Other Voices, Other Rooms Page 7

  “Hee hee hee,” cackled Jesus, “I tumble thataway, I bust every bone.”

  Zoo picked up her accordion and, reclining against a porch-pole, presently, with careless effort, produced a hesitant, discordant melody. And her grandfather, in a disappointed child’s wheedling singsong, reiterated his grievances: he was about to perish of chill, but what matter; who gave a goldarn whether he lived or died? and why didn’t Zoo, inasmuch as he’d performed his Sabbath duty, tuck him in his good warm bed and leave him in peace? oh there were cruel folk in this world, and heartless ways.

  “Hush up and bow that head, Papadaddy,” said Zoo. “We gonna end this meetin proper-like. We gonna tell Him our prayers. Joel, honey, bow that head.”

  The trio on the porch were figures in a woodcut engraving; the Ancient on his throne of splendid pillows, a yellow pet relaxed in his lap gazing gravely in the drowning light at the small servant bowed at its master’s feet, and the arms of the black arrow-like daughter lifted above them all, as if in benediction.

  But there was no prayer in Joel’s mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

  “Amen,” whispered Zoo.

  And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

  FOUR

  “Can’t we be more specific?” said Randolph, languidly pouring a glass of sherry. “Was she fat, tall, lean?”

  “It was hard to tell,” said Joel.

  Outside in the night, rain washed the roof with close slanted sounds, but here kerosene lamps spun webs of mellow light in the darkest corner, and the kitchen window mirrored the scene like a golden lookingglass. So far Joel’s first supper at the Landing had gone along well enough. He felt very much at ease with Randolph, who, at each conversational lag, introduced topics which might interest and flatter a boy of thirteen: Joel found himself holding forth exceedingly well (he thought) on Do Human Beings Inhabit Mars? How Do You Suppose Egyptians Really Mummified Folks? Are Headhunters Still Active? and other controversial subjects. It was due more or less to an overdose of sherry (disliking the taste, but goaded by the hope of getting sure enough drunk . . . now wouldn’t he have something to write Sammy Silverstein! . . . three thimble glasses had been drained) that Joel mentioned the Lady.

  “Heat,” said Randolph. “Exposing one’s bare head to the sun occasionally results in minor hallucinations. Dear me, yes. Once, some years ago, while airing in the garden, I seemed quite distinctly to see a sunflower transformed into a man’s face, the face of a scrappy little boxer I admired at one point, a Mexican named Pepe Alvarez.” He fondled his chin reflectively, and wrinkled his nose, as if to convey that this name had for him particular implications. “Stunning experience, so impressive I cut the flower, and pressed it in a book; even now, if I come across it, I fancy . . . but that is neither here nor there. It was the sun, I’m sure. Amy, dearest, what do you think?”

  Amy, who was brooding over her food, glanced up, rather startled. “No more for me, thank you,” she said.

  Randolph frowned in mock annoyance. “As usual, out picking the little blue flower of forgetfulness.”

  Her narrow face softened with pleasure. “Silver-tongued devil,” she said, unreserved adoration brightening her sharp little eyes, and making them, for an instant, almost beautiful.

  “To begin at the beginning, then,” he said, and burped (“Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît. Blackeyed peas, you understand; most indigestible”). He patted his lips daintily. “Now where was I, oh yes . . . Joel refuses to be persuaded we at the Landing aren’t harboring spirits.”

  “That isn’t what I said,” Joel protested.

  “Some of Missouri’s chatter,” was Amy’s calm opinion. “Just a hotbed of crazy nigger-notions, that girl. Remember when she wrung the neck off every chicken on the place? Oh, it isn’t funny, don’t laugh. I’ve sometimes wondered what would happen if it got into her head his soul inhabited one of us.”

  “Keg?” said Joel. “You mean Keg’s soul?”

  “Don’t tell me!” cried Randolph, and giggled in the prim, suffocated manner of an old maid. “Already?”

  “I didn’t think it was so funny,” said Joel resentfully. “He did a bad thing to her.”

  Amy said: “Randolph’s only cutting up.”

  “You malign me, angel.”

