Kate sat in David’s big chair, waiting for him to come back. She smoked two of his cigarettes, trembling and then not trembling. For minutes at a time she thought neither of Wood nor of Gordon, but then she would have to come back to right now. She squirmed in sudden ghost pain, feeling things swimming inside her, where she was unprotected.
Last night when she’d come to her senses it was like coming up out of deep water, like a diver coming slowly back to the pressures and rules of another atmosphere. She was appalled at what she’d let him do. She hadn’t remembered opening her legs. She’d cried for shame. But even now, horrified as she was, she remembered that delicious melting. She moved, half in shame and half in luxury. Then shame bleared the room.
All Gordon had seemed to feel afterwards was a good-humored sort of pleasure. He even tried to kid her about it, saying how she’d have to marry him. “You’re used goods now, Kate,” he’d said. Then, quickly, he was tender. “Did I hurt you? I felt that little ring.”
“No,” she’d said coldly. She’d contemplated her new situation. She had been sexually used. Virginity did not seem a funny idea at all. How callous were the jokes she had once laughed at! While she lay there, confronting the enormity of what had happened to her, he took off the rest of his clothes. Of course it was a lie about his parents coming. In the firelight she saw his enormous penis shining. Then she was angry, nearly hysterical, and made him take her home.
He didn’t speak until they stopped in the Whipples’ driveway, then formally said again that he wanted to marry her, that he damned well would marry her, that he deliberately hadn’t “used” anything because he wouldn’t mind at all if he made her pregnant. He seemed so pleased at how he’d managed everything. She left him without answering and ran to the house.
And now, as if to show her how one didn’t lightly play with life, Wood had tried to kill himself. Everything was too serious and deadly. She could hardly get a breath. When David came back she ran to him and held onto him. “David, I’m so unhappy! I don’t know what to do!”
“Hey, Katie,” he said. His arms surrounded her, holding her steady, her nose pressed against his musty old shirt. “Hey, hey, Kate, now. What’s the matter?”
She bawled against his chest, the noises coming out of her chest with pain, as though they were chunks of things. He patted her and patted her, crooning comforting sounds into her ear. Finally she could stop crying. She didn’t want to let him go, but she had to blow her drippy nose. She didn’t know how to tell him what she had to tell him.
“Is it Wood?” he said.
“Yes, but other things too, Davy. I feel so selfish! I should shut up.” She saw how worried he was. “How’s Wood?” she managed to ask.
“Well, Peggy’s taken over, I guess. But Katie—”
“How does he look, Davy?”
“He looks at Peggy—like he’s looking at a ghost.” David took hold of her at arm’s length and stared at her. “What else is it, Katie?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you!” She was trembling so much he shook her a little as if to jar her out of it. “Davy, everything’s mixed up. I feel like I’m being electrocuted or something.”
“Gordon Ward,” he said. His face grew cold, lumpy along his jaws.
“Yes, Davy, but—”
“What did the son of a bitch do to you?”
“I’ve got to tell somebody, Davy, and there isn’t anybody but you.”
“Okay,” he said, obviously trying to be calm. “Sit down and I’ll try not to act like your big brother.” Gently he sat her down in his easy chair again. He sat at his desk and gave her a cigarette. “I’m sorry, Katie. I’ve had a bad day too. Like a goddam nightmare. But we can talk, can’t we?”
“Yes, Davy,” she said gratefully.
“We could always talk, couldn’t we?” he said.
They were silent for a while.
“He asked me to marry him, for one thing,” she said finally.
“Katie, he’s charming and all that, when he wants to be.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“But he’s a shit.”
“I guess so.”
“Did he…?”
“Yes.” It seemed too important a thing to answer yes or no to, but there it was. You did it or you didn’t do it, and she had let Gordon do it. “But it was a combination of things, Davy!” She had to explain to him why it was so much an accident, because of everything that led up to it.
“Okay, tell me if you want to, Katie,” he said, and she knew she loved David and could trust him. She told him most of what had happened—the parts she could make words go around, with the words that were utterable in his presence.
“Are you sure he didn’t use anything?” David said sternly. She felt that he was trying to salvage that part of the damaged goods that was salvageable.
“I’m not sure of anything, Davy. I mean it. I was out of my mind. I couldn’t stop, you know? It felt so…like I was having a dream or something.”
“Did he pull out? Did he withdraw?”
“God, Davy. I wouldn’t know. I’m not even sure what that means. I’m sorry.”
“He sure likes to get what he wants, doesn’t he? The son of a bitch is thinking all the time. If it would do any good I’d maim him a little.”
“I think I loved him, Davy. I thought about marrying him.”
