Whipple's Castle (30 page)

Their advisor was Miss Palmer, who thought Wayne was a genius, so she didn't advise much; she mostly said “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “Isn't that beautiful!” Which was good, in a way, because Wayne had changed
The Quill
considerably during his editorship. He was awfully hard on girls who wrote stories about how a fluffy little chick feels when it first pecks its way out of its shell and views the great, wide, wonderful world. He could be positively mean. He'd put Carol Oakes into tears over her poem about the sun falling, falling, to the forest floor. The first thing he'd changed last fall, when he'd become editor in chief, was the cover, which had always had the same drawing of a quill pen on it.

“If we're going to have a silly, stereotyped name like
The
Quill,
all we can do is try to use it as best we can,” he said. Now his covers were different every issue. His first one was a caricature of a porcupine, and that was the one he was proudest of. The issue they were working on now would have a cover with one big rose on it. “The thorns,” Wayne said. “That's our
motif—
beauty with a sting in it.”

This afternoon Kate was typing on stencil some of Wayne's poems. She wasn't officially an editor yet, because she wouldn't be in ninth grade until the fall. She had turned fourteen, though, and Wayne called her his “editorial assistant.”

Wayne sat across from her with several piles of manuscripts, alternately groaning and sighing judiciously. “My God,” he said, dropping his hand upon a pile of notebook paper. He resumed his reading. “Hmm. Listen to this: ‘The sun stank up the sky like a big greasy fried egg.' Hmm. Some talent there. A squeak of talent. That is, providing the inelegance of that simile is altogether deliberate. Hmm.”

She thought him handsome. His thin neck rose up out of the large open collar of his white shirt, then widened perceptibly just below his long, aristocratic ears. His dark hair, always worn long, partially covered the bows of his gold-rimmed glasses. Above his forehead, through the heavy dark hair, a narrow streak of white went up and over the top of his head. This was a strange natural mark that distinguished him from everyone else—the reason David and others sometimes called him “Skunkhead.”

No one ever picked on Wayne, except to call him insulting names, and she sometimes wondered why they didn't torment him more, because Wayne made no concessions to the way they thought a boy should act. “You are simply being vulgar,” he would say to them, give a haughty toss of his head and stride away on some business or other he considered important.

She turned back to her typing.

 

Eld, coin-silver, gilt-medallion form,
The deep fish drops through his fadings
Down where flesh is wafer to bright
Teeth…

 

Wayne came around and stood behind her, reading his poem over her shoulder.

“You don't, probably, see an admitted influence here. Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be brutally candid.” He put a thin, cool finger through her hair and lightly touched her ear. “Ah, Veronica,” he said. Sometimes he told her she looked like Veronica Lake. “No, let's put it this way,” he'd said once, “Veronica Lake is privileged to resemble our Kate Whipple.”

He drew his finger down to her shoulder, touched her lightly, and abruptly went back to his side of the desk. She shivered. There he sat, once more completely absorbed in his reading. She typed some more.

 

Waves no more the bright air push;
Hushed in iron deep the bleak teeth
Grind
Upon the needful bodies of the fish.
Oh! Dark Prince of fathoms down!
Where mariners dream from blind
White eyes,
Allow me power to look…
And then return!

 

She shivered again, full of admiration. Wayne's thin wrist and hand rested across the disordered manuscripts, and his white skin was clean. But
iron,
she thought, given a dark princely iron value by the depths of his mind. He seemed ten times stronger than any other boy. No, he didn't even live in the same world as they. He was David's age, yet she couldn't conceive of him zooming around on a bike. He walked, always fast, always intently not quite there, always unconscious of himself, always with his big leather briefcase swinging. Sometimes his gestures, even his walk, were delicately girlish, and when he crossed his legs he never put his ankle on his knee, but crossed them completely.

 

Oh! There is fair vision yet
In such rueless dark
Where freak cracked forms must pulse neon
And sign their bones in that bleak dark!
Give me to look!

