Patricia Highsmith: The Heroine

The girl was so sure she would get the job that she had come to Westchester with her suitcase. She sat in the living room of the Christiansens' house, looking, in her plain blue coat and hat, even younger than her twenty-one years.

'Have you worked as a governess before?' Mr Christiansen asked. He sat beside his wife on the sofa. 'Any references, I mean?'

'I was a maid at Mr Dwight Howell's home in New York for the last seven months.' Lucille looked at him with suddenly wide gray eyes. 'I could get a reference from there if you like . . . But when I saw your advertisement this morning, I didn't want to wait. I've always wanted a place where there are children.'

Mrs Christiansen smiled at the girl's enthusiasm, and said, 'We might phone them, of course ... What do you say, Ronald? You wanted someone who really liked children . . .'

And fifteen minutes later Lucille Smith was standing in her room in the servants' house, at the back of the big house, putting on her new white uniform.

'You're starting again, Lucille,' she told herself in the mirror. 'You're going to forget everything that happened before.'

But her eyes grew too wide again, as though to deny her words. They looked like her mother's when they opened like that, and her mother was part of what she must forget.

There were only a few things to remember. A few silly habits,

like burning bits of paper in ashtrays, forgetting time sometimes - little things that many people did, but that she must remember not to do. With practice she would remember, because she was just like other people (hadn't the psychiatrist told her so?).

She looked out at the garden and lawn that lay between the servants' house and the big house. The garden was longer than it was wide, and there was a fountain in the center. It was a beautiful garden! And trees so high and close together that Lucille could not see through them, and did not have to admit or believe that there was another house somewhere beyond ... The Howell house in New York, tall and heavily ornamented, looking like an old wedding cake in a row of other old wedding cakes.

The Christiansen house was friendly, and alive! There were children in it! Thank God for the children. But she had not even met them yet.

She hurried downstairs and went across to the big house: What had the Christiansens agreed to pay her? She could not remember and did not care. She would have worked for nothing just to live in such a place.

Mrs Christiansen took her upstairs to the nursery where the children lay on the floor among colored pencils and picture books.

'Nicky, Heloise, this is your new nurse,' their mother said. 'Her name is Lucille.'

The little boy stood up and said, 'How do you do.'

Patricia Highsmith: Old folks at home

'Well,' Lois said finally, 'let's do it.' Her expression as she looked at her husband was serious, a little worried, but she spoke with conviction. 'Okay,' said Herbert, tensely.

They were going to adopt an elderly couple to live with them. More than elderly, old probably. It was not a hasty decision on the part of the Mclntyres. They had been thinking about it for several weeks. They had no children themselves, and didn't want any. Herbert was a strategy analyst at a government-sponsored institution called Bayswater, some four miles from where they lived, and Lois was an historian, specializing in European history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thirty-three years old now, she had three books and a score of articles to her credit. She and Herbert could afford a pleasant two-story house in Connecticut with a glass-enclosed sunroom that was Herbert's workroom and also their main library, handsome grounds and a part-time gardener all year round to look after their lawn and trees, bushes and flowers. They knew people in the neighborhood, friends and acquaintances, who had children-young children and teenagers-and the Mclntyres felt a little guilty about not fulfilling their duty in this department; and besides that, they had seen an old people's nursing home at first hand a few months ago, when Eustace Vickers, a retired inventor attached to Bayswater, had passed away. The Mclntyres, along with a few of Herbert's colleagues, had paid a visit every few days to Eustace, who had been popular and active until his stroke.

One of the nurses at the home had told Lois and Herbert that lots of families in the region took in old people for a week at a time, especially in winter or at the Christmas season, to give them a change, 'a taste of family life for a few days,' and they came back much cheered and improved. 'Some people are kind enough to adopt an old person-even a couple-to live with them in their homes,' the nurse had said.

Patricia Highsmith: The kite

The voices of Walter's mother and father came in jerky murmurs down the hall to his room. What were they argu¬ing about now? Walter wasn't listening. He thought of kicking his room door shut, and didn't. He could shut their words out of his ears quite well. Walter was on his knees on the floor, carefully notching a balsa wood strip which was nearly nine feet long. It would have been exactly nine feet long, but he had notched it too deeply, he thought, a few minutes ago, and had cut that little piece off and started again. This was the long center piece for the kite he was making. The cross-piece would be nearly six feet long, so only by turning the kite horizontally would he be able to get it out his room door.

'I didn't say that!' That was his mother's shrill voice in a tone of impatience.

A couple of times a week, his father went mumbling into the living room to sleep on the sofa there instead of in the bedroom with his mother. Now and then they mentioned Elsie, Walter's sister, but Walter had stopped listening even to that. Elsie had died two months ago in the hospital, because of pneumonia. Walter now noticed a smell of frying ham or bacon. He was hungry, but the menu for dinner didn't interest him. Maybe they would get through the meal without his father standing up and leaving the table, maybe even taking the car and going off. That didn't matter.

Patricia Highsmith: Something the cat dragged in

A few seconds of pondering silence in the Scrabble game was interrupted by a rustle of plastic at the cat door: Portland Bill was coming in again. Nobody paid any atten­tion. Michael and Gladys Herbert were ahead, Gladys doing a bit better than her husband. The Herberts played Scrabble often and were quite sharp at it. Colonel Edward Phelps-a neighbor and a good friend—was limping along, and his American niece Phyllis, aged nineteen, had been doing well but had lost interest in the last ten minutes. It would soon be teatime. The Colonel was sleepy and looked it.

'Quack,' said the Colonel thoughtfully, pushing a fore­finger against his Kipling-style mustache. 'Pity-I was thinking of earthquake.'

'If you've got quack, Uncle Eddie,' said Phyllis, 'how could you get quake out of it?'

The cat made another more sustained noise at his door, and now with black tail and brindle hindquarters in the house, he moved backwards and pulled something through the plastic oval. What he had dragged in looked whitish and about six inches long.

'Caught another bird,' said Michael, impatient for Eddie to make his move so he could make a brilliant move before somebody grabbed it.

'Looks like another goose foot,' said Gladys, glancing. 'Ugh.'

The Colonel at last moved, adding a P to SUM.

Patricia Highsmith: The Artist

At the time Jane got married, one would have thought there was nothing unusual about her. She was plump, pretty and practical: she could give artificial respiration at the drop of a hat or pull someone out of a faint or a nosebleed. She was a dentist’s assistant, and as cool as they come in the face of crisis or pain. But she had enthusiasm for the arts. What arts? All of them. She began, in the first year of her married life, with painting. This occupied all her Saturdays, or enough of Saturdays to prevent adequate shopping for the weekend, but her husband Bob did the shopping. He also paid for the framing of muddy, run—together odd portraits of their friends, and the sittings of the friends took up time on the weekends too. Jane at last faced the fact she could not stop her colours from running together, and decided to abandon painting for the dance.

The dance, in a black leotard, did not much improve her robust figure, only her appetite. Special shoes followed. She was studying ballet,. She had discovered an institution called The School of Arts. In this five—storey edifice they taught the piano, violin and other instruments, music composition, novel—writing, poetry, sculpture, the dance and painting.

‘You see, Bob, life can and should be made more beautiful,’ Jane said with her big smile. ‘And everyone wants to contribute, if he or she can, just a little bit to the beauty and poetry of the world.’

Bob happened to be there, because he was to have fetched Jane at 5 p.m. He had heard about the bomb rumour, but did not know whether to believe it or not. With some caution, however, or a premonition, he was waiting across the street instead of in the lobby.