Whipple's Castle (68 page)

“How's mother taking it?” he said.

“Quietly. She sort of chirped and then she was quiet.”

“Dad?”

“I don't know. He came upstairs on his canes and now he's back downstairs. Horace helped carry Wood around, but Peggy really took charge of the whole thing until Dr. Winston got here.”

“She would,” he said. “I can see that.”

“I don't think he even sees her,” Kate said.

“Sees her?”

“I mean she loves him so much.”

“What's bothering him, anyway? Have you got any idea, Katie? Is it his leg and eye? I can't understand it if it's that.”

“I don't know. He's so unhappy. Nobody knows. Even Dad asked me if I knew.” She looked at him as though her eyes had focused for the first time since she'd entered the room. “Davy? What are all those scratches all over your face?”

He thought, perhaps too long. “I was hunting and I got caught in a blackberry patch.”

“Oh,” she said. “Hunting.”

“I better go see him, Katie. You know I have to.”

“Yes.” She lay back in the chair, looking exhausted and small. She wore her faded dungarees and an old blue dress shirt he'd given her at the beginning of the summer. Her pretty arms, coming out of the rolled sleeves of his old shirt, showed how slender she really was, compared to him.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “I bet we'll get all this straightened out.”

She stared up toward the moose, but not as though she saw it. “Davy, I thought you were going to show up at the dance last night.”

“I couldn't find a clean shirt. They're all out at the cabin.”

“Oh.”

“Did you have a good time?”

She looked at him, frowning unhappily. “I don't know. Davy, come back and talk to me, will you? After you see Wood? Can I stay here and wait for you?”

“Of course you can,” he said, but he thought: Oh, God, what did that shit do to her? He felt sick and responsible. In a way, he didn't want to hear, just as in one way he didn't want to have to see Wood.

He left her in his room and went to the bathroom to see how scratched up he really was. He washed off a few crusty lines of dried blood, but he'd still have explanations (lies) to make if anyone looked at him closely. Then he remembered that he hadn't taken Tom's sandbox out. He must get rid of any evidence that there had ever been a cat. Yes, quickly. He went down the back stairs to the kitchen, took the stinking box in his arms, lugged it out across the driveway and dumped the sand in the underbrush. The box he stamped flat and jammed into one of the trash cans. There.

But his mother was waiting for him in the kitchen, looking as though she knew something. “David, you've got to help us,” she said.

He was relieved, first, then a little frightened and wary. He thought of saying,
“I don't live here, you know. Just visiting, sort of.”

“It's about Wood. Your father and I can't…”

She was so upset. Her magnified eyes swiveled back and forth in her lenses.

“I know,” he said. “I'm going to see him now.”

“See your father too, Davy. Oh!”

“Don't cry, now, Hank,” he said. “You just wait and see if we don't get this all straightened out.” Liar, coward. He patted her shoulder, an easy gesture, and went through the dining room. Strange, knowing what he knew, that he yearned to have his father tell him what to do about Wood.

His father sat at his oak table, pale and overweight, a glaze of sweat on his forehead. He seemed at first to be reading the newspaper that lay on the table before him, but David saw that his eyes were distant and still.

“Dave,” he said. His eyes had flicked over and gone back. “God knows you must be closer to him than I ever was. What's eating him?” When he turned his head he looked old. His hair was sparse, darker and thinner than David had ever noticed before. His eyes were gummy in the whites, with brownish striations radiating out of the irises, as though the irises were slowly melting with age. When David looked away he saw in his mind a different picture of his father—in fact two different pictures, one fatter but more fierce and powerful, one a younger man startlingly like himself. It was the first time he'd ever considered himself to be what his father once was, and the cold hand of age and death brushed over them both.

“I don't know, unless it's his leg and all that.”

“But Christ, don't you think I know what it's like to be a cripple? Whipple the Cripple. For God knows how many years I was in pain all the time and I never tried to scrag myself!”

“Maybe it's something else,” David said.

“Jesus. Don't you kids think we ever loved you?”

