Highsmith, Patricia Read online

  He closed his mind to Metcalf, to Miriam, and to Bruno, and concentrated on the work for Palm Beach which, he saw from the first day, would demand all that he had in diplomacy, technical knowledge, and sheer physical strength. Except for Anne, he closed his mind to all his past that, for all his idealistic aims and the fighting for them, and the small success he had known, seemed miserable and grubbing compared to the magnificent main building of the country club. And the more he immersed himself in the new effort, the more he felt recreated also in a different and more perfect form.

  Photographers from newspapers and news magazines took pictures of the main building, the swimming pool, the bathhouses, and the terracing in the early stages of construction. Members of the club were also photographed inspecting the grounds, and Guy knew that below their pictures would be printed the amount of money each had donated to the cause of princely recreation. Sometimes he wondered if part of his enthusiasm might be due to a consciousness of the money behind the project, to the lavishness of space and materials he had to work with, to the flattery of the wealthy people who continually invited him to their homes. Guy never accepted their invitations. He knew he might be losing himself the small commissions he would need next winter, but he also knew he could never force himself to the social responsibilities that most architects assumed as a matter of course. Evenings when he did not want to be alone, he caught a bus to Clarence Brillhart’s house a few miles away, and they had dinner together, listened to phonograph records, and talked. Clarence Brillhart, the Palmyra Club manager, was a retired broker, a tall, white-haired old gentleman whom Guy often thought he would have liked as a father. Guy admired most of all his air of leisure, as imperturbable on the bustling, hectic construction grounds as in his own home. Guy hoped he might be like him in his own old age. But he felt he moved too fast, had always moved too fast. There was inevitably, he felt, a lack of dignity in moving fast.

  Most evenings Guy read, wrote long letters to Anne, or merely went to bed, for he was always up by five and often worked all day with a blowtorch or mortar and trowel. He knew almost all the workmen by name. He liked to judge the temperament of each man, and to know how it contributed or did not contribute to the spirit of his buildings. “It is like directing a symphony,” he wrote to Anne. In the dusks, when he sat smoking his pipe in a thicket of the golf course, gazing down on the four white buildings, he felt that the Palmyra project was going to be perfect. He knew it when he saw the first horizontals laid across the spaced marble uprights of the main building. The Pittsburgh store had been marred at the last moment by the client’s change of mind about the window area. The hospital annex in Chicago had been ruined, Guy thought, by the cornice that was of darker stone than he had intended. But Brillhart permitted no interference, the Palmyra was going to be as perfect as his original conception, and Guy had never created anything before that he felt would be perfect.

  In August, he went North to see Anne. She was working in the design department of a textile company in Manhattan. In the fall, she planned to go into partnership in a shop with another woman designer she had met. Neither of them mentioned Miriam until the fourth and last day of Guy’s visit. They were standing by the brook behind Anne’s house, in their last few minutes together before Anne drove him to the airport.

  “Do you think it was Markman, Guy?” Anne asked him suddenly. And when Guy nodded: “It’s terrible—but I’m almost sure.”

  Then one evening when he returned from Brillhart's house to the furnished room where he lived, a letter from Bruno awaited him with one from Anne. The letter was from Los Angeles, forwarded by his mother from Metcalf. It congratulated him on his work in Palm Beach, wished him success, and begged for just a word from him. The P. S. said: Hope you are not annoyed at this letter. Have written many letters and not mailed them. Phoned your mother for your address, but she wouldn’t give it to me. Guy, honestly there is nothing to worry about or I wouldn’t have written. Don’t you know I’d be the first one to be careful? Write soon. I may go to Haiti soon. Again your friend and admirer. C. A. B.

