It’s past twelve when he hears it. A sort of… ? He can’t find the—
Flapping, we supply. (Might as well throw him a bone.)
Flapping! (As if he’d thought of it!)
The beating of something, rapidly, was it in the next room—? The thrumming—of several—A low hum. Whoever or whatever it is, there is more than one of it, of that he feels certain. He tiptoes into the hall, making his way to the living room, peering around the corner where his evergreen looms. The scene where he’d imagined carols and canoodling. Seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five gold— —His eyes dart to the packages tucked beneath, having bought and carefully wrapped for Jack a thin gold band from Cartier, tied with a robin’s-egg bow.
The branches of the tree cast shadows that loom; ominous, rustling slightly. The window open, chintz curtains fluttering in the breeze. His blood trickles cold. While not operating at full capacity, he knows he didn’t leave said window open, and it seems even less likely that Jack would, it being much more in Jack’s temperament to close that which Truman has opened.
A rustle from behind the fir. Tinsel jostles.
Someone, something, is hiding behind it.
‘Hello?’ he calls, trying to sound less frightened than he is.
‘Hello? I can see you—I know you’re there…’ Shadows moving behind. ‘Just so you know, I’m calling the police…’ As he flips on the light switch, a fuse blows. A flash! in which he thinks he spots the gleam of several sets of eyes—and the tree lights are out.
He is in darkness. Alone. Abandoned—He shrieks and makes a break for it, running for the door, groping for the cold brass knob. Turns it one way—then the other. Won’t budge.
From behind, he thinks that he hears laughter, a low, dangerous hum.
He turns the knob again, throwing all of his weight against it. It flies open, propelling him into the hallway. He races—this a boy who once proclaimed that he only ran when chased—to his nearest neighbors, pounding on their door. ‘Help! Help me!’ he shouts.
After a minute or two, the door opens, and Mr. Rothstein, Truman’s neighbor, peers out, groggy-eyed. ‘Mr. Rothstein, thank goodness! There’s been a break-in! Intruders!’
He practically pushes past the poor man and his wife, who appears in her housecoat and curlers. They stare at their unexpected guest, his robe hanging open, nakedness on display. Mrs. Rothstein recovers first, leading him inside.
‘Truman, you poor dear, may I get you anything?’
‘Yes, sugar— I do hate to ask, but I’m in desperate need of a little tipple to steady my nerves. And I need to borrow your phone to call the police! They may still be in there!’
When the cops arrive half an hour later, Truman has depleted half a bottle of the Rothsteins’ vodka, and is busy relaying his conspiracy theory of one Jack Dunphy, his former lover, holding him hostage—worse still, plotting to kill him.
‘I just know he left tonight so they could come and do the deed.’
How did ‘they’ get in?
‘Oh honey, through the window. I didn’t leave it open!’
Up twenty-two flights?
‘Well, I don’t know their techniques, but surely they have their ways. They don’t just burgle ground floors, you know.’
Could he describe the intruders?
‘Assassins.’
Could he describe the assassins?
‘Weeuull… I think one of them was I-talian.’ Even describing them in detail, he senses that they’re fiction. But in the thick of it he’s convinced that he has seen them. As the cops are searching his apartment, he turns to Mrs. Rothstein.
‘Mimi, that reminds me—may I use your phone one more time? I need to get hold of Liz Smith at New York magazine. She’ll print the truth, so when Jack succeeds in bumping me off, people’ll know what happened to li’l ole Caposey…’
When Jack arrives home from his Verdi and a late supper (having stayed out longer in the hopes that Truman might be asleep when he returned) he finds the twenty-second floor of the United Nations Plaza crawling with cops. He’s taken in for questioning, a matter of routine, where it becomes quickly apparent how bogus the accusations are and how round the twist his accuser. When the police have gone, Jack packs a single suitcase and departs for his house in Sagaponack, given to him long ago by a boy he once loved.
‘But Jack, what did I do? What did I doooooo?’ Truman will wail in the coming weeks, no memory of the episode, assassins long forgotten.
Jack refuses to yield, his only comment on the matter: ‘There’s only so long you can watch something you love burn to bits before your very eyes before it starts to take you with it.’
