Capote (2 page)

His was a dazzling talent, too large to be confined to his job with the Streckfuses. During March and August, his two free months, and in whatever other spare time he had, he continued to hunt for that gold mine, as he called it, that was waiting just over the hill. During the years when Truman was a baby, he tried any number of schemes, each one of which he expected to be the mother lode. One year he managed a prizefighter who went by the name of Joe Littleton. Arch wanted to stage a match in Monroeville, right on the courthouse square, and, to get publicity, he sent the main attraction jogging around town in his boxing shorts. “All the ladies were scandalized,” remembered Lillie Mae’s sister Mary Ida Carter. “They had never seen a man’s legs before.” But the city council, alarmed by the uproar, passed an ordinance banning boxing within the town limits, and Joe Littleton put his trousers back on and returned home to New Orleans.

Another time, Arch spied that elusive gold mine in the Great Pasha, otherwise known as Sam Goldberg from the Bronx. Goldberg, who wore a turban and a robe, made his living putting on a kind of grotesque variety act. His best trick, the gimmick that excited Arch so much, was his ability to survive burial. With the help of what was advertised as a secret Egyptian drug, he could retard his heartbeat to such an abnormally slow rate that he hardly needed to breathe; he could remain alive in an airtight coffin for up to five hours. Calling him the “World’s Foremost Man of Mystery,” Arch staged his Pasha show—“Burial Alive, Blindfold Drive, Nailed to Cross, Torture Act and 100 others”—in half a dozen places. In Monroeville, people came to see it from a hundred miles around; even the banks closed for the day. Despite their success, Arch and the Pasha eventually quarreled and parted. For Arch it may have been just as well. Not long after their breakup, Goldberg’s Egyptian drug failed him, and one day when his coffin was dug up, the Great Pasha was as still as the Pharaohs.

Arch had other projects: a plan to syndicate shorthand lessons in newspapers, a magazine for sororities and fraternities, a series of popularity contests for high school girls. There was, in fact, no end to his schemes. His mind shot off ideas like a Fourth of July sparkler, and he thought of little else but new ways to make his fortune. “Money is the sixth sense, without which the other five are of no avail,” he liked to say, and he believed that it was his destiny to be rich. If he had had some extra quality—perhaps nothing more extraordinary than patience—he might have fulfilled that destiny and become as famous a promoter as Billy Rose, Mike Todd, or the man he resembled most of all, P. T. Barnum. But whatever that quality was, he did not possess it. His emotional barometer was subject to too many fluctuations—ebullience one day, depression the next—and he did not have the temperament to stick to any single thing for very long. He was, moreover, not always scrupulous about how he acquired his money. As he rushed toward fortune, he sometimes stooped very low to pick up a dollar and looked less and less like a visionary promoter and more and more like an ordinary con man. The image that remains from those years is that of the local sheriff automatically fingering the keys to the lockup every time Arch came to town. Even his mother, who was convinced that God meant for him to do something grand and important, complained that he did not know the difference between right and wrong.

L
OOKING
back years later, Lillie Mae often said that she had married Arch only to get away from home. Sometimes, however, when she was in a mellow mood, she admitted that she had once loved him—and that is doubtless the truth of the matter. “Arch was so romantic,” said Mary Ida. “He would always bring her a bouquet of flowers—even if he had to go to the side of the yard to pick them.” But their romance scarcely outlasted their courtship: Arch was an easy man to like, but he was not an easy man to love; the very thing that made him so charming—all those promises he passed out so freely—invariably led to disenchantment. Instead of forgiving him his feckless ways, as she might have done if he had not raised her hopes so high, Lillie Mae held them against him, convinced that he had deceived her. “She thought that she had been hooked into marrying him,” said Seabon. “She had thought she was marrying a man who would give her some security and a home life.” Arch could give her neither, and if she had not become pregnant, it is doubtful that they would have stayed together more than a year.

