Capote by Gerald Clarke Read Free Book Online

to keep him away from fountain pens and checkbooks. To no one’s great surprise, he was uncontrite when he was released, blaming all his troubles on his good nature in trying to do a favor for a larcenous hotel clerk. “I am as innocent of wrongdoing as a baby,” he maintained.
    In the first week of September, 1932, what he feared most finally happened: belatedly asserting her rights and duties as a mother, Lillie Mae sent for her son. Accompanied by Lucy Brown, a black woman who was going north to be the Capotes’ cook, Truman boarded a train for New York. Arch drove down from Birmingham to say goodbye, but he was too late and in a letter to John three weeks later expressed his bitterness and frustration: “Today is Truman’s birthday. I did not have money to send him a present, or even a wire. I never hear from him or about him as of course the Spaniard forbids any communication with me. Isn’t that a hell of a position to be in? Next summer, it will be a different story. I will take possession June 1st, and then somebody else will be up against a wall of silence. In fact, when I get on my feet, I am going to ask the Court for a new deal on the custodianship as her marriage changes the situation entirely, and I have good reason to think Truman’s welfare is not best served by being in daily association with a man who must dislike him and what he stands for—especially a person of that type.”
    The truth about Joe was just the opposite. Far from disliking Truman, Joe was an indulgent stepfather, more likely than Lillie Mae to spoil him or forgive him when he was bad. To demonstrate to Arch how well they were all doing in New York—or, more likely, just to show off—Lillie Mae took Truman and Joe to visit Sam in October. The car was new, and Lillie Mae was “dressed to kill,” Sam reported, “full of bull and brag” as usual. Yet Truman, he grudgingly acknowledged, was being well taken care of.
    Lillie Mae’s sudden affluence must have been galling, in fact, to everyone in the Persons family; even Sam and John, steady and industrious as they were, had been gravely hurt by the Depression. But to Arch her obvious prosperity must have been a particular wound. He not only was destitute, but also stood a good chance of being sent to Louisiana’s Angola State Prison—the toughest in the world, he observed, with customary hyperbole. At Christmas all he could afford was fifty cents to send Truman a telegram; that was enough to break even Sam’s heart, and he sent the boy a pair of skates, with a card indicating that it came from his father rather than his uncle. More bad news still came Arch’s way in the first week of 1933, when he received a subpoena from Monroeville, telling him that Lillie Mae, who had not received child support since the previous May, was petitioning the court for full custody. For once he had a good reason to feel sorry for himself; he was a man fighting off a pack of lions with his bare hands, he said.
    He was not about to give Truman up without a struggle, however, and when Truman returned to Monroeville for the summer, Arch was determined that he stay there. The court hearing was scheduled for August, and while Lillie Mae was enjoying a belated honeymoon in Europe, he was preparing a surprise for her return. He would give up his three months of custody if she would give up her nine. Truman, the prize in that give-and-take, would be left with Jennie and Callie and would be allowed to leave Alabama only to attend the Gulf Coast Military Academy, Arch’s own alma mater, in neighboring Mississippi. He was working hard, Arch wrote John, to save Truman from that “she-devil.”
    Everything he could do Arch did do. He hired Jennings Ratcliffe, a well-known local lawyer, to represent him, and he prevailed upon his old friend Bill McCorvey to talk to the judge, who had been the law partner of Bill’s father. Arch persuaded his mother, Truman’s grandmother, to write as well, and he sent a