The Boy Who Followed Ripley (30 page)
“And you went away the same evening—just after the boy died?” she asked.
“Yes. I didn’t see what good I could do by staying longer. The funeral—it might have been two days away.” Might be today, Tuesday, Tom thought.
“I don’t think you could face the funeral,” Heloise said. “You were very fond of the boy—weren’t you? I know.”
“Yes,” said Tom. He could look at Heloise steadily now. It had been strange to try to steer a young life like that, as he had tried—and to have failed. Maybe one day he could admit that to Heloise. But on the other hand, he couldn’t, because he was never going to tell her that the boy pushed his father over the cliff, and that was the whole explanation of the boy’s suicide, or at least it was more important than Teresa, Tom felt.
“Did you meet Teresa?” Heloise asked. She had already asked for a full description of Lily Pierson, the former actress who had married such wealth and Tom had done his best there, including a description of the attentive Tal Stevens, whom Tom suspected she would marry.
“No, no, I didn’t meet Teresa. I think she was in New York.” And Tom doubted that Teresa would even come to Frank’s funeral, and did that matter, either? Teresa to Frank had been an idea, intangible almost, and so she would remain, as Frank had written, “forever.”
Tom went upstairs after lunch to look at his post, and to unpack. Another letter from Jeff Constant of the Buckmaster Gallery, London, and at a glance Tom saw that all was well. The news was that the Derwatt Accademia in Perugia had had a change of managership to two artistically inclined young men from London (Jeff supplied their names), and they had the idea of acquiring a nearby palazzo which could be converted into a hotel for the art students. Did Tom like the idea? Did he possibly know the palazzo to southwest of the art school? The new London boys were going to send a photo next post. Jeff wrote:
This means expansion, which sounds all to the good, don’t you think, Tom? Unless you have some inside information about Italian internal conditions that might make the purchase inadvisable just now.
Tom had no inside information. Did Jeff think him a genius? Yes. Tom knew he would agree to the purchase idea. Expansion, yes, as to hotels. The art school made most of its money from the hotel. The real Derwatt would cringe with shame.
He pulled off his sweater, strolled into his blue and white bathroom, and threw the sweater behind him onto a chair. He fancied he heard the carpenter ants shut up at his step, or had he heard the ants in the first place? He put his ear to the wooden shelf side. No! He had heard them, and they hadn’t shut up. There was the faintest whir, which augmented even as he listened. At it still, the little zealots! On a folded pajama top on one shelf, Tom saw a miniature pyramid of fine reddish-tan dust which had fallen from excavations above. What were they building in there? Beds for themselves, egg repositories? Had these little carpenters put their wits together and constructed maybe a tiny bookcase in there, composed of spit and sawdust, a little monument to their know-how, their will to live? Tom had to laugh out loud. Was he going mad himself?
From the corner of his suitcase, Tom took the Berlin bear, fluffed its fur out gently, and set it at the back of his desk against a couple of dictionaries. The little bear was made to sit, its legs didn’t bend for it to stand up. Its bright eyes looked at Tom with the same innocent gaiety as in Berlin, and Tom smiled back at it, thinking of the “3 Würfe 1 Mark” which had won it. “You will have a good home for the rest of your life,” Tom said to the bear.
He would take a shower, flop on the bed, and look at the rest of his letters, he thought. Try to get back to normal in time, twenty to three now, French time. Frank would be lowered into a grave today, Tom felt sure, and he didn’t care to figure out just when it might be, because for Frank time had ceased to matter.
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, as has the posthumous publication of
The Selected Stories
and
Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories
, both of which received widespread acclaim when they were published by W. W. Norton & Company.
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.
Praise for Patricia Highsmith
and the
Ripley
novels
“Tom Ripley is one of the most interesting characters of world literature.”
—Anthony Minghella
“Mesmerizing . . . a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“The brilliance of Highsmith’s conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist—thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby.”
—Frank Rich,
New York Times Magazine
“The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced. . . . This young, charismatic American protagonist is, it turns out, a murderer, a gentleman of calm amorality. It’s an unnerving characterization, and time and again Highsmith pulls it off, using all the singular tools of her trade.”
—Mark Harris,
Entertainment Weekly
“Highsmith’s subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley’s cold logic.”
—
Daily Telegraph
(UK)
“[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero’s point of view.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
“[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any mystery writer has ever created.”
—
Newsday
“Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”
—Joyce Carol Oates,
New York Review of Books
“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”
—
Time
“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
Copyright © 1980 by Patricia Highsmith
Copyright © 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
First published as a Norton edition 2008
Published in Great Britain by Heinemann, London, in 1980
Published in the United States by Lippincott & Crowell, Publishers,
New York, in 1980
Lyrics from Lou Reed’s “Make Up” and “Satellite of Love”
reprinted with the kind permission of the Esther Creative Group.
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
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W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Production manager: Devon Zahn
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–1995.
The boy who followed Ripley / Patricia Highsmith.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-33211-7 (pbk.)
1. Ripley, Tom (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Serial murderers—Fiction. 3. Psychopaths—Fiction.
4. Criminals—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.I366B69 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008005021
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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