SSC (2004) The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (41 page)

I watched until my father had finished his chores and blown out the few candles that still burned. I waited until I was sure he was in bed and sound asleep. Then I crept downstairs to the parlor, which still reeked of gardenias and Havana cigars.

I sat there, thinking: Now I will have to be the one to tell Sook the truth. An anger, a weird malice was spiraling inside me: It was not directed towards my father, though he turned out to be its victim.

When the dawn came, I examined the tags attached to each of the packages. They all said: “For Buddy.” All but one, which said: “For Evangeline.” Evangeline was an elderly colored woman who drank
Coca-Cola all day long and weighed three hundred pounds; she was my father’s housekeeper—she also mothered him. I decided to open the packages: It was Christmas morning, I was awake, so why not? I won’t bother to describe what was inside them: just shirts and sweaters and dull stuff like that. The only thing I appreciated was a quite snazzy cap-pistol. Somehow I got the idea it would be fun to waken my father by firing it. So I did.
Bang. Bang. Bang
.

He raced out of his room, wild-eyed.

Bang. Bang. Bang
.

“Buddy—what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Bang. Bang. Bang
.

“Stop that!”

I laughed. “Look, Daddy. Look at all the wonderful things Santa Claus brought me.”

Calm now, he walked into the parlor and hugged me. “You like what Santa Claus brought you?”

I smiled at him. He smiled at me. There was a tender lingering moment, shattered when I said: “Yes. But what are
you
going to give me, Daddy?” His smile evaporated. His eyes narrowed suspiciously—you could see that he thought I was pulling some kind of stunt. But then he blushed, as though he was ashamed to be thinking what he was thinking. He patted my head, and coughed and said: “Well, I thought I’d wait and let you pick out something you wanted. Is there anything particular you want?”

I reminded him of the airplane we had seen in the toy store on Canal Street. His face sagged. Oh, yes, he remembered the airplane and how expensive it was. Nevertheless, the next day I was sitting in that airplane dreaming I was zooming toward heaven while my father wrote out a check for a happy salesman. There had been some argument about shipping the plane to Alabama, but I was adamant—I insisted it should go with me on the bus that I was taking at two o’clock that afternoon. The salesman settled it by calling the bus company, who said that they could handle the matter easily.

But I wasn’t free of New Orleans yet. The problem was a large silver flask of moonshine; maybe it was because of my departure, but anyway my father had been swilling it all day, and on the way to the bus station, he scared me by grabbing my wrist and harshly whispering: “I’m not going to let you go. I can’t let you go back to that crazy family in that crazy old house. Just look at what they’ve done to you. A boy six, almost seven, talking about Santa Claus! It’s all their fault, all those sour old spinsters with their Bibles and their knitting needles, those drunken uncles.
Listen
to me, Buddy. There is no God! There
is
no Santa Claus.” He was squeezing my wrist so hard that it ached. “Sometimes, oh, God, I think your mother and I, the both of us, we ought to kill ourselves to have let this happen—” (He never killed himself, but my mother did: She walked down the Seconal road thirty years ago.) “Kiss me. Please. Please. Kiss me. Tell your daddy that you love him.” But I couldn’t speak. I was terrified I was going to miss my bus. And I was worried about my plane, which was strapped to the top of the taxi. “Say it: ‘I love you.’ Say it. Please. Buddy. Say it.”

It was lucky for me that our taxi-driver was a good-hearted man. Because if it hadn’t been for his help, and the help of some efficient porters and a friendly policeman, I don’t know what would have happened when we reached the station. My father was so wobbly he could hardly walk, but the policeman talked to him, quieted him down, helped him to stand straight, and the taxi-man promised to take him safely home. But my father would not leave until he had seen the porters put me on the bus.

Once I was on the bus, I crouched in a seat and shut my eyes. I felt the strangest pain. A crushing pain that hurt everywhere. I thought if I took off my heavy city shoes, those crucifying monsters, the agony would ease. I took them off, but the mysterious pain did not leave me. In a way it never has; never will.

