Other Voices, Other Rooms Page 5

  “Whichever you’ve got the most of,” he said, really wanting candles, for they brought to mind the St. Deval Street Secret Nine, a neighborhood detective club of which he’d been both treasurer and Official Historian. And he recalled club get-togethers where tall candles, snitched from the five ’n’ dime, flamed in Coca-Cola bottles, and how Exalted Operative Number One, Sammy Silverstein, had used for a gavel an old cow bone.

  She glanced at the firepoker which had rolled halfway under a wing chair. “Would you mind picking that up and putting it over by the hearth? I was in here earlier,” she explained, while he carried out her order, “and a bird flew in the window; such a nuisance: you weren’t disturbed?”

  Joel hesitated. “I thought I heard something,” he said. “It woke me up.”

  “Well, twelve hours sleep should be sufficient.” She lowered herself into the chair, and crossed her toothpick legs; her shoes were low-heeled and white, like those worn by nurses. “Yes, the morning’s gone and everything’s all hot again. Summer is so unpleasant.” Now despite her impersonal manner, Joel was not antagonized, just a little uncomfortable. Females in Miss Amy’s age bracket, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, generally displayed a certain tenderness toward him, and he took their sympathy for granted; if, as had infrequently happened, this affection was withheld, he knew with what ease it could be guaranteed: a smile, a wistful glance, a courtly compliment: “I want to say how pretty I think your hair is: a nice color.”

  The bribe received no clear-cut appreciation, therefore: “And how much I like my room.”

  And this time he hit his mark. “I’ve always considered it the finest room in the house. Cousin Randolph was born here: in that very bed. And Angela Lee . . . Randolph’s mother: a beautiful woman, originally from Memphis . . . died here, oh, not many years ago. We’ve never used it since.” She perked her head suddenly, as if to hear some distant sound; her eyes squinted, then closed altogether. But presently she relaxed and eased back into the chair. “I suppose you’ve noticed the view?”

  Joel confessed that no, he hadn’t, and went obligingly to a window. Below, under a fiery surface of sun waves, a garden, a jumbled wreckage of zebrawood and lilac, elephant-ear plant and weeping willow, the lace-leafed limp branches shimmering delicately, and dwarfed cherry trees, like those in oriental prints, sprawled raw and green in the noon heat. It was not a result of simple neglect, this tangled oblong area, but rather the outcome, it appeared, of someone having, in a riotous moment, scattered about it a wild assortment of seed. Grass and bush and vine and flower were all crushed together. Massive chinaberry and waterbay formed a rigidly enclosing wall. Now at the far end, opposite the house, was an unusual sight: like a set of fingers, a row of five white fluted columns lent the garden the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin: Judas vine snaked up their toppling slenderness, and a yellow tabby cat was sharpening its claws against the middle column.

  Miss Amy, having risen, now stood beside him. She was an inch or so shorter than Joel.

  “In ancient history class at school, we had to draw pictures of some pillars like those. Miss Kadinsky said mine were the best, and she put them on the bulletin board,” he bragged.

  “The pillars . . . Randolph adores them, too; they were once part of the old side porch,” she told him in a reminiscing voice. “Angela Lee was a young bride, just down from Memphis, and I was a child younger than you. In the evening we would sit on the side porch, sipping cherryade and listen to the crickets and wait for the moonrise. Angela Lee crocheted a shawl for me: you must see it sometime, Randolph uses it in his room as a tablescarf: a waste and a shame.” She spoke so quietly it was as though she intended only herself to hear.

  “Did the porch just blow away?” asked Joel.

  “Burned,” she said, rubbing a clear circle on the dusty glass with her gloved hand. “It was in December, the week before Christmas, and at a time when there was no man on the place but Jesus Fever, and he was even then very old. No one knows how the fire started or ended; it simply rose out of nothing, burned away the dining room, the music room, the library . . . and went out. No one knows.”

  “And this garden is where the part that burned up was?” said Joel. “Gee, it must’ve been an awful big house.”

