The Talented Miss Highsmith (80 page)

 

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Salon Room (Chimney Room)

 

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Desk Drawers

Part 1

A few months before Patricia Highsmith's death in early February of 1995, Daniel Keel, knowing that Pat was ill and fading fast, decided to make the long railway journey from Zurich to Pat's house in Tegna to talk to her about preparations for the publication of one of her books.

While Pat was still living in Aurigeno, she had admired the sheepskin and leather coat Keel was wearing, and in a gallant gesture, he offered it to her on the spot. She tried it on, and “strangely enough,” says Keel, “it fit her: we were the same size.” Although “flustered,” Pat took the coat. Perhaps the gift appealed to something deep and doubled in her nature: Keel had kept an exact copy of the garment himself and continued to wear it, so whenever it was cold Pat and her publisher were twins. It was this same attention to his author's needs that prompted Daniel Keel to ask Pat if he could bring her something from Zurich when he came to visit.

“Flowers?” he offered. “No, no flowers,” she said. Good, he thought, because his wife, the painter Anna Keel, told him that Pat had thrown out the last bouquet of flowers they'd brought her—and it had cost a small fortune. Pat, anyway, had expressed herself fully on the subject of flowers in another telephone call: “Your wife Anna always brings me bunches of wonderful roses. But I don't like flowers. Do you mind not bringing them anymore?”

Daniel Keel couldn't have known this, but Pat had already left a trail of broken blossoms behind her in New York. Her next-to-last American publisher, Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press, brought Pat to New York from Switzerland in the mid-1980s to do a little publicity—“not,” he says, “realizing the idiocy of what I was doing”—for his specially designed, limited editions of
People Who Knock on the Door
and five collections of Highsmith short stories:
¹
slipcovered volumes with the copies numbered and signed, all issued between 1985 and 1988.
^*
On her first night in New York, Penzler took Pat out to dinner at his favorite Italian restaurant, Giordano's at Thirty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue, and watched in disbelief at what she did when his publicity representative handed her a single perfect rose at the restaurant table. “Pat took the rose and dropped it on the floor. Didn't acknowledge it, didn't say thank you, just took the rose and dropped it on the floor.”
²

And then Penzler watched again—this time in rigid silence—while Pat “ranted” and “yelled” at Roberto, the restaurant's popular maître d', because the veal chop he'd gone to the kitchen to personally select for Pat—“He made every effort,” says Penzler; “he couldn't do enough for her”—was too large for her liking.
³

Pat's performances at dinner tables—by now, they were site-specific and designed to give maximum offense to whomever she was sitting next to—still retained their power to shipwreck an evening and shape an opinion. Before that restaurant party and the subsequent days he spent escorting her on publicity junkets, Otto Penzler had been thinking of Pat Highsmith as “one of my heroines because I loved her fiction.” He ended by describing her as “the most unloving and unlovable person I've ever known…a really terrible human being…. I never heard her say a positive thing. Except once. She said: ‘I like beer.'”
⁴

A year later, waiters in the United States had apparently wised up to Patricia's ways—David Streitfeld, book columnist for
The Washington Post,
says the serving staff at the hotel restaurant where he was interviewing Pat in November of 1988 “was giving us a wide berth”—but she was still able to create havoc at a table. Pat's plane had just spent three hours stalled on a runway (“I'm a very lousy Christian, but I don't believe in revenge,” was how she dismissed the disruption), she was at her most gnomic, and David Streitfeld thought she “seemed a little batty.” He had planned to do a feature article on her, but their conversation was so scattered that he couldn't make his piece “cohere.”

Pat was “cackling”—often—and she brought to the luncheon table a book of medical symptoms which she said she found more interesting than any novel.
⁵
She “betray[ed] no interest in the food,” but she did favor Streitfeld with some readings aloud from her medical book. And she seemed happy to examine the long list of all her published titles her interviewer brought with him. “‘This looks good,'” she said. “‘It always makes me feel strong. Either strong, or exhausted.'”
⁶

It was during this luncheon that Pat, eating nothing herself but providing some food for thought, told David Streitfeld why she'd parted company with Otto Penzler as a publisher. Penzler, she said, had “deliberately” suppressed her dedication to the Intifada in his edition of
People Who Knock on the Door,
and she told Streitfeld exactly why: “‘Do you know why he did that?' Highsmith hissed to me. ‘Because he's a Jew.'” (“I don't,” says David Streitfeld, “as a reporter, use the word ‘hissed' very often. But in this case, it's a literal description.”)
⁷
As it happened, Pat was wrong in both her assumptions: Otto Penzler, like Pat's father J. B. Plangman, is a German Protestant. And Penzler had asked permission from the Diogenes representative in New York to delete Pat's dedication because he felt it would create trouble for the book with local reviewers.
⁸

So Daniel Keel, on the telephone to Pat in Tegna, asked her again: “‘What can I bring you, what can I bring you that you would like?'

