AS rarely as they saw Truman, his parents saw each other even less, and by the fall of 1930 the story of Arch and Lillie Mae was rapidly approaching its conclusion: after six years of their strange, twilight marriage Lillie Mae wanted out. She had many reasons, but the deciding incident, the one that convinced her, seems to have been the discovery that he had tricked her into driving a carload of bootleg liquor into Monroeville.
She had, in fact, probably done the same thing many times before without knowing it; because he was night-blind as well as near-sighted, Arch often asked her, or anybody else who was around, to sit behind the wheel when he wanted to go anywhere after dark. But he did not tell her what was in the trunk, and when she found out that she was engaged in such a common, low, and even hazardous pursuit as carrying illegal hootch, she was furious and unforgiving. “That was the final straw for her,” said Mary Ida. “She couldn’t stand for him to disgrace her like that in Monroeville. A bootlegger was beneath anybody’s nose.”
He had finally gone too far, but Lillie Mae’s problem was what it had always been: a lack of money. She had never earned her own living, and Arch’s income, unsteady and increasingly irregular as it was, was all that separated her from total reliance on Jennie’s charity. Twice before, first in Selma, then in Bowling Green, she had attended business schools in hopes of preparing herself for a career, and both times she had dropped out. Now she tried once again. The Elizabeth Arden School of Beauty in New York had offered her a scholarship, and in a moment of uncharacteristic generosity, Arch, who had recently come into some money—compensation for injuries he had suffered after falling into a ditch in St. Louis—promised to send her forty dollars a week for expenses. “The only reason I consented was because my brother Sam was living in New York,” he later explained, “and I figured he’d more or less keep an eye on her. The course was only supposed to take three months, at which time she was supposed to come back to Monroeville.” With that understanding, Lillie Mae left for New York on January 15, 1931. Sam, the third of the three Persons brothers, had no use at all for Arch, and not much more for Lillie Mae. “Seems to me she is always studying something or taking some kind of course, but not actually going to work,” he wrote John. He nonetheless played the good brother and met her when she arrived the next morning.
It is certain, in the light of what followed, that Lillie Mae had not been candid with Arch and, one way or another, hoped to stay on past her allotted three months. New York had always been her eventual destination, and once there, she was in no hurry to rush back to Monroeville. And she did in fact remain. Indeed, she had little choice. As he had on their honeymoon, Arch ran out of money, this time leaving her stranded far from home. In difficulty with the law in Alabama, he began sending her bad checks or persuaded his mother to wire the forty-dollar allowance. It was at that point that John, who saw himself as his mother’s defender, stepped in. He explained the situation to Lillie Mae—“Arch is headed for immediate serious trouble”—and pointedly suggested that she look for support from some other source than the Persons family. “I can well understand why you are so desirous of finishing your course there—now more than ever,” he wrote her. “But apparently Arch can’t be depended upon for the regular expenses, and Mother hasn’t the money for any more telegrams, even if it were right for her to send it.” A few days later, on March 16, John telegraphed the sequel: Arch was in jail in Birmingham, charged with writing bad checks and extortion.
Lillie Mae had guessed that something was wrong when his checks began to bounce, and in early March, even before she had received John’s warning letter, she had taken a job in a restaurant on lower Broadway. Still, she was shaken when John wired her that Arch was actually behind bars, and on a tiny dime-store notepad, the only stationery at hand, she breathlessly replied: “Please excuse this paper, etc. Your wire just received and I’m too nervous & upset to write. Your letter more or less prepared me for your wire—there’s just nothing to say. Why—Why—Why? Do you know anything? I just can’t write you I’m so nervous. As soon as [he] started letting checks come back on me I knew something was wrong. I haven’t heard from him in 2 wks. I only make enough to exist on but I believe I will try it for awhile as there is nothing I could do if I came back as I have no money. What would you advise? Please write me fully.”
