The Early Stories of Truman Capote

by Truman Capote

  He turned laughing and ran toward her, and suddenly, running as fast as he could, he felt like a young sapling bending in the wind.

  That night, after he had finished his supper and had had his bath, he set to work to gather up all his comic magazines. They were stuffed helter-skelter in his closet, cedar box, and bookshelf. Except for the brightly covered magazines, his bookshelf was a picture in solemn literature—The Child’s Book of Knowledge, The Child’s Garden of Verse, and Books Every Child Should Know.

  He managed to gather thirty fairly recent issues together before his mother and father came to say good night. His mother was dressed in a long flowery evening gown and she had flowers and perfume in her hair. He loved the smell of gardenias, so pungently sweet. His father was in his tuxedo and carried his tall silk hat.

  “What are all these magazines for?” his mother asked him.

  “For a friend,” said Teddy, hoping she wouldn’t ask any more. It would not be quite as secretive, quite as exciting, if his mother knew about it.

  “Come on, Ellen,” his father said impatiently. “The curtain goes up at eight-thirty, and I’m tired of getting to shows right in the middle.”

  “Good night, darling!”

  “Good night, Son.”

  He threw them a kiss as they closed the door behind them. Then, quickly, he turned back to his magazines. He got the sheet of wrapping paper his new suit had come in, and awkwardly wrapped them in it. It made a big package. He tied it up with thick, coarse string. Then he stepped back and looked at it. Something was wrong, he thought. It wasn’t fancy enough; it didn’t look like a gift.

  He went to his desk, delved around inside and came up with a box of crayons. With alternating red and green letters, he printed, “THIS IS,” then shifted to blue and red, “FOR JAMIE—FROM TEDDY.”

  Satisfied, he put the package away before Miss Julie came in to turn off his light and open the window.

  The next morning before they started to the park, he got out his Red Sky Chief Wagon, put his package in and covered it with playthings.

  When they reached the park, Teddy could tell it was going to be an easy matter to get away from Miss Julie. She had on her best dress. She was all excited and had on more lipstick than usual. Teddy knew that she was expecting to meet Officer O’Flaherty in the park. Officer O’Flaherty was Miss Julie’s fiancée, at least as far as Miss Julie was concerned.

  “Now, Teddy, you just run on and have a good time, but mind now, Miss Julie will meet you at the playground.”

  He ran as quickly as he could toward the reservoir. He couldn’t take any short cuts with the wagon; it bumped along behind him.

  He saw Frisky and the woman sitting on the bench.

  “Well, here on time, I see,” she laughed when she saw him.

  He rolled the wagon up beside the bench, threw off his playthings and proudly exhibited his big parcel of magazines.

  “Oh,” she cried, “what a big package! Why, Jamie will never finish reading all these. He will love them, Teddy. Come here; let me kiss you.”

  He blushed slightly as she kissed him on his cheek.

  “You’re a sweet child,” she said softly as she stood up and gathered her coat about her. “We had to take Jamie to the hospital last night.”

  “Won’t he be able to read the comics?” Teddy asked anxiously.

  “Yes,” she smiled, “yes, of course—it’ll keep him busy. The only thing I’m worrying about is whether I’ll be able to carry them all.” She lifted the big package and sighed wearily. Frisky jumped around, pulling at the leash and almost making her drop them.

  “Stop that, Frisky,” Teddy cried.

  “Well, thanks again, Teddy. I can’t stay today.” She waved her hand and started down the path. Frisky pulled back toward Teddy.

  “Will you be here tomorrow?” Teddy called.

  “I don’t know—maybe,” she called back; then she turned a bend and disappeared.

  He wanted to run after her, to go with her to the hospital and see Jamie, and to play with Frisky and have the woman kiss him on the cheek again and tell him that he was a sweet child. Instead he went to the playground where he met Miss Julie and went home.

