The Talented Miss Highsmith (90 page)

The year Pat's relations with Yaddo began to thicken, 1992, was also the year in which she began, laboriously, to work on
Small g,
the only long fiction she would set in Switzerland. She'd written, hopefully, to Liz Calder that the city at the center of the novel she was thinking about, Zurich, “can be a violent town,”
¹⁸
but before she started the book in March, she was presented with a serious intimation of mortality: another operation. It was the prelude to a long series of hospital stays.

Pat had been having bad pains in her left leg, her “smoker's leg,” for some time, and in January of 1992 she finally went to London to get it looked at. Her friend the actress Heather Chasen accompanied her to the Royal Free Hospital for her checkup, and then Pat went on to see a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition. The only thing Pat noticed about the art was that every single print had a round or square stamp on it “so that no thief could steal it”:
¹⁹
she was still on the lookout for life's little felonies. On 19 January, Chasen gave a tea party at her mews house near Harley Street for Pat's seventy-first birthday. Amongst the guests were Heather's son Rupert, with whom Pat had “interesting conversations” the actor Jonathan Kent, who had taken over the directorship of the Almeida Theatre; the writer Jill Robinson, daughter of former M-G-M studio head Dore Schary; and four or five other people. “It wasn't friends of Pat's,” says Heather Chasen; “there weren't many left.”
²⁰
Liz Calder picked Pat up from the tea party and took her to dinner at her house. Pat made a note of Calder's “light-green” parrot—“maybe 38,” she guessed at his age, still fascinated by numbers—and nothing else.
²¹

During the operation on her leg the following day, Pat's left femoral artery was “ballooned” out (Pat wrote down, as always, a minute description of the procedure), the operation was a success, and her surgeon, Mr. Hamilton, told her: “Well, you were lucky.” “I
feel
lucky,” Pat replied.

Back in Tegna, Pat started writing
Small g
in the spring of 1992, sending letters to her sometime neighbor, Julia Diener-Diethelm, who owned a dressmaking business in Zurich (and who altered Pat's clothes for no charge) about apprenticeships in fashion and about inheritance, since the book turned on the inheritance of a fashion business. Frieda Sommer was Pat's proxy researcher on the Zurich gay scene.

On 10 October 1992, Pat was back in the United States visiting “brother Dan” at Box Canyon Ranch, “now my only family-connected house in Texas,”
²²
and, as she usually did in conservative Texas, Pat slipped into her vocal role as a political “liberal.” She criticized Dan and his wife Florine's lack of books, their old-fashioned ways, and, most sharply, their conservative politics: the very politics Pat herself would instantly adopt whenever she came face-to-face with anything that resembled a New York “liberal.” Pat had expressed great admiration for Margaret Thatcher, and she'd voted for George Bush in his initial presidential run, telling a British journalist that she hoped Bush would “take a more realistic stand about the situation in Palestine.”
²³
A month after visiting Dan and Florine, still horrified by the violence of the Los Angeles riots in April of 1992 that followed the police beating of Rodney King (King, out on parole for robbery, had a history of spousal abuse and drunk driving), Pat “voted Perot [a Texan, an independent, and a fiscal conservative], feeling sure Clinton would win.”
²⁴

But Pat had already experienced “the glaring truth” of American violence a little closer to home: her “brother Dan,” suffering from Parkinson's disease, had been stabbed in Weatherford, Texas, in 1990 “on his own property” for no discernible reason by someone he didn't know. Pat's stay in Texas in 1992 made the incident real for her, and she wrote about it as though it had just happened, “criminalizing” and complicating the behavior of the local police in her own special way. “[T]he local police were (and are) too afraid to bring the culprit to justice, because he is in the drug racket, & either the police are being paid off, or are too afraid for their own lives to tackle the problem.”
²⁵

From Texas, Pat, who had been invited to appear at the Harbourfront festival in Toronto, flew to Canada in the middle of October. There she met Margaret Atwood, one of the handful of women writers whose work she had reviewed. (Pat felt she could forgive the feminism of
The Handmaid's Tale
in light of the novel's undeniable power.) But the focal point of her trip to North America was the nine days she'd spent in New York before she went on to Texas and Canada. Three of those days were passed at Marijane Meaker's house in East Hampton, Long Island, during which Pat soaked herself in alcohol; behaved, according to Meaker, like a social terrorist; and produced a series of remarks that would make her “conservative” Texas relatives sound like committed Trotskyites.