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, the boy takes the elevator up to the roof.
It’s a crisp, clear December dawn, snow having fallen in the night.
He walks to the edge and looks down at the street. Cars crawling like fire ants below. He thinks of Maggie Case, standing in just such a spot, before the wind filled her coat with air as she leaped to the ground, suspended like a parachute in a final moment of flight.
I’ve got two wings for to veil my face… Two wings for to fly… He can almost hear a Baptist chorus of angels, as sublime as any requiem. Fly away…
He looks to the building opposite, where he’s surprised to see a figure, mirroring his own.
Dark features. Like Perry’s, but not… Where does he know the face from?
The sun is rising behind the figure, features obscured, surrounded by a halo of—
Truman nods across the divide, and imagines that he sees the form return the gesture. And with that he turns and walks back to the elevator, back down to his evergreen, where he opens the gold band he bought for Jack, placing it on his own finger for safe keeping.
THE BOY ISN’T sure what’s real anymore, but he does know what is false.
What is false, bearing no semblance of truth whatsoever, is a vile book that his publisher informs him has been written about him, by Marie ‘Tiny’ Rudisill, Lillie Mae’s black-sheep sister. An aunt he never knew. Spreading lies about his boyhood—calling him abnormal and his Mama a filthy whore. At least he has his defenders—another aunt whom he did know, Mary Ida, the boy’s last simpatico relative, who claimed she used its slanderous pages as a toilet roll in her privy, a gesture that oddly moved him.
Perhaps more important, his greatest ally has emerged from the shadows of time. He always knew she had his back when push came to shove.
‘Truman?’ Her voice on the line, for the first time in years—he can’t remember why.
‘Nelle!’ He almost weeps, so comforted is he to hear her. ‘Have you read it?’
‘I never read so many goddamn lies in one place!’
He feels a sudden wash of relief and a yearning for the past.
He remembers in a flash that together they could outsmart the whole damn bunch. She’s his one true friend and he hers.
WITHIN A WEEK he’s at the airport to catch a plane headed home.
Just hearing the colt-girl’s whinny has made him miss the South something awful. Forget that Nelle lives half the year in Brooklyn, where he hardly ever sees her. Forget that it was her great success—never part of his master plan—that had created the space between them. He hears the wind-voices drawing him back home, toward porch chat and creek beds and time the pace of molasses.
‘I’m throwin’ my knapsack on my shoulder, puttin’ on my old shoes, and returnin’ to my homeland where the decent folks live,’ he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen—the sum total being his lawyer, his publisher, Sidney the doorman, and the dentist where he finds himself waiting in a lobby, flipping through the New Yorker, a sad fuck with a root canal.
At the Pan Am counter, he’s pleased to find the sartorial state of affairs much improved since he last traveled, the counter girls having resurrected headgear—not the pillbox hats of old, but navy felt fedoras. ‘Honey, we match,’ he enthuses as they check him in. He’s wearing his straw panama, which he’s decided has something of
the Southern gent about it, and thus selected it specially. ‘You look just like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, about to get on that plane and fly off with Victor Lazlo, leaving poor Rick behind. Of course I knew Ingrid—and Bogie. Terrible shame that both of them are gone.’ Blank stares. ‘Why sugar, don’t you know Casablanca?’ The Misses Pan Am shake collective heads. He smiles. ‘Well, I supppooooose it was before your time.’ He takes care to keep up with the carry-on bag containing his precious pages, this time strapped to his person, all too aware of what might happen when travel distracts.
On the plane when the hostess makes her rounds, there’s something about her pantsuit that makes him think of Jagger. Oddly nostalgic for a time he hadn’t particularly cared for, he orders a Tequila Sunrise in homage. He finds, to his dismay, that the taste calls Lee to mind, turning acrid on his tongue with the very thought. He calls the hostess back, and trading Sunrise for old-fashioned, settles back in his seat.
It’s as he’s drifting off that he feels her presence beside him. He reaches for the armrest and feels her fingers stroke his arm. Manicured nails. Oxblood, buffed to perfection…
Babe.
‘Soon, Truman…’
‘Babyling.’