  “It wasn’t funny,” said Joel.

  Squinting one eye, Randolph studied the spokes of amber light whirling out from the sherry as he raised and revolved his glass. “Not funny, dear me, no. But the story has a certain bizarre interest: would you care to hear it?”

  “How unnecessary,” said Amy. “The child’s morbid enough.”

  “All children are morbid: it’s their one saving grace,” said Randolph, and went right ahead. “This happened more than a decade ago, and in a cold, very cold November. There was working for me at the time a strapping young buck, splendidly proportioned, and with skin the color of swamp honey.” A curious quality about Randolph’s voice had worried Joel from the first, but not till now could he put a finger on it: Randolph spoke without an accent of any kind: his weary voice was free of regional defects, yet there was an emotional undercurrent, a caustic lilt of sarcasm which gave it a rather emphatic personality.

  “He was, however, a little feeble-minded. The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.” His expression became smugly remote, as though, having made an observation he thought superior, he must pause and listen admiringly while it reverberated in his head. “Let’s compare them to a Chinese chest: the sort, you remember, that opens into a second box, another, still another, until at length you come upon the last . . . the latch is touched, the lid springs open to reveal . . . what unsuspected cache?” He smiled wanly, and tasted the sherry. Then, from the breastpocket of the taffy-silk pyjama top that he wore, he extracted a cigarette, and struck a match. The cigarette had a strange, medicinal odor, as though the tobacco had been long soaked in the juice of acid herbs: it was the smell that identifies a house where asthma reigns. As he puckered his lips to blow a smoke ring, the pattern of his talcumed face was suddenly complete: it seemed composed now of nothing but circles: though not fat, it was round as a coin, smooth and hairless; two discs of rough pink colored his cheeks, and his nose had a broken look, as if once punched by a strong angry fist; curly, very blond, his fine hair fell in childish yellow ringlets across his forehead, and his wide-set, womanly eyes were like sky-blue marbles.

  “So they were in love, Keg and Missouri, and we had the wedding here, the bride all clothed in family lace . . .”

  “Nice as any white girl, I’ll tell you,” said Amy. “Pretty as a picture.”

  Joel said: “But if he was crazy . . .”

  “She was never one for reasoning,” sighed Randolph. “Only fourteen, of course, a child, but decidedly stubborn: she wanted to marry, and so she did. We lent them a room here in the house the week of their honeymoon, and let them use the yard to have a fishfry for their friends.”

  “And my dad . . . was he at the wedding?”

  Randolph, looking blank, tapped ash onto the floor. “But then one night, very late . . .” Lowering his eyelids sleepily, he drew a finger round the rim of his glass. “Does Amy, by chance, recall the very original thing I did when we heard Missouri scream?”

  Amy couldn’t make up her mind whether she did or not. Ten years, after all, was a long time.

  “We were sitting like this in the parlor, doesn’t that come back? And I said: it’s the wind. Of course I knew it wasn’t.” He paused, and sucked in his cheeks, as though the memory proved too exquisitely humorous for him to maintain a straight face. He aimed a gun-like finger at Joel, and cocked his thumb: “So I put a roller i
n the pianola, and it played the ‘Indian Love Call.’ ”

  “Such a sweet song,” said Amy. “So sad. I don’t know why you never let me play the pianola any more.”

  “Keg cut her throat,” said Joel, a mood of panic bubbling up, for he couldn’t follow the peculiar turn Randolph’s talk had taken; it was like trying to decipher some tale being told in a senseless foreign language, and he despised this left-out feeling, just when he’d begun to feel close to Randolph. “I saw her scar,” he said, and all but shouted for attention, “that’s what Keg did.”

  “Uh yes, absolutely.”

  “It went like this,” and Amy hummed: “When I’m calling yoo hoo de da dum de da . . .”

  “. . . from ear to ear: ruined a roseleaf quilt my great-great aunt in Tennessee lost her eyesight stitching.”

  “Zoo says he’s on the chain gang, and she hopes he never gets off: she told the Lord to make him into an old dog.”

  “Will you answer da de de da . . . that isn’t quite the tune, is it, Randolph?”

  “A little off-key.”

