SSC (2004) The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (33 page)

“If that kid was mine,” said Mr. Belli.

“I feel so ashamed.”

“Say, listen. What for? That was beautiful. I mean it; you can sing.”

“Thanks,” she said; and, as though setting up a barricade against impending tears, clamped on her spectacles.

“Believe me, I was touched. What I’d like is, I’d like an encore.”

It was as if she were a child to whom he’d handed a balloon, a unique balloon that kept swelling until it swept her upward, danced her along with just her toes now and then touching ground. She descended to say: “Only not here. Maybe,” she began, and once more seemed to be lifted, lilted through the air, “maybe sometime you’ll let me cook you dinner. I’ll plan it really Russian. And we can play records.”

The thought, the apparitional suspicion that had previously
passed on tiptoe, returned with a heavier tread, a creature fat and foursquare that Mr. Belli could not evict. “Thank you, Miss O’Meaghan. That’s something to look forward to,” he said. Rising, he reset his hat, adjusted his coat. “Sitting on cold stone too long, you can catch something.”

“When?”

“Why, never. You should
never
sit on cold stone.” “When will you come to dinner?”

Mr. Belli’s livelihood rather depended upon his being a skilled inventor of excuses. “Any time,” he answered smoothly. “Except any time soon. I’m a tax man; you know what happens to us fellows in March. Yes sir,” he said, again hoisting out his watch, “back to the grind for me.” Still he couldn’t—could he?—simply saunter off, leave her sitting on Sarah’s grave? He owed her courtesy; for the peanuts, if nothing more, though there was more—perhaps it was due to her that he had remembered Sarah’s orchids withering in the icebox. And anyway, she
was
nice, as likeable a woman, stranger, as he’d ever met. He thought to take advantage of the weather, but the weather offered none: clouds were fewer, the sun exceedingly visible. “Turned chilly,” he observed, rubbing his hands together. “Could be going to rain.”

“Mr. Belli. Now I’m going to ask you a very personal question,” she said, enunciating each word decisively. “Because I wouldn’t want you to think I go about inviting just anybody to dinner. My intentions are—” her eyes wandered, her voice wavered, as though the forthright manner had been a masquerade she could not sustain. “So I’m going to ask you a very personal question. Have you considered marrying again?”

He hummed, like a radio warming up before it speaks; when he did, it amounted to static: “Oh, at
my
age. Don’t even want a dog. Just give me TV. Some beer. Poker once a week. Hell. Who the hell would want me?” he said; and, with a twinge, remembered Rebecca’s mother-in-law, Mrs. A. J. Krakower, Sr., Dr. Pauline Krakower, a female
dentist (retired) who had been an audacious participant in a certain family plot. Or what about Sarah’s best friend, the persistent “Brownie” Pollock? Odd, but as long as Sarah lived he had enjoyed, upon occasion taken advantage of, “Brownie’s” admiration; afterwards—finally he had
told
her not to telephone him any more (and she had shouted: “Everything Sarah ever said, she was right. You fat little
hairy
little bastard”). Then; and then there was Miss Jackson. Despite Sarah’s suspicions, her in fact devout conviction, nothing untoward, very untoward, had transpired between him and the pleasant Esther, whose hobby was bowling. But he had always surmised, and in recent months known, that if one day he suggested drinks, dinner, a workout in some bowling alley … He said: “I
was
married. For twenty-seven years. That’s enough for any lifetime”; but as he said it, he realized that, in just this moment, he had come to a decision, which was: he
would
ask Esther to dinner, he would take her bowling and buy her an orchid, a gala purple one with a lavender-ribbon bow. And where, he wondered, do couples honeymoon in April? At the latest May. Miami? Bermuda? Bermuda! “No, I’ve never considered it. Marrying again.”

One would have assumed from her attentive posture that Mary O’Meaghan was raptly listening to Mr. Belli—except that her eyes played hookey, roamed as though she were hunting at a party for a different, more promising face. The color had drained from her own face; and with it had gone most of her healthy charm. She coughed.

