SOURCE: “Surprised by Joy: Stories of the Fifties and Sixties,” in Truman Capote, Frederick Ungar, 1980, pp. 91–110.

[In the following essay, Garson describes the plots and major thematic concerns of four of Capote's short stories and a novella published in the 1950s and 1960s.]

The story “A Diamond Guitar,” which appeared first in Harper's Bazaar in 1950, was reprinted in the collection Capote called Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Short Stories, in 1958. Also included in the group were “A House of Flowers” (1951) and “A Christmas Memory” (1956), both of which had been published in Mademoiselle. The story, “Among the Paths to Eden” (1960), printed originally in Esquire, is in Selected Writings (1963), which also contains a reissue of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

“A Diamond Guitar” reveals Capote's early interest in prison stories as well as his sympathy towards certain kinds of convicts. The same empathy exists in the book In Cold Blood and in his collaborative writing of the script for a prison movie, The Glass House.

The setting of “A Diamond Guitar” is a Southern prison farm twenty miles from the closest town. It is a different kind of prison, located in a pine forest from which the prisoners take turpentine. Unlike city penal institutions there are few reminders of physical restrictions. A red clay road leads to the prison in the pines. At night the men can go into the yard to look up at the stars, or go to sleep with moonlight coming through the windows. There is a great stillness in this prison story, but it is the quiet that comes with the absence of life. Although the convicts live in a natural environment, they are as unhappy as any people who live behind bars. Some chafe for the real world, whatever that is for each of them; others have blocked out all hope of change, living only in the present. Mr. Schaeffer, the major figure in the story, is one of the latter.

Mr. Schaeffer has been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a “man [who] deserved to die.” At fifty he has been in prison for seventeen years. A lonely man, with no friends outside the prison and no close friends inside, he is one of the few convicts who can read and write, and he helps other prisoners when possible. He is also a carver who makes dolls that are sold in town, a talent that provides Mr. Schaeffer with small sums of money.

One day a young Cuban named Tico Feo is brought into the prison and assigned to Schaeffer, who is to teach him the routine. Schaeffer is very much taken with the golden-haired, blue-eyed boy who plays a jeweled guitar. Tico Feo makes him feel alive, and he remembers the pleasures as well as the pain of what life once was. Schaeffer “had not wanted to be alive,” but he and all the prisoners are affected by the presence of Tico Feo. When he plays his guitar the prisoners sing and dance and laugh as they had not before he came.

The two men become good friends when Schaeffer gives Tico Feo dolls for his sisters. The older man is generous to the younger, sharing with him the things he gets from his earnings. Although Schaeffer knows that Tico Feo lies and is lazy, he tells himself that Tico Feo is a boy and “it will be a long time” before he is a grown-up. He thus forgives him for his untruths and exaggerations.

But Tico Feo arouses a great feeling of sadness in the men, emotion brought on by his music, which revives memories of life outside the prison walls. Schaeffer's emotional barriers are broken down by his closeness to the boy, and although there is no sexual relationship, “they were as lovers.”

The young man does not adjust to the penal life. He constantly speaks of the freedoms of the real world. However, the outside world evoked for Mr. Schaeffer is different from what Tico Feo represents. Mr. Schaeffer reawakens to dreams of brown rivers and sunlight, but Tico Feo's “El Mundo” is gaudy and artificial, like the glass-diamonded guitar.

Tico Feo wants to escape from the prison. Although Schaeffer believes himself too old to begin a totally new life, Tico Feo finally persuades the man to break out with him. One day, during a time the convicts are at work in the forest, the two men attempt to escape. However, as Schaeffer is running he trips over a log in the creek, breaking his ankle. As he looks up at Tico Feo's face, he realizes that the boy “had not wanted him to make it, had never thought he would.” In addition to being a liar and a thief, the young prisoner is also a betrayer. Schaeffer remembers how he had thought “it would be a long time before his friend was a grown man.”

The guards find Schaeffer but Tico Feo escapes and is never found. The Captain of the prison protects Schaeffer by claiming he had attempted to prevent Tico Feo from escaping.

Schaeffer is left with a limp and Tico Feo's guitar, for there is nobody who can play it properly. As the years pass, the glass diamonds turn yellow. Sometimes during the long nights Mr. Schaeffer's fingers “drift across the strings: then, the world.” Where he had shut out the world before he met Tico Feo, he can do that no longer. Once he had chosen not to be alive, for to be numb was to be free from pain; Mr. Schaeffer's discovery of love has now made him a vulnerable man. Lonelier than ever, he remembers, he dreams, and he suffers.

