Castle: A Novel (17 page)

I didn’t respond.

“That’s why I split that time he was here,” Jill went on. “I figured it was all going to be about making me behave.”

Another moment of silence passed. Somewhere outside my cracked-open window, a dog was barking.

“Eric, did Dad hit her or something?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mom,”
she said, sounding somewhat exasperated. “She looked nuts the next day. Like… just really loony.”

I pulled the covers up to my chin. “I should go to sleep now,” I told her.

She waited. I heard her tongue move across her lips. “Just watch out for that guy, Eric,” she said. “Seriously. You don’t have to do what Dad says. You don’t have to listen to anybody.”

Jill stood up and, seemingly as an afterthought, patted my curled-up form through the blankets. A momentary impulse almost made me ask her to stay, but I kept my mouth shut. Seconds later, she was gone.

The second of my weekly meetings with Doctor Stiles proceeded in much the same way as the first, with the Doctor testing my adherence to his code of conduct, and punishing me with sudden vehemence when I strayed from it. The third week, he slapped me only once, and that merely when the chair beneath me creaked—a circumstance arguably beyond my control. By the fourth week, it was nearly summer, and Doctor Stiles had the windows of his office open, and a spring in his step. I sat, as he had commanded me, in the straight-backed wooden chair, and I had begun to experience what would eventually, in later years, come to be a familiar sense of anxious well-being. I was comfortably suspended in a web of interlocking strands of obligation, strength, and bureaucratic mastery. I was tense, alert, and on the verge of contentment. Doctor Stiles waited long minutes before he spoke, during which I stared straight ahead, at the curled yellow warrior poster on the back of the door. That poster—which I would later learn depicted Achilles’ defeat of Hector at the siege of Troy—had become the linchpin of my inner calm, the mast that I had learned to lash myself to when the ship of my tutelage encountered stormy seas.

It was around this time, I believe, that I began to feel different from the people around me. I had never been close to any of my classmates at school, but after a few weeks in Doctor Stiles’s presence, I began to take notice of their apparent lack of self-control, their irrational responses to simple problems, their disrespect for their teachers. But my feelings were more complicated than that: the teachers themselves came under my scrutiny as well, and I could not help but notice the inexpertise with which they wielded their authority. By comparison, Doctor Stiles was a master of consistency and restraint. Though I appreciated my teachers’ praise of my newly adopted poise, obedience, and serenity, I had begun to realize that they were weak leaders, easily swayed by their emotions, easily manipulated by their charges. At times, when the only response they could muster to a rowdy classroom was a deep, tired sigh, I pitied them.

Now Doctor Stiles broke the silence of his office. “Eric, I have something I wish to tell you today.”

I remained still, concentrating on the crumpled form of Hector at Achilles’ feet.

The Professor crossed the room and stood before me. “Please stand up,” he said, “and sit in the leather chair.”

I did as I was told, without registering the surprise I felt. The Doctor took my place in the wooden chair, leaning back without fear of the chair’s collapse, despite its unnerving creak. He threw one long leg over the other in a fluid, almost feminine motion, and one might have thought, to look at him, that he was more at ease there than in the soft and sturdy chair I now occupied. I gazed at him in silent anticipation.

“Perhaps you know that I am without wife or child,” the Doctor began. “My daughter died of an illness some years ago, and my wife, by a cruel coincidence, also died soon after.

“My daughter was named Rachel,” he went on, “and she was preoccupied with the notion of living in a castle. I suppose this is the case with many girls, but in Rachel’s case, the desire was very intense, and I felt duty-bound, as her father, to provide her with the same. In addition to my salary here at the college, I am fortunate to possess considerable family wealth, and I set out to create a home for my family that would fulfill my daughter’s wishes. Based on a drawing she made of the castle she envisioned, I designed a dwelling, a small castle, and hired contractors and builders to help me make it a reality. I chose a secluded, wooded area on our property, a clearing at the base of a large rock outcropping, and began construction. That was seven years ago.

“This might be difficult for you to understand, Eric, but my wife—and yes, even my daughter—did not appreciate my plans. At first they did, of course—there is a romantic charm to the idea of building a castle, in this day and age. But the project soon came to obsess me, and I lost sight of the very people whose lives I hoped to enhance with it. I spent most of my time at the building site, particularly in the summer, when the weather was fine and the college was not in session. My daughter cried herself to sleep some nights, and my wife eventually ceased conjugal relations with me.”

He paused, and frowned at me. “Do you know what that means, Eric?”

I did not speak.

“You may speak.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what it means.”

“It means sexual intercourse?”

Doctor Stiles scowled at my interrogative tone. I knew that I was on thin ice, and might soon be struck. I knew very little about sex, my mother having sketchily explained it to me after I inadvertently caught a glimpse of her in bed with my father.