“Yes, I guess so,” David said. His father seemed a little gross in his looseness of skin and emotion. Long curly hairs grew out of his nose.

“Of course we did!” his father said. “There was always a lot of yelling and screaming around our house, but when the chips were down, you goddam well knew your mother and I loved you!”

Was his father talking to Wood? “Maybe that isn't it either,” David said.

“What? Well, what is it? Why? Was it Lois Potter giving him the old heave-ho?”

“I think he more or less gave her the old heave-ho,” David said, regretting his repetition of those words.

“What? He did?” His father looked at him with real curiosity. “Lois Potter? Why, she's so pretty she'd give asthma to a brass monkey. You mean to say he broke it off?”

“That's what I think. She cried on my shoulder about it, anyway. Once she got over the shock of the leg and eye, she wanted him back. I think she was telling the truth about it. Maybe she just felt guilty, I don't know.” That had been a strange session, because at the same time he had been feeling genuinely sorry for Lois and patting her on the back, a sweet push of desire had come over him and he sneezed on her neck.

“I can't figure anything,” his father said.

“Me either.”

“Try to find out, Dave, will you? Christ, sometimes I don't think I have the right to feel so bad about it, I'm such a selfish son of a bitch. But I love that boy!” His father's voice broke and he turned his head directly away from David—an awkward, strained position. It was all wrong. There must still be power in this thronelike center of the great hall. When he thought of home, no matter where he was, it was first the man sitting tensely here, powerful and exciting, and then the other rooms and towers, all held together by the father at his broad oak table. He could laugh at him, and sometimes even half despise him, but the power had always been there.

“All right,” he said. Not wanting to look at his father any longer, he turned to go.

“Oh, Dave,” his father said.

“Yes?” His father's tone meant a change of subject.

“I meant to tell you about Ben Caswell.”

“What?”

His father turned the
Free Press
around on the table so he could see the short notice. After five years in a coma, Benjamin R. Caswell, twenty-one, had died of pneumonia.

“I guess it was a good thing,” his father said. “Their medical expenses must have been out of sight.”

“Good thing?” David said. He felt numb, really. He hadn't thought—not a trace of a thought—of Ben for a long time. It was as if the dead friend had risen from the grave for a last look into his concern before passing away. It had happened, Ben's accident, so long ago. So many things had happened since, things that Ben had never heard about.

“About Wood, Dave. We'll get this straightened out,” his father said.

Those words haunted David up the stairs.

Kate sat in David's big chair, waiting for him to come back. She smoked two of his cigarettes, trembling and then not trembling. For minutes at a time she thought neither of Wood nor of Gordon, but then she would have to come back to right now. She squirmed in sudden ghost pain, feeling things swimming inside her, where she was unprotected.

Last night when she'd come to her senses it was like coming up out of deep water, like a diver coming slowly back to the pressures and rules of another atmosphere. She was appalled at what she'd let him do. She hadn't remembered opening her legs. She'd cried for shame. But even now, horrified as she was, she remembered that delicious melting. She moved, half in shame and half in luxury. Then shame bleared the room.

All Gordon had seemed to feel afterwards was a good-humored sort of pleasure. He even tried to kid her about it, saying how she'd have to marry him. “You're used goods now, Kate,” he'd said. Then, quickly, he was tender. “Did I hurt you? I felt that little ring.”

“No,” she'd said coldly. She'd contemplated her new situation. She had been sexually used. Virginity did not seem a funny idea at all. How callous were the jokes she had once laughed at! While she lay there, confronting the enormity of what had happened to her, he took off the rest of his clothes. Of course it was a lie about his parents coming. In the firelight she saw his enormous penis shining. Then she was angry, nearly hysterical, and made him take her home.

He didn't speak until they stopped in the Whipples' driveway, then formally said again that he wanted to marry her, that he damned well would marry her, that he deliberately hadn't “used” anything because he wouldn't mind at all if he made her pregnant. He seemed so pleased at how he'd managed everything. She left him without answering and ran to the house.

