Free A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

had summoned me to the garden; she had transplanted a blossoming chrysanthemum bush into a tin washtub and needed help to haul it up the steps onto the front porch, where it would make a fine display. It was heavier than forty fat pirates, and while we were struggling with it ineffectually, Odd Henderson passed along the road. He paused at the garden gate and then opened it, saying, “Let me do that for you, ma’am.” Life on a dairy farm had done him a lot of good; he’d thickened, his arms were sinewy and his red coloring had deepened to a ruddy brown. Airily he lifted the big tub and placed it on the porch.
    My friend said, “I’m obliged to you, sir. That was neighborly.”
    “Nothing,” he said, still ignoring me.
    Miss Sook snapped the stems of her showiest blooms. “Take these to your mother,” she told him, handing him the bouquet. “And give her my love.”
    “Thank you, ma’am. I will.”
    “Oh, Odd,” she called, after he’d regained the road, “be careful! They’re lions, you know.” But he was already out of hearing. We watched until he turned a bend at the corner, innocent of the menace he carried, the chrysanthemums that burned, that growled and roared against a greenly lowering dusk.

TRUMAN CAPOTE
    Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and then fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in Harper’s Bazaar established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties, and his novels Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as “an attempt to exorcise demons,” and The Grass Harp (1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.
    From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples were Local Color (1950) and The Muses Are Heard (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954).
    Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death .
    He worked for many years on Answered Prayers , an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of