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

architect had done Sally’s father’s house on Bank Street, which she still lived in, and she showed him the plans and letters the architect had left. She sat him down at her escritoire and moved her little gnome’s body carefully, cane in one hand and a roll of thick yellow paper in the other, her round face crazed by twinkly little lines. She smiled nearly all the time, and her blue eyes were glittery.
    â€œThe man was more than eclectic,” she said in her deep, playful voice, “he was a regular pack rat. A nut, an absolute nut. Nutty as a fruit cake. He thought he was creating his masterpiece, but he was really trying to imitate the cathedral at Chartres.” She giggled as she moved away, leaving him to unroll the yellow papers, and slowly poured two glasses of sherry from a crystal decanter.
    â€œHe says in one of his letters he had a dream of the cathedral,” she said. “He certainly wasn’t looking at a picture of it!”
    It must have been a dream, she told him, in which strange lenses came across his mind—yes, something like lenses—to swell and wither the vision, leaving one area as blank as paper, while another bulged and squirmed like wall come alive. “Here, look,” she said, pointing to the front elevation. “Here are the three arched doors, the three arched windows above them, and then the great round window with its twelve sets of spheres and spheroids—’oblate and prolate shapes,’ he calls them. They look like eggs, or eyes.” In her opinion, though this mad architect dreamed of Gothic, his imagination was essentially round—Romanesque and symmetrical. When he had conceived of one shape, his mind closed down upon his talent, and all he could do was to balance, in an utter void of inspiration, that shape with its mirror image. “He didn’t know,” Sally said triumphantly, “that Gothic is the triumph of asymmetry! Maybe nobody knew.”
    Another of the architect’s troubles was that most of his raw material was wood, and another was that he built upon a steep, wooded hill in a small New Hampshire town among true Gothic structures made of pine and spruce that must have seemed to his eyes only the result of material and spiritual poverty. His wood was cypress, sent by railroad from Florida; his moldings and parquetry, wooden imbrications and crenelations were none of them of local manufacture. His mind was cluttered with the vocabulary of his age—with quoin and groin, pantile and pilaster, pediment and parquet, trefoil and quatrefoil, marquee, mullion and modil-lion.
    When the house was finished he wrote at the bottom of the front elevation sheets: With this house I have cleaned my mind, so to speak. All I know of grandeur, the glory of all the ages of my art, has, as it were, been embodied here. This is the greatness of our time, that we embrace all styles, all fashions, and make them our own!
    â€œBut who’s to say whether this madman’s masterpiece is supremely ugly, or supremely beautiful?” Sally asked. “You’re obviously in love with it. I live in this one, although I’ll admit it isn’t half as big or quite as nutty. One thing I’ll say for yours, it never looks the same twice. When I walked more, I used to go up High Street and look at it once in a while. Sometimes in the rain it looked like a toad. Sometimes, when the sun hit it right, in the late afternoon, it looked like a city in Tibet. If you take it by levels, or strata, you might say, it can look like the Paris of Villon. But then you look again and you can almost hear a muezzin singing from one of those four ridiculous minarets. You could get lost in the damned pile, but you’ll never get bored with it.”
    And the house was beautifully made; where mansard met corbel, where corbel met Byzantine dome, there were no cracks or leaks. All of its cypress had been cured for five years in an open-walled