Mockingbird (20 page)

For Nelle, it all added up with the material she had collected from the interviews—the house's interior, careful as a window display; the showy sanctimony of religious materials on view; and Mrs. Clutter, still an attractive woman in her midforties, sleeping apart from her husband and medicated for depression. Then there was Nancy, in her officelike bedroom, channeling sexual feelings into love objects such as stuffed toys appropriate for younger children. (The week of her death, her father had ordered her to break up with Bobby because Herb had caught the two petting, Nelle learned.)
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And in the room next door to his sister's, Kenyon burrowed into his textbooks. No friends could link him to a girl. In school photographs, his face is completely without expression. In Herb Clutter's household, emotions were screwed down tight.

On one rare occasion Nancy had cracked. Mrs. Stringer told Nelle it had happened when she was giving the Clutter girl a ride home after school. As they were about to turn up the River Valley Farm's tree-lined lane, Nancy asked if they could please stop for a moment. Mrs. Stringer pulled over and waited. Groping for words, Nancy broke down: “If you only knew about Mother,” she said, gasping between shuddering sobs.
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Nancy's mother was a casualty, but no one inside the family seemed to want to acknowledge it. “I can't worry about her,” Herb snapped when someone in the community suggested they try the doctors at the Mayo Clinic.
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Bonnie Clutter's emotional illness had left Nancy feeling utterly alone, deprived of female reassurance. Nelle spoke to a number of people who had known Nancy and her mother well, but she couldn't find “anything resembling a normal mother-daughter relationship.… Nancy was one of the lonely ones, not made any the less lonely by the fact that her days were spent in almost unceasing activity.…”
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Yet she was expected to carry on energetically, competently, like one of her father's employees. The normal concerns and feelings of a teenage girl had no place or outlet. She was a child, Nelle wrote sympathetically, “who had been trained by an expert to make every second and every penny count, bear her private sorrows in private and present a cheerful aspect to the public; she was taught early in life to take everything to God in prayer.… How did she maintain the outward semblance of a wholesome, extremely bright and popular sweet teenager without cracking at the seams? Her family life was ghastly.”
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In that light, Beverly and Eveanna's diamond-hard reserve offered its own explanation.

Bonnie Clutter was also a victim of the pressure that had caused Nancy to burst into tears, Nelle believed. But she suffered the additional pain of being tormented by guilt by what she saw as her failure to measure up to Herb's expectations on every count. As if arguing for the deceased, Nelle characterized Bonnie as “stomped into the ground by her husband's Christ-like efforts to regulate her existence.… She was probably one of the world's most wretched women: highly creative in instinct but with the creative will in her stifled over the years by a dominating husband.… She seems totally to lack a sense of achievement in any relationship; and truly so, for there's no indication that she was successful as a wife, a lover, a mother, a homemaker; or that she was successful as an effective personality in her own right or as Clutter's helpmate.”
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*   *   *

The Clutters were an emotionally troubled family, and Lee wrote pages of notes providing evidence of it. But in the end, Capote barely used her insights in the final version of what would become
In Cold Blood.
One reason was simple: a harsh view of a murdered family would have been unacceptable. Feeling sympathy for the innocent was natural, and Capote, who wanted literary fame and a bestseller, knew better than to alienate readers. But another reason why it was necessary to paint the Clutters in flattering hues emerged later. Originally, Truman had arrived in Kansas to write about the impact of multiple murders on a small town. After he got to know the killers, however—two unexpectedly intelligent men but without moral restraint—Capote saw possibilities for a story about the nature of evil. To tell it in the strongest dramatic terms, he needed a foil for evil that was unblemished—an idealized Clutter family. He was aware, of course, that Herb Clutter, the “master of River Valley farm,” could be a hard man and not always the benevolent neighbor and paterfamilias that Herb himself wanted to be seen as. Local authorities, in fact, seriously entertained the theory at first that Clutter's inflexible attitude might have led to the murders. “Clutter prohibited hunters from hunting on his land,” one deputy said. “Maybe one of them overrode Clutter's objections and ran into an argument that got out of hand.”
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But to keep the Clutters consistent with his vision, Capote took the hunting scenario and turned it around. Early in
In Cold Blood
, he has Herb Clutter encounter some hunters trespassing on his land. In life, Herb would have sent them packing. The fictionalized Herb, on the other hand, is a model of Christian charity. When the trespassers “offered to hire hunting rights, Mr. Clutter was amused. ‘I'm not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you can,' he said. Then, touching the brim of his cap, he headed for home and the day's work, unaware that it would be his last.”
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It's a Hollywood fade-out by a writer with screenwriting experience who knew the importance of keeping the good guys separate from the bad guys.

