Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Read Free Book Online Page A

dry and wind-rushed, very much like the beat of bird wings; it was this sound, he realized while rolling over, which had wakened him.
    An expanse of pale yellow wall separated two harshly sunlit windows which faced the bed. Between these windows stood the woman. She did not notice Joel, for she was staring across the room at an ancient bureau: there, on top a lacquered box, was a bird, a bluejay perched so motionless it looked like a trophy. The woman turned and closed the only open window; then, with prissy little sidling steps, she started forward.
    Joel was wide awake, but for an instant it seemed as if the bluejay and its pursuer were a curious fragment of his dream. His stomach muscles tightened as he watched her near the bureau and the bird’s innocent agitation: it hopped around bobbing its blue-brilliant head; suddenly, just as she came within striking distance, it fluttered its wings and flew across the bed and lighted on a chair where Joel had flung his clothes the night before. And remembrance of the night flooded over him: the wagon, the twins, and the little Negro in the derby hat. And the woman, his father’s wife: Miss Amy, as she was called. He remembered entering the house, and stumbling through an odd chamber of a hall where the walls were alive with the tossing shadows of candleflames; and Miss Amy, her finger pressed against her lips, leading him with robber stealth up a curving, carpeted stairway and along a second corridor to the door of this room; all a sleepwalker’s pattern of jigsaw incidents; and so, as Miss Amy stood by the bureau regarding the bluejay on its new perch, it was more or less the same as seeing her for the first time. Her dress was of an almost transparent grey material; on her left hand, for no clear reason, she wore a matching grey silk glove, and she kept the hand cupped daintily, as if it were crippled. A wispy streak of white zigzagged through the dowdy plaits of her brownish, rather colorless hair. She was slight, and fragile-boned, and her eyes were like two raisins embedded in the softness of her narrow face.
    Instead of following the bird directly, as before, she tip-toed over to a fireplace at the opposite end of the huge room, and, artfully twisting her hand, seized hold of an iron poker. The bluejay hopped down the arm of the chair, pecking at Joel’s discarded shirt. Miss Amy pursed her lips, and took five rapid, lilting, ladylike steps. . . .
    The poker caught the bird across the back, and pinioned it for the fraction of a moment; breaking loose, it flew wildly to the window and cawed and flapped against the pane, at last dropping to the floor where it scrambled along dazedly, scraping the rug with its outspread wings.
    Miss Amy trapped it in a corner, and scooped it up against her breast.
    Joel pressed his face into the pillow, knowing that she would look in his direction, if only to see how the racket had affected him. He listened to her footsteps cross the room, and the gentle closing of the door.
    He dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the previous day: a blue shirt, and bedraggled linen trousers. He could not find his suitcase anywhere, and wondered whether he’d left it in the wagon. He combed his hair, and doused his face with water from a washbasin that sat on a marble-topped table beside the rosewood four-poster. The rug, which was bald in spots and of an intricately oriental design, felt grimy and rough under his bare feet. The stifling room was musty; it smelled of old furniture and the burned-out fires of wintertime; gnat-like motes of dust circulated in the sunny air, and Joel left a dusty imprint on whatever he touched: the bureau, the chiffonier, the washstand. This room had not been used in many years certainly; the only fresh things here were the bedsheets, and even these had a yellowed look.
    He was lacing up his shoes when he spied the bluejay feather. It was floating above his head, as if held by a spider’s thread. He plucked it out of the