People Who Knock on the Door (34 page)

Arthur didn’t give a damn where she was. His mother sounded shaky. He knew that his mother had invited the Griffins for dinner, and he assumed they had left now. “Well, Mom, don’t
you
worry.—Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m all right,” said his mother promptly.

“Okay, stay that way.—I won’t be late tonight, Mom.”

As Arthur walked back to the booth, he noticed Roxanne at the table far to his left, laughing giddily as usual, with a big group. He’d heard that Roxanne had got married and left town. Maybe a false rumor. Arthur realized that he was glancing around for faces he might know or who might know him. He saw at least two, acquaintances from C.U., who were paying him no mind. He sat down again next to Maggie.

“Anything wrong?” Maggie asked.

“No, no.” Arthur had an impulse to blurt it out. Everyone would know tomorrow or the next day, anyway. Gus and Veronica were looking at him. “Well, that was my Mom. She said Irene’s had a baby girl.”

“Well, well,” said Gus. “I think I’ll have another beer.”

“The one at the diner,” Veronica said calmly.

“Yes.” Arthur supposed that Gus had told Veronica that Alderman Senior was suspected of having sired the child. Or had Gus?
I suppose I have a half-sister now,
Arthur thought of saying, but that was going too far; that was too awful.

Maggie patted Arthur’s hand, which rested on the bench seat between them. Arthur had clenched his fist, but he opened it and took Maggie’s hand, and with his other hand rubbed his eyes, then reached for what was left of his beer. The baby was going to live. It hadn’t been born dead. And what would its blood type be? Arthur reminded himself that he had decided not to care. He realized that he did care. He glanced at Maggie and swallowed his beer as if it were a lump of something. “What the hell?” Arthur said, addressing all three.

Maybe he wasn’t heard across the table in all the noise.

“
State
gonna take care of that kid?” Gus almost shouted the question.

“The
State
? I really dunno. The church a little bit—I heard.” Arthur managed a weak laugh.

Their beers finished and more on the way, they all got up to dance. Old Gus looked happy this evening, more sure of himself. Gus wasn’t thinking about Irene’s bastard. Dancing with Maggie, Arthur could forget everything except her and the music, the drums, the
tings
of the cymbals. They had a life together, for now at least. The rest of the world was something apart, distant even, when he was with Maggie.

33

A
rthur was home by just after 1 a.m. His mother was in the kitchen, washing up some pots at the sink.

“Still at it, Mom? Can’t I finish those for you?”

“I’m only late because I was watching a film on TV.” His mother seemed tense and did not look at Arthur.

He wanted a final beer and reached into the fridge. He had just said to Maggie, “I wish I could spend the night with you, upstairs in that narrow bed,” and he had thought it might be possible, if he had left early in the morning. It would have been possible, Arthur knew, but for Betty’s presence in the house, though Maggie didn’t say so. He was sure that one of these evenings Maggie would come out with, “My mother won’t be back till one in the morning, I know,” and consequently Arthur felt quite cheerful at that moment. And with a pleasant future dancing in his head, he was supposed to concentrate on Irene lying in some hospital bed with a tiny infant girl by her side, because his mother was thinking of that.

“Well, did—” Arthur began. “Did the Griffins say anything about Irene?”

“They didn’t say a word,” his mother replied over her shoulder. “Almost ominous. Ha!” She turned and looked at him.

“Maybe they don’t know. What’s so fascinating about Irene’s offspring? Don’t take it so seriously, Mom.”

His mother dried her hands on a paper towel.

Arthur pressed the cold beer can against his forehead and tried to continue. “Bob Cole went to the hospital?”

“Yes, because Irene wanted him to come. He said the baby had a little blond hair.”

So would a child of his father’s, Arthur realized with disgust and annoyance. He and his brother had had “a little blond hair” when they had been born, Arthur had heard. “And why did he take the trouble to mention that?”

“Oh—Bob talks on and on.—He said Irene wanted me to come and see the baby.”

“Oh, f’Chris’ sake!” Arthur felt like flinging his beer can at the sink, but he set it atop the fridge and took his mother’s hands in his, something he had never done before. “Mom, you’ve got to let it roll off you. Ignore it!—If you don’t talk to people you know—and if they don’t ask you questions—or if they do, just brush it off! Let Irene handle it. And give her the brush-off, too. If—” His mother was listening, looking straight at him with rather sad blue eyes, and Arthur suddenly and shyly released her hands. “Mom, if I could only give you some of what
I
feel tonight. Everything’s going so well! I’m going away in September, and Maggie—Everything’s all right there, I’m sure. I’d like you to be—” Happy or happier, he wanted to say, but things were not going well for Robbie, and Robbie was part of his mother’s life, too. His mother couldn’t turn loose of Robbie as easily as she might wash her hands of Irene. “I had an idea tonight.”

“What?”

“We should move to another town. Maybe some place in New Jersey. Pennsylvania, maybe. Change your life, Mom! Sell the house here—Mom, have you considered getting married again?”

“Married again? No, Arthur, why?”

“Well, why not? Companionship. And you’re still pretty!”

“Any prospects in mind for me?” His mother laughed as if the idea were an absurdity.

“No, because I haven’t given it much thought. In this boring town?—Anybody but the Reverend Cole, Mom! Holy cow!” Arthur rocked back, laughing. Bob Cole was a bachelor and without the least sign, which Arthur had looked for, of being gay. Arthur suspected him of playing the field carefully with girls some distance from Chalmerston.

