SSC (2004) The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (23 page)

On the previous visit, the parlor in which she had awaited her audience with Mr. Revercomb had been empty except for herself. This time there were others present, women of several appearances, and an excessively nervous, gnat-eyed young man. Had this group been what it resembled, namely, patients in a doctor’s anteroom, he would
have seemed either an expectant father or a victim of St. Vitus. Sylvia was seated next to him, and his fidgety eyes unbuttoned her rapidly: whatever he saw apparently intrigued him very little, and Sylvia was grateful when he went back to his twitchy preoccupations. Gradually, though, she became conscious of how interested in her the assemblage seemed; in the dim, doubtful light of the plant-filled room their gazes were more rigid than the chairs upon which they sat; one woman was particularly relentless. Ordinarily, her face would have had a soft commonplace sweetness, but now, watching Sylvia, it was ugly with distrust, jealousy. As though trying to tame some creature which might suddenly spring full-fanged, she sat stroking a flea-bitten neck fur, her stare continuing its assault until the earthquake footstep of Miss Mozart was heard in the hall. Immediately, and like frightened students, the group, separating into their individual identities, came to attention. “You, Mr. Pocker,” accused Miss Mozart, “you’re next!” And Mr. Pocker, wringing his hands, jittering his eyes, followed after her. In the dusk-room the gathering settled again like sun motes.

It began then to rain; melting window reflections quivered on the walls, and Mr. Revercomb’s young butler, seeping through the room, stirred a fire in the grate, set tea things upon a table. Sylvia, nearest the fire, felt drowsy with warmth and the noise of rain; her head tilted sideways, she closed her eyes, neither asleep nor really awake. For a long while only the crystal swingings of a clock scratched the polished silence of Mr. Revercomb’s house. And then, abruptly, there was an enormous commotion in the hall, capsizing the room into a fury of sound: a bull-deep voice, vulgar as red, roared out: “Stop Oreilly? The ballet butler and who else?” The owner of this voice, a tub-shaped, brick-colored little man, shoved his way to the parlor threshold, where he stood drunkenly seesawing from foot to foot. “Well, well, well,” he said, his gin-hoarse voice descending the scale, “and all these ladies before me? But Oreilly is a gentleman, Oreilly waits his turn.”

“Not here, he doesn’t,” said Miss Mozart, stealing up behind him
and seizing him sternly by the collar. His face went even redder and his eyes bubbled out: “You’re choking me,” he gasped, but Miss Mozart, whose green-pale hands were as strong as oak roots, jerked his tie still tighter, and propelled him toward the door, which presently slammed with shattering effect: a tea cup tinkled, and dry dahlia leaves tumbled from their heights. The lady with the fur slipped an aspirin into her mouth. “Dis
gusting
,” she said, and the others, all except Sylvia, laughed delicately, admiringly, as Miss Mozart strode past dusting her hands.

It was raining thick and darkly when Sylvia left Mr. Revercomb’s. She looked around the desolate street for a taxi; there was nothing, however, and no one; yes, someone, the drunk man who had caused the disturbance. Like a lonely city child, he was leaning against a parked car and bouncing a rubber ball up and down. “Lookit, kid,” he said to Sylvia, “lookit, I just found this ball. Do you suppose that means good luck?” Sylvia smiled at him; for all his bravado, she thought him rather harmless, and there was a quality in his face, some grinning sadness suggesting a clown minus makeup. Juggling his ball, he skipped along after her as she headed toward Madison Avenue. “I’ll bet I made a fool of myself in there,” he said. “When I do things like that I just want to sit down and cry.” Standing so long in the rain seemed to have sobered him considerably. “But she ought not to have choked me that way; damn, she’s too rough. I’ve known some rough women: my sister Berenice could brand the wildest bull; but that other one, she’s the roughest of the lot. Mark Oreilly’s word, she’s going to end up in the electric chair,” he said, and smacked his lips. “They’ve got no cause to treat me like that. It’s every bit his fault anyhow. I didn’t have an awful lot to begin with, but then he took it every bit, and now I’ve got
niente
, kid,
niente
.”

“That’s too bad,” said Sylvia, though she did not know what she was being sympathetic about. “Are you a clown, Mr. Oreilly?”

“Was,” he said.

By this time they had reached the avenue, but Sylvia did not even
look for a taxi; she wanted to walk on in the rain with the man who had been a clown. “When I was a little girl I only liked clown dolls,” she told him. “My room at home was like a circus.”

“I’ve been other things besides a clown. I have sold insurance also.”

“Oh?” said Sylvia, disappointed. “And what do you do now?”