He got all excited. “For God’s sake, don’t even think about that! Don’t even consider it! You could come to Chicago and we could take care of it. I mean it! By a real doctor too, no fly-by-night outfit.”
“God,” she said. She felt sick.
“You’re too valuable to give to Gordon Ward. He doesn’t even think the way you do, Katie. Listen to me! He’s not like us—not like you, I mean. He’s a different species or something from us. Just think of Wood and then think of him. Do you see what I mean? He’s cold. He’s like a fucking crocodile, Katie!”
Why, she thought, David has tears in his eyes. He has tears in his eyes, he means that so much.
“Oh, Davy, I love you,” she said. “There isn’t anybody in the world I love as much as you.”
He took her hand. “Katie, this isn’t the end of the world, you know. It was just the first time for you, and girls always have to be in love, or think they are. The only complication is if you get…” He had trouble with a word. “Pregnant. I can raise the money, though, easy. It’s three hundred bucks. Nobody’d ever know about it. You could fly out and back, from school, and nobody’d ever know you were gone.”
“I could meet Letty,” she said.
“That’s right!” He laughed. “You’re fine, Katie. Always look on the bright side. We’d have a great time.”
How she would love to live near David in Chicago. He and Letty would be there, secure in their love for each other, and she would go out to dinner with them sometimes, she and Letty like loving sisters. She would tell Letty about David as a little boy, about some of his foibles, about the secret paintings hidden behind his desk.
David had got up and gone to the window. “What’s that?” he said, listening intently, frozen for a moment into silence. He didn’t seem to breathe, yet he wasn’t all that excited.
“What’s what?” she said.
“Listen,” he said.
On the wind over Leah came a sound that was rare though familiar. It was the breathy moo that always dipped strangely into focus. Not the noon whistle—that had to be rejected first. It was now deep in the afternoon, and that windy, hoarse cow’s roar meant a fire somewhere. It rose and fell as the wind took it—the warm wind of this August afternoon. Then she began to try to count the number of short moos and long moos.
“It’s the fire whistle,” David said calmly, now that he had identified it. “I wonder where the fire is.” He came back to her and leaned his threadbare knee on the arm of the easy chair. “Anyway, Sis, take it easy. All this ‘pregnant’ talk is probably hysterical. It depends on whether you’re in a fertile period and all that, and who knows when that is? It only lasts for a day or two—I think, anyway—out of the whole month.” He picked something off her shoulder and held it up to the light. “You know we’ve got the same hair?”
“But it means so much to a girl, Davy. I didn’t think it would hit me like that. And then Wood did what he did.”
“I know,” he said, suddenly growing nervous. “And you know what I did this morning? I took Tom out in the woods and murdered the poor old bastard.”
“Oh, Davy!”
“I couldn’t even do that right,” he said. “Christ, he ran off with one ear hanging. The thing was, I thought I was doing him a favor, but then he found out I was trying to kill him. He looked right at me. I had to hunt him all morning, and he knew all the time who was coming after him. Uh!” He shuddered. “And you think you did something bad?”
“But you didn’t mean to…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence.
“I’m scared about what I meant to do,” he said. “Certain parts of it I remember with a creepy sort of pleasure.”
“But he had to be put away, Davy!”
“Sure. And I elected myself executioner. I won’t go into all the fraudulent reasons.” He shook himself. “Anyway, Katie, I think it’s fading out. Everything fades out, you know? Don’t you feel a little better now about last night?”
“Yes, I do.” She got up and tucked in her shirt, thinking how that must represent a kind of symbolic return to order—Wayne would say that. Like tucking in the mind.
The fire whistle continued its vaguely hysterical mooing. They both listened, trying to count the longs and shorts, but the wind blew some of the moos away off toward Vermont. She hoped no one was afraid because of that fire, wherever it was.
“Just talking to you about it helped an awful lot,” she said.
“I mean that about getting it taken care of, Katie, if anything happens. If you miss your period and all.”
She was so grateful that he should know how simple and human it was—she was—to have periods. It was natural, wasn’t it? Everything was only natural. It was really no terrible thing she’d done with Gordon. She felt she must tell this to David.
“Nobody was hurt. I mean, he didn’t hurt me. Maybe I made too much of the virgin bit.”
“That’s right, Katie.”
“And I loved it, Davy. I was out of my mind, I loved it so much.” She had to tell him how marvelous it was. “There was just this little tick of pain, that’s all, and then it was like I was all hollow and empty and he filled me.”
“Katie,” he said. He was upset, she could tell, and this gave her a funny feeling of power and pleasure. He stood there so trim and young in his raggedy old clothes. He had that authority she had always admired—a sort of authority over his limbs and all the parts of him. The scratches on his face and hands seemed very uncharacteristic, but these were peculiar times.