  The next day he came to the park and went directly to the bench, but there was no one there. He waited for an hour and a half, and then, with a sudden sick knowledge, he knew that she wasn’t coming—that she would never be back and that he would never see her again, nor Frisky. He wanted to cry, but he wouldn’t let himself.

  The next day was Sunday and he couldn’t go to the park. In the morning he went to church. Then his grandmother came to visit, and she mooned over him all afternoon.

  “If you ask me, Ellen, that child’s sick! He’s been acting strange all afternoon. Why, I gave him money to go get a soda and he said he didn’t want one. He said he wanted a dog, a wire haired dog that he could call Frisky. Now if that isn’t the strangest thing!”

  And that night his father tried to pry it out of him.

  “Son, aren’t you feeling well? You can tell me if there’s anything wrong?”

  Teddy pursed his small mouth. “Well, Papa, it’s a dog, a little dog called Frisky—a sick boy’s mother—Jamie—he—”

  His mother came to the door. “Bill, if we’re going to the Abbotts’ you’d better hurry. They expect us for cocktails at seven.”

  His father got up, looked at his watch and said, “I’ll see you about this some other time, Son.” Then he went out, and shortly afterward Teddy heard the apartment door slam.

  He was lying stretched out across his bed crying when Miss Julie came in. She was very excited and her face was all flushed. She took him in her arms, and patted his head. It was the first time he had ever known her to comfort anyone. For a moment he almost liked her.

  “Guess what, Teddy! Oh you just never will guess! Guess what?”

  He looked up and stopped crying. “I don’t want to guess. I don’t feel like guessing. My mother and father don’t love me—no one loves me—leastwise no one you know.”

  Miss Julie scoffed.

  “Oh what a little ninnie you are, Teddy. Silly boy—oh well, I suppose we all go through this age.”

  Miss Julie and her ages!

  “But you haven’t guessed yet. Oh, well, I’ll tell you. Mr. O’Flaherty has asked me to marry him!” Her face was wreathed in smile.

  “Are you going to?” he asked.

  She held out her hand and exhibited a silver ring with an amethyst stone, which Teddy took for an engagement ring.

  Then she got up and hurried into her room. She did not come in to put him to bed that night nor to open the window.

  The next morning he awoke very early. No one was up, not even Miss Julie, and no sound came from his parents’ bed room, nor the maid’s. Cautiously and quietly he dressed. Then he stole out of the apartment and down the long corridor toward the stairs. He did not dare ring for the elevator.

  In the park it was chilly but beautiful. There was no one there except one man asleep on a bench. He was all huddled up and looked so cold and hungry and ugly that Teddy raced past him without daring to look a second time.

  He went to the reservoir and sat down on the same old bench. He made up his mind he was going to sit there until Frisky and Jamie’s mother came, even if it was all day.

  The water was beautiful. He imagined it was some great ocean and he was sailing a ship across it, while musicians played in the background, just like at the movies.

  He had been sitting a long while before he saw the first horseback rider. He knew it must be getting late if the riders were coming out. After that first one, they came thick and fast. He counted them as they passed. He had seen many celebrities riding in the park, but without Miss Julie to identify them he could not tell them from ordinary people.

  Then the carriages and nurses began to arrive. It was nearly ten o’clock. The sun had risen full and bright in the sky. In the drowsy warmth of its rays, he felt himself falling asleep.


  Suddenly he heard a yelp and a bark. A little wire haired terrier jumped up on the bench beside him.

  “Frisky—Frisky—” he cried. “It’s you!”

  A tall thin man was attached to the other end of the leash. Teddy gazed up at him bewilderedly.

  “What’s your name, Son?” the stranger asked.

  “Teddy,” he answered in a small, frightened voice.

  The man handed him an envelope. “Then I guess this is for you.”

  Teddy tore it open anxiously. It was written in a long, graceful hand. He had a hard time reading it.

  Dear Teddy,

  Frisky is for you. Jamie would have wanted you to have him.

  It was unsigned. Teddy stared at it for a long time until he couldn’t see it anymore. He grasped the dog to him and squeezed him as hard as he could. He could explain to Mama and Papa somehow.

