Capote in Kansas

by Kim Powers

  She still hadn’t opened it.

  Maybe she wouldn’t; the others had all been Pandora’s boxes, releasing evil into the world. She’d looked in the bottom of them all, after she’d emptied them out, and hadn’t found any hope.

  Why should this one be any different?

  But it was different; she could feel it, literally. It was a different size than the others, much larger and heavier. Its heft, the exact way it sat in her hands, reminded her of something from her past, but she couldn’t place it, not yet.

  Sitting on the Snake Man’s grave and leaning against his marker, she took a deep breath and unwrapped the paper; there was no collaged snakebite kit inside, no hand-carved coffin underneath that, no picture inside that—except for the one that formed in her brain when she finally realized what Truman had sent to her, by way of Boo Radley’s sister.

  The Book.

  Her book.

  He’d given her back her book, the copy of the manuscript she had given him to read on their way to Kansas the first time. On the cover page was the love letter he’d written to her, on that trip: “It’s the book I wish I could have written. Truman.”

  All these years, she’d forgotten he had it, left in his room when she fled one night in the snow.

  It was the proof she’d waited for her entire life—or that Alice had waited for—evidence, once and for all, that Nelle wrote The Book she’d always said she’d written, that Truman had nothing to do with it, no matter what he said.

  All she had to do now was show them, show the world, show anyone who came to town to ask, and shove it in the faces of those who didn’t dare. The manuscript was dated; scholars could compare it line by line to the published version and see that nothing had changed. They could analyze Truman’s handwriting to prove it really was him who’d written on the cover page.

  But she wouldn’t.

  What good would come of it?

  People would still wonder, still accuse of her of some kind of fakery.

  She didn’t need to do it, to know what she’d written.

  The doubt had almost made her forget what she’d known since all those years ago, when she and Truman sat together for three days on a train ride to Kansas.

  It was freezing, and her life was about to begin.

  Why they took a train instead of a plane she didn’t know, except that Truman had become convinced they had to see the country from down low, they had to experience the transition from the mountains of the East to the flatness and nothingness of Kansas. He wanted to see the very first stalk of corn that came into view, the very first grain silo.

  Nelle said you could see the same thing from a plane, even better.

  “But can you reach out and touch it?” he said.

  They took the train, and he put his hand out the window.

  Three days for her to agonize, while he read her book, and the landscape turned from green and blue to yellow and finally dusty brown.

  Finally, she couldn’t wait any longer: she had to know what he thought.

  He closed his eyes, choosing his words as carefully as an epigraph he would commit to print: “You’ve done something better than even I could do: you’ve written the perfect book about childhood, from your heart. I used to know how, but I’ve forgotten. Somehow, I think going to Kansas will show me the way, again . . . the way back to what you’ve already found.”

  He kissed her cheek and fell asleep with his head on her shoulder, like they used to do when they were little. She turned and looked out the window onto a changing landscape, racing past with blurry scenes from her life.

  She was six, hiding in a chinaberry tree with her best friend.

  Seven, he dragged her along to see a stranger get buried.

  Nine, she stood on tiptoes and looked in a knothole on the tree, to see if he’d sent her a present from his new home in New York.

  Eleven, she cried, she missed him so much.

  Thirteen, she grew up and was forced to wear a dress for the first time.

  Eighteen, she left Eden, and went off to school. Twenty-three, she moved to a different Eden searching for her old friend.

  Twenty-five, she said good-bye to her mother and brother, forever.

  Twenty-seven, she started remembering what it was like to be a child, and began writing it all down.

  Thirty, she had written her first book.

  Thirty, she was on her way to a grand adventure, with her strange best friend from childhood.

  Thirty, she shivered in the cold and delight of the night, everyone asleep in the dark railroad car except for her, and said a prayer of thanks for being alive.

  Thirty, on a night train speeding into Kansas, and she wanted to remember the moment forever. She blew on the window and made a cloud to write her name on, to prove she’d been there.

  Now, in her fifties, propped up against the Snake Man’s tombstone, granite for a pillow instead of feathers, Nelle was dreaming, instead of remembering:

  Truman shifted in the seat next to her, but when she looked at him, he had aged. The hollows under his eyes were deep, and his skin was marked with little explosions of blood vessels. No amount of plastic surgery, of skin pulled tight everywhere, could disguise the fact that she was looking at a death mask.