*   *   *

The day following the visit to the farm, Monday, began the workweek leading up to Christmas on Friday, which would mean an enforced break in Nelle and Truman's research. The courthouse, library, and post office would be closed; even local law enforcement authorities would be hard to reach. To celebrate Christmas Day, the two would probably have to fall back on a holiday dinner special in the Warren Hotel coffee shop—turkey, gravy, instant potatoes, and canned cranberry sauce.

The holidays were unavoidable; but it was also isolation, the inimical feature of the prairies, that was still interfering with their making steady progress. Truman had arrived in Kansas with no friends, and still he hadn't made any. Like a child going to camp for the first time, he had boarded the train in New York with a suitcase loaded with food, afraid there wouldn't be any he liked where he was going. On the other hand, he was aware of Nelle's ability to get along with people and tolerate his need for attention. “She is a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious or dour,” he later told his friend George Plimpton, for a 1966
New York Times
interview, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel.”
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But under the terms of their partnership in Garden City, she was only following his lead. So far, they hadn't been in a friendly social situation where she could model, in a sense, how to take Truman “Cappuchi”—which was indulgently, and with a big grain of salt.

On Christmas Eve, Nelle spent part of the day assembling a description of the Clutters' last evening, based on several interviews with Nancy's boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, who had stayed at their house watching television until 10:00
P.M.
on November 14. Sometime after that, police estimated, the killers had arrived.

The phone rang in Nelle's room. It was Cliff Hope. “You and Truman going to be in town tomorrow?” he asked.

Nelle said they were.

“Any plans?”

None that she knew of.

“How about coming over for Christmas dinner?” He mentioned that he and his wife, Dolores, were having another couple over: Detective Alvin Dewey and his wife, Marie.
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She and Truman accepted.

*   *   *

The Hopes lived in a cream-colored two-story house built in 1908 in Garden City—an old house by western standards—on Gillespie Place, a block-long street with a sign at either end announcing a private drive: “an attempt to establish a small-town aristocracy at one time, I suppose,” remarked one of the Hopes' daughters, Holly.
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There were eleven houses on Gillespie Place: eight across from the Hopes, and only three on their side. On Sundays, people tended to drive past slowly and stare.

Truman and Nelle arrived half an hour late because first he had to locate a gift bottle of J&B scotch, his favorite brand. During the introductions, Detective Al Dewey's wife, Marie, an attractive raven-haired woman, explained her southern accent by saying she was Kansan by marriage but Deep South by birth and upbringing—from New Orleans, in fact; to which Truman replied that he had been born in New Orleans and Nelle was from Alabama. “It was instant old home week,” said Al Dewey.
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Nelle, shaking hands, insisted everyone call her by her first name.

“Can I help in the kitchen?” she asked Dolores Hope.

“This way,” Dolores replied happily. As the two women took twice-baked potatoes from the oven and put condiments in bowls to go with roast duck, the main course, Dolores found herself liking Nelle right away. “After you talked to her for three minutes, you felt like you'd known her for years. She was ‘just folks'—interested in others, kind, and humorous.”
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Dolores announced that dinner was ready, and the adults seated themselves in the dining room. The Hopes' four children—Christine, Nancy, Quentin, and Holly—sat at a smaller version of the grown-ups' table.

