Highsmith, Patricia (8 page)

“No,” Therese said.

“Not many? Just three or four?”

“Like you?” Therese met her eyes steadily.

And Carol looked fixedly at her, as if she demanded another word, another phrase from Therese. But then she set the glass down on the stove top and turned away. “Do you play the piano?”

“Some.”

“Come and play something.” And when Therese started to refuse, she said imperatively, “Oh, I don’t care how you play. Just play something.”

Therese played some Scarlatti she had learned at the Home. In a chair on the other side of the room. Carol sat listening relaxed and motionless, not even sipping the new glass of whisky and water. Therese played the C major Sonata, which was slowish and rather simple, full of broken octaves, but it struck her as dull, then pretentious in the trill parts, and she stopped. It was suddenly too much, her hands on the keyboard that she knew Carol played, Carol watching her with her eyes half closed, Carol’s, whole house around her, and the music that made her abandon herself, made her-defenseless. With a gasp, she dropped her hands in her lap.

“Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly.

The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”

Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese’s shoulders.

Therese could see her hands in her memory—flexible and strong, the delicate tendons showing as they pressed her shoulders. It seemed an age as her hands moved toward her neck and under her chin, an age of tumult so intense it blotted out the pleasure of Carol’s tipping her head back and kissing her lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel the kiss at all.

“Come with me,” Carol said.

She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up by the banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.

“I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning down the flowered cotton bedspread and the top blanket.

“Thanks, I’m not really—”

“Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that commanded obedience.

Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night before. “I don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”

“I’ll wake you in half an hour.” Carol pulled the blanket over her when she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed. “How old are you, Therese?”

Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but bearing them nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder. “Nineteen.” How old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.

Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little.

Therese felt that she thought of something so intensely, one might have touched the thought in the air between them. Then Carol slipped her hands under her shoulders, and bent her head down to Therese’s throat, and Therese felt the tension go out of Carol’s body with the sigh that made her neck warm, that carried the perfume that was in Carol’s hair.

“You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her head. “What would you like?”

Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant, and she set her teeth in shame.

“What would you like?” Carol repeated.

“Nothing, thanks.”

Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a cigarette.

Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by Carol’s restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see her smoke.

“What would you like, a drink?”

Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the tenderness and the concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick with fever. Then Therese said it: “I think I’d like some hot milk.”

The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot milk,” she mocked. Then she left the room.

And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the long while until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided white cup with a saucer under it, holding the saucer and the cup handle, and closing the door with her foot.

“I let it boil and it’s got a scum on it,” Carol said annoyedly. “I’m sorry.”

But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what Carol would always do, be thinking of something else and let the milk boil.

“Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?”

Therese nodded.

“Ug,” Carol said, and sat down on the arm of a chair and watched her.

Therese was propped on one elbow. The milk was so hot, she could barely let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo.

It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup, and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill. Then Carol came and took the cup, and Therese was drowsily aware that Carol asked her three questions, one that had to do with happiness, one about the store, and one about the future. Therese heard herself answering. She heard her voice rise suddenly in a babble, like a spring that she had no control over, and she-realized she was in tears. She was telling Carol all that she feared and disliked, of her loneliness, of Richard, and of gigantic disappointments. And of her parents. Her mother was not dead.

But Therese had not seen her since she was fourteen.

Carol, questioned her, and she answered, though she did not want to talk about her mother. Her mother was not that important, not even one of the disappointments. Her father was. Her father was quite different. He had died when she was six—a lawyer of Czechoslovakian descent who all his life had wanted to be a painter. He had been quite different, gentle, sympathetic, never raising his voice in anger against the woman who had nagged at him, because he had been neither a good lawyer nor a good painter. He had never been strong, he had died of pneumonia, but in Therese’s mind, her mother had killed him. Carol questioned and questioned her, and Therese told of her mother’s bringing her to the school in Montclair when she was eight, of her mother’s infrequent visits afterward, for her mother had traveled a great deal around the country.

She had been a pianist—no, not a first-rate one, how could she be, but she had always found work because she was pushing. And when Therese was about ten, her mother had remarried. Therese had visited at her mother’s house in Long Island in the Christmas holidays, and they had asked her to stay with them, but not as if they wanted her to stay. And Therese had not liked the husband, Nick, because he was exactly like her mother, big and dark haired, with a loud voice, and violent and passionate gestures.

Therese was sure their marriage would be perfect. Her mother had been pregnant even then, and now there were two children. After a week with them, Therese had returned to the Home. There had been perhaps three or four visits from her mother afterward, always with some present for her, a blouse, a book, once a cosmetic kit that Therese had loathed simply because it reminded her of her mother’s brittle, mascaraed eye-lashes, presents handed her self-consciously by her mother, like hypocritical peace offerings. Once her mother had brought the little boy, her half brother, and then Therese had known she was an outsider. Her mother had not loved her father, had chosen to leave her at a school when she was eight, and why did she bother now even to visit her, to claim her at all?

