Beautiful Shadow (17 page)

     Highsmith continued her relationships with Mary Sullivan – who sent Pat a bunch of gardenias every afternoon under the name of ‘Mike Thomas’, before the couple eventually separated in July 1941 – and her old girlfriend Virginia, but neither woman was enough for her. She recognised her insatiable appetite for a constant supply of new conquests and the inherent destructiveness of her habit, yet she felt unable to resist its power, classifying herself as something of a ‘degenerate’.

     Fellow Barnard student Rita Semel remembers how on one occasion Pat invited her to dinner at her apartment. ‘I went around for dinner, her mother wasn’t there, and she came on to me,’ she says. ‘I was very confused I didn’t know what was happening. She tried to seduce me both with words and actions but I think I just pushed her away and left soon after. Only years later did I realise what she was up to. I didn’t say anything afterwards and neither did she.’
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A friend once said of Highsmith that she left a trail of unmade beds behind her. ‘How Pat ever got to class – she was hungover so many times – I’ll never know, with all this coming and going,’ says Kingsley. ‘It’s a mystery to me how she managed to get anything done or read anything at all.’
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     Paradoxically, Highsmith’s seemingly unstoppable sexual drive was fired by a sense of incompleteness, the frustrating sense that, during lovemaking, she was forever the observer rather than the active participant. Sex, for her, she said, was very much a hoax, an overrated con-act as false as a Coney Island sideshow. ‘Yet why must I always stand aside and watch myself and others as though we were on stage!’ she wrote.
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     One of her associates at this time was the ‘charmingly naive’
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painter Buffie Johnson, whom Pat met at the beginning of July 1941. ‘She stood out from the crowd, she was very handsome,’ says Buffie of that first meeting.
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Pat asked for Buffie’s telephone number and astounded the painter by telling her she didn’t need to write it down as she had memorised it. ‘To my surprise she did,’ says Buffie, ‘and I was impressed with this trick of memory especially since my own is poor.’
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On the 19th of the month, Buffie, who was friends with New York’s literary set, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Paul and Jane Bowles, took her new friend to a party, which she knew would be a good opportunity for Pat to meet people in the publishing world. ‘Although they were much older, she immediately busied herself among them,’ says Buffie. ‘Emerging from a deep conversation, I suddenly realised that all the other guests had left the party. Without even saying goodnight, Patricia had left with the group of editors.’
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One of those women was Rosalind Constable.

Rosalind was an elegant thirty-four-year-old British-born woman and a researcher on
Fortune
magazine, but to Highsmith, the New York magazine journalist with her ‘blond Dutch boy hair and frosty light eyes’
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could have walked straight out of the pages of Proust. To Highsmith, Rosalind was not so much an individual as a symbol, embodying an idealised love of her own making. ‘I don’t think anything ever did happen between them, but Pat absolutely adored her,’ says Kingsley. ‘She was a true role model for her.’
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     The day after they met, Pat telephoned Rosalind, who invited her over to her apartment on Madison Avenue, where the women drank and played records. At 2 a.m., the younger woman made moves to go, but Rosalind invited her to stay in her roommate’s bedroom, where, ‘We were both kidding around and laughing a lot.’
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Pat was particularly touched that Rosalind – who went on to forge a formidable reputation as the avant-garde specialist and cultural trend-spotter across a number of titles at Time Inc. – kept a piece of string from her dress as a memento of their time together.

     From this briefest of encounters, Highsmith immediately concluded that she was in love with the older, Scandinavian-looking woman, feelings which were strengthened by a period of separation. During a four-week driving tour of America in late July and August, which Highsmith made with her uncle, John, and his wife, Grace, the writer composed an evocative word-picture of Rosalind in her diary. At each of the stops on the cross-country trip – Chicago, Sioux Falls, across the Badlands and the Rockies, to Reno, Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles – Highsmith checked the post office for letters forwarded from Rosalind. Together with her relatives, she drove west on roads that ran straight for forty miles, riding through the night, under a half moon, thinking of ‘happiness and love to come’.
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     The language she chose to describe Rosalind indicated the special status she afforded her new figure of worship, casting her as a perfect statue, a Titan, an angel. She was Beatrice to Highsmith’s Dante, her one source of inspiration, her ‘bit of heaven’.
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Rather than view Rosalind as a sexual object, Highsmith saw the cultured sophisticate – of whom it was later said, ‘Everyone knew that Rosalind Constable was The person to ask about anything ranging from the latest slang to the first stirrings of a literary style or new art movement’
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– in Platonic terms. She would, she confessed, rather worship her from afar and bask in the unsullied purity of their relationship than take pleasure in the sordid madness of the moment. From the beginning of their friendship, Highsmith knew that Rosalind was attached – her partner was the artist and gallery owner Betty Parsons – and it seems her very unobtainability was one of her most attractive qualities. ‘When we love unrequited we are very much conscious that we are in love. That is all we have to think about,’ she wrote. ‘When our love is returned there is, in me, at least, a holding back, almost a fear of perfection.’
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     On her return to New York at the end of August, Highsmith resumed her relationships with a number of individuals of both sexes. One prospective lover wryly observed that Highsmith was rather like the Allied army in that she was ‘ “too thinly deployed on too many fronts” ’.
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But Pat justified her promiscuity by telling herself that it was better to have sex than ‘stagnating’; otherwise she wouldn’t be in any condition for her true love: Rosalind. ‘I shall take the rest holding my nose,’ she wrote, ‘like a dose of castor oil.’
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     Rosalind, for her part, certainly flirted with Pat. She walked through the streets of Greenwich Village holding her hand, called Pat ‘Baby’, before her friends and invited the younger woman to sit on her lap in taxis. But the relationship did not progress as quickly as Pat wished and she turned to fantasy as a way of channelling her desires. Highsmith realised that her obsession with Rosalind could unbalance her: she forced herself to think of her only at certain times of the day, when she was in a room full of people, for example, or in bed. As a result her mental image of Rosalind became a stand-in for the real thing. ‘Unfortunately it has had to do for seeing you many times, and one gets rather good at pretending after a while,’ she wrote.
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Mary and Stanley saw their daughter’s fixation on Rosalind as the cause of her odd behaviour at home. ‘Pat’s mother thought that Rosalind led Pat astray,’ said Kingsley.
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Mary Highsmith wrote to her daughter later, ‘Stanley and I were with you 100% on everything you wanted. That was our pleasure. Then you met Rosalind – you changed. We were no longer your friends . . . Stanley says now that you wanted to make us out ignorant, crude and unthinking so you could show people how far you had sprung from your poor and slimy background.’
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     Highsmith thought that her mother was jealous of her new sophisticated friends such as Rosalind, while Mary just could not understand why her daughter behaved so strangely. In an effort to pull her into line, Mary went so far as to threaten to take Pat out of Barnard. Fundamentally, however, Rosalind was not responsible for what Mary and Stanley thought was Pat’s increasingly peculiar behaviour. ‘Rosalind is supposed to have changed my character,’ she wrote to her stepfather.
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But she didn’t meet the older woman until she was twenty and her personality, Highsmith said, was formed much earlier in life. The real source of her problems was her relationship with her mother.

