Her new husband commanded most of her attention, in any event, and there was little room in her life for Truman or anyone else but Joe. They were consumed by each other: instead of taming their romance, turning it toward the ordinary and the domestic, as is usually the case, marriage had made it more ardent and impassioned than it had been before, and all the affection they had been unable to give their former spouses they now rained upon each other. “They were madly in love,” said Lyn White, one of Lillie Mae’s closest friends. “They didn’t want to do anything but be together.”
To outsiders, their life together seemed charmed, almost enchanted. Living at the top of Joe’s salary, and above, they appeared to have the best of everything: weekends at the racetrack, evenings at the theater or in fashionable nightclubs, vacations in East Hampton, Cuba, Bermuda, or even Europe, which they toured twice during the thirties. They were rarely still, and for them the Depression brought not hard times, but one long, boisterous party. All of Lillie Mae’s ambitions had been realized. She was exactly where she wanted to be, doing precisely what she wanted to do, in the company of the only man she wanted to do it with. Like a lovely plant that had been stunted by lack of light, she blossomed under the sunshine of a happy, prosperous marriage, and before the decade was over, she had transformed herself from an unsophisticated country girl into a woman of worldly tastes and glamorous occupations.
The metamorphosis even included a change in her first name. Along with most of her Southern accent, she discarded the hillbilly name of Lillie Mae in favor of one that was more cosmopolitan, more in keeping with her new life—Nina—and to everyone but her friends and family in Alabama, Nina was what she was called henceforth.
The new Nina Capote had only one serious regret, and that was, having had a child with a man she did not love, she could not, several years into her new marriage, have one with a man she so fervently did love. But she had only herself to blame. Jennie and Arch had prevented her from having an abortion when she was pregnant with Truman, but Joe was not able to stop her from terminating the two pregnancies that followed after she came to New York. “I will not have another child like Truman,” she told him, “and if I do have another child, it will be like Truman.” Something went wrong on the operating table during the course of one of those abortions, however, and she very nearly lost her life. The doctor, in a panic, called Joe in his office, demanding that he come and take her home. Although she soon recovered, she had suffered permanent damage to the reproductive organs, and a few years later, when she had changed her mind and finally did want to have a baby, she was no longer capable of doing so. She conceived two, perhaps three times; but each time she had a tubal pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage. “I think it did something to her head, because she was never the same afterward,” Truman said. “She really wanted to have a child with him.”
“If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling,” Freud wrote, “he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings success with it.” The reverse might also be said, and a man who has been denied maternal esteem has also been denied that easy confidence, that wonderful feeling of triumph, with which the mother’s darling automatically greets every morning. If he does manage to achieve success, he often views it not as a gift, not as a birthright, but as a loan, and for the rest of his life he worries that it may be snatched away and given to someone more deserving. The emotional cost, the tension and the anxiety, may be considerable. Such was to be the case with Truman, at any rate, and it is impossible to dispute his bleak and chilling judgment of his own mother: “she was the single worst person in my life.”
She did not hate him; if she had, he could at least have hated her in return, simply and unconditionally. Nor, though she continued to dump him in the laps of other people, did she really ignore him; if she had, he perhaps could have ignored her too. What she did was worse. She let him know that after all the years, and after all her battles to gain custody from Arch, she still regarded him with ambivalence: she loved him and she did not love him; she wanted him and she did not want him; she was proud to be his mother and she was ashamed of him. Her feelings toward him oscillated between polar extremes, in other words, and from one day to another, sometimes from one hour to another, he could not predict how she would greet him.
The loving mother, the one he had known in Monroeville, remained warm and full of concern. The unloving mother looked on him suspiciously, as if he were not her child, but the son of the father he so much resembled—and only a poor substitute for the boy she really wanted to have and at last felt she should have had with Joe. This mother could be cold and cruelly critical, eager to find and eradicate fault.
