Beautiful Shadow (10 page)

     At the end of the summer of 1933, Mary did leave her husband, travelling to Forth Worth with her daughter. But after only a few weeks in Texas, Stanley arrived and took his wife back to New York, leaving their daughter with Willie Mae. Highsmith’s sense of loss was overwhelming.

     ‘She had just found a social group in New York in which she felt really comfortable,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘She was part of this group of kids and then she got shipped off to Texas when she was twelve. Taking a hypersensitive child – and this was a really bright child, for whom New York was like water for someone dying of thirst – and sticking them in cow country must have been incredibly traumatic for her.’
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     Highsmith never forgave her mother for deceiving her at this crucial time in her life. Of course, she loved her grandparents dearly, but she felt bitter and betrayed that her mother could lie to her in this way. In a letter to her stepfather, she confessed how her mother’s actions affected her.

     ‘She never said in regard to the (to me) appalling year 12–13 which I spent in Texas, “We parked you with Grandma because we were broke.” Or “I decided to go back to Stanley. I am sorry because I told you we were going to be divorced, but it is not so.” Either of these statements would have made the situation easier to bear.’
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     Her mother, she related to her father, Jay B, ‘never realized what a devastating betrayal of faith this was to me, at that time’
⁵⁴
and Highsmith later referred to this period as the saddest year of her life.
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Chapter 4

Suppressions

1933–1938

Records kept by the Fort Worth Independent School District show that on 14 September 1933, Willie Mae, acting as guardian, made an application for her twelve-year-old granddaughter’s admission to the junior high school on South Jennings Avenue. The continuous transfer between schools in New York and Fort Worth meant that Patsy found it difficult to make friends and the fact that her new fellow pupils were two years older than her only served to increase her sense of isolation. Her classmates invited her to a Hallowe’en party on 31 October, but she was considered too young to go and so, feeling alienated and alone, she went for a walk late at night and, in a rebellious moment, removed a tyre cap from a parked car. In her journal, exactly fifty years later, Highsmith wrote of the incident; of how she had toyed with the idea of letting the air out of the tyre, but decided against it and how, throughout the experience, she remembered feeling ‘furtive’.
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     At school she took a year’s course in carpentry – a hobby she would later use to sculpt figures and animals out of pieces of wood – but she was the only girl in the class. It was at this point in her young life that she formulated an idea which helped her make sense of her confused sexual identity, viewing herself as having an unmistakable masculine essence secreted away within a female shell. ‘I am a walking perpetual example of my contention: as I said brilliantly at the age of twelve, a boy in a girl’s body.’
²
Later in life, in 1948, a New Orleans fortune teller would say to her mother, ‘You have one child – a son. No, a daughter. It should have been a boy, but it’s a girl.’
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Highsmith confessed in her diary that she felt haunted by the remark.

     For most of that year in Texas she felt bereft and utterly miserable and she turned to her twenty-three-year-old cousin, Dan Coates, who still lived with Willie Mae and Daniel, to raise her spirits. During this time the two became so close that they regarded each other not so much as cousins, but as brother and sister; later Dan would address letters to her ‘Dear Sis Pat’. In a letter she wrote to Dan in 1968, she reminded him of the happy times they spent together, playing football on the front lawn, drying dishes in the kitchen and fooling about, ‘snapping moist dishtowels at each other’.
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On Sunday evenings, the local preacher would sometimes drop by for dinner at Willie Mae’s house. Highsmith could remember that the dining room was often plagued by sex-mad flies, insects which seemed to be attracted not so much by the food on the dining table but by the embarrassment they knew they would cause the family. ‘Those flies in the dining room were different from any flies I’ve seen before or since . . .’ she said. ‘Then one would catch the other and perform the sex act in the air.’
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     Soon after moving back to Fort Worth, she met her real father, Jay Bernard Plangman, for the first time. Their meeting, at her grandmother’s house, was a low-key, rather understated affair. She recalled feeling shy but curious about this shadowy figure, yet neither of them showed much emotion. Jay B merely took hold of her hand as if to say yes, you are my daughter, ‘but he was almost a stranger, rather brusque and formal’.
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After that first encounter, he walked her to school and back a couple of times, but their relationship was not a deep one and it was for her mother that she still yearned.

