Mrs. Rittenhouse closed her eyes and traced her finger round the rim of the tea-cup. Several words stuttered on her lips, but she said nothing.
“Pistol?”
“No. Definitely no. Firearms involve all sorts of whatnot. At any rate, I don’t believe insurance companies recognize suicide—that is what it would have to appear to be. No, accidents are best.”
“But the Good Lord would have to take credit for that.”
“Not necessarily.”
Mrs. Green, plucking at a stray wisp of hair, said, “Oh, stop teasing and talking riddles: what’s the answer?”
“I’m afraid there is no consistently true one,” said Mrs. Rittenhouse. “It depends as much upon the setting as the situation. Now, if this were a foreign country it would be simpler. The Marseille police, for instance, took very casual interest in Martin’s accident: their investigation was most unthorough.”
A look of mild surprise illumined Mrs. Green’s face. “I see,” she said slowly. “But then, this is not Marseille.” And presently volunteered, “Harry swims like a fish: he won a cup at Yale.”
“However,” continued Mrs. Rittenhouse, “it is by no means impossible. Let me tell you of a statement I read recently in the Tribune: ‘Each year a larger percentage of deaths are caused by people falling in their bathtub than by all other accidents combined.’ ” She paused and eyed Mrs. Green intently. “I find that quite provocative, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure whether I follow—”
A brittle smile toyed with the corners of Mrs. Rittenhouse’s mouth; her hands moved together, the tips of her fingers delicately meeting and forming a crisp, blue-veined steeple. “Well,” she began, “let us suppose that upon the evening the—tragedy—is scheduled, something apparently goes wrong with, say, a bathroom faucet. What does one do?”
“What does one do?” echoed Mrs. Green, frowning.
“This: call to him and ask if he would mind stepping in there a moment. You point to the faucet and then, as he bends to investigate, strike the base of his head—right back here, see?—with something good and heavy. Simplicity itself.”
But Mrs. Green’s frown persisted. “Honestly, I don’t see where that is any accident.”
“If you’re determined to be so literal!”
“But I don’t see—”
“Hush,” said Mrs. Rittenhouse, “and listen. Now, this is what one would do next: undress him, fill the tub brim full, drop in a cake of soap and submerge—the corpse.” Her smile returned and curved to a wider crescent. “What is the obvious conclusion?”
Mrs. Green’s interest was complete, and her eyes were very wide. “What?” she breathed.
“He slipped on the soap, hit his head—and drowned.”
The clock tuned six; the notes shimmered away in silence. The fire had gradually sifted to a slumbering bed of coals, and a chill seemed settled on the room like a net spun of ice. The cat’s bells shattered the mood as Mrs. Green dropped him plumply to the floor, rose and walked to the window. She parted the draperies and looked out; the sky was drained of color; it was starting to rain: the first drops beaded the glass, distorting an eerie reflection of Mrs. Rittenhouse to which Mrs. Green addressed her next remark:
“Poor man.”
Where the World Begins
Miss Carter had been explaining the eccentricities of Algebra for almost twenty minutes now. Sally looked disgustedly up at the snail-like hands of the schoolroom clock, only twenty-five more minutes and then freedom—sweet, precious freedom.
She looked at the piece of yellow paper in front of her for the hundredth time. Empty. Ah, well! Sally glanced around her, staring with contempt at the hard working mathematical students. “Humnph,” she thought, “as if they’re goin’ to make a success in life just by addin’ up a lot of figures, an’ X’s that don’t make any sense anyway. Humnph, wait’ll they get out in the world.”
Exactly what getting out in the world or life was, she wasn’t sure; however, her elders had led her to believe it was some horrible ordeal that she was going to have to undergo at some definite, future date.
“Uh, oh,” she moaned, “here comes Robot.” She called Miss Carter “Robot,” because that was what Miss Carter reminded her of, a perfect machine, accurate, well oiled and as cold and shiny as steel. Hurriedly she scribbled a mass of illegible numbers over the yellow paper. “At least,” Sally thought, “that’ll make her think I’m working.”