“It’s Wood we have to worry about now,” he said. “Maybe it’s too deep for us.”
“Yes. But thank you, Davy,” she said, and lost her breath. She kissed him on the cheek, turned and left him there in his room.
The wind belled Wood’s curtains and let them fall back to the sides of the windows like the skirts of dancers. But they hadn’t the reassuring rhythm of dancers, so they were always just a little startling, those flamboyant flourishes. The day had cleared and grown harshly bright in that dry wind. The checked pattern of the curtains had a slightly unpleasant, hallucinatory effect on Peggy; were those little checks upside down or not?
She would not ask Wood why he had done what he had done. She would be his nurse—efficient, observant, always present. Perhaps it really had been an accidental overdose, although Dr. Winston obviously didn’t think so. She looked up and found Wood staring at her. He sat in his desk chair, keeping himself upright. At first he’d been tied upright with a bathrobe sash around his chest under his arms. The injection of picrotoxin was wearing off, and he seemed a little less jittery. He stared, and she looked straight back at that dark eye, looking for recognition. She found that he was looking at her and thinking about her, but he wasn’t aware that her look asked for recognition. She was being studied by that consciousness that had tried to end itself, to end all its processes. Earlier, when he was still extremely groggy, Wood had mumbled, “Oh, God, I’m awake.”
It must have been a disappointment to him to wake into a world he never wanted to see again. He hadn’t wanted to see daylight again. How could he want to leave, when all she wanted in the world was to be near him? There was no balance, no fairness in it. That he could want to end himself! Somehow she must get inside him and find out what was wrong. She must ask, and if that failed she would have to do something else. But she was still shy. She could not, even for the most urgent of reasons, get over that shyness. It was still like iron. When she made up declarations of love they appeared in her mind already mute and doomed. She could not even muster up a chiding anger; she had become his nurse, just his nurse.
His robe had fallen open across his chest, where the shining hairs were springy and alive against his skin. His bathrobe was maroon, warm as blood; his skin was too vivid against it, suggesting the parts of a wound. She began to shake, as if it had been she who had taken the injection of stimulant. He seemed to notice her trembling; a slight frown made lines on one side of his forehead. The string of his eye patch cut those lines off short, so the eyeless side remained clear as unmarked paper.
Though she was frightened and unhappy about him now, memory told her, as it always seemed to do no matter what troubles she had at the moment, that she had come a long way toward Wood. When she was ten, he was fifteen; they had been separated by those five years from any sort of equality. She had been the little girl he was kind and friendly toward. He had always been the leader, not really named as such, but the power behind a zone of protection that had surrounded her all of her life. Ever since she could remember, she had lived in a world where there was an ultimate authority who could be trusted. Yes, and how peculiar it was for her to claim poverty and stupid drunkenness as her childhood environment when Wood had always been nearby. He was her environment too, wasn’t he? The Whipples were her environment long before she came to live with them, and always that dark, quiet boy was there, the one person in the world she knew would never betray her. She had lain in her damp bed up in the sugarhouse, listening to the dangerous, stupid conversation between her mother and father or between her mother and other men, frightened half out of her wits by their crashing and thrashing because she didn’t know what kept them at it. If they could say such crude things to each other and seem to hate each other, why didn’t they keep away from each other? She really hadn’t known until Wood explained it to her. Well, not really explained everything, she supposed, but at least he told her there was a reason, that it wasn’t all pure madness. That was when she was nine or ten. What had been Wood’s explanation? He had wiped off her tears with a rather dirty handkerchief—she remembered that. They were sitting on one of the porches of the Whipple house—he had been sitting there, that is. It was raining but warm. All that day in school she had been nervous, on the edge of whimpering, because of what had happened the night before. On the way home she’d seen him sitting there reading and come running across the lawn. His kindness made her cry. She asked him what made her mother have to do what she hated so much. “Don’t you know, Peggy?” he said. He was fourteen or fifteen, yet even so she trusted him not to giggle or to evade any question. This seemed more of a miracle every year. She had known then, of course, that what she spoke of was wrong, dirty, sinful, giggle-making. She knew that much, maybe more, because now she couldn’t remember the exact words of his explanation. He had made it something she could live with, though. What had he said? That there was a strong attraction between male and female. “Strong attraction”—she remembered that clearly. She’d already known that. But then he went on to say that even though her mother sounded as though she didn’t like it, she did like it, very much; that it was only a kind of game to say the words that meant the opposite of what you felt. Good God! she thought now, the boy had actually said that to herl
It had to do with her shyness now—not just that incident, but all the times he had kept the world meaningful. He still did. If only she could get angry with him, or even make fun of him! Then she might get her tongue back. But he was invulnerable. He was too important.