Pat had decided to add New York to her Texas and Toronto itinerary so that she could have more dental work done, and at the last possible moment her editor, Gary Fisketjon, called Bob Lemstrom-Sheedy, the publicist for the Rizzoli Bookstore in SoHo—one of the “hot” places to do readings in Manhattan in the early 1990s—to ask if he could set something up for
Ripley Under Water
. It would be Pat's last professional appearance in the United States.

The ads, says Bob Lemstron-Sheedy, went up on a Tuesday, the reading took place on a Thursday, and the bookstore was completely packed with people. Pat arrived with a woman friend and read sections from each of the four preceeding Ripleys, setting them up in her “marvellous, deep, gravelly voice.” She didn't speak extemporaneously, but read from notes typed on a very thin piece of onionskin.
²⁶

She began by introducing
The Talented Mr. Ripley
.

“I was on my balcony in Positano very early in the morning, and way down below on the beach I saw a young man walking, in Madras shorts with a towel around his neck; it was”—here she paused dramatically, and everyone expected her to say Tom Ripley, because that had always been her shorthand explanation to the press about how she'd conjured up Tom—“Dickie Greenleaf!”
²⁷

Pat was very professional in her signing, and people waited eagerly in a long line to get her signature. She knew how to handle herself personally. “I don't want to sit down anymore,” she said, and went to sign books at the bar, where the bookstore had arranged a little collation. “Too tired,” she said.
²⁸

Then Gary Fisketjon took everyone out to the Odeon for dinner and Pat continued talking in her “marvellous voice.” She drank glass after glass of whiskey, ordered a hamburger and mashed potatoes, made her usual fuss over the food because the potatoes were, she said, “cold,” and then performed her customary
acte gratuite
at a dinner table: Bob Lemstrom-Sheedy watched her stub out her ever-present Gauloise in the potatoes. Still, he says, “I've seen everything in authors, believe me, from the obsessional to the hysterical—but I thought she was terrific, a real professional.”
²⁹

Pat was also taken to Scribner's bookstore for a shelf signing. Scribner's was run by Lemstrom-Sheedy's wife, Kaarin, who had just read
Edith's Diary
and told Pat what a wonderful book she thought it was. And Pat said immediately: “Yes, I don't know how I did that.”
³⁰

Because Pat was thinking about leaving her house in Tegna to Yaddo as an art colony, she took the opportunity while she was in New York to meet with Don Rice in his law offices. “So,” says Rice, “as we talked the thing through—with her smoking Gauloises, in violation of every extant law and some intermittent complaints from people walking down the hall—we talked about the impossibility of this thing and her interest in wanting to be a benefactor.”

As Rice got to know Pat, he began to think of her “self-presentation” as someone from “the English moors. The way she was dressed in a heavy tweed something or other, lots of material, lots of layers, strong smell of tobacco and the gravelly voice. I mean I liked her…and I think she trusted me.”
³¹

Pat's sporadic work on
Small g
—the novel she'd hoped would tell a “current” story—was the work of an ill and intermittently exhausted woman; Pat wrote her way through it between hospital diagnoses and the many intrigues she was hatching in life for the disposal of her wordly goods.
Small g
was another Highsmith “fairy tale” whose plot would mutedly summarize (rather than dramatize) all her themes. Viewed in terms of the rest of her work, the novel might be considered—not entirely facetiously—as the “classic comic book” version of a Highsmith novel.