Therese would have been happier to have no parents, like half the girls in the school. Finally, Therese had told her mother she did not want her to visit again, and her mother hadn’t, and the ashamed, resentful expression, the nervous sidewise glance of the brown eyes, the twitch of a smile and the silence—that was the last she remembered of her mother.

Then she had become fifteen. The sisters at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother for two hundred dollars.

Therese hadn’t wanted any money from her, had half believed her mother wouldn’t give her any, but she had, and Therese had taken it.

“I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to give it back.”

“Nonsense,” Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair, resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. “You were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you’ll be an adult.”

Therese did not answer.

“Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years from now?”

Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her eyes. “I don’t want to talk any more about it.”

“Does Richard know all this?”

“No. Just that she’s alive. Does it matter? This isn’t what matters.” She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now. Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the half-suppressed sobs.

“I’ll never cry again,” she said.

“Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.

Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her nose.

“Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.

She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in Montclair, too. Now who was there? The Kellys who lived on the second floor at Mrs. Osborne’s. And Richard. “When I was fired from that job last month,” Therese said, “I was ashamed and I moved—” She stopped.

“Moved where?”

“I didn’t tell anyone where, except Richard. I just disappeared. I suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed.

I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”

Carol smiled. “Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you are to be able to do it. You’re free. Do you realize that?”

Therese said nothing.

“No,” Carol answered herself.

Beside Carol on the dressing table, a square gray clock ticked faintly, and as Therese had done a thousand times in the store, she read the time and attached a meaning to it. It was four fifteen and a little more, and suddenly she was anxious lest she had lain there too long, lest Carol might be expecting someone to come to the house.

Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek of a hysterical woman in the hall, and they saw each other start.

Carol stood up, and slapped something twice in her palm, as she had slapped the gloves in her palm in the store. The telephone screamed again, and Therese was sure Carol was going to throw whatever it was she held in her hand, throw it across the room against the wall. But Carol only turned and laid the thing down quietly, and left the room.

Therese could hear Carol’s voice in the hall. She did not want to hear what she was saying. She got up and put her skirt and her shoes on. Now she saw what Carol had held in her hand. It was a shoehorn of tan-colored wood. Anyone else would have thrown it, Therese thought. Then she knew one word for what she felt about Carol: pride. She heard Carol’s voice repeating the same tones, and now opening the door to leave, she heard the words, “I have a guest,” for the third time calmly presented as a barrier. “I think it’s an excellent reason. What better?… What’s the matter with tomorrow? If you—”

Then there was no sound until Carol’s first step on the stair, and Therese knew whoever had been talking to her had hung up on her. Who dared, Therese wondered.

“Shouldn’t I leave?” Therese asked.

Carol looked at her in the same way she had when they first entered the house. “Not unless you want to. No. We’ll take a drive later, if you want to.”

She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese started to straighten the bed.

“Leave the bed.” Carol was watching her from the hall. “Just close the door.”

“Who is it that’s coming?”

Carol turned and went into the green room. “My husband,” she said.

“Hargess.”

Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked at the same time.

“No end prompt today,” Carol murmured. “Come down, Therese.”

Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but of Carol’s annoyance at his coming.

He was coming up the stairs. When he saw Therese, he slowed, and a faint surprise crossed his face, and then he looked at Carol.

“Harge, this is Miss Belivet,” Carol said. “Mr. Aird.”

“How do you do?” Therese said.

Harge only glanced at Therese, but his nervous blue eyes inspected her from head to toe. He was a heavily built man with a rather pink face. One eyebrow was set higher than the other, rising in an alert peak in the center, as if it might have been distorted by a scar. “How do you do?”

Then to Carol, “I’m sorry to disturb you. I only wanted to get one or two things.” He went past her and opened the door to a room Therese had not seen. “Things for Rindy,” he added.

“Pictures on the wall?” Carol asked.

The man was silent.

Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room Carol sat down, but Therese did not.

“Play some more, if you like,” Carol said.

Therese shook her head.

“Play some,” Carol said firmly.

Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her eyes. “I can’t,”

Therese said, stubborn as a mule.

And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.

They heard Harge’s quick steps cross the hall and stop, then descend the stairs slowly. Therese saw his dark clad figure and then his pinkish blond head appear.

“I can’t find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my room,” he said complainingly.

I know where it is.” Carol got up and started toward the stairs.

“I suppose you want me to take her something for Christmas,” Harge said.

“Thanks, I’ll give the things to her.” Carol went up the stairs.