     Although Highsmith missed her mother when Mary went back to Fort Worth on the death of her father, Daniel Coates, on 28 December 1941 – she symbolised, Pat said, ‘the stability, the femininity, the comfort and warmth of my life’
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– after her return the two women were at each other’s throats again within a matter of days. Pat knew that she had a problem with Mary and that it was a deep-seated one; in her diary she even went so far as to posit the theory that she was in love with her own mother. She still resented Stanley’s presence – she told her mother that they would never be content as long as he was around – and she felt at ease only if she, not her stepfather, was in control. ‘I’m happy if I can be boss,’ she said, ‘lighting her cigarettes and dominating as I did yesterday.’
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Mary thought that her daughter was ‘an intellectual snob’,
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while Pat said her mother was boring and obsessed with celebrity tittle-tattle such as Fred Astaire’s status as a romantic hero and Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash. ‘Mother of course says I’m inhuman, I treat her like a dog, I don’t do a thing around the house – every whit of which is a) jealousy b) inferiority c) retribution for her not getting work and consequent worry.’
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     Highsmith’s mother became anxious about what she saw as her daughter’s difference from other young women and gave her lectures on how she would never succeed or get a job after graduating from Barnard. A husband and babies were the secret of female happiness, Mary added, a comment which disgusted her daughter. Stanley, too, joined in the character attack, informing Pat that she only liked people who complimented her. Highsmith was desperate to leave home – in 1940 the family had moved to a flat at 48 Grove Street, Greenwich Village, before switching to an apartment at 345 East 57th Street in March 1942 – but she felt powerless and trapped. While Mary relied on Christian Science and Dale Carnegie, one of the world’s first self-help gurus with his bestseller,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, her daughter, aware there was the possibility that there was something not quite right about herself, wanted to explore the possibility of serious psychiatric help. ‘I talked of a psychiatrist, & she talked of MB Eddy!’ she wrote in her diary.
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     In June 1942, Mary slapped her daughter across the face after Pat, then aged twenty-one, accused her mother of only being able to have ‘trite conversation’.
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Nine days later Highsmith wrote an outline for a story about a young girl putting her mother to bed. The seemingly dutiful daughter agrees to all the older woman’s demands – including her mother’s wish never to see the daughter’s boyfriend again – and, like the kind soul she appears to be, gets the frail figure ready for the night, pouring out her toilet water and fetching her a nice cup of hot milk. Then the girl takes out a pair of scissors from her pocket and, with a smile, plunges them into her mother’s breast, turning and twisting them with all her might. ‘What do they know,’ she wrote of her mother and Stanley, ‘of my fury, impatience, frustration, ambition, energy, desperation, loves & hates, and of my ecstasies!? Nothing! & they never can.’
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The substitution of fantasy for reality was the central motif of many of the novels Highsmith would write later in her career, but the appearance of the theme can be traced back to her earliest work. In September 1941, she wrote the short story ‘The Heroine’, a chilling tale about a governess, Lucille, who deliberately sets fire to her employers’ house in order to satisfy her perverse desire to save their children, Nicky and Heloise. The girl dreams about guarding the children from an intruder, rescuing her charges from a flood or saving Nicky and Heloise from an earthquake. In such a scenario, she imagines, she would be able to show her bravery and devotion by dashing back into the wreckage to rescue not only the children but their toys too. As the story progresses, Lucille becomes more and more divorced from reality until she eventually surmises that if she were to start a fire herself, then she would really be able to prove how much she cared. ‘She would let the flames leap tall, even to the nursery window, before she rushed in, so that the danger might be at its highest.’
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Smiling, she takes a tank of petrol from the garage, empties its contents around the house, sets it alight and then stands back to watch the flames. The story ends with the tank exploding, as she walks towards her employers’ home to do her duty. Throughout ‘The Heroine’, Lucille battles with the memory of her late mother’s insanity, conscious that she has inherited her madness. As she stands in front of a mirror, her eyes stretching ever wider, she desperately tries to control the mania which is erupting inside her, until it eventually possesses her.