six years old, and his penny-colored eyes were round with terror: Holy Ghost, the preacher said,
pressing him down into baptism water; he screamed, and his mother, watching from a front pew, rushed
forward, took him in her arms, held him, whispered softly: my darling, my darling. He lifted his face from
the great stillness, and, as Idabel splashed a playful wave, seven years vanished in an instant.
«You look like a plucked chicken,» said Idabel. «So skinny and white.»
Joel’s shoulders contracted self-consciously. Despite Idabel’s quite genuine lack of interest in his
nakedness, he could not make so casual an adjustment to the situation as she seemed to expect.
Idabel said: «Hold still, now, and I’ll shampoo your hair.» Her own was a maze of lather-curls like
cake icing. Without clothes, her figure was, if anything, more boyish: she seemed mostly legs, like a
crane, or a walker on modified stilts, and freckles, dappling her rather delicate shoulders, gave her a
curiously wistful look. But already her breasts had commenced to swell, and there was about her hips a
mild suggestion of approaching width. Joel, having conceived of Idabel as gloomy, and cantankerous,
was surprised at how funny and gay she could be: working her fingers rhythmically over his scalp, she
kept laughing and telling jokes, some of them quite bawdy: «. . .so the farmer said: ‘Sure she’s a pretty
baby; oughta be, after having been strained through a silk handkerchief.’ «
When he did not laugh, she said: «What’s the matter? Don’t you get it?» Joel shook his head.
«And you from the city, too,» she sighed.
«What did he mean. . . strained through a silk handkerchief?»
«Skip it, son,» said Idabel, rinsing his hair, «you’re too young.» Joel thought then that the points of
Idabel’s jokes were even for her none too clear: the manner in which she told them was not altogether her
own; she was imitating someone, and, wondering who, he asked: «Where’d you hear that joke?»
«Billy Bob told me,» she said.
«Who’s that?»
«He’s just Billy Bob.»
«Do you like him?» said Joel, not understanding why he felt so jealous.
»Sure I like him,» she said, rising up and wading toward land; her eyes fixed on the water, she
was, moving slowly and with such grace, like a bird in search of food. «Sure: he’s practically my best
friend. He’s awful tough, Billy Bob is. I remember back in fourth grade we had that mean Miss Aikens,
and she used to beat Billy Bob’s hands raw with a ruler, and he never cried once.»
They sat down in a sunny place to dry, and she put on her dark glasses.
«I never cry,» Joel lied.
She turned on her stomach, and, fingering moss, said with gentle matter-of-factness: «Well, I do.
I cry sometimes.» She looked at him earnestly. «But you don’t ever tell anybody, hear.»
He wanted to say: no, Idabel, dear Idabel, I am your good true friend. And he wanted to touch
her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing
closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek. There was a hush; tenuous moods
of light and shade seemed to pass between them like the leaf-shadow trembling on their bodies. Then
Idabel tightened all over. She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull, and when she did this a terrible,
and puzzled rage went through Joel. This was the real betrayal. And so he fought back; tangled and
wrestling, the sky turning, descending, revolving, they rolled over, over. The dark glasses fell off, and
Joel, falling back, felt them crush beneath and cut his buttocks. «Stop,» he panted, «please stop, I’m
bleeding.» Idabel was astride him, and her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her
red, angry face close to his: «Give up?»
«I’m bleeding,» was all Joel would say.
Presently, after releasing him, she brought water, and washed his cut. «You’ll be all right,» she
said, as if nothing had happened. And, indefinably, it was as if nothing had: neither, of course, would ever
be able to explain why they had fought.
Joel said: «I’m sorry about your glasses.»
The broken pieces sprinkled the ground like green raindrops. Stooping, she started picking them
up; then, seeming to think better of this, she spilled them back. «It’s not your fault,» she said sadly.
«Maybe. . . maybe some day I’ll win another pair.»