‘You’ll be home soon, and just think how nice that will be.’
Closing his eyes he smiles, nods… falling asleep on her shoulder.
He wakes in two hours’ time when the hostess gently shakes him, asking him to restore his seat and tray-table to their full, upright positions. He wipes groggy eyes. The seat beside him is empty, but for a plastic cup bearing the hint of a lipstick-mark, which does not surprise him in the slightest. He thinks that he can smell the faintest scent of heliotrope sweetening the stale air of the cabin, but of this he can’t be certain.
He descends the stairs to the tarmac, smacked with the brick wall of humidity he’s long since forgotten, soaking his shirt and linen suit before he’s collected his bags and managed to find the driver that he’d ordered, standing just outside the whirl of the baggage carousels, holding a sign: ‘CAPOTE’ scrawled in red marker.
The driver—a gaunt man, who the boy thinks the spitting image of Skin-and-Bones from the railroad tracks in Monroeville—collects his luggage, a lone Vuitton suitcase, fraying with overuse. Could it possibly— —? But the derelict had been ancient when the boy was but a child. Now that the boy is aging himself, surely poor ole Skin-and-Bones is long, long gone.
‘The Holiday Inn, s’il vous plaît,’ he squawks from the back of the town car, for he could find no limousine to drive him from Birmingham to Montgomery, much less Monroeville.
‘Yesssir. I got instructions here.’ The driver waves a paper in the rearview mirror.
Truman scans the backseat, knowing better than to expect a bottle of anything, and removes his hip flask from his pocket.
‘You don’t mind if I have a few sips from my trusty flask here… ?’
The driver merely shrugs.
Truman tries again to drum up conversation. ‘You know, I’m from Alabama—well, originally from N’awlins, but I grew up in Alabama all the same.’ This too fails to elicit a response. ‘I left for New York City when I was all of twelve, and I’ve hardly been back since. I did bring the dreadful Princess Radzilla back with me once to have a gander at hicksville, and the whole dang town thought we were engaged, thanks to my Daddy spreading that whopper.’ Silence from Skin-and-Bones-as-Chauffeur.
Truman, agitated, ‘Have you never heard of Lee Radziwill?’
‘Nah, sir.’
‘Surely you’ve heard of her sister, Mrs. Onassis…’
‘Nope.’
Failing to impress, the pint-sized raconteur slumps back in his seat, watching dull, ugly landscapes fly past, beginning to remember precisely what it was he’d been so desperate to escape.
DROPPED AT THE holiday inn—a chain he’s always loved for their blessed anonymity—he’s checked in by midday, enjoying the familiar hum of the ice machine as he fills his bucket, shuffling back to the room where he pours a li’l-something-on-the-rocks. He removes the trio of Fabergé paperweights he’d brought from his collection, carefully chosen to make the space feel personal. Harvest golds and greens, calling to mind Babe’s miniature vegetables, which never cease to warm his heart. Her impossibly minuscule carrots, sweet peas, and ears of baby corn. These he sets like a shrine on the nightstand, assured that in the evening they’ll sparkle in the lamplight like bottles of Mama-juice, of which he’s brought ample supplies.
He’s donned swimming trunks and a terrycloth robe, plucked from a hook on the door. He’s made his way down to a communal swimming pool, waded in, and started his dog-paddle laps. He’s left his hat on his lounger so that he might turn backflips in the water, something that once gave him pleasure. He wants to explore all the simple things he’s forgotten over the years. Perhaps he’ll restore his name to ‘Persons’; move back to the podunk town where authors with vision might speak their minds without causing a fuss…
He’s so taken with the notion, he hurls his guppy frame backward in the deep end, feeling it swish around him as he turns in an endless series of loops. He can do so without getting dizzy—this he knows from boyhood. It’s one of his special talents. He tries to shout for joy beneath the surface, mid-flip. He’d like to reproduce the operatic gurgles of humpback whales, which he’s listened to on vinyl. His submerged shouts come out a pipsqueak peep, far from the sonar-song of the creatures of the deep with whom he feels a kinship. Still, he enjoys the sound of his own weak echo, until it blends with another…
Did you really think you could escape us, Truman… ?