As it was, their marriage did not so much end as it dissolved, slowly at first and then faster and faster, like a cube of sugar dropped into an iced drink. Lillie Mae appears to have made an effort to preserve it for a few months after Truman was born, but she soon gave up and other men entered her life. “She’d take a notion to a fellow and she just couldn’t wait to get into bed with him,” said Arch. “She wanted a thrill and she would get it. Then in three or four weeks she’d be through with it and ready to go on to something else.” In the seven years they were man and wife, Arch claimed to have counted twenty-nine such affairs. His brother John, who also had been tricked and lied to by Arch, was willing to forgive Lillie Mae her adulteries; what he could not forgive her was her poor choice in men. “Invariably,” he complained in one letter, “they are either Greeks, Spaniards, college sheiks, foolish young city upstarts, or just as immature small-town habitants.”

The first on the list may have been a Central American who appeared in the summer of 1925. Matching all the stereotypes of the hot-blooded Latin lover, he was passionate, he lavished presents on her, and he threatened to kill her if he ever saw her with another man, excluding her husband, of course. Arch did not like her seeing him—or so he later said—but he did not make an issue of it. “What could I do?” he asked plaintively. “She’d slip around and see him when I was working. It was just something I didn’t talk about.”

To avoid embarrassing confrontations, Lillie Mae would usually see her Latin in the afternoon. But sometimes at night, after she had told him where she and Arch were going, he would also follow them into a movie theater. She would help Arch find a seat in the front row—he was so shortsighted that he could barely see the screen if he was farther back—and she would then join her lover in a secluded corner in the rear. When the film was over, she would return to Arch and the other man would go home to his own wife. Near-sighted as he was, Arch was usually aware of what was happening.

Several times she carried out her trysts in front of Truman, believing, no doubt, that he was too young to notice. In that she was mistaken. “She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis,” Truman recalled. “I was only two or so, but I remember it clearly, right down to what he looked like—he had brown hair. We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch. Suddenly they had a big fight. He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it. He only stopped when I became hysterical. A couple of years after that, she took me to Jacksonville to leave me with my grandmother. She and my father were more or less separated by that time, and she went out with several young men while she was there. One night I could hear them doing whatever they were doing in the rumble seat of a car. Another night she brought a man right into the house. She must have been drinking, because I could hear her giggling and her voice sounded funny. Suddenly all the lights came on and she and my grandmother were yelling at each other. She then started packing and every few minutes she would come on to the porch where I was sleeping. She would cry, put her arms around me and tell me she would never leave me. Once again I became hysterical, and at that point my memory stops cold.”

Not all of her lovers were Greeks, Spaniards, or college sheiks. One, Jack Dempsey, the ex–heavyweight champion of the world, satisfied even John Persons’ exacting standards. Lillie Mae met him when she was traveling with Truman on a train from Memphis to St. Louis. “We were sitting in the coach section when a man walked up and down the aisle and looked at my mother—I was used to men looking at my mother. Then he asked us to have a drink in Dempsey’s compartment. I knew even then who Dempsey was, or at least I knew that he was somebody famous. So we went to his compartment and my mother talked to him. After a while Dempsey suggested to the man, who must have been his manager, that he take me to the observation car for a Coke, and he and I went back there and sat watching the rails for most of the afternoon. I remember saying, ‘Where’s my mother?’ But I knew where she was. Things like that happened a lot.”

One reason Arch remained so quiet all those years, methodically counting his wife’s lovers as if he were keeping score in a card game, was that he was not above using them to help him turn a dollar. When they were first married, for example, he persuaded her to cash bad checks for him, employing her good looks as a come-on. In Dempsey, for example, he saw one of his gold mines—bigger even than the Great Pasha—and with Lillie Mae as his go-between, he persuaded the ex-champ, who was still an enormously popular figure, like Charles Lindbergh or Will Rogers, to referee a wrestling match in Columbus, Mississippi. He sent out thousands of promotional fliers, had letterheads printed with both his picture and Dempsey’s, and erected wooden stands to seat 11,500. “There wasn’t a big enough place in the state to hold the people we expected!” he exclaimed. But luck eluded him yet again. A terrible storm pelted Columbus on “Jack Dempsey Day,” November 10, 1930, and even Dempsey was not popular enough to persuade more than 3,000 people to sit in the wind and rain. Arch failed to meet his expenses.

Though she was not faithful, Lillie Mae stuck by Arch in most other ways, long after most women would have dismissed him. She overlooked his failures, defended him during his increasingly frequent troubles with the law, and helped him when she could. Though their times together grew progressively shorter, neither mentioned divorce; both of them seemed content with their civilized arrangement.