“Do you believe that it means sexual intercourse, or not, Eric?”

“It does mean sexual intercourse, sir.”

“Do you know what sexual intercourse is?”

I knew that I had to be decisive. “Yes, sir.”

“Eric, tell me what sexual intercourse is.”

“It’s a man and a woman,” I said. “And they… they have no clothes on, and are together in bed. And it makes her pregnant. Sir.”

I felt certain now that he would slap me, but instead, a small smile appeared to play at his lips. He let out a long breath that I had not noticed him drawing, and continued his story as though he had never paused.

“It is an unfortunate fact, Eric,” he said, “that people’s desires are irrational. My daughter wanted a castle, and my wife wanted me to please my daughter. But neither considered the incidental costs of the fulfillment of such a desire, and it was this cost—my absence from their lives—that they had failed to imagine. This did not prevent them from complaining about it, however.

“My wife and I never resolved our differences over this issue, Eric, but Rachel and I did. When she was in her sickbed, she used to gaze out the window at the rock under which her castle was being constructed. She kept her drawing of the castle taped to the wall beside the window, and she imagined what it would look like when it was finished. Unfortunately, she was never to see the completed structure. She died of her illness while I was at work upon it.”

Doctor Stiles gazed at me hungrily. I remained perfectly still.

“Eric, though my family is gone, my castle is finished. Its purpose, until now, was uncertain. But you have given me the inspiration to put it to use. I want to tell you that you have shown tremendous potential in these sessions, and I would like to continue them with you, at my castle. The tests of personal control and endurance you have been given here, you have passed with flying colors. You could become a young man of tremendous strength and loyalty, and a great leader. I would like you, Eric, to spend the summer in my castle.”

Though I did not, of course, reply, I felt an upwelling of pride and personal satisfaction at the Doctor’s words, even as I felt a deep anxiety about what he was asking me to do, whatever it might be.

“Is there anything you would like to say, Eric?”

This was not a question he had ever asked me before. I cleared my throat.

“You may speak,” he said.

I hesitated before replying, “Thank you, sir. No, sir, I have nothing to say.”

He nodded once. “Good. I will speak with your father, then.”

SIXTEEN

There was a fight. It seemed to me at the time that it was my mother who was being unreasonable, and who threw the first punch. Or perhaps it was a slap. In my mind’s eye, I can see her strike my father, open-handed, on the face, and my father recoil in shock and surprise. In fact, I remember him stumbling backward across the living room, tripping over the ottoman, and banging his head, hard, against the mantel. I also remember seeing him with bandages around his head, and a limp.

However, I also remember coming home from school to find my mother missing and my father waiting in her place, and hearing from him that Mother wasn’t feeling well, and they had had an argument while I was at school, and she had forbidden me to spend the summer at Doctor Stiles’s. My father, however, had extracted a promise from her that I would be permitted to attend sessions with the Professor twice weekly for the entire summer, beginning the week school let out.

In my memory, my father was unharmed during this conversation, and I recall not being allowed to see my mother for several days due to her illness. And that, when I did see her at last, it was she who had a limp, and her face was purple and swollen, and she didn’t speak for quite some time.

It is difficult to reconcile these memories, I’m afraid. Perhaps I am recalling a different injury of my father’s, one he sustained at work. I vaguely remember something about a fall from a ladder. And, rationally speaking, it seems unlikely that I would have been present for this fight. Yet I am struck by the vividness of this memory—the balletic grace in my mother’s slap, the studied athleticism. I see the slap being delivered with the same strength and precision I imagine her golf swing to have possessed, back before she married my father.

In any event, a fight did occur, the result of which was that I would be given over to Doctor Stiles’s care twice weekly, from sunrise to sunset. Though I expressed disappointment that I wouldn’t be there for the entire summer, I was privately relieved, as I had been looking forward to spending time alone as I usually did, wandering through the neighborhood and exploring the swamp and woods. I felt mildly guilty, harboring this desire, and chastised myself for my weakness.

In the final week of June, on a Friday morning, my father woke me before dawn and told me to get dressed. When I came down into the kitchen, he was waiting there with a cup of coffee. “It’s time you tried it,” he said.

I took the hot mug into my hands and blew on the oily black surface. I had sipped my mother’s coffee once, and found it peculiar but nonetheless appealing. That coffee, however, had had cream and sugar added. I looked at my father.

As if reading my mind, he said, “No sugar and milk. That’s for women.”

I nodded, and sipped. The coffee scalded my mouth. I surprised myself by suppressing my cry of pain, and realized that it was because of Doctor Stiles’s training that I was able to do so. The thought made me proud. I was a person who could endure pain. I wondered, idly, if any of my acquaintances at school could say the same, and I surmised that none could. There was no time to drink it all, though—my father soon led me out to the car, and we took to the road in the pink light of sunrise.

