Late in the summer the Whipples gathered in the great hall. There was Wood, tall and pale, his dark hair grown too long, leaning against the mantel with a slight angle to his hips that gave away his false leg. He wore a brown tweed suit for this semi-formal occasion, the celebration of his twenty-fourth birthday. The black eye patch was a shadow they had all grown used to, and his eye moved deep in the other socket, calmly surveying them all, or so they thought.
Peggy Mudd crossed the room in their sight, her faille dress rustling against her legs, hiding from them the trembling her decision had caused her, and kissed Wood upon the mouth. His hands came slowly to her waist, and he smiled. To her he seemed sadly pleased, an emotion that barred her from him as with iron. “Happy birthday,” she said. When he perceived her disappointment his face grew thoughtful and remote.
From across the room, a distance great enough to place him in a different and cooler light, David began to speak in mock-stentorian tones: “Ladies, gentlemen, squires, blood cousins, dames of quality…” He bowed toward Sally De Oestris who perched, blue and silver, upon her straight throne. “We have been summoned to celebrate the birthday of our brother Wood, an occasion of high rejoicing in this kingdom.”
“Oyez oyez!” cried Kate from above.
David read from a paper held before him in both hands: “‘Brother, son, cousin, in all ways dutiful, valorous and fair, hero wounded in the wars against the Black Evils, Cruelty and Pride, all hail!’” David nodded to Kate, who stood upon the landing in the solemn ecclesiastical glow of the stained glass. She began to recite:
“First in his five wits he faultless was found;
In his five fingers the man never failed…
The fifth five the hero made use of, I find,
More than all were his Uberalness, love of his fellows,
His courtesy, chasteness, unchangeable ever,
And pity, all further traits passing. These five
In this hero more surely were set…”
Her voice broke, and she turned, suddenly awkward, toward David. “I’m sorry, Davy! I can’t finish!”
Everyone looked away from Kate, and then toward Wood, who frowned unhappily. The most powerful reasons they could think of for his unhappiness were not powerful enough.
“All right,” David said, “we’ll shorten the ceremony somewhat.” He nodded to Peggy, who went to the old harmonium and took her seat upon its oak bench. The little chapel’s round stained-glass window glowed dark blue and amber, and suddenly the hall’s antique details—the false balcony, the various panels, sills and ornately carved and cabineted wood—all seemed to grow into deeper relief. As Peggy worked the wheezy pedals and began to play a thin and unfamiliar melody, all the pretentious ornamentations of the great hall gained authority. The song she played was ancient, bitter-sweet, as though composed for instruments with names like psaltery or dulcimer.
“On earth, or far or near,
It seemed as if he ought
To be a prince sans peer
In fields where fierce men ought.
“Of us this hero now
Will noble manners teach;
Who hear him will learn how
To utter loving speech.”
Wood didn’t hear the words, but the sweet voice pierced him. It did not mean what his dreams meant, yet its clarity changed the world as forcefully as the dark shutter of his dreams. The soft wind of her throat, her slender hollow throat shaped by the delicate cords and muscles she so gracefully commanded. When she glanced at him he lost his breath. She was only human, yet she carved that music out of the air—no, took the ordinary air and made this lovely order. In its returns and predictions the melody bound him, but it was not his hands tied, no one’s body cruelly tied. As in a dream he felt the presence of a force he could not understand or even attempt to define. It was not to murder; of course not, on the face of it. Peggy—Margaret. Margaret. She glanced at him again and smiled. It was not like a little while ago when she kissed him and waited for the response he knew ought to be given, that he could not then give.
A Wandervoge!, Sally had called her long ago, the Christmas she had come to live with them. That little bird had grown and changed. A German word again, from the language that meant to him cool rational insanity, or cool sane irrationality, whose harsh clean sounds stretched across his mind like steel cords. The language of the intellect.
“Of us this hero now
Will noble manners teach;
Who hear him will learn how
To utter loving speech.”
As Peggy sang the verse again he understood the words, and they all took note of his wry smile. They sang him happy birthday, and Henrietta brought in a chocolate cake with twenty-four candles burning and smoking like a small bonfire in her hands. Her face was a warm moon above the fires, and her thick lenses cast brighter ovals upon her eyelids. They noticed how her hair was turning gray. The children were grown up, now. Would this be the last summer all of them would spend in Leah?
Horace felt them all going away, all but him. Wood was somehow gone already. Wood was frightened; he felt it. He knew all the symptoms. Wood took no joy in this birthday party. Kate had gone to the Blue Moon and other places with Gordon Ward, and David instead of Wood saw Susie Davis. Were they all mad? David! All this mouthing of smooth words. David had tried to teach him how to drive, but everything he said was cruel and apprehensive. The clutch, the clutch! he said, nervous and cold, and the truck bucked and stalled, bucked and stalled as though each wheel were as independent as the leg of a wild horse. He hated the truck. He didn’t want to become its brain, its intelligence. David was so smooth and skillful with it.
Peggy kissed Wood; she was grown-up and had left herself behind—how was that? She wanted Wood to be grown-up with her. She was after something, out of herself, too old to be Peggy any more. Susie said she loved him, but she went out with—David! Look at him, so smooth and sure of himself. He hadn’t died of fear a thousand times; he did not deserve! He would never marry her and make her happy. All he wanted was that part of her down there. The brown room darkened. She liked it or she wouldn’t let him do it to her. But how could she give herself away to such cheap lust? He had followed them. He knew. Hiding in the pines, waiting for them to return to the cabin, his bike behind the woodpile at midnight. Through the screen he heard them thrashing, and cried inside himself, cold and silent. So cheap and so dangerous! David caused her loose laughter, said things that made her laugh. That clever brother. They were all gone away now, all of them, driven by their new desires, joining or being pursued by evil. Kate trying to be all smooth and confident with Gordon Ward, laughing with him, not caring who he was or what he had done. What had made them turn? He looked at their faces that were firmed by these alien certainties. They knew what they wanted, now, and that knowing must be a terrible forgetfulness.
Wood blew out all the candles in one breath, and they gave a cheer.
