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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