My father, true to form, did not speak as we drove. It occurs to me now to wonder what it must have felt like to him, to be so uncomfortable in the presence of his own son. Most likely his own feelings of low self-worth—his fear that he was, or was perceived as, stupid—came into play here. I know that he considered me to be intelligent, because he once wondered aloud how it was possible I was so smart, as I didn’t get it from him, and I sure didn’t get it from my mother, and my sister sure as hell didn’t have it, either. Of course he underestimated my mother as well as himself, and perhaps even my sister, too. At any rate, I was now under the tutelage of a “famous professor,” as I had heard him tell the man at the hardware store, and this fact must have both intimidated him and filled him with pride, two emotions that tended to have the effect of silencing him entirely.

Over the next twenty minutes, we wended our way out of town and out into what appeared to me at the time to be untrammeled wilderness. My family was not “outdoorsy” and rarely left the house except to run errands in town, so this trip had the flavor of the exotic and new. I gazed into the dark woods, imagining what might be in them. Soon we had crested a hill and there, in an intersection, stood a white house.

The house was two stories, clapboarded, and surrounded by what must once have been a lovely flower garden and arboretum, with curved paths running through it, and trellises and gates, and low stone walls. It was obvious to me, even at the age of ten, that the garden had not been tended to for some time; the plants were shaggy, crowding one another, and wild grapevine had begun to overwhelm the whole.

We parked on a gravel drive and were met at the door by Doctor Stiles. Here, at his home, he looked very different. He wore torn and discolored khaki pants and a khaki shirt with four pockets, two on each breast. His boots were heavy and worn, and his eyeglasses were absent. I had dressed much as I had for the office visits, in dress shoes and pants, and a plaid short-sleeved Oxford shirt, and I suffered a moment of embarrassment as he glanced pityingly at me.

“Good morning, Eric.”

“Good morning, sir.”

He turned to my father. “That will be all, Brian,” he said.

My father’s hand had been resting on my shoulder. Now it tightened, as though nervously, and slipped away.

“All right then!” my father said, drawing a deep breath. “So I should see you here at…?”

“Sundown.”

“Eric,” my father said, “I’ll see you later.”

I stood very still, and did not speak.

“Son, I’m heading out.”

Doctor Stiles faced me, his brow creased, his hard eyes boring into mine. I blinked and tried to look past him, at the house. I hoped my father would understand that I was not able to speak. But he persisted.

“Son, turn and say goodbye to your father.” He was angry, to be sure—he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around to face him.

“Good
bye,
Eric,” he said, in a tone that would brook no argument.

Quietly, as if there were some chance that Doctor Stiles wouldn’t hear, I said, “Goodbye.”

“Speak up,” my father answered. “I can’t hear you.”

At last I gave up all pretense. I stood straight and barked out a second farewell: “Goodbye, Father.” My father smiled, less at my words, I think, than at the fact of his having retained authority over me. My goodbye extracted, he shook Doctor Stiles’s hand and drove away.

As soon as the car was out of sight, I heard the faint crack of Doctor Stiles’s shoulder, and the whisper of his sleeve against his arm, and a moment later I found myself lying on the gravel, my right ear exploding in pain.

My instinct was to get up, but I remained on the ground. I heard the Doctor’s footsteps as they climbed the front stoop, and the sound of the door being opened. A few minutes later, I heard him emerge.

“Stand up.”

I did as he said, and faced the road, as I had been doing when he hit me.

“Turn around.”

His face was expressionless. “You will be very uncomfortable today,” he said, “and your clothes will be ruined. Next time, you will dress more appropriately.” He paused to make sure I wouldn’t answer. Then he nodded once, and said, “Follow me.”

I followed Doctor Stiles to the treeline, where he stepped over a deadfall and into the trees. Though the sun was fully risen now, the air was cold and the light dim. The woods, though hardly impassible, were tough going, and I had difficulty keeping up. The Doctor walked with complete confidence, seeming to follow some zigzagging, almost arbitrary path, and I understood that, wherever we were headed, I would be entirely incapable of finding my way back without him.

We walked for what must have been the better part of an hour. My blood raced and my mouth was dry, perhaps from the coffee I had drunk, and to which I was unaccustomed; and I was growing very tired. In addition, I had to urinate, and Doctor Stiles, disinclined to turn around, would never see my raised hand. Branches raked my face, my good pants tore on a fallen tree limb, and my stiff dress shoes were rubbing my skin raw.

I was momentarily distracted from my discomforts, however, when the trees thinned and what I thought to be a huge gray wall came into view. It was, in fact, a giant stone, protruding from the ground as if dropped there from the sky. The wall was sheer and stretched high into the air.

