Beautiful Shadow (8 page)

     It was against this backdrop that Mary and Stanley Highsmith settled in New York. The couple had left Fort Worth for Manhattan with the ambition of furthering their careers in the commercial art world and soon after moving to the city, Mary started working freelance as an illustrator. ‘My stepfather, Highsmith, was working for the telephone – what do you call it? – the Yellow Pages, layout and lettering,’ Highsmith told one interviewer, ‘and my mother did fashion work for newspapers and
Women’s Wear Daily
for a while.’
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     The family lived in a flat on 103rd Street and Broadway and enrolled their six-year-old daughter under the name of Mary Patricia Highsmith – not her birth name of Plangman – at a school near their home.
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On her first day, her mother walked her to the large building made from red brick and grey cement, where a few hundred small children were playing games of tag or tossing balls. Holding her daughter’s hand, Mary led her through the playground into a large, gloomy gymnasium hall. The oppressive room was painted dirty grey and dark green and the few lights that existed were covered by wire cages. The windows seemed to tower above the little girl and were set far too high in the walls to see anything of the outside world.

     She was assigned to class 1A, but after her reading was tested, and found to be superior for her age, she was transferred to 2B, where the children were two years older than her. Unfortunately, Patsy’s skills in mathematics did not match her reading ability; she thought a multiplication sign was a plus sign that had fallen on its side. In each of her classes she sat near the back of the room and felt that her Southern accent marked her as an outsider. At the end of her first day, when her mother came to collect her at three o’clock, Patsy walked out of the building and down the steps of the school hand in hand with a black boy. She made friends with him, she assumed, because he was one of the few people who could understand what she was saying and vice versa.

     ‘I had romped and played in my grandmother’s “alley” ever since I could walk, with the black kids of the families to whom my grandmother rented houses,’ she wrote. ‘It was no surprise to me, it was indeed a pleasure, to find black children in the New York schools. I had not been to school before, not in the South, so I knew nothing of segregation.’
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     Mary, who held liberal views, did not worry about her daughter mixing with black children, but Willie Mae was horrified. Playing with the kids in ‘Negro Alley’ was one thing, she thought; making friends with them at school in New York something rather different. She persuaded Mary and Stanley to take their daughter out of her school and transfer her to a ‘private’ one on nearby 103rd Street and Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson river. The girl, however, found her new school boring, as there were only around thirty pupils in the whole building compared to the hundreds of children in the previous one.

     Highsmith remembered walking down to Riverside Park, just one street away from the school, in waist-high snow and returning blue with cold. She also recalled that on Fridays she would have kidneys for lunch, which she hated, and after being forced to clean her plate, she would often sneak off to the bathrooms to be sick.

     In February 1929, the family moved back to Texas and eight-year-old Patsy was enrolled at the old Sixth Ward school, which from 1904 was called the Stephen F. Austin Elementary School, at 319 Lipscomb Street, Fort Worth. The school was located just a few blocks south of the Texas and Pacific Railway tracks and from the playground she would have been able to hear the roar of the trains. Her school records show consistently high marks in almost every subject: 92 in reading, 94 in spelling, 83 in language, 90 in arithmetic, 81 in geography, 85 in drawing and 88 in music. Her lowest mark was 70 for handwriting.

     It was while she was at this school that Patsy became fascinated by American Indians. She looked forward to the hour each week when teachers allowed the class to browse in the library. In each session she would read about the ‘Indians in their teepees, Indians making bows and arrows . . . I carried it in my head for a week and could hardly wait to plop down on my backless stool – a dark, docile lump – to reopen the book where I had left and go on, finding out about the people who had lived on the land where I was born, long before I was born.’
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     She also read a book on Greek myths, given to her by her parents, and was spellbound by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. ‘I was carried along by the atmosphere and action,’ she said, ‘I thought Sherlock Holmes was a genius.’
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Between the ages of eleven and twelve she would also listen to them on the radio.

     Her first experience of the magic of storytelling came after a summer trip with her mother and stepfather to the Endless Caverns near New Market, Virginia. On returning to school she had to complete an assignment in her English class, entitled, ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’, which she had to recite, without notes, standing at the front of the room. Shy and self-conscious as she was, Patsy made a nervous start, but as she started to describe the caves, with their natural limestone formations that took the shapes of flowers, she became aware that her classmates had become hooked by her story.

     ‘The caverns had been discovered by two small boys who were chasing a rabbit,’ she said. ‘The rabbit dashed down a crevice in the earth, the boys followed it; and found themselves in an underground world – huge, cool, beautiful and full of color. When I came to this part, there was a different atmosphere in the classroom. Everyone had begun to listen, because they were interested. I had suddenly become entertaining, and I was also sharing a personal emotion. I forgot my self-consciousness, and my little speech went much better. This was my first experience at giving enjoyment through a story. It was like a kind of magic, and yet it could be done and had been done by me.’
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     The Fort Worth of Highsmith’s childhood was very different from the city as it is today. The Coates’ house on West Daggett no longer stands, demolished to make way for a car park, and a large area of its south section seems to be nothing but a mass of industrial wasteland. A stroll through the centre, with its gleaming skyscrapers and soulless office blocks, is a slightly dispiriting activity. Yet for all of Fort Worth’s modern blandness there are a few buildings still standing which Highsmith would have seen as she walked around her home town.