Presenting a cavalcade of recognizably Highsmithian characters, it begins with an incidental murder, ends with an accidental death, and highlights: bisexual relations; a series of forged identities; the sexual idealization of youth; hoaxed and entrapped situations; the specter of AIDS (another hoax); and a clubfooted “witch,” Renata Hagnauer, who has a fashion business, a mentally deficient henchman, and a semierotic attachment to Luisa, the “fairy-tale princess” who is also Renata's beautiful young apprentice. It again features what is probably one of Ellen Blumenthal Hill's dogs—the white poodle. It is the same dog for whom Ellen, a few years after Pat's death, would prepare the same killing pills she herself took when she came to the characteristically disciplined decision that she was too old and too ill to go on living.
^*
32

But what
Small g
obviously lacks as a novel is what Pat herself had almost given up on by now: the overarching idea of the “double.”

Small g
has a happier ending than its murderous beginning promises: Rudi Markwalder, the aging gay male protagonist,
doesn't
have AIDS; everyone ends up sleeping with someone; and no one kills the dog. Still, Pat did not hesitate to frighten Renata Hagnauer down the stairs to her death—an accidental murder by the novel's merry band of pranksters—so that her assistant, Luisa, can inherit her fashion business. Murder and malevolence are not entirely erased from this final work, but, like its author's other deep feelings, they are half extinguished by the book's material concerns. Pat was a long way from the summer of 1955, when, “sick” with emotion and alight with inspiration, she wrote Tom Ripley's murder of Dickie Greenleaf as an act that was indistinguishable from love.

Nonetheless, the desire to stalk and keep secrets, the obsession with pursuit and threat, the flirtation with forgery and “getting away with it”—all of which had sustained Pat's fictions for five decades—were still alive in her imagination. And it is with these themes that Pat made her last, truly characteristic work, a creation that was much more representative of Highsmith at the height of her powers than this newer, tamer, timelier novel—
Small g
—whose writing was costing her so much effort. It was a final hurrah for Pat—this flaring up of old obsessions—and she enjoyed it enormously. But instead of consigning her inspiration to the pages of a notebook or a new fiction, she used it to light up her life, acting out, intermittently and in her own character, the transgressive motifs into which she had always poured everything, including her love. And so Pat began to bend the relationship that was blossoming between herself and Yaddo towards all the themes she had left undeveloped in
Small g.

Just as she'd done when she was writing
The Price of Salt,
Pat started to play stalking games with Donald Rice, turning the magnificent possibility of her bequest to Yaddo (it was finally three million dollars: the largest bequest ever made by a former Yaddo resident, the cornerstone of Yaddo's capital campaign, and an encouragement to other Yaddo colonists to make similar bequests) into an elaborate game of pursuit, escape, and disguise. Coincidentally, Rice, who was looking at Pat's work in an attempt to get to know her better, read
The Price of Salt,
which he “thought was brilliant and very, very touching. It may be my favorite book of hers. That's when I became aware of her sexuality and it was so subtle in that book, so beautifully portrayed.”
³³

It was an unlikely pairing, Donald Rice and Patricia Highsmith, and it had the unlikeliest of results: Pat would manage to inspire a prominent lawyer with her most personal and unconventional novel, while Rice would manage to interest an author not known for magnanimity in some very serious philanthropy. By now, Pat didn't want anyone she knew to profit from her death (this was, after all, the woman who had written to her mother's lawyer to get
herself
disinherited), she was anxious not to pay trustee fees, and she wanted free advice from Donald Rice to help coordinate all the other free advice she was soliciting. But she was also, as always, having her own complicated kind of fun. And she was ill and knew it and really did need a place to put her money. And so the slowly growing idea of bestowing her worldly goods on the artists' colony—that “supreme hospital,” as she'd once called it—where she had developed her first published novel, would come to seem both a pragmatic solution to her problems and the highest of the high ideals with which she began her life as a writer. Pat Highsmith never did anything for just one reason.

But first, Pat was ready to improve her current financial state by making use of Donald Rice as a sounding board for her intricate schemes. Rice thought that “with me, she was on a mission.” In fact, they were both on missions.