Joe had rolled away, placing a pillow over his ears. Nina ripped it from his grasp (Seabon says…), enraged by her whole goddamn life. ‘You’re so thick, you’re not even smart enough to know to hide the evidence—I found pecker-tracks on your undershorts, for Chrissakes!’
Joe sat up, awake, trembling with rage.
‘That’s immoral, Nina, to go through a man’s private things. You’re a nosy, vicious bitch!’
‘And you’re just a no-good cheating waste of space.’
‘I’d never go through your things,’ Joe shot back.
‘I had cause,’ she insisted, unable to remember whether this was true or not.
Seabon later tells the boy that he had driven Joe to the only hotel he could afford, the West Side YMCA, while he himself had proceeded on to his office in Queens, to sleep on a pull-out sofa. Sometime while they were gone, Nina managed to consume another half-bottle of Scotch, which she used to wash down a fistful of Seconals.
There is evidence that she’d changed her mind before it was over. Beside her lifeless body—which Joe discovered when he returned just before dawn—was a princess telephone, off the hook, Nina’s motionless hand posed as if reaching out to grab it.
‘Who was she trying to call?’ Truman breathes.
Who had she attempted and failed to call in those ebbing final moments? A doctor, to undo her own damage? Joe, to say that she was sorry? Or her boy, whom she loved and resented in equal measure—the son she never asked for, whose persona shamed her as much as his talent made her proud? Had she reached out to call for their help? Or to tell them each to go to hell for spoiling her vision of a life they had denied her? Or had the phone merely fallen when she toppled unconscious, bumping into an object she never intended to grasp?
Neither the boy nor Joe will ever know the answer, that being something Lillie-Mae-Nina-Faulk-Persons-Capote would take with her to the grave.
The phone rings sometime during the wake at 1060 Park. Joe, who has been drinking so steadily he can hardly stand, lumbers to answer it.
‘Capote rezzzzzzzzzz…’ Joe, on the line, garbled. ‘Herald who…?… I don’t know any— Circumstanzzzes… ? NO suzzzzzzspicious… Yeah? Well, whadda you know about it?’
The boy hears Joe’s voice rise and knows what the call must be.
The vultures, circling.
‘Look here, you lowlife hack—you got alotta nerve, calling here, interrupting a family’zzzzzzz—Yeah, Truman Capote’zzzzz—’
The boy rushes to intercede. ‘Hang up, for gawd’s sake! Hang up!!’ he screeches at Joe, who drops the receiver like a hot potato.
LATER, AFTER THE guests have mostly gone, the grown boy sits on his Mama’s bed, still in his Brooks Brothers suit, the jacket of which he refuses to remove—as if by wearing something she loved he might magically conjure her back. He’s playing her favorite ragtime records on the old gramophone with its fraying needle, over and over on loop.
Each mourner tiptoes in to comfort him, sharing a memory of the last time they saw her. One recalls Nina staring into the windows at Tiffany’s at dawn in a decades-old evening gown, drinking cold coffee from a cheap Styrofoam cup.
‘It was hours before they opened—I don’t know what she was doing there,’ the witness ponders. The boy smiles to himself through his grief.
At last, something of the Nina that he recognizes…
‘She was escaping the Mean Reds,’ he says. His book not yet published, the term is something he shares with his Mama alone— and she’s not around to appreciate the reference.
WHEN LATER ASKED what happened to his Mama, the boy’s stock answer is ‘pneumonia.’ Sometimes it’s ‘rapid-onset cancer.’ Other times a heart attack or seizure took her out.
Nelle alone can tell that he’s lying—she knowing the boy well enough—and vows to, over time, learn the truth of Nina’s passing.
He is careful who he shares this with, the secret of his Mama’s death having become his most valuable of playing cards.
It’s not until a year later, when he meets the one that should have been his mother, or lover, or both combined, that the boy tells the real tale. (We mean Babe, of course, Nina’s exit having paved the way for her entrance.)
To some who have no means of fact-checking, he tests the waters with a bolder lie: ‘My Mama was murdered, you know.’ Depending on reactions, he’ll either leave it at that, or quantify: ‘She was killed by the people who shunned her. They slaughtered her, in cold blood.’
