We had each, on more than one occasion, listened as Truman spun the trauma of Slim’s childhood into mythos, as he had for each of us in turn. ‘He was mummified, you know—actually mum-mified, like those sad souls in Pompeii. Poor little Buddy. Saddest thing. That tiny boy, in an old man’s nightshirt, one he would never grow into. Flames lapping him up like a thousand serpents’ tongues. Slim tried to save him—her name was Nancy then, and Nancy was a very brave girl and she adored her baby brother. They shared a secret language, just like Slim and I do.’ Here he’d pause, wistful, sometimes removing his glasses for effect.
‘I’ve always felt quite close to Slim—eerily so. From the moment we first met, in Mrs. Vreeland’s living room, a room so red you could hear the walls sizzle. Well, I plopped down beside Slim on that crimson-patterned sofa, and I said to her, “Honey, I just know we’ve met before—another lifetime ago.” I recognized her, see… ? It was like finding a missing scrap of my own mislaid self. We’re old souls, Slim and me—we’ve been around the block a few times. Why, for all we know, I could be Buddy reincarnate!’ (Most of us thought this last bit was asinine, and told him so—but we nearly saw his point about the rest.)
Whether Slim was born an old soul or was forced to become one remains uncertain, but grief had robbed her of a childhood, her youth incinerated alongside Buddy, when she was still little Nancy in Salinas. She’d been reborn as we know her in Death Valley, where she was sent to cure her spotted lung, a scrawny kid of seventeen. An ironic place to start a life, but start one she did, when Bill Powell plucked her from a motel in Mojave and christened her ‘Slim Princess,’ the ‘Slim’ sticking long after the ‘Princess’ had been dropped.
Even now, decades later, Slim has told us she still wakes in an icy sweat, having felt in her nightmares the blast of heat from the open grate. She comes to, rolling in bed, trying desperately to smother the flames that had licked the edge of Buddy’s nightshirt; flames that traveled as if through wild brush through the cotton fibers.
When the surviving Grosses later stood at the cemetery watching his body being entombed in the mausoleum her father had bitterly purchased, Nancy had noticed that there were only plaques enough for four of their five. On an unseasonably cold day for the California valley, Nancy wondered which of them her father had blamed for Buddy’s death and denied a place in the family plot, in some sick game of permanent musical chairs. She decided in short order that that was the last place in the world she wanted to end up, and quietly vowed to bequeath her spot to whomever had been slighted.
The men she had chosen from that day on were, each in his own way, the father she’d been denied. Her string of husbands, revolving door of lovers—there was something of the patriarch in each. ‘Big Mama’s on the hunt for a Big Daddy, because her real one was so absent,’ Truman noted. ‘He only cared for Buddy, and when he went away, so did Mr. Gross. You never get over being left like that…’ This was the cue to replace his glasses, with a practiced shift in tone. ‘I know this, you see, because I had absent parents too.’
They’d been chasing them since. A head-shrinker’s field day, the pair of them. Filthy ole Freud’s wet dream—Slim searching for Daddy, and Truman for Mommy, he desperate to recast Nina with a swanlike being, one who would love him with unwavering devotion. He had us now, en masse. And Slim realized, in Russia more than ever, just how desperately Truman needed the love that Nina had denied him.
IT WAS AFTER s Even Longer Journey to Copenhagen, after they’d checked into the Hotel d’Angleterre and basked in the rediscovered luxury of creature comforts, that Slim saw Truman shed his armor. And it was in that moment that she understood him. Or thought that she did…
They’d had an idyllic day out, devoured an absurdly indulgent lunch of pickled herring and schnapps, followed by a heaving platter of smørrebrød—though they concurred that anything would have seemed indulgent after weeks of freezing borscht. Even what Truman pointed out were, let’s face it, little more than open-faced sandwiches with fancy Danish names.
On their way back to the hotel, Slim stopped to photograph a group of local children tossing coins into a fountain. When she turned around, Truman was gone. Slim popped her head into a row of shops, checking them one by one. No Tru. She continued on to the hotel when he suddenly appeared at her side once more. He slipped a wrapped box into her coat pocket.
‘For you, Big Mama. That’s because I want you to have things as pretty as you are.’