“Arthur, I think you’re a little drunk.”

“I think you’re a little right. But—I’ll say the same thing tomorrow. It’s a good idea if we move. If we sold this house—”

“And Robbie?”

Arthur looked into his mother’s eyes again. “Robbie’s not coming back, Mom. Not here—to this house. I’d bet my life on that. He doesn’t want to.” And there was the study in this house, reminding his mother that his father had died there.

“This house is sad, Mom.”

His mother bent her head. “Ye-es, I know.”

Arthur kissed his mother’s cheek. “Go to bed, Mom. But think about what I said. Sleep on it.”

A
RTHUR’S FIRST THOUGHT ON AWAKENING
the next morning was
moving
. Settling his mother in another town, maybe in northern Pennsylvania, as he had said last night. The East Coast was more expensive than the area where they lived now, but the next house need not be as big as this, perhaps. He could look for a house in early September, in the weeks before Columbia classes began. He could drive his car east, as he had not thought of doing before, sell it finally for a couple of peanuts in New York or in some small town, since a car in New York was useless and a drain. Then his mother could keep her own car and find a secretarial job in the town where the new house would be, if she wanted or needed to take a job. Why was that such an impossible dream?

The sunlight came through the window on Arthur’s left, beautiful, cool and warm at the same time on the white sheet that covered him. It was almost 8. “Ah-h,” Arthur said, because the world seemed good at that moment.

His next thought was not so pleasant: Irene and her offspring. He sat up on the edge of his bed. A birth announcement might be in the
Chalmerston Herald
today, and if not, certainly tomorrow, because all births and deaths got at least a two-line mention. Miss Irene Langley standing by itself after “born to” would make the announcement look as if she’d had the child by some kind of parthenogenesis! She would probably have given the little thing a name already.

His mother tapped on the door. “Coffee is served!”

“Ah, most welcome! And good morning, madame,” said Arthur holding the door. “Did you think about what I was saying last night?”

“Yes. And I think it’s a good idea. I’ll ask Mama what she thinks.” His mother looked at him, and her eyes seemed already happier, younger, merely with the thought.

“Leave it to me. I’ll scout around. East Coast. Can’t think now till I’ve had my coffee, you know.” Arthur picked up the mug and sipped.

Arthur called Maggie from Shoe Repair just after noon, as he had promised to do, and told her about his idea of his mother moving to another town in the East. Maggie said she thought it was a
very
good idea, because the present house “must be so sad for her.” In Maggie’s voice he heard a sympathy that struck deep. Maggie said there were some brochures on real estate in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in her house, six months old but maybe still useful, because her parents had been thinking last winter of moving to the East Coast. Arthur made a date with her to come to her house that evening after dinner.

Maggie gave him the pamphlets and brochures, which had a lot of photographs of houses that were not out of his and his mother’s price range. Arthur told Tom Robertson of his intention. This meant he would work only the first week in September in the shop, not the first two weeks. Tom said he was sorry—mainly at the idea of Arthur’s moving out of Chalmerston—but he gave Arthur his blessing. He used the word blessing, and Arthur recollected that Tom was one of the few who knew him and who did not seem to have heard of Irene Langley’s connection with his father.

One day in early September, just before Arthur was to head east in his car, his mother said:

“I saw Irene pushing a baby carriage this morning on Main Street. I must say, it was that fat sister who caught my eye. I thought it was a tent swaying from side to side in the breeze!” His mother paused to laugh. “Then I blinked and I recognized Louise in a wide blue dress, ambling along eating an ice-cream cone. And beside her, Irene—pushing a baby carriage.”

Arthur gave a one-sided smile. “Did you have a look at the infant?”

“Well, I confess I did. At the risk of being noticed by Irene and talked to, but she was walking along as if in a trance—and her sister was concentrating on her ice cream. I was behind them, so I walked ahead and turned back. The baby looked asleep. I didn’t see any blond hair, now that I think of it. I’ll just have to take Bob Cole’s word for that.”

The damned thing existed! His mother had seen it. His half-sister. Arthur realized he had forgotten to look for any birth announcement in the
Herald
. “Well, if Madame Irene is walking around already, I suppose she can go back to work soon. Maybe she’s already back at the Silver Arrow.”

“Yes, why not? The sister could look after the baby.”

Arthur noticed that his mother looked a bit nervous. That would pass in a few minutes. He was glad his mother had actually
seen
the thing, because it made the infant less of a ghost, made it flesh and blood, fated to die one day, just like the rest of humanity. “Speaking of Irene going back to work—wouldn’t it be funny if she went back to her old profession—you know—streetwalking.”

His mother’s shoulders bent with a laugh. “Oh, Arthur!”

“Without the church to guide her,” Arthur went on, and at once thought, without his father to guide her. The Reverend Cole was supposed to be doing the job now. Would he? Could he? Arthur tried to be serious. “There really is more money in streetwalking than in the Silver Arrow,” he said in a solemn voice.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published
The Price of Salt
in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States.

The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

P
RAISE FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH

“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

—
The New Yorker

“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”—
Newsday

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

—Robert Towers,
New York Review of Books

“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

—
Time

“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”

—Julian Symons,
New York Times Book Review

“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

—Graham Greene

“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”

—
Boston Globe

“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

—
The Sunday Times
(London)

“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”

—
Newsday

“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”

—
Boston Phoenix