In retrospect it’s clear that’s when he decided to blame us— even though we’d not yet met him. Even though we’d never clapped eyes on Lillie-Mae-Nina-Capote.
He’s looking for a scapegoat—a criminal to condemn—and he’s decided that we’re it. All of us—the privileged set—who robbed him of his Mama.
And perhaps it was then that he had his great idea… to seek us out. To befriend us. To punish us for a crime we hadn’t the faintest idea we’d committed.
To make the whole damn class of us pay—for our money and our manners and our celebrated names, whether to the manor born or married in and up.
To make all of us regret—no matter how long it took—taking his Mama away from him for good.
THIRTEEN
1975
GLORIA CORRIDO
PERHAPS THE PERSON most incensed by Truman’s Esquire slaughter is the one who it hurt the least. Gloria has been in an absolute state since ‘La Côte Basque’ hit stands, we cannot help but note. Gloria, who was spared from harm. Gloria, who wasn’t mentioned once.
We can’t begin to comprehend her reaction, but then we’ve never been able to comprehend much of what Gloria thinks or feels.
We first detect her ire when lunching at that very spot not long after the brouhaha. Occupying our prime table, which we wouldn’t dream of relinquishing for the sake of a half-baked fiction. (If Truman hoped to scare us away from the best lunch in town, he’s got another thing coming…) Having settled in for a nice long session, we rehash the facts once more.
‘I mean honestly. Can you believe the things he said about Paley?’ rants Babe, pushing wilted spinach around with her fork. ‘And Slim, for goodness sakes!’
She cuts her gaze to the co-aggrieved, as Slim coolly sips her martini.
Gloria listens, impassive; ingesting the facts along with her homard Thermidor.
Babe is the first to notice a lobsterish flush that creeps into Gloria’s cheeks, matching the crustacean on her plate almost exactly. Mistaking the color for a sign of solidarity, Babe places a hand on her arm. ‘Oh darling, I just knew you’d understand. And trust me… had he done it to you, I’d be livid too!’
Gloria retracts her limb from Babe’s grasp, scooping the last of the lobster from its shell.
‘Who says I’m not next… ?’
‘Well, I certainly hope not. Count your blessings you escaped this debacle.’
‘There’s more coming,’ Gloria snaps. ‘Much more. Six hundred pages at least.’
Mumbles of assent: ‘Yes! I’ve seen them—’
‘I’ve heard them—’
‘He’s read me snippets—’
‘A parcel, wrapped in brown paper—’
‘—carefully tied with string,’ Gloria completes the phrase, oddly comforted. ‘I’m sure that I’m next. That he’s saving me for the leading role in his next installment. This Kate McCloud whom he speaks of… ? I fear that will be me.’
We stare at Gloria, and more than one of us spots something in those dark doe eyes of hers. She’s feigning fear, feigning concern. Yet lurking beyond is something else…
It’s rage.
She lights a cigarette, a Sobranie Black Russian.
‘I know I’m next. I just know it. I have to be…’
We each nod, sipping our soups, offering words of consolation, trying to comprehend why anyone would long to be the subject of Truman’s vicious slander.
WE’VE NEVER REALLY known Gloria. Likely never will.
We k
now her of course—as one of us.
We have lunch at the Colony every Tuesday, at Basque on Thursdays.
We meet at Kenneth’s, for hair-sets and saunas—at eleven on Mondays and Fridays.
We’ve sailed the Adriatic on board the Seraphina, the Guinnesses’ three-hundred-ton yacht, alternating with the Agnellis’ Agneta, a sailboat by comparison—splitting summers between the two.
We’re frequent guests, when in Palm Beach, not only at C.Z.’s Artemis estate, but at Gemini—Gloria’s seaside showplace. So immense as to be divided by an interstate highway, splitting oceanfront and lakeside-facing wings. We’ve walked the underground tunnel between the two sides, admiring the rococo furnishings Gloria’s chosen to distract from the steady stream of traffic whizzing overhead.
