Whipple's Castle (34 page)

His mother had written, asking him to write more letters to Horace, but what could he say to Horace? The world was full of Horaces; he was in a whole platoon of Horaces. An incident at the gas area had somehow proven the prevalence of Horaces—how, he didn't quite know, but it had been profoundly depressing. After going into the tear-gas chamber, removing their gas masks and giving their name, rank and serial number to a masked cadre sergeant, they were assembled outside and given a lecture on gases, how each one smelled and so on. He had thought of Al Coutermarsh, and wondered which kind of gas had injured his lung. After the lecture small charges were exploded, of lewisite, mustard, phosgene and chlorine, and they had to smell the faint wisps of smoke and fill out a little mimeographed quiz on the subject. Some of the men were whispering the answers to each other when a lieutenant said sarcastically, “Don't bother to cheat, men. You won't flunk out of the infantry.”

Wood had found himself nodding with satisfaction. Good, this was where he belonged. But soon he was depressed. Poor Horaces, all of them, responding in senseless ways to what was immaterial, habitual, stupid, irrelevant. Was that it? The incident didn't seem to warrant such depression. But that wasn't the only cause of it, of course. One of the Horaces of the world was his flesh and blood, his brother, whom he had badly hurt, and perhaps even more depressing than that, today Sergeant Garbanks had ordered him to report to Captain Harry T. Jones, who had practically ordered him to appear before the Officer Candidate Board a week from now.

He couldn't think of a way to say no to the captain, who had looked at him carefully, looked away, and then looked more closely at him. A strangely familiar thing had happened; he had heen recognized, as Al Coutermarsh had recognized him in Milledge & Cunningham. There was that look of recognition and equality.

But he must sleep now, to the distant mumble of the guns. He must sleep. What could he do, go around with his lower lip hanging out, and a pendulum of drool on his chin? No, they would still find him out. The captain had said, “Whipple? At ease.” He pronounced it Whey-pul? like a question, drawling it easily and slowly as if it had several syllables in it. “Sergeant Garbanks allows you have officer potential?”

“I don't know, sir,” Wood said, but the captain didn't choose at first to let him mean what he really meant. The captain's eyes widened for just a second and became clear and cold. He went on in his relaxed, soft yet ominous drawl. “The Officer Candidate Board meets next week at battalion headquarters, and I would like for you to be there.”

“Well, sir—” Wood said, but the captain interrupted him.

“It's a bad war over there. You know that, don't you? And we do what we ought to do, if we can do it? Now, we have a terrible need of infantry officers, and them that have the potential, why I feel it is no less than their duty. Whey-pul? To take on that responsibility.”

“Yes sir,” Wood said. “But—”

“You going to tell me you don't think you have officer potential?” The captain smiled coolly. “You just take a careful look around this company. How we going to take these misfits into combat and bring some of ‘em back whole? Can you answer that? Some of us got to wipe their noses and tell ‘em which way to run. We got to tell ‘em what to do, because they sure not going to figure it out for themselves.”

“Yes sir,” Wood said, but he hadn't given in, and the captain knew it.

“You think it over a few days more, and I'm going to ask you one more time. Dismissed.”

He must sleep. All around him the sleeping men huffed and puffed, snored and sighed. Down the row of bunks someone squeaked loudly in complaint against his dream.

His mother's letters were always short and nongossipy:

 

Dear Wood,

We are all fine & hope you are. Dad's leg doesn't seem any worse & he is quite cheerful about the new ball bearing factory & his two tenements. He didn't get the rent he thought from each apt. but good money & you know how much that means to him now. Gordon Ward Sr. foreclosed Sam Davis' farm & Sam is working in the new factory & being janitor to the two tenements. Seems to be working out all right as he is on the night shift & does his janitor work days.

Saw Lois & she says she writes to you. She is so pretty. She is going to Smith College in the fall but I suppose you know that.

One favor I would like. Will you write to Horace? Your letters mean so much to him, Wood. He has been different since you left & not better at all. Last Wed. he woke us all up screaming he was so scared of those things he imagines. I do hate to bother you with these troubles & I know you have your own life to live in the Army, but Horace needs to know you think of him. Kate misses you, & Peggy most of all. You sure have an admirer there! David says Al Coutermarsh & Beady (?) send you their best. So do we all.

