SSC (2004) The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

by Truman Capote

  Silence.

  “What’s the matter? You sound kind of funny.”

  “Do I?”

  “Are you mad or something?”

  “Just disappointed.”

  “About what?”

  Silence. And then: “It was a cheap thing to do, Walter, pretty cheap.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Good-bye, Walter.”

  On the way out he paid the cashier for a cup of coffee he’d forgotten to have. There was a barbershop in the building. He said he wanted a shave; no—make it a haircut; no—a manicure; and suddenly, seeing himself in the mirror, where his face reflected as pale almost as the barber’s bib, he knew he did not know what he wanted. Rosa had been right, he was cheap. He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer to exist. He went back upstairs, and sat at his desk, and felt as though he were bleeding inside, and wished very much to believe in God. A pigeon strutted on the ledge outside his window. For some time he watched the shimmering sunlit feathers, the wobbly sedateness of its movements; then, before realizing it, he’d picked up and thrown a glass paperweight: the pigeon climbed calmly upward, the paperweight careened like a giant raindrop: suppose, he thought, listening for a faraway scream, suppose it hits someone, kills them? But there was nothing. Only the ticking fingers of typists, a knocking at the door! “Hey, Ranney, K.K. wants to see you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Kuhnhardt, doodling with a gold pen. “And I’ll write a letter for you, Walter. Any time.”

  Now in the elevator the enemy, all submerging with him, crushed Walter between them; Margaret was there wearing a blue hair-ribbon. She looked at him, and her face was different from other faces, not vacant as theirs were, and sterile: here still was compassion. But as she looked at him, she looked through him, too. This is my dream: he must not allow himself to believe otherwise; and yet under his own arm he carried the dream’s contradiction, a manila envelope stuffed with all the personals saved from his desk. When the elevator emptied into the lobby, he knew he must speak with Margaret, ask her to forgive him, beg her protection, but she was slipping swiftly toward an exit, losing herself among the enemy. I love you, he said, running after her, I love you, he said, saying nothing.

  “Margaret! Margaret!”

  She turned around. The blue hair-ribbon matched her eyes, and her eyes, gazing up at him, softened, became rather friendly. Or pitying.

  “Please,” he said, “I thought we could have a drink together, go over to Benny’s, maybe. We used to like Benny’s, remember?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got a date, and I’m late already.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes—well, I’m late,” she said, and began to run. He stood watching as she raced down the street, her ribbon streaming, shining in the darkening summer light. And then she was gone.

  His apartment, a one-room walk-up near Gramercy Park, needed an airing, a cleaning, but Walter, after pouring a drink, said to hell with it and stretched out on the couch. What was the use? No matter what you did or how hard you tried, it all came finally to zero; everyday everywhere everyone was being cheated, and who was there to blame? It was strange, though; lying here sipping whiskey in the dusk-graying room, he felt calmer than he had for God knows how long. It was like the time he’d failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties. Now he would leave New York, take a vacation trip; he had a few hundred dollars, enough to last until fall.

  And, wondering where he should go, he all at once saw, as if a film had commenced running in his head, silk caps, cherry-colored and lemon, and little wise-faced men wearing exquisite polka-dot shirts. Closing his eyes, he was suddenly five years old, and it was delicious remembering the cheers, the hot dogs, his father’s big pair of binoculars. Saratoga! Shadows masked his face in the sinking light. He turned on a lamp, fixed another drink, put a rumba record on the phonograph, and began to dance, the soles of his shoes whispering on the carpet: he’d often thought that with a little training he could’ve been a professional.

  Just as the music ended, the telephone rang. He simply stood there, afraid somehow to answer, and the lamplight, the furniture, everything in the room went quite dead. When at last he thought it had stopped, it commenced again; louder, it seemed, and more insistent. He tripped over a footstool, picked up the receiver, dropped and recovered it, said: “Yes?”

  Long-distance: a call from some town in Pennsylvania, the name of which he didn’t catch. Following a series of spasmic rattlings, a voice, dry and sexless and altogether unlike any he’d ever heard before, came through: “Hello, Walter.”

  “Who is this?”

  No answer from the other end, only a sound of strong orderly breathing; the connection was so good it seemed as though whoever it was was standing beside him with lips pressed against his ear. “I don’t like jokes. Who is this?”