She often accused him of lying, and she worried that he might have inherited Arch’s inability to distinguish truth from falsehood. Joe tried to calm her, assuring her that all boys tell fibs, but she was not persuaded. Jealous of the monopoly Joe seemed to have on his mother’s affections, Truman was not grateful for his help either. Joe did his best to be a good stepfather, but Truman went out of his way to antagonize him, making fun of his Cuban accent, for instance, by repeating, like a parrot, every word he spoke. Joe took such affronts patiently; Nina did not. Both his lying and his rudeness to her new husband were mere irritations, however, normal annoyances she could live with. What truly bothered her about Truman, what she found embarrassing and intolerable, and what she could not accept, was something he could do nothing about: his effeminate, girlish behavior.
People in Monroeville had already marked him down as a sissy, and for almost as far back as his memory carried him, he had been aware that he was the subject of talk, someone both his parents and his Faulk relations thought they had to defend and make excuses for. According to his Aunt Tiny, Nina’s sisters refused even to let their children play with him because of his “sissyish traits.” As the years passed, the differences between him and other boys became even more pronounced: he remained small and pretty as a china doll, and his mannerisms, little things like the way he walked or held himself, started to look odd, unlike those of other boys. Even his voice began to sound strange, peculiarly babylike and artificial, as if he had unconsciously decided that that part of him, the only part he could stop from maturing, would remain fixed in boyhood forever, reminding him of happier and less confusing times. His face and body belatedly matured, but his way of speaking never did. “His voice today is identical to what it was when he was in the fourth grade,” observed one of his teachers many years later, when Truman was well into middle age. “I hear him on television or the radio and I recall him as a young boy.”
Yet no one was more aware that something was wrong than Truman himself. For much of his childhood, until he was nine or so, he found being a boy so demanding and burdensome that he actually wanted to be a girl. “I didn’t feel as if I were imprisoned in the wrong body. I wasn’t transsexual. I just felt things would be easier for me if I were a girl.” Any parent would have been concerned about such a boy. Nina, who had always been hypersensitive to the opinions of other people, was more than concerned; she was obsessed. When her New York friends made comments, she angrily stopped them—no one except his mother was allowed to criticize her son—but their remarks wounded nonetheless. Her problem with Truman was never far from her mind, and she made certain that it was never far from his mind either. She nagged him, bullied him, and belittled him.
When nothing she said or did helped, she took him to two different psychiatrists in hopes of finding a cure, a drug or therapy that would turn him into a real boy. One psychiatrist suggested that she not worry, promising her that the traits she disliked would disappear as he grew older. Whatever it was the other said to her, it annoyed her so much that she refused to tell even Joe what it was, leading him to suspect that the psychiatrist had blamed no one but her for Truman’s odd behavior. She gave up on psychiatry after that, but she did not give up her search for a remedy. “She was always very worried about him,” J
oe said. “She wanted him to be an ordinary fellow, straight in every way. But Truman was reluctant to be an ordinary fellow. He had to be himself.”
The Capotes did not remain in Brooklyn very long. When Truman returned from his Alabama vacation in the fall of 1933, they had already moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, and at the end of September he began fourth grade at the Trinity School, one of New York’s oldest and best private schools for boys.