Slim opened the box to find an exquisite antique ring: brilliant canary gemstones, linked in a delicate band. Truman had disappeared into a shop as she walked, and managed to find a gift more suited to her tastes than her husbands and lovers combined. He could, when he chose to, be the most thoughtful creature alive. He knew us, Truman. This was one of the myriad reasons we loved him. And Slim, despite her cynicism, was not immune.
EACH EVENING ON their Travels they had shared a nightcap, and Truman had walked Slim to her room, kissed her goodnight, and retired to his own. Their last evening in Denmark they repeated the ritual, only this time Truman stopped at her door.
‘I’m gonna come tuck my Big Mama in, that’s how much I love her,’ Truman insisted in an oddly hushed voice.
Slim unlocked the door and Truman followed her into the suite. He sat on the edge of the bed, watching as she undressed, studying her long body with wide eyes. She walked naked to the bathroom, as she would in front of a child. Easy, devoid of self-consciousness. She returned wearing a thin silk robe.
‘You just do what you usually do, then I’ll put you to bed,’ he almost crooned.
Slim settled in at the vanity, proceeding step by step through her nightly beauty ritual. Truman watched with rapt attention as she removed her makeup, as if witnessing the dance of the seven veils as Slim shed each cosmetic layer with tantalizing promise, until her bare flesh was revealed. He studied her face in its natural state, the earliest traces of sunburst lines forming around her eyes.
‘Beautiful,’ he exhaled. The sunburst rays spread as she smiled at him in the mirror, as Lillie Mae once had while he chewed sugared beignets, another lifetime ago.
He watched, enraptured, as she slathered a layer of cream onto her skin. She loosened her hair around her shoulders—a seasoned blonde, darker than it once had been, the color of winter wheat. With soft boar bristles she brushed each side, exactly fifty strokes.
Finally Slim rose, walked to the bed, and removed her robe. And like a tender lover, childlike father, or both combined, Trumanlifted the covers for her. She slipped inside, and he gently tucked the soft blankets around her.
‘I’m doing this, Big Mama, because I love you. I love you very much.’ His eyes met hers, welling with sincerity.
‘I love you too, Truman.’
‘No, you don’t,’ he frowned, turning from her.
‘Of course I do,’ she insisted, reaching her arm out to touch his rounded back.
‘No—you DON’T!’ He jerked away.
Slim sat up, startled. She turned him to face her, his visage flushed the color of rotting cherries. Teeth clenched, tears streaming down his hot, puffy cheeks.
‘Truman, whatever’s wrong?’
‘No one loves me.’
‘That’s not true. I do. And Babe. And Jack—’
‘You don’t. None of you. Well—maybe Jack…’ he allowed. ‘Because Jack sees me for exactly who I am.’
Slim reached for his arm and he snapped. A feral animal, caught in a cage. Protecting the one thing he had: knowledge.
‘You don’t think I know? You don’t think I know what I look like? What I sound like? You don’t think I see people cringe when they meet me? Or wince when I speak?’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m a freak. I’m a monstrous little freak and everybody thinks it.’
Slim started to protest, but he cut her short.
‘Oh sure, people get used to me. People can adjust. But every time they see or hear me, it starts all over, the adjustment—to get past the freak show to al
l that’s trapped inside. Be honest, Big Mama. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’
Slim sat quietly. As much as she hated to admit it, she did know what he meant. She’d watched it happen, again and again— we all had—watched a room forced to acclimatize to his mannerisms. She’d felt it herself—not once, but the tiniest bit every time she saw him, before she slipped into his delicious Trumanisms once more.
She did know, and he knew that she understood.
He hung his weighty head, hiccuping silent, choking sobs. ‘I’m unlovable. No one could ever love me the way I want to be loved.’
With a surge of warmth, Slim wrapped her arms around him and held on tight, trying to smother the flames of Truman’s misery as she’d once attempted to smother the flames lapping at Buddy’s nightshirt.
TO BE FAIR, Truman had Warned her about his Esquire bombshell weeks ago at the Russian Tea Room, where they like to wax nostalgic over their Moscow venture. They laugh at the notion of the stark Soviet haunts they’d braved bearing any resemblance to the jade jewel-box dining room, gold-leaf phoenix reliefs swooping down on chattering Manhattanites. Slim looked doubly radiant in that space, bathed in the warm light reflected off its twenty-three-carat ceiling, light that even gave Truman an oddly flattering, if slightly jaundiced, glow.