Love,
Mother

 

When he'd read the words about Horace screaming he trembled with fear for Horace, and felt the boy's desperation; tears came to his eyes. Horace would hate so much to have to scream for help. The monsters must have been doing something awful to him.

But sleep, he must sleep. Once his mother had told him to think of a tall pine, rising, rising slowly up toward the sky, branches and trunk, needles, branches and smooth trunk growing forever upwards, smoothly rising. He would see this calm tree clear, and think of nothing.

That Saturday Stefan took him on pass into Macon to meet his wife and child, who were living in a two-room apartment on the third floor of a wooden tenement. The rent was too high, the cockroaches passed along the mopboards in convoys, and when it rained, Stefan had told him, the punky plaster walls turned damp, and the flowered wallpaper changed color, like litmus paper. The small rooms—kitchen-living room and bedroom—smelled of damp paper and glue. Not even the smells of cooking could compete with that smell, and the apartment, hastily partitioned from what had been a larger one, did not seem whole—seemed not sure, somehow, of its walls. The kitchen was obviously not a kitchen, but a room into which a stove, an icebox and a sink had been placed. An overstuffed sofa and a bridge lamp formed the living-room side of it. The bathroom was communal, down a short hallway with a tilted, linoleum floor. The frame of one window was flush against a partitioning wall, behind which a radio played at that low, constant volume, its occasional voices not quite understandable, that indicates it is always on, from waking until sleep and perhaps beyond.

Lenore Stefan was a thin, homely girl not much older than Wood. Her chief asset and chief vanity was a mane of long black undulating hair, silky and soft and well kept. Her narrow face was slashed with lipstick, and between the vivid red and the luxuriant black, Lenore herself seemed to peer out shyly. She was very shy of him; when she smiled she was always in the process of looking away, so that she continued to smile at a window or a wall. Her nose was long, and gave the impression of lumpiness, yet when he looked closely Wood saw that it was an ordinary sort of nose, just too long, and indecisive toward its end.

She seemed too fragile—she and Stefan both—to have been taken from Delaware, Ohio, and made to come to this soldier town. She could see Stefan only on Sunday or an occasional weekend, and few of them because of his tendency to get guard duty and K.P.

She knelt at the icebox and got them each a bottle of beer, and when she put the bottles on the table to open them, Stefan noticed a Band-Aid on her thumb.

“What happened?” he said worriedly, taking her hand.

“Oh, I just cut myself on a can.”

“You must be more careful,” Stefan said.

“Now, George. I'm the one that's careful,” she said, pleased. A flash of her smile was directed at Wood, to show him how silly and nice was her husband's concern. “It's just a little tiny cut. You want to see?” Stefan nodded gravely, and she peeled back the tape and let him see. He gazed at her thumb, holding her hand in both of his—that strange, seal-like stare, slightly walleyed, as though he looked at infinity. Finally he nodded, and she pressed the tape back smooth and opened the two bottles.

“You want a glass, Wood?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” he said. The baby uttered a plaintive, questioning sound from the other room, and she went quickly after it. She came back with a large baby, pink and white, in blue pajamas, with a fat fist in its eye.

“Georgie woke up,” she said to the baby, “Little Georgie just woke up!”

The way she stood, her skinny but womanly hips forward, with the clear small bulge of her belly showing through the shiny rayon of her print dress, seemed pathetic to Wood. Her pelvis seemed open, canted toward openness, generous though skimpy in a childish way. Pop Stefan looked at her and at his child as though he were a child acting the part of a father. Yet this was real, and these two children had managed somehow, God knew how, to come together, to have made this child, even to have arrived here in this slum. Below on the streets the soldiers prowled. The whole city seemed dark, a jungle of olive drab, whiskey, fighting and vomit. The Negroes here seemed darker, blacker than any he had ever seen, and they prowled too, frightened and dangerous. The mattresses of the cheap hotels were full of bedbugs and lice, the women of venereal disease. Waitresses slugged the dregs of the soldiers' glasses, and the officers who had to walk on the sidewalks tried to miss the soldiers' eyes in order to save their tired arms from the constant saluting. It was a city of strangers, where the military police cruised along the alleys in jeeps, and areas of whole blocks were off limits.