One of the many places to which Tico Feo had sailed before his imprisonment was Haiti, the island setting for Capote's story, “House of Flowers.” It begins in Port-au-Prince, the seaport capital of Haiti, the city to which Ottilie, the central figure in the story, walked from her mountain home three years earlier.¹ She remains in Port-au-Prince until she meets a handsome young man, Royal Bonaparte, marries, and goes to live with him in his home high up in the mountains.

Ottilie is a beautiful seventeen-year-old of mixed parentage. When Ottilie was a child her mother died, and her father, a planter, returned to France. Brought up by a coarse peasant family, whose sons all used her sexually, Ottilie slips easily into the life of a prostitute when she is befriended by a kind man in the market-place of Port-au-Prince. He takes her to his cousin who runs an establishment known as the Champs Elysées. It is a narrow old building covered with bougainvillea vines, a house of many balconies and a porch where the eight resident prostitutes sit in the evening fanning themselves and telling stories.

Delighted with her good luck, paid for doing what was previously one of her household chores, Ottilie revels in her success: five dresses made of silk, green satin shoes, three gold teeth valued at thousands of francs, steady customers for her services, and an armful of gold bracelets given to her by an admirer, a middle-aged American engineer named Mr. Jamison. Ottilie marvels at the juke box and the electric light and thinks very seldom of the mountain area that had been her home.

Yet, with all her pleasures, she has a feeling of discontent. When her friends, Baby and Rosita, speak of the bliss of love, Ottilie realizes that she has never known it. Disturbed by this, she goes to a Houngan, a voodooist, to find out about the secret of love. When she can hold a bee in her hand without being stung, she is told, then she will know she has found love. Wondering whether she might be in love with Mr. Jamison, Ottilie tries out the message of the gods. When she catches a black bee in her hands she is stung.

Then at carnival time Ottilie goes to a cockfight, where she sees a ginger-colored, smooth and shiny-skinned man, his appearance as arrogant as the cock he has brought to the match. Ottilie feels she has “never known anyone so beautiful.” The man, Royal, and Ottilie dance and talk, and Ottilie finds herself comfortable with Royal, “for the mountains were still with her, and he was of the mountains.” They go into a wooded area, where they make love. Afterwards, as Royal lies on the ground asleep, Ottilie catches a bee. When the bee fails to sting her, she understands that she is in love at last.

They go to Royal's mountain home which is “like a house of flowers,” perched far above the sea. Wisteria covers the roof, vines hang over the windows, lilies grow near the doorway. There in the one-room house Ottilie lives joyfully, except for two problems. One is that Royal after a few months returns to some of his bachelor habits. However, Ottilie manages to accept this. But she is tormented by the other obstacle to her happiness, Royal's grandmother, Old Bonaparte.

The old woman is very cruel to Ottilie, pinching her and predicting an early death for her. People for miles around, and Royal as well, are afraid of Old Bonaparte's power to make spells. At night, when Ottilie and Royal make love, she thinks the grandmother is watching them, and once she is certain she sees a “gummy” eye staring at her in the dark. When Ottilie begins to find strange things in her sewing basket—a cat's head, a snake, spiders, a lizard, a buzzard's breast—she realizes that Old Bonaparte is trying to put a curse on her. Ottilie says nothing, but each day she cooks into the old woman's food the animal parts she finds. When at last Ottilie tells the grandmother what she has done, the old lady collapses and dies.

Not long after the grandmother's death, Ottilie begins to think she is being haunted. One night when she sees an eye staring at her in the dark, she tells Royal what had happened. When she asks him whether she had done wrong he cannot judge, but he decides that Ottilie must be punished to appease the old woman's ghost. Only then will Ottilie be left in peace.

Royal ties Ottilie to a tree in the yard and goes off to work. As she dozes she is amazed to see her two friends, Baby and Rosita, coming up the path. Ottilie's old admirer, Mr. Jamison, provided a car for them to find out what had happened to Ottilie. When the women untie Ottilie, they go into the house, where she puts on a silk dress and stockings and pearl earrings. The three of them drink rum all day and tell stories. Ottilie is happy in her friends' company, but when they expect her to leave with them she is startled, for she has no intention of deserting Royal. Baby and Rosita tie Ottilie up again in the yard once they realize she loves her husband. They return to Port-au-Prince to announce that Ottilie is dead.