And now, as if to show her how one didn't lightly play with life, Wood had tried to kill himself. Everything was too serious and deadly. She could hardly get a breath. When David came back she ran to him and held onto him. “David, I'm so unhappy! I don't know what to do!”

“Hey, Katie,” he said. His arms surrounded her, holding her steady, her nose pressed against his musty old shirt. “Hey, hey, Kate, now. What's the matter?”

She bawled against his chest, the noises coming out of her chest with pain, as though they were chunks of things. He patted her and patted her, crooning comforting sounds into her ear. Finally she could stop crying. She didn't want to let him go, but she had to blow her drippy nose. She didn't know how to tell him what she had to tell him.

“Is it Wood?” he said.

“Yes, but other things too, Davy. I feel so selfish! I should shut up.” She saw how worried he was. “How's Wood?” she managed to ask.

“Well, Peggy's taken over, I guess. But Katie—”

“How does he look, Davy?”

“He looks at Peggy—like he's looking at a ghost.” David took hold of her at arm's length and stared at her. “What else is it, Katie?”

“I don't know if I can tell you!” She was trembling so much he shook her a little as if to jar her out of it. “Davy, everything's mixed up. I feel like I'm being electrocuted or something.”

“Gordon Ward,” he said. His face grew cold, lumpy along his jaws.

“Yes, Davy, but—”

“What did the son of a bitch do to you?”

“I've got to tell somebody, Davy, and there isn't anybody but you.”

“Okay,” he said, obviously trying to be calm. “Sit down and I'll try not to act like your big brother.” Gently he sat her down in his easy chair again. He sat at his desk and gave her a cigarette. “I'm sorry, Katie. I've had a bad day too. Like a goddam nightmare. But we can talk, can't we?”

“Yes, Davy,” she said gratefully.

“We could always talk, couldn't we?” he said.

They were silent for a while.

“He asked me to marry him, for one thing,” she said finally.

“Katie, he's charming and all that, when he wants to be.”

“Don't I know it.”

“But he's a shit.”

“I guess so.”

“Did he…?”

“Yes.” It seemed too important a thing to answer yes or no to, but there it was. You did it or you didn't do it, and she had let Gordon do it. “But it was a combination of things, Davy!” She had to explain to him why it was so much an accident, because of everything that led up to it.

“Okay, tell me if you want to, Katie,” he said, and she knew she loved David and could trust him. She told him most of what had happened—the parts she could make words go around, with the words that were utterable in his presence.

“Are you sure he didn't use anything?” David said sternly. She felt that he was trying to salvage that part of the damaged goods that was salvageable.

“I'm not sure of anything, Davy. I mean it. I was out of my mind. I couldn't stop, you know? It felt so…like I was having a dream or something.”

“Did he pull out? Did he withdraw?”

“God, Davy. I wouldn't know. I'm not even sure what that means. I'm sorry.”

“He sure likes to get what he wants, doesn't he? The son of a bitch is thinking all the time. If it would do any good I'd maim him a little.”

“I think I loved him, Davy. I thought about marrying him.”

He got all excited. “For God's sake, don't even think about that! Don't even consider it! You could come to Chicago and we could take care of it. I mean it! By a real doctor too, no fly-by-night outfit.”

“God,” she said. She felt sick.

“You're too valuable to give to Gordon Ward. He doesn't even think the way you do, Katie. Listen to me! He's not like us—not like you, I mean. He's a different
species
or something from us. Just think of Wood and then think of him. Do you see what I mean? He's cold. He's like a fucking crocodile, Katie!”

Why, she thought, David has tears in his eyes. He has tears in his eyes, he means that so much.

“Oh, Davy, I love you,” she said. “There isn't anybody in the world I love as much as you.”

He took her hand. “Katie, this isn't the end of the world, you know. It was just the first time for you, and girls always have to be in love, or think they are. The only complication is if you get…” He had trouble with a word. “Pregnant. I can raise the money, though, easy. It's three hundred bucks. Nobody'd ever know about it. You could fly out and back, from school, and nobody'd ever know you were gone.”