Highsmith, Patricia (21 page)

“It’s so elaborate.” She didn’t want to wear it, because it made her think of Richard.

“What the hell kind of style is it, Russian?”

Therese gave a laugh. She liked the way Carol cursed, always casually, and when no one else could hear her.

“Is it?” Carol repeated.

Therese was going upstairs. “Is it what?”

“Where did you get this habit of not answering people?” Carol demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with anger.

Carol’s eyes had the angry white light she had seen in them the time she refused to play the piano. And what angered her now was just as trifling.

“I’m sorry, Carol. I guess I didn’t hear you.”

“Go ahead,” Carol said, turning away. “Go on up and take it off.”

It was Harge still, Therese thought. Therese hesitated a minute, then went upstairs. She untied the waist and the sleeves, glanced at herself in the mirror, then tied them all back again. If Carol wanted her to keep it on, she would.

They fixed dinner themselves, because Florence had already started her three weeks’ leave. They opened some special jars of things that Carol said she had been saving, and they made stingers in the cocktail shaker just before dinner. Therese thought Carol’s mood had passed, but when she started to pour a second stinger for herself, Carol said shortly, “I don’t think you should have any more of that.”

And Therese deferred, with a smile. And the mood went on. Nothing Therese said or did could change it, and Therese blamed the inhibiting dress for not being able to think of the right things to say. They took brandied chestnuts and coffee up to the porch after dinner, but they said even less to each other in the semidarkness, and Therese only felt sleepy and rather depressed.

The next morning, Therese found a paper bag on the back doorstep. Inside it was a toy monkey with gray and white fur. Therese showed it to Carol.

“My God,” Carol said softly, and smiled. “Jacopo.” She took the monkey and rubbed her forefinger against its slightly dirty white cheek. “Abby and I used to have him hanging in the back of the car,” Carol said.

“Abby brought it? Last night?”

“I suppose.” Carol went on to the car with the monkey and a suitcase.

Therese remembered wakening from a doze on the glider last night, awakening to an absolute silence, and Carol sitting there in the dark, looking straight before her. Carol must have heard Abby’s car last night.

Therese helped Carol arrange the suitcases and the lap rug in the back of the car.

“Why didn’t she come in?” Therese asked.

“Oh that’s Abby,” Carol said with a smile, with the fleeting shyness that always surprised Therese. “Why don’t you go call Richard?”

Therese sighed. “I can’t now, anyway. He’s left the house by this time.”

It was eight forty, and his school began at nine.

“Call his family then. Aren’t you going to thank them for the box they sent you?”

“I was going to write them a letter.”

“Call them now, and you won’t have to write them a letter. It’s much nicer to call anyway.”

Mrs. Semco answered the telephone. Therese praised the dress and Mrs. Semco’s needlework, and thanked her for all the food and the wine.

“Richard just left the house,” Mrs. Semco said. “He’s going to be awfully lonely. He mopes around already.” But she laughed, her vigorous, high-pitched laugh that filled the kitchen where Therese knew she stood, a laugh that would ring through the house, even to Richard’s empty room upstairs. “Is everything all right with you and Richard?” Mrs. Semco asked with the faintest suspicion, though Therese could tell she still smiled.

Therese said yes. And she promised she would write. Afterward, she felt better because she had called.

Carol asked her if she had closed her window upstairs, and Therese went up again, because she couldn’t remember. She hadn’t closed the window, and she hadn’t made her bed either, but there wasn’t time now. Florence could take care of the bed when she came in on Monday to lock the house up.

Carol was on the telephone when Therese came downstairs. She looked up at Therese with a smile and held the telephone toward her. Therese knew from the first tone that it was Rindy.

“… at—uh—Mr. Byron’s. It’s a farm. Have you ever been there, Mother?”

“Where is it, sweetheart?” Carol said: “At Mr. Byron’s. He has horses. But not the kind you would like.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“Well, these are heavy.”

Therese tried to hear anything in the shrill, rather matter-of-fact voice that resembled Carol’s voice, but she couldn’t.

“Hello,” Rindy said. “Mother?”

“I’m still here.”

“I’ve got to say good-by now. Daddy’s ready to leave.” And she coughed.

“Have you got a cough?” Carol asked.

“No.”

“Then don’t cough into the phone.”

“I wish you would take me on the trip.”

“Well, I can’t because you’re in school. But we’ll have trips this summer.”

“Can you still call me?”

“On the trip? Of course I will. Every day.” Carol took the telephone and sat back with it, but she still watched Therese the minute or so more that she talked.

“She sounds so serious,” Therese said.

“She was telling me all about the big day yesterday. Harge let her play hooky.”

Carol had seen Rindy day before yesterday, Therese remembered. It had evidently been a pleasant visit, from what Carol had told Therese over the telephone, but she hadn’t mentioned any details about it, and Therese had not asked her anything.

Just as they were about to leave, Carol decided to make a last call to Abby. Therese wandered back into the kitchen, because the car was too cold to sit in.

“I don’t know any small towns in Illinois,” Carol was saying. “Why Illinois?… All right, Rockford… I’ll remember, I’ll think of roquefort… Of course I’ll take good care of him. I wish you’d come in, nitwit… Well, you’re mistaken, very mistaken.”

Therese took a sip from Carol’s half-finished coffee on the kitchen table, drank from the place where the lipstick was.

“Not a word,” Carol said, drawling the phrase. “No one, so far as I know, not even Florence… Well, you do that, darling. Cheerio now.”

Five minutes later, they were leaving Carol’s town on the highway marked on the strip map in red, the highway they would use until Chicago. The sky was overcast. Therese looked around her at the country that had grown familiar now, the clump of woods off to the left that the road to New York passed, the tall flagstaff in the distance that marked the club Carol belonged to.