As twilight settles in, Ottilie, hearing Royal's footsteps, throws herself into a position suggesting she has met with violence, happily planning to give “a good scare” to Royal. With that scene the story concludes. Ottilie has done her penance; Royal does his when he is frightened by the way his wife looks as he comes towards the house. But as in any fairy tale, all's well that ends well.

In looking at “House of Flowers” the reader may readily see why Capote used it as the basis for the musical comedy which he wrote in 1954. The story has many of the characteristics of the genre: lightness, humor, exotic setting, and one-dimensional characters. As fiction, the work is a loose mixture of love story and violence; neither part is memorable. The strangeness of the setting does not alter the superficiality of the romantic tale. And the introduction of voodoo, the evil eye, cockfights, superstition, wizardry, and death is more humorous than serious. Where Capote has used similar elements at other times to provide a look at the dark side of human nature, in “House of Flowers” they seem merely colorful.

Capote's ability to combine comedy, nostalgia, and a child's sense of tragedy is nowhere more evident than in the story “A Christmas Memory.” Declared by Capote to be his most cherished piece, it is more overtly autobiographical than anything else he has written. The author has said that the child in the story is himself and the elderly relative, his cousin, Miss Sook Faulk. He further emphasized the reality behind the fiction in “A Christmas Memory” by having a childhood picture of himself and Miss Faulk reproduced for a reprinting of the story in 1966, ten years after its original publication.

In addition to seeing the autobiographical connection between the story and the author, the reader can discern immediately similarities to Capote's novel, The Grass Harp. In both works, the major figures are a young boy and his older female relative; the scenes take place primarily in the kitchen and in the woods; the story is set in the past and the tone is nostalgic; and an event of great significance takes place in both the story and the novel, that is, the parting of the child and his cousin. In The Grass Harp the woman dies and the young man goes north to school, whereas in “A Christmas Memory” the boy is sent away to a military school, never to see his cousin again; her death occurs after his leaving.

“A Christmas Memory” opens as the narrator evokes memories of late November mornings spent in a warm country kitchen. Looking backwards the speaker becomes a seven-year-old who has lived for a long time with his distant cousin. Although it is not her house, in his child's world the other inhabitants don't matter unless they cause difficulties. The old woman and the boy, whom she has named Buddy, after a childhood friend of hers who died in the 1880s,² are best friends. It is possible because the white-haired, small, sprightly, craggy yet delicate-faced woman with sherry-colored, timid eyes has never outgrown the sunny world of childhood. Buddy stresses the great difference between her and others, saying, “She is still a child.”

On a particular morning every November, a special ritual is repeated. His cousin looks out the window, notes the chill of the season, thinks of Christmas, and makes the pronouncement: “It's fruitcake weather.” The two of them find her hat—worn more for propriety than for warmth, a straw cartwheel decorated with roses of velvet—and get Buddy's old baby carriage, which serves as a cart for carrying the load of pecans that will go into the fruitcake. Along with their dog, Queenie, they walk to a pecan grove, where, on their hands and knees, for hours they will search out nuts.

Their expeditions are like those in The Grass Harp. Dolly, Catherine, and Collin go to the woods to gather ingredients for Dolly's dropsy medicine or to picnic. Buddy and his cousin collect flowers, herbs, and ferns in the spring, firewood in the winter, and fish the creek in the summer. The lives of the two families resemble each other in their patterns. And another similarity exists in their attitudes toward money. It is intended to bring pleasure. However, where Dolly, Catherine, and Collin have Dolly's earnings to purchase magazines and games, Buddy and his cousin enter contests to try to win money to support their activities; they also sell jars of jams, jellies, and preserves they've made, berries they've gathered, and flowers they've picked for important occasions.

They need money for the buying of the items that go into the fruitcake, the candied fruits, the spices, the whiskey, the flour, the butter, the eggs. All year long they save in their “Fruitcake Fund;” most of it is in pennies, which they count out for the thirty or more cakes they send to people they like, such as President Roosevelt, a bus driver who waves at them every day, and a couple who once took a picture of them. And afterwards there are the thank-you letters for their scrapbooks.

