Castleview

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Authors: Gene Wolfe

BOOK: Castleview
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Roy E. Wolfe, and to that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I’d like to thank Elliott Swanson and the folk group Barley Bree for their help, and also to send my very best wishes to Cyndi Shaeffer and her colt, Urth Sun Rebel.
Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword or the scabbard? Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur. Ye are more unwise, said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the swords, for whiles ye have the scabbard upon you, ye shall never lose no blood be ye never so sore wounded, therefore keep well the scabbard always with you.
 
-Sir Thomas Malory
THE HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELDS
TOM HOWARD stood at the edge of the loading dock and stared out across the storage yard. It was raining, raining hard, and that made it hard for him to see. The first shift had already gone; there was no second now that summer had gone, too. The yard was clamorous with rain, cold drops that pounded the steel drums.
Yet he was certain he had seen something.
When he went down the dock steps, the rain pounded him as well, drummed upon the shoulders of his yellow slicker, drove hard against the brim of his rubberized hat. It was not dark enough yet—not quite dark enough—for him to require the black, five-cell flashlight he carried, but he switched it on just the same.
No one crouched between the rows of fifty-five-gallon drums. No one squatted behind the low stack of three-quarter-inch angle iron. As Tom splashed toward the scrap heap and the dumpsters, there came a sudden jolt that halted all thought. He fell face down onto the flooded gravel, but he never felt it.
 
Joy Beggs, “Your Real Estate Lady,” regarded the old Howard place with an admiration that was not entirely feigned. It was by current standards much too large, and it had not
really been modernized to the degree Joy would have liked. And it was wood, true. But it had been repainted in August, white not some crazy color, and its roof was only two years old. “A lovely old home, Mr. Shields,” she declared with enthusiasm. “Didn’t I tell you?
And,”
she let her voice drop, “you can get it for a song. He’s been promoted, and they have to move.”
Leaning forward so that her mouth was at her husband’s ear, Ann Schindler whispered, “Look at those flowers, Willie.” Ann had retained her maiden name.
Her husband answered firmly, “We’re not going to pay sixty thousand for flowers.” He added, “No matter how wet they are.”
Ann murmured, “But it shows they care.”
Joy nodded approvingly. “You’re absolutely right, and let me tell you, Mr. Shields, you’re lucky to have this rain. Most folks looking for a home won’t go out when it rains, but there’s nothing sillier. With rain like this you can go up in the attic with a flashlight—I’ve got one—and look for leaks. Then there won’t be any surprises the next time it rains.”
Shields nodded and rubbed his jaw. He was a long lank man, and it was a long lank jaw that he rubbed.
“Aren’t we even going to get out and look at it?” Mercedes Schindler-Shields griped from her place beside her mother in the rear seat. Mercedes was sixteen.
“Of course we are,” Joy told her. “There’s a black-topped drive around here somewhere, and I’ve got enough umbrellas for everybody.”
They were golf umbrellas, striped orange and brown; Joy and Mercedes shared one, Shields and Ann the other. There was, very fortunately, a spacious front porch with a roof; Joy pressed the bell button. Above the pounding of the rain, Shields could hear chimes tolling slowly and almost sadly, somewhere far beyond the door.
Keeping her voice down, Joy said, “It’s an old farmhouse. There’s more than three acres still. Let me tell you, we call
properties a lot smaller than this ‘estates’ in the real estate business.”
“Room for a tennis court?” Mercedes wanted to know.
“Absolutely.”
Shields folded their umbrella and banged the ferrule on the porch to shake the water out.
Joy told him, “When the subdividers get interested in this area—and they will—you could sell off a couple acres for more than the down payment on the house.”
Seth Howard opened the door. “Come on in,” he said. “You can leave your umbrellas in the hall.”
“We’ll leave them on the porch,” Joy told him. “They’ll be okay.” They trooped inside. The hallway was wide for a private house, high-ceilinged and dark.
“Mom’s in the kitchen. You want to see her? Dad’s not home yet.”
Joy said, “That won’t be necessary. I’ll show the house. Just don’t pay any attention to us.”
Seth followed them anyway, mouse-quiet in athletic shoes. He was seventeen, nearly eighteen, tall already, and dark, with his father’s blue Norman eyes. Mercedes lagged somewhat behind her parents, and soon she and Seth were walking side by side, neither speaking until she asked, “Where does this little door go?”
“To the turret—want to see it? It’s kind of cool, but it’ll be cold up there.”
“Sure,” she said. “I noticed the turret from outside.” I am, she thought, ohmyGod, a
twelve
. What the heck would he want with a pig like me?”
“Okay.” He opened the door, disclosing a steep and narrow stair. “All the rest of the house is two stories, but this’s three. There are windows, and you can see pretty far.” He led the way, to Mercedes’s infinite relief.
 