8
Randolph dipped his brush into a little water-filled vinegar jar, and tendrils of purple spread like
some fast-growing vine. «Don’t smile, my dear,» he said. «I’m not a photographer. On the other hand, I
could scarcely be called an artist; not, that is, if you defineartist as one who sees, takes and purely
transmits: always for me there is the problem of distortion, and I never paint so much what I see as what I
think: for example, some years ago, this was in Berlin, I drew a boy not much older than yourself, and yet
in my picture he looked more aged than Jesus Fever, and whereas in reality his eyes were childhood
blue, the eyes I saw were bleary and lost. And what I saw was indeed the truth, for little Kurt, that was
his name, turned out to be a perfect horror, and tried twice to murder me. . . exhibiting both times, I must
say, admirable ingenuity. Poor child, I wonder whatever became of him. . . or, for that matter, me. Now
that is a most interesting question: whatever became of me?» As if to punctuate his sentences he kept, all
the while he talked, thrusting the brush inside the jar, and the water, continually darkening, had at its
center, like a hidden flower, a rope of red. «Very well, sit back, we’ll relax a minute now.»
Sighing, Joel glanced about him. It was the first time he’d been in Randolph’s room; after two
hours, he still could not quite take it in, for it was so unlike anything he’d ever known before: faded gold
and tarnished silk reflecting in ornate mirrors, it all made him feel as though he’d eaten too much candy.
Large as the room was, the barren space in it amounted to no more than one foot; carved tables, velvet
chairs, candelabras, a German music box, books and paintings seemed to spill each into the other, as if
the objects in a flood had floated through the windows and sunk here. Behind his liver-shaped desk
unframed foreign postcards crusted the walls; six of these, a series from Japan, were for Joel an
education, even though to some extent he knew already the significance of what they depicted. Like a
museum exhibit, there was spread out on a long, black, tremendously heavy table a display consisting in
part of antique dolls, some with missing arms, legs, some without heads, other whose bead-eyes stared
glass-blank though their innards, straw and sawdust, showed through open wounds; all, however, were
costumed, and exquisitely, in a variety of velvet, lace, linen. Now set in the center of this table was a little
photograph in a silver frame so elaborate as to be absurd; it was a cheap photograph, obviously taken at
a carnival or amusement park, for the persons concerned, three men and a girl, were posed against a
humorous backdrop of cross-eyed baboons and leering kangaroos; though he was thinner in this scene
and more handsome, Joel, without much effort, recognized Randolph, and another of the men looked
familiar, too. . . was it his father? Certainly the face was only mildly reminiscent of the man across the hall.
The third man, taller than his companions, cut an amazing figure; he was powerfully made and, even in so
faded a print, very dark, almost Negroid; his eyes, narrow and sly and black, glittered beneath brows
thick as mustaches, and his lips, fuller than any woman’s were caught in a cocky smile which intensified
the dashing, rather vaudeville effect of a straw hat he wore, a cane he carried. He had his arm around the
girl, and she, an anemic faunlike creature, was gazing up at him with the completest adoration.
«Oh, yes,» said Randolph, stretching his legs, lighting a mentholated cigarette, «do not take it
seriously, what you see here: it’s only a joke played on myself by myself. . . it amuses and horrifies. . . a
rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, nor night; the seasons are changeless
here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven’t already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as
in my mother’s womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn’t that be an ironic finale for one who,
deep in his goddamned soul, sought the sweetly clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to
share with some beloved, nothing more.» Smiling, smoothing the back of his hair, he put out the cigarette,
and picked up his brush. «Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born
dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?» He looked at Joel in an
amused way. «Answer me: did she?»
«Did she what?» said Joel, for, as usual, he did not understand: Randolph seemed always to be
carrying on in an unfathomable vocabulary secret dialogues with someone unseen. «Randolph,» he said,
«please don’t be mad with me: it’s only that you say things in such a funny way.»
«Never mind,» said Randolph, «all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell
you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those
flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own
cocoon, I shall weep a little for you.» Rising, going to a huge baroque bureau, he dabbed on lemon
cologne, combed his polished curls, and, posturing somewhat, studied himself in a mirror; while
duplicating him in all essentials, the