  “Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” A click, and nothing.

  5

  It was night and raining when the train reached Saratoga. He’d slept most of the trip, sweating in the hot dampness of the car, and dreamed of an old castle where only old turkeys lived, and dreamed a dream involving his father, Kurt Kuhnhardt, someone no-faced, Margaret and Rosa, Anna Stimson and a queer fat lady with diamond eyes. He was standing on a long, deserted street; except for an approaching procession of slow, black, funeral-like cars there was no sign of life. Still, he knew, eyes unseen observed his nakedness from every window, and he hailed frantically the first of the limousines; it stopped and a man, his father, invitingly held open the door. Daddy, he yelled, running forward, and the door slammed shut, mashing off his fingers, and his father, with a great belly laugh, leaned out the window to toss an enormous wreath of roses. In the second car was Margaret, in the third the lady with the diamond eyes (wasn’t this Miss Casey, his old algebra teacher?), in the fourth Mr. Kuhnhardt and a new protégé, the no-faced creature. Each door opened, each closed, all laughed, all threw roses. The procession rolled smoothly away down the silent street. And with a terrible scream Walter fell among the mountain of roses: thorns tore wounds, and a sudden rain, a gray cloudburst, shattered the blooms, and washed pale blood bleeding over the leaves.

  By the fixed stare of a woman sitting opposite, he realized at once he’d yelled aloud in his sleep. He smiled at her sheepishly, and she looked away with, he imagined, some embarrassment. She was a cripple; on her left foot she wore a giant shoe. Later, in the Saratoga station, he helped with her luggage, and they shared a taxi; there was no conversation: each sat in his corner looking at the rain, the blurred lights. In New York a few hours before, he’d withdrawn from the bank all his savings, locked the door of his apartment, and left no messages; furthermore, there was in this town not a soul who knew him. It was a good feeling.

  The hotel was filled: not to mention the racing crowd, there was, the desk clerk told him, a medical convention. No, sorry, he didn’t know of a room anywhere. Maybe tomorrow.

  So Walter found the bar. As long as he was going to stay up all night, he might as well do it drunk. The bar, very large, very hot and noisy, was brilliant with summer-season grotesques: sagging silver-fox ladies, and little stunted jockeys, and pale loud-voiced men wearing cheap fantastic checks. After a couple of drinks, though, the noise seemed faraway. Then, glancing around, he saw the cripple. She was alone at a table, where she sat primly sipping a crème de menthe. They exchanged a smile. Rising, Walter went to join her. “It’s not like we were strangers,” she said, as he sat down. “Here for the races, I suppose?”

  “No,” he said, “just a rest. And you?”

  She pursed her lips. “Maybe you noticed I’ve got a clubfoot. Oh, sure now, don’t look surprised: you noticed, everybody does. Well, see,” she said, twisting the straw in her glass, “see, my doctor’s going to give a talk at this convention, going to talk about me and my f
oot on account of I’m pretty special. Gee, I’m scared. I mean I’m going to have to show off my foot.”

  Walter said he was sorry, and she said, oh, there was nothing to be sorry about; after all, she was getting a little vacation out of it, wasn’t she? “And I haven’t been out of the city in six years. It was six years ago I spent a week at the Bear Mountain Inn.” Her cheeks were red, rather mottled, and her eyes, set too closely together, were lavender-colored, intense: they seemed never to blink. She wore a gold band on her wedding finger; play-acting, to be sure: it would not have fooled anybody.

  “I’m a domestic,” she said, answering a question. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s honest and I like it. The people I work for have the cutest kid, Ronnie. I’m better to him than his mother, and he loves me more; he’s told me so. That one, she stays drunk all the time.”

  It was depressing to listen to, but Walter, afraid suddenly to be alone, stayed and drank and talked in the way he’d once talked to Anna Stimson. Shh! she said at one point, for his voice had risen too high, and a good many people were staring. Walter said the hell with them, he didn’t care; it was as if his brain were made of glass, and all the whiskey he’d drunk had turned into a hammer; he could feel the shattered pieces rattling in his head, distorting focus, falsifying shape; the cripple, for instance, seemed not one person, but several: Irving, his mother, a man named Bonaparte, Margaret, all those and others: more and more he came to understand experience is a circle of which no moment can be isolated, forgotten.