She was getting so jittery herself she couldn’t even think straight. There he sat. There he was, yet right in this room last night he had almost gone out of himself. She must keep him here—a crazy vision of herself holding him down, like a wrestler. She could get her arms around his waist and hold him down on the bed so he couldn’t do anything. She could wrap her legs around him so he couldn’t even move; she would hold him quiet and soft until her warmth melted into him and he was calm.
A knock on the door startled her so much the wind went out of her chest. It was Dr. Winston back again. As he came in he gave her a quizzical, smiling little look, half secretive. “How’s your patient?” he said, putting his bag on the chair she’d been sitting in.
“I think he’s better.”
“You’d know if he was better or not,” Dr. Winston said. “In any case, it’s not the physical part I’m interested in now. The danger of the hypostatic pneumonia is over, to my thinking. He’s young. Even if he is a little flabby from sitting on his butt all the time, he’s pretty strong.” While he spoke he handled Wood—peered with the help of a little flashlight into his eye, then reached down into his bathrobe to thump his chest and squeeze his stomach. He didn’t speak directly to Wood, or even ask him to do anything. “Will he talk to you?” he asked.
“I haven’t asked him to,” Peggy said.
“Well, I’ll do some straight talking. Are you listening, Wood?”
Wood nodded.
“Are you going to try this again? Because if you do it’s going to be a little messy for me. Ordinarily I’d have to refer you to the psychiatrist at the clinic, and this business would be on your record. But there’s something peculiar about you and all the other people around here. I’ve been around a long time, and I can smell it. This young lady here, for instance. She doesn’t want you to go off and leave us, so I don’t expect you will. I don’t think you’d want to do that to your mother and father. There’s too strong a current running around in this house. And I think I know you. I’ve known you for a long time, off and on all your life, and I know your war record. I don’t know the details of whatever sort of hell you found yourself in last night. It must have been god-awful. But you’re not the type to hurt other people that much, now that you can think about it. You’re going to have to live with whatever it is. What I mean to say is you’ve got a duty toward the people who love you and want you alive. You’re not free to commit suicide.”
Dr. Winston shut his thin lips and nodded once, as if to say “There.”
Wood glanced at him and then away. “All right,” he said wearily.
“All right,” Dr. Winston said. He packed his bag and strode out on his long legs. As he went through the door he instinctively ducked his head, though the door was much taller than he was. Before he shut the door he turned around with a look of exasperation, as though Wood’s short answer had cut him off.
“Look!” he said. “As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing morally wrong with suicide. You understand that? In the proper circumstances, who can say? And you know as well as I do that ‘duty’ is a highly abused term, to say the least. I just want you to know I’m aware of that.”
“Yes,” Wood said, nodding his head.
“All right.” Dr. Winston shut the door.
Peggy turned back to Wood, to find him staring at her again. What was he seeing? She looked away. She wanted him to understand how much she loved him; he must see that. But maybe he didn’t want that love all over him, piled on like chocolate sauce over a sundae. Maybe he wanted Lois Potter. Jealousy pierced her so sharply she almost said “Ow.”
“What are you looking at?” she said. Her words slowly went into his head; she could almost see them disappearing into his mind, and she waited, shivering, to see what happened.
He turned shy, and looked away. “I was thinking how you’ve grown up,” he said.
“I’ve caught up to you.”
“Peggy, you’ve passed me. I haven’t even been to college.”
“No, I haven’t!” She didn’t know if her outburst was from anger or from fear of crying.
“Peggy,” he said. She heard his concern, then watched it change. Slowly it submerged into his usual immobility. She wondered if she considered herself worthy of him because he had been crippled. If he hadn’t been so maimed he would of course belong to someone like Lois Potter. Did she think she could sneak into his life because of what a machine gun had done to him?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You’re sorry?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “What have you ever done to be sorry about?”
“I wish I could get mad,” she said. Maybe she was getting angry. He kept making her breathless, knocking the wind out of her. Maybe he was the one who ought to wake up and see what was going on. “You sit there,” she said. “You sit there.” Now, that didn’t make sense. She had too much pride to tell him the truth right out straight, no matter what had happened. But what kind of pride was that? It was the pride that didn’t want him to treat her with kindness—not that goddam kindness!
“You’re angry,” he said.
“Well, don’t say you don’t blame me or something!”
“Peggy, I don’t think I can explain what happened to me last night.”
She saw the pain, but that wasn’t exactly what she had been talking about. He’d knocked the wind out of her again. Maybe he would always be able to do that. How could she explain that she wanted to be a woman to him?
“You tried to kill yourself!” she said. She almost added, “I can’t use you dead!” She was selfish, why not? He couldn’t use her, either, if he were dead. She had to get to him, right next to him. They had to burn up together so she could cure that death thing. “I’m not a little girl any more!” she said.
