Whipple's Castle (51 page)

“You're a love, Horace. You're so nice. You really are.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Oh, Horace!” she said, smiling. “And I love you too. Very much!”

But the next Friday when he came she looked awful. She looked older, with puffy places below her eyes and even at the sides of her mouth.

“What's the matter?” he asked. She sat hunched over, drinking black coffee. Her white blouse was dirty.

“Oh me,” she said, trying to smile. “It's a combination of a hangover and the wrong time of the month, I guess.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Maybe I'll have a little hair of the dog,” she said. “Ooo, my achin' head!”

Black visions swam through his mind. Monthly, hangover, hair of the dog. He knew vaguely that women had a bad thing at certain phases of the moon. It was a curse they bore for being women, for being able to give birth. They bled. The hair of a dog he didn't understand, but it was monstrous, bestial enough to go with the other.

“A little hair of the dog that bit me,” she said, and got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. “It's a saying, Horace, when the dog is alcohol. Oh, here, before my mind goes blank.”

She had the due rents ready, and a list of materials her father had bought for repairs to the two buildings—toilet floats, faucet washers, lumber, nails, paint, glazing compound, and three 7” x 9” lights. Horace was learning about these things, and now knew that lights meant panes of glass and not light bulbs.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked. She stood at the table, leaning on the knuckles of one hand while she drank out of the bottle.

“Oh, Horace, I'm sorry to be such a slob. I meant to take a bath and change before you came, but I crapped out on the davenport.”

“That's okay,” he said.

She sat down and leaned back in the kitchen chair, her eyes shut. “I know it's awful, but a girl gets lonely, Horace. You know what I mean?” She opened her dark blue eyes and stared seriously at him while she thought.

“I don't know exactly,” he said.

“To sit alone, nobody around, and hear music from somewhere? People laughing?”

“I don't have any friends except at home,” he said. “And you.”

“Neither do I, really,” she said. “I mean Candy and Beady are sort of fun, but they have their own lives. Not that Beady wouldn't try plenty if I didn't slap him down once in a while.” She chuckled wearily.

“Slap him down?”

“Oh, he's a good guy, Horace. Don't get excited. My goodness, you
are
all het up!”

“I wouldn't let anybody hurt you!”

“Well, he wouldn't
hurt
me, Horace,” she said, and laughed, then grimaced and held her head. “Ow! It only hurts when I laugh.”

“Don't talk like that,” he said.

She opened her eyes wide. “What?”

“When you joke about whatever it is. You aren't you.”

“Oh, dear. I'm afraid I am me, Horace. I'm afraid I am me, and it's not so nice.”

“What's hurting you?” he asked her. He knew that his own experiences might really qualify him to help. “Please tell me, Susie. Maybe I can help you. Really.”

“Life,” she said. “It hurts.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Horace,” she said sadly. “You don't want to know.”

“I want to know.”

She shook her head loosely. Dusk was coming into the room, and with it the cold ghostly blue of Futzie Petrosky's tavern sign. He wondered if he ought to reach up above the table and turn on the light.

“Horace, would you go into my room and get me the pack of Chesterfields on the bed table? The room on the left in there?”

He went through the small living room, where the dark, bulky stuffed furniture was, dim rolled shapes that shouldered up into the windows. He felt his way, not knowing where any light switches were, past the toothpaste-watery smell of the bathroom. Her room smelled of her, and beside the bed the white pack of cigarettes gleamed on the table. Her bed was mussed, unmade, and he went quickly to his knees and put his head down underneath the covers in the wrinkled sheets, deep in her powerful smells where her body had lain. It was sweet, and he breathed deeply that heavy sweetness edged with sour.

Back in the kitchen she took the cigarettes and lit one, her face edged black in the matchlight. She sipped her beer and then took a deep red drag on the cigarette. “Don't turn on the light,” she said. “Futzie's sign is bad enough when you look like a zombie.”

“I want to help you,” he said. In the dusk his voice seemed grown-up and strange to him.