  She said: “There, by the willows and goldenrod . . . that is the site of the music room where the dances were held; small dances, to be sure, for there were few around here Angela Lee cared to entertain. . . . And they are all dead now, those who came to her little evenings; Mr Casey, I understand, passed on last year, and he was the last.”

  Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers (“Angela Lee played the harp,” Miss Amy was saying, “and Mr Casey the piano, and Jesus Fever, though he’d never studied, the violin, and Randolph the Elder sang; had the finest male voice in the state, everyone said so”), but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still.

  Miss Amy sighed as she slipped back into the shade of the room. “Your suitcase is in the kitchen,” she said. “If you’ll come downstairs, we’ll see what Missouri has to feed you.”

  A dormer window of frost glass illuminated the long topfloor hall with the kind of pearly light that drenches a room when rain is falling. The wallpaper had once, you could tell, been blood red, but now was faded to a mural of crimson blisters and maplike stains. Including Joel’s, there were four doors in the hall, impressive oak doors with massive brass knobs, and Joel wondered which of them, if opened, might lead to his father.

  “Miss Amy,” he said, as they started down the stairs, “where is my dad? I mean, couldn’t I see him, please, ma’am?”

  She did not answer. She walked a few steps below him, her gloved hand sliding along the dark, curving bannister, and each stairstep remarked the delicacy of her footfall. The strand of grey winding in her mousy hair was like a streak of lightning.

  “Miss Amy, about my father . . .”

  What in hell was the matter with her? Was she a little deaf, like his cousin Louise? The stairs sloped down to the circular chamber he remembered from the night, and here a full-length mirror caught his reflection bluely; it was like the comedy mirrors in carnival houses; he swayed shapelessly in its distorted depth. Except for a cedar chest supporting a kerosene lantern, the chamber was bleak and unfurnished. At the left was an archway, and a large crowded parlor yawned dimly beyond; to the right hung a curtain of lavender velvet that gleamed in various rubbed places like frozen dew on winter grass. She pushed through the parted folds. Another hall, another door.

  The kitchen was empty. Joel sat down in a cane-bottom chair at a large table spread with checkered oilcloth, while Miss Amy went out on the backsteps and stood there calling, “Yoo hoo, Missouri, yoo hoo,” like an old screech owl.

  A rusty alarm clock, lying face over on the table, ticktucked, ticktucked. The kitchen was fair-sized, but shadowed, for there was a single window, and by it the furry leaves of a fig tree met darkly; also, the planked walls were the somber bluegray of an overcast sky, and the stove, a woodburning relic with a fire pulsing in it now, was black with a black chimney flute rising to the low ceiling. Worn linoleum covered the floor, as it had in Ellen’s kitchen, but this was all that reminded Joel of home.

  And then, sitting alone in the quiet kitchen, he was taken with a terrible idea: what if his father had seen him already? Indeed, had been spying on him ever since he arrived, was, in fact, watching him at this very moment? An old house like this would most likely be riddled with hidden passages, and picture-eyes that were not eyes at all, but peepholes. And his father thought: that runt is an impostor; my son would be taller and stronger and handsomer and smarter-looking. Suppose he’d told Miss Amy: give the little faker something to eat and send him on his way. And dear sweet Lord, where would he go? Off to foreign lands where he’d set himself up as an or
gan grinder with a little doll-clothed monkey, or a blind-boy street singer, or a beggar selling pencils.

  “Confound it, Missouri, why can’t you learn to light in one place longer than five seconds?”

  “I gotta chop the wood. Ain’t I gotta chop the wood?”

  “Don’t sass me.”

  “I ain’t sassin nobody, Miss Amy.”

  “If that isn’t sass, what is it?”

  “Whew!”

  Up the steps they came, and through the back screen door, Miss Amy, vexation souring her white face, and a graceful Negro girl toting a load of kindling which she dropped in a crib next to the stove. The Major’s suitcase, Joel saw, was jammed behind this crib.

  Smoothing the fingers of her silk glove, Miss Amy said: “Missouri belongs to Jesus Fever; she’s his grandchild.”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Joel, in his very best dancing-class style.

  “Me, too,” rejoined the colored girl, going about her business. “Welcome to,” she dropped a frying pan, “the Landin.”

