The Swans of Fifth Avenue(5)
Once upon a time.
“My mother’s name was Nina,” Truman told Gloria, told C.Z., told Slim. His eyes gleamed softly, reverently. “Nina was beautiful—a real lady. She was too much for Monroeville, Alabama! She always told me, ‘Truman, my little man, I’m going to take you to New York one day.’ And she did, when I was eleven. That’s when my life really began—because it’s New York! Not sleepy little Monroeville, where nothing ever happened. Although I did get bit by a cottonmouth once, and nearly died. Nearly—oh, my goodness, I was one foot over the line! But they saved me. Nothing can kill me, not even a snake!”
“Oh!” Slim gasped. Then she grinned. “Let me see the scar!”
“Big Mama!” Truman wagged a finger at her but obliged, rolling up his shirt to reveal a thin, supple arm, paler than the moon, covered with a fine down of silken blond hair, as white as the hair on his head, the hair brushing his eyes, always falling, falling over his face like a curtain or a veil. “See?”
Slim did see: two faint punctures on his forearm, barely visible.
“These are my scars, my only scars,” Truman told her, triumphantly. “I don’t have any others!”
—
“MY MOTHER’S NAME WAS really Lillie Mae,” Truman revealed to Babe. It was early in their friendship, those days when they had to catch each other up on everything that had happened to them, so that they could mark their lives—Before. And After.
“Lillie Mae Faulk. And she was a selfish bitch,” Truman said, his voice flat for once. He wasn’t trying to captivate or ensnare; he knew he had Babe, knew it in his heart. Knew it as a dream come true, for that was what it was.
A beautiful—an exquisite—woman. Loving him, Truman. Needing him, as he needed her. For what, neither could precisely express just yet. They only recognized each other, not as a reflection in a mirror, but as a reflection of a deeper, darker, murkier sore, or hole, or something gaping but always, always hidden. Until the moment they locked eyes on the CBS plane, each so startled their masks fell, and Truman was, for only a fragment of a moment, no longer the startlingly self-assured prodigy but a lost little boy, forgotten. And Babe was, beneath the couture and makeup, a shy, unsure woodland creature, hugging herself for comfort.
Two souls, exposed like raw wounds. Visible only to each other, they firmly believed.
“My mother hated me. Hated me! Despised, loathed.” Truman gnashed the words with his teeth. “She abandoned me to those horrible cousins in Monroeville, and I thought I’d never see her again. She used to lock me in hotel rooms, did you know? Lock me in while she went off with her ‘gentleman callers’—thank you, Tennessee!—and I’d cry and cry, but she’d left instructions, you see. Told the staff not to let me out, no matter how I hollered. And I did! But then I’d finally tire myself out and fall asleep, never knowing when—if—she’d come back for me.”
Babe was shocked; she wanted to fold her new friend up in her arms, hug him to her heart, which was pierced on his behalf. But she did not; she knew the effort it took to keep one’s exterior self together, upright, when everything inside was in pieces, broken beyond repair. One touch, one warm, compassionate hand, could shatter that hard-won perfect exterior. And then it would take years and years to restore it.
So Babe did not hug Truman, who looked, in that moment of confession, as if he were still that six-year-old boy abandoned by his mother in Monroeville, Alabama. Forgotten by his father, too—“Arch Persons! What a farce he was. Is. Someday I’ll tell you about him, but not today, Babe, dear. I’m a little weary today.” And he rubbed his eyes tiredly, with his two small fists.
“But she did bring you here, Truman. That’s the good thing. The blessed thing.”
“Yes, Lillie Mae did get here, after all. She married my stepfather, Joe Capote. She changed her name to Nina and she had a fabulous apartment on Park Avenue, just as she’d dreamed. She finally sent for me and put me in military school, to butch me up. She hated who I was. Called me a fag one moment, then asked me when I’d marry a nice girl the next. She never was proud of me, never. I could have written the Bible, and she’d still call me, to my face, the greatest disappointment in her life.”
“Never! You’re no disappointment, Truman. You’re a beautiful person, a great artist. You must know that!”
“Well”—and Truman did grin up at her, a sly, satisfied little boyish grin. “I will admit to overcoming my childhood, anyway. The hell that it was.”
—
“I HAD THE MOST MARVELOUS CHILDHOOD!” Truman exclaimed to Slim, to Gloria, to C.Z., at their parties, where they would surround their new discovery, these glamorous wives of glamorous men, while their husbands looked on in confusion, for they’d never seen a Truman Capote before, and hoped, at first, never to see one again. This tiny, effeminate creature dressed in velvet suits, red socks, an absurdly long scarf usually wrapped around his throat, trailing after him like a coronation robe, who pronounced, after dinner, “I’m going to go sit over here with the rest of the girls and gossip!” This pixie who might suddenly leap into the air, kicking one foot out behind him, exclaiming, “Oh, what fun, fun, fun it is to be me! I’m beside myself!”
These men, titans of industry, old money, heirs to fortunes, looked on, agape. And told one another, “Well, at least we don’t have anything to worry about from him,” as their wives fluttered and cooed and preened and fought to sit next to him.