“There's nothing to do to help.”

“You can tell me what's making you so sad,” his grown-up voice said.

“I was in high school once,” she began, as though she were telling a bedtime story. “I was in high school and I was a good girl and got good grades. I was maybe a little plump, but everybody said how pretty I was anyway. What was wrong with me was I was too friendly and I believed everything another person said. I just couldn't believe anybody would lie. Now, that's pretty stupid.”

“And then?”

“And I was in love with Wood. A lot of girls were in love with Wood Spencer Whipple. I guess I showed it more than anybody.”

“Do you still love Wood?”

“I threw that chance away a long time ago, Horace.”

“Chance?”

“Yes. Anyway…” She took a drink of beer; he heard the liquid gurgle in the bottle. “Anyway, one day at school I found a note in my desk, and I'll tell you word for word what it said. It said, ‘Dear Susie, I think you are swell. I like you a lot. Would you meet me at 9:30 after DeMolay by the big pine next to the Congregational Church? Love, Wood W.'

“That's what the note said. Naturally I thought it was from Wood. But it wasn't, because he told me about six months later, as nice as he could, that it wasn't from him. So I'm waiting in the shadow of that big pine and my heart's beating a thousand times a minute. I'm all dressed up, all fixed up as good as I can, and I see a tall boy—I can see his outline against the lights of the square…Well, it was Gordon Ward, saying that because of something or other at DeMolay, Wood couldn't come, but he'd asked Gordon to take me home. Boy, was he smart! He figured everything. I couldn't stand him, you see. He used to goose me in school. And now he had a chance to be so nice, and Wood never sent me another note or anything, so I kind of rebounded. I was lonely anyway, living three miles out on the farm and not getting into town for things. It was a long ride on a bicycle, and scary after dark. And Gordon had his Plymouth convertible coupé, so he could stick my bike in the rumble seat.”

“Gordon Ward,” Horace said.

“Oh, that's all history,” Susie said. “Water under the dam. Now everybody's in the service. Gordon's a hero. Poor Wood's overseas too. Wood was so kind to me, Horace. He came to the farm, and my father pointed his shotgun at him. Now people are really shooting at him. I pray he won't get hurt!”

“I pray Gordon Ward gets killed,” Horace said.

“Don't say that! Oh, my God, Horace! Don't say such a thing! It's wrong!”

“There's others too,” Horace said, “I wouldn't mind seeing dead.”

“Horace!” she said. A chair scraped, and she stood up. “Please, Horace, never say things like that!”

He got up slowly and went to her, so strong he could hardly move. She smelled of beer, that bread smell, and sharp sweat, and the deep, hurt sweetness that was part of her skin and glands or whatever. He brought her against his chest.

“Horace?” she asked, her arms against her sides.

“I'm not going to let anybody hurt you,” he said slowly, hearing that new odd timbre in his voice. He wanted to convince her that he had seen death as close as anyone, that he was deadly serious and did not wish upon death lightly.

“Oh, I feel awful,” she said, tapping his sides as a signal that he should let her go. “And I've got to work tonight. I'm taking Bessie Higgins' shift for her, and it's going to be sheer purgatory.”

“How can I take care of you if you won't tell me what's wrong?” he asked.

“You can't take care of me, Horace.” He hadn't let her go, so she stood on her toes, kissed him on the mouth and pushed him away. “You can't. Nobody can. I don't even trust myself with you. It's too late for me.”

“No.”

“You're so good, Horace. I don't blame you for feeling that way about Gordon and those others that…you know. But you're not like that, really. You're so good, so sweet. You're the nicest thing in my whole life, and I mean that.”

“I love you,” he said.

“And I love you, an awful lot.”

She had to take a bath and change for work, so he left, and walked home in the night. He went carefully up Water Street, then through the square that was now busy before the first show at the Strand, past all the frail people of the town. She was wrong, but of course she didn't know. She had no idea of his power.

