she is. She doesn’t do what other mothers do. She hardly even knows any other mothers!”

  “She’s always taken good care of us.”

  “Yes, but she just does it. You know what I mean, Wood? She doesn’t do it like a mother.”

  “I’ve always found her maternal instincts perfectly adequate,” Wood said.

  David began to laugh, and because, in a way that hurt him in the throat, Horace wanted to laugh too, he heard himself shout, “She loves us!” The words came out of him in awkward, even shameful pieces, as though they were parts of something he had broken.

  “Oh, Horace!” Kate said. She hugged him hard and kissed his cheek. “Of course she does!”

  David said, “Yeah, Hoss. That wasn’t what we were talking about.”

  Wood looked at his graduation wrist watch. “We’ve got to get up and shovel snow in the morning,” he said.

  They all looked, suddenly remembering the snow, to the three high windows. The snow still fell, passing down calmly through the light. It seemed impossible that the three boys would be able to affect it with their shovels; it would fall forever because it had paid no attention to them at all; through their small excitements and noises it had fallen steadily, at its own thick speed.

  Henrietta came to the door. “Why, you’re all here!” she said, and it seemed to Horace that she was as surprised as she was pleased. Her eyes swerved back and forth, counting them all, before she looked more or less steadily at him, and frowned.

  “Are you all right, Horace? You didn’t eat supper.”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “Do you want something to eat? I left the macaroni and cheese on the oven door.”

  “I could make some popcorn,” Kate said. “Anybody want some popcorn?”

  “Gluh,” David said.
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  “That would be nice,” Henrietta said. “And we all could sit in the living room in front of the fire.”

  They all thought of Harvey Whipple. Father. Horace looked at each of their faces. Kate thought it might be a good idea. David showed no opinion one way or the other. Wood disapproved.

  “I’ve got some reading to do,” Wood said.

  “Why can’t you make an effort?” Henrietta said.

  Wood was embarrassed; it was not like him to give excuses, and here he had been caught. Horace watched, with a sense of comfort, the inevitable triumph of Wood’s duty. “All right,” Wood said.

  “Who could be hungry?” David said.

  “Horace is hungry. He ought to come downstairs and be with the family. This is a family!” Henrietta was getting angry. She took off her glasses and wiped them on some loose cloth at her chest, and as she put them back to her dark face it seemed they were her eyes, and her eyes returned to her face.

  “You do things because you ought to, for somebody else once in a while!”

  They all thought of Harvey Whipple in his chair, down there in front of the fire, and of his white, violent face that would be the center of their attention, as though it were the center of light in the high room. They could look at the fire, but always they would be forced to turn away from the flames and to look at the cold light of that face. Pocked by his eyes, white like the moon.

  “Your father,” Henrietta said.

  “Well, why doesn’t he act like one?” Wood said.

  “Only young people can act,” Henrietta said, “because they don’t have anything to lose. It’s easy for them to be generous. Try it when you see the end of your life coming up. He can’t see any hope, don’t you know that?”

  Horace felt bad for his father, yet he believed the best thing was to stay away from him as long as possible, the way you rested when you were sick, so that you could heal better.

  “He knows you avoid him,” Henrietta said.

  “Well, he ought to know why,” Wood said.

  “He knows why, but it doesn’t help.”

  “He asks for trouble. He picks away until he finds some,” Wood said.

  “Oh, I don’t like any of you when you’re like this!” Henrietta took off her glasses and wiped them again, and they all stared at the brown hollows of her eyes, where tiny glints showed like pieces of glass. “Oh, oh!” she said. Wood stepped over and put his arm around her, but she jerked her shoulders and he dropped his arm. He remained next to her, though, leaning over almost as though he meant to threaten her.

  She adjusted her glasses and stood with her shoulders squared, defiantly. No one said anything for too long a time. Horace’s jaw ached, but he had no words he dared say. Kate still held his arm in her lap, and she squeezed it, as if she were asking him to say something. But he couldn’t. He looked to Wood, who would know what to do, but Wood’s face had grown stem and quiet. The snow, in a gust of wind around the eaves, ticked at the windows and then moved away. It was David who spoke first.

  “Shall we go down?” David said. “Shall we descend, ladies and gentlemen?”

  2

  Harvey sat in his wheelchair, pretending for a moment that he was not its prisoner, and grasped the carved edge of his thick oak table. Firelight, reflected by the brass bowls and inflorescences of the chandelier, by the round mirror on the wall next to the dining room, by the curved lights of the bay window and other dark, polished surfaces, flickered warmly across the glassy oak. This was the place to sit—in this rich, ornate room he had always wanted to own, and now owned. But he was its prisoner. Ironic, like the wish in a child’s tale; he was like Midas, who wanted flesh, surrounded by cold metal.

  He knew his wife and children were upstairs together, and that their councils concerned him, their problem, the source of their quietness and tension. But what else could he be? Didn’t they understand that a man like him, placed in this hellish position, was not going to be easy to get along with? But did they even understand what sort of man he was…had been? No, they had no idea. Henrietta, perhaps, because she had lived without him, and made a choice when she married him; but Wood and David and Horace and Kate? No, he was not a man at all, he was their father, whom they hadn’t chosen. Everything he said to them, they took just a little wrong—just a degree beyond the force he meant it to have. They were all foreign to him, as though he spoke to people who could not quite grasp the exact meanings of his words. Even Henrietta now heard him through the dense, literal ears of her children, because she was worried about his effect on them. Often—always—they missed the hidden twinkle he meant to have in his eyes, behind his screaming. He imitated himself, and they saw only the fictional screamer he invented, never the man inventing. The only one around who could see it, strangely enough, was Peggy Mudd. Kate was indifferent, but Peggy knew, and was not merely indifferent. So shy before the others she could hardly speak to them, she had no fear of him, even in those moments when he yelled so loud his ears popped, and he seemed to be hollering down inside the huge canyon of his head bones, playing with echoes and reverberations. That skinny, ugly, unfortunate girl would smile back at the joke he knew was almost invisible, as though she perceived it through the smoke and blast of an explosion.