‘You’re in it, Big Mama,’ he’d smiled as they snuggled close in a circular banquette, sipping blood-red pickled-beet borscht and a round of Black Russians, chased by a round of White. ‘Hold on to your hat… !’ Slim had not thought about it since. She’d expected a cameo—not the leading goddamn role!
Well. He won’t charm his way out of this mess, the snake.
Slim has a sudden flash of the pair of taxidermy cobras in Truman’s United Nations Plaza apartment. They’d found them together in an antique shop in Madrid, thought they were kooky and fun. Scaly bodies stuffed upright, raised at the point of attack; mouths agape, sharp little fangs poised to sink into unsuspecting flesh. He’d laughed and laughed like Br’er Rabbit in his briar patch when each of us jumped at the lifelike reptiles, encountering them for the first time.
Oh, it’s war all right.
Slim hears the click of Babe’s Ronson on the line, and imagines her bringing the next in a string of L&Ms to her lips, nails buffed to perfection.
We can each picture Babe, fingering a stray lock of hair as she tends to when she’s nervous—the bit tinged with premature silver, usually hidden in her neat bouffant.
‘Slim. Tell me honestly. As my friend. If you know, tell me… Is it Bill?’
Slim takes care her answer comes neither too quickly, nor too slow:
‘It isn’t Bill.’
She downs her third Scotch and tells her first lie of the morning.
It’s not yet 10 a.m.
THREE
1932–?
VARIATION NO. 2
THE BOY IS Eight, maybe nine, We’re told.
It’s a sweltering day in Monroeville, the kind of day when lizards sizzle on the pavement, the kind that sears the tender pads of doggies’ paws.
He reclines on the porch planks, listless, watching an ice cube melt atop the griddle of his chest, translucent dribble rolling between his bony ribs.
It’s the kind of day when the heat seeps into your brain and sets it on fire. When you just have to stir something up or go out of your pent-up, heat-stroked skull.
He wills himself from the shade and his toy limbs follow, buttoning his shirt, trotting next door to Nelle’s house. He knocks on the frame of the mosquito-proof screen, waiting for his friend.
Mr. Lee answers in his hybrid-cotton suit, a loose weave that, in theory, would allow breeze to blow through, should the breeze ever choose to cooperate.
‘Well hey there, Truman,’ he says in his molasses baritone. Alawyer’s voice, trained to appeal to twelve good men and true—to the whole dang town, to be honest. He’s the classiest act the boy has met, a beacon of what he thinks of as ‘justice’ when it’s preached by folks who wouldn’t know it if it smacked them in the kisser. Teachers and preachers, each dumber than a bucket of hair.
‘Hiya, Mr. Lee. Might Nellie be available to play?’ He bows with formality, a midget suitor, pushing the fringe from his sweat-soaked forehead.
‘Nelle honey—Truman!’ Mr. Lee calls, setting his scuffed briefcase by the door. He reaches for a hair comb and straw hat, turning to the kitchen mirror as the boy moves to the porch swing, the latter wondering what it might feel like to wait there for a sweetheart.
He swings back and forth, his feet dangling, enjoying the creak of the metal chains, calling to mind the uneven croaks of bullfrogs at the swimming hole. Through an open window he can hear a voice inside the house, buzzing like a gadfly, presumably on the telephone, hardly pausing to land on one topic before irritatingly buzzing’ round to the next.
‘… And I just told her to pack her things and get! But would she listen? With a man like that, poking every stuffing from here to Mobile, and all before the wedding cake was in the icebox? Well, who could blame Itty for running off with Scrub Mangram? But all the way to N’awlins—? She did though—Esther Reaben saw them check in! I swear it on a stack of Bibles! At the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles. I tell you, Esther saw them at the Bayou Bar, clear as crystal! Well, Itty best watch out or she’ll end up like this one next door—knocked up without two pennies to rub together, before she’s old enough to order a cocktail. Dumping her brat with that bunch of spinsters… Mark my words—that boy’ll turn out just like his con man Daddy, if you can call him a man, or call that a boy—’
‘Nelllllllll—eeeeeeeee,’ the boy screeches in his highest, most affected wail.
