Whipple's Castle (14 page)

“What did it feel like when it felt good?”

“Well…” What had it felt like? He'd taken four or five swigs from the bottle, as his turn came. It was cold on the lips, and the ice descended into the middle of his chest and began to fume and bum. “I liked the guys better. They seemed funnier than they were, and we laughed harder.”

“I'd like to get drunk sometime.”

“You mean like Susie?” he said.

She blushed and took a quick puff on her cigarette. “No. I'm just curious, Davy. Weren't you?”

“I still am, I guess,” he said. “Anyway, Kenny Clark was sick before I was.”

“Davy?” she said nervously, and flung her hair around so that it whipped her cheeks and then dropped lightly back, each strand softly in place again.

“What?” he said.

“Could we try it sometime? Just you and me? I think it might be a good idea—to see what it's like. I mean how it affects a person.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “Forewarned and all that?” He saw that she was proud of her reason.

“You're the only one I know. Well enough, I mean. Everybody else…You know,” she said.

He knew.

“How do you know it won't affect you like Susie Davis?” he said.

“That's just it. We could go up to my tower, maybe, and only you would be there, and you could tell me all about how I acted.”

“It's too damn cold up there,” he said, but it was the idea itself that gave him a funny sort of chill.

“But we couldn't have anybody barging in on us. That would be awful, wouldn't it? How about that old electric heater in the hall closet? Does it work?”

“The cord's all frayed.” The heater was round, and grew copper-orange, like a big hot eye. His father used to sit in front of it and focus it on his leg. “Well, it's an idea,” he said.

“And we could bring a basin in case we threw up.”

“How about the booze?” he said.

She blushed again, guiltily. “I've been planning this, because I knew you'd go along. You have to, Davy. Who knows what I might do under the influence of alcohol? I might throw myself from the window. I knew you'd go along, Davy.”

“You mean you've got the booze already?”

“I'm not usually sneaky, am I?” she asked, half proud of herself, but really worried about his opinion, he could see.

“No,” he said. That was true. “No, Katie, you're pretty un-sneaky. That's the truth. But how did you sneak the hooch? From Whip?”

“Yes. See, each time he wants a drink, or some ice in his glass or something, I try to be the one to get it. I've got a Mason jar—it's in back of the syrup jars, and it looks something like it from the outside.” She was proud of herself now. “Anyway, each time I know he's had a drink I take just a little bit, and now I've got a whole Mason jar full, and Dad never seemed to notice. He gets confused, see, because he's got one bottle there in the drawer of his desk, and some others open in the kitchen, and I sort of switched them around once in a while, when nobody was home. He drinks a lot, did you know that? He drinks nearly a whole bottle a week.”

“Okay, when do you want to make this experiment?” He surveyed its risks as he spoke.

‘Tonight. We don't have to go to school tomorrow.”

“How come you don't want to do this with one of your girl friends? Why me?” he asked.

“Oh, don't be like that, Davy!” she said, as if he'd betrayed her.

“I just wondered, that's all,” he said.

“Girls aren't honest with each other, that's why. They're hypocrites. I don't know any girl as well as I know you. They're either all mushy over me, or they're sneaks. I don't talk to them much. I mean, to tell the truth. We gab all the time, but…Anyway, I don't like girls very much.”

“But you trust me?” he asked, flattered but distrustful because it didn't seem anything he deserved.

“Stop that!” she said, looking at him sternly. “You're my favorite brother. We're just alike. We could be twins. We're the only people in this whole family that understand each other. I mean I don't care if you are nearly sixteen. Girls mature faster than boys. All the boys in my class still think they're cowboys and Indians—all a bunch of stupid little children shooting bent pins with rubber bands.”

“But we've never told each other very much,” he said, some-what overawed, and not liking his cowardice. It seemed to him that he could be a betrayer.

“We've never had to, because we understand each other.”

“Maybe you're right,” he said.

“But you're still all embarrassed.”

“Well, you shouldn't startle people, you know,” he said.

