A ridiculous scene presented itself: Zoo, crouched near the broken columns, was tugging at the slave-bell, trying, it seemed, to uproot it, and Amy, her hair disarranged and dirt streaking her face like war paint, paced back and forth, directing Zoo’s efforts. “Lift it, stupid, lift it . . . why, any child! . . . now try again.” Then she saw Randolph; her face contorted, a tick started in her cheek, and she shouted at him: “Don’t think you’re going to stop me because you’re not; you don’t own everything; it’s just as much mine as it is yours and more so if the truth were known, and I’m going to do just what I please; you leave me alone, Randolph, or I’m going to do something to you. I’ll go to the Sheriff, I’ll travel around the country, I’ll make speeches. You don’t think I will, but I will, I will . . .”
Randolph did not look at her, but went on across the garden quite as if he had no idea she was there, and she ran after him, pulling at his sleeve, pleading now: “Let me have it, Randolph, please. Oh, I was so good, I did just what you told me: I said they’d gone away, I said they’d gone off on a long squirrel hunt; I wore my nice grey dress, Randolph, and made little tea-cakes, and the house was so clean, and really she liked me, Randolph, she said she did, and she told me about this store in New Orleans where I could sell my girandoles and the bell and the mirror in the hall: you aren’t listening, Randolph!” She followed him into the house.
As soon as she was gone, Zoo spit vindictively on the bell, and gave it such a kick it overturned with a mighty bong. “Ain’t nobody gonna pay cash-money for that piece-a mess. She plumb outa sense, the one done told Miss Amy any such of a thing.”
Joel tapped the bell like a tomtom. “Who was it that told her?”
“Was . . . I don’t know who.” And it was as if Zoo walked away while standing still; her voice, when she spoke again, seemed slowed down, distant: “Was some lady from New Orleans . . . had a ugly little child what wore a machine in her ear: was a little deaf child. I don’t know. They went away.”
“My cousin Louise, she’s deaf,” said Joel, thinking how he used to hide her hearing aid, of how mean he’d been to her: the times he’d made that kid cry! He wished he had a penny. But when he saw her again, why, he’d be so kind; he’d talk real loud so that she could hear every word, and he’d play those card games with her. Still, it would be fun to make her mad. Just once. But Ellen had never answered his letters. The hell with her. He didn’t care any more. His own bloodkin. And she’d made so many promises. And she’d said she loved him. But she forgot. All right, so had he, sure, you forget, o.k., who cares? And she’d said she loved him. “Zoo . . .” he said, and looked up in time to see her retreating through the arbor-vitae hedge, which shivered, and was still.
A sound, as if the bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden, and Joel, as though following a kite, bent back his head: clouds were coming over the sun: he waited for them to pass, thinking that when they had, when he looked back, some magic would have taken place: perhaps he would find himself sitting on the curb of St. Deval Street, or studying next week’s attractions outside the Nemo: why not? it was possible, for everywhere the sky is the same and it is down that things are different. The clouds traveled slower than a clock’s hands, and, as he waited, became thunder-dark, became John Brown and horrid boys in panama hats and the Cloud Hotel and Idabel’s old hound, and when they were gone, Mr Sansom was the sun. He looked down. No magic had happened; yet something had happened; or was about to. And he sat numb with apprehension. Before him stood a rose stalk throwing shadow like a sundial: an hour traced itself, another, the line of dark dissolved, all the garden began to mingle, move.
It was as if he had been counting in his head and, arriving at a number, decided through certain intuitions, thought: now. For, quite abruptly, he stood up and raised his eyes level with the Landing’s windows.
His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus. The wall yellowed in the meticulous setting of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold, seasonal color. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph’s window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge where, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
A. S. Byatt
Caleb Carr
Christopher Cerf
Ron Chernow
Shelby Foote
Charles Frazier
Vartan Gregorian
Richard Howard
Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
Edmund Morris
Azar Nafisi
Joyce Carol Oates
Elaine Pagels
John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
William Styron
Gore Vidal
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and then fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in Harper’s Bazaar established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties, and his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as “an attempt to exorcise demons,” and novella The Grass Harp (1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.
From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples were “Local Color” (1950) and “The Muses Are Heard” (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954).
Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death (1976).
He worked for many years on Answered Prayers, an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once
dominated. In his later years he published two collections of fiction and essays, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). He died on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.
2004 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1948 by Truman Capote
Copyright renewed © 1975 by Truman Capote
Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2004 by John Berendt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Capote, Truman
Other voices, other rooms/Truman Capote; introduction by John
Berendt.—Modern Library ed.
p. cm.
1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Stepmothers—Fiction.
4. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 5. Southern States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3505.A59O7 2004
813’.54—dc22 2004046666
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43157-8
v3.0
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
(Series: # )
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