  “If we aren’t more careful,” stage-whispered Miss Amy, “we’re liable to find ourselves in serious difficulty. All this racket: Randolph will have a conniption.”

  “Sometime I get so tired,” mumbled Missouri.

  “She’s a good cook . . . when she feels like it,” said Miss Amy. “You’ll be taken care of. But don’t stuff, we have early supper on Sundays.”

  Missouri said: “You comin to Service, Ma’am?”

  “Not today,” Miss Amy replied distractedly. “He’s worse, much worse.”

  Missouri placed the pan on a rack and nodded knowingly. Then, looking square at Joel: “We countin on you, young fella.”

  It was like the exasperating code-dialogue which, for the benefit and bewilderment of outsiders, had often passed between members of the St. Deval Street Secret Nine.

  “Missouri and Jesus hold their own prayer meeting Sunday afternoons,” explained Miss Amy.

  “I plays the accordion and us sings,” said Missouri. “It’s a whole lota fun.”

  But Joel, seeing Miss Amy was preparing to depart, ignored the colored girl, for there were certain urgent matters he wanted settled. “About my father . . .”

  “Yes?” Miss Amy paused in the doorway.

  Joel felt tongue-tied. “Well, I’d like to . . . to see him,” he finished lamely.

  She fiddled with the doorknob. “He isn’t well, you know,” she said. “I don’t think it advisable he see you just yet; it’s so hard for him to talk.” She made a helpless gesture. “But if you want, I’ll ask.”

  With a cut of cornbread, Joel mopped bone-dry the steaming plate of fried eggs and grits, sopping rich with sausage gravy, that Missouri had set before him.

  “It sure do gimme pleasure to see a boy relish his vittels,” she said. “Only don’t spec no refills cause I gotta pain lickin my back like to kill me: didn’t sleep a blessed wink last night; been sufferin with this pain off and on since I’m a wee child, and done took enough medicine to float the whole entire United States Navy: ain’t nona it done me a bita good nohow. There was a witch woman lived a piece down the road (Miz Gus Hulie) usta make a fine magic brew, and that helped some. Poor white lady. Miz Gus Hulie. Met a terrible accident: fell into an ol Injun grave and was too feeble for to climb out.” Tall, powerful, barefoot, graceful, soundless, Missouri Fever was like a supple black cat as she paraded serenely about the kitchen, the casual flow of her walk beautifully sensuous and haughty. She was slant-eyed, and darker than the charred stove; her crooked hair stood straight on end, as if she’d seen a ghost, and her lips were thick and purple. The length of her neck was something to ponder upon, for she was almost a freak, a human giraffe, and Joel recalled photos, which he’d scissored once from the pages of a National Geographic, of curious African ladies with countless silver chokers stretching their necks to improbable heights. Though she wore no silver bands, naturally, there was a sweat-stained blue polka-dot bandanna wrapped round the middle of her soaring neck. “Papadaddy and me’s countin on you for our Service,” she said, after filling two coffee cups and mannishly straddling a chair at the table. “We got our own little place backa the garden, so you scoot over later on, and we’ll have us a real good ol time.”

  “I’ll come if I can, but this being my first day and all, Dad will most likely expect me to visit with him,” said Joel hopefully.

  Missouri emptied her coffee into a saucer, blew on it, dumped it back into the cup, sucked up a swallow, and smacked her lips. “This here’s the Lord’s day,’’ she announced. “You believe in Him? You got faith in His healin power?”

  Joel said: “I go to church.”

  “Now that ain’t what I’m speakin of. Take for instance, when you thinks bout the Lord, what is it passes in your mind?”

  “Oh, stuff,” he said, though actually, whenever he had occasion to remember that a God in heaven supposedly kept his record, one thing he thought of was money: quarters his mother had given him for each Bible stanza memorized, dimes diverted from the Sunday School collection plate to Gabaldoni’s Soda Fountain, the tinkling rain of coins as the cashiers of the church solicited among the congregation. But Joel didn’t much like God, for He had betrayed him too many times. “Just stuff like saying my prayers.”

