She hopped and skipped and giggled and sang a song and said a poem, and when she came off the platform, Idabel, more excited than Joel had ever seen her, rushed up and asked, please, wouldn’t she have some sodapop with them. «Charmed,» said Miss Wisteria, twisting her gold sausage curls, «charmed.» Idabel humbled herself; she bought cokes, found them a place to sit, and made Henry keep his distance, for Miss Wisteria confessed to a fear of animals. «Frankly,» she lisped, «I do not think God intended them.» Except for rouged kewpie-doll lips, her baby-plump face was pale, enameled; her hands flitted about so that they seemed to have a separate life of their own, and she glanced at them now and again as if they deeply puzzled her; they were smaller than a child’s these hands, but thin, mature, and the fingernails were painted.
«Well, this is surely a treat,» she said. «Now lots of show-people are just plain put-ons, but I don’t hold with any put-on, I like to bring my art to the people. . . lots of whom don’t see how come I jog around with an outfit like this. . . look, they say to me, there you were out in Hollywood pulling down a thousand dollars a week as Shirley Temple’s stand-in. . . but I say to them: the road to happiness isn’t always a highway.»
Draining her coke, she took out a lipstick and reshaped her kewpie-bow; then a queer thing happened: Idabel, borrowing the lipstick, painted an awkward clownish line across her mouth, and Miss Wisteria, clapping her little hands, shrieked with a kind of sassy pleasure. Idabel met this merriment with a dumb adoring smile. Joel could not understand what had taken her. Unless it was that the midget had cast a spell. But as she continued to fawn over tiny yellow-haired Miss Wisteria it came to him that Idabel was in love. No, she would not consider leaving, there was a world of time. «Charmed,» said Miss Wisteria to a suggestion they ride the ferris-wheel, «charmed.»
A rash of lightning rattled the stars; Miss Wisteria’s royal headgear caught fire in this brief tinseled burst, the glass jewels glittering roselike in the pink lights of the ferris-wheel, and Joel, left below, could see her white winglike hands alight on Idabel’s hair, flutter away, squeeze the dark as if eating its very substance. They swung low, their laughter rippling like Miss Wisteria’s long sash, and, rising toward a new flush of lightning, dissolved; still he could hear the midget’s penny-flute voice purring persistent as a mosquito above every fairground noise: Idabel, come back, he thought, thinking he would never see her again, that she would travel into the sky with Miss Wisteria at her side, Idabel, come back, I love you. So then she was there, telling him, «You can see way off, you can almost touch the sky,» so then he was aboard the ferris-wheel, alone with Miss Wisteria, and together they watched Idabel diminish as the rocking rickety car started to climb.
Wind swung them like a lantern; it is wind, Joel thought, for he could see the pennants trembling above the tents, trash-paper scurrying animal-like along the ground, and over there, on the walls of the old house where a Yankee bandit had murdered three women, raggedy posters danced a skeleton jig. The car in front contained a sunbonneted mother and her little girl, who nursed a corncob doll; they waved to a farmer waiting below. «Y’all better get offen that thing,» he called back, «hitsa fixin to rain.»
Around they went, wind rustling Miss Wisteria’s purple silk. «Run away, is it?» she said, a smile displaying rabbity teeth. «Well, I said to her, and I say to you: the world is a frightening place.» She gestured her arms in an arc, and in that moment she seemed to him Outside, to be, that is, geography, earth and sea and all the cities in Randolph’s almanac: her queer little hands, twittering midair, encompassed the globe. «And oh a lonesome place. Once I ran away. I had four sisters (Maudy went to Atlantic City as Miss Maryland, she’s that beautiful), tall lovely girls, and my mother, bless her soul, stood nearly six feet in her stockings.
We lived in a big house in Baltimore, the nicest on our street, and I never went to school; I was so little I could sit in my mother’s sewing basket, and she used to joke that I could crawl through the eye of her needle; there was a beau of Maudy’s who could balance me in the palm of his hand, and when I was seventeen I still had to sit in a highchair to eat my supper.
They said I need not play alone, there are other little people, they said, go out and find them, they live in flowers. Many’s the petal I’ve peeled but lilac is lilac and no one lives in any rose I ever saw; a spot of grease is all a wishbone leaves, and there is only candy in a Christmas stocking. Then I was twenty, and Mama said it wasn’t right I shouldn’t have a beau, and she sat right down and wrote a letter to the Sweethearts Matrimonial Agency in Newark, New Jersey. And do you know a man came to marry me: he was much too big, though, and much too ugly, and he was seventy-seven years old; well, even so, I might have married him except when he saw how little I was he said bye-bye and took the train back to from whence he’d come.
I never have found a sweet little person. There are children; but I cry sometimes to think little boys must grow tall.» Her voice, while making this memoir, had stiffened solemnly, and her hands folded themselves quietly in her lap. Idabel waved, shouted, but wind carried her words another way, and sadly Miss Wisteria said: «Poor child, is it that she believes she is a freak, too?» She placed her hand on his thigh, and then, as though she had no control over them whatsoever, her fingers crept up inside his legs: she stared at the hand with shocked intensity but seemed unable to remove it, and Joel, disturbed but knowing now he wanted never to hurt anyone, not Miss Wisteria, nor Idabel, nor the little girl with the corncob doll, wished so much he could say: it doesn’t matter, I love you, I love your hand.
The world was a frightening place, yes, he knew: unlasting, what could be forever? or only what it seemed? rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm? every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it bloomed, and while the old man grows spinsterish, his wife assumes a mustache; moment to moment, changing, changing, like the cars on the ferris-wheel. Grass and love are always greener; but remember Little Three Eyes? show her love and apples ripen gold, love vanquishes the Snow Queen, its presence finds the name, be it Rumpelstiltskin or merely Joel Knox: that is constant.
A wall of rain pushed toward them from the distance; you could hear it long before it came, humming like a horde of locusts. The operator of the ferris-wheel began letting off his passengers. «Oh, we’ll be last,» wailed Miss Wisteria, for they were suspended near the top. The rain-wall leaned over them, and she threw up her hands as if to hold it back. Idabel, everyone, fled as down it toppled like a tidal wave.
Presently only the hatless man stood there in the emptiness below. Joel, his eyes searching so frenziedly for Idabel, did not at first altogether see him. But the carnival lights short-circuited with a crackling flare, and when this happened it was suddenly as though the man turned phosphorescent: he seemed to Joel no more than a hand’s space away. «Randolph,» he whispered, and the name gripped him at the root of his throat. It was a momentary vision, for the lights all fizzled out, and as the ferris-wheel descended to a last stop, he could not see Randolph anywhere.
«Wait,» demanded Miss Wisteria, assembling her drenched costume, «wait for me.» But Joel leaped past her, and hurried from one shelter to the next; Idabel was not in the 10¢ Tent: no one was there but the Duck Boy, who was playing solitaire by candlelight. Nor was she in the group huddled on the merry-go-round. He went to the livery stable. He went to the Baptist church. And soon, there being scarcely another possibility, he found himself on the porch of the old house. Leaves, gathering in a coil, spiralled hissingly across its deserted expanse; empty rocking chairs tilted gently back and forth; a Prince Albert poster swept like a bird through the air and struck him in the face: he fought to free himself, but it was as though it were alive, and, struggling with it, it suddenly frightened him more than had the sight of Randolph: he would never rid himself of either.
But then, what was there in Randolph to fear? The fact that he’d found him proved he was only a messenger for a pair of telescopic eyes. Randolph would never bring him harm (still, but, and yet). He let