Glug… glug… Fuck.
Not that , we know he thinks, for we can read his very mind.
Not here …
You can’t just go back to where you started and forget it ever happened. You’ll never escape it. Never! Wherever you go you’ll be locked inside—alone. Abandoned…
The boy shoots to the surface, choking for breath.
BACK IN HIS room, rattled, he downs a glass of bourbon at Agnelli speed.
He gropes in his carry-on for a bottle of his pills—any pills— the three he extracts matching his Fabergé shrine to Babe almost exactly. Within minutes he’s sprawled on the russett bedspread, floating on a liquid Orange Drink. The hotel staff have knocked repeatedly, guests having seen him retreat in a state. Concerned for his well-being, with no answer coming from within—‘Mr. Capote? We just wanna make sure you’re all right… Mr. Capote, please open the door.’ He can hear them as if trapped in an echo chamber, but cannot bring himself to move, the old venom running through his veins.
‘Mr. Capote, we’re comin’ in now.’ He hears a skeleton key jimmy the lock. Hears their cautious tread, drawing close. As the manager stands over him, examining his paralyzed form, the boy feels a rush of terror that they’re taking him away; stuffing him in a casket to bury him alive. Worse still, perhaps they’re here to steal his precious pages, which he’s carefully hidden in the room safe. The fight floods back into him as it so often does on the brink, and he attacks—his stubby little legs kicking with all their might, nearly knocking Mr. Manager in the head, grazing his ear instead. There’s enough vitriol left in that midget carcass to have done serious damage, so the staff will later say they considered themselves lucky. They couldn’t believe someone that shrunken had so much force in them, a dying beast, poked with a stick. Rabid. Desperate. He feels his limbs contract, then… nothingness.
It’s terribly anticlimactic when he’s rushed to the Baptist Medical Center and it turns out to be nothing more than a seizure, which he’s suffered on and off for the last several years and thus has come to bore us. There was the usual siren’s wails and ambulance and solicitous team of doctors. Forty-six roses from Governor Wallace, and a plant from his aunt Mary Ida. After two days’ observation he’s released, the jouissance of his visit home seized clean out of him.
BANNED FROM THE holiday inn for obvious reasons, he checks into a nearby
motor lodge—Doby’s Hotel Court on Mobile Road, just off the Dixie Highway. He likes the bungalows with their faux porches. It seems a fated place to get back on one’s feet. He pays a week in advance to stay and recuperate.
It’s here that the colt-girl finds him. She of the gangly limbs and bowl-cut bob—the same traits he remembers, now stuck on a middle-aged lady. He says nothing, nor does she, sitting down in the rocking chair beside him, her down-tilts acting as counter-points to his.
The only thing missing is the buzzing of the porch chat, but that will come. For two souls who love words, between them they hardly seem necessary.
That night over dinner—takeout fried chicken, which they eat on trays in the room that Nelle has moved into—they find they’ve been thinking the same thought.
‘What does this remind you of?’ she asks, a gleam in her eye.
Without skipping a beat—‘That hotel in Garden City. Spitting image.’
‘It’s as if they picked it up in Kansas and plunked it down here.’
They smile, remembering the feeling of arriving together in that land of barren plains, Nelle having agreed to act as his Girl-Friday when he decided to travel to Holcomb to research the Clutter case. She had just delivered Mockingbird to Lippincott and it seemed an adventure. A grown-up version of their childhood snooping. Little did they know, in those early, innocent days, that by the end of six years they would both have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings, though at what price was another matter.
He studies her sideways, taking in the strong jaw, the beauty that exists in her for him as it always had, if beauty might exist in plainness. Ever the midget suitor, he leans in close.
‘Did I ever properly thank you, by the way?’
Same old Nelle, she refuses to indulge him. ‘No, Truman. Matter of fact, you didn’t.’
‘But I dedicated it to you! To Harper Lee with love and gratitude—What?’ off her look. ‘What?’
‘To Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee,’ she challenges in her tough Southern drawl. ‘I think for the sake of all that work I deserved a bit more than unspecified “gratitude” alongside Jack, much as I love him. All Jack did was put up with you. Which as we know—’
Swan Song Page 43