  6

  The bar was closing. They went Dutch on the check and, while waiting for change, neither spoke. Watching him with her unblinking lavender eyes, she seemed quite controlled, but there was going on inside, he could tell, some subtle agitation. When the waiter returned they divided the change, and she said: “If you want to, you can come to my room.” A rashlike blush covered her face. “I mean, you said you didn’t have any place to sleep.…” Walter reached out and took her hand: the smile she gave him was touchingly shy.

  Reeking with dime-store perfume, she came out of the bathroom wearing only a sleazy flesh-colored kimono, and the monstrous black shoe. It was then that he realized he could never go through with it. And he’d never felt so sorry for himself: not even Anna Stimson would ever have forgiven him this. “Don’t look,” she said, and there was a trembling in her voice, “I’m funny about anybody seeing my foot.”

  He turned to the window, where pressing elm leaves rustled in the rain, and lightning, too far off for sound, winked whitely. “All right,” she said. Walter did not move.

  “All right,” she repeated anxiously. “Shall I put out the light? I mean, maybe you like to get ready—in the dark.”

  He came to the edge of the bed, and, bending down, kissed her cheek. “I think you’re so very sweet, but …”

  The telephone interrupted. She looked at him dumbly. “Jesus God,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece with her hand, “it’s long-distance! I’ll bet it’s about Ronnie! I’ll bet he’s sick, or—hello—what?—Ranney? Gee, no. You’ve got the wrong …”

  “Wait,” said Walter, taking the receiver. “This is me, this is Walter Ranney.”

  “Hello, Walter.”

  The voice, dull and sexless and remote, went straight to the pit of his stomach. The room seemed to seesaw, to buckle. A mustache of sweat sprouted on his upper lip. “Who is this?” he said so slowly the words did not connect coherently.

  “Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” Then silence: whoever it was had hung up.

  “Gee,” said the woman, “now how do you suppose they knew you were in my room? I mean—say, was it bad news? You look kind of …”

  Walter fell across her, clutching her to him, pressing his wet cheek against hers. “Hold me,” he said, discovering he could still cry. “Hold me, please.”

  “Poor little boy,” she said, patting his back. “My poor little boy: we’re awfully alone in this world, aren’t we?” And presently he went to sleep in her arms.

  But he had not slept since, nor could he now, not even listening to the lazy lull of the fan; in its turning he could hear train wheels: Saratoga to New York, New York to New Orleans. And New Orleans he’d chosen for no special reason, except that it was a town of strangers, and a long way off. Four spinning fan blades, wheels and voices, round and round; and after all, as he saw it now, there was to this network of malice no ending, none whatever.

  Water flushed down wall pipes, steps passed overhead, keys jangled in the hall, a news commentator rumbled somewhere beyond, next door a little girl said, why? Why? WHY? Yet in the room there was a sense of silence. His feet shining in the transom-light looked like amputated stone: the gleaming toenails were ten small mirrors, all reflecting greenly. Sitting up, he rubbed sweat off with a towel; now more than anything the heat frightened him, for it made him know tangibly his own helplessness. He threw the towel across the room, where, landing on a lampshade, it swung back and forth. At this moment the telephone rang. And rang. And it was ringing so loud he was sure all the hotel could hear. An army would be pounding at his door. So he pushed his face into the pillow, covered his ears with his hands, and thought: Think of nothing things, think of wind.

  CHILDREN ON THEIR BIRTHDAYS

  (1948)

  (This story is for Andrew Lyndon.)

  Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit. I’m not sure what there is to be said about it; after all, she was only ten years old, still I know no one of us in this town will forget her. For one thing, nothing she ever did was ordinary, not from the first time that we saw her, and that was a year ago. Miss Bobbit and her mother, they arrived on that same six-o’clock bus, the one that comes through from Mobile. It happened to be my cousin Billy Bob’s birthday, and so most of the children in town were here at our house. We were sprawled on the front porch having tutti-frutti and devil cake when the bus stormed around Deadman’s Curve. It was the summer that never rained; rusted dryness coated everything; sometimes when a car passed on the road, raised dust would hang in the still air an hour or more. Aunt El said if they didn’t pave the highway soon she was going to move down to the seacoast; but she’d said that for such a long time. Anway, we were sitting on the porch, tutti-frutti melting on our plates, when suddenly, just as we were wishing that something would happen, something did; for out of the red road dust appeared Miss Bobbit. A wiry little girl in a starched, lemon-colored party dress, she sassed along with a grown-up mince, one hand on her hip, the other supporting a spinsterish umbrella. Her mother, lugging two cardboard valises and a wind-up victrola, trailed in the background. She was a gaunt shaggy woman with silent eyes and a hungry smile.