Miss Carter sailed past her without even a look. Sally breathed a deep sigh of relief. Robot!
Her seat was right next to the window. The room was on the third floor of the High School and from where she sat she could see a beautiful view. She turned to gaze outside. Her eyes became dilated, and glassy and unseeing—
“This year it makes us very happy to present the Academy Award for the finest portrayal of the year to Miss Sally Lamb for her unparalleled performance in Desire. Miss Lamb, you will please accept Oscar on behalf of myself and my associates.”
A beautiful, striking woman reaches out and gathers the gold statuette in her arms.
“Thank you,” she says in a deep, rich voice. “I suppose when something wonderful like this happens to anyone they’re supposed to make a speech, but I’m just too grateful to say anything.”
And then she sits down with the applause ringing in her ears. Bravo for Miss Lamb. Hurray. Clap, clap, clap, clap. Champagne. Did you really like me? Autograph? But certainly— What did you say your first name was, dear boy—John? Oh, French, Jean— All right— “To Jean, a dear friend, Sally Lamb.” Autograph, please, Miss Lamb, autograph, autograph—Star, money, fame, beautiful, glamorous—Clark Gable—
“Are you listening, Sally?” Miss Carter sounded very angry. Sally jumped around, startled. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then, if you’re paying such undivided attention perhaps you can explain this last problem I put on the board.” Miss Carter’s gaze swept the class superciliously.
Sally stared helplessly at the board. She could feel Robot’s cold eyes on her and the giggling brats. She could have choked them all until their tongues hung out. Damn them. Oh, well, she was licked, the numbers, the squares, the crazy X’s, Greek!
“Just as I thought,” the Robot announced triumphantly. “Yes, just as I thought! You’ve been off in space again. I would like to know what goes on in that head of yours—certainly it has nothing to do with your school work. For a girl who’s so—so, stupid, it looks like you could at least favor us with your attention. It’s not just you, Sally, but you disrupt the whole class.”
Sally hung her head and drew crazy little designs all over the paper. She knew her face was cerise, but she wasn’t going to be like these other stupid morons who giggled and carried on every time the teacher bawled them out—even old Robot.
GOSSIP COLUMN:
What number one debutante of the season whose initials are Sally Lamb was seen romancing at the Stork Club with millionaire playboy Stevie Swift?
“Oh, Marie, Marie,” called the beautiful young girl lying on the huge silken bed. “Bring me the new Life magazine.”
“Yes, Miss Lamb,” answered the prim French maid.
“Hurry, please,” called the impatient heiress. “I want to see if that photographer did me justice; my picture’s on the cover this week, you know. Oh, and while you’re about it bring me an Alka-Seltzer—dastardly head-ache, too much champagne I guess.”
RADIO:
Rich girl makes Debut Tonight. The long awaited Social Event of the Season brings forth Sally Lamb to Society in a brilliant Ten thousand dollar Ball. Nice work if you can get it! Flash, flash—
“Will you please pass your papers to the front of the room, hurry it up, please!” Miss Carter rapped her fingers impatiently against her desk.
Sally shoved her illegible paper over the shoulder of the pink faced boy that sat in front of her. Children. Humnph. She pulled her big Scottish plaid handbook over to her, delved around inside, and came up wi
th a compact, lipstick, comb, and Kleenex.
She gazed at herself in the powder-dusty mirror as she smeared the lipstick on her pretty shaped lips. Raspberry.
The tall, slinky woman stood admiring her image in front of a huge gilt mirror at one of the more spectacular residences in Germany. She patted a stray hair back into her elaborate silver coiffure.
A dark, handsome gentleman bent over and kissed her bare shoulder. She smiled faintly.
“Ah, Lupé, how lovely you look tonight. You are so beautiful, Lupé. Your skin, so white, your eyes—Ach…you can’t imagine what they make me feel.”
“Umm,” purred the Lady, “that, General, is where you are mistaken.” She reached over to a marble table and picked up two wine glasses, slipped three pills into one, and handed it to the General.
“Lupé, I must see you more often. We will dine together every night when I return from the front.”
