The summer lost its breath, and the maple leaves grew enormous about the house, so that only the four towers rose above the leaves for a view of the undulant green cloud that Leah had become. In only two months all the gray bones had fleshed out in green and darker green. Kate stood at her tower window and gazed across the soft town. From below the strata of leaves came the scything whirr of the lawn mower, a dry sound muted now by the rich grass. A hungry sound, as though those teeth were famished for all the moist green, and no matter how long they cut the swathes they were still bright and eager. She could almost see them down deep in there, Horace grimly leaning them forward, the steel blades coated by the mint-green blood of the dark grass. The heavy air was furry, velvety with the smells of summer, and from an eave paper wasps shot like bullets, out and away. Those coming in suddenly appeared, stopped, as though they had hit an invisible target, then turned to prove they were alive and had an intense purpose. They knew exactly what to do, and she was full of respect for their authority and knowledge. The summer was thick, night and day, with such insistent business. The robins’ stiff ceremonies were only jaunty and impertinent until you saw the cold knowing eye, and the colder green eyes of Tom the cat, watching from the top step.
Wood was away, and they all felt incomplete. With her it was a slight breathlessness, as if she were about to call to someone who wasn’t there. Wood had always been there, or at least somewhere not too far. He was part of them, almost as if with all their arguing and fighting and independence they were one, really. One organism, and you couldn’t take a part away. Someone else had said that. Was it Peggy? But Peggy missed Wood so much, with such tender nervousness. She said she was writing him a letter, but she seemed to be having a hard time of it. She had a funny little habit of biting her lower lip when she sat down to write, as if that helped force the words off the end of her pen, or forced her hand to write, and her dark little face squinched down upon the task. Right now she was in her room, writing to Wood, but could she say what she wanted to say? Wood was Peggy’s hero. Once she had said, in a sudden outburst, that Wood was the best person in the world.
Poor Peggy, she thought guiltily, to have only us. Several times she had found Peggy crumpled over, hiding her face. She had heard from her mother, from Worcester, and she missed her mother because she was her mother, but she didn’t want to go down there.
“My mother’s a whore,” Peggy had said, shrugging her shoulders, tears on her face.
“Peggy!” she’d said. They had been in Kate’s room, talking. Peggy suddenly straightened up, shrugged her shoulders bravely and said it.
“Peggy!”
“I don’t care. Everybody knows it. She brought men home and I was right in the other room.”
“You heard them?” Kate’s immediate curiosity gave her a shiver of cold, because she really wanted to make Peggy tell what she had heard, and this made her feel cruel.
“I heard them all right. It was awful. Sometimes they’d curse each other all the time and call each other nasty names, and all the time the bed was going up and down.”
“What did they say?”
“Nasty things.”
“Like what?”
“Just nasty things.” Peggy’s face turned dark and primitive, and Kate knew she wouldn’t say the words.
But Kate had kept thinking about that, thinking of the man and woman snarling like beasts and all the while joined by each other’s flesh. At night she thought of it, and in the mornings before she got up she thought of it, when she lay soft and lazy in her bed. She wondered what Peggy had felt, what terrible fright and disgust. It was her own mother. But she would like to have known little Peggy’s feelings. One Sunday morning instead of getting up, she’d gone back to sleep and had a curious dream, a wrong sort of dream, but it hadn’t bothered her very much. In the dream she had put her arms around Peggy when Peggy was naked. Just that, the smooth skin, and Peggy didn’t seem to think it strange. It was curious because she had never been the type to want to pet other girls. She’d never had that kind of a crush. The dream remained as a slightly haunting little experience—interesting, as were so many of the things happening to her senses lately. She would wander through the dim servants’ quarters with their low ceilings and squat, varnished furniture, look out the small windows and want to cry because of the dingy, squalid feeling of the past. Today in such a mood she had climbed here to her tower and wiped cobwebs from the windows, opened them all and stood letting the thick summer air pass over her, holding her bare arms out as if to a lover. She was alone above the trees, in the open sky, but no one could see her, only birds and wasps. Swallows flew twisting on wings like bending little blades. Everything mounted and grew in the green heat.
