He pats her arm and wanders out into the sun, where he sits in a lounger for the better part of the afternoon. He returns, not with an excerpt from Answered Prayers, but a simple portrait, exquisitely penned: ‘Remembering Willa Cather.’
He talks about her writing and recalls her kindness to him in his youth. They’d met by chance in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library when he was just a loud-mouthed nobody. She speaks to him now—the voice of an author with a cadence like his own.
He hands the pages to Joanne as he retreats to his room.
‘There you go, Jo. Happy birthday.’
THE NEXT DAY he rises and begins to dress for his morning swim.
It is earlier than usual—barely five o’clock. The boy knows this because he can just see the sun rising outside his postage-stamp window.
As he reaches to pull his swimming trunks on, his strength fails him.
He sits back on the bed, exposed. He feels his blue whale heart race with a surge of something he can’t control.
He cries out—‘Jo-Jo?’ No answer. ‘Jo-Jo… ?!’ Then, growing desperate as he had been in fleabag motels when his Mama locked him in while she stole out with her lovers, the boy shrieks in earnest—‘JO!’
You’re just the same as you always were, Truman.
You weren’t fooling any of us…
Just look at you…
Unlike his Mama, unlike us, Joanne comes running.
‘Truman, what is it… ? Whatever’s wrong?’
He’s sitting on the bed, naked. Madras swimming trunks halfway up his legs, a deflated fabric inner tube, dangling around his calves. Frozen in the effort of pulling them to his waist.
He looks at her with fixed, frightened eyes.
‘I think I’m dying,’ he tells her simply.
She checks his pulse, which is racing, but she’ll think what we’d think… Take it with a grain of salt; he’s always been high-strung.
Joanne rises. ‘I’ll go get you some juice.’
The boy pulls her back—‘No. Just sit with me. Sit with me so I’ll have someone to talk to.’
She relents and sits down beside him on the bed. The boy begins to talk, if only to enjoy the familiar timbre of his own voice. She feels his pulse as he recounts all the things he loves—about Jack, and Slim and Babe, about his inconsistent Mama. His pulse flutters, the whisper-weight of a moth, trapped inside his bone-cage.
‘Truman,’ Joanne says, fingers pressed to his wrist, ‘I think you’re in a little trouble… I need to call an ambulance. Let’s get you to the hospital right away.’
‘Honey, no.’ The boy grasps her arm with his deceptively strong grip.
‘You need a doctor—’
He looks at her. Imploring. Certain.
‘Please. No more doctors. No more hospitals. If you love me, let me go.’
Joanne’s eyes meet his, welling with tears. ‘What do you mean, let you go?’
‘Exactly what you think I mean.’
‘I can’t do that, Truman. You need help.’
‘Jo. Just let whatever’s gonna happen happen,’ he says, a sense of calm overtaking him. ‘I wanna leave—let me.’
Joanne shakes her head. ‘I can’t—I’m a doctor.’ (We’re not sure how being a nutritionist qualifies Joanne as a doctor…) ‘What will I tell them when they find out I knew you were in danger and didn’t call? I could get into trouble…’
‘Well, don’t tell them, dummy.’
Joanne will report she felt a sob escape her throat. ‘Truman, I can’t. Please don’t ask me this. I can’t bear to lose you.’
As he sits in this state, childlike, drained of ambition, the rattler’s venom sucked clean out of him, we’re stunned to find that we feel for him too.
‘Just think of me as going off to China. There’s no phones or mail service there, so think of me as being away…’ He shivers as he says it. ‘I’m cold… so cold. Hold me… ?’
Joanne swaddles him in a blanket and wraps her arms around him, rocking him. She quietly sobbing. He talking, ever so softly. (We can hear him, even if she can’t.)
He imagines that her arms are Jack’s, holding him tight in his protective grasp. Or his Mama, cradling him close, telling him in dulcet tones what a fine boy he is.
He thinks of how he’d longed to have been there for Babe in the end. How he would have held her close and told her how very much he loved her—how she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever met. Inside and out. How he never meant to hurt her—or any of us.
He has flashes of us, the idealized snapshots he treasures for each.
