Capote by Gerald Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

if he threatened to expose her supposedly lurid past to Joe. “We have the goods on her in black and white,” he told John, “and she will want to save her present soft bed.” He never carried out his threat, however, and in April he walked into a federal court in Mobile to plead guilty to the forgery of a postal money order. His sentence, three years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, was suspended, but the close-up vision of cell bars apparently chastened him: he meekly agreed to let Joe adopt Truman as his legal son. He made only one condition: that Truman retain the Persons name.
    Now in command, Lillie Mae was unwilling to give in even on that, and on July 11, 1934, she filed formal adoption papers in Manhattan’s Surrogate’s Court. Trying to prove Arch’s unfitness as a father, she declared that she could not even find him to ask for child support. “My former husband makes it a practice to travel from place to place on the slightest occasion and in pursuits best known to him,” she said with some venom. A helpful friend had sent her news of his conviction in federal court, and she added to her evidence the clipping from a Mobile newspaper. “S ENTENCE I S S USPENDED ,” read the headline; “M AN E NTERS P LEA OF G UILTY TO F ORGING P OST O FFICE M ONEY O RDER. ”
    Feeling himself cornered, Arch once again talked of blackmail. “Can you imagine anything so terrible as that—giving that gorgeous kid a legal spic name, and naming him for the man who stole my wife?” he asked John. “It beats storybooks.” But when the adoption hearing began in Manhattan’s Hall of Records on the morning of September 28, 1934, there was never any real doubt as to the outcome, and four and a half months later, on February 14, 1935, Lillie Mae’s petition was granted: Joe became a father, and at the age of ten Truman Streckfus Persons was renamed Truman Garcia Capote. Arch alone clung to the old name, as if by doing so he could preserve his place as the rightful father. Finally, Truman himself asked him to stop addressing him the old way. “As you know my name was changed from Person’s to Capote,” he scrawled on a piece of school notebook paper, inserting, probably as a deliberate insult, an incorrect apostrophe in the family name. “And I would appreciate it if in the future you would address me as Truman Capote, as everyone knows me by that name.”

8
    W HEN he was in Alabama, Truman had longed to be in the North with his mother. Now that his wish had been granted, he looked back, with sharp and unexpected nostalgia, to his life in Monroeville. For several years before he joined her, he had known Lillie Mae only as a visitor, an adored relation who would suddenly appear, awing him with her beauty and glamour, and then disappear just as abruptly, leaving behind, like a whisper on the air, the promise that someday she would take him with her. From those tantalizing glimpses his busy mind had constructed a woman more of fiction than of fact. Much as he had done with Arch, he had turned Lillie Mae into a character out of one of his storybooks, someone who would transport him to a more romantic and exciting world, a place where he would be loved, protected, and ceaselessly admired.
    Living with her in New York, he discovered that neither that world nor that woman existed in fact. The city was exciting, certainly, but big and alarming as well; even Brooklyn, where the Capotes had rented a house, seemed too fast and too impersonal to a boy who was accustomed to the amiable shuffle of Monroeville. If Lillie Mae had given him the love that Sook had poured on him as freely as bathwater, in time he probably would have become used to his new life. But the Lillie Mae who had smothered him with kisses in Alabama was stingy with her affection in New York. She had taken him with her, as he had prayed so many times, but the rest of the story was not following the plot he had imagined. His disappointment was complete, and he