But the summer was passing, moving of its own momentum toward its end, and she felt this with sadness; she longed for and yet dreaded something undefined that could only be in the future. She had begun to notice a slight acceleration in time. Things happened too surely, as if on a barbarous schedule no one could control. The war went on, one violent, cruel battle after another. Wood, who had only just gone, it seemed, was now at Fort Benning, Georgia, being made into an officer. She could see Leah changing too, so fast she could see it. Troop trains came through Leah, full of Canadian soldiers who carried rifles with little tea-caddylike things wrapped around the trigger parts. As the train stopped, the soldiers stamped out onto the platform, formed lines and drilled, the sergeants screaming hysterically. They stamped and turned and postured like stiff wooden soldiers for five minutes, then marched back onto the train again, to go south, to go overseas to kill and to be killed. Prudence Trask’s brother John was dead, and in the second-story window above the pharmacy they had changed the blue star on the service flag to gold. Mrs. Trask was now a gold-star mother, the mother of a dead boy. The new ball-bearing factory had brought in hundreds of strangers, and the dances at The Blue Moon had become drunken and dangerous. A girl in the sophomore class, Marcia Warwick, was pregnant, and wouldn’t be coming back to school in the fall. There were rumors of trench mouth and even worse things. David made a dollar an hour, now—that child David, who was as much a child as she was—making a dollar an hour. Everybody had too much money to show, dollars and dollars packed into their wallets.
Her father’s tenements were all full, and he was always excited or morose; his good news seemed at once to make him sad, and he sat all day in his counting house, the living room, which he sometimes called the great hall, mumbling, yelling or staring around him like a visitor in a museum. Sometimes his staring didn’t mean he was unhappy. He’d say, “How do you like this bloody castle of mine, Princess? Some place, huh?” This would be most likely in the late afternoon when he had a drink of whiskey in his hand. Or he’d kid with Peggy, whom he seemed to like better than anybody else, and she’d smile and blush. But most of the time he scribbled and mumbled.
It was hard to remember that other man who’d been their father. When she was eight or nine all of them seemed to bounce around, all of the Whipples. He never sat still for very long; in fact she could hardly remember that man sitting down at all. They had the great big open car then—a Packard—with running boards almost as high as her waist. They’d go for rides, all of them in the big red car, and people would wave and shout as the Whipples went by, all of the Whipples laughing and singing as they rode through Leah in the late summer light. They sat high above all the other cars, and they could hear the engine working inside the long red hood, slow and lazy. It was the only car like it in town, and her father was very fond of it. On Saturdays he’d wash it and simonize it, and if it wasn’t raining they’d all go on the ride around town that always seemed triumphal, as though their father had just conquered the town, or become king.
That was the car he’d been driving when the people in the Ford came out of a side road and hit him. For a month after that the Packard had been more or less on display down at Hayes’s garage, buckled and rusting, with the maple blossoms falling all over the seats and hood, and the glass slivers on the floor. Then it disappeared; where had that big car gone? She had never seen another one like it.
Horrible things happened, even to your own family, to change life forever. She knew that from the past. And now the war, and all the boys and men going where it was even more dangerous. She wasn’t as frightened as Horace, but it was still bad. The war mixed with all of the future to make the future so ominous. “What will become of us?” she said to the summer air. How flamboyant, she thought. What a gesture! Again she opened her arms as if to a dangerous and irresistible lover. Suddenly the world changed, and she was no longer acting. Pain changed the color of the leaves to orange, and she almost fainted, was almost sick enough to vomit. It was like being nailed. Her arm above the elbow, in the tenderest soft place, writhed and burned, and the black wasp fell to the sill, its white face jerking and nodding. She jumped back and held her arm with her other hand as if in a tourniquet to stop the pain. It was so horrible, so unasked for. It was betrayal, because she had only wished them well. She would not moan or cry, but her eyes filled with bitter tears.