Oreilly chuckled and threw his ball especially high; after the catch his head still remained tilted upward. “I watch the sky,” he said. “There I am with my suitcase traveling through the blue. It’s where you travel when you’ve got no place else to go. But what do I do on this planet? I have stolen, begged, and sold my dreams—all for purposes of whiskey. A man cannot travel in the blue without a bottle. Which brings us to a point: how’d you take it, baby, if I asked for the loan of a dollar?”

“I’d take it fine,” Sylvia replied, and paused, uncertain of what she’d say next. They wandered along so slowly, the stiff rain enclosing them like an insulating pressure; it was as though she were walking with a childhood doll, one grown miraculous and capable; she reached and held his hand: dear clown traveling in the blue. “But I haven’t got a dollar. All I’ve got is seventy cents.”

“No hard feelings,” said Oreilly. “But honest, is that the kind of money he’s paying nowadays?”

Sylvia knew whom he meant. “No, no—as a matter of fact, I didn’t sell him a dream.” She made no attempt to explain; she didn’t understand it herself. Confronting the graying invisibility of Mr. Revercomb (impeccable, exact as a scale, surrounded in a cologne of clinical odors; flat gray eyes planted like seed in the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses) she could not remember a dream, and so she told of two thieves who had chased her through the park and in and out among the swings of a playground. “Stop, he said for me to stop; there are dreams and dreams, he said, but that is not a real one, that is one you are making up. Now how do you suppose he knew that? So I told him another dream; it was about him,
of how he held me in the night with balloons rising and moons falling all around. He said he was not interested in dreams concerning himself.” Miss Mozart, who transcribed the dreams in shorthand, was told to call the next person. “I don’t think I will go back there again,” she said.

“You will,” said Oreilly. “Look at me, even I go back, and he has long since finished with me, Master Misery.”

“Master Misery? Why do you call him that?”

They had reached the corner where the maniacal Santa Claus rocked and bellowed. His laughter echoed in the rainy squeaking street, and a shadow of him swayed in the rainbow lights of the pavement. Oreilly, turning his back upon the Santa Claus, smiled and said: “I call him Master Misery on account of that’s who he is. Master Misery. Only maybe you call him something else; anyway, he is the same fellow, and you must’ve known him. All mothers tell their kids about him: he lives in hollows of trees, he comes down chimneys late at night, he lurks in graveyards and you can hear his step in the attic. The sonofabitch, he is a thief and a threat: he will take everything you have and end by leaving you nothing, not even a dream. Boo!” he shouted, and laughed louder than Santa Claus. “Now do you know who he is?”

Sylvia nodded. “I know who he is. My family called him something else. But I can’t remember what. It was so long ago.”

“But you remember him?”

“Yes, I remember him.”

“Then call him Master Misery,” he said, and, bouncing his ball, walked away from her. “Master Misery,” his voice trailed to a mere moth of sound, “Mas-ter Mis-er-y …”

It was hard to look at Estelle, for she was in front of a window, and the window was filled with windy sun, which hurt Sylvia’s eyes, and the glass rattled, which hurt her head. Also, Estelle was lecturing. Her nasal voice sounded as though her throat were a depository for
rusty blades. “I wish you could see yourself,” she was saying. Or was that something she’d said a long while back? Never mind. “I don’t know what’s happened to you: I’ll bet you don’t weigh a hundred pounds, I can see every bone and vein, and your hair! you look like a poodle.”

Sylvia passed a hand over her forehead. “What time is it, Estelle?”

“It’s four,” she said, interrupting herself long enough to look at her watch. “But where is your watch?”

“I sold it,” said Sylvia, too tired to lie. It did not matter. She had sold so many things, including her beaver coat and gold mesh evening bag.

Estelle shook her head. “I give up, honey, I plain give up. And that was the watch your mother gave you for graduation. It’s a shame,” she said, and made an old-maid noise with her mouth, “a pity and a shame. I’ll never understand why you left us. That is your business, I’m sure; only how could you have left us for this … this …?”

“Dump,” supplied Sylvia, using the word advisedly. It was a furnished room in the East Sixties between Second and Third Avenues. Large enough for a daybed and a splintery old bureau with a mirror like a cataracted eye, it had one window, which looked out on a vast vacant lot (you could hear the tough afternoon voices of desperate running boys) and in the distance, like an exclamation point for the skyline, there was the black smokestack of a factory. This smokestack occurred frequently in her dreams; it never failed to arouse Miss Mozart: “Phallic, phallic,” she would mutter, glancing up from her shorthand. The floor of the room was a garbage pail of books begun but never finished, antique newspapers, even orange hulls, fruit cores, underwear, a spilled powder box.