He wants the voice on the phone to know. He’s heard her.
He’s listening. Always listening…
‘Listening and lurking,’ he’s heard her say about him, that busybody. Old Mrs. Busybody Lee! How could someone as decent as Mr. Lee have chosen such a witch? How could that biddy havespawned his precious Nelle, speak of the devil—
The coltish form that bolts onto the porch is as far a cry from sweetheart as the boy is from beau. The masculine to his feminine, with her bowl-cut bob, rolled blue jeans, and Keds that she can run in. She’s his one true friend and he hers.
She joins him on the swing, each appreciating the harmony of creaking back and forth together, swinging higher and higher…
Then, from an upstairs window, the fly-buzz amps to a buzz-saw wail—‘Nelle… ? Don’t you dare leave this house with that little nancy!’
Mr. Lee flashes a wary grin on his way out. ‘Y’all best be off before you get caught!’ He stops the swing and gives the colt-girl a quick nuzzle before hurrying to trade the wrath of the missus for the sanctity of his office.
Nelle and the boy exchange a glance and leap from the swing in unison, running from the porch with the speed of a hurricane. Not a minute too soon, as the figure—absurdly plump for an insect—is in the doorway, her buzzing having escalated to the baying of a hound dog.
‘Nelle Harper Lee! You come back here this minute! You’ve got a ballet lesson at two thirty!’
But they’re off, making their getaway into the fields. Onto dirt roads outside town. Into treehouses and under porches, listening to unsuspecting voices they will both later repeat to one another, still later rehash in their prose. Sometimes the boy has Nelle take dictation, weaving tidbits into stories as he orates. Sometimes he types, on an old Remington with keys that stick, that he found in his cousins’ attic.
As he furiously types that very night—the open window scant comfort in the sticky stillness—he relishes his revenge on Old Mrs. Busybody.
She’ll get hers. He’ll teach her to talk that way about — —
THE BOY IS nine or ten, He Tells us—certainly no older. It’s a sweltering day in Monroeville. Lizards sizzle on the pavement. Dogs scorch the pads of their paws.
He and Nelle wander along the train tracks, balancing on the rails, wondering how long it woul
d take for the conductor to spot a body, were one tied to the tracks, and whether or not the brakes could stop in time to avoid hitting it. In an old abandoned depot at the fork in the road, they spy two derelicts. Local men, ‘once nice family types,’ the preachers caution, ‘until they got hooked on the hooch.’
One looks to be asleep, a Stetson over his face—or maybe he’s a body, dragged in off the tracks. The other, a shirtless figure, Skin and Bones, swigs from a bottle of Wild Turkey as he gives the reclining feller an earful, who, if he wasn’t dead already, might wish that he was after all that talk.
The boy puts a finger to his lips, signaling Nelle to follow him around the back of the ramshackle structure. They lie in the tall grass, so hot it laps like flames at their sockless ankles. Eaves-dropping…
‘Goddamn preachers’ll tell you otherwise, but there ain’t nothin’ wrong with Faffy Bixter’s roadside cathouse, sure as I live and breathe,’ Skin and Bones assures his passed-out friend. ‘Them’s just honest gals, makin’ an honest wage…’ He takes another gulp, swilling the liquor through the gaps in his teeth. ‘I’d haul these ole bones right on over there this minute, if I hadn’t done lost the only quarter I had on the chicken fights… I coulda just fried that no-good losing cockerel in a pan and gobbled him up myself—still madder than a wet hen!’ He downs another mouthful of Turkey, directing a resentful gobble at the label.
The boy and Nelle suppress giggles as they listen to Skin and Bones’ bourbon-drenched diatribe, when— —
THE BOY IS ten, but only just. He knows this because he just had a birthday the week before.
He was given as presents an eggshell herringbone suit (mailed in a box from his Mama), a slingshot (from Nelle), and a typewriter ribbon (from Mr. Lee). He had wanted a dog, and his Daddy had promised him… He’ll bring one the next time he comes to visit.
Because it’s September, just one day shy of the start of October, the boy is certain that the trees are losing their leaves.
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