But Doctor Stiles did not stop to admire it. Rather, he turned left and continued around it, at an increased pace now that the ground was clear of trees and brush.

Ironically, it was at this moment that my fatigue overwhelmed me, and my thin legs gave out. I lay in the dirt as my bladder emptied, and tears stung my hot and filthy face. I wanted to cry out, to ask the Doctor to stop and wait, but I knew how such a request would be met: with violent, dispassionate cruelty. I thought, uncharacteristically, of my sister, and longed to fall into her arms. And it was this very thought—and my growing disgust for myself, for thinking it—that eventually forced me to my feet, and the tears from my eyes. I stood panting for some seconds, trying to get my bearings. The enormous wall of rock was to my right, and we had arrived from my left—but what these directions represented, and what our goal might be, was impossible to discern. I assumed I was being led to Doctor Stiles’s castle, but none was in sight. I could only continue in the last direction I had seen the Professor walk—and so, gathering up my strength, I set off along the rock wall.

In a moment, the rock began to curve, and soon it had turned a corner, running off to the right. It was less smooth here, but still rose nearly vertical into the sunny sky; I walked along it for a few minutes more.

And then, at last, I came to a man-made wall about twenty feet tall, and I knew I had arrived at the castle. The wall terminated at each end with a tower, one topped by a conical turret, the other stout and square with slotted sides. The slots seemed to penetrate deeply into stone, giving the castle an impression of tremendous strength. There was, however, no sign of my tutor.

I continued around the castle, staring up at the towers, alert for any movement. Soon my neck grew tired and I was forced to lower my head. Eventually I made it all the way around, and came to an enormous wooden door, bound together with iron straps and spikes. There was a handle, as well, but no matter how hard I pushed and pulled, I could not budge it.

It was when I stood back to reconsider my tactic that I heard the Doctor’s voice, faint and distorted by echoes, bouncing off the cliffs above.

“Eric. Find your way in.”

May I say that I am embarrassed to recount the relief, even joy, that I felt when I heard that voice? It was as though I was hearing the voice of God. My exhaustion, the acrid damp of my ruined pants, my aching feet: all of it fell away and I felt the full, validating force of my mentor’s call.

I knew better than to reply—for that, I would be punished. I began to examine the enormous door more carefully now, searching every crack and irregularity for some hidden lever, hasp, or key that would allow me to open it. I must have spent half an hour, at one point even dragging a large branch from the woods to climb up on, in order to search the upper portion of the door. My efforts were futile, though, and I returned the way I came, feeling along the curtain wall for some handhold.

An hour’s work made it clear that there was none. I tried several times to climb the wall, but the masonry was even and firm, and I slipped back down to the ground each time.

For some long minutes I sat on the forest floor, my back against the wall, and I fell asleep. When I woke, the sun was lower in the sky, my mouth was rank and dry, and I was very hungry. Yet I was determined to attain my goal.

I walked back the way I had come, toward the wooden door, then passed it, heading for the place where the wall met the rock. And it was there I found my answer—a narrow gap between the two, wide enough to admit me. I hurried down it, my eyes raking the ground for the point of entry, and within minutes I had discovered the hole in the wall, and the wooden block with the handle. I pulled it out, ducked inside, and shimmied through the tunnel and into the castle.

I would soon have ample time to take in the courtyard, but at this moment my attention was focused, fifteen or so feet from where I stood, upon a strange but welcome sight—a crude wooden table, standing on the flagstones, overlaid with a white cloth, and bearing a single dinner plate, utensils, a drinking glass, and a folded napkin. The plate was heaped with mashed potatoes, steak, and peas, and the glass full of milk. Even from here, I could see the steam rising from the food. I raced to the table, tripping and nearly falling on my way, and collapsed into the wooden chair tucked underneath the place setting. I had never been so famished, and began to shovel the food into my mouth, barely chewing before I swallowed and scooped up another load.

Because of my manic attention to the meal, I failed to notice precisely when Doctor Stiles appeared and sat down across the table from me. I only registered his presence when I heard him say, “Stop eating.”

I looked up, stunned, and swallowed the bite of potatoes and meat I had been chewing. My eyes narrowed involuntarily as I awaited the blow, but it didn’t come. Instead, the Doctor rewarded me with a half smile.

“I’m sorry, Eric,” he said. “Please, continue.”

After a moment’s hesitation to make sure I wasn’t being tricked, I resumed eating, this time at a more reasonable pace. I hazarded a glance at the Doctor every few seconds, alert for changes in his demeanor. He appeared strangely composed, given the unusual setting, and our having made our way here through those dense, treacherous woods.

“Have you noticed, Eric,” he asked me suddenly, “anything unusual about these woods?”

I slowed my chewing as I considered, then swallowed and said, “No, sir.” My voice came out hoarse, as if I’d been screaming for hours.