Estelle kicked her way through this trash, and sat down on the daybed. “Honey, you don’t know, but I’ve been worried crazy. I mean I’ve got pride and all that and if you don’t like me, well, o.k.; but you’ve got no right to stay away like this and not let me hear from you in over a month. So today I said to Bootsy, Bootsy, I’ve got a feeling
something terrible has happened to Sylvia. You can imagine how I felt when I called your office and they told me you hadn’t worked there for the last four weeks. What happened, were you fired?”

“Yes, I was fired.” Sylvia began to sit up. “Please, Estelle—I’ve got to get ready; I’ve got an appointment.”

“Be still. You’re not going anywhere till I know what’s wrong. The landlady downstairs told me you were found sleepwalking.…”

“What do you mean talking to her? Why are you spying on me?”

Estelle’s eyes puckered, as though she were going to cry. She put her hand over Sylvia’s and petted it gently. “Tell me, honey, is it because of a man?”

“It’s because of a man, yes,” said Sylvia, laughter at the edge of her voice.

“You should have come to me before,” Estelle sighed. “I know about men. That is nothing for you to be ashamed of. A man can have a way with a woman that kind of makes her forget everything else. If Henry wasn’t the fine upstanding potential lawyer that he is, why, I would still love him, and do things for him that before I knew what it was like to be with a man would have seemed shocking and horrible. But honey, this fellow you’re mixed up with, he’s taking advantage of you.”

“It’s not that kind of relationship,” said Sylvia, getting up and locating a pair of stockings in the furor of her bureau drawers. “It hasn’t got anything to do with love. Forget about it. In fact, go home and forget about me altogether.”

Estelle looked at her narrowly. “You scare me, Sylvia; you really scare me.” Sylvia laughed and went on getting dressed. “Do you remember a long time ago when I said you ought to get married?”

“Uh huh. And now you listen.” Sylvia turned around; there was a row of hairpins spaced across her mouth; she extracted them one at a time all the while she talked. “You talk about getting married as though it were the answer absolute; very well, up to a point I agree. Sure, I want to be loved; who the hell doesn’t? But even if I was willing
to compromise, where is the man I’m going to marry? Believe me, he must’ve fallen down a manhole. I mean it seriously when I say there are no men in New York—and even if there were, how do you meet them? Every man I ever met here who seemed the slightest bit attractive was either married, too poor to get married, or queer. And anyway, this is no place to fall in love; this is where you ought to come when you want to get over being in love. Sure, I suppose I could marry somebody; but do I want that? Do I?”

Estelle shrugged. “Then what do you want?”

“More than is coming to me.” She poked the last hairpin into place, and smoothed her eyebrows before the mirror. “I have an appointment, Estelle, and it is time for you to go now.”

“I can’t leave you like this,” said Estelle, her hand waving helplessly around the room. “Sylvia, you were my childhood friend.”

“That is just the point: we’re not children any more; at least, I’m not. No, I want you to go home, and I don’t want you to come here again. I just want you to forget about me.”

Estelle fluttered at her eyes with a handkerchief, and by the time she reached the door she was weeping quite loudly. Sylvia could not afford remorse: having been mean, there was nothing to be but meaner. “Go on,” she said, following Estelle into the hall, “and write home any damn nonsense about me you want to!” Letting out a wail that brought other roomers to their doors, Estelle fled down the stairs.

After this Sylvia went back into her room and sucked a piece of sugar to take the sour taste out of her mouth: it was her grandmother’s remedy for bad tempers. Then she got down on her knees and pulled from under the bed a cigar box she kept hidden there. When you opened the box it played a homemade and somewhat disorganized version of “Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” Her brother had made the music-box and given it to her on her fourteenth birthday. Eating the sugar, she’d thought of her grandmother, and hearing the tune she thought of her brother; the rooms
of the house where they had lived rotated before her, all dark and she like a light moving among them: up the stairs, down, out and through, spring sweet and lilac shadows in the air and the creaking of a porch swing. All gone, she thought, calling their names, and now I am absolutely alone. The music stopped. But it went on in her head; she could hear it bugling above the child-cries of the vacant lot. And it interfered with her reading. She was reading a little diary-like book she kept inside the box. In this book she wrote down the essentials of her dreams; they were endless now, and it was so hard to remember. Today she would tell Mr. Revercomb about the three blind children. He would like that. The prices he paid varied, and she was sure this was at least a ten-dollar dream. The cigar-box anthem followed her down the stairs and through the streets and she longed for it to go away.