He coughed. Raising his hat, he said: “It’s been very pleasant meeting you, Miss O’Meaghan.”

“Same here,” she said, and stood up. “Mind if I walk with you to the gate?”

He did, yes; for he wanted to mosey along alone, devouring the tart nourishment of this spring-shiny, parade-weather, be alone with his many thoughts of Esther, his hopeful, zestful, live-forever mood. “A pleasure,” he said, adjusting his stride to her slower pace and the slight lurch her stiff leg caused.

“But it
did
seem like a sensible idea,” she said argumentatively.
“And there was old Annie Austin: the living proof. Well, nobody had a
better
idea. I mean, everybody was at me: Get married. From the day Pop died, my sister and everybody was saying: Poor Mary, what’s to become of her? A girl that can’t type. Take shorthand. With her leg and all; can’t even wait on table. What happens to a girl—a
grown
woman—that doesn’t know anything, never done anything? Except cook and look after her father. All I heard was: Mary, you’ve got to get married.”

“So. Why fight that? A fine person like you, you ought to be married. You’d make some fellow very happy.”

“Sure I would. But
who?
” She flung out her arms, extended a hand toward Manhattan, the country, the continents beyond. “So I’ve looked; I’m not lazy by nature. But honestly, frankly, how does anybody ever find a husband? If they’re not very, very pretty; a terrific dancer. If they’re just—oh ordinary. Like me.”

“No, no, not at all,” Mr. Belli mumbled. “Not ordinary, no. Couldn’t you make something of your talent? Your voice?”

She stopped, stood clasping and unclasping her purse. “Don’t poke fun. Please. My life is at stake.” And she insisted: “I
am
ordinary. So is old Annie Austin. And she says the place for me to find a husband—a decent, comfortable man—is in the obituary column.”

For a man who believed himself a human compass, Mr. Belli had the anxious experience of feeling he had lost his way; with relief he saw the gates of the cemetery a hundred yards ahead. “She does? She says that? Old Annie Austin?”

“Yes. And she’s a very practical woman. She feeds six people on $58.75 a week: food, clothes, everything. And the way she explained it, it certainly
sounded
logical. Because the obituaries are full of unmarried men. Widowers. You just go to the funeral and sort of introduce yourself: sympathize. Or the cemetery: come here on a nice day, or go to Woodlawn, there are always widowers walking around. Fellows thinking how much they miss home life and maybe wishing they were married again.”

When Mr. Belli understood that she was in earnest, he was appalled;
but he was also entertained: and he laughed, jammed his hands in his pockets and threw back his head. She joined him, spilled a laughter that restored her color, that, in skylarking style, made her rock against him. “Even I—” she said, clutching at his arm, “even
I
can see the humor.” But it was not a lengthy vision; suddenly solemn, she said: “But that is how Annie met her husbands. Both of them: Mr. Cruikshank, and then Mr. Austin. So it
must
be a practical idea. Don’t you think?”

“Oh, I do think.”

She shrugged. “But it hasn’t worked out too well. Us, for instance.
We
seemed to have such a lot in common.”

“One day,” he said, quickening his steps. “With a livelier fellow.”

“I don’t know. I’ve met some grand people. But it always ends like this. Like us …” she said, and left unsaid something more, for a new pilgrim, just entering through the gates of the cemetery, had attached her interest: an alive little man spouting cheery whistlings and with plenty of snap to his walk. Mr. Belli noticed him, too, observed the black band sewn round the sleeve of the visitor’s bright green tweed coat, and commented: “Good luck, Miss O’Meaghan. Thanks for the peanuts.”

Talk about mean! Odd Henderson was the meanest human creature in my experience.

And I’m speaking of a twelve-year-old boy, not some grownup who has had the time to ripen a naturally evil disposition. At least, Odd was twelve in 1932, when we were both second-graders attending a small-town school in rural Alabama.

