Whipple's Castle (25 page)

“I don't mind,” Wood said.

“Maybe you don't,” she said, turning to look at him. Her neck didn't turn sideways, and if someone spoke to her from the side she had to move her whole body around. “We'll stop in at the Potters', and you won't mind that,” she said cheerfully. “I've explained to the rest that I can't get out of the car this year. This old body's too hard to manipulate these days.”

He felt relieved.

“That pleased you, didn't it?” she said. “I don't have to imagine you'd rather fool with Lois Potter (my, isn't she getting to be a beauty?) than a seventy-year-old bag of bones like Sally De Oestris.”

It was hard to see through the windshield and the constantly clogging wipers, but few other cars were out, so he didn't have to worry about them. He got stuck once down on Water Street, where one of Sally's poor families lived in a railroad tenement, but with a little shoveling got out again. Finally, after two hours, after explaining to everyone who wanted to give him a drink that Sally was out in the car, and after her friends, relatives and the people she kept an eye on had come out in the snow to greet her and kiss her through the car window, they had made all the calls except for the Potters'.

“It's quite a night,” Sally said. “It's a night for a sleigh. I remember when we used sleighs all winter, nearly, when they didn't plow the snow at all.”

“They didn't?”

“They rolled it down flat and hard. They used six-horse teams, and great rollers weighed down with cut granite blocks. That was exciting. I used to ride up on one of those rigs with Mr. Jason Campbell, captain-elect of the Cascom River Volunteer Fire Company.”

The snow melted on the hood of the car, and the heater fan buzzed as they came back around the square. The Christmas lights were dim in the falling snow, and only one lane had been plowed on any street.

Mr. Potter had shoveled a two-shovel-wide corridor for Sally, and Wood crunched into the bank as far as he could, climbed around and repaired the corridor with his shovel before lifting Sally out. Mr. Potter, calling “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” came out to guide Sally and her canes. Wood followed with the packages, his overshoes full of snow, and they all entered the suddenly warm, dim and cheerful house. Lois, her eyes bright, came and took the packages out of his arms so he could take off his coat and overshoes.

“Merry Christmas, Wood,” she said shyly and softly. She came back to hang up his coat. As she turned, her soft black hair swirled, her slim legs flashed silk, and she was so pretty and dressed up, his legs grew weak. No, the weakness was because this lovely girl had made herself up just for his unworthy eyes.

They turned and entered the living room. Sally was enthroned in the sort of high, straight chair she found most comfortable, and Mr. Potter held her fur coat, melting crystals of snow gleaming on the long, dark tippets of fur. They had been laughing and chattering. “A white Christmas!” Mrs. Potter had just said. But now they turned, and were silent as they looked at Wood and Lois. Lois put her arm through his, and he felt her tremble. Sally's bright gaze narrowed as she smiled, and just perceptibly she nodded. Upon Mr. Potter's long, affable face was an expression almost of pain. But it was Mrs. Potter's face his eyes found and then jumped away from. She smiled, a speculative, encompassing smile, prideful and dark. He read everything in her naked face. She saw her virgin daughter with a man.

 

Peggy sat on a wicker stool next to the fireplace and stared at the lighted tree. The Whipples' tree was the grandest of all. At the very top, a delicate silver angel with real blond hair and a brilliant gold halo stood just below the ceiling, singing from a hymn book that was a real little leather-bound book, with real words in it. They were in a foreign language, though, and the letters were all so full of curlicues and bows she hadn't been able to read them. The angel had gone on the tree at the very last, and she had been the one to stand at the top of the stairs and hand it to Wood. He had stood on the stepladder, and she had put the fragile angel into his strong hand. He'd just been able to reach the top, and he stretched so far his shirt came out of his pants and she'd caught a glimpse of the blue band of his shorts. When he finally crimped the angel's wire holder with his fingers, to make it stand straight, he looked down at her and smiled so warm and triumphant a smile—just to her, because he and she had been the only ones to handle the angel—she became warm herself, and so happy she could name her happiness. Then she smiled, in turn, down at Horace, who had been allowed to steady the ladder. She felt part of them all, being in that chain of warm regard.