Harvey didn’t want to look at Wood, at his son. Dammit, things began to go fairly well for a change and it was always somebody else’s troubles that weighed you down like a wet blanket. He thought of his money. He tried to think of his money—more money than any of them suspected, by God! Even Hanky had no idea. Those lovely zeroes. Zero, zero, zero, zero! In fact, one, five, zero, zero, zero, zero—and that didn’t count real property. Had he taken chances!
He must try again to get Wood interested in the stock market. Wood had the disability check each month, for a good, even sort of ballast, and he had quite a bit in War Bonds. War Bonds, for Christ’s sake! What a terrible waste of capital! Somehow he had to get to Wood and convince him. What a time they’d have together, the New York Times between them. Right here at this table, Wood’s intelligence and his, father and son, saying to each other with calm equality those words they would both instantly understand.
He looked at his son’s face—part face. Gueules casstes—what was that memory? No, what would an eye missing be called? No more binocular vision there, although what about Wiley Post? Famous flyer, but then he did crash. When was that? Will Rogers was with him. Stop procrastinating and look at your son. He looked.
Screw that noble sadness. Hadn’t it been going on for too long a time?
He accepted a piece of cake. “Thank you!” he said, and turned toward Wood. “Many happy returns, as they say!”
“Thanks,” Wood said.
Oh, Jesus, how was he going to break through? All he could do was talk, talk, talk against that impeccable, infuriating calm.
Henrietta, having cut the cake, sat back in the straight chair she rather resentfully knew to be hers, or to be generally considered hers. She had seen the others avoid it. She was not ready to consider herself an institution, like Sally, who always sat in a particular chair, just so, so she could see everybody without moving her stiffened and compressed little spine. No, she was not ready to exist as some sort of predictable adjunct to this family. She loved them—why else would she wait on them, and cry bitter tears over their wounds—but she was herself; she was hard. The whole town didn’t like her sudden opinions. She was never a part of its social structure at all, and because she didn’t care, they didn’t like her one bit. It had been a long, long time since Harvey, for business reasons, had hinted that she might give the ladies of the town, their charities, their study groups, their asinine fashion shows, a little of her time. She could never smile at stupidity, she could never flatter. She was considered a dangerous radical.
This made her smile, as she did not when their wit descended (or ascended?) to imitations of Eleanor Roosevelt (Rosenfeld). “Maay Daay,” they would half snarl, and seeing her, stop, frozen by an audience that ruined their joke unforgivably. “Did you hear? Harry Truman died on the way to Eleanor’s funeral!” Somehow she heard them all—across aisles, through walls, over hedges.
And they all knew her story, from whence she came to this castle. She thought of the time she’d flown all the way across the country to see Wood, shortly after the war, when she sat enclosed in the airplane among all those people who had been made by their adventure important and dramatic. She’d looked down to see the lights of whole cities glimmering on the earth below. What was Henrietta Sleeper doing in that Olympian company? After all these years away from Switches Corners, that ghost place in the woods that was even then doomed, gray birch in the cellar holes, she asked herself that self-acknowledging question. Yes, she was herself still, a visitor to these half-strangers. When I die, she thought, hearing the words, I will die like a cat; I will go off by myself to a private place. She spoke to herself, for no one else’s ear: I will die as I once lived—alone—not because I have to but because I want to. Because I want to.
But in the kitchen Tom the cat, as if to refute her simile, lay emaciated in his washtub, on the soiled burlap, obviously dying. David was going to take him to the vet’s and have him put to sleep. He was an old cat, and the magic had gone out of him. He had cancer in several places—in his belly, in his bowels—and he suffered, not always in silence. Last night they had heard his miniature roar, as though agony were another tomcat he warned away.
She listened above the murmur of their talk. A shout of Sally’s laughter made Wood smile. Tom was quiet, as far as she could tell. He often slept these days with his head up; he couldn’t find a way to the flexible and languorous cat ease that once let him dream, even while draped over the splintery stove wood. Now there was no more stove wood, and the kitchen had grown cold and white. In the cellar the oil burner rumbled at its own urgings. No one went down there for weeks at a time.
Wood tried on his new sweater, and smoked his new pipe. Sally had given him a Japanese print, of carpenters ripsawing a huge beam, with Fuji in the distance.
“It’s work,” he said. “It’s beautiful work. The sawing.” He seemed to dream himself into the landscape. They were all quiet while he looked at it. He turned to them with an almost embarrassed smile. “It’s beautiful, Sally.”
“Glad you like it,” Sally said.
“My God!” Kate said to David. “How can you drink beer and eat chocolate cake at the same time?”
“Actually, I do them separately,” David said. Kate punched him affectionately on the arm as she went by him, taking her fork and plate to the kitchen.
Horace wasn’t having any cake. He wasn’t hungry, he said. Henrietta looked at him more closely than she had for some time. She had been so preoccupied with Wood’s melancholy she hadn’t had much time to worry about Horace. He was still Horace, always that tangle in the back of her mind. Poor Horace, all in snarls, pulling against himself like a jammed knot. He wouldn’t even consider going to college. She had talked Harvey into keeping the one tenement, against what he called his better judgment, so Horace would have that job, at least. As long as Susie Davis lived there, Horace would take care of it. She wondered about that relationship, always skirting the idea, somehow.
Horace’s crude face contained much force. He ground his teeth, and the bristles glinted along his jaw. He was a man now, wasn’t he? And suddenly she let the idea come plain in her mind. Did that woman take her child in…what? There must be a word that contained the drama and fear she either felt, or felt that she must feel. All right, did she, Susie Davis, copulate with Horace? Had she taught the boy what to do and taken him…again, where? What? What about it? Susie was considered by the town to be a loose woman. There was the possibility of disease, or of her becoming pregnant. What a mess! But then, hadn’t she been good for Horace? She had helped him over certain childish fears. Miraculously, he no longer seemed afraid of the dark. That woman. But weren’t they both women, Susie and herself? Was it jealousy? Whose job was it to help the child? Why hadn’t she ever considered going to see Susie, even perhaps to thank her for what she’d done? Yes, she should do that. Of course she should. She shuddered. She could see two women facing each other; from one had come this child, labor and blood and kaput, the flesh distended, the shaved pubes, the cord, the wet placenta—all the gross intimacy of the begun life. That could not be forgotten, ever, no matter how big and old the child became. The other knowledge was how that child groaned upon the other woman, flesh of her flesh ascending toward the darkness of that other womb.