“Ohhh, does my little baby have to go up there where all the fighting is?” Her raspberry lips were close to his. How clever you are, Sally, she thought.
“Lupé knows I have to carry the army maneuver plans up to the front, doesn’t Lupé?”
“Do you have the plans with you?” queried the charming fifth columnist.
“Why, yes, but of course.” She could see that he was passing out, his eyes were getting glassy and he looked very drunk. By the time the Mata Hari had finished her 1928 vintage, the General was stretched out at her feet.
She stooped down and began searching his coat. Suddenly she heard boot steps outside—her heart jumped—
The bell went off with a loud clang. The students rushed helter-skelter for the door way. Sally put her make-up articles back in her handbag, gathered up her books, and prepared to depart.
“Just a minute, Sally Lamb,” Miss Carter called her back. Robot again. “Come back here a minute—I want to talk to you.”
By the time she reached the desk Miss Carter had finished filling out a form and handed it to her.
“That is a detention hall slip, you will go to detention hall this afternoon until it is over. I have told you numerously that I do not want you primping yourself in class. Do you want us to all get your germs?”
Sally blushed. She resented any reference to her anatomy or pertaining there of.
“And another thing, young lady, you didn’t hand in your homework…Well, as I’ve told you, it’s up to you whether you want to do your work or not…It’s certainly not any skin off my back—”
Sally wondered vaguely whether she had any skin on her back—or was it tin?
“—you know, of course, that you’re failing this subject. It’s a mystery to me how anyone could so completely waste their time—I do not understand it—not at all. I think it would be better if you dropped this course, because, to be quite candid, I don’t believe that you are mentally capable of doing the work. I—I—wait a minute—where do you think—”
Sally had thrown her books down on the desk and run out of the room. She knew she was going to cry and she didn’t want to—not in front of Robot.
Damn her anyhow! What does she know about life. She doesn’t know anything but a lot of numbers—Damn her anyway!
She worked her way on down the crowded halls.
The torpedo had hit about a half an hour ago and the ship was sinking fast. This was a chance! Sally Lamb, America’s foremost newspaper woman, right here on the spot. She had gotten her camera out of her water logged cabin. And here she was, snapping pictures of the refugees climbing into the lifeboats and of her fellow sufferers struggling in the raging sea.
“Hey, Miss,” called one of the sailors. “Yuh, better take this lifeboat, I think it’s the last one.”
“No thanks,” she called over the howling wind and the roaring water. “I’m gonna stay right here until I get the whole story.”
Suddenly Sally laughed. Miss Carter and the X’s and the numbers seemed far, far away. She was very happy here, with the wind blowing in her hair and Death around the corner.
Afterword
Truman Capote wrote the fourteen stories in The Early Stories of Truman Capote as an adolescent and a young man. They are, as the title says, the early fiction of a writer who would go on to become one of the twentieth century’s masters. By their very nature, they are not mature works but, rather, the efforts of a young writer developing his craft. “I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven,” Capote said. “I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it.”
Many of the manuscripts—located in the Truman Capote archives at the New York Public Library—show Capote’s edits and revisions. The cross-outs and marginal notes depict a precociously talented young writer dedicated to improving his skills. In these stories, we can see many flashes of Capote’s trademark prose—clear sentences, precise imagery, language that is both vigorous and light. With phrases such as “a fire, purring drowsily in a stone fireplace, reflected yellow pools in the eye of a cat” and “the water spurted out of the fountains in a crystal spray” we can hear an early version of the voice that would captivate us in stories like “A Tree of Night” and “A Diamond Guitar.” The manuscripts offer rare insight into how a writer born with outsized gifts still must apprentice himself. The stories provide ample evidence that Capote had found his own voice by a very early age and, at the same time, had to work hard to develop it.
The stories also show early manifestations of one of Capote’s most powerful talents: empathy. In much of his writing, Capote empathizes with the outsider and the other—the man or woman, the boy or girl, who resides at the fringe of society and its expectations. In these early stories, we see Capote drawn to figures who do not, or cannot, live at the center of their worlds: homeless men, lonely children, a girl of mixed race passing in an all-white school, an old woman near death, an African American woman from the South dislocated in New York City. Just as the manuscripts show a young writer improving his sentences through work and revision, these stories also give us a glimpse of Capote developing his powers of empathy by imagining the lives of many different kinds of people. The profound empathy we find in Capote’s masterworks was nurtured in part by this early fiction.
