Music for Chameleons (33 page)

I thought about St. Julian. About Flaubert’s story
St. Julien, L’Hospitalier
. It had been so long since I’d read that story, and where I was, in a sanitarium far distant from libraries, I couldn’t get a copy. But I remembered (at least I thought this was more or less the way it went) that as a child Julian loved to wander in the forests and loved all animals and living things. He lived on a great estate, and his parents worshipped him; they wanted him to have everything in the world. His father bought him the finest horses, bows and arrows, and taught him to hunt. To kill the very animals he had loved so much. And that was too bad, because Julian discovered that he liked to kill. He was only happy after a day of the bloodiest slaughter. The murdering of beasts and birds became a mania, and after first admiring his skill, his neighbors loathed and feared him for his bloodlust.

Now there’s a part of the story that was pretty vague in my head. Anyway, somehow or other Julian killed his mother and
father. A hunting accident? Something like that, something terrible. He became a pariah and a penitent. He wandered the world barefoot and in rags, seeking forgiveness. He grew old and ill. One cold night he was waiting by a river for a boatman to row him across. Maybe it was the River Styx? Because Julian was dying. While he waited, a hideous old man appeared. He was a leper, and his eyes were running sores, his mouth rotting and foul. Julian didn’t know it, but this repulsive evil-looking old man was God. And God tested him to see if all his sufferings had truly changed Julian’s savage heart. He told Julian He was cold, and asked to share his blanket, and Julian did; then the leper wanted Julian to embrace Him, and Julian did; then He made a final request—He asked Julian to kiss His diseased and rotting lips. Julian did. Whereupon Julian and the old leper, who was suddenly transformed into a radiant shining vision, ascended together to heaven. And so it was that Julian became St. Julian.

So there I was in the rain, and the harder it fell the more I thought about Julian. I prayed that I would have the luck to hold a leper in my arms. And that’s when I began to believe in God again, and understand that Sook was right: that everything was His design, the old moon and the new moon, the hard rain falling, and if only I would ask Him to help me, He would.

TC:
And has He?

TC:
Yes. More and more. But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint. But I shonuf ain’t no saint yet, nawsuh.

TC:
Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Now let’s knock it off and try for some shut-eye.

TC:
But first let’s say a prayer. Let’s say our
old
prayer. The one we used to say when we were real little and slept in the same
bed with Sook and Queenie, with the quilts piled on top of us because the house was so big and cold.

TC:
Our old prayer? Okay.

TC AND TC:
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.

TC:
Goodnight.

TC:
Goodnight.

TC:
I love you.

TC:
I love you, too.

TC:
You’d better. Because when you get right down to it, all we’ve got is each other. Alone. To the grave. And that’s the tragedy, isn’t it?

TC:
You forget. We have God, too.

TC:
Yes. We have God.

TC:
Zzzzzzz

TC:
Zzzzzzzzz

TC AND TC:
Zzzzzzzzzzz

BOOKS BY TRUMAN CAPOTE

Other Voices, Other Rooms
A Tree of Night
Local Color
The Grass Harp
The Muses Are Heard
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Observations
(with Richard Avedon)
Selected Writings
In Cold Blood
A Christmas Memory
The Thanksgiving Visitor
The Dogs Bark
Music for Chameleons
One Christmas
Three by Truman Capote
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
A Capote Reader
Summer Crossing

ALSO BY
T
RUMAN
C
APOTE

ANSWERED PRAYERS

Although Truman Capote’s last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. As it follows the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes,
Answered Prayers
careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.

Fiction/Literature

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany’s; her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm. This volume also contains three of Capote’s best-known stories, “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory,” which the
Saturday Review
called “one of the most moving stories in our language.” It is a tale of two innocents—a small boy and the old woman who is his best friend—whose sweetness contains a hard, sharp kernel of truth.

Fiction/Literature

THE COMPLETE STORIES OF TRUMAN CAPOTE

A landmark collection that brings together Truman Capote’s life’s work in the form he called his “great love,”
The Complete Stories
confirms Capote’s status as a master of the short story. This first-ever compendium features a never-before-published 1950 story, “The Bargain,” as well as an introduction by Reynolds Price. Ranging from the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are here, in stories as haunting as they are compassionate.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

THE GRASS HARP

Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town,
The Grass Harp
tells the story of three endearing misfits—an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who one day take up residence in a tree house. As they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree,
The Grass Harp
manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, “that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.” This volume also includes Capote’s
A Tree of Night and Other Stories
, which the
Washington Post
called “unobtrusively beautiful … a superlative book.”

Fiction/Literature

IN COLD BLOOD

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.
In Cold Blood
is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

Nonfiction/Literature

ALSO AVAILABLE
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available wherever books are sold.
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