Oh, she was hard and cold; she avoided emotion like a cat.
But she was not!
Quickly she got up and went to the kitchen. Kate was coming back and they collided. No, they didn’t collide, Kate had seen her face and put her arms around her.
“Hey, Hanky,” Kate said.
Someone had come up behind her, and some more arms came around her. “The trouble with you,” David said in her ear, “is that you’re an intellectual.”
“What?” Kate said.
“She was wondering again. Very bad for the complexion.”
“What were you wondering about, Mother?” Kate asked.
“The meaning of it all,” David said. “Should never wonder about that. Bad for the pistons. Fouls the intake ports. Shrivels the baffles. Awful.”
“Oh, you two,” Henrietta said. “You’re so pretty.”
“Isn’t it pretty of you to think so,” David said.
“David, stop it!” Kate said.
“I should be serious.”
“Yes, you should.”
“Like everybody else?”
“If you’re going to have an argument,” Henrietta said, “do you need me in the middle?” That made them laugh, and they let her go, although both of them watched her carefully.
Kate found David looking at her. “Speaking of cake and beer,” he said, “how are you and Gordon making out?”
“Nobody’s making out,” she said.
“That wasn’t my question,” he said quickly.
“Wasn’t it, Davy?”
He blushed a little. She wished they hadn’t begun to speak so flippantly, because she would like some serious information from David on this subject.
“You must find him interesting,” David said.
“Well, he’s…” What was it? “He’s lively,” she said. That was part of it. There were subjects Gordon never thought about at all, that he wouldn’t ever stop to consider, but he had a charming impatience with life that kept them jumping and laughing. He was funny without wit, or at least any sort of wit she could remember afterwards. With Gordon everything had to be there at once, in context. And he handled things so well—material things like his sailboat and his car, and his phonograph. Things like cigarettes, lighters, cocktail shakers—they were all made for his hands. He danced lightly and knowledgeably. The people who served him seemed glad. She had little time to find him shallow, because everything they did seemed an occasion, and they were always at the center.
“Yes, he’s lively,” David said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“Why do you have to grant anything to me? He’s your friend, isn’t he?”
“I don’t think so,” David said seriously. “Maybe, but I’m not so sure.”
“Well, what’s a friend, Davy? You see him a lot. What do you mean by ‘friend’?”
“Like you and me,” David said, and it struck her. He said it so plainly. Her skin seemed to melt, and suddenly she grew shy of him. It mattered terribly that he not see her confusion. She turned away, as though casually, and rubbed a small stain from the table, a drop of juice from the beets they had at dinner.
“What’s the matter?” David asked.
“Nothing.”
“Where’s he taking you tonight? To that thing at the Country Club?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by later and case the joint.”
“Okay, Davy,” she said.
They went back into the living room to join the others. David watched Kate talk to Wood, her loved face printing upon its surface her kindness and lightness, how she couldn’t ever lie, not even to Wood about her concern. It occurred to him that none of the Whipples were liars, with the possible exception of himself. With the perfect, exact, absolute exception of himself. For one thing, Letty thought him more real, more possible, than he was. He was struck again by Letty’s likeness to Kate, and as he watched Kate it was as though he had lied to her, been in some way dishonorable to her. She was so open and delicate. He thought of a flower, perhaps a daisy; only an organism as pure and mute as a flower could have Kate’s symmetry and perfection. She was dressed up to go to the dance, and even in the nylons and heels, the make-up, the dress fashioned to fit over a grown woman’s breasts and hips, Kate carried herself so lightly she managed to look as fit as a lovely child.
That evening when Wood took his new print to his room he found an unmarked envelope under his door. In the envelope were two ten-dollar bills and a five-dollar bill. He took the money and the envelope and put them on his desk. A present? But who would give him money like that? Twenty-five dollars. Then he knew; it was the twenty-five dollars Horace had confiscated from the school lockers long ago; now Horace marked that fund paid. Paid in full. Maybe a declaration of independence. He and Horace hadn’t been very close these last years. Horace stayed by himself, and though he was as haunted-looking as ever, he always seemed busy.
Wood was trembling; he wanted peace. Even while the rational part of him considered that old debt, and Horace, and after Horace the rest of the family and their worries, there was a call from his darkness, a scream of helplessness. He took two translucent capsules from an olive-colored box, a bottle from his desk drawer, and washed the capsules down with raw whiskey. Once that would have made him gag, once upon a more innocent time. Now there seemed to be so little power in whiskey or drugs. But there was some power, thank God. He would have no more than an hour to kill before he could sleep.
Duty said he should go knock on Horace’s door and find out in what spirit Horace had paid back the money. Why was there no message with it?
On his desk beside the money was a paragraph he had recently copied into his notebook:
The entire population of Japan is a proper military target…THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN. We are making War and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which War is and seeks to bring about an enduring Peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.
—Col. Harry F. Cunningham, A-2,
Fifth Air Force. Fifth Air Force
Intelligence Review, No. 86,
15-21 July, 1945
These little jewels he saved. They seemed to help his case, as though each document proved him just a little innocent. But wasn’t he the prosecutor? Was it not someone else’s trial, and he only the lawyer’s clerk?
Fifty-five minutes, approximately.
He forced himself to go to Horace’s room. Horace wasn’t there. That took four minutes, what with knocking, waiting and finally opening the door, turning on the light and finding the room empty. Slowly and methodically he went to the bathroom and washed, brushed his teeth and got ready for bed. He took one more drink from the bottle of whiskey, and this time the acid shock of whiskey and toothpaste did almost make him gag. Good. He got into bed and looked at the one foot pushing up the blankets. Good. He felt the smooth depression where he once had an eye. When he tapped it, it made a hollow sound, like a loose drum. The whiskey, he had been warned, increased the effect of the barbituate, and he had found that approximately two ounces, or two swallows, was the right amount if he hadn’t eaten much for supper. Beyond these dosages lay another world where he tossed without control, in the power of the drugs. Once in desperation he had taken himself by the throat and tried to kill the mind that had entertained the fantasies of that world. Now he was more careful.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have got into bed quite so soon. He turned out the light, then quickly turned it on again, because its absence revealed the room with the mustard walls, the wooden guard tower beyond those cold, borrowed windows. This time an operating table stood in the center of the room. He had seen too much. A slender woman lay strapped to the table, her knees spread and her feet tied into stirrups. She was naked, and now his face dollied in, his face and his eyes, looking, seeing everything. Her external genitalia had been closely shaved, and were covered with the reddish scrapes of the razor. The pores stood out upon the scraped pudenda, and the flesh looked tough, like something much handled, although it hadn’t been. He tried to avoid looking at her face because he knew who she was.
