The Talented Miss Highsmith (82 page)

When Liggenstorfer married a director at Diogenes, Pat came to her wedding party, and to everyone's astonishment, she danced with both Daniel Keel and Liggenstorfer's father. (There is a photograph of Pat on the dance floor, one enormous hand lightly bunched at the knuckles and resting on the shoulder of the smiling father of the bride.) And when Pat gave a housewarming party for the Casa Highsmith in Tegna in 1989 (“The house was HER,” says Marianne), Marianne Liggenstorfer (now Fritsch) came with her husband and stayed the night, suffering agonies because she'd forgotten her cat-allergy medicine and Pat's cats were everywhere. It was part of the special care with which Pat was treated at Diogenes that Marianne never said a word about the “nightmare” of suffering caused by her allergies that night: she wanted to spare Pat's feelings in her new house.
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Pat's contract with Diogenes would make her a multimillionaire at a time when a million dollars was still a good definition of the American Dream.

But becoming a Swiss citizen—a long and arduous process of certification which can last for fourteen years—was another matter, and Pat seems to have alternated her desire for it (she thought it would help her tax bill in America) with her fear of losing her American citizenship, one of her crucial identities. America was still the country which commanded her imagination, still the country with which she had the strongest emotional ties. As late as the end of 1991, she was writing to one of her legal advisors that “for sentimental reasons I may not wish to renounce USA citizenship.”
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And the depth of her feeling for her native land could always be measured by the agitated abuse she continued to heap on it. When she wrote to Kingsley about her campaign to become a Swiss citizen, it was in terms which reflected her ambivalence: “I am seriously considering switching to Swiss citizenship…. If I switch I'll probably have to stay in bed 2 days, because of emotional shock.”
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If America remained the focal point of many of Pat's feelings, her house in Moncourt, France, continued to be the locus of her dreams and her regrets.

In 1988, after seven gardenless years in Aurigeno, Pat looked at “20 envelopes of photos from my desk cubbyholes”
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—they were photographs of her Moncourt garden—and allowed them to put a halo of nostalgia around her feelings for the house. She wrote to Monique Buffet about it.

“I must say I was touched by the sight of that garden in colour. Nothing can substitute for a happy garden (walled to boot), and nice friends around. I did not dwell on the photos; I am just serious on the subject; not the same kind of seriousness that brings tears, not at all.”
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Perhaps Pat, a nightly reader of dictionaries, knew that the word “paradise” is derived from the Persian word for “walled garden.”

In 1992, the house in Moncourt was very much on her mind when she sent a letter to Barbara Skelton in the Seine-et-Marne:

“As I look back, as they say—I think I should have tried for compromise in 1980 with the frogs. 1971–80 was the happiest time of my life to work, garden, cats, friends. What else is life all about?”
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But Pat's Moncourt house was long since sold, and death would take the thorny question of citizenship out of her hands. She died an American citizen, with her American-born, Geneva-residing accountant, Marylin Scowden, as her very last houseguest. Pat had first met Marylin Scowden in Geneva on the evening of the April day in 1992 when she'd been chauffeured to Peter Ustinov's house in Rolle for a double interview by German
Vogue
.
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Ustinov had requested Pat as his lunch partner for the interview, and she was quite taken with both Peter Ustinov
and
the paintings he had hanging in his house.
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Although Pat was fond of Marylin Scowden and had gone some distance in the direction of trusting her (not, to be sure, with any personal information), and although Scowden had come to Tegna to settle some important financial matters with her client (Pat made her last will just three days before she died), Pat probably preferred the way in which this final guest availed herself of the hospitality of the Casa Highsmith, arriving, as Scowden did, at the white block of a house a little
after
Pat had been taken to the hospital in Locarno. Of previous visits to Pat in Tegna, Scowden says: “I think she was happy I came and
very
happy when I left.”
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This time—the very last time she had company—Pat was not obliged to share her house with her visitor.

And there are strong indications that she didn't want to share her hospital room, either. When Scowden arrived in Tegna, she had a necessary meeting with Pat's banker at Pat's house, and then went straight to the hospital in Locarno with papers for Pat to sign.

“I said to Pat: ‘This can wait till tomorrow,' and Pat said: ‘No no, I want to sign them now.' Her intuition made her feel that it was necessary to sign those papers: it was done at her insistence…. She was on morphine, very uncomfortable, and she kept saying ‘My legs are hurting, my legs are hurting,' and I tried to massage them, and there was no muscle left.”
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But Pat couldn't bear the personal attention. “You should go, you should go, don't stay, don't stay,” she repeated several times to her deeply concerned visitor.
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And so Marylin Scowden, with no indication from the doctors that this was to be Patricia Highsmith's last night on earth, left the room.

In January of 1980, on the third or fourth day after she had been hospitalized in Nemours, France, for a catastrophically gushing nosebleed, Pat asked a nurse to leave the door of her hospital room open. She was afraid of dying alone, and the prospect felt very near: she was “losing” more blood than she was “gaining.” She thought then that it was “maybe…a sign of vitality or brotherliness to want to speak to someone at the last and say, ‘Stay with me a minute, please—I'm going.'” The nurse refused her request to open the door because the children on the ward were “very
impressionnant
about blood,” and Pat, bleeding copiously every two hours, was covered with it. Pat was angry at the nurse, but she was also “ashamed of my fear of dying alone, since I've always known death is an individual act anyway. I swear to myself next time I'll be better prepared.”
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Perhaps her insistence in Switzerland, a decade and a half later when she really
was
dying, on sending her final visitor out of her hospital room—it is Pat Highsmith's last reported act—was what she had meant by being “better prepared.” But as the longtime companion and close observer of many felines, Pat would also have known that when a country cat is mortally ill, it begins its instinctive transit out of life by going off into the woods to die alone.

