Other Voices, Other Rooms (18 page)

Then over the floors an unearthly clangclang dragging commenced, and Joel, wide-eyed at this uproar, turned to the others; they’d heard it, too. Randolph, flushed with whiskey and talk, frowned and put down his glass. “It be the mule,” said Little Sunshine with an inebriated giggle, “he out there walkin round.” And Joel recalled the spittoon they’d tied to John Brown’s leg: it banged on the stairs, seemed to pass overhead, become remote, grow near.

“How’d he get up yonder?” said the hermit, worried now. “Ain’t no place for him to be: damn fool gonna kill hisself.” He held a hunk of kindling in the fire. Using it as a torch, he stumbled out into the ballroom. Joel tagged bravely after him. But Randolph was too drunk to move.

Around the torch swooped white choirs of singing wings which made to leap and sway all within range of the furious light: humped greyhounds hurtled through the halls, their silent shadow-feet trampling flowerbeds of spiders, and in the lobby lizards loomed like dinosaurs; the coral-tongued cuckoo bird, forever stilled at three o’clock, spread wings hawk-wide, falcon-fierce.

They halted at the foot of the stairs. The mule was nowhere to be seen: the banging of the telltale spittoon had stopped. “John Brown . . . John Brown,” Joel’s voice enlarged the quiet: he shivered to think that in every room some sleepless something listened. Little Sunshine held his torch higher, and brought into view a balcony which overlooked the lobby: there, iron-stiff and still, stood the mule. “You hear me, suh, come down offen there!” commanded the hermit, and John Brown reared back, snorted, pawed the floor; then, as if insane with terror, he came at a gallop, and lunged, splintering the balcony’s rail. Joel primed himself for a crash which never came; when he looked again, the mule, hung to a beam by the rope-reins twisted about his neck, was swinging in mid-air, and his big lamplike eyes, lit by the torch’s blaze, were golden with death’s impossible face, the figure in the fire.

Morning collected in the room, exposing a quilt-wrapped bundle huddled in a corner: Little Sunshine, sound asleep. “Don’t wake him,” whispered Randolph who, in rising, knocked over three empty whiskey bottles. But the hermit did not stir. As they crept out through the hotel Joel closed his eyes, and let Randolph lead him, for he did not want to see the mule: a sharp intake of breath was Randolph’s only comment, and never once did he refer to the accident, nor ask a question: it was as if from the outset they’d planned to return to the Landing on foot. The morning was like a slate clean for any future, and it was as though an end had come, as if all that had been before had turned into a bird, and flown there to the island tree: a crazy elation caught hold of Joel, he ran, he zigzagged, he sang, he was in love, he caught a little tree-toad because he loved it and because he loved it he set it free, watched it bounce, bound like the immense leaping of his heart; he hugged himself, alive and glad, and socked the air, butted like a goat, hid behind a bush, jumped out: Boo! “Look, Randolph,” he said, folding a turban of moss about his head, “look, who am I?”

But Randolph would have no part of him. His mouth was set in a queer, grim way. As if he walked the deck of a tossing ship, he lurched forward, leaning from side to side, and his eyes, raw with bloodshot, acted as a poor compass, for he seemed not to know in which direction he was going.

“I am me,” Joel whooped. “I am Joel, we are the same people.” And he looked about for a tree to climb: he would go right to the very top, and there, midway to heaven, he would spread his arms and claim the world. Running far ahead of Randolph, he shinnied up a birch, but when he reached the middle branches, he clasped the trunk of the tree, suddenly dizzy; from this altitude he looked back and saw Randolph, who was walking in a circle, his hands stretched before him as if he were playing blind man’s bluff: his carpet slippers fell off, but he did not notice; now and then he shook himself, like a wet animal. And Joel thought of the ant. Hadn’t he warned him? Hadn’t he told him it was dangerous? Or was it only corn whiskey swimming in his head? Except Randolph was being so quiet. And drunk folks were never quiet. It was peculiar. It was as though Randolph were in a trance of some kind.

And Joel realized then the truth; he saw how helpless Randolph was: more paralyzed than Mr Sansom, more childlike than Miss Wisteria, what else could he do, once outside and alone, but describe a circle, the zero of his nothingness? Joel slipped down from the tree; he had not made the top, but it did not matter, for he knew who he was, he knew that he was strong.

He puzzled out the rest of the way back to the Landing the best way he could. Randolph did not say a word. Twice he fell down, and sat there on the ground, solemn and baby-eyed, until Joel helped him up. Another time he walked straight into an old stump: after that, Joel took hold of his coat-tail and steered him.

Long, like a cathedral aisle, and weighted with murky leaf-light, a path appeared, then a landmark: Toby, Killed by the Cat. Passing the moon tree, beneath which Jesus Fever was buried, no sign marking his grave, they came upon the Landing from the rear, and entered the garden.