Now it was Christmas Eve. The concert had been called off because of the snow, and instead the choir was to sing on the evening of the twenty-seventh in the Congregational Church. Wood hadn't come back with Sally De Oestris, David and Horace were still out shoveling snow, and Kate and Mrs. Whipple, with elaborate kindness and goodwill, had shooed her out of the kitchen and told her to go entertain Mr. Whipple. “He likes you, you know,” Mrs. Whipple said.

She knew that was true. Mr. Whipple tended to yell a lot, and he pretended to start arguments with her, but she could see he didn't mean it in a bad way. He sat at his big table, drinking sherry. Mrs. Whipple had already told him twice not to drink it all before Sally De Oestris arrived.

“She's a good old bitch, and she'll understand,” he'd answered.

Now he looked at her mock-fiercely and said, “So you're going to sing in the choir, eh?”

“Yup,” she said, consciously impudent.

“All those yowling adenoids! Thank God I don't have to hear it!”

“You ought to come hear us. We're doing Handel's
Messiah.”

“Oh, God!” he said, “spare us poor sinners!”

 

Henrietta stood at the sink, where she and Kate were finishing up the last few odds and ends of pans, dishes and silverware. In a way she looked forward to Sally De Oestris' annual visit, although she hadn't liked Sally at all when she and Harvey were first married. She had sensed immediately that she was being patronized and “understood,” that Sally was speaking to her as if to a hill farm girl. Of course she had always realized that Harvey belonged to a different class—she'd known that long before she seriously considered marrying him, when she began to learn the different vocabulary. But ever since she was a little girl she'd had a strange streak in her that made her quite unlike Sally's idea of a hill farm girl. She read odd books, and she was something of a scholar.

Harvey and Sally might laugh when she pronounced Dostoevsky “Dostóyvsky,” but she had never heard anyone pronounce the name, even in high school. They knew how to pronounce the man's name, but she had read not only
Crime and
Punishment
and
The Brothers Karamazov,
which they both vaguely allowed they'd read long ago in college, she'd read
The Idiot
and
Notes from Underground.
And she'd read all kinds of books. She'd read Ruskin and Cardinal Newman, Jerome K. Jerome, Stephen Leacock, Sir James Frazer and Bret Harte. She had no system, at first, only a dictionary and her curiosity. She read A
Tramp Abroad
as eagerly as
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
and that as eagerly as
Anthony Adverse.
If books on economics and forestry and ornithology came to her hand, she took them home and read them. The two ladies who ran the Leah Public Library thought she was quite odd, but they would let her, at the ages of twelve and thirteen, take twice as many books home as they would the other children.

She still read a lot, but with a certain knowledge of categories now. She knew the difference between
Reader's Digest
and
The
Atlantic,
or
The Virginian
and
The American.
It made her a little sad, this new knowledge, because she no longer read with that sense of unpredictable discovery.

Her politics were not Harvey's at all. She voted for Roosevelt in 1932, and she had in 1936 and 1940, and she would again too, if he ran for a fourth term. This drove Harvey mad, because he couldn't change her mind. And after Sally De Oestris had bumped into certain hard areas of knowledge and opinion in her, their attitudes toward each other changed very quickly. Sally was an odd character too—a rich girl who hadn't done what was expected of her, who had taken her freedom literally. She'd had lovers and never married. One of them had been a general in a revolution, and Sally had stood beside him and seen him order the death of a president. Later the general himself was taken and shot, and Sally took refuge in the American embassy. All this had happened before Henrietta was born, but she went to the college library in Northlee and found a history of those events. She found the general's name there, and with a sense of real shock, because she thought she'd believed Sally, found her name in a footnote:
“…
a wealthy American girl, Sally Destrous[?], friend of General Aranpo.” Sally had told her about it with all the manifestations of truth Henrietta had always recognized and respected. It was simply the subject matter that could not, for all of Sally's authority, pass into Henrietta's mind as truth. And yet there it was. Sally Destrous; it could have been no one else, and she was shocked more by the discovery of her real disbelief than she was by the truth of the story.