Harvey Watson Whipple. He signed upon the receipt the crisp signature that never seemed to change. All that remained of him and his power and hope were the legal things, things of paper. He was making money, but he had nothing to buy. He had heard of misers who wanted nothing but the money; they couldn’t bear to spend it, because it was the heavy gold or the crisp official green they wanted. If only he could find their secret. He wanted…things! But the things he wanted he could no longer want. How could he own them with the firm, manly caress of his hands when he had no hope? Each day he spent in this slug of a body, his life was shortened by more than a day. He knew what the actuaries would say about that. He dreamed of running, of sailing before the wind toward a harbor where he would find good food and drink, and love he was worthy of because of his strength. Now all that was gone, could he believe it?
I can’t believe it.
Memory is worse than oblivion. Sure. Believe it. He remembered when his young wife was dark golden, her hair black as a crow’s wing, and light as that day’s August wind coming down the lake toward camp. How old were they that good year? He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three. Wood was a year old, and her belly was smooth again, with only the silvery little stretch marks slanting V-like from her hipbones. In the lake was that little no-class sloop Harry Thibodeau built for him, and it rode easy beside the dock—lapstraked, white, green canvas over the foredeck. Let’s take a jar of martinis and sail up the lake and come back with the spinnaker (a half-spinnaker, really; and as for the gin and vermouth, he knew a driver on the Canada run. He knew everything there was to know, then).
Aunt Mary Watson was alive then to mind the baby, who would always be a baby, just a cute little fella, always new, a new idea, just their baby.
When they grow up, you grow old.
They were skimming back down the lake under spinnaker and sail, centerboard up, cutting in the dusk, the yellow sun just gone. She leaned back against him, and felt him, and they stopped at the deep end of Pine Island, tied up on a root and slid into the cool water. They helped each other off with their knit cotton bathing suits. The lovely ache of a hard-on in cool water, scrotum hard as walnuts, and her cool cold skin, cool lips hot inside. A rubbery rub and then the always miraculous oil. God, the invisible unoily oil. Welcome. No. More than welcome, “You’re in me,” she said.
Oh, God. He watched his death so soon.
How would he go? Heart? Cancer? Flu? Anything could take him out now. A hangnail. Everybody died, didn’t he know that all the time? He must have known it in his twenties, in his thirties. He must have known it and yet he joked about it. He remembered the jokes. Croak. Kick the bucket. He knew it all the time, and that what was him would turn alive in the ground another way. It was all so logical, so right, so instinctively right. By other instincts than his would he boil—try not to remember that.
But weren’t there people not bothered by…death? He couldn’t even think of that word without breathlessness, fear in his hollow. No, not him. He was all there was of him!
What about Sally? She was over seventy, for God’s sake! Did she wake up at four in the morning with black nothing leaning over her, eye to eye? Maybe some lived for a purpose, died for a purpose. What purpose? All men died. If you were going to die, what was the purpose? For your children? Shit, they had to live their own lives and die their own deaths. That was their problem. Not that he was indifferent. No, he wasn’t. It was all terrible.
Oh, God, he needed some medicine. He needed the drink he hated the taste of. He’d rather taste a blueberry warmed by the sun on top of Cascom Mountain. One firm blueberry pierced by his white teeth, and the acidy blue taste that meant lakes and mountains down and away, boats on the lakes, trees, gray granite, grouse, deer.
What about religion, buddy? You desperate?
He’d never had any, and that was the truth. He was an American; he wasn’t haunted by anything but Nothing. Ancestors? That all washed out long ago, buddy. Some kind of a lemur, scared of snakes and cats but thought he’d live forever. Now cursed with predilection. Some of the more recent ones were human, and they had their scary solutions too. Scary because so obviously impossible to believe. Genealogies, Bibles—they were the property of certain idle aunts, all dead now, their spidery findings stored in attics or cellars.
He always said he’d never commit suicide. He wasn’t the type, nope. Maybe he still wasn’t. Christ, you don’t cut your throat to cure a canker sore. But what was the use of living, when you had to die? He’d heard that question before, but couldn’t remember the answer. Funny he couldn’t remember the answer. Very funny.
Buddy, you’re choking in the clutch. But it isn’t a clutch, friend. That’s a myth. He’d got out of many a clutch. Them he could handle. It was dead certainty that choked him up. He was a gambler, an American; he had to have odds. Save me some sweet innocent odds, God. Shit. Cry, you poor bastard.
