ONE CHRISTMAS

With just 21 pages of large-print text, this autobiographical snippet (which originally appeared in Ladles' Home Journal) is even briefer than A Christmas Memory or The Thanksgiving Visitor; more crucially, perhaps, it's far less cozy than Capote's previous childhood stories—with only brief mention of Truman's surrogate mother, elderly cousin Miss Sook. The Christmas in question here comes when parent-abandoned Truman is six years old, summoned from Alabama (where he's been raised by relatives) to New Orleans: his father suddenly wants him for the holidays—"this stranger, who was forcing me to leave home and be away from Sook at Christmastime." The unhappy boy is hauled around to restaurants and friends. He falls in love—with a huge model air-plane in a store window. And then, on Christmas eve, the elegant father throws a big grownup party—as Truman gets some inkling of his father's gigolo life. . . and realizes for the first time that there is no Santa Claus. (He does, however, rather deviously, get the airplane—and, back home, Sook explains that "everybody is Santa Claus.") A fair enough little sliver of autobiography, complete with slipcase and outsized price-tag—but more poignant as a reminder of Capote's waning productivity than as a story proper.