     Around the corner from the site of the Coates’ home on Daggett Avenue, sits the Rosenberg-Coomer House at 426 Lipscomb Street. Built in 1908, this one-storey, wood-frame house, with its flat-topped hip roof and small gables on the front and sides, is typical of the style of residence popular in the Southside at the beginning of the new century.

     On Wednesday afternoons she would go into town with her grandmother. Walking across the viaduct she could look down at the Mexican settlement below, see the stray dogs and half-clothed children, the men lounging in their shanties or bringing home parcels of groceries for their families. When they reached the centre of town, Willie Mae and her granddaughter often went to see a film, as movies were cheaper on Wednesdays. During the film Patsy used to eat a Hershey bar, making one last the entire show and peeling down the tinfoil as the chocolate melted in her hands. Later, whenever she smelt cloves, she recalled the strong smell of the spice that her grandmother laid on her tongue to sweeten her breath during the film. After the movie, Willie Mae took her to Kresses, a dime store, from where she remembered buying a jumping frog. ‘This was America – Texas – in 1929,’ she wrote in her journal.
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At school she also developed a crush on a fellow pupil. ‘I remember sticking my folded notes in the crack of the stones in the old Sixth Ward building, notes to be found by a certain red-haired little girl in a lower class than mine.’
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Twenty years later, during six months of analysis with a New York psychotherapist, Highsmith would remember the love she had felt for this unnamed flame-haired girl.

     In January 1930, Highsmith and her family moved once again to New York – the yo-yoing between the two states was a common feature of her childhood – this time to Astoria, Queens. A picture of her taken when she was living in Astoria shows her standing outside what was presumably her house with her stepfather, Stanley. The young girl, dressed in a smart winter outfit, complete with fur coat, hat and woolly gloves, is holding a bicycle (her first), but she gazes into the camera not with pride or joy, but with a look of uncertainty. She is sporting a rather severe fringe, her little black eyes squint into the light and from the shape of her mouth it looks as though she could have been biting the inside of her cheek.

     When the family arrived in Astoria – they first settled at 1919 21st Road, near Astoria Park, and then, most likely in 1931, moved to an address on 28th Street
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– the borough was experiencing something of a boom. The arrival of the rapid transit system in the 1920s and the five-cent fare triggered an enormous increase in the demand for houses and suddenly the area, situated in the north-west corner of Queens, came under siege from the white-collar worker. For $34 a month, two families could live in a new brick-built house only two minutes walk from Ditmars Avenue and a mere fifteen-minute subway ride from Grand Central Station or Times Square.
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Although the new apartment houses would have been quite different to the elegant, aristocratic structures which lined the exclusive 12th and 14th streets north of 27th Avenue, an area known as ‘The Hill’, the homes, with their large windows, steps up to the porch and high ceilings were generally considered ‘Greater value for less money’.
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     The commanding prospect of Manhattan, as seen from Queens, across ‘a foreground of verdure and water’ was, according to the influential architectural critic, Lewis Mumford, ‘one of the most dazzling urban views in the world’.
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Manhattan was undergoing a dramatic transformation – between 1929 and 1930 five major skyscrapers, including the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings, were either completed or in the process of construction, while a whole series of new bridges and freeways sprung up around the island. According to
The New Yorker
of November 1929, the city had never before been so ‘torn up’
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as it proceeded to transform itself with increasing protean energy.

     The young Highsmith would have also been intrigued by some of the sights closer to home: the wide boulevard of 30th Avenue, with its busy food and clothing shops; ‘The Big House’, the glamorous Astoria Studio, built in 1920, at 35th Avenue and 35th Street, by Players-Lasky Corporation (Paramount Pictures after 1927) as a rival to the Hollywood studios and the location for the Marx Brothers’ first feature,
The Cocoanuts
; the newly built Church of the Most Precious Blood on 37th Street, with its thrilling references to the Jazz Age, Lutyens’ Castle Drogo, Celtic Architecture and fin de sícle Vienna; and the ferry terminal lying at the foot of Astoria Boulevard and 92nd Street, which, until 1936, carried residents across the East River. She was fascinated by the ‘strange power’
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of Hell Gate Bridge, an imposing structure which served as a rail link between Canada, New England and the Southwest. In fact, when she was twenty-five she toyed with the idea of writing a novel about a young girl, Letitia, growing up in Astoria, using the bridge – with its distinctive parabolic steel arch – as one of the book’s central images.

     While at her new school – PS 122, 2101 Ditmars Boulevard – Highsmith earned high marks each term. She entered the school on 10 February 1930, in the fourth grade, and her records show that she was a conscientious and hardworking pupil, usually winning mostly As for both her conduct and work. Throughout her stay in Astoria, Highsmith – who in September 1932 weighed just over eighty pounds, with a height of fifty-seven and a half inches – never once turned up late for school.
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As a child she was, by her own admission, ‘lugubrious, and very grown up’
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and it is therefore not so surprising, perhaps, that she felt drawn to more adult reading material. Fascinated by human behaviour and its motivation, she joined the Astoria branch of the Queens Borough Public Library – a brick structure built with money donated by Andrew Carnegie – from which she borrowed psychology books. ‘I plunged at once into the psychology section, took books out, and often sat reading books which were not meant to be borrowed,’ she said.
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