Authors: Truman Capote
N
ancy and her protégée, Jolene Katz, were also satisfied with their morning’s work; indeed, the latter, a thin thirteen-year-old, was agog with pride. For the longest while she stared at the blue-ribbon winner, the oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust, and then she was overcome, and hugging Nancy, asked, “Honest, did I really make it myself?” Nancy laughed, returned the embrace, and assured her that she had—with a little help.
Jolene urged that they sample the pie at once—no nonsense about leaving it to cool. “Please, let’s both have a piece. And you, too,” she said to Mrs. Clutter who had come into the kitchen. Mrs. Clutter smiled—attempted to; her head ached—and said thank you, but she hadn’t the appetite. As for Nancy, she hadn’t the time; Roxie Lee Smith, and Roxie Lee’s trumpet solo, awaited her, and afterward those errands for her mother, one of which concerned a bridal shower that some Garden City girls were organizing for Beverly, and another the Thanksgiving gala.
“You go, dear, I’ll keep Jolene company until her mother comes for her,” Mrs. Clutter said, and then, addressing the child with unconquerable timidity, added, “If Jolene doesn’t mind keeping
me
company.” As a girl she had won an elocution prize; maturity, it seemed, had reduced her voice to a single tone, that of apology, and her personality to a series of gestures blurred by the fear that she might give offense, in some way displease. “I hope you understand,” she continued after her daughter’s departure. “I hope you won’t think Nancy rude?”
“Goodness, no. I just love her to death. Well, everybody does. There isn’t anybody like Nancy. Do you know what Mrs. Stringer says?” said Jolene, naming her home-economics teacher. “One day she told the class, ‘Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady.’ ”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Clutter. “All my children are very efficient. They don’t need me.”
Jolene had never before been alone with Nancy’s “strange” mother, but despite discussions she had heard, she felt much at ease, for Mrs. Clutter, though unrelaxed herself, had a relaxing quality, as is generally true of defenseless persons who present no threat; even in Jolene, a very childlike child, Mrs. Clutter’s heart-shaped, missionary’s face, her look of helpless, homespun ethereality aroused protective compassion. But to think that she was Nancy’s mother! An aunt—that seemed possible; a visiting spinster aunt, slightly odd, but
nice
.
“No, they don’t need me,” she repeated, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Though all the other members of the family observed her husband’s boycott of this beverage, she drank two cups every morning and often as not ate nothing else the rest of the day. She weighed ninety-eight pounds; rings—a wedding band and one set with a diamond modest to the point of meekness—wobbled on one of her bony hands.
Jolene cut a piece of pie. “Boy!” she said, wolfing it down. “I’m going to make one of these every day seven days a week.”
“Well, you have all those little brothers, and boys can eat a lot of pie. Mr. Clutter and Kenyon, I know they never get tired of them. But the cook does—Nancy just turns up her nose. It’ll be the same with you. No, no—why do I say that?” Mrs. Clutter, who wore rimless glasses, removed them and pressed her eyes. “Forgive me, dear. I’m sure you’ll never know what it is to be tired. I’m sure you’ll always be happy . . .”
Jolene was silent. The note of panic in Mrs. Clutter’s voice had caused her to have a shift of feeling; Jolene was confused, and wished that her mother, who had promised to call back for her at eleven, would come.
Presently, more calmly, Mrs. Clutter asked, “Do you like miniature things? Tiny things?” and invited Jolene into the dining room to inspect the shelves of a whatnot on which were arranged assorted Lilliputian gewgaws—scissors, thimbles, crystal flower baskets, toy figurines, forks and knives. “I’ve had some of these since I was a child. Daddy and Mama—all of us—spent part of most years in California. By the ocean. And there was a shop that sold such precious little things. These cups.” A set of doll-house teacups, anchored to a diminutive tray, trembled in the palm of her hand. “Daddy gave them to me; I had a lovely childhood.”