  A slow ache fell through him to his feet. He could not bear to be alone in his room. He went out to a bar, and almost before he knew what he was doing, had two ryes and then a third. In the mirror behind the bar, he saw himself glance at his sunburnt face, and it struck him that his eyes looked dishonest and furtive. Bruno had done it. It came thundering down with a weight that left no possibility of doubt any longer, like a cataclysm that only a madman’s unreason could have kept suspended all this while. He glanced about in the little bar as if he expected the walls to topple down on him. Bruno had done it. There was no mistaking Bruno’s personal pride in his, Guy’s, freedom now. Or the P. S. Or possibly even the trip to Haiti. But what did Bruno mean? Guy scowled at the face in the mirror and dropped his eyes, looked down at his hands, the front of his tweed jacket, his flannel trousers, and it flashed through his mind he had put these clothes on this morning as a certain person and that he would take them off tonight as another person, the person he would be from now on. He knew now. This was an instant—He could not say just what was happening, but he felt his entire life would be different, must be different, from now on.

  If he knew Bruno had done it, why didn’t he turn him in? What did he feel about Bruno besides hatred and disgust? Was he afraid? Guy didn’t clearly know.

  He resisted an impulse to telephone Anne until it was too late, and finally, at three in the morning, could resist no longer. Lying on his bed in the darkness, he talked to her very calmly, about commonplace matters, and once he even laughed. Even Anne did not notice anything wrong, he thought when he had hung up. He felt somehow slighted, and vaguely alarmed.

  His mother wrote that the man who had called while he was in Mexico, and said his name was Phil, had called again to ask how he might reach him. She was worried that it might have something to do with Miriam, and wondered if she should tell the police.

  Guy wrote back to her: “I found out who the annoying telephoner was. Phil Johnson, a fellow I knew in Chicago.”

  Seventeen

  “Charley, what’re all these clippings?”

  “Friend of mine, Ma!” Bruno shouted through the bathroom door. He turned the water on harder, leaned on the basin, and concentrated on the bright nickel-plated drainstop. After a moment, he reached for the Scotch bottle he kept under towels in the clothes hamper. He felt less shaky with the glass of Scotch and water in his hand, and spent a few seconds inspecting the silver braid on the sleeve of his new smoking jacket. He liked the jacket so much, he wore it as a bathrobe also. In the mirror, the oval lapels framed the portrait of a young man of leisure, of reckless and mysterious adventure, a young man of humor and depth, power and gentleness (witness the glass held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the air of an imperial toast)—a young man with two lives. He drank to himself.

  “Charley?”

  “Minute, Mom!”

  He cast a wild eye about the bathroom. There was no window. Lately it happened about twice a week. Half an hour or so after he got up, he felt as if someone were kneeling on his chest and stifling him. He closed his eyes and dragged air in and out of his lungs as fast as he could. Then the liquor took. It bedded his leaping nerves like a hand passing down his body. He straightened and opened the door.

  “Shaving,” he said.

  His mother was in tennis shorts and a halter, bending over his unmade bed where the clippings were strewn. “Who was she?”

  “Wife of a fellow I met on the train coming down from New York. Guy Haines.” Bruno smiled. He liked to say Guy’s name. “Interesting, isn’t it? They haven’t caught the murderer yet.”

  “Probably a maniac,” she sighed.

  Bruno’s face sobered. “Oh, I doubt it. Circumstances are too complicated.”

  Elsie stood up and slid her thumb inside her belt. The bulge just below her belt disappeared, and for a moment she looked as Bruno had seen her all her life until this last year, trim as
a twenty-year-old down to her thin ankles. “Your friend Guy’s got a nice face.”

  “Nicest fellow you ever saw. It’s a shame he’s dragged in on it. He told me on the train he hadn’t seen his wife in a couple of years. Guy’s no more a murderer than I am!” Bruno smiled at his inadvertent joke, and to cover it added, “His wife was a roundheels anyway—”

  “Darling.” She took him by the braidedged lapels. “Won’t you watch your language a little for the duration? I know Grannie’s horrified sometimes.”

  “Grannie wouldn’t know what a roundheels means,” Bruno said hoarsely.

  Elsie threw her head back and shrieked.

  “Ma, you’re getting too much sun. I don’t like your face that dark.”

  “I don’t like yours that pale.”

  Bruno frowned. The leathery look of his mother’s forehead offended him painfully. He kissed her suddenly on the cheek.

