But Bonnie Clutter was dead. No, of course she didn’t know.
Babe shuddered, stamped out her cigarette, lit another. She was alone at Kiluna; Bill was in Los Angeles for business. The children were at school, but even if they’d been home, she wouldn’t really know it. They were housed in a separate little wing of their own. And so, isolated, Babe indulged in dark thoughts; it was as sinful, as clandestine, as if she’d eaten an entire cake by herself, and just as satisfying. And disgusting.
Would her children mourn her, were she to die suddenly, horrifically? Babe was no fool; she knew they would not, and it was her own fault. She was close to her oldest son, Tony, now that he was an adult, but she hadn’t been when he was a child. She didn’t like children very much, she had to admit; her arms simply didn’t ache to hold her babies; she wasn’t tolerant of the odors and stains of childhood. And as the children grew, each with their special problems—Amanda terribly shy; Bill Junior hyper, afraid of his father; poor Kate so permanently stressed she’d lost her hair as a child, something Babe could never fully accept despite the fact that she and Bill had had every specialist in to examine her, and the finest, most natural wigs made—Babe found herself letting each one of them down, incapable of fixing them, molding them, as her mother had molded her. So she withdrew from her own children, and hoped others could do it for her. She employed the very best nurses and nannies and governesses and tutors, interviewing them herself, treating the help like family, making sure they were well compensated—she’d even had a separate pool put in just for these helpers, away from the main pool, so they’d have some privacy, some release. She saw that her children attended the best schools. She oversaw their playmates, invited them to stay at Kiluna or Kiluna North; she filled the children’s wing with all the newest toys and record players and televisions and games. She made a point of dropping in once a day, spending time with each child when they were small, reading or playing board games or applauding swimming prowess, new dance moves.
And then she left them—oh, what was that line in Truman’s book? Babe scurried over to the bed and picked it up; yes, there it was. Bonnie was talking about her youngest son—“And how will he remember me? As a kind of ghost.”
Babe shook her head, lit another cigarette. She’d never have thought she’d have so much in common with a plain neurotic housewife from Holcomb, Kansas.
Yet surely that was how she was to her four children: a ghost. A fabulously dressed, unattainable ghost. She left them to their own devices so that she could tend to herself, and to Bill. So that she could tend to her guests, her house, her gardens, her clothes, her charitable organizations. And so that she could tend to Truman; she let him into her heart as she’d never let her children, and she knew it, and they knew it, and so she understood that if she were murdered in the middle of the night as Bonnie Clutter was—messy, imperfect, frail Bonnie Clutter!—she would not be mourned half as much.
Except, of course, by Truman. Astonishing, great little Truman. Who had written an astonishing, great big book that had taken the world by storm, and now she had a new fear—oh, she was afraid of everything, wasn’t she? She was just like Bonnie Clutter! Only a few cigarettes away from retreating to her room, never to emerge in the daylight. Her parents had not raised her to be afraid, but she was; she was constantly beset by uncertainty, nibbled by doubts. If only the world knew! But Truman did know; he knew everything about her, every tough scar and tender wound, except this—
He did not know that she was terrified of losing him.
Despite her education practically at his own knee—the reading of Dickens, Proust, Faulkner—she honestly didn’t know how she was going to talk to him now. Sharing her doubts and dreams with this great man seemed absurd. Tickling him, dancing with him, exchanging confidences and gossip—how on earth could she continue doing that? Now that she had read this book, this book by someone else, not her confidant, not her soul mate. This was a book written by a man—and she had ceased to think of Truman as that. He had become an extension of herself: her analyst, her pillow, her sleeping pill at night, her coffee in the morning.
The phone rang, jolting her out of her reverie. Babe padded over to the gilded French provincial phone on her bedside table, not waiting for the staff to answer. For she knew who it was.
“Bobolink! Darling! So—tell me! Tell me what you think!”
Babe almost gasped with relief. Truman sounded just like—Truman! Her heart, her soul, her twin. And not the great man of letters.