One afternoon the rocking-chair became precisely that; scissors seemed to cut round the edges of his mind, and as he peeled away the dead discardings, Randolph, taking shape, shone blessedly near.
«Randolph,» he said, reaching out to him, «do you hate me?» Smiling, Randolph whispered: «Hate you, baby?» «Because I went away,» said Joel, «went way away and left your sherry on the hall-tree.» Randolph took him in his arms, kissed his forehead, and Joel, pained, grateful, said, «I’m sick and so sick,» and Randolph replied, «Lie back, my darling, lie still.»
He drifted deep into September; the blissful depths of the bed seemed future enough, every pore absorbed its cool protection. And when he thought of himself he affixed the thought to a second person, another Joel Knox about whom he was interested in the moderate way one would be in a childhood snapshot: what a dumbbell! he would gladly be rid of him, this old Joel, but not quite yet, he somehow needed him still. For long periods each day he studied his face in a hand mirror: a disappointing exercise, on the whole, for nothing he saw concretely affirmed his suspicions of emerging manhood, though about his face there were certain changes: baby-fat had given way to a true shape, the softness of his eyes had hardened: it was a face with a look of innocence but none of its charm, an alarming face, really, too shrewd for a child, too beautiful for a boy. It would be difficult to say how old he was. All that displeased him was the brown straightness of his hair. He wished it were curly gold like Randolph’s.
He did not know when Randolph slept; he seemed to vacate the rocking-chair only when it was time for Joel to eat or commit some function; and sometimes, waking with the moon watching at the window like a bandit’s eye, he would see Randolph’s asthmatic cigarette still pulsing in the dark: though the house had sunk, he was not alone, another had survived, not a stranger, but one more kind, more good than any had ever been, the friend whose nearness is love.
«Randolph,» he said, «were you ever as young as me?» And Randolph said: «I was never so old.» «Randolph,» he said, «do you know something? I’m very happy.» To which his friend made no reply. The reason for this happiness seemed to be simply that he did not feel unhappy; rather, he knew all through him a kind of balance. There was so little to cope with. The mist which for him overhung so much of Randolph’s conversation, even that had lifted, at least it was no longer troubling, for it seemed as though he understood him absolutely.
Now in the process of, as it were, discovering someone, most people experience simultaneously an illusion they are discovering themselves: the other’s eyes reflect their real and glorious value. Such a feeling was with Joel, and inestimably so because this was the first time he’d ever known the triumph, false or true, of seeing through to a friend. And he did not want any more to be responsible, he wanted to put himself in the hands of his friend, be, as here in the sickbed, dependent upon him for his very life. Looking in the handglass became, consequently, an ordeal: it was as if now only one eye examined for signs of maturity, while the other, gradually of the two the more attentive, gazed inward wishing him always to remain as he was.
«There is an October chill in the air today,» said Randolph, settling overblown roses in a vase by the bed. «These are the last, I’m afraid, they are quite falling apart, even the bees have lost interest. And here, I’ve brought an autumn specimen, a sycamore leaf.» Another day, and though the air was mild, he built a fire by which they toasted marshmallows and sipped tea from cups two hundred years old. Randolph did imitations.
He was Charlie Chaplin to a T, Mae West too, and his cruel take-off on Amy made Joel double up on the bed, finally absorbed in laughter for its own sake, and Randolph said ha! ha! he would show him something really funny: «I’ll have to fix up, though,» he said, his eyes quickly alive, and made as if to leave the room; then, releasing the doorknob, he looked back. «But if I do. . . you mustn’t laugh.» And Joel’s answer was a laugh, he couldn’t stop, it was like hiccups. Randolph’s smile ran off his face like melted butter, and when Joel cried, «Go on, you promised,» he sat down, nursing his round pink head between his hands: «Not now,» he said wearily, «some other time.»
One morning Joel received the first mail he’d ever had at the Landing; it was a picture postcard, and Randolph, appearing with a copy ofMacbeth, which they’d planned to read aloud, brought it to him. «It’s from the little girl down the road,» he said, and Joel’s breath caught: long-legged and swaggering, Idabel walked from the wall, rocked in the chair. He’d not directly thought of her since the night of the traveling-show, an omission for which he couldn’t account, but which did not strike him as freakish: she was, after all, one with the others covered over when the house sank, those whose names concerned the old Joel, whose names now in gnarled October freckling leaves spelled on the wind. Still Idabel was back, a ghost, perhaps, but here, and in the room: Idabel the hoodlum out to stone a one-armed barber, and Idabel with roses, Idabel with sword, Idabel who said she sometimes cried: all of autumn was the sycamore leaf and its red the red of her hair and its stem the rusty color of her rough voice and its jagged shape the pattern, the souvenir of her face.
The card, which showed joyful cottonpickers, was postmarked from Alabama, and it said: «Mrs. Collie 1/2 sister an hes the baptis prechur Last Sunday I past the plate at church! papa and F shot henry They put me to life here, why did you Hide? write to IDABEL THOMPKINS.»
Well, frankly, he didn’t believe her; she’d put herself to life, and it was with Miss Wisteria, not a baptis prechur. He handed the card to Randolph who, in turn, passed it to the fire; for an instant, as Idabel and her cottonpickers crinkled, he would have lost his hands to retrieve them, but Randolph, adjusting gold reading glasses, began: «First witch. When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain?» and he settled down to listen, he fell asleep and woke up with a holler, for he’d climbed up the chimney after Idabel, and there was only smoke where she’d been, sky. «Hush, now, hush,» said Randolph slowly, softly, a voice like dying light, and he was glad for Randolph, calm in the center of his mercy.
So sometimes he came near to speaking out his love for him; but it was unsafe ever to let anyone guess the extent of your feelings or knowledge: suppose, as he often had, that he were kidnapped; in which case the wisest defense would be not to let the kidnapper know you recognized him as such. If concealment is the single weapon, then a villain is never a villain: one smiles to the very end.
And even if he spoke to Randolph, to whom would he be confessing love? Faceted as a fly’s eye, being neither man nor woman, and one whose every identity cancelled the other, a grab-bag of disguises, who, what was Randolph? X, an outline in which with crayon you color in the character, the ideal hero: whatever his role, it is pitched by you into existence. Indeed, try to conceive of him alone, unseen, unheard, and he becomes invisible, he is not to be imagined. But such as Randolph justify fantasy, and if a genii should appear, certainly Joel would have asked that these sealed days continue through a century of calendars.
They ended, though, and at the time it seemed Randolph’s fault. «Very soon we’re going to visit the Cloud Hotel,» he said. «Little Sunshine wants to see us; you are quite well enough, I think: it’s absurd to pretend you’re not.» Urgency underscored his voice, an enthusiasm in which Joel could not altogether believe, for he sensed the plan was motivated by private, no doubt unpleasant reasons, and these, whatever they were, opposed Randolph’s actual desires.
And he said: «Let’s stay right here, Randolph, let’s don’t ever go anywhere.» And when the plea was rejected old galling grindful thoughts about Randolph came back. He felt grumpy enough to quarrel; that, of course, was a drawback in being dependent: he could never quarrel with Randolph, for anger seemed, if anything, more unsafe than love: only those who know their own security can afford either. Even so, he was on the point of risking cross words when an outside sound interrupted, and rolled him backward through time: «Why are you staring that way?» said Randolph.
«It’s Zoo. . . I hear her,» he said: through the evening windows came an accordion refrain. «Really I do.»
Randolph was annoyed. «If she must be musical, heaven knows I’d prefer she took up the harmonica.»
«But she’s gone.» And Joel sat