The panic was soon over. Arch was still in trouble, but for the moment he was out on bail. As she had done so many times before, his mother had come to his rescue, pledging a month’s salary to pay his hundred-and-fifty-dollar bond. “When he gets in trouble, she would mortgage her life, if necessary, to get him out,” explained the exasperated John to Lillie Mae. “This has been done, as you well know, for many, many years. It isn’t fair, and it is most inconsiderate of Arch to force these situations on her, but inasmuch as she always gets him out, I suppose he feels she will so continue, and goes right ahead to his next difficulty.” Indeed, far from feeling shamefaced, Arch complained that the authorities in Alabama had something against him, and in hurt, petulant tones he threatened to leave the state, perhaps even the country.
When they are forced to, people who have depended on others are often able not only to manage but to thrive. Such was the case with Lillie Mae, who was belatedly learning that she could take care of herself. She was well regarded by her employers, and by the middle of June she had been promoted to branch manager, at a salary of thirty-two dollars a week. Though much of that was sent home to Monroeville to cover Truman’s expenses, she still was able to scrape by in New York. She was clever, as well as attractive, and if she had steadfastly pursued a career, she might well have succeeded. But her basic goal was what it had always been: home, security, and a place in society. Sometime that winter or spring, not long after she had arrived, she discovered—or rediscovered—the man who was to give her all three.
His name was Joseph Garcia Capote, and he was another of the Latins she favored. His father, a colonel in the Spanish army, had arrived in Cuba in 1894, when it was a Spanish colony, and had fought against Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill. He became a landowner, returned to Barcelona to marry, and then came back to Cuba to raise three boys, of whom Joe was the oldest, in solid middle-class comfort. Educated at the University of Havana, Joe left for New Orleans in 1924, when he was twenty-four, to look for a job in the United States. It was in New Orleans, during the summer of 1925, that he met Lillie Mae in the lobby of the Monteleone hotel.
Captivated by her vivacity and beauty, he instantly fell in love with her, just as Arch had done. She liked him because his accent reminded her of her absent lover, the jealous Central American. They had dinner together and they may even have made love; but if they did have an affair, it did not last long. She already had one lover, not to mention a husband and a baby, and Joe was not in a financial position to stay around. Unable to find work in New Orleans, he transferred his job hunt to New York, where he soon married a secretary in one of the offices he visited. He corresponded with Lillie Mae even so, and it is possible that he encouraged her, and perhaps even gave her money, to come North. However it was arranged, they did meet in New York, picking up their romance where they had left it in New Orleans.
They had both matured in the five intervening years. When they had first met, she was just twenty, still a wild and unsettled girl, and he was a youth himself, uncertain what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. When they saw each other the second time, she was twenty-six and somewhat chastened by experience; he was an aspiring young executive with a promising future on Wall Street. For four years, while he was working as a shipping clerk during the day, he had spent his nights studying accounting and business administration at New York University, and by 1931 he was earning a comfortable income as the office manager of an old and respected textile-brokerage firm, Taylor, Clapp and Beall.
Lillie Mae could not have fallen in love with a drudge, and Joe was a lively man with a sense of humor and fun, who enjoyed spending money even more than making it. He liked having a good time; he appreciated fine food and wine; he dressed well, in the conservative way of Wall Street; and he was fastidious in his personal habits. “I never saw a man who was any cleaner than Joe Capote,” said Lillie Mae’s brother Seabon. “He would take a bath in the morning before he went to his office, then take another one and put on clean underwear and a clean shirt before he would have his dinner.” Short, round, and bespectacled, with dark, slicked-back hair, he was not handsome in any conventional sense. But Lillie Mae was not the only woman who found him attractive, and bigger men soon learned not to provoke him. Underneath his dark suit was the build of a boxer: strong, muscular arms, a thick neck, and a big, powerful chest.