  “When I thinks bout Him, I thinks bout what I’m gonna do when Papadaddy goes to his rest,” said Missouri, and rinsed her mouth with a big swallow of coffee. “Well, I’m gonna spread my wings and fly way to some swell city up north like Washington, D.C.”

  “Aren’t you happy here?”

  “Honey, there’s things you too young to unnerstand.”

  “I’m thirteen,” he declared. “And you’d be surprised how much I know.”

  “Shoot, boy, the country’s just fulla folks what knows everythin, and don’t unnerstand nothin, just fullofem,” she said, and began to prod her upper teeth: she had a flashy gold tooth, and it occurred to Joel that the prodding was designed for attracting his attention to it. “Now one reason is, I get lonesome: what I all the time say is, you ain’t got no notion what lonesome is till you stayed a spell at the Landin. And there ain’t no mens round here I’m innersted in, leastwise not at the present: one time there was this mean buzzard name of Keg, but he did a crime to me and landed hisself on the chain gang, which is sweet justice considerin the lowdown kinda trash he was. I’m only a girl of fourteen when he did this bad thing to me.” A fist-like knot of flies, hovering over a sugar jar, dispersed every whichaway as she swung an irritated hand. “Yessir, Keg Brown, that’s the name he go by.” With a fingertip she shined her gold tooth to a brighter luster while her slanted eyes scrutinized Joel; these eyes were like wild foxgrapes, or two discs of black porcelain, and they looked out intelligently from their almond slits. “I gotta longin for city life poisonin my blood cause I was brung up in St. Louis till Papadaddy fetched me here for to nurse him in his dyin days. Papadaddy was past ninety then, and they say he ain’t long for this world, so I come. That be thirteen year ago, and now it look to me like Papadaddy gonna outlive Methusaleh. Make no mistake, I love Papadaddy, but when he gone I sure aimin to light out for Washington, D.C., or Boston, Coneckikut. And that’s what I thinks bout when I thinks bout God.”

  “Why not New Orleans?” said Joel. “There are all kinds of good-looking fellows in New Orleans.”

  “Aw, I ain’t studyin no New Orleans. It ain’t only the mens, honey: I wants to be where they got snow, and not all this sunshine. I wants to walk around in snow up to my hips: watch it come outa the sky in gret big globs. Oh, pretty . . . pretty. You ever see the snow?”

  Rather breathlessly, Joel lied and claimed that he most certainly had; it was a pardonable deception, for he had a great yearning to see bona fide snow: next to owning the Koh-i-noor diamond, that was his ultimate secret wish. Sometimes, on flat boring afternoons, he’d squatted on the curb of St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snowclouds into sifting coldly through the boughs
of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonder-beasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vieux Carré tearoom. “It was one stormy night in Canada that I saw the snow,” he said, though the farthest north he’d ever set foot was Richmond, Virginia. “We were lost in the mountains, Mother and me, and snow, tons and tons of it, was piling up all around us. And we lived in an ice-cold cave for a solid week, and we kept slapping each other to stay awake: if you fall asleep in snow, chances are you’ll never see the light of day again.”

  “Then what happened?” said Missouri, disbelief subtly narrowing her eyes.

  “Well, things got worse and worse. Mama cried, and the tears froze on her face like little BB bullets, and she was always cold. . . .” Nothing had warmed her, not the fine wool blankets, not the mugs of hot toddy Ellen fixed. “Each night hungry wolves howled in the mountains, and I prayed. . . .” In the darkness of the garage he’d prayed, and in the lavatory at school, and in the first row of the Nemo Theatre while duelling gangsters went unnoticed on the magic screen. “The snow kept falling, and heavy drifts blocked the entrance to the cave, but uh . . .” Stuck. It was the end of a Saturday serial that leaves the hero locked in a slowly filling gas chamber.

  “And?”

  “And a man in a red coat, a Canadian mountie, rescued us . . . only me, really: Mama had already frozen to death.”

  Missouri denounced him with considerable disgust. “You is a gret big story.”

  “Honest, cross my heart,” and he x-ed his chest.

  “Uh uh. You Mama die in the sick bed. Mister Randolph say so.”