Beautiful Shadow (62 page)

     The rest of the year she felt dogged by health and domestic problems – firstly with toothache, which resulted in the extraction of more or less all her lower teeth, carried out by dentists in London, and then an attack of flu. In November, her Volkswagen was stolen from Montereau railway station and then, in December, on returning from a trip to London, where she had had yet another tooth out, she discovered that her beloved seven-year-old Siamese cat, Sammy, had died, finding her ‘not yet stiff with death’.
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Highsmith was ‘paralysed’ by shock and gripped by a ‘grief that cannot be shared by well-meaning friends’.
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She had no idea what had killed her, but she suspected that neighbours had poisoned the animal. As she had no proof of this, her brain, she said, whirled around in a turmoil of unhappiness.

     Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams’ play,
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that ‘the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person.’
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     As she gazed at the actress’s face in the magazine, Highsmith surmised that her new object of adoration was intense, neurotic and expressed a great deal of sexual energy, a combination she found irresistible. ‘I have not seen such a bewitching face since I fell in love with Lynn Roth . . .’ she wrote to Alex at one o’clock in the morning on 14 November. ‘She probably is married with two children. That’s my fate.’
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The same night, unable to sleep, she wrote a poem to the actress, in which she said, ‘It’s funny to pledge all my energy/To you. It’s laughter and anguish. Take me. Because I will completely take you.’
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     Barbara Roett remembers how Highsmith kept a newspaper clipping about Anne Meacham in her wallet for years. ‘Then, one day, she was dining with friends and they mentioned this particular actress in conversation,’ she says. ‘Pat immediately said, “Oh, but she is the love of my life!” Her friends told her that she lived upstairs, they knew her very well, and at this point Pat became pale with horror because she would rather flee than meet her.’
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     As the year drew to a close, Highsmith found herself disenchanted with the country she had initially thought of as a new-found land teeming with possibilities. Now she thought the people were rude, dishonest and untrustworthy; she loathed the noisy behaviour of her Portuguese neighbours – a sound which she likened to the squeal made by pigs after having boiling water thrown over them – and the death of Sammy was, she said, the final blow. She needed, she decided, a break. ‘I have learned a lot in France,’ she wrote to Alex, ‘and I shall never be quite the same again.’
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Prompted by an invitation to stay with Rosalind Constable in Santa Fe and flirting with the idea of moving back to America to live, Highsmith flew to New York in the first few days of February 1970. In Manhattan, she stayed at the $14-a-night Chelsea Hotel, on West 23rd Street, and after three weeks in New York, she travelled down to Fort Worth, where she saw her family at their house on Martha Lane. The ten-day visit was a disaster, as all the tensions that had been repressed over the last few decades boiled to the surface. Mary blamed her daughter for what she saw as her particularly cruel ‘technique of torture’,
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while Highsmith believed the problem was caused by her seventy-four-year-old mother’s manic depression. Pat, busy trying to finish off the corrections to
Ripley Under Ground
, was already feeling anxious that she wouldn’t be able to meet her deadline of 31 March. The noise of the television interrupted her thoughts and she felt uncomfortable working in what she saw as such a disordered environment. Then her parents organised an informal buffet to celebrate their daughter’s visit. During the party, the local preacher asked her whether it was true she had written a book under another name. ‘Who told you that?’ Highsmith asked, appalled that anyone could know about
The Price of Salt
. ‘Your mother,’ replied the preacher.

     Highsmith was furious. When
The Price of Salt
was published in 1952, she had decided not to give her mother a copy of the novel, but Mary discovered her daughter’s secret when she stayed in Highsmith’s East 56th Street flat in 1956. ‘Would it not occur to any idiot that if a person writes a book under another name, that person (the writer) wishes to keep the fact secret from the public?’ Highsmith wrote to her stepfather, Stanley, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
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     Mary Highsmith, upset by her daughter’s ‘inhuman treatment’
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of her, asked her friends what they thought what was wrong with her, receiving a range of replies including one which accused the writer of being jealous of her mother. ‘My doctors say if you had stayed 3 more days I would be dead . . .’ Mary wrote to her daughter. ‘All your schooling, college, Europe and the group of intelligensia [
sic
] friends, rubbed off no culture on you . . . You once wrote, “To visit your family is hell”. Well, if it isn’t you are going to see it gets that way . . . Don’t feel bad if I don’t write – I wish you well. I’ve tried with all I have and failed.’
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     Reeling from the emotional violence of Fort Worth, Highsmith was relieved to join Rosalind Constable in Santa Fe at the beginning of March. The two friends had initially planned to stay in Santa Fe for two months and drive to Los Angeles and then back to New York in Rosalind’s Karmann Ghia, but the older woman decided to sell the car. They stayed at the La Posada Inn – ‘Santa Fe’s Motor Hotel’ – each taking a large suite, complete with kitchen, for $9 a day, and Highsmith went to dinner with Mary Louise Aswell and Agnes Sims. The peacefulness of Santa Fe came as a blessing and she soon finished her revisions of the second Ripley book.