The only daughter of a prosperous wheat grower named Fox, the adored sister of three older brothers, she had not been spoiled but spared, led to suppose that life was a sequence of agreeable events—Kansas autumns, California summers, a round of teacup gifts. When she was eighteen, inflamed by a biography of Florence Nightingale, she enrolled as a student nurse at St. Rose’s Hospital in Great Bend, Kansas. She was not meant to be a nurse, and after two years she confessed it: a hospital’s realities—scenes, odors—sickened her. Yet to this day she regretted not having completed the course and received her diploma—“just to prove,” as she had told a friend, “that I once succeeded at something.” Instead, she had met and married Herb, a college classmate of her oldest brother, Glenn; actually, since the two families lived within twenty miles of each other, she had long known him by sight, but the Clutters, plain farm people, were not on visiting terms with the well-to-do and cultivated Foxes. However, Herb was handsome, he was pious, he was strong-willed, he wanted her—and she was in love.
“Mr. Clutter travels a great deal,” she said to Jolene. “Oh, he’s always headed somewhere. Washington and Chicago and Oklahoma and Kansas City—sometimes it seems like he’s never home. But wherever he goes, he remembers how I dote on tiny things.” She unfolded a little paper fan. “He brought me this from San Francisco. It only cost a penny. But isn’t it pretty?”
The second year of the marriage, Eveanna was born, and three years later, Beverly; after each confinement the young mother had experienced an inexplicable despondency—seizures of grief that sent her wandering from room to room in a hand-wringing daze. Between the births of Beverly and Nancy, three more years elapsed, and these were the years of the Sunday picnics and of summer excursions to Colorado, the years when she really ran her own home and was the happy center of it. But with Nancy and then with Kenyon, the pattern of postnatal depression repeated itself, and following the birth of her son, the mood of misery that descended never altogether lifted; it lingered like a cloud that might rain or might not. She knew “good days,” and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those days when she was otherwise her “old self,” the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband’s pyramiding activities required. He was a “joiner,” a “born leader”; she was not and stopped attempting to be. And so, along paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semi-separate ways—his a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors. But she was not without hope. Trust in God sustained her, and from time to time secular sources supplemented her faith in His forthcoming mercy; she read of a miracle medicine, heard of a new therapy, or, as most recently, decided to believe that a “pinched nerve” was to blame.
“Little things really belong to you,” she said, folding the fan. “They don’t have to be left behind. You can carry them in a shoebox.”
“Carry them where to?”
“Why, wherever you go. You might be gone for a long time.”
Some years earlier Mrs. Clutter had traveled to Wichita for two weeks of treatment and remained two months. On the advice of a doctor, who had thought the experience would aid her to regain “a sense of adequacy and usefulness,” she had taken an apartment, then found a job—as a file clerk at the Y.W.C.A. Her husband, entirely sympathetic, had encouraged the adventure, but she had liked it too well, so much that it seemed to her unchristian, and the sense of guilt she in consequence developed ultimately outweighed the experiment’s therapeutic value.
“Or you might never go home. And—it’s important always to have with you something of your own. That’s really yours.”
The doorbell rang. It was Jolene’s mother.
Mrs. Clutter said, “Goodbye, dear,” and pressed into Jolene’s hand the paper fan. “It’s only a penny thing—but it’s pretty.”
Afterward Mrs. Clutter was alone in the house. Kenyon and Mr. Clutter had gone to Garden City; Gerald Van Vleet had left for the day; and the housekeeper, the blessed Mrs. Helm to whom she could confide anything, did not come to work on Saturdays. She might as well go back to bed—the bed she so rarely abandoned that poor Mrs. Helm had to battle for the chance to change its linen twice a week.
