The Early Stories of Truman Capote by Truman Capote Page A

time.
    He went to the reservoir and sat down on the same old bench. He made up his mind he was going to sit there until Frisky and Jamie’s mother came, even if it was all day.
    The water was beautiful. He imagined it was some great ocean and he was sailing a ship across it, while musicians played in the background, just like at the movies.
    He had been sitting a long while before he saw the first horseback rider. He knew it must be getting late if the riders were coming out. After that first one, they came thick and fast. He counted them as they passed. He had seen many celebrities riding in the park, but without Miss Julie to identify them he could not tell them from ordinary people.
    Then the carriages and nurses began to arrive. It was nearly ten o’clock. The sun had risen full and bright in the sky. In the drowsy warmth of its rays, he felt himself falling asleep.
    Suddenly he heard a yelp and a bark. A little wire haired terrier jumped up on the bench beside him.
    “Frisky—Frisky—” he cried. “It’s you!”
    A tall thin man was attached to the other end of the leash. Teddy gazed up at him bewilderedly.
    “What’s your name, Son?” the stranger asked.
    “Teddy,” he answered in a small, frightened voice.
    The man handed him an envelope. “Then I guess this is for you.”
    Teddy tore it open anxiously. It was written in a long, graceful hand. He had a hard time reading it.
Dear Teddy,
    Frisky is for you. Jamie would have wanted you to have him.
    It was unsigned. Teddy stared at it for a long time until he couldn’t see it anymore. He grasped the dog to him and squeezed him as hard as he could. He could explain to Mama and Papa somehow.
    Then he remembered the man. He looked up. He looked all around him but the man had gone and all he could see was the pathway and the trees and the grass and the reservoir gleaming in the morning sun.

Lucy

Lucy was really the outgrowth of my mother’s love for southern cooking. I was spending the summer in the south when my mother wrote my aunt and asked her to find her a colored woman who could really cook and would be willing to come to New York.
    After canvassing the territory, Lucy was the result. Her skin was a rich olive and her features were finer and lighter than most negroes’. She was tall and reasonably round. She had been one of the teachers at the school for colored children. But she seemed to have a natural intelligence, not formed by books, but a child of the earth with a deep understanding and compassion for all that lived. As most southern negroes, she was very religious, and even now, I can see her sitting in the kitchen reading her Bible, and declaring most earnestly to me that she was a “child of God.”
    So we had Lucy, and when she stepped off the train that September morning at Pennsylvania Station, you could see the pride and the triumph in her eyes. She told me that all her life she had wanted to come north, and, as she put it, “to live like a human being.” That morning she felt that she would never want again to see Jim Crow with all its bigotry and cruelty.
    At that time we lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive. From all of the front windows we had an excellent view of the Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades, rising steep against the sky. In the morning they looked like heralds greeting the dawn and in the evening, at sunset, when the water was dyed in the confusion of crimson shades, the cliffs shone magnificently, like sentinels of an ancient world.
    Sometimes, at sunset, Lucy would sit at the apartment window and gaze lovingly at the spectacle of the dying day in the world’s greatest metropolis.
    “Um, um,” she would declare, “if only Mama and George were here to see this.” And at first she loved the bright lights and all the noise. Almost every Saturday she took me down to Broadway and we went on theatrical sprees. She was crazy about the vaudevilles, and the Wrigley sign was a show in itself.
    Lucy and I were constant