Summer Crossing Read online

  A bell jangled as she closed the door, and she saw Clyde’s face, leaner, less sturdy, flash in the light; someone she’d never seen shook her hand, Gump, a lanky boy with stained skin wearing a summer shirt gaudy with shimmying hula dancers, and she felt the stubble of Clyde’s unshaven chin against her cheek. “I know. I know,” she said, avoiding his reconciling whisper. “It isn’t anything to talk about now; not here.”

  “Say, who’s going to pay for this?” cried the waitress, wagging bowls of chowder, and Gump, following out after Clyde and Grady, said: “Send me a bill, honey.”

  They all three fitted into the front seat of Grady’s car. Clyde drove, and she sat in the middle. Her unrelaxing profile discouraged talk, and they drove in silence; winding round curves, the car left a trail of tension. It was not that she meant to be cold; rather, she meant nothing, felt little, except, perhaps, a fallen-in, ironed-out apathy. An orange moon was mounting like an airship, and road signs, studded with glass that leapt before their lights like cat eyes, said NEW YORK 98 MILES, 85.

  “Sleepy?” said Clyde.

  “Oh so sleepy,” she said.

  “Got just the thing.” Gump spilled the contents of an envelope into his hand, a dozen or so cigarette ends. “Only roaches, but they’ll wake us up.”

  “Go on, Gump, put that stuff away.”

  Gump said, “To hell with you,” and lighted a butt; “Look,” he said to Grady, “here’s how you do it”: he swallowed the smoke as though it were something to eat; “Have a drag?” Like a drowsy patient who never questions what the nurse brings she took the cigarette and kept it until Clyde jerked it away; she thought he was going to toss it out; instead, he smoked it himself. “You’ve got the idea—get your jumps from Doctor Gump.” The butts were passed again, one for each, and someone turned on the radio: You are listening to a program of recorded music. Ash sparks darted, and their faces grew smooth as the young moon. Let’s take a kayak to Quincy or Nyack,/Let’s get away from it all. “Feel good?” said Gump, and she told him that she didn’t feel anything, but a giggle escaped her, and he said, “You’re doing fine, honey, just keep it up.” It was Clyde saying, “I forgot your present, it was a present I brought you, a butterfly in a candy sack,” that set her off: like fish-bubbles the giggles rose and burst into laughter, and, laughing, she slung her head from side to side—“Don’t! Don’t! It’s too funny.” No one knew quite what was funny, yet they all were convulsed; Clyde, for instance, could hardly hold the car to the road. A boy on a bicycle, careening before the rush of their headlights, plunged into a fence. But even if they had killed the boy the laughter could not have stopped: it was all so hilarious. A scarf loosened off Grady’s neck and trickled into the dark; and Gump, producing his envelope, said, “Let’s pick up again.”

  A red votive haze hung over New York, but as they streaked across the Queensboro Bridge, the city, seen suddenly full-length, went off like a Roman candle, each tower a crumbling firework of speeding color, and “I want to dance!” cried Grady, applauding the voluptuous skyline. “Throw off my shoes and dance!” The Paper Doll is a flimsy side-street catchall somewhere in the East Thirties, and Clyde took them there because it was the club where Bubble tended bar. Bubble, who saw them come in, coasted up, hissing: “You crazy? Get her out of here. She’s stoned.” But Grady had no intention of leaving, she welcomed the sleepless neon, the wiseguy faces, and Clyde had to follow her onto the dance floor, which was too small and knockabout for dancing: they simply held on to each other.

  “All these days. I thought you were running out on me,” he said.

  “You don’t run out on people; you run out on yourself,” she said. “But it’s all right now?”

  “Sure,” he said, “it’s all right now,” and danced her a cautious step or two. It was a curious trio that played for them: a silken Chinese youth (piano), a colored woman who peered respectably through steel schoolmarm spectacles (drums), and another Negro, a tall, especially black girl whose sleek splendid head shivered in the green pallor of an overhead light (guitar). There was no difference between tunes, for their music sounded all the same, jellied, jazzy, submerged.

  “You don’t want to dance anymore,” Clyde said, as the trio rounded out a set.