Twelve hours later I was home in bed. The room was dark. Sook was sitting beside me, rocking in a rocking chair, a sound as soothing
as ocean waves. I had tried to tell her everything that had happened, and only stopped when I was hoarse as a howling dog. She stroked her fingers through my hair, and said: “Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are. Even your cousin Billy Bob. Now go to sleep. Count stars. Think of the quietest thing. Like snow. I’m sorry you didn’t get to see any. But now snow is falling through the stars—” Stars sparkled, snow whirled inside my head; the last thing I remembered was the peaceful voice of the Lord telling me something I must do. And the next day I did it. I went with Sook to the post office and bought a penny postcard. That same postcard exists today. It was found in my father’s safety deposit box when he died last year. Here is what I had written him:
Hello pop hope you are well l am and I am lurning to pedel my plain so fast I will soon be in the sky so keep your eyes open and yes I love you Buddy
.

“The Walls Are Cold” copyright © 1943 by Truman Capote

“A Mink of One’s Own” copyright © 1944 by Truman Capote

“The Shape of Things” copyright © 1944 by Truman Capote

“Jug of Silver” copyright © 1945 and copyright renewed 1973 by Truman Capote
“Miriam” copyright © 1945 by Truman Capote

“My Side of the Matter” copyright © 1945 and copyright renewed 1973
by Truman Capote

“Preacher’s Legend” copyright © 1945 by Truman Capote

“A Tree of Night” copyright © 1945 and copyright renewed 1973
by Truman Capote

“The Headless Hawk” copyright © 1946 and copyright renewed 1973
by Truman Capote

“Shut a Final Door” copyright © 1947 and copyright renewed 1974
by Truman Capote

“Children on Their Birthdays” copyright © 1948 and copyright renewed 1976
by Truman Capote

“Master Misery” copyright © 1949 and copyright renewed 1976
by Truman Capote

“The Bargain” copyright © 2004 by the Truman Capote Literary Trust

“A Diamond Guitar” copyright © 1950 and copyright renewed 1977
by Truman Capote

“House of Flowers” copyright © 1951 and copyright renewed 1979
by Truman Capote

“A Christmas Memory” copyright © 1956 and copyright renewed 1984
by Truman Capote

“Among the Paths to Eden” copyright © 1960 by Truman Capote, copyright
renewed 1988 by Alan U. Schwartz

“The Thanksgiving Visitor” copyright © 1967 by Truman Capote, copyright
renewed 1995 by Alan U. Schwartz

“Mojave” copyright © 1975 by Truman Capote, copyright renewed 2003
by Alan U. Schwartz

“One Christmas” copyright © 1982, 1983 by Truman Capote

Other Voices, Other Rooms

A Tree of Night

Local Color

The Grass Harp

The Muses Are Heard

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Observations
(with Richard Avedon)

Selected Writings

In Cold Blood

A Christmas Memory

The Thanksgiving Visitor

The Dogs Bark

Music for Chameleons

One Christmas

Three by Truman Capote

Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel

A Capote Reader

The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote

In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Capote created a woman whose name entered American idiom and whose style is part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen at Tiffany’s; her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm. This volume also contains three of Capote’s best-known stories, “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.”

The Complete Stories
brings together Capote’s life’s work in the form he called his “great love,” and confirms his status as a master of the the short story. This first-ever compendium features a never-before-published 1950 story, “The Bargain,” as well as an introduction by Reynolds Price. Ranging from the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are here, in stories as elegant as they are heartfelt, as haunting as they are compassionate.

Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, this is the story of three endearing misfits—an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who take up residence in a tree house. As they pass sweet yet hazardous hours,
The Grass Harp
conveys all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom, as well as the sacredness of love.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held at close range. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.

In these gems of reportage, Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders them with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old-girl he has never met.

Capote’s first novel is a foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when he arrives, what he finds is a sullen stepmother, an uncle with the face and heart of a debauched child, and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

The Letters of Truman Capote

Edited by Gerald Clarke

Spanning more than four decades, these letters are the closest thing we have to a Capote autobiography, showing us the uncannily self-possessed naïf who jumped headlong into the post–World War II New York literary scene; the more mature Capote of the 1950s; the Capote of the early 1960s, immersed in the research and writing of
In Cold Blood
; and Capote later in life, as things seemed to be unraveling. With cameos by a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century
glitterati
,
Too Brief a Treat
shines a spotlight on the life and times of an incomparable American writer.