“Huh.”

“Okay, little sister…”

“Davy, don't pull that stuff with me.”

“All right. All right. We'll get drunk and tell nothing but the truth,” he said. “But you're just a kid, you know.”

“Huh.”

“We're both freaks, I guess,” he said.

“Well, we don't have to tell
all.
There's no use going overboard, is there?”

“No,” he said.

“You see? I understand you, don't I?” she said. “The main reason I like you is you don't blab your head off. Even if I got disgusting you probably wouldn't tell anybody about it, would you?”

“No, not about you. I'll tell you about it, though,” he said. “You'll never hear the last of it, you know.”

“Good. That's a chance I'm willing to take. I'll meet you in my tower at eleven o'clock sharp. It's now eight-thirty. I'll have everything else ready, but you bring the heater. Bring your ashtray and those Chesterfields, okay?”

“Right,” he said, and couldn't help smiling.

“So it's sort of stupid, maybe. But I've got to find out.”

“I'll take notes,” he said, but he was nervous all the same.

Kate got up, brushing out her skirt as she went to the door. “I wonder if a person can be honest,” she said thoughtfully. “But then, I don't have any real shameful secrets—I mean things that really happened. Do you, Davy?”

“You don't have to tell secrets just because you drink some whiskey,” he said, and she studied him carefully. “I mean,” he added, feeling guilty and wondering just why, “it's not like a Catholic confessing or anything like that.” She still pondered him.

“I'd like to know your secrets, Davy,” she said. “That would be interesting. I don't know anybody's secrets. Peggy tells me a lot, but she doesn't seem to have any secrets. I like Peggy, don't you?”

“She's a girl. I thought you didn't like girls.”

“She's different. She's so…unfortunate,” Kate said.

“That's a good word for it,” he said.

“Yes.” She sighed. “Her mother is totally irresponsible.”

“That's putting it mildly,” he said. “You mean she's a prostitute.”

“I know what that means. It's in the dictionary. I mean, in
general
I know what it means, but there're a lot of details that escape me.”

He wondered if that were true, then realized that it was, because Kate never lied. No, she never did, and that was one of the things that always seemed to give her an advantage over him.

“Well!” she said briskly. “Are you game, David? Eleven sharp?”

“Okay, Katie,” he said. She left, waving a thin hand, the last thing he saw as she closed the heavy door after her.

Suddenly his room was cold—or perhaps its sense of protection had faltered when that thin hand dematerialized as though it had gone like a ghost through the cypress door itself. This thought, too, occurred to him: it would have been better to have been born an only child, even an orphan, because then his essential coldness would not have cheated so many people. No, not coldness, really, but a feeling that he could not have a proper relationship with his own family. His feelings toward them were not familial. If he felt guilty about teasing Horace, or was somehow threatened by an eighth-grade girl, what did family have to do with his reactions? He felt no different about them than he did any other people he knew. They seemed no more vulnerable, or pitiful, and behind their eyes he felt the same yearnings he felt in strangers. They all claimed to be closer to his thoughts than they really were, and asked for his secrets. And his lack of curiosity about their secrets must be coldness in him. As he shivered, an icy wind seemed to come from his skin like the swirl of breath that had flowed down across the wooden shelves of the old icebox they used to have.

He opened his fireplace damper, started a small fire of just newspaper and kindling, and watched the bright flames crack. As long as he could remember, this had been his room. Only a vague brightness, like a flash of blue, might have been the memory of another room he had slept in as a baby. That had been the nursery, a room next to his parents' old upstairs bedroom. Now both were empty except for bed frames and cardboard boxes. The nursery had bright blue wallpaper with white rabbits in diagonal rows, three slightly dissimilar rabbits repeated over and over from splashboard to picture molding. He hadn't looked into that room for a long time, but he would always remember the repetition of the three rabbits; the discovery of this small deception had always seemed to him an important step in his understanding of the ways of the world.