High in the attic, Joy Beggs apologized. “I’m afraid it’s terribly cluttered right now. They’ll be moving a lot of this out.
Anything they leave will belong to you folks, and you can do whatever you want with it.”
Shields nodded absently, staring around. He looked first at the underside of the roof, because it was where Joy played her light; but reason suggested that she would not have been so eager to bring them here if she had thought there was a chance of a leak, and he transferred his attention to the contents of the attic, mostly boxes, old trunks, and stacks of books. He had a sudden premonition that the Howards would move none of it. All this would be theirs, if they bought this house—his to explore slowly, on rainy Sunday afternoons.
“You could convert this into more bedrooms,” Joy suggested. “There are eight of these big dormer windows, and they let in plenty of light when the sun’s out, even with all this junk in front of them.”
Ann murmured, “Or a study. Willie, I could write up here—I know I could.”
“Oh, you’re a writer!”
“Only cookbooks,” Ann told Joy.
Shields said, “She’s had three published so far. Arkin and Patris in New York—they’re her publishers.” Proud of her, he wanted to say that it was not just some church group printing a few hundred, though he did not know how to do it without giving offense.
“Cooking with the Lake Poets,
that was my first one. And then I wrote
Cooking with Abe and Mary
, and
Cooking for George Bernard Shaw.
That’s Irish-English vegetarian. What are you looking at, Willie?”
Shields had been peering through the grimy glass of the nearest attic window. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
Rain drummed unceasingly on the roof.
 
In the turret, Mercedes looked out of each gray window in turn. “Boy, I
like
this,” she said. “Wonder if my folks will let me have it.”
Seth asked, “Are they going to buy the house?”
Mercedes shrugged. “We’ve got to live someplace.”
“You’re just moving to Castleview?”
“My dad’s bought a dealership here.” There was a window seat, and Mercedes sat down, careful to leave room for Seth if he wanted it.
“Motorcycles?”
She shook her head. “No, cars. He’s been the manager at a Buick agency ever since I was a little kid. Now he’s bought his own agency here.”
“Oh, yeah. I know the one. It’s been for sale.” Seth did not sit down.
“You don’t mind that we’re maybe going to buy your house?”
“What for? We’ve got to sell it. We’re moving to Galena. My dad’s been promoted, and he says we can’t afford two places. Only my great-grandfather built it, and I’ve lived here my whole life. See that little picture?” He pointed toward a watercolor framed behind glass, the only decoration in the small, hexagonal room. “My grandmother painted that.”
“No kidding?” Mercedes rose to look. “Where’s Galena? Is it very far from here?”
“About thirty miles.”
The watercolor showed a line of rugged hills, fringed with scarlet-and-gold maples. Slender stone towers, faint and even ghostly, loomed above the treetops.
“Then you could come over,” Mercedes told him. “I mean, if you wanted to see the house again. That is, you could say you were coming to see me. We could walk around, and you could tell me about stuff.”
Seth nodded.
 