  He got up out of his seat on the railroad car and reached in the berth overhead for his suitcase.

  Something was wrong. Truman would never reach for his own suitcase; he’d have a porter do it. He was too short to reach the overhead bin, but his arms magically extended, just as hers had when she reached into their tree just days ago, in a dream.

  “I’m tired, Nelle. I’m leaving.”

  “But we aren’t there yet.”

  “I’ve been everywhere I’ve ever wanted to go. I don’t need to go anywhere else.”

  “I kept waiting for you to call back . . .”

  “I ran out of words, used ’em all up. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I thought the boxes could take over, speak for me, give you a new story to write . . . You were such a good writer.”

  “That’s a lot of history to put on some boxes. Cardboard and paste and pictures.”

  “I know.”

  He really had run out of words, this great poet who was now as silent, as sheepish, as Kenyon Clutter had been.

  “I’ve done my job now, it’s yours. Let the dead bury the dead. I can stop.”

  The very same words Sally Boular had said to her.

  “I stopped a long time ago, except for hurting people.”

  “But why?”

  A question, like the ones she had asked Bonnie Clutter and Kenyon, that didn’t have an answer.

  Nelle looked out the train window one last time: she was old, and the tired man who’d been sitting next to her, keeping her warm, walked off with a suitcase and a book in his hand, and left her behind.

  The year was 1984.

  Nelle awoke with a start, leaning against the Snake Man’s mossy grave, and knew that Truman was dying.

  She was surprised she felt as sad as she did.

  She looked around the cemetery as if she might catch him walking there, among the paths to Eden, as he had once called them. But there was no Truman, no ghost, although there would be one, soon enough.

  In seconds, it was as if she’d finally learned we don’t get ghosts of those we love the most, we just get dreams of them, and memories. Memories of loves that had come and gone; some Truman had foreseen, some he hadn’t. Ghosts were left to relative strangers, like Bonnie and Kenyon. Real ghosts, of real people we loved, would scare us too much, remind us too much.

  Most times, a dream was as much of a good-bye as we’d ever get.

  But now, Nelle got something else, too; a return to something, and a lightning’s flash of understanding: why Truman had said what he had at the Clutters’ grave, why he had fought with Nelle there, about ending the book with Alvin Dewey and Nancy’s best friend Susan meeting there, when they hadn’t in real life.

  Real life w
asn’t all it was cracked up to be, he’d said then, and Nelle, of all people, had gotten mad.

  Some lies were good, if they kept people from hurting.

  Some lies were good, if they brought peace.

  That’s what Truman had been trying to say back then, but Nelle hadn’t wanted to listen. Maybe that was his good-bye to her, so long ago.

  The morning sun was coming up; it was time to go. Alice would be worried. Enough of visiting graves. She’d be back, soon enough, for good. She patted the earth back into place, and began to make her way home. She even laughed a little; she didn’t know why, but it felt good for a change.

  For now, she was alive.

  It was time to go home.

  A few days later, another package will arrive at Nelle’s house, an address hastily scribbled on it. But somehow, this one won’t scare her as she tears it open. Inside, there will be no box, no coffin, no picture, just a jumble of sticks and white paper and cut-out letters and string. Nelle will see, with the eyes of the child she once was, that it had been a kite. She will take her time to smoothe out its wrinkles and mend its breaks, take it outside and run to get it up in the air. There, she will finally see the words that Truman had once sailed up to Nancy Clutter, that had been lost for a time in a Palm Springs desert. Now, they will seem to unfurl only for her: “I’m Sorry,” the message on the kite will read, as it takes flight into the clouds.

  Author’s Note

  I knew of Harper Lee long before I knew of Truman Capote—sort of. My older brother Porky took my twin brother Tim and me to see the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird when we were just six or seven; he must have thought we were too young to understand and thus be disturbed by the rape of Miss Mayella Ewell. He was right—that part went right over my head, although I knew it was something “bad”—but far more disturbing, in a way Porky couldn’t have foreseen, was one of the final scenes of the movie. Late at night, in those haunting black and white shadows, Jem and Scout are walking home after their school agricultural pageant and get attacked by a drunken Bob Ewell, Mayella’s father. Scout, encased in her “ham” costume, is knocked to the ground, and witnesses the rest of the attack through a prism of chicken wire, papier mache, and terror. She awakens back at home, to find that Boo Radley has been her savior, and that her father would watch after her broken-armed brother, in what for me became the most glorious sentence to ever end a book: “He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” After a childhood of broken arms, an absent father, and terrors both imagined and real and only partially glimpsed, I wanted, somehow, to live inside that story.