The clipboard said: Zeugungs versuchsstelle: 1-004-065 (m). There was no question as to the inevitability of the operation, which would be performed without anesthesia, an interesting problem (it was written) in the traumatic effects of such pain; the next experiment (Versuch), scheduled for 1400 hours, would be upon a patient of the same approximate age and in the same approximate health. In this case spinal anesthesia would be used. What the clipboard promised would be done.
“Wood?” she said. It was Lois, as he had known. “Wood?” Her face was sick and pale. Her black hair, so dirty it was the color of slate, fell thinly to the gray paper. Canvas straps cut across her chest.
“Wood, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d rather die.”
“It’s too late now.”
“What are they going to do to me?”
Of course he knew. “Just a little operation,” he said.
“Wood, I’m cold. My nose itches.”
“My arms are tied,” he said. “What can I do?”
“Remember when I played the duke? Remember my costume? You were the king. You were always my king.”
“I’m only a prisoner!” he shouted. “Don’t ask me to do anything! You should have died! You made the wrong choice and I can’t help it!”
“Oh, Wood,” she said softly, “don’t cry, my dear. I’m so happy to be a woman.” She listened, and seemed to be remembering.
Soon the experiment would begin, and he would hear her first long unbelieving call. His eyes were forced to the schedule on the clipboard. Heben: ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina, labia majora, labia minora, clitoris, fourchette, fossa navicularis, vestibule, vestibular bulb, Skene’s tubules, glands of Bartholin, hymen, vaginal introitus. Extend meatus urinarius beyond perineum.
Why had he studied their work?
“Can’t you kill me, Wood, before they come?”
He fell from the bed and crawled to the corner where his shotgun stood, but it wasn’t there. He propped himself upon his stump, and his arms scythed that corner, but never found the cold gun. His box of shells was gone from the shelf. All right, he coldly thought, you have tried to disarm me. My visions are precise and even scientific; agony is considered an incidental phenomenon, below all but perhaps the mildest curiosity of the state. He stumbled and hopped to his desk and gobbled all the rest of the translucent capsules. If he drank too much whiskey with them he might vomit them up (auswerfen), so he did not.
At ten o’clock that evening Horace walked down Bank Street, past the windowlights of houses, past the dark high school. Today had been the first Friday that Susie hadn’t been up to greet him when he came for the rents. Sam Davis had let him in, Sam Davis so drunk he drooled as he grinned, and when Sam stepped back he shoved the kitchen table so far, the electric toaster came to the end of its cord and fell to the floor. An old piece of dried toast was still in the toaster, and this struck Horace with ominous meaning, as though life had somehow ended with that small forgetting. He must get Susie out of there and away, and now, this evening, he had begun. He had six hundred dollars in traveler’s checks in a neat little folder with a snap on it, and a hundred dollars in cash. They would take Grimes’ taxi to Wentworth Junction and take the midnight train south. If he couldn’t get her to leave tonight they would leave tomorrow; he was ready now. There were no more Herpes, and Zoster had faded, disappeared, gone away without leaving a memory of cellar stench. Below his window he’d found, long ago, a ball of mouse fur, the last sign of Leverah. He was a man now. He knew the ball of mouse fur had been passed by a cat, probably Tom. He knew what had been in his imagination and what had not, and in his singular clarity of mind he made this new decision with no trepidation whatsoever. He had saved the seven hundred dollars out of his salary—it had taken less than a year. He would get a job, and maybe Susie would get a job when she felt better, and there would be no cheap laughter any more. She was only four years older than he was. If she couldn’t do without sex, she could show him what she liked and he could do it to her. They would be married. But first he must get her away from Leah, from this terrible place. How many times had he heard them joke about her. They said she “ate the bird,” and he didn’t know what that meant. The lowest, filthiest men in town had the right to print her with the word “Fuck,” then laugh with expressions like they had to go to the bathroom. It was Leah, this terrible place that wouldn’t let you go, that remembered everything bad. They would change their names; they would never think of Leah again. They would start new, with no memories, just their own kindness.
In the square the grown people seemed furtive. Some high-school-age kids hollered and lounged on the steps of the Town Hall, flicking cigarettes ten feet across the sidewalk to the gutter, watching for girls and women so they could act their smut out upon their faces. Cruelty was everywhere. In Trask’s the bright lights proclaimed those thoughts official, as though the people were on the stage. In the Strand they all sat close as a pinch or a goose in the dark, watching the murder they had paid to see. The mills and factories were closed for the night, the pale steel gears waiting to mesh.
Water Street smelled of cinders and coal and the ancient fumes of locomotives. Futzie’s Tavern door opened like a mouth to let a shadow in as a bad breath of smoke and beer seeped out into the street. The mouth of hell with blue neon lips. He would take her out of Leah. The stars closed down upon the town, so close they might have been pinned to a blanket stretched across the tops of the houses. Someone came out of the tenement and quickly walked toward the railroad tracks, keeping in the shadow.
Susie’s door was ajar, so he went straight on in through the empty kitchen. The toaster was still on the floor with the piece of toast sticking half out of it like a dead tongue. He heard a gag, that despairing sound, and ran to Susie’s bedroom. Her light was on, and she lay across her bed. The white balloons of her buttocks gleamed pure and cool; her bathrobe was all up around her waist, and her head hung down on the dark side of her bed.