Arch had not met him, or even heard about him, as he had some of the other men in Lillie Mae’s life, when Joe was in New Orleans in 1925. Not long after she had taken up residence in New York, however, by April, 1931, at the latest, he had guessed that there was someone new in her life: she was no longer writing to him, he complained to John. By that summer she had confirmed his suspicion, and frantic that she would leave him, he begged her to quit her job and return home immediately. Finally, she agreed to meet him July Fourth—or so he believed—in Jacksonville, where he was putting on a show with the Great Pasha. When she failed to appear, John, who lived in Jacksonville, wired Sam in New York, asking him to plead Arch’s case to her. “His mental state concerning her desperate otherwise okay,” John telegraphed Sam, adding, without any evidence whatsoever, that Arch had done a complete about-face and was now able to support her.
That was too much for the hardheaded Sam, who was now almost as irritated with his younger brother for speaking in Arch’s favor as he was with Arch for asking him to do so. “The enclosed wire came last night after I had gone to bed,” he replied. “John’s name is signed to it but it is hard to believe he could have sent such a foolish message. Let me analyze it briefly:
“1. ‘Arch’s mental state desperate otherwise okay.’ Why should his mental state be desperate because Lillie Mae has too much sense to quit a job and go back to a husband who has failed to support her, and who has humiliated her on countless occasions?
“2. ‘She promised him come fourth, etc. etc.’ She shouldn’t have done that, but Arch’s letters were worded so pitifully (his old trick when he is desperate of appealing to sympathy) that she thought she would promise him anything which might temporarily relieve his feelings.
“3. ‘Strongly recommend that she come immediately.’ How utterly ridiculous. Why should she come? Arch hasn’t a nickel to his name, no job, hunted by the police, owes everybody under the sun, and you recommend that she return to that. Have you lost your mind, John?
“4. ‘No further question about A’s complete about-face and ability support her now.’ This is even more absurd than No. 3. There is every question about his complete about-face. He has been giving trouble continuously for about twenty years—serious and endless trouble—and it will be a miracle indeed if the day should ever dawn when he acts like a normal person.”
Lillie Mae could not have stated her case better, and when she finally did travel south to meet Arch, her purpose was not to discuss their marriage, but to end it. With Joe paying her way, she left New York in mid-July, 1931, and, picking up Truman in Monroeville on her way, met Arch in Pensacola, Florida, on July 24. There was no discussion. Within fifteen minutes she had told him that she wanted a divorce so that she could marry another man. “She wouldn’t tell me who he was,” Arch remembered. “She just said his initials were J.C. and that he was a big executive with a textile firm in New York. She didn’t tell me he was a Spaniard or spic or nothin’ like that.” Joe’s name was not secret very long, but months later Arch still pretended not to know it. In letters to his family, Capote was misspelled as Capotey or Catobey or dropped altogether in favor of “the foreigner,” “the Spaniard,” “the N.Y. dago,” “that lousy cheap Cuban,” or, finally, “a Cuban, the lowest type of white person imaginable.”
In her divorce complaint, Lillie Mae alleged cruelty, and Jennie swore in an affidavit that she had seen Arch strike her. Arch denied it—although he later said that she sometimes deserved it; but he seemed happy—delighted, even—to play the part of the innocent and righteously angry husband. In letters to his family and friends, he wallowed in self-pity, splashing in his own tears as he bewailed the terrible injury that had been done him. Trying to find money to please Lillie Mae was what had led to his problems with the law, he said; it was her “greed and unprincipled actions” that had led him astray. “I am the deserted boy,” he concluded, complaining that she had been both disloyal and ungrateful. In everything that had transpired he believed himself to be blameless. The supreme salesman, he was his own best customer, and his capacity for self-delusion verged on the pathological.
Lillie Mae’s lawyer formally filed for divorce August 2, and at the end of August, three weeks after she had returned to New York, Arch was presented with legal papers. In a letter to John he once again bemoaned his unlucky fate. Lillie Mae, he reported, had phoned to tell him “that she wanted to marry Joe at once, and that she loved him, and that I had never meant anything to her. So that’s that. She was just as cruel and heartless about it as possible. Girls are sure a pain.” There was a short delay in the proceedings when, out of pique and spite, he spent a couple of days dodging a sheriff who was trying to serve him with papers. But by November 9, 1931, the divorce was final and that really was that. Arch and Lillie Mae were no longer man and wife.