We’ve dined at her Paris town house on avenue Matignon, and her Waldorf Towers pied-à-terre, where she makes sure that the vegetables she serves are even smaller than Babe’s. ‘Practically microscopic,’ as Tru would note.
Marella sees Gloria when they overlap at their respective Swiss chalets—the Guinnesses’ Villa Zanroc ‘just a simple farmhouse,’ or so its mistress claims, nothing like their château in Normandy, which few of us have seen.
Perhaps we’ve come the closest to glimpsing the real Gloria at her house in Acapulco. The space itself reflects her stark simplicity, her elegant lines. Composed of stucco, smooth and white, cool to the touch on a humid summer’s day. Palapa roofs calling to mind indigenous huts, beneath which we loll, only rousing ourselves to indulge in the exotic fare we’ve come to love: the tamales in their corn-husk wraps, the tang and brine of ceviche.
The tequila flows as freely as the chatter, and we hear a thickness return to Gloria’s cadence as she slips back into the skin of whatever girl she once had been. While we aren’t sure who that is exactly, we spot glimpses of her in the candlelight, over tables scattered with paper flowers, an explosion of primary hues.
‘It’s easier, actually, to have six houses than one,’ Gloria’s been known to boast—especially to the press. ‘You just hop on a plane and ¡hecho!—your life is there; no need to pack.’ (It’s rumored she and Loel keep full wardrobes in each locale—from winter furs to evening dress to trajes de baño for dips in the sea.) ‘I just can’t imagine how hard it must be to only run one household. Who could possibly spend twelve months in one place?’
We know for a fact that this is bullshit. It’s not the tedium that keeps the Guinnesses on the move, but desire to stave off the taxman. We’ve heard our husbands say so often enough, and Bill and Gianni and Winston in particular would know the details of such things, they being in Loel’s orbit as pillars of business and industry.
We’ve heard Truman tell us flat out—‘Sugar, they need to stay on the run or risk paying through the nostrils. Gloria notates in her diary when they’ve hit their limit in such-and-such, and have to flee to so-and-so. I wouldn’t call it fraud per se… But they’re a pair of high-class bandidos!’ Who but La Guinness could make tax evasion seem adventurous… ?
Yes, we know her as one of our own, but we’ve never really known her beyond that which she’s allowed. We’ve had to subsist on the rumors, and of those there has always been feast enough to gorge to the point of sickness.
She was born in Mexico—that much is certain. Her clipped speech is seasoned with a soupçon of picante. The voluptuous vowels. The slight trill of R’s rolled languidly on the tongue. She walks with the faintest trace of sway in her slender hips. Suggesting the promise of curvaceousness, if falling short in fact. We envy her mane, a shade so black it glistens with undertones of navy—blacker than we could hope to achieve with Kenneth’s master colorists. She wears her hair pulled back in an immaculate twist—which would read far too severe if sported by the rest of us.
We’ve cobbled together other bits and pieces:
That she was born Gloria Rubio—sometimes Alatorre.
When is another matter. She’s the oldest in our midst, by a decade at least, we suspect, though she’s managed to shave it down to a four-or-five-year difference.
That she grew up in Guadalajara—or the bustling Mexico City. Sometimes along the coast of Veracruz.
That her father was a journalist, her mother a seamstress— though there have always been whispers of origins less salubrious.
Babe, who loves Gloria as much as she loathes her—the press having lopped them both together as ‘the goddesses’ of the age— is the first to defend her when under attack. Yet we’ve each heard her mutter in moments of vexation, in the wake of the one-upsmanship that Gloria practices with zeal—‘You do know that she started life as a shill in a Mexican nightclub… ?’
Truman, who’d been generally present for such flares, would simply laugh with glee.
‘But Babyling dear, it was much more than that! She was a compañera de baile paga!’ We’d stare at him blankly. ‘A taxi dancer, honey! The menfolks pays theys fares, and off and away theys goes!’
‘Precisely,’ said Babe, satisfied. ‘One step shy of a prostitute.’
‘You have a problem with prostitutes?’
‘Frankly I don’t care what she does with her nether regions. But why not be honest about it? Why can’t she just tell the truth?’