Clinging to Slim on a freezing Russian train, wrapped in a dozen coats to stave off the ferocious cold, knocking back shot after shot of crystal-clear Mama-juice as it trickles like lava down their throats. Of Lee, back when she was lovely in a white bathing suit, before she could fathom betraying him, sipping frothy piña coladas from coconut shells in matching insect shades. Of C.Z. in her garden, in jodhpurs and pearls, garden mitts up to her elbows like a pair of mud-caked debutante gloves, telling him all about the first flowers to grace the new branches of spring. Of Gloria, in Acapulco, her olive skin all the more so against her crisp striped djellaba—beneath her domed palapa, where she drops international graces and sets the uncensored Latina in her free, at home in her natural habitat. Of Marella, on their first Amalfi tour, sunbathing topless on the polished deck, when a Corsican swallowtail lands on her exposed breast…
Or, wait—was that not Babe?
Babe comes to him in a hundred images all at once, perhaps the most indelible of which is her beautiful face leaning across an intimate luncheon table, whispering, close to his own…
‘Babe!’ he cries out loud, telling her, under his breath, all that he needs to say to her; all that he never got to say in the end.
The boy talks and talks in the canopy bed—its four posters the gallows for a pair of piñatas he’ll never crack open—the words that once eluded him flowing like a cool Alabama stream.
He sees it all, in filmic flashes——the snippets of memory he cherishes. What he’ll remember… What will flicker before him when the end finally comes.
The last words of Answered Prayers, which he wrote before his first. The final page, which he’s kept in a very special place since 1954, since the day that his Mama killed herself. It was always for her that he did what he did.
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones…
The boy finds it difficult to get air into his cetacean lungs—or is it his heart?
It feels like he’s drowning. He imagines himself by the river dock… He’s fallen into the water. He can’t swim, in this version of the fiction. All he can do is let the gentle current take him, gasping for air, clinging to his memories.
It’s a sweltering day in Monroeville
The kind of day when lizards sizzle on the pavement,
The kind that sears the tender pads of doggies’ paws.
The boy is eight, maybe nine, in a garden thrumming with bees. He’s digging up his cousin Jenny’s vegetable patch himself, desperate to tunnel his way to China.
He picks round ripe tomatoes from the vine, the heirlooms he and a kind man called Jack once ate with fresh-caught redfish after a swim.
He runs through a cedar forest toward a crystal creek, where he washes the tomatoes and peels back their outer skin to reveal slushy inner guts.
In the distance a dog barks, possibly the beagle he’d won for his stories and never received. He can just hear the snippets of the Negro spiritual from the First Baptist Church in the little ole country town… I’ve got two wings for to veil my face, I got two wings for to fly away…
Fly away…
The boy bathes himself in the creek, to the cadence of cicadas, to the clucks of the porch chat and the trill of Nelle’s mockingbirds.
To a porch swing with croaks like the bullfrogs at the swimming hole.
Then, gliding through the river water, he sees it
—a snake. The very water moccasin that bit him years before, when the farmer’s wife and his Faulk Carter cousins slaughtered five fresh hens, dousing his bite with poultry blood to cure him. He watches the serpent writhing in the water, setting it a-ripple. Swimming ever closer…
But the boy is not afraid. Ophidian ribboning toward him, he stands stock-still, just as his Daddy once taught him—cool as a cucumber.
This is his species, after all.
Are you sure you aren’t afraid, Truman… ?
‘Stop,’ the boy says aloud, to no one in particular.
The scene shifts—it’s ten years later.
He’s nineteen, but he still looks twelve. He’s in a smoky jazz club in Manhattan, on West 52nd. The Famous Door.
He sits enraptured, watching Lady Day, signature gardenia in her hair, though he chooses now to remember it as a Little Gem magnolia—just like the ones Nina kept out on a crummy fire escape in her Bronx walk-up. Just like the kind Big Daddy removed from its plastic coffin and pinned in Big Mama’s butterscotch mane. He watches, mesmerized, as Miss Holiday’s heroin-dimmed eyes gaze into the cheap glow of a lavender follow spot. A look the boy will come to share in decades’ time, squinting into the rose-hued strobe light on the floor at 54, dancing a frenzied, tipsy jitterbug to the Big Bands in his mind.
