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 R. 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.
Amy pursed her lips. «. . .the last chance you’ll ever have to humiliate me,» she told Randolph, flouncing over to the curio cabinet, and replacing her blue fan. Joel had inspected the contents of this cabinet before supper, and had yearned to have as his own such treasures as a jolly Buddha with a fat jade belly, a two-headed china crocodile, the program of a Richmond ball dated 1862 and autographed by Robert E. Lee, a tiny wax Indian in full war regalia, and several plush-framed daintily painted miniatures of virile dandies with villainous mustaches. «It’s your house, I’m perfectly aware. . .»
But a queer sound interrupted: a noise like the solitary thump of an oversized raindrop, it drum-drummed down the stairsteps. Randolph stirred uneasily. «Amy,» he said, and coughed significantly. She did not move.
«Is it the lady?» asked Joel, but neither answered, and he was sorry he’d drunk the sherry: the parlor, when he did not concentrate hard, had a bent tilted look, like the topsy-turvy room in the crazyhouse at Pontchartrain. The thumping stopped, an instant of quiet, then an ordinary red tennis ball rolled silently through the archway.
With a curtsy, Amy picked it up, and, balancing it in her gloved hand, brought it under close scrutiny, as if it were a fruit she was examining for worms. She exchanged a troubled glance with Randolph.
«Shall I come with you?» he said, as she hurried out.
«Later, when you’ve sent the boy to bed.» Her footsteps resounded on the black stairs; somewhere overhead a doorlatch clicked.
Randolph turned to Joel with a desperately cheerful expression. «Do you play parcheesi?»
Joel was still puzzling over the tennis ball. He concluded, finally, that it would be best just to pretend as though it were the most commonplace thing in the world to have a tennis ball come rolling into your room out of nowhere. He wanted to laugh. Only it wasn’t funny. He couldn’t believe in the way things were turning out: the difference between this happening, and what he’d expected was too great. It was like paying your fare to see a wild-west show, and walking in on a silly romance picture instead. If that happened, he would feel cheated. And he felt cheated now.
«Or shall I read your fortune?»
Joel held up a clenched hand; the grimy fingers unfurled like the leaves of an opening flower, and the pink of his palm was dotted with sweat-beads. Once, thinking how ideal a career it would make, he’d ordered from a concern in New York City a volume calledTechniques of Fortune-Telling, authored by an alleged gypsy whose greasy earringed photo adorned the jacket; lack of funds, however, cut short this project, for, in order to become a bonafide fortune-teller, he had to buy, it developed, a generous amount of costly equipment.
«Sooo,» mused Randolph, drawing the hand out of shadow nearer lamplight. «Is it important that I see potential voyages, adventure, an alliance with the pretty daughter of some Rockefeller? The future is to me strangely unexciting: long ago I came to realize my life was meant for other times.»
«But it’s the future I want to know,» said Joel.
Randolph shook his head, and his sleepy sky-blue eyes, contemplating Joel, were sober, serious. «Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.»
«At least may I ask a question?» and Joel did not wait for any judgment: «There are just two things I’d like to know, one is: when am I going to see my dad?» And the quietness of the dim parlor seemed to echo when? when?
Gently releasing the hand, Randolph, a set smile stiffening his face, rose and strolled to a window, his loose kimono swaying about him; he folded his arms like a Chinaman into the butterfly sleeves, and stood very still. «When you are quite settled,» he said. «And the other?»
Eyes closed: a dizzy well of stars. Open: a bent tilted room where twin kimonoed figures with curly yellow hair glided back and forth across the lopsided floor. «I saw that Lady, and she was real, wasn’t she?» but this was not the question he’d intended.
Randolph opened the window. The rain had stopped, and cicadas were screaming in the wet summer dark. «A matter of viewpoint, I suppose,» he said, and yawned. «I know her fairly well, and to me she is a ghost.» The night wind blew in from the garden, flourishing the drapes like faded gold flags.
5
Wednesday, after breakfast, Joel shut himself in his room, and went about the hard task of thinking up letters. It was a hot dull morning, and the Landing, though now and again Randolph’s sick cough rattled behind closed doors, seemed, as usual, too quiet, too still. A fat horsefly dived toward the Red Chief tablet where Joel’s scrawl wobbled loosely over the paper; at school this haphazard style had earned him an F in penmanship. He twitched, twirled his pencil, paused twice to make