Looking around the scene, Truman realized it was a breakthrough in eliminating the town's suspicions about them, and he also knew Nelle deserved the thanks: “She was extremely helpful in the beginning when we weren't making much headway with the townspeople, by making friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet,” he later told Plimpton.
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Here he was sharing a meal with Alvin Dewey, the coordinator of the Clutter investigation, who had completely stonewalled him just two weeks earlier. And as dinner got under way, Truman further learned that both couples, the Deweys and the Hopes, were bright, well-informed people, interested in him, Nelle, and books. “Reading was an unqualified good” in the Hope family, said Holly Hope, “a quiet pleasure, not requiring special equipment or adult supervision. The glass doors of the built-in china cabinet in the dining room were removed to make room for more books; magazines and newspapers accumulated on coffee tables and chairs until my mother took a stack to a neighbor or to a doctor's office. Even the rest of the household hesitated to interrupt a member of the family who was embarked on a story.”
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Al Dewey was a book lover, too; his ability to read deeply had helped him breeze through law enforcement training. Marie Dewey was secretary to Cliff Hope's father, former U.S. congressman Clifford R. Hope. Cliff, Jr., was a Harvard graduate; and Dolores wrote for the
Garden City Telegram.

At last Truman was in his element with an audience; and the irrepressible raconteur leaned forward to signal that he was about to launch into one of his best tales. “Capote was the center,” Al remembered. “What he had to say and the way he said it was usually intelligent and always interesting. His friend (she asked us to call her ‘Nelle') was unaffected and charming. She joined everyone else in listening to Capote, never attempting to upstage or interrupt him. Capote talked about himself mostly … what he had written, who was suing him.”
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Through it all, everyone took their cue from Nelle, who rocked back and forth with laughter at Truman's gossip and love of attention, and winked confidentially at the others when it was obvious Truman was stretching the truth. Dolores Hope said Nelle's motherly attitude was “almost like if you have a child who doesn't behave well” and begs people's indulgence.
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One of the Hopes' daughters, Holly, later author of
Garden City: Dreams in a Kansas Town
, said Christmas dinner that night brought together six people who became lifetime friends because they met on an intellectual level. “My experience in a small town is that there are always some people who have been involved in the arts and they like to keep up, but they might not have much opportunity. So when someone like Lee and Capote come through, it's a big deal. You just have to tap into it.”
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By the end of the evening, Marie Dewey had invited Truman and Nelle to dinner at their house for red beans and rice—a real southern dinner. It was music to their ears. And Truman felt emboldened to ask a favor of Al. He and Nelle were going over to see Dr. Fenton, the coroner, the next day—would Al meet them there to smooth the way? Sure he would, Dewey said. Truman took to calling Al “Foxy”; and Dewey called him “pardner” in return.

“Harper Lee had a way of smiling as she explained in her soft drawl, ‘Well, Truman is a genius, you know. He really is. He's a genius,'” said Dewey. “I don't know a lot about geniuses, but I could buy that.”
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In retrospect, KBI detective Harold Nye, who by now was logging thousands of miles chasing down leads, saw the pattern developing. “Truman didn't fit in, and nobody was talking to him. But Nelle got out there and laid some foundations with people. She worked her way around and finally got some contacts with the locals and was able to bring Truman in.”
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*   *   *

Dr. Robert M. Fenton, the Finney County coroner, stammered the next day during introductions. And because Detective Dewey's presence implied that the visit had some official importance, Fenton was anxious to impress his visitors. He produced a report he'd written, drawn from firsthand observations made at the Clutter crime scene, which he had dictated at the time into a Dictaphone. At first, he tried reading important sections of the report aloud, but his stammer grew worse. Nelle and Truman said they were really more interested in getting answers to specific questions. Fenton relaxed and, with the help of gestures to aid him in descriptions, such as forming a circle with his thumb to indicate the size and shape of a wound, the interview went more smoothly.