  “But how should it go?”

  “Haven’t the faintest notion, angel.”

  Joel said: “Poor Zoo.”

  “Poor everybody,” said Randolph, languidly pouring another sherry.

  Greedy moths flattened their wings against the lamp funnels. Near the stove rain seeped through a leak in the roof, dripping with dismal regularity into an empty coal scuttle. “It’s the kind of thing that happens when you tamper with the smallest box,” observed Randolph, the sour smoke from his cigarette spiraling toward Joel, who, with discreet hand-waves, directed it elsewhere.

  “I do wish you’d let me play the pianola,” said Amy wistfully. “But I don’t suppose you realize how much I enjoy it, what a comfort it is.”

  Randolph cleared his throat, and grinned, dimples denting his cheeks. His face was like a round ripe peach. He was considerably younger than his cousin: somewhere, say, in his middle thirties. “Still, we haven’t exorcized Master Knox’s ghost.”

  “It wasn’t any ghost,” muttered Joel. “There isn’t any such of a thing: this was a real live lady, and I saw her.”

  “And what did she look like, dear?” said Amy, her tone indicating her thoughts were fastened on less farfetched matters. It reminded Joel of Ellen and his mother: they also had used this special distant voice when suspicious of his stories, only allowing him to proceed for the sake of peace. The old trigger-quick feeling of guilt came over him: a liar, that’s what the two of them, Amy and Randolph, were thinking, just a natural-born liar, and believing this he began to elaborate his description embarrassingly: she had the eyes of a fiend, the lady did, wild witch-eyes, cold and green as the bottom of the North Pole sea; twin to the Snow Queen, her face was pale, wintry, carved from ice, and her white hair towered on her head like a wedding cake. She had beckoned to him with a crooked finger, beckoned . . .

  “Gracious,” said Amy, nibbling a cube of watermelon pickle. “You really saw such a person!”

  While talking, Joel had noticed with discomfort her cousin’s amused, entertained expression: earlier, when he’d given his first flat account, Randolph had heard him out in the colorless way one listens to a stale joke, for he seemed, in some curious manner, to have advance knowledge of the facts.

  “You know,” said Amy slowly, and suspended the watermelon pickle midway between plate and mouth, “Randolph, have you been . . .” she paused, her eyes sliding sideways to confront the smooth, amused peach-face. “Well, that does sound like . . .”

  Randolph kicked her under the table; he accomplished this maneuver so skillfully it would have escaped Joel altogether had Amy’s response been less extreme: she jerked back as though lightning had rocked the chair, and, shielding her eyes with the gloved hand, let out a pitiful wail: “Snake a snake I thought it was a snake bit me crawled under the table bit me foot you fool never forgive bit me my heart a snake,” repeated over and over the words began to rhyme, to hum from wall to wall where giant moth shadows jittered.

  Joel went all hollow inside; he thought he was going to wee wee right there in his breeches, and he wanted to hop up and run, just as he had at Jesus Fever’s. Only he couldn’t, not this time. So he looked hard at the window where fig leaves tapped a wet windy message, and tried with all his might to find the far-away room.

  “Stop it this instant,” commanded Randolph, making no pretense of his disgust. But when she could not seem to regain control he reached over and slapped her across the mouth. Then gradually she tapered off to a kind of hiccuping sob.

  Randolph touched her arm solicitously. “All better, angel?” he said. “Dear me, you gave us a fright.” Glancing at Joel, he added: “Amy is so very highstrung.”

  “So very,” she agreed. “It was just that I thought . . . I hope I haven’t upset the child.”

