Geraldine

A Christmas Memory

by Truman Capote

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than ...
twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country
town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round
table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today
the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.A woman with shorn white hair is
standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray
sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam
hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched.
Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun
and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored
and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's
fruitcake weather!"This is our last Christmas together.
Life separates us.
Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a
miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer
camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn't count. Home is where my friend is,
and there I never go.And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen. Alone
with Queenie. Then alone. ("Buddy dear," she writes in her wild hard-to-read
script, "yesterday Jim Macy's horse kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn't
feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet and rode her in the buggy down to
Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her Bones....").
For a few
Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes single-handed; not as many, but
some: and, of course, she always sends me "the best of the batch." Also, in
every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet paper: "See a picture show and
write me the story." But gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with
her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880's; more and more, thirteenths
are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a
leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to
exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!"