“Again?” she said, and retched. “Didn’t you get your rocks off? Can’t you see I’m sick? Get out of here! Ugg, ugg!” Liquid splashed, with a metal-bowl sound. “Glaag! Oh, oh!” she said. “Get out!” she sighed in despair. “Oh, oh, oh!” She lost her breath, and heaved. Her hand clutched the spread, and the great pure virginal moons of her shivered and clenched.
She raised her head and looked. “Horace! Oh, my God!” She pulled her bathrobe down, turning as she tried to pull it out from under her. He saw the dark cloud between her legs, dark as a piece of twilight, furred brown as a rabbit pelt.
“I’m sorry, Horace. I’m sick,” she said quickly. “Go out to the kitchen and I’ll be out in a mintue.”
“You’re sick,” he said. “Lie down.” He pressed her back, his hand on her chest. He took the vomit to the bathroom and flushed the thin brownish stuff down the toilet. He found a sponge under the kitchen sink and cleaned up the splashes, then cleaned the basin. With a washcloth damp with cool water he came back and washed the sweat from her face and neck.
“Oh, Christ.” She sighed. “I’m so drunk. I’m stinking drunk. Give me a cigarette.” Her hand waved weakly toward the table. He got her a cigarette and lighted it for her. She took a long drag and immediately heaved, and he caught the cigarette and a string of drool in the washcloth. Her hair was all brown strings pasted to her head.
“Go away, Horace. Go away. Go home.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you.”
He went to the bathroom, rinsed out the washcloth with soap and came back to wash the old make-up off the bottom half of her face.
“You’re washing me,” she said. “You’re washing me.”
“Do you feel better?”
“Oh, God, no. I stink.”
“You ought to take a bath, then.”
“I stink all over.”
He went to the bathroom, turned on the tub faucets and waited for the water to warm, then went back to her.
“The tub’s filling,” he said. “Come on.”
When she closed her eyes, the brown hollows under them made him melt with tenderness. He touched those soft places. She opened her eyes and looked at him almost with horror. “What are you doing?”
“I just touched your eyes.”
“Horace, what are you doing here?”
“From now on I’m going to be taking care of you.”
“I don’t understand you. I’ve never made you happy.”
Something odd happened to her mouth, as though it weren’t her moving it. “You’ve always made me happy,” he said.
“I’ve made everybody else happy. I’ve made everybody happy but you.”
“Come on. The tub’s filling. It’ll run over.”
“I’ve got this thing makes them happy.” She laughed, and retched, but not so badly as before.
“Come on.” He took her by the arms and stood her up. She began to fall back, so he put his arm around her and began to walk her down the hall.
A door banged open behind them and Sam Davis came staggering out in his long underwear. The wrists, neck and fly of the underwear were all worn brown. He stopped, his pinkish eyes bugging out.
“Jesus Baldheaded Christ!” he yelled. “What the shit are you doing?”
Susie’s head lay on Horace’s shoulder, her bare feet dragging on the floor.
“Never mind,” Horace said. The bathtub would run over if he didn’t get there soon, but now Sam Davis ran around in front of them and blocked the way, his brown crotch sagging like a diaper and his scrawny arms braced against the wallpaper.
“I’ve got a right to know!” he yelled. One hand slid down the wall and he nearly followed it to the floor.
“Get out of our way,” Horace said. When Sam didn’t, he walked over him, and Sam fell down like several sticks.
“Christ, you didn’t have to do that,” Sam whined from the bathroom door. “You hurt me. I ought to call the cops.”
“Oh, God,” Susie said, and retched.
“Well, Jesus,” Sam said plaintively, “I’m your father and you ain’t got a blessed stitch on under that bathrobe. Jesus, I got a right to think I ought to be told something. Besides, I got to take a leak so bad I can taste it.”
Still holding Susie, Horace bent down and turned off the faucets. “All right,” he said, and walked Susie out to the hall. Sam shut the door, and they heard the splashing. Susie breathed on his neck, the sour smell of her hair and her vomit breath surrounding him. She leaned against him and she seemed to be getting drunker.
“Poor Horace,” she said. “Oh, my, I’m so drunk. I’m such a drunk. I’m a filthy drunk. I’m a filthy old bag, Horace. Horse. I’m a slut. I’m a great piece of ass as the whole town knows I can’t say no to anything that wears pants.”
“Be quiet.”
“I just want everybody to be happy, Horsie-Horse. I never played with your pickle, though, did I? I never played your piccolo?”
He would wash away all that, and they would begin again. He would tear down all that—this house—with his bare hands, and all it meant. The wallpaper exuded that rotten slime. It smelled of sweat.
“‘Susie Davis, in a dream, took on the Leah football team.’ Haven’t you ever sang…sung that at a picnic?”
“Be quiet now,” he said.
Sam came out of the bathroom. “I’d still like to know what you got in mind,” he said.
“I’m going to give Susie a bath,” Horace said.
“What? You’re what?”
Horace moved Susie into the bathroom and removed her bathrobe, revealing great, achingly pure expanses of her delicate flesh. He rolled up his sleeves and lowered her into the tub. Sam stood in the door with his face averted, arguing.
“What gives you the right to look at all of her like that? Jesus Christ!”
“I’m going to make her clean again.”
“Jesus, you sure do give funny answers. You’re gitting me all confused.”
Horace soaped her hair, and wrung the suds through it. His rough hands squeezed and rinsed the long brown hair. “Ah,” Susie sighed.
“I’m gonna git me a beer,” Sam said.
Horace soaped her neck and shoulders, then her sandpapery armpits. She leaned forward obligingly, as if in a dream, as he washed her back. He washed her all over, his hands at times seeming to sink deep into forbidden places, quicksand places. Her hard breasts, the pink nipples, her thighs and calves and feet; he washed the deep complications of her sexual place, amazed at his right. Under his ministering fingers passed the button of her anus. He left no part of her unclean.
Sam came back to argue, keeping his face turned so he would catch no glimpse of his daughter.
“You sure got a lot of gall,” Sam ventured.
“I’m taking Susie away,” Horace said. He lifted her out, and she stood leaning against him as he dried her. His shirt and pants were all wet in front.
“Taking Susie away?” Sam looked, this time, and quickly, guiltily looked away. “What d’ you mean, take her away?”
“Away,” Horace said. He put her bathrobe around her and led her back to her room.