The fun and excitement of shopping is followed by the pleasure of preparing the cakes: the glowing of the stove, the sounds of the mixing, the smells of the spices delight Buddy. However, in four days it is all over and he feels let down afterwards. His cousin has a remedy though for depression, the whiskey left from the baking. After Queenie gets a spoonful mixed in coffee, the two of them drink the remainder. Then the sour taste of the liquor is soon replaced by happy feelings. They begin to giggle, to sing, and to dance. Queenie rolls in drunken joy as the cousin waltzes around in her squeaky tennis shoes.

The delightful comedy of the drinking scene is produced by the deft touch of the writer, not only here but elsewhere in the work as well. The description of the meeting with Haha Jones—so named for his somber disposition—proprietor of the shop where they buy the whiskey for the cakes, is another episode enlivened by the lightness of the humor. Looking at the odd pair, Haha asks, “Which one of you is a drinking man?” The appearance of Haha and the tongue-in-cheek designation of the “sinful” café he runs all add to the comic note.

There are also other kinds of humor in the story. A line here and there suggests the eighteenth-century satirist Alexander Pope. When the narrator tells of earning pennies by killing house flies, he says in mock-heroic style, “Oh the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven!” Superstition further provides the opportunity for comedy; the number thirteen has several possibilities. Fear of having thirteen dollars causes Buddy and his cousin to throw a penny out of the window to avoid the multiple catastrophes that could occur from the unlucky sum. Twelve ninety-nine is safer. The importance of hoarding the money of the “Fund” provides another chance for verbal and visual humor. Buddy makes the following statement, creating an expanding comic effect by the use of detail and the repetition of the word “under”: “These moneys we keep hidden in an ancient purse under a loose board under the floor under a chamber pot under my friend's bed.”

The only money ever withdrawn from their savings is the ten cents Buddy is given each week for the movies, to which he goes alone. Although his elderly cousin enjoys hearing him tell the film story, she has never been to a movie. Her life, like that of Dolly Talbo, is that of a recluse. One thinks of Dolly's nunlike, pink room when Buddy describes his cousin's bedroom containing an iron bed painted in her favorite rose pink. Further, his cousin has never been far from home, has had very limited experiences, and is ignorant of the world outside the little town in which she lives. Yet she knows all kinds of wonderful things a small boy admires: how to tame hummingbirds, how to tell terrifying ghost stories, and how to treat ailments by using old Indian cures.

Buddy's cousin, who reads only the funny papers and the Bible, is a religious Christian who fully expects to come face to face with God at the end of her life. However, she also understands the natural world, loves and respects it. Once someone chides her for refusing to sell a beautiful fragrant pine she has cut for a Christmas tree and she is told she can get another one. But she responds like a nineteenth-century Romantic philosopher in tune with nature: “There's never two of anything.”

Decorating the Christmas tree they have dragged home from the woods and making presents consumes much of their time. As early as August they pick cotton to sprinkle on the tree in December. Later, old treasures are brought down from the attic; cutouts of fruits and animals are made from colored paper and tinfoil angels from candy wrappers. They make holly wreaths and family gifts together. But then they separate to make the most important items, the things they will exchange with each other. Both want to give something special, but they have no money for bought presents. Because of that, every year they design colorful handmade kites.

When the holidays are over and the wind is right, they go out of doors to the nearby pastures to fly their kites. Thus the seasons pass, from fruitcake time to tree cutting and decorating, to kite-flying weather. And during the last kite-flying days they have together, Buddy's cousin speaks of a sudden vision she has. She tells him that God shows Himself in many guises, but only at the end of life do we realize that He “has already shown Himself.” And as she says that to Buddy, she moves her hand in an encompassing gesture “that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone.”

It is not long after his cousin has described to him her sense of a godlike indwelling that Buddy is parted from her. He is forced to take up a new life in military schools, camps, and another home. However, because of his love for his cousin and his great sense of loss in the separation, he never feels that he belongs anywhere. He always identifies home with his cousin.

Remaining alone, his cousin writes him of her activities and sorrows, of the death of Queenie. Each November she sends him the best of the fruitcakes. But she lives only a few years more. Soon her memory fails and she can no longer distinguish the narrator from the Buddy who was her childhood friend.