 

As far as she could understand it, the poet wanted, in a sort of gruesomely cruel way, to look straight at a kind of hell. She thought of poor Horace, who always tried not to look, but was always finding monsters in every comer. As for herself, she didn't want to look at such things either, but she wanted to be near Wayne, and to listen to him. She had a real crush on him, all right. She felt unworthy, because she couldn't write or say anything half as serious or clever as he could. She knew she was pretty, but using this seemed the worst sort of cheating, and it made her even more unworthy. At least she could work hard on
The Quill,
and do more typing than any of the other editors.

Carol Oakes was supposed to be an editor, but she never did anything any more, and Mary Denney ran around a lot, supposedly getting advertisements and looking for new material, but actually the same old advertisements appeared in each issue—Trask's Pharmacy, Trotevale's Department Store, the Thorn McAn Shoe Store and the rest.

But even all this extra work was cheating, wasn't it? The only real qualifications one needed for Wayne's company—the company of wit and style and charm—were wit and style and charm. She could make a joke once in a while, but that was about it.

Oh well, back to work. Maybe Wayne would walk her home. If he didn't, she would think of an excuse to walk down street with him.

At five Mrs. Jarvis, in her kindly but ponderous fashion, shooed them out of the school. Mary Denney had come in just before, and the three of them stood on the front steps, looking at the four big piles of scrap iron for the war effort—one for each of the senior-high classes. The junior-class pile was much bigger than the others, mainly because of Junior Stevens' grandfather's farm truck, which Junior could drive. Also, Junior seemed to know where every old rusted cultivator or hay rake had been abandoned long ago. If this was a redeeming quality it was Junior's only one. He was a dull brute of a farm boy, and an imitator of Gordon Ward's. Ugh.

It was a warm day, with the new leaves green as lettuce, and the hard rusty iron seemed rather brutal itself the way it was piled among the hedges and young grass.

Without having to give a reason, she began walking down-street with Mary and Wayne. Mary lived on the way, and she left them where she had to turn off, on Union Street. When they reached the square, Kate remembered that she had no money at all, so she couldn't go to Trask's as an excuse for this walk. She would leave Wayne there at the door to the stairs that led up to the apartments, then merely walk around the square and back home. But when they reached the sidewalk opposite the stairs Wayne said rather offhandedly, “Come up and I'll make you a cup of tea.” •

She considered this. To go up to the place where he lived. She would see his desk, his room, where he washed his face, where he slept. Up the dark stairs were those rooms she had never seen.

“All right,” she said. She was trembling, and her knees were a little weak as she climbed the long flight of wooden stairs. A smell of varnish and old cooking was in the hall, a smell that seemed as yellowish-brownish as the painted walls and moldings.

Wayne unlocked his door and moved her inside. “Here are our sumptuous quarters,” he said. His hand slid around the doorframe and found a wall switch. They had entered a small kitchen-dining room. The overhead-light globe contained two moths and various flies, whose shadows fell upon the maple dinette table, where salt and pepper shakers and a sugar bowl stood centered upon a crocheted mat. Dimly, through a doorway, were the somnolent slits of dropped Venetian blinds. The fat curve of an antimacassar predicted an overstuffed chair. The ceilings were very low, and the air was rich with the same varnishy smell of the hall. It all seemed very strange and exotic, and her heart was beating hard.

Wayne pulled out a kitchen chair and waved her to it, then quickly filled a teakettle and put it on the gas stove to boil. “There,” he said. “As you can see, the place is sordid. Mother's taste in such matters is not mine, and I await the hour of my escape.”

“Your father?” she asked.

“A good question. Yes, there generally is one of them around, isn't there?” He seemed completely unaffected by this question, his face calm. He leaned negligently against the counter. “I can barely remember him. Sometimes I don't think I actually remember him at all. I might be remembering the milkman or some other man who had to come to wherever we were living.”

“But where's your mother?” Kate said.

“She works late today.”

“Oh.” She was alone with him in his apartment, and that was even more exciting.

“In any case, according to my mother he departed without warning. I sometimes wonder if there weren't warnings the poor old girl didn't happen to notice, but that's neither here nor there.” He got down a brown teapot and spooned some black tea from a canister.

“We hardly ever have tea at home,” she said.

He shrugged and peered at the kettle. “It whistles when the water boils. Come, I'll show you the rest of the place.”

