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Authors: Truman Capote

Summer Crossing

BOOK: Summer Crossing
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“Beautifully fashioned … unrefined Capote is still worth a million hacks.”


The New York Post

“A wonderful discovery for the scholars, who will find Capote in possession, in his early [years], of a confident voice and fine storytelling skills.”


Kirkus Reviews

“Fans of Capote’s more mature works, especially
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and the short story ‘Sahara,’ will find
Summer Crossing
a prototype of things to come.”

—Time Out New York

“[A] page-turning story … Readers of
Summer Crossing
are apt to wonder if more Capote manuscripts are floating around and hope that is the case.”

—The Sunday Oklahoman

“A great breezy read. … [
Summer Crossing
] teems with Capote’s trademark wit, but also with genuine youthful awe at the exhilaration of late-forties New York.”

—New York

This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2006 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2005 by The Truman Capote Literary Trust
Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
and the T
ORCHBEARER
Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Capote, Truman
Summer crossing: a novel / Truman Capote.—1st ed.
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82278-9
1. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3505.A59S86 2006
813′.54—dc22     2005054307

www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

Contents
Chapter 1

“You are a mystery, my dear,” her mother said, and Grady, gazing across the table through a centerpiece of roses and fern, smiled indulgently: yes, I am a mystery, and it pleased her to think so. But Apple, eight years older, married, far from mysterious, said: “Grady is only foolish; I wish I were going with you. Imagine, Mama, this time next week you’ll be having breakfast in Paris! George keeps promising that we’ll go … I don’t know, though.” She paused and looked at her sister. “Grady, why on earth do you want to stay in New York in the dead of summer?” Grady wished they would leave her alone; still this harping, and here now was the very morning the boat sailed: what was there to say beyond what she’d said? After that there was only the truth, and the truth she did not entirely intend to tell. “I’ve never
spent a summer here,” she said, escaping their eyes and looking out the window: the dazzle of traffic heightened the June morning quiet of Central Park, and the sun, full of first summer, that dries the green crust of spring, plunged through the trees fronting the Plaza, where they were breakfasting. “I’m perverse; have it your own way.” She realized with a smile it was perhaps a mistake to have said that: her family did come rather near thinking her perverse; and once when she was fourteen she’d had a terrible and quite acute insight: her mother, she saw, loved her without really liking her; she had thought at first that this was because her mother considered her plainer, more obstinate, less playful than Apple, but later, when it was apparent, and painfully so to Apple, that Grady was finer looking by far, then she gave up reasoning about her mother’s viewpoint: the answer of course, and at last she saw this too, was simply that in an inactive sort of way, she’d never, not even as a very small girl, much liked her mother. Yet there was little flamboyancy in either attitude; indeed, the house of their hostility was modestly furnished with affection, which Mrs. McNeil now expressed by closing her daughter’s hand in her own and saying: “We
will
worry about you, darling. We can’t help that. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s safe. Seventeen isn’t very old, and you’ve never been really alone before.”

Mr. McNeil, who whenever he spoke sounded as though he was bidding in a poker game, but who seldom spoke in any event, partly because his wife did not like to be interrupted and partly because he was a very tired man, dunked out a cigar in his coffee cup, causing both Apple and Mrs. McNeil to wince, and said: “When I was eighteen, why hell, I’d been out in California three years.”

“But after all, Lamont … you’re a man.”

“What’s the difference?” he grunted. “There has been no difference between men and women for some while. You say so yourself.”

As though the conversation had taken an unpleasant turn, Mrs. McNeil cleared her throat. “It remains, Lamont, that I am very uneasy in leaving—”

Rising inside Grady was an ungovernable laughter, a joyous agitation which made the white summer stretching before her seem like an unrolling canvas on which she might draw those first rude pure strokes that are free. Then, too, and with a straight face, she was laughing because there was so little they suspected, nothing. The light quivering against the table silver seemed to at once encourage her excitement and to flash a warning signal: careful, dear. But elsewhere something said Grady, be proud, you are tall so fly your pennant high above and in the wind. What could have spoken,
the rose? Roses speak, they are the hearts of wisdom, she’d read so somewhere. She looked out the window again; the laughter was flowing up, it was flooding on her lips: what a sparkling sun-slapped day for Grady McNeil and roses that speak!

“Why is that so funny, Grady?” Apple did not have a pleasant voice; it suggested the subvocal prattlings of an ill-natured baby. “Mother asks a simple question, and you laugh as though she were an idiot.”

“Grady doesn’t think me an idiot, surely not,” said Mrs. McNeil, but a tone of weak conviction indicated doubt, and her eyes, webbed by the spidery hat-veil she now lowered over her face, were dimly confused with the sting she always felt when confronted by what she considered Grady’s contempt. It was all very well that between them there should be only the thinnest contact: there was no real sympathy, she knew that; still, that Grady by her remoteness could suggest herself superior was unendurable: in such moments Mrs. McNeil’s hands twitched. Once, but this had been a great many years ago and when Grady was still a tomboy with chopped hair and scaly knees, she had not been able to control them, her hands, and on that occasion, which of course was during that period which is the most nervously trying of a woman’s life, she had, provoked by Grady’s inconsiderate
aloofness, slapped her daughter fiercely. Whenever she’d known afterwards similar impulses she steadied her hands on some solid surface, for, at the time of her previous unrestraint, Grady, whose green estimating eyes were like scraps of sea, had stared her down, had stared through her and turned a searchlight on the spoiled mirror of her vanities: because she was a limited woman, it was her first experience with a will-power harder than her own. “Surely not,” she said, twinkling with artificial humor.

“I’m sorry,” said Grady. “Did you ask a question? I never seem to hear anymore.” She intended the last not so much as an apology as a serious confession.

“Really,” twittered Apple, “one would think you were in love.”

There was a knocking at her heart, a sense of danger, the silver shook momentously, and a lemon-wheel, half-squeezed in Grady’s finger, paused still: she glanced swiftly into her sister’s eyes to see if anything were there that was more shrewd than stupid. Satisfied, she finished squeezing the lemon into her tea and heard her mother say: “It is about the dress, dear. I think I may as well have it made in Paris: Dior or Fath, someone like that. It might even be less expensive in the long run. A soft leaf green would be heaven, especially with your coloring and hair—though I must say I wish
you wouldn’t cut it so short: it seems unsuitable and not—not quite feminine. A pity debutantes can’t wear green. Now I think something in white watered silk—”

Grady interrupted her with a frown. “If this is the party dress, I don’t want it. I don’t want a party, and I don’t intend to go to any, not those kind at any rate. I will not be made a fool.”

BOOK: Summer Crossing
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