“I can see that,” he said, smiling a little. Icicles touched her waist, and then her breasts. For a moment she was burning up, confused. She’d put her hands on her stomach, and it embarrassed her terribly that he might know why. He just looked at her and she had gone all to pieces.
Outside, the leaves streamed and glittered in the wind. The curtains made their graceful but frantic swirls against the dark carved window frames. The fire whistle had been windily calling, hoarse and urgent, but it was so distant in this wind it might have been calling from another town, or even another country. It was such a distant urgency, so far away it might have even come from another time. Another brush fire, she supposed, in this dry year. Although this morning’s dew had been deceptively heavy, the wind had blown it all away. She listened, but it was impossible to count the number of whistles.
Wood looked at her as she turned away toward the window. She gave him a strangely sinful feeling, like the memory of stolen looks at girls in childhood. Maybe it had something to do with a time long ago when for one shocking second he’d seen Peggy Mudd naked. He’d nearly forgotten about it. She was only a child. He’d been hunting partridge up by the reservoir, and coming suddenly upon the sugarhouse he’d stepped to a window and looked in. She stood in a washtub next to the sink, shining wet and naked, so smoothly pure, unmarked by body hair. He’d fled at once.
The two images slid into place: little Peggy and the little girl murdered by freezing, a ghost function of his missing eye, impossible diplopia. He put his hand to his eye, and as if he’d touched her, she spoke. “What is it? What is it?” She leaned over him, her warmth on his face and on the back of his hand. “Do you hurt or something, Wood?” Firmly she took his hand down from his eye, and looked into his head. He shut his eye tight, trying to keep her from that scene. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” she cried. “Stop it, Wood!” She pulled his face against her—muscle and softness, the presence of bone and the flutter of her heart. In that mustard-colored room her warmth could only bleed before the cold noneye, the flame-green intent that should not ever touch her.
It was so dangerous he couldn’t move.
“Wood!” he heard her call from outside. “Wood!” She seemed to have more than a small power of warmth. Her heart beat against him like the heart of a bird whose warm wings enfolded him. As long as they could not subdue that strong idea, all would be precariously safe. But it was Peggy, and he knew she was not a prisoner; she was here in his room, holding his head in her arms as fiercely as one holds a contested basketball. A peculiar sight, signifying that perhaps this was not Auschwitz, Maidanek, Sibibor, Chelmno, Wolzek, Treblinka. Leah; so it was Leah. The cold ones waited everywhere for their chance at power. Vernich-tungslager in Russian or in English would smell as sweet. Or in Chinese or Japanese. The nasty little two-legged things, indifferent or deadly, had come down into him by that ageless diffusion of characteristics. He opened his eye to a crack of sun, a flash like a strobe light illuminating the familiar cold room, the tower legs and barbed wire outside that strangely borrowed window.
She still called to him, caring for him. There was that power, and he came back to her, his face pressed against her body. He heard the little gurglings inside her, and the light thud of her heart. Her smooth arms slid around his head and neck, searching for better ways to hold onto him. So he came back into the August afternoon.
It was the first time they hadn’t meticulously continued. Always before they went all the way until the screaming stopped and the Test Person was comatose or dead.
Peggy was scared, and he tried to comfort her.
“Where did you go?” she kept asking him. “Where did you go, Wood?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “I’ve been right here with you all the time.” She held his face in her hands, making him look at her.
“Wood! I’m sorry, but I love you so much you can’t do that. You had a sort of fit, and you mustn’t do that!”
“No, I really didn’t have the fit that time. You kept me from having it, Peggy.” That was true, perhaps.
“You’ve got to tell me what’s the matter,” she said in that nervous, serious voice that comes straight down to a hard question. He was fascinated by the montage of Peggy’s child face upon this woman’s. The wide mouth, the high, Indian cheekbones, the even darkness of skin. The other girl had looked almost sickly around the eyes, but this woman’s were clear and demanding. This woman was, however, Margaret Marcia Mudd. The lovely flesh, though it cradled old memories and fears, had changed so much. He touched her hipbones, now subtly sheathed where once they had been starved, canted, it had seemed, like the edges of a dish.
They were poised there, looking straight at each other, Peggy’s hands on his shoulders, when a clatter and unintelligible voices approached the door. Peggy went to open it, and in the door appeared Sally De Oestris, supported gingerly by David and Henrietta. She got her canes straightened out and came on in, seeming to look up and out from her bent spine. “What’s all this they tell me?” she demanded.
“Now, Sally,” Henrietta said, cautioning her.
“He looks all right,” Sally said. “Peggy, how is he?”
“I think he’s much better. Physically.”
