Other Voices, Other Rooms

Somewhere above the stairs in a rotting Alabama house, a red tennis ball comes bouncing down, and that is the only way the man up there can say anything at all. Joel Knox has come to Skully's Landing at thirteen, newly motherless, to meet the father he has never seen; what waits for him is a household of exiles, among them a cousin named Randolph, sherry-soaked and courtly, who first appears at an upper window as a strange pale lady in a wig.