     Santa Fe was one of the towns in which Highsmith thought she might settle, but obviously during her time there she changed her mind. ‘My idea of coming back to America is to push myself (professionally, ugh) for the next few years,’ she wrote to Ronald Blythe from Santa Fe. ‘Maybe it is not a bad idea, as I have been entirely too much of a recluse for the past nine years.’
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     In mid-March, she flew back to New York, from where she travelled on to New Hope, to see Daisy, and Rockland County, another possible venue for her new home. At the end of the month she visited Sneden’s Landing, Palisades – yet another potential relocation venue – and saw that the barn she had once rented had burnt down two years before. Her fantasies about moving to America came to nothing, however, and once back in France, where she arrived in April, she decided to move to Moncourt, eighteen kilometres from Montmachoux, into a house next door to her journalist friends, Mary and Desmond Ryan.

     Before she left New York, while staying at a hotel in Washington Square North, Highsmith had the idea for a story told from the perspective of a cockroach, a tale which was eventually published as ‘Notes from a Respectable Cockroach’, in the 1975 collection
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
. ‘The roaches were, in their fashion, a good deal more decent than the clientele,’ Highsmith wrote of her brief stay in the rundown hotel.
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Manhattan, she observed, was depressingly illuminating – ‘an eye-opener – on the future, perhaps’
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– and the High School system a shambles. ‘A knowledge of midwifery is now compulsory for all New York high school teachers,’ she wrote to Koestler.
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The rest of 1970 was overshadowed by increasingly vicious letters from her mother, who not only criticised her daughter but attacked her real father, Jay B, to whom Highsmith would dedicate
A Dog’s Ransom
. In June, Highsmith became so sick of her mother’s epistolary assaults that she wrote to Stanley to tell Mary not to write any more. If she did, Highsmith would not even bother to open them; instead she would re-direct them, slowmail. Her stepfather, in a letter sent to Highsmith in August, rigorously defended his wife, but Pat could not understand why he failed to recognise Mary’s real character, ‘her buck-passing, evasions, arrogance, stupidity’.
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Not only this, but Mary also refused to acknowledge that she had played any part in determining her daughter’s sexuality. ‘She refuses any bit of blame or responsibility for my character, or to put it bluntly queerness,’ she wrote to Alex. ‘Not that I blame her. We all become reconciled to being queer and prefer life that way. But she refuses to see that her very muddled married life had anything to do with it. Need I say, she thinks herself an angel, and me a destructive old bitch.’
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     The subsequent series of letters written between Pat and Stanley in August and September can be read as key documents which articulate, in an autobiographical framework, themes Highsmith explored in her fiction. Highsmith herself realised the importance of these letters; in fact, later she would tell Kingsley that the fifteen-page potted psychological self-portrait was, ‘good for biographer, I assure you’,
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while in 1974, one of the author’s friends, Mary Sullivan, told her that she should use the testimony as raw material for her try at the great American novel.

     On 23 August, Stanley wrote to his stepdaughter with a heavy heart, ‘How I’ve hoped it would not come that I was to be faced with answering your last written pages,’ he said.
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First of all, he felt he had to address the question of his stepdaughter’s assumption that she would inherit her grandmother’s house at 603 West Daggett Avenue, Fort Worth. The house, he explained, was left to Mary and her brother, Claude; there was never any suggestion that she would share in the $30,000 resulting from its sale. It was, said Stanley, difficult for him to believe how Pat had behaved on her trip to Fort Worth earlier in the year. He was amazed at her cruelty. ‘When you had gone and I saw what you had done to her [Mary] I regretted so very much that I didn’t step in and stop it,’ he wrote. ‘You would have had more respect for me and maybe for yourself. Mary was always ready to meet you with love and friendliness and so was I. You talked to her in the most disrespectful manner and constantly and most of it with untruthful accusations. She made the mistake of fighting back and denying them when what she should have done was to turn and leave the room. Once she did just that then you started wrecking the kitchen. Throwing a big container of milk all over the place and breaking the louvered door, like a mad woman.’
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     After a few days in her daughter’s presence, Mary became so nervous that after each meal she would vomit, ‘not from illness but from your treatment’.
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Stanley believed what lay behind his stepdaughter’s behaviour was ‘liquor’, since he knew that, at other times, she was capable of showing love and affection. However, he also recalled the time when Mary visited her daughter at her apartment on East 56th Street in New York, picking up French pastries from the bakery, thinking that they could have a nice chat, only to be met by Pat’s iciness. ‘There would be no satisfactory contact and she’d spend the time in the kitchen,’ he wrote, ‘cleaning and scrubbing the bath, or ironing until time to go.’
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     Mary had recently finished reading a copy of Marc Brandel’s autobiographical novel,
The Choice
, in which his relationship with Highsmith was described, and she concluded that it was her daughter’s intention to destroy him. ‘She [Mary] thinks he really loved you with a tenderness that you do not possess or feel for him,’ wrote Stanley. He concluded that his stepdaughter’s letters to his wife were peppered with lies. ‘There’s no end to your injustice and wasted years and you won’t have her always,’ he said.
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     As soon as she received his letter, Highsmith sat down to respond, touching upon her rejection by her mother when she was twelve; the confusion over her surname; her mother’s disgust at what she saw as her daughter’s lesbianism; her relationship with Marc Brandel and the analysis she underwent so she could transform herself into a heterosexual. At the end of this extended
cri de coeur
to Stanley, written on 29 August and 1 September, she concluded, ‘I am not playing the martyr. In fact, I often wonder what my mother thinks is so wrong with me. I have not been in prison, I do not take drugs, I have had no car accidents, no broken marriages, no illegitimate children, I earn a good living – I am even in Who’s Who.’
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