A ridiculous scene presented itself: Zoo, crouched near the broken columns, was tugging at the slave-bell, trying, it seemed, to uproot it, and Amy, her hair disarranged and dirt streaking her face like war paint, paced back and forth, directing Zoo’s efforts. “Lift it, stupid, lift it . . . why, any child! . . . now try again.” Then she saw Randolph; her face contorted, a tick started in her cheek, and she shouted at him: “Don’t think you’re going to stop me because you’re not; you don’t own everything; it’s just as much mine as it is yours and more so if the truth were known, and I’m going to do just what I please; you leave me alone, Randolph, or I’m going to do something to you. I’ll go to the Sheriff, I’ll travel around the country, I’ll make speeches. You don’t think I will, but I will, I will . . .”

Randolph did not look at her, but went on across the garden quite as if he had no idea she was there, and she ran after him, pulling at his sleeve, pleading now: “Let me have it, Randolph, please. Oh, I was so good, I did just what you told me: I said they’d gone away, I said they’d gone off on a long squirrel hunt; I wore my nice grey dress, Randolph, and made little tea-cakes, and the house was so clean, and really she liked me, Randolph, she said she did, and she told me about this store in New Orleans where I could sell my girandoles and the bell and the mirror in the hall: you aren’t listening, Randolph!” She followed him into the house.

As soon as she was gone, Zoo spit vindictively on the bell, and gave it such a kick it overturned with a mighty bong. “Ain’t nobody gonna pay cash-money for that piece-a mess. She plumb outa sense, the one done told Miss Amy any such of a thing.”

Joel tapped the bell like a tomtom. “Who was it that told her?”

“Was . . . I don’t know who.” And it was as if Zoo walked away while standing still; her voice, when she spoke again, seemed slowed down, distant: “Was some lady from New Orleans . . . had a ugly little child what wore a machine in her ear: was a little deaf child. I don’t know. They went away.”

“My cousin Louise, she’s deaf,” said Joel, thinking how he used to hide her hearing aid, of how mean he’d been to her: the times he’d made that kid cry! He wished he had a penny. But when he saw her again, why, he’d be so kind; he’d talk real loud so that she could hear every word, and he’d play those card games with her. Still, it would be fun to make her mad. Just once. But Ellen had never answered his letters. The hell with her. He didn’t care any more. His own bloodkin. And she’d made so many promises. And she’d said she loved him. But she forgot. All right, so had he, sure, you forget, o.k., who cares? And she’d said she loved him. “Zoo . . .” he said, and looked up in time to see her retreating through the arbor-vitae hedge, which shivered, and was still.

A sound, as if the bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden, and Joel, as though following a kite, bent back his head: clouds were coming over the sun: he waited for them to pass, thinking that when they had, when he looked back, some magic would have taken place: perhaps he would find himself sitting on the curb of St. Deval Street, or studying next week’s attractions outside the Nemo: why not? it was possible, for everywhere the sky is the same and it is down that things are different. The clouds traveled slower than a clock’s hands, and, as he waited, became thunder-dark, became John Brown and horrid boys in panama hats and the Cloud Hotel and Idabel’s old hound, and when they were gone, Mr Sansom was the sun. He looked down. No magic had happened; yet something had happened; or was about to. And he sat numb with apprehension. Before him stood a rose stalk throwing shadow like a sundial: an hour traced itself, another, the line of dark dissolved, all the garden began to mingle, move.

It was as if he had been counting in his head and, arriving at a number, decided through certain intuitions, thought: now. For, quite abruptly, he stood up and raised his eyes level with the Landing’s windows.

His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus. The wall yellowed in the meticulous setting of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold, seasonal color. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph’s window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge where, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.

THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Carolyn See

William Styron

Gore Vidal

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and then fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at
The New Yorker
in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in
Harper’s Bazaar
established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties, and his novel
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948), a gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as “an attempt to exorcise demons,” and novella
The Grass Harp
(1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.

From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in
A Tree of Night
(1949) and published the novella
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting
The Grass Harp
into a play and writing the musical
House of Flowers
(1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples were “Local Color” (1950) and “The Muses Are Heard” (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s
Beat the Devil
(1954).

Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for
In
Cold Blood
(1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in
The New Yorker
the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of
In Cold Blood
was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in
Murder
by Death
(1976).

He worked for many years on
Answered Prayers,
an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in
Esquire
in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once dominated. In his later years he published two collections of fiction and essays,
The Dogs Bark
(1973) and
Music for Chameleons
(1980). He died on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.

2004 Modern Library Edition

Copyright © 1948 by Truman Capote

Copyright renewed © 1975 by Truman Capote
Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2004 by John Berendt

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Capote, Truman
Other voices, other rooms/Truman Capote; introduction by John
Berendt.—Modern Library ed.
p. cm.

1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Stepmothers—Fiction.
4. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 5. Southern States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3505.A59O7 2004
813’.54—dc22 2004046666

Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com

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eISBN: 978-0-307-43157-8

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