Part 56 (1/2)
They did not know Castlemain either.
She proposed to teach it. In seconds she had them organized. Cadres of Purselets drilled before her. Castlemain, it developed, was military. Its rules were deducible-it could not be undertaken without a missile-but its theory, if it had one, was arcane, probably irrational. No ordinary or extraordinary human satisfaction could be recognized as the object of the game. It was like a pessimist's philosophy: an energetic futility concluding in a vacuum.
Accordingly Mohandas K. Gandhi was drafted to be the ball.
”Just get all round,” she instructed, and bowled him furiously down a line of boys representing the collective mouth of a cannon. The Castle-this was Harriet Beecher-was immediately and suitably knocked down. The collective mouth of a cannon cheered.
”Stef,” William's son called. ”Come on. Come on, Stef. Let's go look at the upstairs.”
A wing of lightning threw a tender, irregular white feather at the window. The Purses' flashlights surprised the ceiling seraphim. Celestial love turned the pallor of the smiles of these angels to silver: it was as though a fasces of old awarenesses had beaten them into ecstasy, or into a belief in the cognition of chandeliers. Under the black self-rubbings of the unlit chandeliers Purse and Mrs. Purse sat, not close, on my sofa, sunk into the heap of blanket, a mythological pair lost in the early vengeance of middle age. Where I had slept my virgin sleep their pressed and lowered thighs brooded on the principle of sensation. They felt themselves separate, already cooled, already inaccessible, shut away, unremarked, universalized into the unnecessary. They were burned out. In that decaying room the lovers were taking breath after breath in an antic.i.p.ation of the lubricity of their act. The air was an envelope of secret waiting. And the Purses, flakes of ash, sc.r.a.ps of white soot, were no more than trifles of granules the lovers would find and flick from the inner corners of one another's kissed eyes when they woke from love's sopor: sand from the love-G.o.d's slipper. In this room of gathering love the Purses now seemed sacks of sand, sacks of ash; sand and ash weighted them where they leaned, their hands loose and self-forgetful, the white clay of their covered thighs inert. Meanwhile the skins of the lovers were divided by vastnesses, those skins that would grind fiercely, those skins that would seek and seek friction, those skins that would grow metaphysical and gardenlike, those patient ineluctable skins-how divergent they were now! The Purses, bags of sand, yet kept their consciousness of that divergence. They knew how love's confluence would flatten them. Let love connect, and these vessels of ash lose human shape and collapse. Yet love is destined for this place, and the lovers await their moment. The Purses await it too, resigned-they see how at the instant of connection it is all over with them, at the instant of connection they must vanish. A commonplace spell. Nothing remains of the man or the woman-two low uneven heaps perhaps, grainy underfoot, For first lovers, middle age is not. It refuses to be. It is not there. Hence, in the moment of convergence, the disappearance of the Purses. Let no one be astonished. And-G.o.d forbid!-let no one go and look for them.
Meanwhile they merely waited. Oblivion was not yet. Meanwhile the skins of the lovers were divided, and by vastnesses. Here was William's son in a soaked s.h.i.+rt, morose, on the piano-bench next to Tilbeck-where else in an absence of movables could he put himself down? And there, far, far over, an immensity away, under the high silent harps, there, all movement, was Stefanie, Stefanie seen in typical rapture of the chase: she was trying to prevent the ball from running back to its mother. The ball's frenum was bleeding.
”It won't happen if you keep your mouth closed. All you Lave to do-now look, you want to spoil the game for everybody ?-sort of bunch up, that's right. See, I'll show you again. Get all round, didn't I tell you?-that's the way, do what I do. Stick your arms out and punch when you get there. All right now! Let's get going!-Hey you. Manny? Al? What's-your-name, you. You be the Castle. Not you. You. The rest of you be the cannon. O.K., everybody line up now. Fine. Here we go. Pow! Let 'er rip! Bunch up! There we are! Watch it now! That's it, that's it! Got 'er! Great, that's great!-Watch that cannonball, mister! Use your foot, stupid, give it a shove!-Well look, you can't be the ball if you bawl. Oh shut up, Sonny, I didn't say that to be funny. Always cackling. Just for that you have to be the Castle next time. Well / don't see what difference it makes if you've got a moat or you haven't. p.u.s.s.yhead, you'll just die, they're so spooky, he wants to know if he's been de-moated. I swear you're all out of the mola.s.ses pot. Just line up now. Try it again.”
