Трумэн Капоте - Other Voices, Other Rooms

"Happy birthday," said Joel, though what he wished her was hardly happiness, for when he'd come home she'd rushed down, the hall with every intention, or so she'd said, of breaking an umbrella over his head; whereupon Randolph, throwing open his door, had warned her, and very sincerely, that if ever she touched him he'd wring her damned neck.

Randolph went right on chewing a pig's knuckle, and Amy, ignoring Joel, glared at him, her eyebrows going up and up, her lips pursed and trembling. "Eat, go on and eat, get fat as a hog," she said, and slammed down her gloved hand: hitting the table it knocked like wood, and the old alarm clock, touched off by this commotion, began to ring: all three sat motionless until it whined itself silent. Then, the lines of her face becoming prominent as veins, Amy, with a preposterously maudlin sob, broke into tears and hiccups. "You silly toad," she panted, "who else has ever helped you? Angela Lee would sooner have seen you hanged! But no, I've given up my life." Spouting intermittent pardon-mes, she hiccuped in succession a dozen times. "I tell you this, Randolph, I would sooner go off and clean house for a bunch of tacky niggers than stay here another instant; don't think I couldn't earn my way, the mothers of any town in America would send their children to me and we would play organized games, blind man's bluff and musical chairs and pin the tail, and I would charge each child ten cents: I could make a good living. No, I need not depend on you; in fact, if I had a particle of sense I'd sit down and write a letter to the Law."

Randolph crossed his knife and fork, and patted his lips with his kimono sleeve. "I'm sorry, my dear," he said, "but I'm afraid I haven't been following: exactly where is it you fancy me at fault?"

His cousin shook her head, took a deep, nervous breath; the tears stopped coming, the hiccups ceased, and all at once she turned on a shy smile. "It's my birthday," she said, her voice reduced to a waver.

"How very odd. Joel, does it seem to you peculiarly warm for January?"

Joel was listening for sounds above their voices: three short whistles and a hoot-owl wail, Idabel's signal. In his impatience it was as if the clock, having unwound, had stopped time altogether.

"January, yes; and you, my dear, were born (if one believes a family Bible, though I'll admit one never should, so many weddings being listed an erroneous nine months early) one January New Year's."

Amy's neck dipped turtlewise into shoulders timidly contracting, and her hiccups racked up again, but less indignant now, more mournful. "But Randolph… Randolph, Ifeel as though it was my birthday."

"A little wine, then," he said, "and a song on the pianola; look in the cupboard, too, I'm certain you'll find a box of stale animal crackers with little silver worms in every crumb." Carrying lamps, they moved into the parlor, and Joel, sent upstairs to fetch the wine, crossed Randolph's room quickly, and raised the window. Below, bonfires of newly bloomed roses burned like flower-eyes in the August twilight, their sweetness filling the air like a color. He whistled, whispered, "Idabel, Idabel," and with Henry she appeared between the leaning columns. "Joel," she said, unsure, and behind her it was as though the falling night slipped a glove over the five stone fingers which, curling in shadow, seemed bendingly to reach her; when he answered, she hurried beyond their grasp, came safely under the window. "Are you ready?" She'd plaited a collar of white roses for Henry, and there was a rose hung awkwardly in her hair. Idabel, he thought, you look real beautiful. "Go to the mailbox," he said, "I'll meet you there." It was too dark now to maneuver without light. He lit a candle on Randolph's desk, and went to the cabinet, searching there until he located an unopened bottle of sherry. Stooping to extinguish the candle, he noticed a sheet of green tissue-thin stationery, and on it, in a handwriting daintily familiar, was written only a salutation: "My dearest Pepe." Randolph, then, had composed the letters to Ellen, but how could he have supposed that Mr Sansom could ever have written a word? In the black hall, lamplight rimmed Mr Sansom's door, which, as he waited, a cross-draft commenced to swing open, and it was as though he were seeing his father's room through reversed binoculars, for, in its yellow clarity, it was like a miniature: the hand with the wedding ring slouched over the bed's side; scenes of Venice, projected by the frost-glass globe, tinted the walls, the crocheted spread, and there in the mirror whirled his eyes, his smile. Joel entered on tiptoe and went on his knees beside the bed. Downstairs the pianola had begun pounding its raggedy carnival tune, yet somehow it did not interfere with the stillness and secrecy of this moment. Tenderly he took Mr Sansom's hand and put it against his cheek and held it there until there was warmth between them; he kissed the dry fingers, and the wedding ring whose gold had been meant to encircle them both. "I'm leaving, Father," he said, and it was, in a sense, the first time he'd acknowledged their blood; slowly he rose up and pressed his palms on either side of Mr Sansom's face and brought their lips together: "My only father," he whispered, turning, and, descending the stairs, he said it again, but this time all to himself.

