Florence Nightingale, she enrolled as a student nurse at St.
Rose’s Hospital in Great Bend, Kansas. She was not meant to be a nurse, and after two years
she confessed it: a hospital’s realities — scenes, odors — sickened her. Yet to this day she regretted
not having completed the course and received her diploma — «just to prove, «as she had told a
friend, «that I once succeeded at something. «Instead, she had met and married Herb, a college
classmate of her oldest brother, Glenn; actually, since the two families lived within twenty miles of
each other, she had long known him by sight, but the Clutters, plain farm people, were not on
visiting terms with the well-to-do and cultivated Foxes. However, Herb was handsome, he was
pious, he was strong-willed, he wanted her — and she was in love.
«Mr. Clutter travels a great deal,» she said to Jolene. «Oh, he’s always headed somewhere.
Washington and Chicago and Oklahoma and Kansas City — sometimes it seems like he’s never
home. But wherever he goes, he remembers how I dote on tiny things.» She unfolded a little
paper fan. «He brought me this from San Francisco. It only cost a penny. But isn’t it pretty?»
The second year of the marriage, Eveanna was born, and three years later, Beverly; after each
confinement the young mother had experienced an inexplicable despondency — seizures of grief
that sent her wandering from room to room in a hands wringing daze. Between the births of
Beverly and Nancy, three more years elapsed, and these were the years of the Sunday picnics
and of summer excursions to Colorado, the years when she really ran her own home and was the
happy center of it. But with Nancy and then with Kenyon, the pattern of postnatal depression
repeated itself, and following the birth of her son, the mood of misery that descended never
altogether lifted; it lingered like a cloud that might rain or might not. She knew «good days,» and
occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those
days when she was otherwise her «old self,» the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends
cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband’s pyramiding activities required.
He was a «joiner,» a «born leader»; she was not and stopped attempting to be. And so, along
paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semi-separate ways — his
a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound
through hospital corridors. But she was not without hope. Trust in God sustained her, and from
time to time secular sources supplemented her faith in His forthcoming mercy; she read of a
miracle medicine, heard of a new therapy, or, as most recently, decided to believe that a «pinched
nerve» was to blame.
«Little things really belong to you,» she said, folding the fan. «They don’t have to be left behind.
You can carry them in shoebox.»
«Carry them where to?»
«Why, wherever you go. You might be gone for a long time.»
Some years earlier Mrs. Clutter had traveled to Wichita for two weeks of treatment and remained
two months. On the advice of a doctor, who had thought the experience would aid her to regain «a
sense of adequacy and usefulness,» she had taken an apartment, then found a job — as a file clerk
at the Y.W.C.A. Her husband, entirely sympathetic, had encouraged the adventure, but she had
liked it too well, so much that it seemed to her unchristian, and the sense of guilt she in
consequence developed ultimately outweighed the experiment’s therapeutic value.
«Or you might never go home. And — it’s important always to have with you something of your
own. That’s really yours.»
The doorbell rang. It was Jolene’s mother.
Mrs. Clutter said, «Goodbye, dear,» and pressed into Jolene’s hand the paper fan. «It’s only a
penny thing — but it’s pretty.»
Afterward Mrs. Clutter was alone in the house. Kenyon and Mr. Clutter had gone to Garden City;
Gerald Van Vleet had left for the day; and the housekeeper, the blessed Mrs. Helm to whom she
could confide anything, did not come to work on Saturdays. She might as well go back to bed the bed she so rarely abandoned that poor Mrs. Helm had to battle for the chance to change its
linen twice a week. There were four bedrooms on the second floor, and hers was the last at the end of a spacious
hall, which was bare except for a baby crib that had been bought for the visits of her grandson. If
cots were brought in and the hall was used as a dormitory, Mrs. Clutter estimated, the house
could accommodate twenty guests during the Thanksgiving holidays; the others would have to
lodge at motels or with neighbors. Among the Clutter kinfolk the Thanksgiving get-together was
an annual, turnabout to-do, and this year Herb was the appointed host, so it had to be done, but
coinciding, as it did, with the preparations for Beverly’s wedding, Mrs. Clutter despaired of
surviving either project. Both involved the necessity of making decisions — a process she had
always disliked, and had learned to dread, for when her husband was off on one of his business
journeys she was continually expected, in his absence, to supply snap judgments concerning the
affairs of the farm, and it was unendurable, a torment. What if she made a mistake? What if Herb
should be displeased? Better to lock the bedroom door and pretend not to hear, or say, as she
sometimes did, «I can’t. I don’t know. Please.»