“Oh yeah? Physically. Well now, as I’m the nearest to going where he had a mind to go last night, I’d like to talk to him alone. You can go wash your face or something, Peggy, while I talk to him.” She shooed them all out. “I’ll have to ask you for that chair, Wood.”
He gave her the chair and sat on the edge of his bed. His stump tingled. All his joints felt slow and old, as if filled with heavy grease.
“So you tried to step out,” she said. “Is the reason a secret? They tell me you didn’t bother to leave a note.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” he said.
“Puh!”
“All right, Sally.”
“I’m not what you’d call a curious old woman. I used to be a curious young woman, but my curiosity rewarded me with too much knowledge. I thought, presumptuous as it might sound, that I could help.” She gleamed brightly, and though she sat erect—she had to sit erect—her knees were spread awkwardly for balance. She held her canes in one hand, her blotched, arthritic fingers flattened against the crooks. Her fingers seemed to articulate only at their first joints. It was hard to think of that wizened, softly wrinkled face as having been young. It seemed to him that Sally had been just as old as this for as long as he had been alive. Just old, a state that everyone a decade or so older than yourself had entered. But Sally had been nearly fifty years old when he was born. From all the myths and rumors about her, she had lived quite a life by then.
“Well?” she said.
“I don’t think I’d know how to talk about it.”
“What I don’t see is why you’re in such a bloody hurry. You’ll be dead soon enough as it is. Even if you live as long as this old bag of bones, you’ll look back and your life will seem short. Too short.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he said. He was afraid for Sally, and guilty because he had made death the subject of this day. She would have to get back down the stairs without his help, and he trusted no one else to keep her from falling. His hip joints tingled for her fragile old bones—another form of the anxiety, familiar as a scream laid lightly on the nerves.
“Do you mind if I rattle on?” Sally asked—really asking it as a question. He shook his head, and she took a breath. “All right. All right,” she said. “I don’t think you’re afraid of much. Tell me if I’m getting warm. No. Let me tell you about the De Oestrises—a crazy tribe but the world hasn’t been exactly destroyed by their presence on it. One branch of the family made its money in mines. Gold mines. I suppose you know something about that. And silver mines and iron mines. That’s what I call the Rough Rider branch, the hunters, the Wild and Woolies. The other branch settled down around here and played with stores and mills. That branch wore spectacles and sleeve garters—you know what I mean? They owned land too, but hired somebody else to lumber it. This goes way back, before the log drives on the Connecticut River. Back to the time of Governor Wentworth, and before that.
“The name sounds sort of Dutch, don’t it? Sounds like something to do with eggs. In Greek distros means gadfly, and in Latin oestrus means frenzy, passion. Oestrus in English has to do with the whole cycle of fertility in female mammals. Hell of a name, ain’t it? You call yourself a Whipple, but you’re really a De Oestris, because the line’s dominant over Whipples and Sleepers. Anyway, I know because you’re crazy like a De Oestris. I meant to say the line went batty in my generation. Crazy as hoot owls. Now, pardon an old woman—you’ll find old women are dippy about blood lines and all that. It’s all they’ve got left to talk about or be proud of. But you had the De Oestris mark on you when you came home from the hospital. The eyes—it’s in the eyes. I took one look and there it was. Your mother was such a strong, healthy girl—peaches and cream and raven black hair. She was a country beauty, full of good rich milk and strong as an ox. She was okay. But the De Oestris mark was on every one of her children, the poor girl.” Sally shook her head and sighed.
“Oh, come on, Sally,” he said.
She laughed—a great bellow of laughter that shook her. “Now they’ll wonder what in the world we’re laughing about,” she said. “Oh, my! Oh, dear! Now tell me why you took all those sleeping pills.”
“Because I can’t stand…I couldn’t…” He heard his words. They hung in the air while he read them and saw that they hadn’t said anything yet. “I couldn’t stand being a witness.”
“A witness to what?” She squinted carefully, like a sharpshooter.
“To torture. Murder.” The words were dangerous to say. He looked around for Peggy. Even in his anxiety he found it interesting that he’d looked for Peggy. Where was she? He wondered if she were in any danger; the thought caused a sharp pain in his throat.
“I see. Yes,” Sally said. “Are you going to do it again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“What about Margaret Mudd?”
“What?” he said, startled. Sally’s words had superimposed themselves upon those identical words in his own mind. Maybe Sally was a little magic—like all old people who could still think. That was it, he supposed. You got used to old people being so dim; when one wasn’t, it was as strange as hearing a talking dog.
“I said, ‘What about Margaret Mudd?’”
“What about her?” he said defensively.
“Have you discovered she’s a woman yet?”
“Well, yes. I know she’s growing up.”