His own room had always been papered with the small, dark roses, most of them covered, now, by maps and pictures, by his pine gun rack and the back of his huge roll-top desk, a monster made of angry orange maple, with enough room in it for all his loading equipment, notebooks and papers.

He took a canister of black powder from one of its shelves and poured a thimbleful of the shiny grains into his palm, then tossed them into the fire. A soft whoosh, gray smoke in a solid, inside-out turning billow that the flue swallowed all at once in a silent gulp. Above the mantel, like a great nudge against the space of the room itself, hung the head of a bull moose with dusty staring eyes above its suitcase of a nose, and above them the spreading palmated antlers, where spiders lived. He'd found the moose head in the attic, shot long ago in Newfoundland by one of the hunting De Oestrises, combed and brushed it, painted in some of its mangy places and oiled the antlers. Now he hardly noticed it except when someone entered his room and looked above his head, quickly, as they always did. And yet that dark animal was up there, leaning anciently into the room.

He looked up at its pounds of nostrils; it seemed so much a thing of the past, so steady against this time of revolution and anxiety. The present was something tolerable mainly when it was possible to forget it, and his life itself either seemed over, so that he could look all the way back along its length, or not even begun. It would begin when he left Leah. Again he felt disloyal, this time toward all of his possessions. Of the four children's bedrooms, his was the most cluttered, the most personal, and yet he would leave all these things so easily. The clutter seemed childish. Except for the old oil painting of Mt. Chocorua in a gilt frame, a picture full of dark browns, where even the green of the trees was brownish, most of the pictures had been clipped from magazines and crudely matted. One of Cézanne's views of L'Estaque was next to a long photograph of an engraved Winchester Model ‘76, and next to that a painting by Aaron Bohrod of a dark city street in winter, and next to that a map of Southeast Asia with yellow-headed pins representing Japanese advances.

All of his things were mixed, pattemless, not quite what he really wanted. Because of the war he could no longer buy .22 shells or percussion caps, and sometimes the urge to shoot, to go out into the woods and deal with a reality that couldn't be denied, could not be called childish because there was the real blood, the real finality of the wild thing become still in his hand—sometimes the curtailment of this joy seemed to gray out his life, and a .22 Long Rifle hollow-point shell became as beautiful and meaningful an object as anything in the world.

And then, alternately, the joy of L'Estaque—what was that composed of, and was it more meaningful than a shell? Cézanne had made that bay, that sky, more powerful than any real view of any real place—a miracle. His own efforts, even though he sometimes worked on his own paintings so hard, and studied so hard he became bilious and fragile, never approached that clarity and power. His paintings were secret, and stood behind his desk, often painted out with white lead and begun again. His family knew he had paints, but after a while had never asked to see his work.

Last week, by accident, he had made a discovery that seemed so simple, afterwards, his excitement had been mixed with dread of his own blindness, as though in discovering light he had also discovered a congenital dimness of mind. He'd been scraping old paint from a canvas, and suddenly beneath his palette knife he found an impossible subtlety of color, then light, as though he were scraping paint from glass, and he looked through into sky. Not real sky with its artificial china-blue or dead flat gray, but a sky created, full of godlike power that flowed up through the knife into his hand. How could the opaque, garish paints in his tubes have been transmuted into such reality? But there it was, an unpaintlike texture of tiny scrapes and flakes, variations, upon close examination, mostly of browns and greens—these last so faint, so mixed with whites and grays they had to be identified by a deliberate effort of the mind. That one patch of power was the only successful thing he'd ever done with paints, and he hadn't touched it again because he knew what would happen to it the second he put paint on a brush and touched its translucency with mud.

Things almost worked, but nothing really worked, and some of the things in his life that seemed almost to work, like that orphan patch of sky, were accidents he could not quite yet study hard enough to understand. He was a virgin, yet he could at night call up in his mind any girl in school and take her, carefully and slowly until his semen lay hot on his chest, heavy with strangeness and egg smell, and what had been the sacred deep vessel of her was only his hand, and she had never been with him at all.