“Oh, Horace,” she said. “What in the world are you doing?”
“You may be the goddam janitor,” Sam said, “but it don’t follow you got a right to come in here and wash my girl!” A gust of drunkenness hit him and he rolled along the wall. Without spilling his beer he fell to one knee. “I ought to call the cops,” he said.
“It’s too late for you,” Horace said.
“What? What?”
“All you are is a drunk.”
“I’m a farmer!”
“You’re a drunk.”
“I’m a farmer! Susie, ain’t I a farmer? Tell him!” Sam began to blubber. “If he takes you away, what happens to me? Answer me that! What happens to me?”
“If I don’t take her away, what happens to her?”
“It ain’t fair!” Sam cried.
Horace let her down on the bed and pulled the spread over her. From her bureau he began to gather her clothes.
“Horace, what are you doing?” She tried to get up on her elbow, but fell back with a groan. “I’m so drunk. It’s got me.”
“I’m getting your clothes together.”
“What happens to me?” Sam cried.
“You’ve taken money from Gordon Ward,” Horace said.
“Who says so?” Sam was terribly indignant.
“I’ve seen. Do you think I’m blind? I know everything. He buys your liquor for you.”
“It ain’t true!” Sam was truly indignant; no one could be accused of such a thing. Horace saw his true indignation. Sam could not believe how things could be summed up.
“Daddy,” Susie called in a sick voice. “Let me talk to Horace. Go away and leave us.”
“Well, I don’t know, now,” Sam said. “It don’t seem right, somehow, to leave him in here when you got no clothes on.”
“Shut up, Daddy. Go get yourself another beer.”
“It don’t seem proper.”
“Oh, God!” Susie groaned.
Muttering and complaining, Sam went out of the room.
“Haven’t you got a suitcase?” Horace said.
Susie sat up and tried to look at him. She held the spread across her chest, and her damp hair fell over her shoulder and back. “What?” she said.
“A suitcase,” Horace said.
“What you doing?”
“I’m going to pack your things. You’ve got to tell me what you want to wear.”
She had fallen back. “Sick, Horsie. Can’t you see ‘m sick.”
He leaned over her and grabbed her face. “Listen!” he said, shaking her face back and forth. Her lips slid over her teeth; he had made that grimace with his hands, and he was afraid he hurt her. She opened her eyes.
“Can I make you happy, Horsie? I think I’m going to sleep, so hurry up.”
“No!” he shouted. “Wake up! You’re acting crazy!”
She tried to wake up, he could see. She shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said in a rational voice. “What is it, Horace? If you want to, go ahead. Go ahead if you want to.” She began to pull the spread from her body, and he pulled it back and held it to her shoulders.
“I want you to go away with me,” he said clearly. “Do you understand? I’ve saved up a lot of money, and I want to take you away from Leah. We can go right now. I’ve got it all planned.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
“Don’t you understand, Susie?”
“I’m not thinking too good, Horace.”
He held the match to her cigarette and she took a long drag. The blue cone of smoke sighed from her throat, and her eyes flickered.
“Susie, please listen to me!”
“Get me a beer. Maybe that’ll wake me up.”
“You don’t want a beer!”
“I want to make you happy, Horace. It makes me happy to make you happy.”
“Will you go with me?”
“Oh yes, yes. Anything you say, Horace.” She dropped the cigarette and he picked it up and put it in the ashtray.
“Do you understand what I want? Susie! Do you really understand?”
“Yes, Horace.”
If only he could pick her up right now and take her out of this house. But he couldn’t think of a place. If only he had learned to drive when David tried to teach him, instead of freezing up tight. He groaned. If he could get her dressed he could call Grimes’ taxi. But he couldn’t lug her out like a sack of meal. Grimes would take one look and tell him to put her to bed, enjoying it all immensely too.
“Listen, Susie!”
“Cigarette.”
He handed her the cigarette.
“Listen, Susie. I’m taking you away. We’re going to start all over again, like when you were a little girl. Remember? You and me.” His words seemed all at once hopeless, a weird echo of something hopeless he had heard before.
“Okay.”
She didn’t understand at all.
“You’re so sweet, Horsie. Oh my, I feel so clean and so sleepy.”
Suddenly he was discouraged. He couldn’t fight her lethargy, her absent mind. Even if he managed to take her away now, it wouldn’t be Susie, it would only be that bright flesh and hair he had washed and dried. He would have to leave and continue his own preparations. He hadn’t even thought to pack a suitcase for himself, and he didn’t want to spend their money on clothes. Evidently she didn’t have a suitcase. Her drawers were full of silky female things, and strange boxes and ointments she’d probably need. These petty considerations had him caught, like a haunting blow from the past when elbows and angles always reached for him and stung him. For a second his vision turned red and he considered tearing the doorframe out of the wall. This grimy, sill-rotten building, bought with a cheat and a lie, with its stinking drains and sweating pipes.
He shouldn’t leave her here even for a moment.
Susie moaned and rolled toward him. “Gimme cigarette.”
He pushed her back. “Go to sleep.”
“Mmm.”
He put his hand on her breast; beneath the rubbery flesh was the even beat of her heart. She half woke. “Did you come, Horace? Did you like it? Did you do like to give me a baby?” With a sigh, she slept.
He melted, and wrung his face with his hands. He couldn’t leave her unprotected. He considered the possibility of the eight o’clock bus to Wentworth Junction; could he get her organized by morning? He would have to leave her here for a while with no defenses, not even her wits, with that broken fool her father. Gordon Ward might come, or Keith Joubert, Donald Ramsey, Bruce Cotter, Junior Stevens, even David. No, he would keep his plan for a while longer, reorganize it and perfect it. He would consider things like suitcases this time, and train reservations. He would know their destination. It would be Springfield, Lawrence or Providence, not just some vague city to the south. He would present the plan to her not in breathless desperation but with calm strength.
She breathed evenly now, with a little repeating tick of mucus in her nose—a little-child noise he found so moving tears came to his eyes. Her hair was drying glossy and soft, and he rearranged it on the pillow. Beneath her lids her gentle eyes moved in a dream. He would sit beside her and be her sentinel until dawn.