Although it was not in Henrietta's nature to so casually mention things in her past, Sally would have found some of her experiences hard to believe too. That her father was partly eaten by pigs, for instance, or the winter they lived mostly on wild vegetables, tubers and johnnycake, when she had come down with what she now believed to have been either a vitamin deficiency or an allergy to some of that food—apples, pigweed, burdock, canned fiddleheads, dandelion greens, Jerusalem artichoke, hemlock tea and all the rest—and came out with sores and runny pus all over her body, so that she smelled awful, and most likely nearly died. The Overseer of the Poor brought them milk and flour. Their three cows had been condemned because of tuberculosis, and a bear had killed the two heifers in the orchard. They burned gray birch that winter, green and unsplit, and they were as close to the bone as most people ever got. They had no tree that Christmas because her grandfather was too tired to find one and drag it home. Her father sat in the kitchen, holding his soiled bandaged stumps with fearful care, and gave great breathless sobs because of his worthlessness and frustration. Of all the Christmases of her childhood, that was the one she remembered most clearly.

 

One miraculous thing happened on Christmas Eve, and at least one close shave. Tom came home after nearly a year of God knew where—that was the miracle. Kate heard a scrabbling, thumping noise at the back door and opened the inner door. There in the small window of the storm door was a cat's face staring at her, right into her eyes. Tom had climbed up the storm door by sheer claw, as he always did, and looked in. She opened the door and he dropped down, walked in, twitched his tail, thumped his head on her ankle as of old, jumped up on the stool and said “Miaow.”

For a moment she was confused about his absence. Had he really been gone? There he was, looking no different. His eyes were as green, his gray tiger coat as smooth and neat as ever, his gums as pink. He licked a paw, combed his brow with it, and said “Miaow” again.

“Tom!” she said, and ran into the living room, where David, Horace, Peggy and her mother and rather sat around the tree. “Tom's back!” To prove her point he followed her in, his tail up straight, each paw putting itself down with his old lion's authority, in which there always seemed to be some distaste for the texture of the carpet. He went straight to David, who sat in a high-backed oak and leather chair, jumped up on his lap and rolled over, exposing his fleecy white belly. When David scratched his stomach, Tom grabbed David's hand with his front paws and gently bit it as he went clawlessly through the gutting motions with his hind paws. There was no doubt that he was back, and that he didn't care to discuss his absence, or to allude to it by any way of strange behavior. He had been gone, they finally decided, about eight months.

“Where the hell have you been?” Harvey asked him. “Where the hell have you been, you murdering nightwalker?” Tom looked over at him and slowly closed his eyes.

“He's got one little souvenir of his travels,” David said, rolling the fur away from a long scar on his flank. Tom batted his hand away and jumped down.

“He's been out on the tomcat trail,” Harvey said. “He's lucky that's all he's got.”

“When Wood and Sally come, let's not mention it,” Kate said. “Let's see what Wood says!”

Tom walked over to where Horace was sitting on the floor with his back against the paneling. He sat down in front of Horace, looked at him and yawned fearsomely, exposing all his needlelike white teeth and the pink cavern of his throat.

Horace shivered and looked away from those weapons. He wished Wood were back. He had never understood the cat, never understood why the others all seemed to like it, and to kid with it, as his father just had, about its hunting prowess. “What a killer!” David had often said proudly.

The cat went to the dining-room archway and rubbed itself in mock affection against the molding. “Miaow!” it said, and Kate rushed out to get it a saucer of milk.

Peggy sat next to the fire, licking a peppermint candy cane to make it last. She saw Horace shiver when the cat yawned at him, and she thought she knew how he felt. One night almost a year ago she woke up hearing the shrill death screams of a rabbit. Over and over the high “No! No!” broke out of the darkness, then died down, then was torn out again, pitiful and hopeless with tenor. What could a rabbit call to for help? That cry was for no reason but pain and despair. It took a quarter of an hour before the cries came no more. In the morning by the outhouse she found a dead coney rabbit, its spine bare where a cat, or something, had eaten out its live backstrap muscles. The Whipples' fondness for Tom had always been a little strange to her too, and it made them all somehow larger than life, even somewhat frightening and heroic, as though they could look straight at death without even a shudder.