There were four bedrooms on the second floor, and hers was the last at the end of a spacious hall, which was bare except for a baby crib that had been bought for the visits of her grandson. If cots were brought in and the hall was used as a dormitory, Mrs. Clutter estimated, the house could accommodate twenty guests during the Thanksgiving holidays; the others would have to lodge at motels or with neighbors. Among the Clutter kinfolk the Thanksgiving get-together was an annual, turnabout to-do, and this year Herb was the appointed host, so it had to be done, but coinciding, as it did, with the preparations for Beverly’s wedding, Mrs. Clutter despaired of surviving either project. Both involved the necessity of making decisions—a process she had always disliked, and had learned to dread, for when her husband was off on one of his business journeys she was continually expected, in his absence, to supply snap judgments concerning the affairs of the farm, and it was unendurable, a torment. What if she made a mistake? What if Herb should be displeased? Better to lock the bedroom door and pretend not to hear, or say, as she sometimes did, “I can’t. I don’t know. Please.”
The room she so seldom left was austere; had the bed been made, a visitor might have thought it permanently unoccupied. An oak bed, a walnut bureau, a bedside table—nothing else except lamps, one curtained window, and a picture of Jesus walking on the water. It was as though by keeping this room impersonal, by not importing her intimate belongings but leaving them mingled with those of her husband, she lessened the offense of not sharing his quarters. The only used drawer in the bureau contained a jar of Vick’s Vaporub, Kleenex, an electric heating pad, a number of white nightgowns, and white cotton socks. She always wore a pair of these socks to bed, for she was always cold. And, for the same reason, she habitually kept her windows closed. Summer before last, on a sweltering August Sunday, when she was secluded here, a difficult incident had taken place. There were guests that day, a party of friends who had been invited to the farm to pick mulberries, and among them was Wilma Kidwell, Susan’s mother. Like most of the people who were often entertained by the Clutters, Mrs. Kidwell accepted the absence of the hostess without comment, and assumed, as was the custom, that she was either “indisposed” or “away in Wichita.” In any event, when the hour came to go to the fruit orchard, Mrs. Kidwell declined; a city-bred woman, easily fatigued, she wished to remain indoors. Later, while she was awaiting the return of the mulberry pickers, she heard the sound of weeping, heartbroken, heartbreaking. “Bonnie?” she called, and ran up the stairs, ran down the hall to Bonnie’s room. When she opened it, the heat gathered inside the room was like a sudden, awful hand over her mouth; she hurried to open a window. “Don’t!” Bonnie cried. “I’m not hot. I’m cold. I’m freezing. Lord, Lord, Lord!” She flailed her arms. “Please, Lord, don’t let anybody see me this way.” Mrs. Kidwell sat down on the bed; she wanted to hold Bonnie in her arms, and eventually Bonnie let herself be held. “Wilma,” she said, “I’ve been listening to you, Wilma. All of you. Laughing. Having a good time. I’m missing out on everything. The best years, the children—everything. A little while, and even Kenyon will be grown up—a man. And how will he remember me? As a kind of ghost, Wilma.”
Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing, and put on one of her trailing nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks. Then, before retiring, she exchanged her ordinary glasses for a pair of reading spectacles. Though she subscribed to several periodicals (the
Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest
, and
Together: Midmonth Magazine for Methodist Families
), none of these rested on the bedside table—only a Bible. A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”
T
he two young men had little in common, but they did not realize it, for they shared a number of surface traits. Both, for example, were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails. After their grease-monkey morning, they spent the better part of an hour sprucing up in the lavatory of the garage. Dick stripped to his briefs was not quite the same as Dick fully clothed. In the latter state, he seemed a flimsy dingy-blond youth of medium height, fleshless and perhaps sunken-chested; disrobing revealed that he was nothing of the sort, but, rather, an athlete constructed on a welterweight scale. The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings, self-designed and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word P
EACE
accompanied by a cross radiating, in the form of crude strokes, rays of holy light; and two sentimental concoctions—one a bouquet of flowers dedicated to M
OTHER
-D
AD
, the other a heart that celebrated the romance of D
ICK
and C
AROL
, the girl whom he had married when he was nineteen, and from whom he had separated six years later in order to “do the right thing” by another young lady, the mother of his youngest child. (“I have three boys who I will definitely take care of,” he had written in applying for parole. “My wife is remarried. I have been married twice, only I don’t want anything to do with my second wife.”)