576
PARTISAN REVIEW
grimaces of faces when you were yelled at were sometimes so
gr0-
tesque that you dreamt of them, strained and veined and goggle-eyed
-and in your dreams the faces were only making faces at you and
not saying anything.
You came to hear only the voices in your head. All the world
beyond you was hushed as though some turning of a great wheel was
stopped beyond you (but went on inside you), and there remained
only the silence of working mouths on shifting faces ...• and there
was only the babel of voices in your head.
When desire failed you, you had nothing left but the betrayal
of desire (the moth-eaten coronation robes of dethroned queens) and
a pair of ruby beads given you once by a dark alien youth who found
you at a carnival and loved you and stayed to love you longer and
again. You would steal away at night and run to
him
at the City
Hotel and all the town knew. It was said that Christy was
this
stranger's son but no one ever proved it, for Christy was black-headed
and swarthy among the other towheads--but this could have been
the Indian blood that was supposed to be in the Ganchion veins come
out in him, you said.
Your father was a southern sea-captain with a wart on the left
side of
his
nose for lechery and by the time you were fourteen he
had shot dead two Negroes for not keeping their place and calling
him
Cap'n.
You had had a hand upon your thigh in the church choir that
made you trill like a meadowlark "Fling Wide the Gates!"; and once
while singing "Hear The Soft Whisper" at communion when
all
the
heads were bent you received your first baptism of joy-and had been
Joy's sister ever since.)
And then, when the family started walking by your coffin to
look at your doll-in-the-rain face for the last time, Granny Ganchion
flung herself into your coffin and tried to seize you
to
her, crying
out in her carline voice, but you would not come up to her; and
they pulled her away.
As
we drove along (what Charity was not in the procession was
standing watching us like a parade) a storm broke over us and scat–
tered leaves. It was the first full devastation of autumn.
We stood around the grave and they let you down in it while
Brother Ramsey sprinkled rose petals. It seemed he was murmuring