“And she said, instantly, ‘Chocolate cake.'” Keel was quite surprised to hear this because, as he says, he had “never seen her eating cake, or anything else” for that matter. When she'd come to dinner at his house in Zurich she had two large whiskies before dinner and then asked if she could bring her glass to the table, sipping the whiskey instead of eating. Anna Keel had especially prepared the classic Swiss dish
roesti
for Pat, and Pat had pushed the food around and around on her plate with her fork, redesigning it the way a child of two with a shovel might reconfigure a sand castle. She'd scraped the meat into the vegetables, the vegetables into the meat, and the whole into an “unrecognizable mess.” Anna Keel, worried that she'd cooked a dish which didn't please her guest, asked Pat if perhaps the
roesti
wasn't too dry for her. Yes, Pat said baldly, the
roesti was
too dry.

Keel's publisher's lunches and dinners with Pat over the years had yielded the same arid conversational results. “For the first twenty years we would meet and she would say yes and no, and sometimes ask something. Nothing unnecessary, she was very spare. As though you had to put in a franc to get even a word.” Everything he learned about her “came through her books.” And when the Keels visited Pat in Tegna “towards the end,” Pat, doing her part, had made an attempt to serve them an unidentifiable mass that was in her refrigerator, a kind of “pudding,” which she announced was “a chicken without legs.” (She was being allowed alcohol again by her doctors—who obviously figured it no longer mattered.) “I hope you don't mind,” Pat said as they ate; “I gave the chicken legs to the cats.” She had also been cooking something to serve with the chicken—something that had celery in it—but forgot to serve it. She announced this in the middle of the meal as well.

That was why Daniel Keel was so surprised to hear his author requesting something as edible as a chocolate cake from Zurich.

“It was on a Sunday that I next went to the Ticino,” Keel says, “and I went alone.” He'd called the famous sweet shop, Sprüngli in the Main Station in Zurich, told them he was taking an afternoon train “at the last minute, I'm always late,” and asked them to prepare a medium-sized chocolate cake (“Pat had said ‘not a small one and not a big one'”) and to put it in a box for transport. At the last possible moment, Keel picked up the cake from Sprüngli, paid for it, and “ran to the train.”

Dense, rich, and deeply delicious, Sprüngli chocolate cakes are famous all over Switzerland. One of the great pleasures of arriving at the Main Station in Zurich by train is that the Sprüngli store is located right there in the station. The Sprüngli chocolate cakes—usually a few of the cakes are displayed in the shop window—are oddly shaped: geometrically angled at one end and rectangular at the other. Like the cases for miniature musical intruments, I thought when I first saw them—until Daniel Keel's story clarified for me what those cakes
really
looked like.

When Keel arrived at Pat's house in the Ticino, he gave her the box with the chocolate cake in it, told her it was from Sprüngli, and then they sat down to work on the manuscript. After a few hours, Pat—no doubt reluctantly—mentioned that she thought perhaps they should eat something. And Keel said: “Dessert. We can have a piece of your chocolate cake.”

And so Pat put the cake box on the table, opened it, and Daniel Keel and Patricia Highsmith had a shared and immediate shock. Both of them realized at the same moment that the Sprüngli chocolate cake Keel had brought from Zurich (he was unfamiliar with this particular cake and saw it only after it had been boxed) “had the shape of a coffin.” An “elegant and expensive coffin.” At the time, of course, Pat was seriously ill, she was obviously dying, and Keel was beside himself at the implications of the gift he'd carried into her house: “I was so shocked, I was speechless. I didn't know what to say.”

What finally slipped out of his mouth was a horrified acknowledgment: “I didn't know,” he said to Pat.

“I have friends,” says Keel, “who, in that situation, would laugh and say: ‘Look, I'm dying, and you bring me a chocolate cake in the shape of a coffin!' But Pat wouldn't laugh. She didn't say anything. But I saw her eyes, and I know she realized that the cake had the shape of a coffin.

“We ate a piece and she put it back in the kitchen.” And nothing more was said about the cake.

When Daniel Keel returned to Zurich, he had his secretary call up the Sprüngli shop to suggest that because “other old and sick people were receiving these cakes that were in the shapes of coffins,” perhaps Sprüngli would care to reconsider the kinds of cake pans they were using. And the lady on the telephone line from Sprüngli was astonished. This chocolate cake was a
famous
cake and
no one,
until now, had
ever
remarked on its shape; there was certainly no reason to change it.

“It's strange,” Keel says about Patricia Highsmith and the cake that was shaped like a coffin, “that it happened with her and to her.”
⁹