Capote by Gerald Clarke Page B

supper.”
    They talked for it as well, making up for their perennial shortage of cash by mastering the knack of cadging drinks and dinners from charitable older couples at the bar. “We’re on the hockey team at Princeton,” Truman would joke, while Phoebe would display her expansive eyes and charm their barside benefactors with her effervescent chatter. After a night of such strenuous activity, they would rush out the door, like Cinderella leaving the ball, and race down to Grand Central Station, arriving just in time to catch the last train to Greenwich.
    They climbed only rarely to such dizzying altitudes, however, and when they descended, they had to confront an unpleasant reality. All their friends knew that Phoebe was unhappy at home. Her mother was an alcoholic with a history of mental illness, and her father, whom she adored, died when she was sixteen. What their friends did not know was that Truman was equally miserable. Beyond New York and the nightclubs, beyond even their shared devotion to writing, Truman and Phoebe had in common a similar sadness. Their secret excursions to New York were not only trips to Oz; they were also escapes from the ugly scenes they found inside their doors. “What an odd and lonely pair of children we were!” marveled Phoebe. “We were like a brother and sister, and we helped each other through the dark, because really, life was terribly lonely for both of us.”
    Loneliness was nothing new to Truman, of course. From earliest childhood he had felt isolated and unwanted. Even during the happy times with Sook, even while he was enjoying the exuberance of the Millbrook gang, he lived with the knowledge, sometimes distant, sometimes close, that things were not right at home. His mother’s ambivalence toward him had neither died nor lessened in the years since she had brought him North. It had instead become more pronounced, and when she had been drinking, as she did more and more in Greenwich, the loving, good Nina could change into the bad and unloving Nina with terrifying speed.
    The good Nina was the one most of his friends saw, the woman who made the Capote house on Orchard Drive an inviting and congenial place for them to meet. Gregarious and fun, she treated his friends as her friends, laughing with them at risqué jokes, dancing with them, and winking indulgently at their infractions of ordinary rules. Few other mothers would have put up with their noise, looked the other way when they smuggled in their stolen bottles of liquor, or pretended not to see them carry out the empties. “We were all just smitten with her,” said Howard Weber. “She seemed very young, and we thought of her as being more of our generation than that of our parents.”
    This public Nina was also a devoted mother whose concern for her son was shown in little things as well as big. Howard Weber, who visited often, noticed, for example, that she would stop whatever she was doing to give Truman a fond but careful scrutiny before he went out at night, wetting her finger with her tongue to slick back his straying cowlick and unruly eyebrows. And, added Weber, “when she and Joe went out, she never failed to come into his room when they returned. Truman and I made a pretense of being asleep, but we were usually wide awake, having made a mad dash for the beds after polishing off a bottle of apricot brandy. She would tuck him in, kiss him good night, and check to see that the windows were closed. She always seemed very fond of him in front of me.”
    Yet even those who liked her best noticed something unusual about her relationship with Truman. She did not seem comfortable playing the role of his mother, and if she treated his friends as equals, she also treated him as an equal—like a brother or perhaps a lover, but rarely like a son. It was the old story updated. She could be protective and loving, and she could also be cruel and degrading. “Sometimes I thought she hated him because of the way he