They parked by the first tee and crossed the lawn in the balmy summer air, Gordon’s hand lightly on her elbow. The Country Club was gay with Japanese lanterns hung all around the wide porches. As they approached, band music, laughter and light came from the windows and verandas, proclaiming a kind of disorganized joy. Tall elms stood over the Country Club like fond giants—parents, even—guarding it into the dusk. The young deserved their gaiety, did they not? They walked so firmly, breathed so easily. The air they drank was friendly to their energies.
Inside, she and Gordon danced among the others, everyone gracefully passing and turning. Gordon moved lightly on his feet, and she couldn’t combine this Gordon with the Gordon Ward of high school who had seemed so big and crude. The two boys simply would not come together in her mind. It reminded her of the depth finder in her camera with its two images, one gold and the other plain. They were supposed to slide together to make one image, but her memory would not do that to the bright boy who held her. This Gordon, who was slenderer than the other one, hadn’t the cruel laugh and swagger she remembered.
The song was “Sweet Eloise,” the last of a set of old fox trots, so when it was over they found a table near the band and sat down. The players knew Gordon, or remembered him, and they smiled and nodded as they put their instruments down by their chairs.
She knew David was worried about her going out with Gordon, but she found herself smiling with pleasure at this thought. David had even been worried about Wayne, who had never seriously kissed her. Wayne would always have to be acting. He would bow, saying some ironic thing, and kiss her hand or her forehead. When Gordon first kissed her he knew enough to just plain take her in his arms and do it, without any joking or asking for permission or any words at all. He was very hard and strong, but very gentle in his strength. She had the sense of that restraint, of the strong man being so gentle with her. When he held her with that powerful but gentle intent she thought she must be in love with him.
But then she would look, as she did now, at his large freckled hand sporting his class ring, the biggest model obtainable, and a sort of dull, unwelcome warning sounded. Something was wrong. And something was wrong with his watchband—a series of gold S-shaped bars that flexed and glittered. Why did these little things strike her that way? She remembered feeling the same guilt about her evidence when she looked at Wayne’s hickish clothes. Gordon wasn’t hickish, he was deliberately Ivy League, but was that watchband some kind of miscalculation, or what? Was it too right, or just a little wrong? In any case, Gordon looked like money and he knew he looked like money. He’d told her once that a headwaiter always looked at your shoes, and could always tell. One time they’d decided to eat at the Inn in Northlee, a rather formal place, when they’d been driving back from Vermont and were wearing sports clothes. When Gordon had asked the hostess if they were dressed too informally, a man at the reception desk had turned to another and said in their hearing, “A forty-dollar sweater and he’s worried?” This pleased Gordon; he seemed pleased that people could look at your clothes and know exactly what they cost.
Were the people here appraising them in this fashion? As she looked around to see who was here, the always slightly embarrassing thing occurred; faces caught looking at her and Gordon turned slightly, eyes changed their focus slightly. There was Lois Potter, pretty dark hair and alabaster skin, and that also Ivy League boy must be her fiancé from Brown. With them were Foster and Jean Greenwood, who looked strange whenever they danced because he was so tall and she was so short. It looked just a little possible that Jean was pregnant again. John Cotter was there with, of all people, Minetta Randolf. He was a quiet, silent boy and she was as sexy-looking as Carol Oakes, only sultrier. There were a lot of couples in their early thirties, and they were the ones who were a little drunk and noisy. Some of the men had red faces and ears. She knew very few of the names of the couples in that group.
Their drinks came—a gin rickey for Gordon and a Coke for her. The waiter, probably a college boy, seemed to be a great admirer of Gordon’s. She didn’t know who he was, but Gordon called him “Skink,” and Skink seemed joyful at that recognition.
Mr. and Mrs. Ward came over to say hello, Gordon rising with a mock-gallant flourish to ease his mother’s chair. The tall old couple were all decked out and glittering. They were both more vivid than life, with whiter hair, bigger jewels and sparklier teeth than anyone their age ought to have.
“We won’t bother you youngsters for more than a minute!” Mr. Ward said. Another waiter brought their drinks from their table.
“How are you, my dear?” Mrs. Ward said. “My, you make such a striking couple. Everybody looked up when you came in!” She’d had a few drinks, evidently, because her voice was a little slurry and a little more honest in its intonations than it was when she was totally sober. She affected what David called “the East Coast upper-class accent,” but all her affectations were harmless because she was a character, not a real force. Kate liked her.
She leaned toward Kate conspiratorially, her veined waxy hand glowing beneath its jewels, and said, “Like father, like son. Aren’t my men dashing?” Gordon and his father were laughing at something, and Mrs. Ward looked at them proudly.
There was a sort of charm to that life. Kate could feel it, expensive and dashing, possessed of the richest and best of things. How gray and fussy Wayne’s round of life seemed compared to the Wards’. She thought of them as walking upon their green manicured lawns, or riding in great silent cars, always having a kind of holiday.
She and Gordon danced, and the Wards went back to their friends. At the next intermission they went out to the car, where she had a real drink, a gin and collins Gordon skillfully prepared from his leather-covered portable bar. The night was warm and starry, so Gordon put down the top of the car. The sweet smell of mown grass, damp from the night sprinklers they heard busily hissing, wafted across the golf course.
After that drink of gin she seemed to dance more lightly, perhaps a little abandonedly. Gordon was always there, turning and coming back to her, pleased by her lightness. Later they went out to the car again, a tune following them across the lawn. “Falling in love with love” came smoothly from among the happy noises inside the Country Club. The Japanese lanterns along the verandas glowed inside themselves, not casting any light at all.
“You happy, Kate?” Gordon asked. She had been humming the song.
“Yes, I guess I am,” she said.
“I’m serious about you,” he said.
The moon had come up, lighting the strong angles of his face, so that he seemed very noble and important. He turned and kissed her, steadily but uninsistently. When he drew his lips away she wasn’t ready for that departure—it was almost like loss.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Gordon said. “It’s such a warm night. Top down. How about it?”
As they drove she leaned her head back and watched the trees swing by overhead, dipping their great dignified branches as if in salute, as if the smoothly running car were a sort of throne, or sedan, passing down wide dark aisles. She hadn’t noticed where they were going, or even that they had climbed a hill, when they stopped in front of her house.