  Then he remembered the man. He looked up. He looked all around him but the man had gone and all he could see was the pathway and the trees and the grass and the reservoir gleaming in the morning sun.

  Lucy

  Lucy was really the outgrowth of my mother’s love for southern cooking. I was spending the summer in the south when my mother wrote my aunt and asked her to find her a colored woman who could really cook and would be willing to come to New York.

  After canvassing the territory, Lucy was the result. Her skin was a rich olive and her features were finer and lighter than most negroes’. She was tall and reasonably round. She had been one of the teachers at the school for colored children. But she seemed to have a natural intelligence, not formed by books, but a child of the earth with a deep understanding and compassion for all that lived. As most southern negroes, she was very religious, and even now, I can see her sitting in the kitchen reading her Bible, and declaring most earnestly to me that she was a “child of God.”

  So we had Lucy, and when she stepped off the train that September morning at Pennsylvania Station, you could see the pride and the triumph in her eyes. She told me that all her life she had wanted to come north, and, as she put it, “to live like a human being.” That morning she felt that she would never want again to see Jim Crow with all its bigotry and cruelty.

  At that time we lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive. From all of the front windows we had an excellent view of the Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades, rising steep against the sky. In the morning they looked like heralds greeting the dawn and in the evening, at sunset, when the water was dyed in the confusion of crimson shades, the cliffs shone magnificently, like sentinels of an ancient world.

  Sometimes, at sunset, Lucy would sit at the apartment window and gaze lovingly at the spectacle of the dying day in the world’s greatest metropolis.

  “Um, um,” she would declare, “if only Mama and George were here to see this.” And at first she loved the bright lights and all the noise. Almost every Saturday she took me down to Broadway and we went on theatrical sprees. She was crazy about the vaudevilles, and the Wrigley sign was a show in itself.

  Lucy and I were constant companions. Sometimes in the afternoon after school she would help me with my mathematical homework, she was very adroit at mathematics. She read a great deal of poetry, but she didn’t know anything about it except that she loved the sound of the words, and occasionally the sentiment behind them. It was through these readings that I first became aware of how homesick she really was. When she read poems with a southern theme, she read them beautifully, with a unique compassion. Her soft voice recited the lines tenderly, understandingly, and if I glanced up quickly enough there was just the trace of a tear gleaming in the exquisite blackness of those negro eyes. Then she would laugh if I mentioned it and shrug her shoulders.

  “It was pretty though, wasn’t it?”

  When Lucy worked she invariably accompanied her actions with a soft singing, “blues” in its quality. I liked to hear her sing. Once we went to see Ethel Waters and she went around the house imitating Ethel for days, then finally she announced she was going to enter an amateur contest. I’ll never forget that contest. Lucy won second place, and my hands were raw from applauding. She sang “It’s De-Lovely, It’s Delicious, It’s Delightful.” I remember the words even now, we rehearsed them so many times. She was scared to death she was going to forget them and when she went on the stage, her voice tremored just enough to give it a Ethel Waterish tone.

  But eventually Lucy abandoned her musical career, because she met Pedro, and she didn’t have time for much else. He was one of the basement workers in the building and he and Lucy were thicker than molasses. Lucy had been in New York only five months when this happened and she was still, technically speaking, green. Pedro was very slick, he dressed flashy, and besides I was mad because I didn’t get to go to the shows anymore. Mama laughed and said, “Well, I guess we’ve lost her, she’ll go northern too.” She didn’t seem to care so much, but I did.

  Finally, Lucy didn’t like Pedro either, and then she was more lonesome than ever. Sometimes I would read her mail when it was lying around open. It went something like this,

  Dear Lucy,

  Yu Pa he’s got sick, he in bed now. He say, hallo. We guess now yo up thea yo hev no time fo us po folk. Yo brother, George, he done gone to Pensacola, he work in bottle factry thea. We sends you all ouah love,

  Mama

  Sometimes, late at night, I could hear her softly crying in her room, and then I knew she was going home. New York was just vast loneliness. The Hudson River kept whispering “Alabama River.” Yes, Alabama River with all its red muddy water flowing high to the bank and with all its swampy little tributaries.

