Free Capote by Gerald Clarke

smile, he smirks in delight—but they move swiftly, with a small measure of grace, and so far as can be judged on such slim evidence, he is trying to give his work shape as well as size.
    The most interesting story from those Trinity years, however, is one that exists only in memory. His ninth-grade English teacher, John Lasher, handed it one day to a colleague, C. Bruner-Smith, without saying who had written it. The story described, in a dream-like way, the sensation of rolling down a hill and tumbling into unconsciousness. “It was a rather lengthy manuscript,” recalled Bruner-Smith, “and I was struck and impressed by it. It had to do with children, and it had a feeling that I found very remarkable. Very few writers, even great writers, are able to get inside the mind of a child. Mark Twain could do it, and so could Booth Tarkington. But Shakespeare couldn’t. The story that Lasher handed me showed that facility. The spelling was bad, but I still couldn’t believe that a boy of thirteen or fourteen could have produced it. ‘Who wrote this?’ I asked Lasher, and he answered, ‘Truman Capote said he did.’ And so he had.”
    Not long after that, Truman’s life once again abruptly changed course, and in June, 1939, the Capotes left New York for Greenwich, Connecticut. They rented a house on Orchard Drive in the Millbrook section, a small upper-middle-class enclave that maintained a careful, if friendly, distance from the rest of the town. Stone columns marked its entrance from the main road, a private policeman patrolled its pretty, winding streets, and its ninety or so houses were, like the Capotes’, all built in traditional Tudor styles. To give it a rural appearance, the people who laid it out in the twenties had left reminders of the country: hills, trees, streams, and two large lakes, which were used for boating in the summer and skating in the winter. Small as it was, the community had its own country club, to which only residents could belong. Millbrook was not the richest part of Greenwich, nor was it the most prestigious, but those who lived there usually stayed there; people from Millbrook tended to spend their time with other people from Millbrook.
    Joe and Nina, gregarious both, soon felt at home. They brought with them their maid and her husband, whom they employed as chauffeur, and Nina was free to spend her afternoons shopping, playing bridge, or gossiping with other wives at the country club. Then, nearly every night, shortly after the commuting husbands returned from Manhattan, there would be a larger gathering. Liquor flowed freely in Greenwich, and the Capotes’ new acquaintances enjoyed a good time as much as they did. For Joe and Nina, who had been enjoying themselves in such ways and with such friends for the better part of a decade, the party had merely changed addresses.
    Surprisingly, considering the pain previous disruptions had caused him, the move to Greenwich was just as easy for Truman, who entered Greenwich High School as a tenth-grader in September. A few hostile remarks were directed his way, of course. By the standards of the time, he did not look right, sound right, or dress right; while the other boys wore slacks and shoes, he came to class, a generation too early, in sloppy-looking blue jeans and sneakers. But it was mild disapproval, all in all, and if Truman cared what was said about him, he did not show it. “Those who knew him accepted him as an equal,” said one of his classmates, Crawford Hart, Jr. “He looked down his nose at the others.”
    Indeed, he probably welcomed the attention. At Trinity he had learned how to set himself apart from everyone else; at Greenwich he went a step further: he discovered how to turn the spotlight on himself and himself alone. “Truman was vividly nonconventional,” said Thomas Flanagan, a classmate who later became a historical novelist of considerable renown. “He was full of energy and self-confidence, and quite flamboyant, a