Therese let a crack of air in at her window. It was quite cold and the heater felt good on her ankles. The clock on the dashboard said quarter to ten, and she thought suddenly of the people working in Frankenberg’s, penned in there at a quarter of ten in the morning, this morning and tomorrow morning and the next, the hands of clocks controlling every move they made. But the hands of the clock on the dashboard meant nothing now to her and Carol. They would sleep or not sleep, drive or not drive, whenever it pleased them. She thought of Mrs. Robichek, selling sweaters this minute on the third floor, commencing another year there, her fifth year.

“Why so silent?” Carol asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of miles, could straighten them out. Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania they went through a section of pale sunshine, like a leak in the sky, but around noon, it began to rain. Carol cursed, but the sound of the rain was pleasant, drumming irregularly on the windshield and the roof.

“You know what I forgot?” Carol said. “A raincoat. I’ll have to pick one up somewhere.”

And suddenly, Therese remembered she had forgotten the book she was reading. And there was a letter to Carol in it, one sheet that stuck out both ends of the book. Damn. It had been separate from her other books, and that was why she had left it behind, on the table by the bed. She hoped Florence wouldn’t decide to look at it. She tried to remember if she had written Carol’s name in the letter, and she couldn’t. And the check. She had forgotten to tear that up, too.

“Carol, did you get that check?”

“That check I gave you?—You said you were going to tear it up.”

“I didn’t. It’s still under the cloth.”

“Well, it’s not important,” Carol said.

When they stopped for gas, Therese tried to buy some stout, which Carol liked sometimes, at a grocery store next to the gas station, but they had only beer. She bought one can, because Carol didn’t care for beer. Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and opened the box of sandwiches Richard’s mother had put up. There was also a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn’t open the beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the floor in the back of the car.

“Caviar. How very, very nice of them,” Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. “Do you like caviar?”

“No. I wish I did.”

“Why?”

Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was.

“Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it,” Therese said.

Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. “It’s an acquired taste.

Acquired tastes are always more pleasant—and hard to get rid of.”

Therese poured more coffee into the cup they were sharing. She was acquiring a taste for black coffee. “How nervous I was the first time I held this cup. You brought me coffee that day. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“How’d you happen to put cream in it that day?”

“I thought you’d like it. Why were you so nervous?”

Therese glanced at her. “I was so excited about you,” she said, lifting the cup. Then she looked at Carol again and saw a sudden stillness, like a shock, in Carol’s face. Therese had seen it two or three times before when she had said something like that to Carol about the way she felt, or paid Carol an extravagant compliment. Therese could not tell if she were pleased or displeased. She watched Carol fold the wax paper around the other half of her sandwich.

There was cake, but Carol didn’t want any. It was the brown-colored spicecake that Therese had often had at Richard’s house. They put everything back, into the valise that held the cartons of cigarettes and the bottle of whisky, with a painstaking neatness that would have annoyed Therese in anyone but Carol.

“Did you say Washington was your home state?” Therese asked her.

“I was born there, and my father’s there now. I wrote him I might visit him, if we get out that far.”

“Does he look like you?”

“Do I look like him, yes—more than like my mother.”

“It’s strange to think of you with a family,” Therese said.

“Why?”

“Because I just think of you as you. Sui generis.”

Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. “All right, go ahead.”

“Brothers and sisters?” Therese asked.

“One sister. I suppose you want to know all about her, too? Her name is Elaine, she has three children and she lives in Virginia. She’s older than I am, and I don’t know if you’d like her. You’d think she was dull.”

Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol, with all Carol’s features weakened and diluted.

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside restaurant that had a miniature Dutch village in the front window. Therese leaned on the rail beside it and looked at it. There was a little river that came out of a faucet at one end, that flowed in an oval stream and turned a windmill.

Little figures in Dutch costume stood about the village, stood on patches of live grass. She thought of the electric train in Frankenberg’s toy department, and the fury that drove it on the oval course that was about the same size as the stream.

“I never told you about the train in Frankenberg’s,” Therese remarked to Carol. “Did you notice it when you—”

“An electric train?” Carol interrupted her.

Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her heart suddenly.

It was too complicated to go into, and the conversation stopped there.

Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff and cold from the car.

“I wonder if you’ll really enjoy this trip,” Carol said. “You so prefer things reflected in a glass, don’t you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that windmill. It’s practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if you’ll even like seeing real mountains and real people.”

Therese felt as crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt Carol meant, too, that she had a private conception of her, and that Carol resented it. Real people? She thought suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.

And she had fled her because she was hideous.

“How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your experiences second hand?” Carol asked, her voice soft and even, and yet merciless.

Carol made her feel she had done nothing, was nothing at all, like a wisp of smoke. Carol had lived like a human being, had married, and had a child.

The old man from behind the counter was coming toward them. He had a limp. He stood by the table next to them and folded his arms. “Ever been to Holland?” he asked pleasantly.

Carol answered. “No, I haven’t. I suppose you’ve been. Did you make the village in the window?”

He nodded. “Took me five years to make.”

Therese looked at the man’s bony fingers, the lean arms with the purple veins twisting just under the thin skin. She knew better than Carol the work that had gone into the little village, but she could not get a word out.

The man said to Carol, “Got some fine sausages and hams next door, if you like real Pennsylvania made. We raise our own hogs and they’re killed and cured right here.”

They went into the whitewashed box of a store beside the restaurant.

There was a delicious smell of smoked ham inside it, mingled with the smell of wood smoke and spice.

“Let’s pick something we don’t have to cook,” Carol said, looking into the refrigerated counter. “Let’s have some of this,” she said to the young man in the earlapped cap.