The living room, with its low ceiling, was so stuffed with furniture it seemed more a storage place than a room to live in. But she was used to the high ceilings of the castle (“Veronica of the High Castle,” he'd called her). The wallpaper was alternate green and white vertical stripes, each about six inches wide, which gave her the feeling of being inside a Christmas box.

They skipped one door that must have been his mother's bedroom, and he opened another door. “My inner sanctum,” he said. This room was different. The bed was a mattress that lay right on the floor, although it was neatly made up. Across one wall was a bookcase made of red bricks with boards running across them, and against the opposite wall was a kitchen table obviously used as a desk because there were papers and books and pencils on it. The one picture in the room, she recognized—the yellow-green portrait of a young man by Van Gogh.

“My ivory tower,” he said.

In one way, at least, she was sorry for him. He had no friends. But who in Leah would he want for a friend? “Aren't you lonely sometimes?” she asked him.

He looked down at her and smiled benignly. “My feeling is that I'm in prison,” he said. “My brain is imprisoned in this…adolescent body. At least I know that in two or three years I'll be able to go out of these doldrums into the real world.”

“That's what David says!”

“David?” he said with distaste, his lip curling a little bit. “I doubt if we desire admittance to the same world.”

“Maybe not,” she said. It did seem sometimes that David was only a boy running around with toys, like his guns.

The teakettle in the kitchen began to whistle, so they moved back through the furniture. “That's the bathroom,” he said, pointing to another door. “My mother's room is over there, and now you've seen the limits of my cage.”

He set the tea to steeping and they sat down.

“I wonder,” he said, looking steadily into her eyes. “I wonder if you know what you are.”

“What do you mean?” No boy but Wayne, except for David, maybe, had ever looked her straight in the eyes and spoken calmly.

“You know you're an extremely beautiful girl.”

She would have resented that, but the way he said it—so calmly, with no cuteness or false sarcasm—took away her resentment. It was as though he were speaking to her about someone else, or about some objective quality she needn't blush about. He seemed to be inviting her honest opinion.

“All right, yes,” she said, but she did blush, and her ears felt warm.

“A gift of the gods,” he said. “A gift of the gods.” He said this sadly, and rose to get the teacups and saucers from a cupboard. He poured the tea, and offered her sugar from the bowl. Each of his calm gestures seemed stranger and more grown-up than the last.

“There must be something wrong with you,” he said. “Isn't there some little defect somewhere?” She thought of the mole down there, and shivered. “You're bright, you're not narcissistic…”

“What's that?”

“Narcissus so admired his reflection in the water he fell in and drowned.”

“Sometimes I feel like a freak,” she said.

“I'd ask you to be proud of it, but that might ruin you, Kate.” He stood up. “May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“It's a favor. Now don't get all worried.”

She was, suddenly, frightened, but it was exciting. “What is it?” she said quickly.

“I'd like to comb your hair. Isn't that rather silly. But I'd like very much to comb your hair. I have a beautiful ivory comb. Wait, I'll show it to you.” He went through the other room and in a minute came back with a wide yellow comb, very old and crazed with tiny hairlike cracks. One end was a handle, turned and carved with squares and little egg shapes.

“It's so old,” she said. He picked it out of her fingers and moved behind her. It occurred to her that she hadn't given him permission. The teeth were like little fingers at first, that didn't seem to pull, but only to smooth. She wondered if he was using the toothed edge at all.

“Ah,” he said. She felt him kneel behind her chair. “No, stand up,” he said, getting up himself. She obeyed, and he moved her chair away. This time the comb drew deeper. A snarled strand cracked like a small electric shock, so small she wasn't sure she felt at all, it was such a small part of the massive gentle pull of the comb. Her chin rose, and the surface of her throat grew sensitive and at the same time languid. Each hair seemed to go deeper than her scalp. As he parted her hair it was like the cold slit of a knife, or a razor, and then the smoothness again. There was static, but those little snaps were nothing; they were like the tiniest little silverfish in a deep calm river. She loved to have her hair combed, and she began to feel all golden and ivory. The cups of dark tea grew darker, and incredibly round.