‘Ah, but isn’t one’s story its own special truth… ?’
Babe’s eyes would meet his and she’d smile. Slim, less convinced, would take a drag from her cigarette—‘A bullshit artist.’
‘Storyteller,’ Truman would correct. He’d lean forward, conspiratorially. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a corrido?’
‘A what?’
‘A corrido, darling. Why, it’s Gloria in a nutshell.’
‘Corrid-aaa… ?’ Slim would venture, recalling her Hemingway exploits.
‘Corrid-oooooo. A folk ballad, en la tradición Mexicana. An homage to heroic deeds. Epic. Lyrical…’ (the final condition suiting him most of all) ‘narrative.’
‘In other words,’ Slim confirmed, ‘a bullshit artist.’
‘Or…’ Truman would rhapsodize, ‘something much finer. Something much more rare.’ He’d nibble a cocktail onion, thoughtful. ‘If one can appreciate the form.’
Of course Truman could hear it, the strum of the guitar, the brass of the mariachis, battling for supremacy. But most of all, the guttural voice, rising beyond the chorus. Ragged and rich, a contralto more masculine than feminine, ripened in wood and smoke and peat.
A primal wail, asserting her identity.
EL CORRIDO DE GLORIA GUINNESS
Listen, my dear Diablito—
Listen, beloved one,
To the corrido of Gloria y Rubio.
’Fore La Guinness’s life had begun.
Born the humble daughter,
Of a left-wing journalist pa—
A child of the Revolución—
And a zealous laundress ma.
She was nineteen (maybe twenty?)
In that June of 1933.
She had traded her plaits for ebony waves,
And raised her skirt-lengths with glee.
She lived in a tenement cuarto.
Shared with her family of five,
Set’ round a fetid courtyard,
Surrounded by other tribes.
On a sweltering midsummer’s evening,
In the port slums of Veracruz,
She painted her lips cereza red,
Reinventing herself as Man’s Muse.
At a makeshift mirror of broken glass
She rouged kaleidoscope cheeks;
Through the crack in an airless window
The stench of the wasteland reeked.
But somewhere beneath the shit and the sweat
She detected a delicate scent:
A bougainvillea’s fragrant blooms,
That firmed her resolve as she went.
Slithering into her thinnest dress—
A white of filmiest gauze—
She tucked a flower into her hair
And left the
room without pause.
‘Where are you going?’ she heard her ma shout
As Gloria slipped through the door.
‘To the dancing hall, to earn my way out—
I’m a partner’s delight on the floor!’
She progressed through the sticky stillness,
Down littered streets toward the hall,
Where beneath the flickering streetlamps
The loitering men would catcall—
‘Come with me, angel from heaven…’
(There were other proposals more lewd.)
She brushed past them and haughtily onward;
She hadn’t the time for the crude.
Into the smoke-thick dance hall she marched,
Assuming a worldly-wise role;
That she’d never been far beyond Veracruz
Would never occur to a soul.
She passed by the ticket-booth window
Where men waited to finance their way,
To be given a snake-coil of tickets,
For dancers they fancied to pay.
Girls lined the sides of the ramshackle hall,
Waiting to be asked to dance.
Some of them listless, some of them keen,
Desperate to reel in their chance.
Men hugged the bar—every shape, age, and creed—
Skittishly nursing their booze.
They paid for the pleasure of guaranteed luck—
Just a matter of which gal they’d choose.
But when Gloria Rubio stepped out on the floor,
’Twas as if the whole room ceased to breathe…
They watched as she moved with the sway in her hips,
Dancing alone, as to tease.
She roused them from stagnancy onto their feet,
With seductress’s man-luring charm,
The big fish lined up, ten pesos a dance—
Each eager to next take her arm.
There were strapping young bucks, smug in their brawn,
Who pulled her close, gripping her tight.
There were shy, quiet types with rough calloused hands,
Who avoided her eyes in sheer fright.
There were men far too short who came up to her breasts,
Men far too tall or too wide,
Men who had stutters or walked with a limp,
Swan Song Page 22