The accents of Miss Jewett's won them. Strain and wors.h.i.+p marked the slabs of their faces. She railed; they adored, turning tenderly black-and-blue, bruised, sc.r.a.ped, lacerated. The dust of decades drizzled and whitened their whiteness; the gumminess of inhabited cobwebs stopped up their noses. Through a respiratory racket, gluey, raspy, they celebrated her conquest. They took her in, they volunteered, for her they a.s.sumed everything, they were willing to be bats, mats, ladders, poles, goals, straps, burdens, carriers, walls, b.a.l.l.s, subject, object, it, athletic equipment of the most complex and versatile powers. They were hers. (And me they would not have.) She bellowed, yelled, howled, moaned. Oh, her glorious gymnast moans! She moaned like a populous stadium in the bliss of agony, and in return they sacrificed one another to the muscle of her pleasure, and would have lopped off their sibling heads if the mistress of games (so Miss Jewett might have styled her) had commanded it. And she slapping her drenched, heavy, seal-like hair into the void, sent it streaking before and behind her, and followed it the way a hunter follows a trace, or a gleam, or a glimpse, or a stench, and was all the while innocent, and thought she was waiting for the rain to end, and whipped the blood in her innocently, and thought it was exercise and games. But she exercised in preparation for her moment, she waited for her moment to begin.
And then a vibration, not thunder, not the herd of feet, though minute as that delayed and gla.s.sy thunder, close as that stampede: a note, two notes, ten notes, fifteen tumbling grim chords.
”Stef! Come on. Come on, Stef. Quit that, cut it out, let's look around, come on,” her lover wailed.
She fled the game.
”I didn't know you could play the piano.”
”Sure,” my father said.
”I mean that's good. You're good.”
”Sure,” my father said.
”You could even do it for a living, you're that good.”
”You go in for music?”
She said doubtfully, responsibly, ”We went to a concert last week. Bach and all.”
A chord that laughed.
”You don't go in for that, hah?”
”My fiance does, don't you, p.u.s.s.yhead?”
A chord that snickered.
”Dancing's what I'm crazy for. Dance music kills me. She had a party, nothing but marches. Like a funeral. Can you play Latin stuff?”
”Mm.” He played a layer of Latin stuff.
”Come on, p.u.s.s.yhead, let's go round the floor. Terrific for dancing, all that s.p.a.ce-”
”No,” p.u.s.s.yhead said.
”Oh come on. He's great.”
”Fine, a minute ago you said he was a roach-”
”So what? I like a tango-playing roach.”
”Then it's not me you like,” Tilbeck said, turning the tango into London Bridge.
”Ooh! Aren't you a riot! p.u.s.s.yhead, he's a riot.”
”Look, do you want to take a look upstairs or not?” William's son said.
”Nothing up there,” Mrs. Purse called in a voice like a bit of tissue behind the Zeppelin.
”A library,” floated up vacantly from Purse.
”I don't care about any old library. I want to dance,” Stefanie said, and stamped. But this was the signal for the Castle to take position. It did. ”Oh go away! Fall out! Forget it! n.o.body wants the whole pack of you hanging around like that. I want to dance.”
Instantly the Purselets clamored to be taught to dance.
She capitulated, but not to them. ”All right, let's go and look at the d.a.m.n house, what's the difference?”
”If it's a favor never mind. You just go back to Physical Training. Go back to those kids, that's all,” William's son said.
”Lovers' quarrel,” said Tilbeck, and tinkled out a sigh from the Wedding March.
”Oh pooh, we never fight, spite isn't fight, don't think you're so smart. Cut out playing that. We came to look around, why not? This place might have been my fiance's inheritance if his father hadn't gotten divorced. That's all you know about things. C'mon, puss, let's go up. Just get rid of these G.o.dawful brats. Scat!” she told the ball. Rebuffed, it ascended its mother's lap. She took the Mahatma up coolly, her eyes on the stairs and the climbing lovers.
”So that's the lawyer's boy?” my father said. ”Got himself a looker, hah?”
But I would not answer in that din of Purselets begging tunes. London Bridge rose and fell, and they all came swarming at the mystical sounds. He raised the bridge twice over, and then Three Blind Mice fluttered out, and then A Bicycle Built for Two, and then Home on the Range, and then Clementine-he was glad to be restored to their esteem, and rejoiced in their fickleness. ”Defected from the lady athlete, see that?” he said into the disorder of their high-decibel cawing; none of the Purselets could sing.
”Do you need the B flat for any of those?” I asked. ”The one that's broken?”
”I use the key of C,” he said proudly, ”the people's key. Any requests?”
I said: ”Rhapsody in Blue.”
He loosed a trivial chord, like a shrug; down went the B flat, mute. ”See? Can't be done with a dumb note. What's ancient doesn't necessarily revive. I don't go for the dipped madeleine, if you get me. Guidebook's out of date, hah? What d'you want me to do? Re-run an old movie of your mother's life? No sirree. Whatever you think I am, that's what I'm not.”
”I don't know what you are,” I said.
”That's the beauty of it, neither do I. Except now and then. Right now what I am is the Pied Piper. Couple of rats've left already, you noticed that? Well, if they think they'll find a preacher up there, those two, all they'll find is plaster dust. Pastor Dust,” he amended, ”marries n.o.body.”
”And no beds.”
”That's right. No beds up there,” he agreed, grinning. ”Watch. The Pied Piper-Pie-eyed Piper? Fried Piper?-what the h.e.l.l, the Stewed Piper of Do-Neck-'Er lures the Affianced Couple down. -Get that!” he announced into a river of lightning; on the quickly lurid keys his stunned hands were made unready.