He sat in his wheelchair dry-eyed.
Peggy came running across the grass toward him, and he was afraid he wouldn’t stop pushing the lawn mower in time; he would do something dumb. “Horace! Horace!” she cried. The maples dipped toward her, thick oily green, and once she slipped on the wet cut grass, her little ankle slipping out and her shoulders tilting to counteract it. With a little hop she righted herself and came on toward him. She had worried him with her running and crying out his name, but her dark little face wasn’t panicky. He stepped between her and the teeth of the lawn mower as she came up to him. She stopped, smiling, her hands on his arms, and looked up at him. “Your father wants you,” she said.
“Oh.”
“It’s all right. He’s not mad or anything.” She frowned at his worry, and squeezed his arms with her little bird hands.
He looked up the lawn toward the house. His father sat inside its bulk and darkness. It grew beyond and above the trees, and the grass ended at the black dirt under the hedges and the lilacs rooted next to the gray granite blocks of its foundations. It was the house he had always lived in, yet there were windows in odd and irregular shapes, mouth- and eye-like, whose rooms he wasn’t sure of. There were windows in closets, in stairwells, windows peering out of rooms he may have never dared to discover. The four towers led up into green; David’s, Wood’s, Kate’s and…his. He never went there. They told him it was his tower—David and Kate had—but he was afraid to go there. He’d seen it from David’s tower, and it looked, the little square room on its high shaft, empty of all but cobwebs. But he couldn’t see down over the sills, and he couldn’t see up into the ceiling. He’d lied to Kate, and said he’d gone up in it. He was afraid something else lived there.
“Go on, Horace,” Peggy said, pulling his arms.
In the big room his father turned with a creak, the white face coming around slowly, its power turning.
“You’re tracking grass all over the place. Can’t you learn to wipe your feet?”
Horace looked back along his path through the hall and saw some blades of grass on the red carpet.
“Yes, it’s grass,” his father said wearily, “and it’s all over the sides of your shoes, and the tops of your shoes, and in your cuffs, and hanging from your knees.” His father shook his head, as if at himself for going on so. “I want you to do some errands for me.” He looked up, calculating. “Do you think you can? Maybe if I write them down in block letters?”
“I’m not stupid!” Horace said, his hurt turning toward fear.
“Look, I just want the errands done. Whether you’re stupid or not is another matter.”
His mother’s voice came from the dining-room archway. “Cruel!” she said.
“Shut up! You’re the one says he ought to be trusted more!”
“You would say that in front of him, wouldn’t you!”
“God damn it! Who asked you for your two cents’ worth? Go on back and button your pudding irons, or whatever the fuck you were doing!”
“I ought to let you sit in that chair and rot!”
“What do you think I am doing, you stinking bitch!”
Horace felt like a tree; no one had given him the permission or the power to get away from this violence. They went on, cold words shouted, hatred in their icy faces, frowns of absolute zero.
His mother turned, her face set in that coldness, and went back to the kitchen.
For a moment his father looked down at his table, his hands over his face. They were pale, fat hands, the nails bitten down halfway, and here and there in the cracks beside what were left of the nails were traces of dried blood. His father wrung his face with those hands, then looked up.
“Now,” he said. “If that’s all over, I’ll ask you again if you can be trusted to do a couple of errands for me. Wipe your nose.”
Horace had no handkerchief.
“Take a Kleenex tissue. Here!”
Horace took one of the filmy, inconsequential things from the box his father held out to him, and wiped his nose. He felt the wet snot come through on his fingers.
“Put it in the wastebasket. Now. First I want you to go to the bank. All you have to do is give this envelope to Mr. Ward or Mrs. Wilson. Got it?”
Horace nodded. Then his father told him to go to the Water Street tenement and get the rents that had come due that week from Sam Davis. Sam Davis was supposed to get up at one o’clock in the afternoon, so he’d be awake, right?
Horace accepted the two envelopes, one to be given to the bank, one to be filled and brought home. He placed them both deep in the side pocket of his pants, and then he was allowed to go. His bike had a flat tire, so he had to walk.
