Трумен Капоте - Answered Prayers

Mrs. Cooper stared after him, scowling.

Eventually Mrs. Matthau said: "You didn't recognize him, did you?"

"N-n-no."

"Life. Life. Really, it's too sad. There was nothing familiar about him at all?"

"Long ago. Something. A dream."

"It wasn't a dream."

"Carol. Stop that. Who is he?"

"Once upon a time you thought very highly of him. You cooked his meals and washed his socks" — Mrs. Cooper's eyes enlarged, shifted-"and when he was in the army you followed him from camp to camp, living in dreary furnished rooms—"

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No."

"Yes, Gloria. Your first husband."

"That… man… was… Pat di Cicco?"

"Oh, darling. Let's not brood. After all, you haven't seen him in almost twenty years. You were only a child. Isn't that," said Mrs. Matthau, offering a diversion, "Jackie Kennedy?"

And I heard Lady Ina on the subject, too: "I'm almost blind with these specs, but just coming in there, isn't that Mrs. Kennedy? And her sister?"

It was; I knew the sister because she had gone to school with Kate McCloud, and when Kate and I were on Abner Dustin's yacht at the Feria in Seville she had lunched with us, then afterward we'd gone water-skiing together, and I've often thought of it, how perfect she was, a gleaming gold-brown girl in a white bathing suit, her white skis hissing smoothly, her brown-gold hair whipping as she swooped and skidded between the waves. So it was pleasant when she stopped to greet Lady Ina ("Did you know I was on the plane with you from London? But you were sleeping so nicely I didn't dare speak") and seeing me, remembered me: "Why, hello there, Jonesy," she said, her rough whispery warm voice very slightly vibrating her, "how's your sunburn? Remember, I warned you, but you wouldn't listen." Her laughter trailed off as she folded herself onto a banquette beside her sister, their heads inclining toward each other in whispering Bouvier conspiracy. It was puzzling how much they resembled one another without sharing any common feature beyond identical voices and wide-apart eyes and certain gestures, particularly a habit of staring deeply into an interlocutor's eyes while ceaselessly nodding the head with a mesmerizingly solemn sympathy.

Lady Ina observed: "You can see those girls have swung a few big deals in their time. I know many people can't abide either of them, usually women, and I can understand that, because they don't like women and almost never have anything good to say about any woman. But they're perfect with men, a pair of Western geisha girls; they know how to keep a man's secrets and how to make him feel important. If I were a man, I'd fall for Lee myself. She's marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine; she's feminine without being effeminate; and she's one of the few people I've known who can be both candid and cozy-ordinarily one cancels the other. Jackie-no, not on the same planet. Very photogenic, of course; but the effect is a little… unrefined, exaggerated."

I thought of an evening when I'd gone with Kate McCloud and a gang to a drag-queen contest held in a Harlem ballroom: hundreds of young queens sashaying in hand-sewn gowns to the funky honking of saxophones: Brooklyn supermarket clerks, Wall Street runners, black dishwashers, and Puerto Rican waiters adrift in silk and fantasy, chorus boys and bank cashiers and Irish elevator boys got up as Marilyn Monroe, as Audrey Hepburn, as Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, Mrs. Kennedy was the most popular inspiration; a dozen boys, the winner among them, wore her high-rise hairdo, winged eyebrows, sulky, palely painted mouth. And, in life, that is how she struck me-not as a bona fide woman, but as an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.

I explained what I was thinking to Ina, and she said: "That's what I meant by… exaggerated." Then: "Did you ever know Rosita Winston? Nice woman. Half Cherokee, I believe. She had a stroke some years ago, and now she can't speak. Or, rather, she can say just one word. That very often happens after a stroke, one's left with one word out of all the words one has known. Rosita's word is 'beautiful.' Very appropriate, since Rosita has always loved beautiful things. What reminded me of it was old Joe Kennedy. He, too, has been left with one word. And his word is: 'Goddammit!"' Ina motioned the waiter to pour champagne. "Have I ever told you about the time he assaulted me? When I was eighteen and a guest in his house, a friend of his daughter Kek…"

Again, my eye coasted the length of the room, catching, en passa, nt , a bluebearded Seventh Avenue brassiere hustler trying to con a closet-queen editor from The New York Times ; and Diana Vreeland, the pomaded, peacock-iridescent editor of Vogue , sharing a table with an elderly man who suggested a precious object of discreet extravagance , perhaps a fine grey pearl—Mainbocher; and Mrs. William S. Paley lunching with her sister, Mrs. John Hay Whitney. Seated near them was a pair unknown to me: a woman forty, forty-five, no beauty but very handsomely set up inside a brown Balenciaga suit with a brooch composed of cinnamon-colored diamonds fixed to the lapel. Her companion was much younger, twenty, twenty-two, a hearty sun-browned statue who looked as if he might have spent the summer sailing alone across the Atlantic. Her son? But no, because… he lit a cigarette and passed it to her and their fingers touched significantly; then they were holding hands.

"… the old bugger slipped into my bedroom. It was about six o'clock in the morning, the ideal hour if you want to catch someone really slugged out, really by complete surprise, and when I woke up he was already between the sheets with one hand over my mouth and the other all over the place. The sheer ballsy gall of it-right there in his own house with the whole family sleeping all around us. But all those Kennedy men are the same; they're like dogs, they have to pee on every fire hydrant. Still, you had to give the old guy credit, and when he saw I wasn't going to scream he was so grateful…"

But they were not conversing, the older woman and the young seafarer; they held hands, and then he smiled and presently she smiled, too.

"Afterward—can you imagine? — he pretended nothing had happened, there was never a wink or a nod, just the good old daddy of my schoolgirl chum. It was uncanny and rather cruel; after all, he'd had me and I'd even pretended to enjoy it: there should have been some sentimental acknowledgment, a bauble, a cigarette box…" She sensed my other interest, and her eyes strayed to the improbable lovers. She said: "Do you know that story?"

"No," I said. "But I can see there has to be one."

"Though it's not what you think. Uncle Willie could have made something divine out of it. So could Henry James-better than Uncle Willie, because Uncle Willie would have cheated, and for the sake of a movie sale, would have made Delphine and Bobby lovers."

Delphine Austin from Detroit; I'd read about her in the columns-an heiress married to a marbleized pillar of New York clubman society. Bobby, her companion, was Jewish, the son of hotel magnate S. L. L. Semenenko and first husband of a weird young movie cutie who had divorced him to marry his father (and whom the father had divorced when he caught her in flagrante with a German shepherd… dog. I'm not kidding).

According to Lady Ina, Delphine Austin and Bobby Semenenko had been inseparable the past year or so, lunching every day at Côte Basque and Lutèce and L'Aiglon, traveling in winter to Gstaad and Lyford Cay, skiing, swimming, spreading themselves with utmost vigor considering the bond was not June-and-January frivolities but really the basis for a double-bill, double-barreled, three-handkerchief variation on an old Bette Davis weeper like Dark Victory : they both were dying of leukemia.