In the winter season when she dies, Buddy intuits her death before he is told of it. He describes his feeling of loss as an “irreplaceable part” of himself, “loose like a kite on a broken string.” He looks up to the December sky as if to see that lost self of his joining with his other self, the spirit of his cousin, “rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”

The concluding passage in its nostalgia and tenderness hearkens back to the last section of The Grass Harp, in which Collin becomes aware of Dolly's spirit moving from the confined world of human existence to the eternal freedom of nature, symbolized by the Indian grass which is the Grass Harp. The conclusion of the story differs, however, from that of the novel in one significant aspect: Collin accepts Dolly's death, seeing it as a part of the mortal cycle, the human story, and recognizes that he must move on. Buddy, on the other hand, has a sense of irrevocable loss; the perception is reinforced by the words “irreplaceable,” “broken,” “searching,” and “lost.” Dolly's presence seems to continue in nature, in the singing grass, but Buddy's cousin has gone far beyond the wintry sky.

The Thanksgiving Visitor was published in 1967, following the reissue of “A Christmas Memory.” In numerous ways the two stories can be paired: the time period is the same, 1932–34, and the place is rural Alabama; the major characters are Buddy and his elderly cousin; their way of life and their activities follow a similar pattern. But there are also important differences. The Thanksgiving Visitor is more specifically detailed and less sentimental than the earlier work. However, it lacks the tenderness as well as the humor of “A Christmas Memory.” The poetic quality is gone as well as the nostalgia. It is as though the author, having come to terms with the anger and pain of his childhood, looks back more objectively to those years that he retraces in both stories.

The elderly cousin, known only as “my friend” in “A Christmas Memory,” is now given her actual name, Miss Sook Faulk. Her character and personality once again are central to the theme. Buddy learns a significant lesson about kindness from Miss Sook, one that he grows to understand eventually. The plot of the story is built on the gentle moral teaching of the lady.

I was “a sissy of sorts,” says the grown-up Buddy, looking back at himself as a small child in second grade. Although Buddy doesn't object to being educated, he fears going to school because of an older boy in his class, Odd Henderson. Odd is a big, rambunctious twelve-year-old who terrifies all the children, even those his own age. Buddy is so frightened of Odd that he tries to avoid attending school. He has nightmares because he feels tormented by Odd. However, when he tells Miss Sook about it, Buddy is distressed by her unwillingness to condemn Odd. Instead, his cousin is sympathetic toward Odd, saying he is to be pitied because of his hard life and disreputable father.

Odd's father, Dad Henderson, a bootlegger who spends most of his days in jail, is married to a woman Miss Sook remembers fondly. Molly Henderson, much younger than her husband, was once a red-haired, lovely girl. But now, says Miss Sook, she has become a toothless hag at thirty-five, with no money and “a houseful of children to feed.”

Miss Sook expects Buddy to have tolerance and pity, for the two of them agree on everything else. Thus, when she wants to invite Odd Henderson for Thanksgiving dinner, she assumes Buddy will agree with her decision. He doesn't; but his cousin goes to the Henderson home anyway to issue an invitation. She returns, filled with sadness by the poverty she has witnessed, telling Buddy of “the shame” she feels “for all of us who have anything extra when other people have nothing.”

To Buddy's dismay, Odd comes to the Faulk house for Thanksgiving dinner. But neither of the boys gets to sample the feast of glazed turkey, ambrosia, whipped sweet potatoes, fritters, mince pie, or banana pudding—Buddy's favorite dish. After grace has been recited and as the thirty people prepare to eat dinner, Buddy accuses Odd of having stolen Miss Sook's cameo from her bureau. Although it is true, Miss Sook denies it, attempting to protect Odd Henderson. She says that Buddy has been playing a joke. With that, Buddy's uncle insists that he apologize. But Odd Henderson does not allow it. He confesses and leaves, after saying, “You must be a special lady, Miss Sook, to fib for me like that.”

Buddy runs out of the house, taking shelter in a nearby smokehouse. There, late in the afternoon, Miss Sook finds him. Despite his self-pity, Buddy accepts the turkey leg his cousin has brought him. And he listens to her, although he scarcely understands what she tells him about wrongdoing. Only “deliberate cruelty” is “unpardonable,” says Miss Faulk, as she attempts to explain that Odd's action though wrong was not calculated. Buddy's behavior, however, was inexcusable because it was an intentional wrong. The adult narrator Buddy notes that he learned after a period of time the significance of the event. But what immediately concerns the child Buddy is the assurance of the continuing love and friendship of his cousin. She convinces him he can never lose those.