The room she so seldom left was austere; had the bed been made, a visitor might have thought it
permanently unoccupied. An oak bed, a walnut bureau, a bedside table — nothing else except
lamps, one curtained window, and a picture of Jesus walking on the water. It was as though by
keeping this room impersonal, by not importing her intimate belongings but leaving them mingled
with those of her husband, she lessened the offense of not sharing his quarters. The only used
drawer in the bureau contained a jar of Vick’s Vaporub, Kleenex, an electric heating pad, a
number of white nightgowns, and white cotton socks. She always wore a pair of these socks to
bed, for she was always cold. And, for the same reason, she habitually kept her windows closed.
Summer before last, on a sweltering August Sunday, when she was secluded here, a difficult
incident had taken place. There were guests that day, a party of friends who had been invited to
the farm to pick mulberries, and among them was Wilma Kidwell, Susan’s mother. Like most of
the people who were often entertained by the Clutters, Mrs. Kidwell accepted the absence of the
hostess without comment, and assumed, as was the custom, that she was either «indisposed» or
«away in Wichita.» In any event, when the hour came to go to the fruit orchard, Mrs. Kidwell
declined; a city-bred woman, easily fatigued, she wished to remain indoors. Later, while she was
awaiting the return of the mulberry pickers, she heard the sound of weeping, heartbroken,
heartbreaking. «Bonnie?» she called, and ran up the stairs, ran down the hall to Bonnie’s room.
When she opened it, the heat gathered inside the room was like a sudden, awful hand over her
mouth; she hurried to open a window. «Don’t!» Bonnie cried. «I’m not hot. I’m cold. I’m freezing.
Lord, Lord, Lord!» She flailed her arms. «Please, Lord, don’t let anybody see me this way.» Mrs.
Kidwell sat down on the bed; she wanted to hold Bonnie in her arms, and eventually Bonnie let
herself be held. «Wilma,» she said, «I’ve been listening to you, Wilma. All of you. Laughing. Having
a good time. I’m missing out on everything. The best years, the children — everything. A little while,
and even Kenyon will be grown up — a man.
And how will he remember me? As a kind of ghost, Wilma.» Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs.
Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing, and put on one of her
trailing nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks. Then, before retiring, she exchanged her
ordinary glasses for a pair of reading spectacles. Though she subscribed to several periodicals
(the Ladies’ Home Journal, McCalls, Reader’s Digest, and Together: Midmonth Magazine for
Methodist Families’), none of these rested on the bedside table — only a Bible. A bookmark lay
between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered:
«Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.»
The two young men had little in common, but they did not realize it, for they shared a number of
surface traits. Both, for example, were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of
their fingernails. After their grease-monkey morning, they spent the better part of an hour
sprucing up in the lavatory of the garage. Dick stripped to his briefs was not quite the same as
Dick fully clothed. In the latter state, he seemed a flimsy dingy-blond youth of medium height,
fleshless and perhaps sunken-chested; disrobing revealed that he was nothing of the sort, but,
rather, an athlete constructed on a welterweight scale. The tattooed face of a cat, blue and
grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings, selfdesigned and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human
skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word peace accompanied by a cross radiating, in the form of crude strokes, rays of holy light; and two
sentimental concoctions- one a bouquet of flowers dedicated to mother-dad, the other a heart that
celebrated the romance of Dick and Carol ,whom he had married when he was nineteen, and
from whom he had separated six years later in order to «do the right thing» by another young lady,
the mother of his youngest child. («I have