Stefan coughed deeply, his hand over his mouth, the uneven bones of his shoulders turning. It was as if Wood could see a diagram of his awkwardly cantilevered bones.

Lenore was heating Georgie's bottle in a pan of water, and Stefan held Georgie, who cried, then stared, his face wrinkling and unwrinkling, in focus and out.

“He was born with an enlarged thymus gland,” Stefan said. “And Lenore didn't make enough milk, she's so little up there. We had quite a time of it, didn't we, Georgie?” He chuckled and crooned into Georgie's damp pink ear. “He's fine now, though. He's a healthy baby now, isn't he, Georgie? Isn't he?”

Georgie stared from his olive-colored eyes, and hit the table a miniature blow with his fist.

After a while, Wood said goodbye to Pop Stefan and Lenore. “See you Monday morning,” he said. When Stefan's face grew stiff, almost ashy at this prospect, he wished he hadn't said it.

“You won't have supper with us?” Lenore said.

“I said I'd meet Perrone and Quillen,” Wood said. This was almost a lie—there had been only a vague sort of arrangement. He knew the Stefans had no time for company, and hardly any money. What he really meant to do was to go by the hotel and if Perrone and Quillen weren't in its bar—called “The Boiler Room”—he'd buy a magazine, eat while reading it in some restaurant, then take an early bus back to camp. This seemed a pleasant enough prospect. The city depressed him; it felt invaded, and in the eyes of the civilians he found a mixture of greed and disgust that amounted to disease. At least the Army camp was free of this. On a weekend when the company was on pass it would be free of about everything, in fact.

As he walked back downtown, keeping an eye out for officers he would have to salute, he thought of the pleasantness of an evening by himself. He preferred this emptiness. He would not think of the Stefans, would not pity them, would not tremble for them. Macon was full of such people, some of them doomed—maybe all of them. He could see the thin girl-mother, the unhealthy scraped color of her legs. Did she and Stefan take each other seriously? Could they believe in their own future, and if so what did they foresee? He saw her having her periods, her headaches, babies, sniffles, bowel movements, intercourse with her frail and awkward husband. On and on, so real because it would go on for a while, and yet not real. If for some reason he went back to the Stefans' apartment, would they still be there? It was as if the Stefans were made of cardboard and weren't aware of it. They thought they were real, but the damp would creep in and they would grow spongy and disintegrate, and no one would ever really be called upon to care very much.

Stefan had gone to Ohio Wesleyan for two years, then lost interest in college, then sold advertising for the local newspaper, but didn't sell much. He'd tried to sell other things, he'd told Wood with as little interest in the telling as there had been in the doing. Selling was always there for a while, for those who couldn't do it. What Stefan really wanted was to be home with Lenore, where they could play, and she could get him his dinner. He was color-blind, and was amazed that the Army took him. He hadn't got over that amazement yet, and if he didn't it might kill him.

Wood cursed himself and kept walking. He saluted a captain with a service forces patch on his shoulder, a harried-looking captain whose garrison cap wasn't on straight, an obvious civilian type. Somewhere down a side street an MP's whistle blew, shrill as a scream, and in the comer of his eye, in the corner of his head, was the feeling of running and of fear.

Perrone and Quillen were in The Boiler Room, and saw him as he stood in the door. The big room was full of the khaki of the summer uniforms.

“Hey, Whip!” Perrone yelled, standing up and motioning him over. It always gave Wood the feeling, when he was called this name, that he was impersonating his father. Perrone's square, dark face split and there was the flash of his huge grin. Wood sometimes found himself counting Perrone's teeth. “Hey, you Yankee bastard!” The word came out “basstid.” Perrone came from what he called “Goombahdaville—Seconanyeh.” This meant Second Avenue, in Manhattan. But soon Wood understood Perrone's language clearly enough, even when, for ironic and sometimes crazy reasons of his own, he spoke half in Italian. These Italian phrases he translated in the same breath.
“Mangia
qualunque cosa mangefran'—he
eats anything.” This about poor fat Smallers in the mess hall.