Good morning, heartache, thought we’d said goodbye last night…
The boy is twenty-nine. He is in Italy. He is in love…
He is standing on a terrace in Taormina. Stucco covered in bougainvillea, the scent of ripe blood oranges perfuming the air.
A passenger boat is arriving from the mainland. On the wharf, carrying a suitcase, is someone the boy knows well—a man’s man with freckles and dark auburn hair. A man who had said goodbye, for all the reasons you’d expect, but who has come back. A man who’s changed his mind. A man walking toward him, choosing him.
‘Jack!’ the boy calls out, as if he’s still wondrous new to him.
Something he’ll never tire of.
The boy ages in an instant to a ripe old forty-one.
He knows this because he’s both waited for this day and dreaded it for six long years. It is the day that will make him as an artist, but destroy him as a man. Another man approaches, this one limping toward him, wearing a leather harness. He trembles as a cigarette is lifted to his lips and he takes a last drag. He smiles at the boy, and whispers in his ear—
‘Amigo.’
He shakes the hand of the lawman who captured him, as if encountering a long-lost friend. Twenty minutes later he is dead, twitching at the end of a rope, eyes bulging beneath a delicate black mask that has been tied over them to conceal the barbarity of his passing.
The images are coming faster now, along with his racing pulse—
A drive through the Alps, with air so crisp it scrapes the mucus from his lungs. A thunderstorm in Central Park, breathtaking pyrotechnics.
Streamers on the Champs-Élysées, sticking to shoe heels like soggy seaweed, just before he gets the call his Mama’s gone away for good. Billows of reddest smoke from her prior attempts to leave him.
The Ritz bar in Paris. Lilac in a lobby.
A bulldog pup, howling in the dunes—though he’s uncertain if it’s a girl called Maggie or a boy called Charlie J. Fatburger.
Hope’s End… a garden in the desert, a brittle, thirsty landscape.
The rustle of branches in the chinaberry trees, and the laughter of a colt-girl who climbs them in record time.
Love, pure, shimmering love. Then love, the violent, toxic kind.
A bevy of swans, their feathers trailing on the placid lake like ball gowns—or their ball gowns trailing on the dance floor like feathers… he can’t remember which.
‘Beautiful Babe—’ the boy breathes.
The down-creaks of sweet Sook’s rocking chair as she mends long johns to his high, melodic voice, reading aloud from the Obits,’ bout all the folks who’ve come and gone, and all the folks who’ll carry on without them.
An old lady with the soul of a child and a small child with the soul of a very old man, flying homemade kites together.
‘Sook—wait! It’s Buddy… I’m coming!’
And then there she is—Nina.
Barely more than a girl herself, her honeyed pin-curls restored. Lips redder than a tin fire engine a con man called Daddy once gave him. She hands him a cup of Mama-juice, stroking the white fringe that tops his head once more, telling him what a fine boy he is…
‘Mama!’ he says aloud.
Warm, amniotic fluid against his heart. Or is it the stuff he’s expelled from his lips, the body possessing a will of its own?
She smiles at him, offering her hand; he stretches his toy limb out to grasp it.
‘Mama!’ he calls again. As Joanne Carson rocks him gently, the boy mistakes her for Lillie Mae. He has already sprouted wings and flown away, soaring over the Bund.
Suddenly, he finds himself back in the Alabama river, with its gentle currents, on which he floats. He sees the cottonmouth circling, but he has ceased to care. He thinks he sees the face of an angel, features obscured, surrounded by a halo of light…
Mr. Angelotti, have we reached the city of your kind… ? ‘Mama…’ he exhales, a third and final time.
And just like that, she brushing his cheek with her tender lips, his blue whale heart bursts, his Mean Reds and wasted love exploding into an invisible shower of crimson confetti.
CODA
THE NIGHT BEFORE his heart burst, he’d reached into the pockets of his Fu Manchu pajamas and procured a key from their silken folds.
He handed it wordlessly to Joanne, between the wontons and shumai and Eight Treasure Chicken (he having informed the delivery boy that eight was a lucky number in Chinese culture).
‘What’s this?’ she had asked him.
‘Answered Prayers,’ he’d smiled.
‘Where is it?’
