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 shirt, 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 worship 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.

It came on us like a blot of swift but total seeing, turning lips electrically vivid, nearly blue with vividness, the veins x-rayed to a sudden deep visibility; the image of my father's mouth like a carved silver bar froze in my mind, part of a torso. I saw him not like a photograph-though half the vividness was in the stillness and stiffness of him registered in surprise, preserved-but solidly, thickly, one of those small haughty straight-backed Egyptian figurines, all silver, a G.o.d of the Nile reduced to a curio. It was not he who had shrunk; it was the world-that hardening shrinking world which withdraws, age by age, from its fierce little G.o.ds. My mother's fantastic lover! And now thunder was bursting out of the keys, as though something had exploded in his fingertips, producing-behold!-Stefanie herself, howling into s.p.a.ciousness. "Hey, that was a close one! Did y'see it? Shook the G.o.dd.a.m.n roof!"-she: hanging dewy and plaintive over the bannister.

"Thor at the clavier," my father said. "He-I, understand-he presses the note long silent, and presto, the voice of G.o.d in B flat."

"Don't give me that, that was no piano," Stefanie argued from the stairs. "That was real thunder."

"Bad thinking," Tilbeck said. "It leaves out a possible alternative. Never leave out a possible alternative. It might've been the piano and thunder, in conjunction. A duet. Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck and G.o.d making music together."

"Oh Christ," she threw down.

"Is Christ G.o.d?" Tilbeck asked, and began, in waltz time, Onward, Christian Soldiers. "Dance, children, dance!"

But the Purselets had, at G.o.d's great stroke, vibrated toward the front door. It was open; they cl.u.s.tered on the sill in admiration of the shining storm, above which my grandfather's uncommon romantic imported lintel made a kind of Gothic picture-frame. And faintly, a far growl, we heard the rain grunting against the canvas cheeks of the tents. A draft like the devil's breath seized the room.

"Shut that door!" Purse called.

"Colds! Colds! You'll all catch colds!" cried his wife; slung between her legs was a baby like a white snail; curled, porcelain, bruised.

Tilbeck asked, "Where's the lawyer's boy?"

"Looking around," said Stefanie.

"Come down," he invited.

"Come up."

"I know what's up there."

"Books. Filthy old books. Phew, dust makes me sneeze." Languidly she hooked her shoulders over the rail and dangled her bright arms loose as a monkey's. "You're not the only one, my p.u.s.s.yhead knows what's up there and he's never even seen this place before. He knows all about it just the same. He even found a part of a new wall they started to put up once."

I broke in, "You want to bet he's seen the plans? Snooped everything out of the files, even the blueprints-"

My father viewed me. "Don't hold a brief for the lawyer's boy, hah?"

"Yes she does. If you ask me she's crazy about him. Admit it!" she dared me. "I could tell the first time I ever saw you. I can always tell when somebody's jealous."

"I'm not jealous."

"Aren't you though," she mocked, and switched to what she supposed me jealous of. "You know where we're putting our sleeping bags tonight? We were going to put them in the woods-like Indians-only you don't catch me in mud up to my ears, thank you. So p.u.s.s.yhead said O.K., then let's spend the night in the upstairs part of a real house, just like when we're married. We're supposed to move into this house when we get back from our honeymoon, it's this sort of town house. Know where we're going? Venezuela. It's all arranged, it's part a business trip we have to do for Willie though. Anyhow now all we need is to pick out where. Which room I mean. There're thousands up there. You want to come help choose?"

"All right," I said, but it was not I she was appealing to.

"That's the way," Tilbeck said. "Bed 'em down. Watch 'em at it."

"You've got your nerve," Stefanie clucked, but she had no indignation. "You I mean. You coming up? The two of you."

"The two of us?" Tilbeck said acutely.

"We like to do-everything together," she explained.

"Is that why you're downstairs and p.u.s.s.yhead's upstairs?" I said.

"Smarty." She blew out a loud breath. "Well it's such a bore. All that oceany stuff, I can't be bothered with that stuff. There's a whole moldy old shelf full of maritime law or whatever you call it and he's all squatted over it with one of those flashlights. First he says come look around and then next thing you know he's drowning in some stupid moldy old book."

I said sympathetically, "Maybe they won't have any books in Venezuela."

This somehow struck her. "Say! Isn't that where your stepfather's going to be Amba.s.sador?"

"No," I said. "Not Venezuela."

"Venice was it? Vienna?"

"No."

"Well I give up. It's such a bother remembering those countries with those names. I don't know how anybody who doesn't live in America remembers where they live."

Tilbeck was delighted. "They have special propaganda for it. They write it on billboards. You'll notice this when you get to Venezuela, watch for it especially up around the rain forests where the natives are more primitive and can't read. In other countries they have to actually tattoo the babies at birth. You take a place like Czechoslovakia, if the baby's foot's too short to hold it, they tattoo it right down the shin for easy reference when it gets to be an adult-"

She said suspiciously, "If you ask me that sounds Fascist."

"No," he denied, "it's just fair and equal. Reduces capital punishment in fact. I knew a fellow once had 'Bermuda' in red, white, and blue, right across the palm of his right hand, and there he was, standing in front of a firing squad in the noonday sun, they were going to shoot him for spying for Luxemburg. He puts up his right hand to get the sun out of his eyes and then they see he was born in Bermuda. So they abandoned the whole project. He's alive today."

"I don't believe any of that," Stefanie said. "Luxemburg might've paid him to be a spy. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with patriotism or anything like that, he might've been doing it for the money."

Tilbeck gleamed. "She's O.K. Don't kid yourself, she's got the world figured out."

"I never heard about any of that," she was insisting. "That tattooing business."

"Look, you don't learn Realpolitik in finishing schools. If you don't trust me, ask the Amba.s.sador."

"He's going to be Amba.s.sador," I bit off.

"To Bermuda?" Stefanie cried. "You mean your stepfather?"

"Well who said no?"-My father blinked bluntly at another st.i.tch of lightning. But each time there was a lengthening interval before the catarrh.

"Enoch's going to get that job," I said, "whatever you do."

"That's right," he obliged.

"No, it's true, whatever you do. It doesn't matter about you. It's too late."

"It's always too late. That's philosophy," he said mildly.

"He's probably already got it They had the hearings this morning. By now he's got it. It doesn't matter about you. It doesn't matter about any newspapers either."

"You get this from the lawyer's boy?"