  “Yes, yes; I’m not going home,” but she let him lead her over to the corner where Gump had got them a table.

  The guitarist joined them. “I’m India Brown,” she said, holding her hand out to Grady. It was a hand that felt like an expensive glove, but the fingers were thick and long as bananas. “Bubble says I should take you to powder your nose.”

  Grady said, “Bubble bubble bubble.”

  The colored girl leaned on the table; her eyes were like cuttings of dark quartz, and they filmed over, dismissing Grady; in a thin conspiratorial voice, she said, “It’s none of my business what you boys are up to. But see that fat man toward the end of the bar? Got this place spotted—just waiting for the chance to slap on a padlock. One little noise from chicken like her and we’re out. Sincerely.”

  Noise? Singsong lurched in Grady’s head, and her eyes halted on the fat man: he regarded her over the rim of a beer glass. Standing next to him there was a tanned young man in a trim seersucker suit, who, carrying a drink, sidled across the room. “Get your things, McNeil,” he said, seeming to speak down from vast heights. “It’s time somebody took you home.”

  “Look, my friend, let’s get this straight,” said Clyde, partly rising.

  “It’s only Peter,” said Grady; like so much that was happening, his being there didn’t strike her as unreasonable, and she recognized him as though she were immune to surprise. “Peter, darling, sit down; meet my friends, smile at me.”

  Simply, Peter said, “You’d better let me take you home,” and lifted her purse off the table. A waiter, bringing a tray of drinks, pulled back, and Bubble, his mouth a galvanized O, bent over the bar: the distant crash of a passing elevated vibrated the tinseled room. Clyde walked around the table: it was not a fair match, for, though Peter was taller, there was no muscle to him, nothing of Clyde’s scrappiness; and yet Peter met a measuring appraisal with ready-and-willing glances of his own. Clyde’s hand shot out fast as a snake’s thrust; he snatched back the purse and put it down beside Grady, who, just then, saw his exposed wrist: “You’ve hurt yourself,” she said in a hardly alive voice, and touched the raw tattooed letters of her name; “for me,” she said, raising her eyes, first to Clyde, whom she could not see, and then to Peter, whose white, intolerably stern face seemed to whittle away. “Peter,” she said strangely, and sighing, “Clyde has hurt himself. For me.” Only the Negro girl moved; she put her arm around Grady, and together, weaving a little, they went to the ladies’ room.

  As long as I am here, nothing can happen to me, she thought, letting her head loll against the guitarist’s hard breasts. “He brought me a butterfly,” she said, talking into a brown and peeling mirror. “It was in a peppermint sack.” The guitarist said, “There’s a way to the street: through that door, then out the kitchen,” but Grady smilingly replied, “I thought it was a peppermint, it tasted just as sweet: feel my head, feel it flying?” To have her head held was pacifying, it lulled the sway there, the power-dive sound: “And sometimes it flies in other parts of me, my throat, my heart.” The door opened, and the little drummer, looking like a rather lewd schoolteacher, came in brassily snapping her fingers. “All clear,” she trumpeted. “Hooper gave those sonsabitches the bounce, and not a broken head so far. No fault of yours,” she added, turning on Grady. “You hop-heads give me a fucking pain, always messing round.” But the guitarist, gently smoothing Grady’s hair with her banana fingers, said, “Oh shove it, Emma—she don’t know what it’s all about.” The little drummer looked long at Grady: “Know what it’s all about, sugar? I’ll say!”

  At the curb a sailor stood urinating; except for him, there was no one on the street, a brownstone street where they had parked the car; and yet the car was not there, so Grady circled u
nder a lamp, soberly considering possibilities: that the car had been stolen, or: what? Funnel pipes, part of some street-construction project, spit gloomy gushers of steam, and the sailor, wreathed in these outpourings, seesawed over the pavement. She fled down to Third Avenue, where the slowly swinging headlights of a car struck her starkly.

  “Hey, you!” shouted the driver, and she blinked: it was her own car with Gump at the wheel. “Sure it’s her,” he said; then she heard Clyde: “Hurry it up, put her in there with you.”