  “Promise me you’ll sit in the sun a half hour today anyway. People come thousands of miles to get to California, and here you sit in the house!”

  Bruno frowned down his nose. “Ma, you’re not interested in my friend!”

  “I am interested in your friend. You haven’t told me much about him.”

  Bruno smiled shyly. No, he had been very good. He had let the clippings lie out in his room only today for the first time, because he was sure now both he and Guy were safe. If he talked a quarter of an hour about Guy now, his mother would probably forget, too. If it were even necessary that she forget. “Did you read all that?” He nodded toward the bed.

  “No, not all that. How many drinks this morning?”

  “One.”

  “I smell two.”

  “All right, Mom, I had two.”

  “Darling, won’t you watch the morning drinks? Morning drinks are the end. I’ve seen alcoholic after alcoholic—”

  “Alcoholic is a nasty word.” Bruno resumed his slow circuit of the room. “I feel better since I drink a little more, Ma. You said yourself I’m more cheerful and my appetite’s better. Scotch is a very pure drink. Some people it agrees with.”

  “You drank too much last night, and Grannie knows it. Don’t think she doesn’t notice, you know.”

  “About last night don’t ask me.” Bruno grinned and waved his hand.

  “Sammie’s coming over this morning. Why don’t you get dressed and come down and keep score for us?”

  “Sammie gives me ulcers.”

  She walked to the door as gaily as if she had not heard. “Promise me you’ll get some sun today anyway.”

  He nodded and moistened his dry lips. He did not return her smile as she closed the door, because he felt as if a black lid had fallen on him suddenly, as if he had to escape something before it was too late. He had to see Guy before it was too late! He had to get rid of his father before it was too late! He had things to do! He did not want to be here, in his grandmother’s house furnished just like his own house in Louis Quinze, eternal Louis Quinze! But he did not know where else he wanted to be. He was not happy if he were long away from his mother, was he? He bit his underlip and frowned, though his small gray eyes were quite blank. Why did she say he didn’t need a drink in the mornings? He needed it more than any other drink of the day. He flexed his shoulders in a slow rotary movement. Why should he feel low?

  The clippings on the bed were about him. Week after week went by and the dumb police got nothing on him, nothing except the heelprints, and he had thrown his shoes away long ago! The party last week with Wilson in the San Francisco hotel was nothing to what he would do now if he had Guy to celebrate with. A perfect murder! How many people could do a perfect murder on an island with a couple of hundred other people around?

  He was not like the dopes in the newspapers who killed “to see what it felt like,” and never had a bloody thing to report except sometimes a sick-making, “It wasn’t as good as I expected.” If he were interviewed, he would say, “It was terrific! There’s nothing in the world like it!” (“Would you ever do it again, Mr. Bruno?”) “Well, I might,” reflectively, with caution, as an arctic explorer when asked if he will winter up north again next year might reply uncommittingly to a reporter. (“Can you tell us a little bit about your sensations?”) He would tip the microphone toward him, look up, and muse, while the world awaited his first word. How had it felt? Well, there’s only it, see, and nothing to compare it with. She was a rotten woman anyway, you understand. It was like killing a hot little rat, only she was a girl so it made it a murder. The very warmth of her had been disgusting, and he remembered thinking that before he took his fingers away, the heat would really have stopped coming, that after he left her, she would grow chill and hideous, like she really was. (“Hideous, Mr. Bruno?”) Yes, hideous. (“Do you think a corpse is hideous?”) Bruno frowned. No, he did not really think he thought a corpse was hideous. If the victim was evil, like Miriam, people ought to be pretty glad to see the corpse, oughtn’t they? (“Power, Mr. Bruno?”) Oh, yes, he had felt terrific power! That was it. He had taken away a life. Now, nobody knew what life was, everybody defended it, the most priceless possession, but he had taken one away. That night there had been the danger, the ache of his hands, the fear in case she made a sound, but the instant when he felt that life had left her, everything else had fallen away, and only the mysterious fact of the thing he did remained, the mystery and the miracle of stopping life. People talked about the mystery of birth, of beginning life, but how explainable that was! Out of two live germ cells! What about the mystery of stopping life? Why should life stop because he held a girl’s throat too tightly? What was life anyway? What did Miriam feel after he took his hands away? Where was she? No, he didn’t believe in a life after death. She was stopped, and that was just the miracle. Oh, he could say a great deal at his interview with the press! (“What significance did it have for you that your victim was female?”) Where had that question come from? Bruno hesitated, then recovered his poise. Well, the fact she was a female had given him greater enjoyment. No, he did not therefore conclude that his pleasure had partaken of the sexual. No, he did not hate women either. Rather not! Hate is akin to love, you know. Who said that? He didn’t believe it for a minute. No, all he would say was that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it quite so much, he thought, if he had killed a man. Unless it was his father.