Kate sat in
The Quill
office in the teachers' lounge, where no teacher ever lounged. She was the editor, and felt a great responsibility to maintain the standards of originality Wayne had set last year and the year before. He was at the university now, but she sent him copies of
The Quill
for criticism. One hard thing was to think up cover pictures that would do justice to Wayne's idea of “beauty with a sting in it.” Without being positively morbid—like an arrow stuck into somebody—it was hard to continue the play on the word “quill.” One idea she liked, and so did Wayne, was the cover with a quill pen stuck into a large black beetle. That is, the beetle was really an inkwell made in the shape of a very realistic beetle. Wayne was enthusiastic about that one, and praised her originality. She had copied the beetle from a book of Japanese woodcuts that belonged to Sally De Oestris.

She had his letter, written in brown ink on beige paper, beside the typewriter.

 

106 South Hall
April 5, 1945

My dear Kate,

Your beautiful bug impaled by the pen is superb! Nice drawing too; not only are you original, you have a sensitive Pre-Raphaelite line—whether copied or not. Like poetry, line is hardest to translate.

Some of the contributions in this issue are of doubtful quality, but that is life. We both know that few flowers grow in a cultural desert (certain ones do, however,
viz.:
you and I). Your poem has some nice lines in it, and at least one fascinating conceit. The pottery fragments “…which man made alien to clay…” is utterly superb. Perhaps someday one will have to admit that your talent equals your beauty.

 

Kate blushed each time she read that part. Although she could sense Wayne's admiration of his own prose style, she still flushed with pleasure—flattery or not—whenever anybody said she had something to her besides “beauty.”

His letter continued:

 

As far as this university is concerned, I have had few triumphs since last fall, when I convinced the powers that be that I had no need of “freshman rhetoric.” One sits in enough classes as it is full of dull clods whose primal desire is only to graduate out of boredom into a secure job (after the war) in which they will manifest all the human alternatives and glories of a screwdriver. And full of dull female clods that (pardon me) want only to be the recipients of what that tool drives. The College of Matrimonial Arts, perhaps it should be called. There are so few males here that the dishonor of civilian clothes hardly makes a difference, and even I find myself considered possibly eligible in the eyes of these desperately man-hungry, beef-headed, bladder-prowed matrons of the future. And when they aren't rather aggressive they are excruciatingly shy, as though heartily ashamed of their female parts. They walk about hunched, avoiding eyes, squinched in as though afraid some sweating wild man will emerge, roaring, from the lilacs, overwhelm and ravish them, Kleenex, pens and textbooks flying, upon the sacred walks of the Administration Building.

Among all of them, dear Kate, you would move as a goddess among kine.

Thank you for saying “hello” to my mother. I must admit I don't write her as often as I probably should. Unfortunately we don't speak the same language, although the dear old thing tries.

Ciao,
K,
Wayne

 

She read the letter through again, again blushing at his flattery. As for his horrible picture of the university, this depressed her a little even though, knowing Wayne's exaggerated opinions, she knew it couldn't be anywhere near that bad.

She would go to the university too, and Wayne would still be there, an upperclassman, when she was a freshman. It would be an exciting time, full of new experiences. And triumphs? Let's face it, she thought, that too.

But now with the war being won, Leah did seem an awful backwater. All the people working on
The Quill
seemed about half there. Her thoughts always went out to the soldiers and sailors. Wood was in combat again, that much he let them know. You could see in his short V-mail letters how he tried not to worry his mother, and how she knew he didn't say much so as not to worry anybody.

Davy's letters were different, but of course he wasn't overseas. He positively bragged about shooting “expert” with the rifle, and about all the big explosive things he was shooting off. You'd think David was the one in combat, from his letters. But she knew him; he was probably having a fine time strutting around, playing soldier. But then she thought: Yes, but when would the war really end? Would it ever really end altogether? Wouldn't they have to fight all the way up through China? Maybe David would really have to go and be really
shot
at. She shivered—almost a paroxysm, really, and it was fear, real fear for David. He shouldn't have to do that. He shouldn't be made to take such real risks.