  Somewhere down the road, I discovered that Harper Lee had based the character of Dill Harris—all buck teeth and fancy outfits and indignation, just like me—on her childhood buddy, Truman Capote. I didn’t quite know who he was, but I knew he was important, and I pretended to understand why.

  Then I saw the movie of In Cold Blood. (A fact of my small-town Texas growing-up: I saw the movies of most books before I read them.) Now a new and different scene came to haunt my childhood: the scene of Nancy Clutter being shot to death in her farmhouse bedroom, after so softly pleading, “Please. Don’t.”Years later in New York, I met the actress who played Nancy, and all I could do was babble incoherently, and ask how she survived filming that scene, what scar it must have left on her; what scar it left on me, just watching it. When I found out that Harper had been Truman’s assistant—that the two writers who had most haunted my childhood had been together, in that haunted place in Kansas—I couldn’t get over it. I thought I alone knew the secret of what must be the greatest story never told.

  Those were the underpinnings, so long ago, of Capote in Kansas—their fractured childhood next door to each other in Monroeville, Alabama; their reunion, over two decades later, in Kansas. Parts of those events have been well-documented, in many books and articles; the rest of the novel is a product of my life-long fascination, imagination, and even obsession. During the writing and research of this book, I consulted many sources; the two primary ones were Gerald Clarke’s masterful biography Capote and George Plimpton’s oral biography Truman Capote. Any factual errors, whether deliberate or unintentional, are entirely my own.

  A surprising amount of the book is based on real events, beginning with the childhood Halloween party that Truman threw, and Son and Sally Boular’s attempt to join it, only to be rescued from the Klan by Nelle’s father Amasa. (Son did in fact die of pneumonia when he was thirty, after having spent the bulk of his life in his father’s house, but Sally’s reaction to Nelle is entirely a product of my own imagination.)

  In broad outline, my account of the writing of In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird are based on fact, as are the existence of Harper’s sister Alice and the deaths of Harper’s mother and older brother Ed, within five weeks of each other. However, their private thoughts about each other, the details of their burials, the letters that Harper writes to her dead brother, and most certainly her travels to a nearby cemetery (that may or may not exist) are my own invention. Perhaps most audaciously, I have placed her at two events where I know she wasn’t present: Truman’s legendary Black and White Ball at the Plaza (she was, of course, invited); and his night of “bar-hopping” in Kansas City. Truman did, almost unbelievably for that time and place, take Detective Nye and his wife as well as another couple from a drag show to a gay bar to a lesbian bar. Harper was not there, and any of the attitudes or feelings my “character” Harper Lee expresses during that night are my own.

  Myrtle Bennett, Truman’s housekeeper during his time in Palm Springs, was a real person; at one point a Cotton Club dancer as I have written, Truman did in fact promise he would stake her in her own maid service. I’m sure the real Myrtle was much more aware of Truman’s fame and writings than I have made her, but one unfortunate fact I did not invent was her death from cancer. In reality, she died before Truman, and he was reportedly devastated by it. Of all the characters in the book, she is the one I would most like to have met. “Danny,” as Truman called him, was also a real lover of Truman’s during that period, but several of the events in which he participates (the stealing of the book manuscript, the “sugar-bombing” of his gas tank) are composites of others in Truman’s life.

  One of the most tantalizing—and to me, little-known details I discovered about Truman—were his “snake boxes,” as I call them. He began constructing these mysterious and evocative artworks late in his life, and they were exhibited at Manhattan’s Gotham Book Mart after his death. (When Truman approached Gotham’s Andreas Brown about his long-in-the-works “secret project,” Brown at first thought it might be Truman’s finished manuscript for Answered Prayers.) Many of the boxes were sold; some were left to friends in Truman’s will. More recently, a number of them were sold at auction. I was fascinated by them, but the use to which I put them is entirely my own.

  CAPOTE IN KANSAS

  A Ghost Story

  Copyright © 2007 by Kim Powers

  First Da Capo Press paperback edition 2008

  This is a work of fiction, suggested by certain incidents

  in the lives of its two main characters.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN : 978-0-786-72630-1

 

 

 
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