“What?” she said, recognizing the towering house with surprise.
“I’ve got an idea,” Gordon said. “Go get your bathing suit and we’ll go for a swim. What do you say?”
“Where?”
“At our cabin, where else?”
“My goodness. What time is it?”
“Ten-thirty. It’s early. Come on, Katie, it’ll cool us off. Then I’ll light a fire in the fireplace and warm us up again.”
“I don’t know.” She wondered how she could tell him what her worry was. She wanted to be with him, but she was a little—just too tantalizingly little—afraid of him.
“You can trust me,” he said, laughing. “Anyway, Mother and Dad’ll be there at midnight, and I’ll bring you home. Safe as hell! Even I can be trusted for an hour and a half!”
“All right,” she said, thinking that it was peculiar but that she wanted to run her fingers over his wound, over the livid burn that smeared his freckled arm.
The Wards’ cabin was on the sandy side of the lake. The cabin itself was less like a camp than a year-round house, with finished and polished furniture, a large brick fireplace and a chromed and enameled modern kitchen. She changed, into her yellow one-piece suit, in Gordon’s parents’ bedroom, leaving her clothes on one of the twin beds.
When she came out, Gordon had already changed and was lighting the fire. When the papers flamed, his wiry hair turned red as the fire, and his chest glowed warmly. He was all live skin and curls.
He rose and turned toward her. “We’ll have one for courage. Then, splooshl Last one in’s a rotten egg!” He opened a knotty-pine cabinet, revealing all kinds of bottles—short, tall, amber, green, even red and yellow ones. “I’m going to make you a special potion,” he said, rubbing his hands like a movie villain. “It’s small, and green, ha! ha! It will make you my slave, Kate Whipple!”
His green eyes did glitter with almost evil intent, and she shivered as she laughed.
“You may laugh, me proud beauty,” he said. Then his voice changed and he came to her and took hold of her arms. “Katie, I’m absolutely serious now. I want to marry you. I love you, God damn it, and I want to marry you.”
The man offered himself to her, totally, for all time, altogether. The generosity of this offer stunned her. She couldn’t speak, but she found her hand sliding up the marble-smooth scar tissue on his arm. God! What had she been thinking? She knew too much, she saw too much. That contract had to be perfect, without any reservations at all. The world, something else, must still be out there for her. “Gordon,” she said.
“Now, now, Katie, I know. Bad taste to spring such a proposition on you without warning, right?”
She nodded, and he said, “However, the offer stands, pending notification by the party of the first part of intent to cancel. You understand? Serious. Thought out. Even discussed with parents. I’ve got it so bad I look at building lots.”
She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she squeezed his hand. They went down to the beach, subdued and silent. The sand was cooler than the water. They eased into the black water, and she felt the motion and the pressure of the man swimming beside her, easily pushing through the warmth. They swam slowly out into the lake, where it was all water and chilly moon-light. He rolled slowly, like a seal, and they swam back toward the lights of the cabin. When she could touch bottom he touched her, and she came against his cool slippery skin.
“I forgot all about the potion,” he said. “I should have given you the potion first. But when you fall in love your timing gets all screwed up.”
They stood in front of the fire in their bathing suits while they drank the potion, which was something with green creme de menthe in it, and then changed back into their clothes. When she came back, Gordon had moved the leather sofa up in front of the fire. His white shirt gleamed. “Here’s your second portion of potion,” he said, handing her the tall glass.
They sat in front of the fire. She asked him what time it was and he told her eleven-thirty. She knew he wanted to put his arms around her, and she wanted him to, but there was that sobering question. It was all too serious now, too meaningful. She had to trust him because he had declared himself. For seconds at a time she eased slowly into considering it, really considering marrying Gordon and having it all over with. All the messing around and the dating and the embarrassed glances would end, because she would be an entity not herself. She would be Mrs. Gordon Ward, who would know who she was and what she was for. She would be for this man to love, to make real love to and to have his babies. How soft and simple that would be.
No.
After a while he took her glass and put it on the floor. Such a firm, authoritative thing it was, his strong arm coming around her. She let go, wondering, melting with pleasure, yet still wondering. Soon his parents would be home, wouldn’t they? Her lips made a noise like silk against the sand of his face. She was conscious of their receiving softness. They were lying next to each other; she had moved lightly as though obeying thoughts, without thinking, and let him use her own body to place them here. How had he done that so beautifully? A warning, a tick of warning. He was too good, but how could a man be too good? His hand held itself firm upon her ribs, and she didn’t want him to and wanted him to move his hand up over her breasts so badly it seemed unfair that he didn’t right now gently caress her breasts. The hand wouldn’t move. Warning, warning, she heard. Look out. She was all slow honey. One step more and she would dissolve into rapture, be impaled by rapture.
How could it remain and grow, the fresh desire for more and more of him, for more and more of his weight? Now she would let him touch her breasts; the moment she decided that, his hand moved over her breasts toward the very edge of reason. Beware, a small voice—her own from far away, a long time ago—spoke thinly. You don’t know what he can do, what he will do. His lips and hands half covered her. Again and again she received his touch without satiation. How strangely slow it was, how the great movements of heat gathered and washed her, and the clean cold Kate let herself be gathered again into heat.
Hadn’t hours passed? How many thousand times had they kissed? Their teeth touched—then, familiar yet always burning, their tongues. He loved her, and his moan broke her—that she caused that pain. Who was this force that grew, that before had only been a boy? His hands were everywhere—border violations, childish business, hot on the forbidden skin of her breasts, the soft brittle nipples. In a wave’s trough she was afloat in a sultry tropical night. She had been prepared, made royal, and awaited the young god who had chosen her from all the virgins of the world. Bathed and delicately scented, she had been placed among ferns on the golden shore. The galleys had sailed away, heaving in the green sea, and she trembled and yearned for his power. Then he appeared, golden and gloriously naked before her, trim of body and shining with his dangerous power. He smiled, and his eyes were kind yet full of dark intent. Pain like a blue spark, a flash, and the saddle of the man was all against her. She was impaled. He was the beloved lovely rack that softly broke her, over and over.