  The telephone…

  Bruno had been staring at it. Every telephone suggested Guy. He could reach Guy now with two well-placed calls, but a call might annoy Guy. Guy might still be nervous. He would wait for Guy to write. A letter should come any day now, because Guy must have gotten his letter the end of last week. The one thing Bruno needed to make his happiness complete was to hear Guy’s voice, to have a word from him saying he was happy. The bond between Guy and him now was closer than brotherhood. How many brothers liked their brothers as much as he liked Guy?

  Bruno threw a leg out the window and stood up on the wrought iron balcony. The morning sunshine did feel rather good. The lawn was broad and smooth as a golf course all the way to the ocean. Then he saw Sammie Franklin, dressed in white tennis clothes with his rackets under his arm, grinning his way toward his mother. Sammie was big and flabby, like a softened-up boxer. He reminded Bruno of another Hollywood stooge who had hung around his mother when they were here three years ago, Alexander Phipps. Why did he even remember their phony names? He heard Sammie’s chuckle as he extended his hand to his mother, and an old antagonism fluttered up in Bruno and lay still again. Merde. Disdainfully he took his eyes from Sammie’s broad flannel backsides, and examined the view from left to right. A couple of pelicans flew loggily over a hedge and plopped down on the grass. Far out on the pale water he saw a sailboat. Three years ago he had begged his grandmother to get a sailboat, and now that she had one, he never felt like using it.

  The tennis balls wokked around the tan stucco corner of the house. Chimes sounded from downstairs, and Bruno went back into his room, so he would not know what time it was. He liked to see a cloc
k by accident as late as possible in the day, and find it was later than he had thought. If there was no letter from Guy in the noon mail, he thought, he might catch a train to San Francisco. On the other hand, his last memory of San Francisco was not pleasant. Wilson had brought a couple of Italian fellows up to the hotel, and Bruno had bought all the dinners and several bottles of rye. They had called Chicago on his telephone. The hotel had chalked up two calls to Metcalf, and he couldn’t remember the second at all. And the last day, he had been twenty dollars short on the bill. He didn’t have a checking account, so the hotel, the best hotel in town, had held his suitcase until his mother wired the money. No, he wouldn’t go back to San Francisco.

  “Charley?” called the high, sweet voice of his grandmother.

  He saw the curved handle of the door start to move, made an involuntary lunge for the clippings on his bed, then circled back to the bathroom instead. He shook tooth powder into his mouth. His grandmother could smell liquor like a dry sourdough in the Klondike.

  “Aren’t you ready to have some breakfast with me?” his grandmother asked.

  He came out combing his hair. “Gee, you’re all dressed up!” She turned her small unsteady figure around for him like a fashion model, and Bruno smiled. He liked the black lace dress with the pink satin showing through it. “Looks like one of those balconies out there.”

  “Thank you, Charley. I’m going into town the latter part of the morning. I thought you might like to come with me.”

  “Could be. Yeah, I’d like that, Grannie,” he said goodnaturedly.

  “So it’s you’ve been clipping my Times! I thought it was one of the servants. You must be getting up awfully early these mornings.”

  “Yep,” Bruno said agreeably.

  “When I was young, we used to get poems out of newspapers for our scrapbooks. We made scrapbooks out of everything under the sun. What’re you going to do with these?”