“It’s not yet happened.” Truman tilted that stubborn chin, steeled those blue eyes. “But it will. The Pulitzer. Of course.”
“Of course,” Babe agreed, thrilled. That her friend, her intimate new friend, would win a Pulitzer Prize! That she should know someone—be sitting by the side of her pool at Round Hill with him, their bare feet cooling off in the silky water—who was an intellectual, a writer of such stature! How had this happened? No one in her life, save her father, had ever been what you could call an intellectual. Not even Bill, for all that he had accomplished. Bill moved through life like a shark, fueled by sheer instinct. His instincts were sound—miraculous, even—but still. One of his most endearing traits was that he was the first to admit he did not have the kind of mind of, say, an Ed Murrow. That was why Bill worshipped Murrow so, had tried to emulate him to the point of wearing the same trench coat and hat, London-made, when they first became friends during the war.
But Truman, with his shrewd eyes, his interest in everything yet an ability to home in on the most intriguing, unusual aspect, his talent for understanding people and what made them tick, his vast knowledge of literature and craft, his precise, yet expansive vocabulary—Truman was an intellectual, she was certain of it. An intellectual with a love of gossip and high society and low life, to be sure. But still an intellectual. And he was her friend.
Hers, not Bill’s. She’d seen him first.
“My greatest accomplishment?” Babe repeated the question. “My children, of course.”
“No. That’s bourgeois. No woman should mistake nature for an accomplishment. It’s distasteful, this emphasis on reproduction. It’s biological, and that is all. Besides, I’ve never met your children, so how can you be so proud of them?”
Babe colored. “I am. All mothers are.”
“Yet you let others care for them? You leave them all week, while you’re in the city or traveling, and they stay out at Kiluna with their keepers?”
“It’s better that way, Truman. More stability. And there’s no room for them in the apartment, you know.”
“And whose idea was that? To live in such a tiny little space with no room for anybody else?”
“Bill’s,” Babe admitted, her throat suddenly tight, unwilling to allow the disloyal words. “Bill wanted that. It’s close to his office.”
“What about you?”
“You don’t understand. Bill needs me, and women always go where they’re needed. I have to take care of him. I have to make sure he eats well, and is entertained, looked after.”
“Your children need you. They need you to take care of them, even with all the nurses and nannies. Children need their mothers, Babe. Oh, honey, that is one thing I do know!”
“Stop!” Babe held up her hand, her breath coming heavily, gearing up for flight. “I don’t—how dare you say these things?”
“I say these things because I’m your friend,” Truman replied with a shrug that threw off her anger and bewilderment—and with a smile that melted the ice threatening to encase her.
And then she knew, with a clarity that echoed some long-forgotten childhood sense of justice, of knowing right from wrong, because it was the simplest thing, because it was true. She knew that he was right. And that he had the right to say this to her.
Because Truman is your friend. Truman is a real friend, the only one who has ever talked to you like this. The only one who cares enough to tell you the truth. The only one who wants to see past the surface. This moment is important. It is the template for the rest of your life. Don’t run away from it.
“I’m not used to having friends,” Babe finally confessed, kicking a foot up so that it broke the surface of the water, like a porpoise. “I have acquaintances.”
“Not anymore,” Truman said solemnly. He crooked his little finger and held it out to her. “Best friends. Pinkie swear.”
Babe smiled, and crooked her own finger through his. “Pinkie swear.” Then her heart—that swollen sac of regret—tore, and she felt something slide down her cheek. She swiped away a tear, as astonished to see it as she would have been to see a lizard floating in the clarion-blue pool, as blue as Montego Bay itself, just down the lush, verdant hill. The air was silky, warm on winter-parched skin; Truman was paler than smoke, while Babe’s flesh was tawny, from years spent following the annual migration of her flock—several long stays each winter in the Caribbean, summers in the country, an annual yachting trip in the Mediterranean. A year spent chasing the sun, in golden chariots. “I’ve never done that before—pinkie swear, I mean. Not with my sisters. Not with my children.”