Tall for his age, a bony boy with muddy-red hair and narrow yellow eyes, he towered over all his classmates—would have in any event, for the rest of us were only seven or eight years old. Odd had failed first grade twice and was now serving his second term in the second grade. This sorry record wasn’t due to dumbness—Odd was intelligent, maybe cunning is a better word—but he took after the rest of the Hendersons. The whole family (there were ten of them, not counting Dad Henderson, who was a bootlegger and usually in jail, all scrunched together in a four-room house next door to a Negro church) was a shiftless, surly bunch, every one of them ready to do you a bad turn; Odd wasn’t the worst of the lot, and brother, that is
saying
something.

Many children in our school came from families poorer than the Hendersons; Odd had a pair of shoes, while some boys, girls too,
were forced to go barefoot right through the bitterest weather—that’s how hard the Depression had hit Alabama. But nobody, I don’t care who, looked as down-and-out as Odd—a skinny, freckled scarecrow in sweaty cast-off overalls that would have been a humiliation to a chain-gang convict. You might have felt pity for him if he hadn’t been so hateful. All the kids feared him, not just us younger kids, but even boys his own age and older.

Nobody ever picked a fight with him except one time a girl named Ann “Jumbo” Finchburg, who happened to be the other town bully. Jumbo, a sawed-off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique, jumped Odd from behind during recess one dull morning, and it took three teachers, each of whom must have wished the combatants would kill each other, a good long while to separate them. The result was a sort of draw: Jumbo lost a tooth and half her hair and developed a grayish cloud in her left eye (she never could see clear again); Odd’s afflictions included a broken thumb, plus scratch scars that will stay with him to the day they shut his coffin. For months afterward, Odd played every kind of trick to goad Jumbo into a rematch; but Jumbo had gotten her licks and gave him considerable berth. As I would have done if he’d let me; alas, I was the object of Odd’s relentless attentions.

Considering the era and locale, I was fairly well off—living, as I did, in a high-ceilinged old country house situated where the town ended and the farms and forests began. The house belonged to distant relatives, elderly cousins, and these cousins, three maiden ladies and their bachelor brother, had taken me under their roof because of a disturbance among my more immediate family, a custody battle that, for involved reasons, had left me stranded in this somewhat eccentric Alabama household. Not that I was unhappy there; indeed, moments of those few years turned out to be the happiest part of an otherwise difficult childhood, mainly because the youngest of the cousins, a woman in her sixties, became my first friend. As she was a child herself (many people thought her less than that, and murmured
about her as though she were the twin of poor nice Lester Tucker, who roamed the streets in a sweet daze), she understood children, and understood me absolutely.

Perhaps it was strange for a young boy to have as his best friend an aging spinster, but neither of us had an ordinary outlook or background, and so it was inevitable, in our separate loneliness, that we should come to share a friendship apart. Except for the hours I spent at school, the three of us, me and old Queenie, our feisty little rat terrier, and Miss Sook, as everyone called my friend, were almost always together. We hunted herbs in the woods, went fishing on remote creeks (with dried sugarcane stalks for fishing poles) and gathered curious ferns and greeneries that we transplanted and grew with trailing flourish in tin pails and chamber pots. Mostly, though, our life was lived in the kitchen—a farmhouse kitchen, dominated by a big black wood-burning stove, that was often dark and sunny at the same time.

Miss Sook, sensitive as shy-lady fern, a recluse who had never traveled beyond the county boundaries, was totally unlike her brother and sisters, the latter being down-to-earth, vaguely masculine ladies who operated a dry-goods store and several other business ventures. The brother, Uncle B., owned a number of cotton farms scattered around the countryside; because he refused to drive a car or endure any contact whatever with mobilized machinery, he rode horseback, jogging all day from one property to another. He was a kind man, though a silent one: he grunted yes or no, and really never opened his mouth except to feed it. At every meal he had the appetite of an Alaskan grizzly after a winter’s hibernation, and it was Miss Sook’s task to fill him up.