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Christmas with Capote - Page 2

© Pamela St. Clair

Their bond is the common theme, as well, in "One Christmas," where Buddy unhappily spends the holiday with his father in New Orleans, and in "The Thanksgiving Visitor," where Sook insists on inviting Buddy's nemesis and the school bully, Odd, to dinner. Whether away from home or sitting around the dining room table, Buddy learns from Sook that deeper currents often swirl beneath the surface of our outward behavior. This simple woman understands better than most the complexity of the human heart.

The stories will ring with simple truths long after the holiday bells stop tolling. They're nostalgic, but not mawkish. Like the famed fruitcakes, spice tempers the sugar, and a dose of whiskey cuts the sentimentality.

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A picture of Truman and Sook.

Another of Truman with his dad.

Truman's behavior, which deteriorated along with his drinking and drug abuse, and his lavish parties often outstripped his literary fame. A brief biographical sketch can be found here., 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."

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