Downstreet among all the eyes he hulked, looked down and into corners, avoiding the eyes as much as possible. The bank was echoey and cool, and Mrs. Wilson smiled voraciously through her teller’s window as he pulled the envelopes from his pocket. One said BANK, underlined, and she seemed too pleased to accept it. She was thinking of the money he stole, she must be, and that he must be rehabilitated or something if his father trusted him. On the way out he was careful not to bump into Miss Colchester, who was just coming through the big doors. “Hello, Horace!” she said, but he noticed how careful she was of him. “My, you’ve grown,” she said, moving out of range.
On Water Street he came to the stoop of the tenement, where grass and cindery dirt competed for the narrow strip between the steps and the crumbling sidewalk. The stoop and steps had been painted gray over the gray weathered wood, to keep down splinters. The glass in the front door had been painted gray too, for some reason. He entered the hallway, which was lighted from the far end by a grimy double-hung window, and from the front by a transom so deep in spider webs the light was brown. It smelled, the hall and its painted walls, of something that had once been hot, and had cooled. Some kind of food, or maybe even clothes. Cellar air leaked up through the floorboards, potatoey, mixed with coal fumes.
He knocked on Sam Davis’ apartment door, the first on the right, and heard quick steps coming. The door opened. It was Susie, and his heart began to skip and hammer. He stuttered something about his father. She smiled and smiled, wider and more delighted and happier to see him. Even her combed brown hair, with the comb furrows in it, seemed to spread away from her ears as she welcomed him.
“Come in, Horace! My goodness! I haven’t seen you all summer! Come in and sit down!”
He sat at the kitchen table, careful to keep his arms and hands off the table and in his lap. He was so pleased and excited he was frightened of his pleasure. The table and the chairs, the jar of brown-eyed susans, the ashtray with a lipsticked butt in it—all the delicate things seemed to have been placed according to exact and precise measurements, and he must not alter any part of that plan by the millionth of an inch.
“Are you surprised to see me?” Susie said. She pulled her chair recklessly next to his, took his hands in hers and squeezed them. He wanted to run away, because she seemed to be giving him too much, too much all at once. “Horace, my good, good friend!” she said. Then her expression seemed to say: Back to the subject. “You see, we’re on split shifts, or something like that. The war. Friday’s my day off, now, so if you come regular for the rent money I’ll be the one here. Won’t that be nice, Horace? My dad’s over to the other building this after…I think, anyway.” A dark bit of worry crossed her face. “He’s been…sad since we lost the farm. You know. And poor Mrs. Garner had to go to the County Farm.”
“Oh,” Horace said.
“But this is so nice! You want a Coke? I’ve got some cold in the icebox, and I’ll have one too.” She squeezed his hands and got up, so happy-looking and walking so lightly, almost dancing to the refrigerator. “We’ll see each other every Friday. Won’t that be nice? I’ll look forward to it, won’t you, Horace? I see David sweeping up the scraps and thread all the time, but I never see you! But now we can have a nice visit every week!”
She poured him his Coke and sat beside him, asking him questions about himself only, no one else. He told her he was making twenty-five cents an hour. It was all love and pleasantness, and he began to grow calm inside, as though some sort of fusion of intent had occurred between his needs and his muscles. Calm and control; his arms did no more than his will bade them to. He drank from his glass and set it on the table lightly, easily. No fear of dribbling on his chin or on his shirt made his throat perversely contract, and he felt no need to squeeze the glass, nor to measure the distance to the table with his eye before putting it down. It descended lightly and surely to the oilcloth, with no bump at all.
Through the small clean panes of the side window were the sprung, flaking white clapboards of the next building. Past the front window’s white curtains was part of Petrosky’s Tavern sign—blue neon, flickering—and past the corner of that old building, once a private house, he could see down Water Street as it turned to the railroad tracks where the black and white wooden bars now slowly descended. The floor hummed from the train that was coming from Vermont, maybe all the way from Montreal, but he couldn’t hear the jangling bell he knew rang from the black box. The alternate red lights blinked on and off, as though one stole the other’s light, then gave it back. Susie stopped whatever she was saying and they both watched as the train became the only thing happening on the street. Two long black engines, whooshing oily black smoke in ponderous rhythm led the train. The second engine was turned around backwards, so that it looked somehow more violent than the other, as if it were being punished, and its power and pressure were that of resentment. Freight cars slid heavily past; he counted forty, then stopped counting. The building seemed tuned to the deep rumble, each room a sounding box, each doorway growling. The heavy rumble seemed to be louder in the room behind him than it was in the kitchen. Then, finally, when he’d almost got used to that deep continuing presence, another black engine, longer and lower than the others, pushed by greasily and with it the sound diminished. The black and white bars of the warning gate went up lightly, and now they seemed frail, as their counterweights fell and they pointed straight up again.