“Growing up!” Sally said disgustedly.
He shied away from this talk; it was like glancing away from direct sunlight, turning away from heat. He knew what he was doing. There was a memory that had been flitting around just outside of memory, that he couldn’t quite get hold of. Ah. The bam. One of the De Oestrises—his great-uncle Walter—had a farm on the Cascom road where he kept horses. A long time ago Wood had spent a whole afternoon climbing a ladder made of boards nailed to an upright, climbing up through the hay-dusty air toward the great hollow peak, to a tie beam that crossed twenty or thirty feet above the loose hay. Then to fall through all that air and space. Each time was like the first time. No amount of repetition dimmed that lovely giving-way. In the absolute of gravity, falling, falling, his bowels shivery with delicious apprehension at that freedom. While he fell he was in thrall. Then to climb again. Though he visited the farm often when he was a boy, that one afternoon was the only time the level of hay had been just right. When his father was ready to go he had called and called, but Wood took one more fall, then one more, and his father had to come and get him. It wasn’t like him to pretend not to hear; maybe that had helped to fix the memory.
The barn burned one August because of damp hay—”spontaneous combustion” they called it—and the house was later sold to summer people.
The falling haunted him. The memory had come back at odd times ever since, full of complicated nostalgia. When he couldn’t stay away from Lenore Stefan it had returned often—then painful and full of yearning. He had to go to her, to let go, but he could never really let go. He had no right to use her.
“Where did you go off to?” Sally said. She looked at him with curiosity and suspicion.
“I had a memory,” he said.
“I hope you’re not such a damned fool you prefer memories to real kisses.”
“What?”
“I said the girl’s out of her mind for you, and you just sit there.”
“Who?”
“You nitwit!”
“What do you want me to do?” he said, suddenly exasperated. “I don’t know! Maybe I don’t feel that way. Who am I to even…Maybe I don’t feel that way!”
“Who said you have to be full of moonbeams? I’m thinking of Peggy, not you. I’m a woman, after all. At least I used to be one before I turned into a bloody ancient gnome. She’s a young, attractive woman. Why don’t you make love to her? You can any time you want to! If there’s anything that drives me insane with anger it’s when a man won’t do what he can do! There’s nothing in the world hurts a woman more, that’s meaner, that shows her how helpless she is, than a…limp man.”
“Maybe she doesn’t feel that way,” he said.
“If she don’t, things have changed since I was a girl. Maybe they have. God knows I was always a strange critter anyway.” Sally signed. She looked a little defeated, perhaps even embarrassed.
“Listen,” she said. “I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking on this subject. And of course I’m thinking of you too. I’m thinking of both of you, because I care more for you two people than anything in the world. That don’t come halfway to saying it. Maybe I’m a nut. I’m an old ‘maiden’ lady voyeur, maybe, who wants to breed Whipples instead of cocker spaniels!” She laughed. “Anyway, you remember what I told you once? Think with your skin—while you’ve got one. Examine your life with the glands. Instead of all this internal bleeding. You were always so damned sensitive, afraid somebody was going to get hurt. God knows they did get hurt. But you’re not being good to Peggy, you know. I think you’ll find that a certain kind of violent use of her will please her as much as it will you.”
Sally shut her eyes and moved her head from side to side as though she were very tired, tired to death. “It’s taken a good deal of energy to say this, to care enough to say it. I’d like to find out what my own reasons are for saving it. I think I’ve been cursed by a strange enthusiasm. Cursed by it all my life. I had a child, a girl. She died of cholera infantum when she was four. I was three thousand miles away at the time. You know how long ago that was? She died April 14, 1899, in Essex, Massachusetts. I was in Paris. I was twenty-five years old—about your age. I felt pretty bad. She was Aranpo’s child, and he was dead too. I was twenty-five. I wasn’t dead.”
Sally stared intently at the print of the carpenters sawing the big beam. “A long time ago. What I mean to say is I was still very much alive.”
Wood looked at her ancient skin, at her cramped, misshapen body. Her trunk was rigid, almost exoskeletal, but the soft, powdery parts of her—her face and forearms—hung limply on the inner bones. Her legs were encased in strong lisle, a weave so hard it shone. She seemed very tired now.
She was looking at him. “Now I’m so old it hardly matters. Why don’t I keep my mouth shut? Even my jaw muscles get tired. It’s that I ain’t dead, I guess. I’d better get on home.” It took her several heaves to get up from the chair. Three or four of them were practice, or aiming heaves, before the real one that brought her to her feet and canes. Again he had those quick shocks of sympathy.
“Be careful,” he said.
She grinned at him. “Be careful,” she said, imitating him. “Be careful. Be careful.”
