Whipple's Castle (23 page)

And at the same time, secretly at first, and then with total loss of pride, her joy grew and grew and became, with a kind of pulsing color, enormous. The colors of Christmas. To be a ward of the Whipples and live (but would they let her?) in the Whipples' house! To have Christmas with them and their great tree with its beautiful electric lights, with Wood there. This was what she wanted more than anything in the world. Yes, more than anything. She wouldn't talk, she wouldn't speak unless spoken to. She would work hard and do anything they asked, if she could just sit in the shadows and be with them.

But why should they do this for her? There was no reason. A girl whose own mother had abandoned her? Their Christmas was their own, and they owed nothing of it to her. Christmas was private, for each family. She had no presents for them, only the compact she had saved up to buy for her mother, and the sewing kit Mrs. Andrews of the Red Cross had given her to send to her father. The compact was cheap and gaudy, with stars glued on it. Neither Mrs. Whipple nor Kate would want it.

Her mother had gone away for the men that wanted to go to bed with her. It was betrayal, because where was that love? Where was that love?

“Mother,” she said sorrowfully, tentatively. “Mother.” She heard her voice close up with self-pity, and thought of the choir, those full, open, joyful voices. She was listening to herself betrayed, to her own voice crying, and yet she was really inconsolable, and could not stop that retching sound.

The lamp was smoking. She must stop crying long enough to turn it down. Now, was that real sorrow? She carefully turned it down, because she had to. Or did she really have to? Yes, because she was not a baby, she was thirteen years old, and she couldn't let everything go crash, go black with soot. How was the fire in the oil stove? She had to look.

And then as she stood up to look at that fire, the word, as if to prove itself real, came unbidden as a hiccup and she was crying “Mother” in a voice so childish it frightened her.

 

David sat in the car outside Trotevale's Department Store, waiting for Kate and his mother. He was still a little hesitant about the clutch-accelerator-shift timing business, and now, because the car pressed forward against the curb, he practiced it with the motor off. Wood had taught him to drive without too much trouble, with very little anger on either side. For this he was grateful.

As everybody knew, the 1941 Chevrolet was a fine car—a very good year for Chevrolet. The ‘42 model, while more streamlined, had painted bumpers and drably painted trim, because of the chrome shortage. Even the grille of the ‘42 was painted. But the ‘41 stood light and high, and glittered nicely under its coat of simonize. It was miraculous the way the car went where he pointed it. Even though no one was supposed to go over thirty-five miles per hour, in order to conserve gas and tires, the wonder of that motion free of work and sweat—no pushing, no pedaling, with the trees and turns going effortlessly by—was enough for him. It seemed that all at once, with his birthday and his driving license, time had suddenly moved, and he had advanced significantly toward real life.

He leaned back, conscious of his commanding presence before the dials and controls, and lit a Chesterfield. The night was warm, and both side windows were rolled down, so the smoke traveled right out the window.

Ben Caswell came along, skinny and whey-faced, always chilly-looking in a mackinaw that was inches too short in the sleeves. “Well,” Ben said enviously, “are you driving or just sitting there?”

“Driving,” David said. “I took Kate and my mother shopping, that's all.”

“There's a war on,” Ben said. “That's nonessential travel, isn't it?”

“Don't be a meatball,” David said.

Ben leaned carefully against the fender and rubbed one long, grayish wrist. “Listen,” he said. “You know why we're losing the war? I just read an article that says we ought to make cartridge cases out of gold. We've got plenty of gold, but we don't have enough copper.”

“Sure.”

“No, I'm telling the truth, Davy. What good is gold if you're losing the war?”

“I didn't think we were losing it.”

“I didn't say we were going to lose it, eventually. I just said we're losing it now,” Ben said. This was typical Ben Caswell hairsplitting—one of the reasons he and David quite often ended their arguments flat on the ground. That is, their arguments never really ended at all; after the bruises, bloody noses and recriminations had replaced them, they simply faded away.

“You know how the War Production Board classifies gold? ‘Plentiful; to be substituted whenever possible for anything critical.' That's a direct quote.”