  As for the others, if they wanted to hate him or fear him, why couldn’t they do it for the proper reasons? There they were, probably up in Horace’s room, discussing the matter—a bunch of connivers, conniving for no reason, wanting peace when there wasn’t any war in the first place. God damn it! Was this why he wanted this huge house, so he could sit in state like a monster king and scare everybody half to death?

  But the house did give him pleasure. It was so generous it triumphed over its ugliness. Where it was cavernous and dark, it meant to be that way. No, it wasn’t ugly—nothing made with such loving care could be ugly. It wasn’t ugly any more than a lobster was ugly, or an alligator. He had been impressed, even scared, by this house ever since he was a little boy, when it had been the haunted house, and only an old, old lady—a De Oestris, Sally De Oestris’ aunt—had lived alone in it with a crazy servant; a mad Swede who talked to himself on the street, who once, in Harvey’s sight, ignored a stone that a boy bounced with an audible thunk off his cropped white head. The Swede went on, cursing at himself or to himself, never looking around.

  When the old lady died, and the Swede had gone back to Sweden, the house stood empty for ten years, really haunted then by the bats that fled over the blackberry thicket that was the lawn, through windows broken by awed little boys. And then, just before Wood was born, Harvey bought it, thirty acres and twenty or more rooms, for five thousand dollars.

  After her aunt’s death, Sally De Oestris had taken away the things like silver and china and linen, but all the high, solid furniture remained. Even the harmonium, which sat like a monument below its own stained-glass window, still worked; the tile roof and wide overhangs had protected the interior of the house in spite of broken windows. Harvey had come at night, with candles, before the electricity was connected, and wandered shivering with fear and pride through his dark castle.

  The same architect had done Sally’s father’s house on Bank Street, which she still lived in, and she showed him the plans and letters the architect had left. She sat him down at her escritoire and moved her little gnome’s body carefully, cane in one hand and a roll of thick yellow paper in the other, her round face crazed by twinkly little lines. She smiled nearly all the time, and her blue eyes were glittery.

  “The man was more than eclectic,” she said in her deep, playful voice, “he was a regular pack rat. A nut, an absolute nut. Nutty as a fruit cake. He thought he was creating his masterpiece, but he was really trying to imitate the cathedral at Chartres.” She giggled as she moved away, leaving him to unroll the yellow papers, and slowly poured two glasses of sherry from a crystal decanter.

  “He says in one of his letters he had a dream of the cathedral,” she said. “He certainly wasn’t looking at a pict
ure of it!”

  It must have been a dream, she told him, in which strange lenses came across his mind—yes, something like lenses—to swell and wither the vision, leaving one area as blank as paper, while another bulged and squirmed like wall come alive. “Here, look,” she said, pointing to the front elevation. “Here are the three arched doors, the three arched windows above them, and then the great round window with its twelve sets of spheres and spheroids—’oblate and prolate shapes,’ he calls them. They look like eggs, or eyes.” In her opinion, though this mad architect dreamed of Gothic, his imagination was essentially round—Romanesque and symmetrical. When he had conceived of one shape, his mind closed down upon his talent, and all he could do was to balance, in an utter void of inspiration, that shape with its mirror image. “He didn’t know,” Sally said triumphantly, “that Gothic is the triumph of asymmetry! Maybe nobody knew.”

  Another of the architect’s troubles was that most of his raw material was wood, and another was that he built upon a steep, wooded hill in a small New Hampshire town among true Gothic structures made of pine and spruce that must have seemed to his eyes only the result of material and spiritual poverty. His wood was cypress, sent by railroad from Florida; his moldings and parquetry, wooden imbrications and crenelations were none of them of local manufacture. His mind was cluttered with the vocabulary of his age—with quoin and groin, pantile and pilaster, pediment and parquet, trefoil and quatrefoil, marquee, mullion and modil-lion.

  When the house was finished he wrote at the bottom of the front elevation sheets: With this house I have cleaned my mind, so to speak. All I know of grandeur, the glory of all the ages of my art, has, as it were, been embodied here. This is the greatness of our time, that we embrace all styles, all fashions, and make them our own!

  “But who’s to say whether this madman’s masterpiece is supremely ugly, or supremely beautiful?” Sally asked. “You’re obviously in love with it. I live in this one, although I’ll admit it isn’t half as big or quite as nutty. One thing I’ll say for yours, it never looks the same twice. When I walked more, I used to go up High Street and look at it once in a while. Sometimes in the rain it looked like a toad. Sometimes, when the sun hit it right, in the late afternoon, it looked like a city in Tibet. If you take it by levels, or strata, you might say, it can look like the Paris of Villon. But then you look again and you can almost hear a muezzin singing from one of those four ridiculous minarets. You could get lost in the damned pile, but you’ll never get bored with it.”