Free Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote

six bastards, a laundress, a servant herself. And yet they respected her; even Mme. Jouet, the head mammy of the Vaccaro family, who owned the United Fruit Company, always addressed her civilly.
    Two days after my conversation with Mrs. Ferguson, a Sunday, I accompanied my grandmother to church, and as we were walking home, a matter of a few blocks, I noticed that someone was following us: a well-built boy with tobacco-colored skinand green eyes. I knew at once that it was the infamous Skeeter, the boy whose birth had caused his mother to be flogged, and I knew that he was bringing me a message. I felt nauseated, but also elated, almost tipsy, enough so to make me laugh.
    Merrily, my grandmother asked: “Ah, you know a joke?”
    I thought: No, but I know a secret. However, I only said: “It was just something the minister said.”
    “Really? I’m glad you found some humor. It struck me as a very dry sermon. But the choir was good.”
    I refrained from making the following comment: “Well, if they’re just going to talk about sinners and hell, when they don’t know what hell is, they ought to ask me to preach the sermon. I could tell them a thing or two.”
    “Are you happy here?” my grandmother asked, as if it were a question she had been considering ever since her arrival. “I know it’s been difficult. The divorce. Living here, living there. I want to help; I don’t know how.”
    “I’m fine. Everything’s hunky-dory.”
    But I wished she’d shut up. She did, with a frown. So at least I’d got one wish. One down and one to go.
    When we reached home my grandmother, saying she felt the start of a migraine and might try to ward it off with a pill and a nap, kissed me and went inside the house. I raced through the garden toward the old wisteria arbor and hid myself inside it, like a bandit in a bandit’s cave waiting for a confederate.
    Soon Mrs. Ferguson’s son arrived. He was tall for his age, just shy of six feet, and muscular as a dockworker. He resembled his mother in no respect. It wasn’t only his dark coloring; his features were nicely defined, the bone structure quite precise—his father must have been a handsome man. And unlike Mrs. Ferguson, his emerald eyes were not dumb comic-strip dots, but narrow and mean, weapons, bullets threateningly aimed and primed to explode. I wasn’t surprised when, not many yearslater, I heard he’d committed a double murder in Houston and died in the electric chair at Texas State Prison.
    He was natty, dressed like the adult sharp-guy hoodlums who lounged around the waterfront hangouts: Panama hat, two-toned shoes, a tight stained white linen suit that some much slighter man must have given him. An impressive cigar jutted from his handkerchief pocket: a Havana Castle Morro, the connoisseur’s cigar Garden District gentlemen served along with their after-dinner absinthe and framboise. Skeeter Ferguson lit his cigar with movie-gangster showmanship, constructed an impeccable smoke ring, blew it straight into my face, and said: “I’ve come to get you.”
    “Now?”
    “Just as soon as you bring me the old lady’s necklace.”
    It was useless to stall, but I tried: “What necklace?”
    “Save your breath. Go get it and then we’ll head somewhere. Or else we won’t. And you’ll never have another chance.”
    “But she’s wearing it!”
    Another smoke ring, professionally manufactured, effortlessly projected. “How you get it ain’t none of my beeswax. I’ll just be right here. Waiting.”
    “But it may take a long time. And suppose I can’t do it?”
    “You will. I’ll wait till you do.”
    The house sounded empty when I entered through the kitchen door, and except for my grandmother, it was; everyone else had driven off to visit a newly married cousin who lived across the river. After calling my grandmother’s name, and hearing silence, I tiptoed upstairs and listened at her bedroom door. She must be asleep. Accepting the risk, I inched the door