Whipple's Castle by Thomas Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

always wanted to own, and now owned. But he was its prisoner. Ironic, like the wish in a child’s tale; he was like Midas, who wanted flesh, surrounded by cold metal.
    He knew his wife and children were upstairs together, and that their councils concerned him, their problem, the source of their quietness and tension. But what else could he be? Didn’t they understand that a man like him, placed in this hellish position, was not going to be easy to get along with? But did they even understand what sort of man he was…had been? No, they had no idea. Henrietta, perhaps, because she had lived without him, and made a choice when she married him; but Wood and David and Horace and Kate? No, he was not a man at all, he was their father, whom they hadn’t chosen. Everything he said to them, they took just a little wrong—just a degree beyond the force he meant it to have. They were all foreign to him, as though he spoke to people who could not quite grasp the exact meanings of his words. Even Henrietta now heard him through the dense, literal ears of her children, because she was worried about his effect on them. Often—always—they missed the hidden twinkle he meant to have in his eyes, behind his screaming. He imitated himself, and they saw only the fictional screamer he invented, never the man inventing. The only one around who could see it, strangely enough, was Peggy Mudd. Kate was indifferent, but Peggy knew, and was not merely indifferent. So shy before the others she could hardly speak to them, she had no fear of him, even in those moments when he yelled so loud his ears popped, and he seemed to be hollering down inside the huge canyon of his head bones, playing with echoes and reverberations. That skinny, ugly, unfortunate girl would smile back at the joke he knew was almost invisible, as though she perceived it through the smoke and blast of an explosion.
    As for the others, if they wanted to hate him or fear him, why couldn’t they do it for the proper reasons? There they were, probably up in Horace’s room, discussing the matter—a bunch of connivers, conniving for no reason, wanting peace when there wasn’t any war in the first place. God damn it! Was this why he wanted this huge house, so he could sit in state like a monster king and scare everybody half to death?
    But the house did give him pleasure. It was so generous it triumphed over its ugliness. Where it was cavernous and dark, it meant to be that way. No, it wasn’t ugly—nothing made with such loving care could be ugly. It wasn’t ugly any more than a lobster was ugly, or an alligator. He had been impressed, even scared, by this house ever since he was a little boy, when it had been the haunted house, and only an old, old lady—a De Oestris, Sally De Oestris’ aunt—had lived alone in it with a crazy servant; a mad Swede who talked to himself on the street, who once, in Harvey’s sight, ignored a stone that a boy bounced with an audible thunk off his cropped white head. The Swede went on, cursing at himself or to himself, never looking around.
    When the old lady died, and the Swede had gone back to Sweden, the house stood empty for ten years, really haunted then by the bats that fled over the blackberry thicket that was the lawn, through windows broken by awed little boys. And then, just before Wood was born, Harvey bought it, thirty acres and twenty or more rooms, for five thousand dollars.
    After her aunt’s death, Sally De Oestris had taken away the things like silver and china and linen, but all the high, solid furniture remained. Even the harmonium, which sat like a monument below its own stained-glass window, still worked; the tile roof and wide overhangs had protected the interior of the house in spite of broken windows. Harvey had come at night, with candles, before the electricity was connected, and wandered shivering with fear and pride through his dark castle.
    The same