Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Music for Chameleons
In 1979 Truman Capote spends the day hanging out with Mary Sanchez – a professional cleaning woman who has worked for him for years. She is tremendously loyal to her clients – she has been cleaning the same apartments for decades – and is very involved in the personal lives of all of the people she cleans for (as will be apparent at the end of this excerpt – the people she prays for, mostly, are her clients.) He records their conversation. He follows her from job to job – they get stoned – and talk about all kinds of things – -Robert Frost, drugs, her work, her family. Her husband Pedro – who had been an alcoholic, a mean drunk, and a sucky father – died last year.
Here’s an excerpt. I love these recorded conversations – there are a bunch of them in the book, and ‘A Day’s Work’ is the first. The excerpt below is the end of the story. Beautiful.
Excerpt from Music for Chameleons
TC: Let me catch you a cab.
MARY: I hate to give them my business. Those taxi people don’t like coloreds. Even when they’re colored themselves. No, I can get the subway down here at Lex and Eighty-Sixth.
(Mary lives in a rent-controlled apartment near Yankee Stadium; she says it was cramped when she had a family living with her, but now that she’s by herself, it seems immense and dangerous: “I’ve got three locks on every door, and all the windows nailed down. I’d buy me a police dog if it didn’t mean leaving him by himself so much. I know what it is to be alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”)
TC: Please, Mary, let me treat you to a taxi.
MARY: The subway’s a lot quicker. But there’s someplace I want to stop. It’s just down here aways.
(The place is a narrow church pinched between broad buildings on a side street. Inside, there are two brief rows of pews, and a small altar with a plaster figure of a crucified Jesus suspended above it. An odor of incense and candle wax dominates the gloom. At the altar a woman is lighting a candle, its light fluttering like the sleep of a fitful spirit; otherwise, we are the only supplicants present. We kneel together in the last pew, and from the satchel Mary produces a pair of rosary beads – “I always carry a couple extra” – one for herself, the other for me, though I don’t know quite how to handle it, never having used one before. Mary’s lips move whisperingly.)
MARY: Dear Lord, in your mercy. Please, Lord, help Mr. Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don’t leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world. And, Lord, I beg you to remember my sons and daughter and my grandchildren, each and every one. And please don’t let Mr. Smith’s family send him to that retirement home; he don’t want to go, he cries all the time …
(Her list of names is more numerous than the beads on her rosary, and her requests in their behalf have the earnest shine of the altar’s candle-flame. She pauses to glance at me.)
MARY: Are you praying?
TC: Yes.
MARY: I can’t hear you.
TC: I’m praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.
MARY: Don’t pray for me. I’m already saved. (She takes my hand and holds it.) Pray for your mother. Pray for all those souls lost out there in the dark. Pedro. Pedro.
