“La C?te Basque 1965.” Christ. Even the title was dreadful.
Well, she’d have him down here when he was finished shooting that terrible movie in California, make a fuss over him, coddle him, protect him. For a while, anyway. But he’d have to sink or swim on his own, as she had, as she’d taught her children to do. She rather doubted that he’d swim, however.
He didn’t have the breeding, the pedigree. He wasn’t a thoroughbred. It was a damn shame, but there it was.
C.Z. shook her head, rose, and went off to find the gardener.
That dandelion simply didn’t belong.
CHAPTER 11
…..
Babe put down her signed copy of In Cold Blood, which Truman had pressed into her hand only last night. His own hands had trembled; his entire body had pulsated with pride, accomplishment, and, perhaps, a touch of fear?
“I do hope you’ll like it, my dearest Babe,” he’d whispered, gazing up at her with his solemn eyes after he dated his inscription January, 1966. “Your opinion means the most to me, truly.”
And she had been touched, as always; touched, and made to feel special and needed and important, and those were feelings that she cherished, clutched to her heart, polished up, and took out to marvel over with more pride of ownership than her finest pearls.
Babe had stayed up all night to finish the book—when it had first appeared in four parts in The New Yorker last fall, Truman had implored her to wait until it was published in book form, so she could read it all in one sitting. And so she had, although before settling down with it, she’d first tiptoed around the house to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, for she was sure it would be rather a frightening book to read alone, at night. And while it was, initially, soon that wore off and she became simply fascinated by the character studies. Yes, the portraits of the killers, Perry and Dick, were mesmerizing, but it was the characterization of one of the victims—Mrs. Clutter, Bonnie—that Babe couldn’t get out of her head.
For Bonnie Clutter was something of a mess, in Babe’s opinion. Frail and neurotic. Unable to cope with life, beset by doubt and inadequacy and fear. Bonnie Clutter hid in her room, slept all day, didn’t run the house—all that was left to her daughter, poor doomed Nancy. And the thing is—everyone in Holcomb, Kansas, apparently knew all about it! And accepted Bonnie, and worried over her, and didn’t seem to judge Bonnie Clutter for being who she was—weepy, fragile, depressed, withdrawn.
All traits that had threatened Babe, in her darkest moments when she felt she couldn’t put up with Bill, with her high-profile life, with the image she herself had spent so much time perfecting. But never, not once, had she given in to the temptation to do what Bonnie Clutter had done right up until the night she was murdered—allow the mess, the darkness, to triumph.
Babe picked up the book again and turned to the photograph insert; there was a picture of Bonnie Clutter in better days. A plain, unfortunately bespectacled woman in one of those dreary Mamie Eisenhower getups, with the full flowered skirt, the enormous corsage pinned to her shoulder, the unflattering, lacy hat perched on tightly permed curls. Bonnie was smiling, with a beguiling dimple. She looked happy.
But Truman’s portrait was of a woman who was anything but; a woman who once explained to a friend that she regretted not finishing nursing school despite the fact that she was no good at it, “just to prove that I once succeeded at something.”
Oh, how Babe could relate to that! She had a diploma, but it was merely decorative; Gogsie had decreed that all her girls attend Westover, a finishing school, rather than a college. And while Babe had graduated at the top of her class, still—it was just a finishing school. Her years as a fashion editor had given her a taste of accomplishment at something other than being her own fabulous self, but they’d been fleeting. Marriage had been her destiny, as it had been Bonnie’s, as it was for most women. At least Babe had succeeded at that, in the only way her mother defined success: marriage to wealthy, desirable men. But Bonnie had done that, as well; Herb Clutter, as portrayed by Truman, had been the alpha male of Holcomb, Kansas, a leader in the community.
But Bonnie couldn’t keep up, couldn’t cope, and while Babe understood this more than anyone but Truman ever suspected, she didn’t give in, she didn’t allow anyone to see her life as anything but a triumph. That was how Babe would be remembered, at least; unlike poor Bonnie, who was now immortalized, vanquished by the life determined for her. How did her surviving daughters feel about this? Did Bonnie Clutter herself somehow know that Truman had stripped her naked, bare? Exposed her for who she really was?