  Clyde was in the backseat, and Peter Bell was there, too; together, each straining against the other, they seemed a solid, double-headed, tentacled creature: Peter, his arm jacked behind his back, was hunched over, and his face, wrinkled like tinfoil, and bleeding, so shocked Grady that something gave way: she screamed, and it was as if for months this scream had been accumulating, but there was no one to hear her, neither in the stony emptiness of spinning streets, nor in the car: Gump, Clyde, even Peter, they were bound together by dumb deaf rapture—there was joy in the stupefying smash of Clyde’s fists, and as the car screeched up Third Avenue, dodging El pillars, oblivious to red lights, she stared silently, like a bird that has stunned itself dashing against walls and glass.

  For when panic emerges, the mind catches like the rip cord of a parachute: one goes on falling. Turning right on Fifty-ninth, the car skidded onto the Queensboro Bridge; there, above the hollow hootings of river traffic, and with a morning he was never to see changing the sky, Gump cried, “Damn it, you’ll kill us,” but he could not loosen her hands from the steering wheel: she said, “I know.”

  Afterword

  To Truman I was, almost from the first, the “avvocato”—his lawyer. But I was also his friend. When I first met him in 1969 he had many friends, both famous and infamous. He was hands down the greatest gossip of his day and people flocked to him. By the time he died in 1984, at Joanne Carson’s house in Los Angeles shortly before his sixtieth birthday, he had few friends left, having allowed his wit to turn poisonous and his imagination to distort reality almost beyond recognition. Over the years I tried to rescue him from many ill-advised and sometimes downright scary relationships, at times more successfully than others. Over these same years, particularly near the end, I had the sad, often heartbreaking, task of placing him in various drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers from which he invariably escaped, often with a highly amusing and improbable tale to tell.

  The last time I saw Truman alive was at a restaurant opposite his apartment at United Nations Plaza in New York, where we often met for lunch. As was his custom then, he arrived early and the waiter put before him what he claimed was a large glass of orange juice but what the waiter and I both knew was a glass half filled with vodka. And it was not his first. I had asked rather urgently for our meeting because the doctor who treated him when he had passed out in Southampton, Long Island, had called and told me that unless he stopped drinking he would be dead in six months and that in fact his brain had shrunk. I reported this directly and pleaded with Truman to get back into rehabilitation and stop drinking and taking drugs if he wanted to survive. Truman looked up at me and there were tears in his eyes. He put his hand on my arm, looked straight into my eyes and said, “Please, Alan, let me go. I want to go.” He had run out of options and we both knew it. There was nothing more to be said.

  Truman never wanted to make a will. As with many people, he found it uncomfortable to contemplate. However, as his health deteriorated I succeeded in making him realize that he had to do something to protect his work after he died. Finally, he agreed to a very short and simple will, which, after providing for his great friend and former lover Jack Dunphy, left everything including his literary properties to a trust of which he insisted I be the sole trustee. His instruction was that I arrange for an annual award for literary criticism in memory of his good friend Newton Arvin. When I asked what we should do with the rest of the money, he said he doubted there would ever be any, but if there was I should provide scholarships in creative writing at universities and colleges of my choosing. In vain I asked for more specific instructions. He left me with the very Truman-like assurance that he was positive I would know just what to do and would do it better than he could.

  Since his death, and with the invaluable support of my wife, Louise, I have tried to do what he would have wanted, and now there are Capote scholarships in universities such as Stanford, Iowa, Xavier, and Appalachian State, all dedicated to the hopeful emergence of bright new Capotes, all with their own unique voice and energy.