Truman had shrugged with a cryptic grin. He’d always loved a secret.
‘Oh… any number of places. It could be in a Greyhound depot in Houston or N’awlins… Or it could be in a deposit box, in a bank in Zurich or Wall Street. Once I left it in the safe behind the counter in Harry’s Bar in Venice. But I thought better of that and moved it to a strongbox at the Ritz. In fact… I moved it around so many times, I can’t quite remember where I left it in the end.’
‘But how will I know how to find it, Truman?’
He’d paused, thought for a long moment, then replied, something we feel certain that he’s sure of— ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. It’ll be found… when it wants to be found.’
Grinning, he nibbled at an egg roll— beside himself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SO MANY PEOPLE contribute to the creation of a book. Especially one that’s taken a decade to research and four years to write. As Truman famously said, ‘Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.’ I owe the following ‘a lot’ and then some…
First and foremost, my brilliant co-conspirators, honourary Swans: My agent, Karolina Sutton—champion, truth-teller, match-maker extraordinaire—whose passion for good writing has emboldened every choice, and whose investment in the long game inspires all that will come. And Jocasta Hamilton—who was the only editor for Truman and our Swans, who understood the depth and pathos beneath their glamour from the ‘third scotch and first lie,’ and who has allowed me every experiment and freedom in the manner of telling their tales.
To Joan Didion for so generously allowing me to introduce my words with hers—words that have meant so much to me over the years, the details of which prove eerily apt here.
The germ of the idea for this narrative came to me in Provence in 2006. Thanks to Michael Ondaatje, Alan Lightman and Russell Celyn Jones for early inspiration.
Swan Song was born of the UEA Guardian Masterclass and completed on the Prose Fiction MA at the University of East Anglia, and owes a debt of gratitude to both camps.
To James S
cudamore, who first heard the chorus singing, without whose early mentorship this would likely not exist. To Jon Cook, whose belief in the promise of this work helped open closed-doors and allowed me to continue the journey.
At UEA, my tutors and peers helped shepherd this book through late incarnations. To Andrew Cowan, story whisperer, who asked all the right questions. Rebecca Stott for conjuring muses past. Laura Joyce for encouraging future collectives. Joe Dunthorne for calm amidst the storm. Philip Langeskov for show-casing new work. Henry Sutton for support in the home stretch. And to my cohort-in-trenches—whose investment in Truman & Co. was essential.
Swan Song would be nowhere without the recognition of literary contests and prizes for novels-in-progress. They were my passport from a world of aspiration to one of realization.
To the Bridport Prize—Kate Wilson and all involved. I am deeply proud to be the first winner of the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award to be published. To Aki Schilz and everyone at TLC—especially the late, great Rebecca Swift.
To my whole ‘family’ at the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize in Cambridge, particularly Nelle Andrew, Allison Pearson, and Gillian Stern. Your platform for female debut novelists is such an important one, something I’m honoured to be a part of.
To Candida Lacey at Myriad First Drafts—who championed this book from Cygnet stage—and to Elizabeth Enfield who I was lucky enough to have as a judge and gain as a friend.
To Richard Lee and the Historical Novel Society New Novel Award. Your passion for historical fiction is invaluable for anyone who does what I do.
To Caroline Ambrose and the Bath Novel Award, a force of good for writers.
To my second sets of eyes from the get-go—Sarah Newell and Megan Davis. And to my London writing group for post-Swan motivation—Ms. Davis (again), Emily Ruth Ford, Sophie Kirk-wood, Campaspe Lloyd-Jacob, Elizabeth Macneal, Richard O’Halloran and Tom Watson.
To Lucy Morris and Enrichetta Frezzato at Curtis Brown— as Truman would say, ‘Merci mille fois!’
To my phenomenal team at Penguin Random House/ Hutchinson—Random House was Capote’s publisher throughout his career. It’s been a treat to bring him home.
Particular shout-outs to Najma Finlay and Celeste Ward-Best, who have heralded the Swans with trumpets blaring. To Lauren Wakefield for her beautiful, brainy cover. To Sasha Cox and my incredible sales team. And to Isabelle Everington, who has weathered my perfectionism with patience and grace through drafts galore. To you all, I raise endless Negronis.
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