It was as though he came back into the room. Susie’s smile seemed frail too, very tender and fleeting.
He didn’t want to leave her, but he said he guessed he’d better because his father would suspect he’d fouled up again.
She frowned, concerned. “I know you did something for me, Horace,” she said, and she blushed and looked down at the table. He couldn’t think what she meant. “I heard,” she said. “I know you meant well, about the money, but I wouldn’t have gone with them. You believe that, don’t you, Horace?”
That. “It was stupid,” he said, stammering. “Sus-stupid. Stupid. I threw it away and Wood had to pay it back.”
“But did you think I’d go with them, really?” She was very serious.
“They seemed so strong,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have gone. Gordon asked me, but I wouldn’t have gone, Horace. After what he did to me. I wouldn’t have gone, not for anything.”
“Yes,” he said. He couldn’t understand why she cared so much what he thought. Of course she wouldn’t have gone of her own free will. Didn’t she understand that?
“Do you believe me?” Tears slid back and forth at the bottoms of her eyes. Each tear was a little globe, and her eyes were so blue. His throat began to ache.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “That isn’t it. Of course you wouldn’t say you’d go. Yes! I believe you!” He sounded as if he were mad at her. His voice came out that way, like one of his accidents, and he was afraid she wouldn’t understand.
“Oh, I know you believe me, Horace!” She said that and leaned over toward him, getting bigger and bigger and more lovely and powerful and she put her lips on his forehead. He sat shocked as she went to the sink and wiped her eyes, a quick dab at each eye with the damp dishcloth. He stood up, and she came back to him, a strange interest in her eyes that melted him. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t understand, until she took the dishcloth and cleaned the lipstick from his forehead. “See?” She showed him the red that had been on his skin, and was now on the cloth. “I got lipstick on you.” She laughed, and he laughed back, a quick bark that was strange to him because he seldom laughed.
They would see each other again next Friday, whether he was given the errand or not. As he walked home he saw clearly, almost too clearly, the sun on the houses, the elms shining, glints of reflected sun on windows. All the lawns seemed a brighter green. For a moment he felt his strength—a moment of daring, because his strength couldn’t be trusted. But he raised his arms over his head, clasped his hands and pulled until something in his shoulder nearly broke: a warning. But a deep thing had happened, a thing almost to hurt, an alliance, a secret deep thing. They had touched deeply, where nothing was hidden. Nothing came between the feelings they had for each other, no disgrace, no freak disaster, nothing mean and cramped and murderous at all.
He saw her every Friday afternoon, and that brief half-hour became his counter for time itself. She always had the rent money ready, and never let him forget it when he left. When he arrived she hugged him briefly, and they talked, sitting at the kitchen table. Always at the back of his mind was the question “Why does she regard me with such joy?” Me. She was in love with Wood, and that seemed right. He had fantasies of a family—Wood, Susie, children. What justice and calm! And he would somehow be part of that family, almost as a child. But no, there was something else he would be, and this part he shied from, because he felt danger. As if he were a soldier. Something like a soldier, only secret, a secret force to avenge, to obliterate the murderers who crept, scaly and cold, toward the children’s windows. He shivered with fear when this began to come to mind, but it was not fear for himself. He couldn’t place it. He couldn’t get it straight.
But in his nights a strange thing began to happen. Sometimes it was as though Leverah and Zoster and the Herpes crept out, their cellar stench falling from scale and tooth, but not for him. Toward him, but not for him. Beyond him, and he was the last outpost of the warmth. Arm thyself, he seemed to hear whispered. Monsters. They are monsters.