Down in the kitchen, Shields and Ann shook hands solemnly with Seth’s mother, Sally Howard having first wiped her flour-powdered hands on a dish towel, and Shields having washed his somehow-dusty hands at the sink.
Ann said, “We didn’t feel it was polite to go all through your home without ever meeting you.”
“Besides,” Joy added practically, “they ought to see the kitchen.”
“It’s a lot of steps,” Mrs. Howard said, sighing, “but I’m going to miss it when we move. The kitchen in the new place is a lot smaller.”
Ann smiled. “And I’ll bet it doesn’t have an avocado-green phone, or half as much cupboard space.”
“No, it doesn’t. Have a look inside if you want to. You folks aren’t from around here, are you?”
Shields shook his head, and Ann said, “We’re from Arlington Heights. It’s northwest of Chicago, about twenty miles from the Loop.”
“I see. Well, this kitchen was meant to feed the farmhands and such, as well as the family. At harvest, there’d be three or four women working in here and ten or twelve men eating at a big table outside.”
Ann spun around.
“Cooking for the Harvesters
! That’ll be my next one! What was in season, and how it was prepared.”
Joy said proudly, “Mrs. Shields writes cookbooks.”
“By Ann Schindler,” Ann corrected her absently.
From Ann’s expression, Shields knew she was already deep in the planning of her new book. He said, “I’ve been wondering why this town’s called Castleview.”
Mrs. Howard glanced toward a kitchen window. It was quick, no more than a flicker of her eyes; yet Shields felt sure he had seen fear.
Joy stepped in. “It’s really quite romantic. They say you can see a castle in the distance, sometimes, just at sunset. I have to admit
I’ve
never seen it, and I’ve lived here seventeen years plus. But lots of people have, or say they have. It’s an illusion, not a hallucination—a few people have taken pictures, although they don’t usually turn out very well.”
“We’re looking east here, aren’t we?” Shields asked. He crossed to the window.
Tonelessly, Mrs. Howard said, “That’s right.”
“Technically, they call it a Fata Morgana,” Joy told him.
“Heaven only knows what that means, but my kids had to study about it in school.”
“It means ‘Morgana the Fairy,’” Shields explained absently. “Morgan le Fay.” He was staring out at the rain.
Ann said, “Willie was a lit. major. It was very handy when I was doing
Lake Poets
and
Cooking for Shaw.
”
“Anyway,” Joy continued, “it’s supposed to be some kind of funny atmospheric effect that takes something way off and makes it look close. My guess is that people are seeing the skyline of Chicago. That would look like a bunch of towers and things, because it is a bunch of towers and things.”
“When was this town settled?” Shields asked.
Sally Howard said, “In eighteen-fifty. We’re really pretty historical here. My family—I’m a Roberts, and we were with the first group, the pioneers. Tom’s family, the Howards, came here in sixty-six, after the Civil War.”
“And was it originally called Castleview?”
“I believe so. You might find out something about that at the County Museum.”
Ann said, “It’s charming, isn’t it, Willie? Like having a family ghost. Should give me some lovely touches for my book.”
Turning to face the three women, Shields nodded. “What did you say the price was, Mrs. Beggs? The asking price?”
Joy shot Mrs. Howard a swift look. “It’s not ethical—”
Mrs. Howard said, “It’s not up to me. Tom will have to decide.”
“Perhaps if we went into the living room … .”
Ann nodded agreement. Shields followed them down the wide, shadowy hall and into a big, high-ceilinged room nearly as dark, where Joy switched on a floor lamp with an old-fashioned fringed silk shade. “This is what they called the parlor when the house was built. Your friends and acquaintances paid calls on Sunday, and this was where you received them.”
“After church,” Ann said eagerly.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
The women were still standing, so Shields remained standing himself, fidgeting and listening to the rain. After a minute or two he heard feet on the stair; the tall boy who had admitted them came in, with Mercedes close behind him.
“There you are,” Shields said. “I’ve been wondering what happened to you.”
Mercedes threw herself into a leather armchair. “Seth’s been showing me around. I like it. Can I have the tower?”
Shields nearly said, “If you’re still a virgin, Merc.” He decided it would not be funny and substituted, “We haven’t made an offer yet.”

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