The only one hurt was Truman, and if it is true, as psychologists say, that a child’s greatest anxiety—the original fear—is that he will be deserted by his parents, then he had good reason to be anxious. Between Arch’s schemes and Lillie Mae’s affairs, there was little time for him. When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do. “Eventually,” he recalled, “I would become so exhausted that I would just throw myself on the bed or on the floor until they came back. Every day was a nightmare, because I was afraid that they would leave me when it turned dark. I had an intense fear of being abandoned, and I remember practically all of my childhood as being lived in a state of constant tension and fear.” An early memory, undoubtedly the recollection of a dream rather than an actual event, is symbolic of those lonely years: as he was walking through the St. Louis Zoo with a black nurse, he heard screams—a lion was loose. The nurse ran away and he was left all by himself, with no place to hide and no safety anywhere.

Lillie Mae made sporadic attempts to keep him with her. In the winter of 1929 she even took him to Kentucky, where, still hoping to find a career for herself, she spent a few weeks in a business college. Arch also professed endless love. But neither one was willing to be a full-time parent or make any permanent sacrifice. They loved him, in short, only when they were not otherwise engaged. Sometimes they left him with Arch’s widowed mother, who had married a Presbyterian minister in Jacksonville. More often they deposited him with Lillie Mae’s relations in Monroeville. Finally, in the summer of 1930, a few months before his sixth birthday, they left him there for good—or for as long as anyone could then foresee. Arch busied himself with his projects; Lillie Mae went off to visit friends in Colorado. Truman’s fear that they would abandon him had finally come true.

I
T
was a strange household he entered in Monroeville, unique to the South, peculiar to the time: three quarrelsome sisters in late middle age, their reclusive older brother, and an atmosphere heavy with small secrets and ancient resentments. Jennie, Callie, Sook, and Bud, united by blood and the boundaries of the rambling old house on Alabama Avenue, divided by jealousy and the accumulated hurts of half a century.

Jennie, a handsome but slightly masculine-looking woman with red hair, was the boss, the final and absolute authority on all matters of consequence. As a young woman, she had realized that she was the only one capable of supporting the family, and she had gone off to learn the hat trade in St. Louis and Pensacola, Florida, returning to open her own shop on the courthouse square. At that time women would not step out the door without some extravagant display on their heads, and Jennie prospered, turning their vague and unarticulated fantasies into fireworks of frills and feathers. Eventually she expanded her shop until it carried everything a woman could want but the shoes on her feet. She would not stoop to fit smelly feet, Jennie declared. “She was the strongest woman I’ve ever seen,” said Seabon, “and one of the finest businesswomen who ever lived. She was one of the first stockholders of both the Monroe County Bank and the First National Bank of Monroeville. She had her hand into everything.” Jennie was also known for her violent temper. She once whipped a lazy yardman with a dog chain; another time, spotting someone who she thought had cheated her, she jumped out of her car and attacked him on his own front porch, in front of his wife and children. People walked on tiptoes when Jennie was around.

Callie, the youngest and at one time the prettiest of the sisters, with curly black hair, had started out as a schoolteacher. When Jennie’s hat shop began to make money, Jennie ordered her to quit and help with accounts, and like everyone else in that house, Callie did as she was told, keeping the books and pecking out business letters on an old typewriter. But Callie, like many weak people, retaliated by constantly nagging and complaining, her head held high in a permanent position of moral superiority. When Jennie decided to skip church, for example, as she sometimes did, Callie would become indignant. “Oh, Jennie, that’s so sinful!” she would say. “I’m goin’!” And so she would, steaming out the door in her Sunday best like a liner leaving harbor, pennants flying and horns tooting. Knowing that both Jennie and Sook, the third sister, were secret tipplers—good Baptists, particularly good Baptist ladies, were not supposed to indulge—she also made it one of her tasks in life to ferret out and empty the bottles of bourbon they had stashed away. Jennie, for one, was unrepentant and always managed to keep a safe supply; weekend mornings she often could be found on the porch sipping what she discreetly called iced tea. If a neighbor, like Mrs. Lee from next door, happened by, she would invite her in for a glass—and then go into the kitchen to brew a pot of real tea.