  But the walls of Joel’s room were too thick for Amy’s voice to penetrate. Now for a long time he’d been unable to find the far-away room; always it had been difficult, but never so hard as in the last year. So it was good to see his friends again. They were all here, including Mr Mystery, who wore a crimson cape, a plumed Spanish hat, a glittery monocle, and had all his teeth made of solid gold: an elegant gentleman, though given to talking tough from the side of his mouth, and an artist, a great magician: he played the vaudeville downtown in New Orleans twice a year, and did all kinds of eerie tricks. This is how they got to be such buddies. One time he picked Joel from the audience, brought him up on the stage, and pulled a whole basketful of cotton-candy clean out of his ears; thereafter, next to little Annie Rose Kuppermann, Mr Mystery was the most welcome visitor to the other room. Annie Rose was the cutest thing you ever saw. She had jet black hair and a real permanent wave. Her mother kept her dressed in snow white on Sundays and all clear down to her socks. In real life, Annie Rose was too stuck up and sassy to even tell him the time of day, but here in the far-away room her cute little voice jingled on and on: “I love you, Joel. I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” And there was someone else who rarely failed to show up, though seldom appearing as the same person twice; that is, he came in various costumes and disguises, sometimes as a circus strong-man, sometimes as a big swell millionaire, but always his name was Edward Q. Sansom.

  Randolph said: “She seeks revenge: out of the goodness of my heart I’m going to endure a few infernal minutes of the pianola. Would you mind, Joel, dear, helping with the lamps?”

  Like the kitchen, Mr Mystery and little Annie Rose Kuppermann slipped into darkness when the lifted lamps passed through the hall to the parlor.

  Ragtime fingers danced spectrally over the upright’s yellowed ivories, the carnival strains of “Over the Waves” gently vibrating a girandole’s crystal prism-fringe. Amy sat on the piano stool, cooling her little white face with a blue lace fan which she’d taken from the curio cabinet, and rigidly watched the mechanical thumping of the pianola keys.

  “That’s a parade song,” said Joel. “I rode a float in the Mardi Gras once, all fixed up like a Chink with a long black pigtail, only a drunk man yanked it off, and set to whipping his ladyfriend with it right smack in the street.”

  Randolph inched nearer to Joel on the loveseat. Over his pyjamas he wore a seersucker kimono with butterfly sleeves, and his plumpish feet were encased in a pair of tooled-leather sandals: his exposed toenails had a manicured gloss. Up close, he had a delicate lemon scent, and his hairless face looked not much older than Joel’s. Staring straight ahead, he groped for Joel’s hand, and hooked their fingers together.

  Amy closed her fan with a reproachful snap. “You never thanked me,” she said.

  “For what, dearheart?”

  Holding hands with Randolph was obscurely disagreeable, and Joel’s fingers tensed with an impulse to dig his nails into the hot dry palm; also, Randolph wore a ring which pressed painfully between Joel’s knuckles. This was a lady’s ring, a smoky rainbow opal clasped by sharp silver prongs. />
  “Why, the feathers,” reminded Amy. “The nice bluejay feathers.”

  “Lovely,” said Randolph, and blew her a kiss.

  Satisfied, she spread the fan and worked it furiously. Behind her, the girandole quivered, and shedding lilac, loosened by the ragged pounding of the pianola, scattered on a table. A lamp had been placed by the empty hearth, so that it glowed out like a wavery ashen fire. “This is the first year a cricket hasn’t visited,” she said. “Every summer one has always hidden in the fireplace, and sang till autumn: remember, Randolph, how Angela Lee would never let us kill it?”

  Joel quoted: “Hark to the crickets crying in grass, Hear them serenading in the sassafras.”

  Randolph bent forward. “A charming boy, little Joel, dear Joel,” he whispered. “Try to be happy here, try a little to like me, will you?”

  Joel was used to compliments, imaginary ones originating in his head, but to have some such plainly spoken left him with an uneasy feeling: was he being poked fun at, teased? So he questioned the round innocent eyes, and saw his own boy-face focused as in double camera lenses. Amy’s cousin was in earnest. He looked down at the opal ring, touched and sorry he could’ve ever had a mean thought like wanting to dig his nails into Randolph’s palm. “I like you already,” he said.

  Randolph smiled and squeezed his hand.

  “What are you two whispering about?” said Amy jealously. “I declare you’re rude.” Suddenly the pianola was silent, the trembling girandole still. “May I play something else, Randolph, oh please?”

  “I think we’ve had quite enough . . . unless Joel would care to hear another.”

  Joel bided time, tasting his power; then, recalling the miserable lonesome afternoon, spitefully gave a negative nod.