He set the bottle of sherry on the hall-tree in the chamber, and, hidden by a curtain, peered into the parlor; neither Amy nor Randolph had heard him come down the stairs: she was sitting on the pianola stool, studiously working an ivory fan, tiresomely tapping her foot, and Randolph, bored to limpness, was staring at the archway where Joel was scheduled presently to present himself. He was gone now, and running toward the mailbox, Idabel, outside. The road was like a river to float upon, and it was as if a roman-candle, ignited by the sudden breath of freedom, had zoomed him away in a wake of star-sparks. "Run!" he cried, reaching Idabel, for to stop before the Landing stood forever out of sight was an idea unendurable, and she was racing before him, her hair pulling back in windy stiffness: as the road humped into a hill it was as though she mounted the sky on a moon-leaning ladder; beyond the hill they came to a standstill, panting, tossing their heads. "Was they chasing us?" asked Idabel, petals from her hair-rose shedding in the air, and he said: "Nobody will catch us now never." Staying to the road, even when they passed close by her house, they walked with Henry between them: roses, strewn from the wreath about the dog's neck, soaked the colors of a stony moon, and Idabel said she was hungry enough to eat a rose, "or grass and toadstools." Well, he said, well, when they reached town he'd splurge and treat her to a barbecue at R. V. Lacey's Princely Place. And they talked of the night he'd first come along this road and heard her in the distance singing with her sister. His eyes nailed down with stars, an old wagon had carried him over a ledge of sleep, a wintry slumber dispelled in the exhilaration of recent waking: meantime, there had taken place a dream, from whose design, unraveling now swifter than memory could reweave it, only Idabel remained, all else and others having dimmed-out as shadows do in dark. "I remember," she said, "and I thought you was a mess just like Florabel; to be honest to God, I never did much change-mind till today." Seeming then ashamed, she scampered down the road-bank, and scooped up drinks of water from a thread of creek which trickled there; abruptly she straightened, and, with a finger to her lips, motioned for Joel to join her. "Hear it?" she whispered. Behind the foliage, a bull-toned voice, and another, this like a guitar, blended as raindrops caress to sound a same rhythm; an intricate wind of rustling murmurs, small laughter followed sighs not sad and silences deeper than space. Moss cushioned their footsteps as they moved through the leafy thickness, and came to pause at the edge of an opening: two Negroes, caught in a filmy skein of moon and fern, lay unclothed and enfolded, the man's caramel-colored body braceleted with his darker lover's arms, legs, his lips nuzzling her nipples: oo-we, oo-we, sweet Simon, she sighed, love shivering her voice, love rolling through her like thunder; easy, Simon, sweet Simon, easy honey, she crooned, and tensed then, her arms lifting as if to embrace the moon; her lover sank across her, and there together, limbs akimbo, they made on the bloom of moss a black fallen star. Idabel retreated with splashful, rowdy haste, and Joel, trying to keep up, went shh! shh! thinking how wrong to frighten the lovers, and wishing, too, that she'd waited longer, for watching them it had been as if his heart were beating all over his body, and all undefined whisperings had gathered into one yearning roar: he knew now, and it was not a giggle or a sudden white-hot word; only two people with each other in withness, and it was as though a tide had receded leaving him dry on a beach white as bone, and it was good at last to have come from so grey so cold a sea. He wanted to walk with Idabel's hand in his, but she had them doubled like knots, and when he spoke to her she looked at him mean and angry and scared; it was as if their positions of the afternoon had somehow reversed: she'd been the hero under the mill, but now he had no weapon with which to defend her, and even if this were not true he wouldn't have known what it was she wanted killed.