And it would be too. With Ben, it never paid to get over on the shifty ground of fact. David thought awhile. Gold was too malleable for the pressures of military cartridges, and it would weigh too much. “You mean make the cartridge cases out of gold, or the bullets? Or what?” he asked slyly.

But Ben, as usual, saw this feint and realized the counterarguments, whether or not they had been in the magazine article. “Of course not,” he said disgustedly. “I mean, to use it as an alloy in place of copper, to cut down corrosion and give the necessary malleability to the metal.”

So he had known this all the time. Ben Caswell was, by common consent, the smartest boy in Leah High School, and he didn't mind proving it, ever. A slow red fog seemed to cover David's vision. As usual with Ben he felt maneuvered, like an experimental rat. Ben had deliberately exaggerated from the very beginning by saying that cartridge cases were to be made “out of gold,” and while David sensed a fallacy here, he had no words to use in pointing it out. Ben was always doing these infuriating logical experiments on him, and would even occasionally give him patronizing compliments, as if to say “Your mind, though crude, is rather interesting.” David couldn't remember how many fist fights they'd had in the last five years.

But here he sat, commandingly, negligently, authoritatively behind the wheel of a car, while skinny Ben stood in a frosty puddle, shivery in a mackinaw he'd outgrown, rubbing his gray-blue knuckles and no place to go. The fog of anger passed as he watched Ben, now hickish and vulnerable, jiggle in the puddle and look up and down the street. Mary Denney and her older sister came along, both carrying packages, and when Mary saw him sitting in the driver's seat and said “Hi,” he answered and Ben didn't. Ben had always lived and acted as though girls didn't exist. If David ever talked about girls, he now realized, it was never with Ben Caswell. Although he supposed he spent more actual time with Ben than with anyone else, and therefore Ben was probably his best friend, they always talked about the war, or of technical, mechanical things, never about girls. He would never dare to ask Ben why this was so—which was a powerful and interesting thing in itself.

His mother and Kate came out of the wide, framed glass doors of Trotevale's, Mr. Hummington himself holding the door for them and wishing them Merry Christmas in his clipped, efficient way, his mauve-colored glasses glinting in the Christmas lights. They carried their too easily identifiable packages in their arms—neckties, socks, shirts—all uninteresting items. Ben grew nervous as they approached, ducked his head, and backed into the side of the car parked in the next parking place.

“Hello, Ben,” his mother said, and Ben said, “H'lo.” To her only, not to Kate.

“Hello, Ben,” Kate said directly to him, and Ben said, “Mmm-hmm.”

Kate smiled at Ben rather humorously and cruelly, but with good nature. David couldn't help smiling. He felt Kate's power, and it was so much more powerful than Ben Caswell's brilliant mind.

“Have you done your tree yet, Ben?” his mother asked as she stowed the packages in the back seat. “We're doing ours tonight.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “Last night.” Ben's father was a mailman, and they lived in a house that was almost miniature. It had many rooms in it, but they were all small. The Caswells always had a tree about four feet high, which Ben's mother covered with so many lights, balls, icicles, ropes of cellophane and tinsel that it looked like a big, glowing, icy hump. It was hard to tell if there was a real tree under there at all.

When the packages were all stowed away in the back seat, his mother got in back with them and Kate got in the front. Ben said, “You think about it, Davy.”

“Think about what?” David said.

“The gold. The gold,” Ben said with a kind of vague importance. He ambled back sideways, stepped up on the sidewalk and raised one thin arm rather significantly but still vaguely as he departed. He seemed to fade away, and David was grateful that he hadn't stayed to see him start the car and back out into the street, because sometimes, especially in reverse, he would let the clutch out too quickly and the car would buck and stall. This time it went all right. He backed up carefully, stopped without too much of a jerk, selected low, just remembered the function of the clutch in time, and they began to cruise slowly around the decorated square. He found second a little late, but that was all right, and they were finally safe in high on Bank Street. The hill at the beginning of High Street had been well sanded, so he didn't anticipate any trouble there, although a certain nervous stimulation made his left leg jump a little.