Trinity, then a High Episcopal school, held morning prayers four days a week, required the boys to kneel for the litany on Friday, and celebrated Communion on holy days. It was a hard-marking institution whose primary goal was to send its students to Ivy League colleges. Although he was the butt of a few jokes, Truman was for the most part accepted, regarded by many of his classmates as the class mascot. He refused to join in team sports—which, fortunately for him, Trinity did not require—but when he was on his own, he was a surprisingly good athlete, an excellent swimmer and an accomplished figure skater who spent much of the winter practicing at the Gay Blades, a skating rink on the West Side. He enjoyed school theatricals, and not long after he arrived, he took the part of a blond-braided Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The first year he was at Trinity his grades averaged 83, which was considered good; but his average dropped to 78 in the fifth grade, then went down still further, to 73, which was considered only fair, in the sixth grade. The reason for the decline was clear to both his teachers and the school’s administrators: he was a very disturbed child. “I always felt sorry for Truman,” said one of them. “I had the feeling that he was somewhat of an unwanted child. There were problems at home, and his mother would call to talk about his temper tantrums, which I gather were not uncommon. She was completely at a loss to know what to do. The year he entered I witnessed one such incident myself. He was lying on his back in the hallway, kicking his feet like a child of two. He was obviously on the verge of hysteria.” Like many disturbed children, he was a sleepwalker; on more than one occasion he suddenly woke up to find himself in pajamas in the lobby of his apartment building.
The people Nina called at Trinity were not very helpful, or, indeed, very sympathetic, and one of them, a teacher now long dead, probably compounded his problems. The teacher would sometimes walk him home, Truman said, stopping on the way at a movie theater, the Olympia, on upper Broadway. They would sit in the privacy of the back row, and while the teacher fondled him, Truman would masturbate the teacher. What effect that tawdry little scene had on a boy like Truman is impossible to say, but it was, at the very least, a sorry initiation into the mysteries of sex.
Nina did not know about those trips to the movies, but it was plain, even so, that Truman was not becoming the ordinary, masculine boy she wanted him to be. Coming from the South, she had known many boys, her brother Seabon included, who had proudly worn the uniform of a military-school cadet, and she reasoned that where she and the psychiatrists had failed, tough drill instructors and the company of other, more virile boys might succeed. Thus it was that after Truman had spent three years at Trinity, she decided to send him to military school. Joe argued with her, and so may have some of the teachers at Trinity. “How could she have been so insane as to send that boy to a military school?” asked one of them long after. “It was cruel, the last place in the world he should have been sent. I couldn’t believe it.” Where Truman was concerned, Nina always prevailed, and in the fall of 1936, shortly before his twelfth birthday, she registered him at St. John’s Military Academy, a now-defunct Episcopal school in Ossining, New York, about thirty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan. Arch’s dream that his son should wear a cadet’s uniform was to be fulfilled, albeit three years later and in a different climate altogether.
Truman himself was excited, thinking more, no doubt, about the pleasures rather than the pains of such a place, about the opportunity he would have to ride horses rather than about the martial discipline. In a rare burst of enthusiasm, he wrote Arch that he would soon be attending a “wonderful Military school.” Once he was there, however, he quickly changed his mind, and it is impossible to imagine a boy who was less suited to a military education than Truman. He disliked wearing a uniform, and he was uncomfortable living in a dormitory. Although he made some friends, his fellow cadets were not so tolerant of him as the boys at Trinity had been, and they found a dozen ways to make his life miserable, including mocking his Southern accent and ridiculing his mannerisms. He was able to alter his accent; but his mannerisms neither he nor St. John’s could change.
If Nina had deliberately wanted to encourage his manifest homosexual tendencies, she could not, in fact, have chosen a better place than a military school. St. John’s did the exact opposite of what she thought it would do. The smallest and prettiest boy in his class, Truman was looked upon as sexual prey by several cadets—the tough, manly types he was supposed to emulate—and when the lights went out, he was occasionally forced into some stronger boy’s bed. As he recalled it, none of what took place beneath those sheets went beyond adolescent sex play—kissing, fondling, and “belly rubbing,” with him providing the belly and some bigger boy doing the rubbing. Still, the threat of coercion turned those relatively innocent sexual experiences into something ugly and unpleasant. “I was afraid of most of the boys at St. John’s,” he said. “They took sex very seriously. Instead of making me happy and secure, being chased after like that had the opposite effect. It was as if I were in prison. I’ve talked to a lot of prisoners and I know what it’s like. There is always some young pretty convict everybody is after.”
