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Christmas with Capote

© Pamela St. Clair

A treasure of The Modern Library: a one volume collection of three Truman Capote short story classics, "A Christmas Memory," "One Christmas," and "The Thanksgiving Visitor." These holiday remembrances recall Capote's childhood in depression-era Alabama, where Capote lived with distant relatives. The stories pay tribute to Capote's childhood friend, his eccentric older cousin Sook Faulk. At sixty-plus years of age, Ms. Sook is as much of a child as is the young Capote, or Buddy, as she calls him. She is a simple woman, a child trapped within an adult body. She views the world with naïve wonder, yet despite never having ventured farther than five miles from home, she is a keen observer of human desires and behavior.

"A Christmas Memory" is the first story in the collection, and from the beginning, Capote lets us know he is recounting events from twenty years past, yet, as in the other two stories collected here, the narrator soon slips into the young Buddy's voice, and we see his and Sook's world through their eyes, through the child-like wonder and merriment that, in the best circumstances, underscore the holiday season. Ms. Sook is introduced right away, with her shorn white hair and her signature tennis shoes and calico dress. Her first words? "Oh my, it's fruitcake season!" Apt words, as much of the world considers the odd Ms. Sook, herself, to be a fruitcake. Apt words, too, because they capture her unsophisticated enthusiasm.

Through odd jobs and creative back yard shows, such as the fun and freak museum, featuring a three-legged chicken and a stereopticon with slides of Washington and New York, Ms. Sook and Buddy save all year for their "fruitcake fund." The baking of the whiskey-laced cakes is arduous, as they whip up thirty to send, not to friends so much, of which they have few, but mostly to those who have caught their fancy, such as President Roosevelt or the bus driver who waves to them daily. Ms. Sook and Buddy are more comfortable with strangers, for both are outsiders, Sook because of her eccentricity and Buddy because of his circumstances. He has been abandoned by his divorced parents and he is the school "sissy." As the grown Buddy considers in "The Thanksgiving Visitor," his friendship with Sook was "inevitable," tied as they were by their "separate loneliness."

The writing is rich with imagery that finds us cooking in the kitchen alongside Buddy and Ms. Sook, with eggbeaters whirling, spoons spinning, vanilla sweetening and ginger spicing the air, and kitchen odors drifting out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. Imagery as rich finds us marching alongside these two companions in the woods, as they search for the tree to take home and decorate with horded treasures or handmade drawings. The two cross frosted grass in early morning, beneath a sun, which is "round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons," and which "balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods." Sounds fill the woods; a renegade hog grunts, a wild turkey calls, birds shrill. Smells permeate as well. The pine scent is described as an ocean, where black crows, rather than seagulls, swoop for red berries. The kitchen, the woods, all are steeped in a magic that often escapes the adult gaze. As Sook speculates, you don't see the Lord upon dying, you see him when you're lying in the grass with your friend, watching your kites dance with the clouds in a blue sky. "A Christmas Story" traces the bond between these two sensitive souls, a bond that clearly doesn't diminish with Sook's death, as Buddy expects to see "a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."

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