POETS DAY: Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory
Happy P.O.E.T.C. Day! There is no Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday scheme or evasion to get you out of work this week because you don’t need one. Just tell your boss that you’re pissing off early because tomorrow’s Christmas. Done.
Since it’s not a proper P.O.E.T.S. Day I decided to get prosaic. Sorry, no poem today. Instead we have Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, a well-loved and very famous story revisited as a Yuletide tradition by many and one that I remember fondly first reading about twenty minutes ago.
The reason I never picked it up until know is that my high school headmaster was an ass. I respected him and he respected me at least as far as I can tell, but we never got along. He was one hell of an actor though and his annual dramatic reading of this story was always a very successful fundraiser, but I never went. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction even though he’d never spot me in the crowded school theater.
He was a quick-witted guy. I’ll credit him with the best line in the standing feud between him and my mother. They were at a charity event and though I’m sure both tried to avoid each other the gravity of socializing pulled them into the same orbit. Mom greeted him without much enthusiasm and he replied “Cristina, you usually keep such an aesthetic distance.”
That was a great line.
We had a good bit of contact my senior year because in addition to being the headmaster he ran his first love, the drama department, in which I took and interest. One day he called me into his office and told me I was the lead in the next play. I didn’t try out. He just thought I fit the part. Like I said, we didn’t get along, but we respected each other.
What followed was a month of hectic after school rehearsals and after rehearsal line running between the leading lady and me at one or the other of our houses. It was a monster of a script that was almost entirely dialogue between her and me and we were given a month. We pulled it off and the headmaster actually shook my hand. I think that was the only time he ever did that when not handing me a diploma.
The play ran two nights and the next school day we had to go one by one into his office – he also taught senior English – and recite Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech. I stammered through it. I didn’t have the time to nail it down with all the play work I’d been doing.
He was back to normal form complaining that I was ill prepared and not taking his class seriously and I yelled at a teacher for the one and only time. I told him he just saw me two nights in a row do eighty or pages of dialogue on a one month rehearsal schedule rather than the usual two. What was the purpose of the assignment? Was it my ability to memorize? I proved that on stage. Was it to demonstrate an understanding of what Hamlet was saying? I wrote an essay on that speech had already earned an A.
He stared daggers at me after I asked him that perfectly reasonable flurry of questions and I turned and left without finishing the Shakespeare speech. He gave me a 98. We didn’t like each other, but there was respect.
I wish I had gone to his Christmas reading. As I said he was a very good actor and in my head as I read the story I couldn’t help but hear his distinct and often mimicked by students voice. In particular I liked the line “she is weeping into a pillow already as wet as a widow’s handkerchief.” It fit’s my recollection of his timbre.
He passed away and I was sad to hear but as I had no contact with him post-graduation it was a sad acknowledgement rather than a cause for mourning. I said a prayer for him as a fellow Catholic and wished his soul well. I didn’t give him much thought after that until last month.
My son is a student at the same high school I went to and in November I saw him perform for the first time in the school theater, appropriately now named in memorial after that ass of a headmaster who, at least I’m told, read a Capote’s tale brilliantly.
The school is different now than when I was kid. There are recording studios, new state of the art labs, a 3D printer, a palace of a gym, and so much more. A friend I graduated with is now the head of the upper school and she was laughing when we took a tour as prospective parents and neither of us could believe the upgrades (my wife is a graduate of the school too.) As she put it, “I went to this school, but I wish I went to this school.
My former headmaster put in place the plan that raised the money to build all of these amazing tools my son has access to now. I’m thankful to him now.
Read it for yourself here, and in your head, imagine it in a sharp southern drawl that could easily shift from flamboyant to dismissive.
Merry Christmas.