Odd Henderson never bothers Buddy again. Soon Odd leaves school to work on a dairy farm, and eventually he goes away to join the Merchant Marine. The last time Buddy sees Odd is in the Faulk garden. Miss Sook and Buddy have been trying to move a large pot of chrysanthemums, when Odd Henderson comes along and carries the heavy tub for Miss Sook. Thanking him for his neighborliness, she cuts a large bouquet of flowers for Odd's mother, sending it with her love. Odd leaves as Miss Sook calls after him, and the story comes to an end.

In A Thanksgiving Visitor the reader has little of the sense of loneliness or isolation so prevalent in The Grass Harp and “A Christmas Memory.” In those stories the boy seems to be separated from ordinary life and other people, so that there appears to be a feeling of distance. The child in A Thanksgiving Visitor, however, leads an everyday existence. In all three stories there are other family members, but in The Grass Harp and “A Christmas Memory” they are regarded as enemies, outside the closed circle. In A Thanksgiving Visitor Miss Sook has two sisters, “vaguely masculine ladies” who are involved in numerous businesses. The sisters aren't named and play no real part in the story; but Uncle B., Miss Sook's brother, now seen as a kind but silent man, is an integral part of Buddy's life. His is “the deciding voice in the house”; he is the head of the family; it is for him that enormous meals are prepared by Miss Sook; he is the one who slaughters the animals or poultry and thinks Buddy needs to learn to do such things also; and he is the person who wants Buddy to have friends other than Miss Sook, male friends.

The description of life during Depression times in the rural South, of Buddy's relatives and the interplay between characters, creates a story very different in tonal quality and imagery from “A Christmas Memory.” In making daily events in the Faulk household run a rather ordinary course and in creating a moral end for the Thanksgiving story, the writer loses a certain quality that is an animating force in the earlier story: delicacy and freshness and a glimmer of a past that can never be brought back. “A Christmas Memory” tells only what one needs to know. Anything else is superfluous.

“Among the Paths to Eden” reveals a different side of Capote. In this story his characters are middle-aged; the time is the present; the setting is realistic; the pace is brisk. Told in third-person narrative, the work reveals an attitude of sympathy but not sentiment towards the protagonists. Although the two people in the story are shown somewhat ironically, the humor contains warmth and an understanding of human frailties.

One pleasant March day, Ivor Belli, a fifty-five-year-old widower, decides to visit his wife's grave, something he has not done since her burial in the fall. Neither affection nor a sense of loss prompts the action. Mr. Belli, far from being unhappy, is enjoying his bachelor life. However, the harsh winter has just come to an end, and Mr. Belli, responding to the hint of spring in the air, wants to get out-of-doors for a walk. A trip to the cemetery will provide him with a stroll in the sunshine and will also mollify one of his daughters.

Taking a bouquet of jonquils with him, Mr. Belli sets out with a feeling of joie de vivre. That changes when he arrives at the huge, ugly cemetery in Queens where his wife is buried. Suddenly, as he hurries to reach his wife's grave, the day seems chill, “the sunshine … false, without real warmth.” Mr. Belli has anticipated “the aroma of another spring about to be,” but instead he has been reminded of his own mortality. Anxious to be on his way, Mr. Belli hastily pushes the jonquils into an urn on the tomb. Yet, he pauses to prune the flowers, regretting that “he could not delay their doom by supplying them with water.”

The jonquils, first flowers after a dead season, March and its promise of happiness, the quiet graves, the sun and winds which first seem warm and then turn cold are vital parts of the theme, and their significance becomes apparent as the story progresses.

As Mr. Belli turns to leave the gravesite, he encounters a woman standing nearby. Although she speaks to him sympathetically, she appears strangely gratified that the dead relative is Mr. Belli's wife. The woman, Mary O'Meaghan, is a reader of obituary columns. Following the advice of a friend, Mary frequents the cemetery in hope of meeting a lonely widower who wants to marry again. She confesses this to Belli later, only after he tells her he would never consider marriage another time.

Mary had looked after her father until he died, and she has been left with nothing to do. She is “on the right side of forty,” heavy, bespectacled, drab looking in spite of her healthy coloring; her fingernails are bitten, and she wears orthopedic shoes because of a game leg. Possessing only the skills of cooking and taking care of people, Mary feels there is nothing in life for her except marriage. Nevertheless, all her ventures are fruitless.