As with all early efforts, the results are imperfect. Hilton Als, in his foreword, notes the young Capote’s limits when attempting to inhabit an African American character. Rather than relying on his own imagination, Capote sometimes turns to trope and stereotype. Occasionally, the female characters in these stories are more gothic than complex. Other characters are more archetype than flesh. Still, these stories, in their subject matter and themes, show Capote, at the earliest stages of his writing life, inspired more by the marginalized and the vulnerable than the powerful and the accomplished. One explanation for this, of course, is Capote’s queerness, which marginalized him within the worlds he inhabited and made him vulnerable to scorn and abandonment, or worse. Like many gay writers before and after him, Capote used deflection to probe his own heart. Even so, most young writers begin by depicting on the page some version of themselves. In many of these stories we find the young Capote looking to others, rather than the mirror, as if he already understood empathy would become central to his art. This capacity, honed and mastered through years of writing, would guide Capote through a celebrated career that would ultimately lead him to Kansas in 1959. In his masterpiece In Cold Blood, Capote is doing much more than telling the story of a family gunned down in their farmhouse. He’s using every talent he has access to, especially empathy, to understand and depict all sides of a vicious crime most could only deem senseless.
We cannot identify the exact dates when Capote wrote all these stories or when he revised them. Seven of the stories were first published between 1940 and 1942 in The Green Witch, the literary magazine of Greenwich High School, in Connecticut, where Capote was a student from 193
9 through 1942: “Swamp Terror,” “The Moth in the Flame,” “Parting of the Way,” “Lucy,” “Hilda,” “Miss Belle Rankin,” and “Louise,” which won second place in the school’s literary contest. According to the winner, Capote was “furious” about not taking top prize. Dorothy Doyle Gavan recalled to a newspaper many years later, “[Truman] came right up to me in class and called me a foul word.” Estimated to have been written between 1945 and 1947, “Kindred Spirits” is likely the last story from Capote’s early years; its uptown setting and wearied characters suggest how much New York City and early adulthood were changing him as a writer.
The stories have been copyedited for spelling, consistency, and, occasionally, clarity, but Capote’s sometimes idiosyncratic punctuation has been preserved when his meaning is clear. The titles are Capote’s, with one exception: the manuscript for “This Is for Jamie” is called “This Is in Jamie.” The story itself implies that the “in” of Capote’s original title was an error.
Posthumous publishing requires a balance of caution and openness. Caution in order to preserve a writer’s legacy, and openness as a way to expand our understanding of a writer’s development as well as to share with readers what is usually accessible only to a few. The Early Stories of Truman Capote does not collect everything he wrote as a young writer. The Capote archives houses several other stories excluded because they seemed too immature (one was written when he was about eleven). The Truman Capote Literary Trust, Random House, and several others with deep knowledge of Capote and his work deliberated over which stories to include. Scholars and students may visit the Capote archives to review the original manuscripts published here as well as those left out.
When Truman Capote died in his sleep in Los Angeles in 1984, he left behind a literary legacy that has enthralled millions of readers. He also left behind an unpleasant public image: drunk, bitter, disloyal, and, perhaps most sadly, not writing. He wasn’t working and hadn’t been, not really, for many years. At the time of his death some felt that despite his literary legacy—one that includes Other Voices, Other Rooms; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; dozens of stories; and In Cold Blood—he had let his talents waste. These early stories offer a counterpoint to that final image: a young writer laboring over his typewriter to maximize his gifts. A Truman Capote not slurring on a television talk show but driven to nail the right word on the page. John McPhee once wrote, “It is a law of sport that everything that happens affects everything that happens thereafter.” This is also a law of the artist. These stories helped develop the Truman Capote who would go on to write the works that so many of us love. They show us genius before the full bloom.
The Early Stories of Truman Capote Page 9