  All the bright lights—a few lanterns shining in the darkness, the lonely sound of a whip-poor-will, a train screaming its haunting cry in the night. Hard cement, bright cold steel, smoke, burlesque, the smothered sound of the subway in the dank, underground tube. Rattle, Rattle,—soft green grass—and yes sun, hot, plenty hot, but so soothing, bare feet, and cool, sand-bedded stream with soft round pebbles smooth, like soap. The city, no place for one of the earth, Mama’s calling me home. George, I’m God’s child.

  Yes, I knew she was going back. So when she told me she was leaving I wasn’t surprised. I opened and shut my mouth and felt the tears in my eyes and the empty feeling in my stomach.

  It was in May that she left. It was a warm night and the sky over the city was red in the night. I gave her a box of candy, all chocolate-covered cherries (because that was what she liked best), and a pack of magazines.

  Mother and Daddy drove her to the bus station. When they left the apartment I ran to my window and leaned over the sill until I saw them come out and climb into the car, and slowly, gracefully glide out of view.

  Already I could hear her saying, “Ohhhh, Mama, New York’s wonderful, all the people, and I saw movie stars in person, oh, Mama!”

  Traffic West

  IV

  Four chairs and a table. On the table, paper—in the chairs, men. Windows above the street. On the street, people—against the windows, rain. This were, perhaps, an abstraction, a painted picture only, but that the people, innocent, unsuspecting, moved below, and the rain fell wet on the window.

  For the men stirred not, the legal, precise document, on the table moved not. Then—

  “Gentlemen, our four interests have been brought together, checked, and harmonized. Each one’s actions now should to his own particulars be bent. And so I make a suggestion that we signify consent, attach our names hereto, and part.”

  A man rose, a paper in his hands. Another rose. He took the paper, scanned, and spoke.

  “This satisfies our needs; we drew it well. Indeed, our companies are by this piece assured advantage and security. Yes, in this document I read great profit. I’ll sign.”

  A third arose. He fixed his lens, perused the scroll. His lips in silence moved, and when words sounded, each was weighed.

  “We must admit—our lawyers, too, agree—the text and wording of this note is clear. I
have it from advice on every hand: herein is, despite the power it assumes, what legally can be, what by the law is. Thus, I’ll sign.” He read the script anew, and passed it to the fourth.

  An executive like the others, he fain would have affixed his name and gone. But his brow clouded. He sat, reading, scanning, examining. Then he laid the paper down.

  “I cannot, though agreeing, sign the document. Nor can you.” He saw their startled faces. “It is the power of the thing that damns it. The very reasons you have just given, that show the lawful measures it allows. The purposes of huge extent, the full assurance of support, the mighty steps permitted these things, though lawful, are not for us. If unlawful, we could risk it, for the law would then be acting contrary—supporting, not oppressing, the thousands of workers; protecting, not destroying, the interests of weaker peoples.

  “But if the law, our government, allows we have the right to make this tract to move, through legal pen, ten thousands for what our interests want—and worse, to misuse those same ones whose rights we represent; then we must draw the line—reject a measure which risks the welfare of the many in our care.

  “We have power, as do all who serve great interests. But if we judge by God, a thing most difficult for moneyed minds to do, we sense, as men of might, our duty to the ‘average man,’ and, gentlemen, I beg you, take no such selfish action.”

  Again the room was still. A businessman had just torn down one kind of code, and in this tearing down revealed another.

  Three others saw his reasoning, and, having seen, replaced old business goals with goals of brotherhood.

  “Let us take the bus away from here, and leave the document destroyed in legal fashion.”

  III

  The bright morning sun streaked over rows of waiting roofs and struck against the closely drawn blinds of the house on the hill.