  Since Truman’s death, as trustee of The Truman Capote Literary Trust, I have made many decisions regarding the publication and other exploitation of his works in various media throughout the world. Until the resurrection of Summer Crossing in late 2004, my most difficult decision had been whether or not to publish in book form the three chapters of what was to be Truman’s next major novel, Answered Prayers. Among his other great talents, Truman was a great dissembler and it was often very difficult to tell whether he was reciting fact or fiction. As his health and abilities deteriorated he dissembled more and more, particularly when it came to his writing output. As a result of the huge success of In Cold Blood I was able to make very advantageous contracts with his publisher, Random House, for the publication of his next books. The star in this firmament was to be a novel entitled Answered Prayers, a work that he loved to describe in detail to his editor Joe Fox and me over drinks and dinner whenever possible. This was to be an intricate, exuberant, witty, and mischievous novel, all told through the eyes of a never-to-be-forgotten character who in many ways reminded Truman of Truman himself. To use Truman’s description, this was to be a kite with a long tail consisting of many chapters, some titles of which he whispered most confidentially into our easily seduced ears. Yes, he was writing away—yes, the fact is he had written at least half of the book—yes, it would soon be finished.… And the years rolled by and I renegotiated and revised the contracts. At times, there was hope. Three chapters were published in magazines. But then he gave us no more. At various times he assured us that it was all packed away and he was already in the editing stage, or it was almost all packed away, or some of it was packed away. And then he died.

  I shall never forget the hours and hours and hours spent by me, Joe Fox, and Truman’s biographer Gerald Clarke trying to find the rest of this momentous manuscript. We searched Truman’s apartment, his house in Bridgehampton. We asked the people he had lived with. We tracked down the theories of well-meaning friends, all to no avail. And then we understood. There was no more. The great dissembler had simply fooled his closest friends and allies. There was no more because he simply could not write any more.

  Although Joe is no longer here to testify, I am sure he would agree that we both felt cheated and somehow bruised but, who knows, perhaps in his delirium Truman really thought he had written the rest of this novel and locked it away and that his two godfathers, as he called us, would find it and bring it forward in all its glory.

  Eventually Joe Fox suggested that the three chapters of Answered Prayers should be published in book form. He reasoned that all three had been published previously in magazines, that they were all well written, and that in some strange way they did manage to huddle together into a structure, if not cohesive then at least structurally sound. At the time I thought long and hard about this suggestion; after all, Truman had certainly not instructed Joe or me or anyone else to publish merely a first part of what was supposed to be a long novel. However, these pieces were Truman’s last published writings, and in fact one of them, “La Côte Basque,” a barely fictionalized description of some of Truman’s closest celebrity friends, stood historically as a marker in Truman’s subsequent downfall. It had proven too bloody for most of his friends to bear. Not only had they turned against him but by that time he had deteriorated to the point where he actually had turned against himself. We agreed that the book should be published, and it came out in 1987.

  That d
ecision turned out to be the easy one. A much more difficult decision arose late in 2004 and carried over to early 2005. In the fall of 2004 I received a letter from Sotheby’s in New York stating that a trove of Capote memorabilia, including manuscripts of some published works, many letters, photographs, and what looked like an unpublished novel, had been delivered to Sotheby’s for auction. None of us had any idea that these documents were in existence. Sotheby’s indicated that an unknown person claimed that his uncle had been a house sitter at a basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights that Truman had inhabited around 1950. He claimed that Truman was away at one point but had decided not to come back to the apartment and had instructed the superintendent of the building to put all of his remaining possessions on the street for garbage pickup. According to this account, when the house sitter saw what had been done, he felt that he could not let this material be discarded, so he decided to keep it. Now, fifty years later, this gentleman had died and a relative of his had come into possession of the material and wanted to sell it.

  I realized immediately that Sotheby’s was trying to get me, as trustee of The Truman Capote Literary Trust, not only to authenticate the material but also to acquiesce in its sale. The catalogue Sotheby’s sent listed the materials and had photographs of some of them. Included was a photograph of a page or two of an unpublished manuscript from a composition book Truman used for his writing.

  My most reliable source for information about Truman before I met him was his biographer Gerald Clarke. Not only had Gerald written a luminous biography of Truman but he also kept meticulous records about events in Truman’s life. In fact, Random House had just published a collection of Truman’s letters that were edited by Clarke and to which he referred me. In those letters Truman writes of struggling with this manuscript, a novel called Summer Crossing, for some time before finally putting it aside. Here the story varies. There is some evidence that he wished it never to be published, and yet in later letters to a friend there are also indications that he was still thinking about it. Truman never mentioned Summer Crossing to me nor did Gerald Clarke have a clear idea of what Truman’s final wishes were for this manuscript. And Joe Fox had passed on in 1995.