She met her escort in the hall. Wood almost called out to them to be careful. They got her downstairs all right, and soon Peggy came back, with David following her.
“Okay, boss,” David said to her, and she smiled. “How’s it going?” David asked.
“Better,” Wood said.
“Good!” David seemed shy. Then he said, “Where was the fire, anyway? Did you hear it?”
“We couldn’t count the whistles,” Peggy said.
“I just wondered. Hank said Horace took off right out straight, and now she doesn’t know whether she ought to be worried or not. She won’t call up to find out for sure where it is.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Peggy said.
David turned to go. Before he reached the door they heard, distinctly this time, the two short whistles that meant the fire was out. Downstairs the telephone began to ring.
“I’ve got to take Sally back home,” David said. “You take good care of Wood, Peggy. Make him happy.”
“I’ll try,” Peggy said.
The ringing of the telephone quieted as David shut the door. Wood had been noticing that everyone rather carefully shut the door upon the two of them. Peggy was blushing, rose and dark gold, at what, he didn’t know.
“Well,” he said.
“Yes?” She turned to him, still smiling and blushing, glowing with some interior idea. Confused, he hopped back to his chair and arranged himself on it, pulling his robe together and draping it over his stump. She came and sat near him on the arm of his easy chair.
“Do you think I’d mind seeing that?” she said, pointing at his leg.
“It’s not pretty.”
“I’ve seen it already, and I saw where your eye used to be. I touched that place. It didn’t bother me at all.”
He heard that confession of love; but would the court accept it?
There was Sally’s advice, the “violent use” he might make of Peggy. Peggy Mudd! Suddenly he was so shy and nervous he couldn’t speak. He turned toward the windows, the main arched window with the narrow arched lights on each side. The curtains swirled before the dry windy day, bright as the light beyond them. In each gust the maple leaves glittered and hissed furiously. She was watching him, and he held back the visions of that violent use. She was still that skinny little girl-child, almost a baby, who had the sniffles every winter. It had been her mother he had often thought about in his early fantasies, never the child. When he had stepped to the window of the sugarhouse it was the mother that had made his throat thick and dry, the older woman who had in fact once looked at him in an appraising way. Just a glance, but it had been enough to set him vibrating for days when he was sixteen.
“Are you all right, Wood?” Peggy said close to his ear.
He had told Sally he couldn’t stand being a witness to what he saw, but of course he had always been more than a witness. Peggy’s cool hands slid along his jaws, to his throat, pulled his collar open and began to massage the tense muscles at the base of his neck. “Do you like that?” she asked in a low, hollow voice. Her hands moved. “Do you like it, Wood? If you don’t I’ll stop, but you looked like a knot.”
“Yes,” he said.
“See? You’re getting softer. You’re untangling.”
“Oh, sure,” he said.
“Don’t scoff. I’ll untangle you. You let me stay with you and I’ll untangle you. I feel sort of powerful all of a sudden. You know what my zoology instructor said once? He said mammals like to touch each other. Did you ever think of that? I mean it’s one common characteristic of mammals—they enjoy touching each other.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he said. Then knives flashed in his mind. Meat thermometers, dull greasy metal. No, not greasy, but dulled by constant autoclaving, racking; the anonymous handiness of things kept in use.
“Relax, now,” she whispered, her lips at his ear. Her hair touched his cheek. “You’re tangled up again. Don’t go away from me like that.” Her hands came back to his skin, and the knives were gone. “There. See? I can tell,” she said.
It was true. He could have groaned with relief. She would stay with him, do anything to help him. Perhaps someday he could let go in her presence, but that would be some other time. In the meanwhile his gratitude welled up and was held. That control had been too long in the making. He was singular in this world; they needed him calm, with all his wits about him. She needed him. Who would protect them? Who would protect her? His men were dying! He must protect them against themselves, the killers of children.
“Wood! Wood!” she called.
Slowly he came back to the brown room. The curtains belled out, spilling wind, revealing all the wild energy in the maple leaves. At least not human. But her arms were. She had pulled him back again. When would he be safe enough to reveal his gratitude? He must let go and fall. But he was all cockeyed, asymmetrical, awkward. He would land on his head and break his neck, or somebody’s neck. He would kick out a foot that wasn’t there any more, get clubbed by a beam on his blind side.
She was crying because of him. With much effort he unclenched his dangerous fists and smoothed her hair away from her forehead. How round her forehead was! He had never noticed that roundness before, and the wonder of it calmed him, he had no idea how. It was a marvel. All right, it was a marvel. She liked his touch; like a cat she moved into his touch.
“Peggy,” he said, being careful of this calmness.
“What?” she said.
“I think I want you to stay with me. I mean I appreciate it very much.”
“It’s all I want to do,” she said.