The effect Mary has on Belli, however, is a positive one, though not for her. Mary's appearance, Mr. Belli decides, is that of a “decent-looking person,” the kind “you could trust.” When he comes to that conclusion, Mr. Belli immediately thinks of his secretary, Miss Jackson, a pleasant, good-natured woman, whom “lately, absentmindedly” he'd been calling by her first name, Esther. Mary has no idea of the direction Mr. Belli's thoughts take as a result of their meeting.

Knowing that she must hold Belli's attention, Mary offers him peanuts—it is lunchtime—and quickly launches into a discussion of food, for cooking is her strong suit. As they sit on his wife's grave, Belli's mood softens. Mary suggests that he must miss his wife's cooking, and Belli remembers the better aspects of his marriage: the good meals, “the cinnamon-scented feastdays,” the “afternoons of gravy and wine,” his pleasure in the fresh linen and silver. Having thought for so long only of his wife's nagging, Belli happily recalls her virtues as wife and mother. He wishes that he had brought an orchid to her grave, a flower she cherished.

When Mary flatters Belli, telling him he looks too young to be a grandfather, the compliment has a magical effect. He feels young again, rejuvenated. The mood with which he first started out the day is recaptured, “perhaps … because the wind had subsided, the warmth of the sun grown more authentic.” Once more he has the feeling of immortality. A season lies before him.

The beauty of the day prompts Mary to speak of parades and of music and singers, especially of Helen Morgan, whom Belli had “truly” loved. When Mary begins to sing it is a perfect imitation of Helen Morgan's voice. Soon Mary seems to become a different person, with “a natural expression of some secluded identity.” While she is singing, a Negro funeral procession interrupts them. Mary is embarrassed, apologetic, but Belli praises her, asking for an encore. Her response is like that of “a child to whom he'd handed a balloon” which carried her through the air. Full of happiness Mary promises she will sing for him again if he will come to dinner.

The invitation destroys the atmosphere she has created, and Belli sees her once again as she is. Confirmed in his suspicion that Mary is a husband hunter, he gives one evasive answer after another to her, until she asks directly about marrying. Belli tells Mary that “twenty-seven years” of marriage were “enough for any lifetime.”

Although Mary's hopes for a future with Belli are shattered, she does not give up the idea of finding a husband among the mourners in the cemetery. As the two walk to the gate, a “new pilgrim” enters, attracting Mary's attention, a lively “little man” of “cheery whistlings and … plenty of snap to his walk.” When Belli sees the man and notes Mary's interest, he wishes her luck and thanks her for the peanuts.

Mary's desire to find happiness, or Eden, with Belli cannot be fulfilled, but she has served as the catalyst for the rebirth of feeling in him. The vague stirrings that he has when he first meets her and is reminded of Esther Jackson build throughout the time they spend together. At the moment Belli declares to Mary that he has had enough years of marriage, he comes to a decision that he will marry Esther Jackson in April or May. First he will take her for dinner and bowling, and he will buy her an “orchid, a gala purple one with a lavender-ribbon bow.”

The orchid represents not only another beginning for Belli in a fresh season but also an acceptance of that which was good in the season that has gone. Throughout the story there is a play on mortality-immortality. Man's life is like a flower, like the seasons; the warmth and chill of the sun and wind remind him of his days. And surely, Capote's most ironic use of the theme appears in the discovery of love in a cemetery. Eden as everlasting life, a paradise of eternal youth, is the path Belli seeks among the quiet graves.

“Among the Paths to Eden” must be counted as one of Capote's best stories. The humor, intriguing story line, and personalities of the characters all mesh under the controlled pen of the writer.³ It is one of a kind. Capote's later work bears no resemblances to “Among the Paths to Eden.”

Notes

1. Capote seems to like three-year spans. When “A Diamond Guitar” opens, the story told has happened three years earlier.

2. Renaming a person one likes after someone she has cared for also occurs in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when Holly decides to call the narrator Fred because that is her brother's name.

3. The flaw, if one chooses to quarrel with “the given” of the story, is in Capote's seeming ignorance of Jewish customs. Belli, portrayed as an observant Jew, would never have had his wife buried in a nonsectarian cemetery.