     She was, by her own admission, in a ‘very depressed state’
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and, in an effort to brighten her spirits, she cut her grandparents’ lawn at 50 cents a time so as to save the $12 she needed to buy a man’s pocket watch she admired. In a letter she wrote to a family friend in 1972, Highsmith told how she looked upon the watch almost as a talisman, a rare object of beauty which she could use as a substitute for real happiness. Although she missed her mother terribly, working for – and then possessing – the watch helped her block out the misery of her life; it was, she said, ‘something to work for, something to achieve, something to have to look at once I had earned it’.
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Later she gave the watch to her stepfather, ‘curious, as at that time I had reason to dislike him.’
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     She would occasionally talk to her friends about her unhappy childhood, particularly this wretched year in Texas. ‘From what she told me she suffered a lot as a child,’ says Bert Diethelm. ‘She was a person whom I could not imagine as a little girl with a doll, hopping around singing her songs. In all the photographs you see, she looks a sombre, introverted little kid, which no doubt must have had an influence on her work. As a child I think she did feel rejected and was rejected subsequently at a later time. I think she had very many unhappinesses.’
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     She would look back on this time – and what she saw as her mother’s betrayal of her – as being especially influential on her future relationships. ‘If I have the steady thing, I reject it,’ she wrote to her friend Alex Szogyi, ‘this has happened over and over – rather, I made it happen. I repeat the pattern, of course, of my mother’s semi-rejection of me. Her “abandonment” of me to my grandmother, when I was aged 12, when my mother took me to Texas, with a promise she would divorce my stepfather . . . I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner, and avoid the women who are – good eggs.’
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The separation from her mother only lasted a year, but as she saw it, the damage had been done. She was reunited with Mary, and, to her disappointment, her stepfather, again in 1934 when they called for her and told her that it would be best if she came to live with them in New York. The day she left Fort Worth, she remembered how her grandmother kissed her on the lips while standing on the steps of the house. As she drove away she felt ‘Her kiss was wet on my upper lip, and I let it stay, dreading the inevitable time when the wind would dry it, and the coolness would be gone.’
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The stockmarket crash of October 1929 had a devastating, but far from immediate, effect on New York and on her return to Manhattan, Highsmith would have noticed a marked difference in the mood of the city. By 1932, 1.6 million Manhattanites received some sort of benefit and a third of the city’s manufacturing plants had closed.
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Nationally, the picture was even bleaker, with millions of people travelling around the country in a fruitless search for work. The unemployed – between 1929 and 1933 they increased from 500,000 to 12 million – constructed shanty slums, known as ‘Hoovervilles’, named after the Republican President Herbert Hoover who was elected in 1929, while beggars, bread-lines and apple-sellers appeared in every city in America. Hoover was voted out of office in 1932 and replaced by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. The actress Lilian Gish witnessed his inaugural address in March 1933, in which he famously said, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’; FDR, the father of the New Deal, seemed, she said, ‘to have been dipped in phosphorus’.
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     To offset the economic gloom casting a shadow over Manhattan, a massive building programme – a restructuring scheme which included the construction of new expressways, bridges and a mass transit system – was initiated by the city’s new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who held office between 1933 and 1945. Later, Highsmith, in
Strangers on a Train
, would describe New York, with its ‘dirty jumble’ of disorderly roofs and streets, as looking like ‘a floor model of how a city should not be built.’
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     The Highsmiths’ new apartment at 1 Bank Street – so named after the temporary move of the Wall Street counting houses to the street following the yellow fever epidemic of 1822 – was in the heart of Greenwich Village, a district which had already established something of a reputation for non-conformity and a tolerance of artistic eccentricity. At the turn of the century the area had been inhabited by working-class Italians, followed by a new influx of writers and artists attracted by its winding streets, Old World charm, cheap rents and the ubiquitous ‘ailanthus’ or ‘backyard tree’ which thrived on poor soil, little water and the minimum amount of light. The Works Progress Administration
New York City Guide
, in a potted history of the area, concluded that the ‘Village’ ‘was the center of the American Renaissance or of artiness, of political progress or of long-haired radical men and short-haired radical women, of sex freedom or of sex license – dependent upon the point of view.’
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The Museum of Living Art at 100 Washington Square East was founded in 1927, housing works by Man Ray, Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Léger and Juan Gris, while three years later, the Whitney Museum opened its doors on Eighth Street, a pioneering space designed ‘to help create rather than conserve a tradition’. Tom Paine spent the last years of his life at a house in Grove Street – to which the Highsmiths would move in 1940 – while Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and Henry James all lived in the area at some point in their lives. In fact, the artistic atmosphere of the Village soon became something of a cliché, and in 1935 the sociologist Caroline Ware described the area as being packed full of ‘pseudo-Bohemians’.
¹⁷
Despite this, the neighbourhood west of Washington Square Park still held the power to shock – in 1936 one writer observed how the Village was a mecca for ‘exhibitionists and perverts of all kinds’.
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On her return to New York in 1934, Highsmith enrolled in yet another school – Julia Richman High School, 317 East 67th Street, where she would stay until 1938. The single-sex school, named after the first woman district superintendent of schools in the City of New York, housed a total of 8,000 pupils – 60 percent of the girls were Italian, 30 per cent Jewish, the rest made up of Irish, German and Polish children, a mix which reflected the city at large – in four buildings. Pupils at Highsmith’s school had to share not only desks, but seats as well, as the influx of immigrants, particularly Jews fleeing Hitler, increased. Figures show that between 1930 and 1939, Jews comprised more than a third of those entering the school system,
¹⁹
an increase caused by Hitler’s pre-World War Two policy of
Judenfrei
, together with the implementation of the 1921 and 1924 National Origins Acts, which calculated the number seeking immigration to the United States on the basis of a percentage of those already living in America. In fact, the demand for school places in New York was so enormous that the Board of Education was forced to erect portable wooden buildings, some structures which were used until after the Second World War.
²⁰

     ‘I always had to share my seat, though some girls plumper than me had their seats to themselves . . .’ Highsmith said. ‘These were the Hitler years, and the school became so crowded, it had three shifts, one starting at 8:15 AM, the second at 9 AM, the third at 9:45 AM. The classrooms were packed, and there was no possibility of getting special help, in case one needed it.’
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