Whipple's Castle Read Online Free Page B

yell, just went about the setting of the table with the calm, professional look of a waitress. He didn’t yell this time, but Kate wouldn’t have cared at all if he did.
    Henrietta looked for something of herself in Kate, her only daughter, and did find something—this self-confidence that bothered her because she couldn’t find much that was similar in their experiences. And so she felt Kate’s to be a little fraudulent, or at least mysterious. And how could one explain that perfection of skin and flesh? Clear and taut, stretched to its most youthful tenderness across her cheeks and hollows, every place on Kate was supple almost to breaking. Her hair was light brown like her father’s, though so fine it gleamed gold. Her small hands were so clean and natural, so negligently, unconsciously graceful they could startle a person into that memory of a time when the human race did seem more beautiful than any other thing in creation. That ridiculous young belief came back again for a moment as she looked at Kate.
    Henrietta knew she herself hadn’t been bad-looking when she was a girl—wasn’t now, for that matter, except for some iron in her dark hair, and the thick glasses that made her eyes seem as big as cows’ eyes. In fact, she’d been called pretty too, but it was a more human and imperfect kind of good looks she’d had. Harvey Whipple had to chase her, and in the end had to have her, but she never scared him the way she’d seen young boys scared right out of words by Kate.
    Now he was yelling again. Kate had touched him with her arm as she bent over to put his silver in order upon his napkin. Henrietta barely listened to the words. “Clumsy!” she heard, but it wasn’t really a definition; Kate was anything but clumsy. It was as if, in the force of Kate’s indifference, Harvey couldn’t think of anything apt to say.
    â€œDoes it hurt to touch you anywhere?” Kate asked calmly, and this put out his rage entirely, for the moment.
    â€œJust be careful, will you?” he said. His eyes were shiny things like mouses’ eyes, but down in dark hollows, seeming to have lost all the little indicators—wrinkles, movements of his eyebrows—that used to let Henrietta understand him. Now there was only darkness there, and pale smooth skin everywhere else that spread smooth and white up underneath his brown hair.
    He watched, or seemed to watch, intently as Kate finished setting the table, but when Wood appeared in the archway he said immediately, as though he’d been thinking of this all the time, “Have you looked at the furnace lately? I mean within the last day or two?”
    â€œThe fire’s all right,” Wood said. “It’s a cold night.”
    â€œWell, let’s not have it a cold night inside.”
    â€œThere’s coal on it. Did you open the damper?” Wood went over to the two little chains just inside the archway and ran them up over their pulleys. From below came a dim clang. Then he ran them back again, and from below came a slightly different clang.
    â€œIt’s open. You want me to build a fire in here?” Wood motioned with his head—leaned his head over in a rather haughty way toward the dining-room fireplace.
    First was the pause, while Harvey’s anger grew into his face, then into his voice. “God damn it! Don’t you pull that superior business with me! I pay for the goddam coal and the goddam food and wood and everything else that gets burned around here, and if I’m cold I’m going to ask why!”
    â€œWhere’s Horace?” Kate asked immediately, as though her father’s shouting were something as loud, but harmless, as the sound of a train’s passing, and now that it had passed one could resume a normal voice.
    â€œGod damn Horace!”
    â€œWell!” Kate said, raising her eyebrows in mock indignation.
    Wood had turned his back on his