  All the children on the porch had grown so still that when a cone of wasps started humming the girls did not set up their usual holler. Their attention was too fixed upon the approach of Miss Bobbit and her mother, who had by now reached the gate. “Begging your pardon,” called Miss Bobbit in a voice that was at once silky and childlike, like a pretty piece of ribbon, and immaculately exact, like a movie star or a schoolmarm, “but might we speak with the grown-up persons of the house?” This, of course, meant Aunt El; and, at least to some degree, myself. But Billy Bob and all the other boys, no one of whom was over thirteen, followed down to the gate after us. From their faces you would have thought they’d never seen a girl before. Certainly not like Miss Bobbit. As Aunt El said, whoever heard tell of a child wearing makeup? Tangee gave her lips an orange glow, her hair, rather like a costume wig, was a mass of rosy curls, and her eyes had a knowing, penciled tilt; even so, she had a skinny dignity, she was a lady, and, what is more, she looked you in the eye with manlike directness. “I’m Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, Miss Bobbit from Memphis, Tennessee,” she said solemnly. The boys looked down at their toes, and, on the porch, Cora McCall, who Billy Bob was courting at the time, led the girls into a fanfare of giggles. “Country children,” said Miss Bobbit with an understanding smile, and ga
ve her parasol a saucy whirl. “My mother,” and this homely woman allowed an abrupt nod to acknowledge herself, “my mother and I have taken rooms here. Would you be so kind as to point out the house? It belongs to a Mrs. Sawyer.” Why, sure, said Aunt El, that’s Mrs. Sawyer’s, right there across the street. The only boarding house around here, it is an old tall dark place with about two dozen lightning rods scattered on the roof: Mrs. Sawyer is scared to death in a thunderstorm.

  Coloring like an apple, Billy Bob said, please ma’am, it being such a hot day and all, wouldn’t they rest a spell and have some tutti-frutti? and Aunt El said yes, by all means, but Miss Bobbit shook her head. “Very fattening, tutti-frutti; but merci you kindly,” and they started across the road, the mother half-dragging her parcels in the dust. Then, and with an earnest expression, Miss Bobbit turned back; the sunflower yellow of her eyes darkened, and she rolled them slightly sideways, as if trying to remember a poem. “My mother has a disorder of the tongue, so it is necessary that I speak for her,” she announced rapidly and heaved a sigh. “My mother is a very fine seamstress; she has made dresses for the society of many cities and towns, including Memphis and Tallahassee. No doubt you have noticed and admired the dress I am wearing. Every stitch of it was hand-sewn by my mother. My mother can copy any pattern, and just recently she won a twenty-five-dollar prize from the Ladies’ Home Journal. My mother can also crochet, knit and embroider. If you want any kind of sewing done, please come to my mother. Please advise your friends and family. Thank you.” And then, with a rustle and a swish, she was gone.

  Cora McCall and the girls pulled their hair-ribbons nervously, suspiciously, and looked very put out and prune-faced. I’m Miss Bobbit, said Cora, twisting her face into an evil imitation, and I’m Princess Elizabeth, that’s who I am, ha, ha, ha. Furthermore, said Cora, that dress was just as tacky as could be; personally, Cora said, all my clothes come from Atlanta; plus a pair of shoes from New York, which is not even to mention my silver turquoise ring all the way from Mexico City, Mexico. Aunt El said they ought not to behave that way about a fellow child, a stranger in the town, but the girls went on like a huddle of witches, and certain boys, the sillier ones that liked to be with the girls, joined in and said things that made Aunt El go red and declare she was going to send them all home and tell their daddies, to boot. But before she could carry forward this threat Miss Bobbit herself intervened by traipsing across the Sawyer porch, costumed in a new and startling manner.