 

The contrast between the happy little Swiss travel piece Pat was working on in her notebook in 1953—overflowing with praise and pleasure and local color—and the glum, grim, grayed-out notes she took when she actually
moved
to Switzerland in the early 1980s (to the house in Aurigeno which Ellen Hill, with the assistance of architect Tobias Amman, had picked out for her) is marked. Pat hadn't had so much peace and quiet since she'd left her double cottage in Earl Soham in 1968—and its effect on her was that her inspirational flame burned low and her depression was awful. She experienced “some of the blackest moments of my life, when for fifteen minutes at a time, I would feel that I'd got myself into a trap, and an unhappy one.”

Part of the problem was the lack of light. The seventeenth-century stone summerhouse Ellen had chosen for Pat sat in the Maggia Valley in the deep shadow of the Dunzio Mountain; in the winter the house got sunlight for perhaps two hours a day. The windows of the house were small (and some of them were barred), and the walls were a good half meter thick, so that even when the sun was out the house was dark and cool.

Daniel Keel says: “People come to the Ticino for the light, and she put herself into the darkest, most cramped house, no room, no quality of life; she didn't give her guests anything, but she didn't give herself anything either. It was the most uncomfortable house in the world with the mountains right up against it, which cut out even the two hours of sunlight a day the town got.”
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“This is where I write,” Pat told Keel, showing him her desk corner. Her desk, as usual, faced the wall and was accompanied by the “most uncomfortable chair” in the house.
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In an odd—a
very
odd—article entitled “Winter in the Ticino” (the canton in which both Aurigeno and Tegna are located), Pat wrote that in Aurigeno she chose to fraternize only with Germans or Swiss Germans, even though she was living in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. She described her house as a “submarine”—but a submarine set in stone and not in water—and evoked the peculiar mineral emanations from the heavy concentrations of granite in the mountains, concentrations which produced a “magnetic effect” said to drain you of your life's energy. Pat seemed to like this idea and to accept it fatalistically: “How can one escape the density of rock?”
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Although Pat began her residency in Aurigeno by giving a cocktail party on her terrace on the day before the opening of the Locarno Film Festival (one guest's report on the hors d'oeuvres: “Boiled eggs, cut in half, mayonnaise out of the tube, the food was quite terrible and unattractive; whoever did it was not exactly an aesthete in food matters”),
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her description of her social life was bleak. “There is only one American, a retired widow, in the region and she lives in Ascona.” (That was Ellen Blumenthal Hill.) “I recently met an Englishman,” she continued, as though she'd been bird-watching and had spotted a rare specimen. She “happen[ed] to like the quiet,” she wrote, but the village appeared to be “without inhabitants.” (Counting Highsmith, the population was 106.) She was a submariner living in a ghost town.
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There was a weekly “or so” dinner party in Aurigeno in which wine and food seemed to play a central role. “Food is important here,” a friend said to her, “because there's nothing else that's very amusing.” These weekly dinners engendered heated political arguments until “2 in the morning,” conducted by guests “made happy on wine.”
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(Were they unhappy without it?) Once again, Pat found someone to do favors and errands for her—a kind and considerably overburdened neighbor in the village, Ingeborg Moelich, a former opera singer, who had a car but very little money, and who was not, say neighbors, adequately recompensed for her efforts. She shopped for Pat, she did some sewing and some laundry, as well as many driving errands. And she continued, faithfully, to stop by Pat's house in Tegna during Pat's last illness. It was Ingeborg Moelich who drove Pat, leaning heavily on Julia Diener-Diethelm in the backseat of Moelich's car, on her very last ride to the hospital in Locarno in early February of 1995.

Pat also befriended the one man in the village who had fought for Germany during the Second World War, a grouchy old gentleman to whom no one else spoke. She found the elderly soldier from Hitler's army quite interesting. But when the man died, Pat, like any good New Yorker, immediately began to speculate on the possibilities of buying his house, situated on the steep stone grade just above hers.
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Someone said to her: “Nothing's alive. Have you noticed that?” She had.
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And so, in the way of a woman with a turbulent imagination who spends time alone in a dark house talking to herself, Pat, once again, began to dream up little inventions to lighten her days. She thought about a “Minivac—small hand-held vacuum cleaner…to dust the tops of books in bookcase.”
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But this was nine years after her native land had produced the ubiquitous Dust-Buster hand vacuum with its myriad irritating attachments: Pat was out of touch with the material facts of her home country. Ditto for her idea for the “small wringer…for kitchen, in order to extract liver paste from tube which has been in fridge”—a device she felt would be a welcome addition to any home.
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Her thumbs, arthritic by now, couldn't squeeze the paste out of chilled food tubes, and she was putting the tubes on the floor and using her feet on them. But once again Pat had been preempted in her invention: it was already being manufactured in America to extract the very last drops out of stubborn toothpaste tubes.

On 1 March 1983, shortly after Pat made her initial move to Aurigeno, Arthur Koestler, whom Pat had known for thirty-five years and who was by now dying of leukemia and disabled by Parkinson's disease, killed himself in his London home. His wife, Cynthia, joined him in what was apparently a suicide pact. Pat hadn't seen Koestler since 2 May 1978 when she'd brought Tabea Blumenschein over to the Koestlers' London town house to show her off. Tabea had been worried because she hadn't read any of Koestler's work, but Pat quickly relieved her of her doubts: “Never mind, my dear, the last thing writers want to talk about is their work.”
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Pat was at Peter Huber's house in Zurich when she got the news about Koestler, and she was alone a day later when she found out that Koestler's wife was also dead. Pat was furious: “My first thought was that he had gently persuaded her; my emotion plain anger.”
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