The end of the school year was the only escape from St. John’s, and Nina was not about to take him out before then. During the months he was there, she seems to have pushed him out of her mind, as well as her life. She was pregnant when he left home—probably another reason for her sending him away—and she had the shock and pain of another miscarriage while he was gone. Even so, she was inexcusably negligent. St. John’s was only an hour away from Manhattan, an easy journey by either car or train, but if Truman’s count was correct, she visited him only twice during the school year.
Once again he felt rejected by his mother, but this time he did not have Sook to turn to. He was isolated and intensely lonely in his expensive jail cell on the Hudson. The Alabama judge who had rejected Arch’s proposal to send him to military school was proved correct, and looking back, Truman’s chief memory was of the hours he spent crying. “I would have been much happier if my mother had just left me in Alabama,” he said. And very probably he was right. Even Nina must have realized that his year there had been a disaster, and in the fall of 1937 she sent him back to Trinity.
9
TRUMAN had been buffeted around so much, sent from place to place and pushed and pulled by so many different people, that until the first year of his teens, his own character was somewhat unfocused. The various pieces were there, but they did not form a pattern. Rather than allowing his own nature to take form, he had, until then, been reacting to what those around him, most particularly his mother, thought he should be. After that dreadful year at St. John’s, he seemed to have hardened himself and to have begun, perhaps unconsciously, to come to terms with himself. He had attempted to become what his mother had wanted, and he had failed. Now, at the age of thirteen, he seemed to have given up trying, and his personality began to take the shape it was to keep through all the years thereafter.
He was no less anxious to be liked than he had been, but he was now old enough and experienced enough to seek favor on his own terms, deliberately and with design. The pocket Merlin who had enthralled Harper Lee with his fantastical tales was becoming a polished storyteller who promised entertainment every time he opened his mouth. The ordinary accomplishments of ordinary boys were beyond his reach, but he had an ability few of them could ever hope to match: if he wanted, he could charm almost anyone.
“It was fascinating to watch him,” said Howard Weber, Jr., who was his closest friend at
the time. “There would be very social pre-deb dances during the Christmas holidays. My aunt would give dinners beforehand for my cousin Louise, who was our age, and I would take Truman and three or four other friends along in tuxedos. My aunt never forgot Truman, because when he walked in the door, all the boys would go over and sit around him in a circle, knowing that he would tell stories and entertain them. The girls would become wallflowers, all by themselves on the other side of the room. My aunt was fascinated to see the way it happened, but it did happen, it absolutely did! The explanation was that, unlike the girls at that age, Truman read everything and could talk about everything; he had a wonderful wit, and he had a biting sarcasm, which all of his friends thought was very funny.”
Many adults were beguiled by him as well, and, overlooking his miserable grades, several of his teachers at Trinity made him a special favorite. “Mr. Putney, who taught dramatics, had a spot for Truman in every play we did,” said Weber. “Since both Truman and I were rather good-looking, we were always girls, and in one play we joined with another boy to be three princesses sitting on a wall. Truman would get everybody into costume, and then he would tell Mr. Putney who should wear the red wig, who should wear the black wig, and so on. He was in his glory!”
At home he was still a disturbed child, however, and once again Nina was calling the school for advice. Although he was fourteen and in the eighth grade, he was still lying on the floor and kicking his legs in the air when he did not get his way. What should she do? No one at Trinity knew, or had ever before encountered such behavior in a boy his age. His teachers saw only a hint of his obstreperousness. “The biology teacher nearly went frantic over Truman, because he would sit in class and comb his hair all the time,” Weber recalled. “‘Please put that comb away!’ he would say. Truman couldn’t have cared less. He would just go right on combing his hair.” His grades reflected his cavalier attitude; he did poorly in all of his courses during his second stay at Trinity, barely passing several, including biology, and failing one, algebra, by a very wide margin. None of his courses, he had concluded, would help prepare him for his life’s role. He had already decided what he wanted to do: he was going to be a writer.
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