The engine hummed along smoothly, with that particular Chevy sound of friendly tappets tapping. On the road in the headlights, the slightly raised areas of compressed snow shone against the asphalt like maps of Baffin Land or Labrador before the wheels thumped lightly over them. The car had hardly warmed up before they reached High Street, where they would have to climb the hill in low. He glanced longingly at the wide street they had to leave. It went out of Leah and became Route 4, passed Cascom and Cascom Center and led south to all the states and cities. But he had to turn toward his home and the coziness of the ceremony of the tree.

He liked Christmas, although not as much as he used to. But what if the car were his, he had all the money and gas he wanted, and his suitcase was packed and safely in the trunk. He could cruise southward all through the warm December night. He would be twenty-six, a discharged veteran scarred not unhandsomely by shrapnel, wearing tweedy civilian clothes. Only in the bottom of his suitcase, in a plain flat box, would be his medals—the ones he showed nobody. In fact she would find them there by accident—the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. She would find them one night in her apartment in New York when she happened to look in his suitcase for a pack of cigarettes. Then, holding the medals before her suddenly glowing, understanding eyes, she would know why he hadn't answered the drunken sailor in the nightclub who had called him a shirker.

The headlights centered on the old stall at the rear of the garage, on cobwebs as thick as molasses between the rounded dark crossbars. He did think of the clutch, so the car didn't stall. He let it idle for a second and turned it off with the key. Kate and his mother bustled happily, gathering their presents, and the engine creaked as it cooled.

“You take these, David,” his mother ordered. “I think one is yours, so don't squeeze.”

 

After they'd come in from shopping and put the packages in one of the hall closets, Harvey said to Henrietta, “Betty Mudd was here.”

“What was the matter?” she answered immediately, and he wondered if she knew about what had gone on up there in the sugarhouse long ago. Not only up there, as a matter of fact, but in various other places as the opportunity had presented itself. They'd even had some close calls, and how Bertram Mudd ever managed not to know was an interesting problem in the psychology of cuckoldry. But then, maybe he did, and maybe Hank knew too, somewhere deep. Did he notice a slight extra keenness in her eye as he spoke of Betty?

“She left town,” he said.

“Left town?”

“She thinks she has a job in Worcester at a dollar an hour, plus time and a half for overtime, whatever the hell that is. She's going to make sixty bucks a week. That's what she thinks, anyway. I wonder if they pay fifty cents an hour for undertime,” he said, and laughed.

“What about Peggy?” she said, ignoring his laughter.

“We're to take care of Peggy until she gets settled, and then, if she happens to remember that she has a daughter, she's supposed to send for her.”

“Oh, poor Peggy!” Hank's face went dark with concern, and her eyes blinked behind the magnifying glasses. “Just before Christmas.”

“You know she'd be happy as hell to live here for a while.”

“That isn't it!” Hank said angrily, surprising him. “You don't understand anything! Where is she now? Is she up there all alone and it's nearly ten o'clock? That woman ought to be—”

“Take it easy. I sent Wood and Horace up to get her.”

“Sometimes I wonder about all you people,” she said. “There's a callousness about you. Sometimes I think Horace—yes, Horace!—is the only one with any human understanding.”

“Well,” he said, “I don't mind having Peggy around. She's at least one poor soul I can feel sorry for.”

 

Wood knocked on the tarpaper-covered door. Horace stood behind him, and he felt that Horace was greatly upset. He seemed to be hiding, because he didn't have to stand directly behind—there was room beside him where Peggy had shoveled around the door.

She opened the door and looked up at him with the dreamy look of crying on her dim little face. Poor Peggy, he thought, poor little Peggy. She looked like a little woods animal just born and abandoned, frizzled and damp, with the last of its warmth going out. She was a few months older than Kate, but she looked younger and much more immature, as though the way she'd had to live, and the food she'd had to eat, had stunted her, and somehow kept her skin dark.

“Hello, Peggy,” he said. His father had told him that she didn't know her mother had gone, but it looked as though she did.