The Talented Miss Highsmith (15 page)

At the age of sixty-six, Mary Highsmith was still complaining that she hadn't been given roller skates as a child when all her brothers got them, and that her mother Willie Mae's reproving “look” left her “sweating blood.”
³⁹
Pat always had Willie Mae to compare her mother to, and her mother always came up short. And it is likely that Willie Mae's partiality for boys laid the foundation for Pat's own later preference for the “active and positive” qualities of men instead of for the “negative and passive” gender with which she so inconveniently continued to fall in love. And so Pat's attentions and affections continued to be split by the circumstances of her birth—circumstances which tightened the passionate lines of tension between mother and daughter and blurred the boundaries between love and hate.

In this house of trespassed borders and reordered relations one clear principle flew like a flag: Willie Mae Stewart Coates was the head of the family.

Part 3

Patsy Plangman was three and a half years old in 1924 when she met Stanley Highsmith. She took one look at her mild-mannered stepfather-to-be and turned him into her first criminal: the man who robbed her of language. As creative in her aversions as she was in her attractions, the infant Pat imagined Stanley to be a kind of fairy-tale ogre (she was holding a book of fairy tales when she met him) pointing “a long, crooked, hairy forefinger” at her and instantly stealing away her pleasure.

Stanley, to be sure, had come to take Pat's mother away—“Marriage,” says a character in one of the stories Pat started to write as a teenager, “is a thief in the night”
¹
—and Pat's family life was already confusingly involved with substitutions, subtractions, and adoptions. Her birth father was defined only by his absence; her grandmother was more like her mother; her mother was like an adored older sister; and her live-in male cousin, orphaned and taken in by her grandmother, was her “brother Dan.” And Pat, before the age of six (or so she wrote to Stanley Highsmith in one of three novella-length letters she attacked him with during May and June of 1970), was already entertaining unconventional feelings about her gender and her sexuality. Gender and sexuality must have seemed to the little girl to be as movable and changeable as all the other counters in her life.

In his photographs, Stanley Highsmith resembles Pat's biological father, Jay B Plangman. Like her daughter, Mary Highsmith was attracted to “types”: both her husbands had dark hair and a mustache, both wore glasses, and both were commercial illustrators. Dan Walton Coates, whose assessing Coates eye had been sharpened by drawing lessons given to him by both his aunt Mary and his cousin Pat, saw at least one difference between Mary's two husbands. Dan thought Stanley was a good fellow, but he felt there was definitely something “fishy” about Jay B Plangman.

“He was a dark, swarthy-looking kind of fellow, very quiet when he was around us. Instinctively I never liked him, and he had a ‘don't trust me' look about him and he had a bit of an evil look about him. And I have nothing in the way of experience with him that would make me feel that way, but that's the way I felt about him.”
²

In her whole diary and cahier life, the secret written life she tried to keep for herself while alive but intended, somewhat ambivalently, for publication after death, Pat was to make only four direct notes about her biological father, Jay B Plangman. Three of these notes belie the vigorous defenses of Jay B she always mounted in letters to her mother and stepfather. Two of her references to Jay B were made on a single trip to Fort Worth in 1938.

At seventeen, in February of 1938, after completing the last term of her senior year at Julia Richman High School in New York City, Pat decided to visit her grandmother Willie Mae in Fort Worth, in the house on West Daggett Avenue she still called “home.” She booked a steamer ticket from New York to the port of Galveston, Texas, writing in her journal that she had “the greatest expectations of this trip.” She left, as usual, a tangle of flirtations with her female classmates behind her (“I like M. Wolf—I like anyone with a brain…. I am very sorry I must leave B[abs] B[aer] and J[udy] T[uvim],” etc., etc.) along with the obsessive habit of frequently recording her own scanty weight. At five feet six and a half inches, Pat weighed as little as 103 pounds and never more than 110. Years later, in 1969, she cut out from the London
Sunday Times
(and pasted in the back of her Cahier 30) an article about “Slimming Sickness” describing how certain “types” of young girls—those who “tend to be obsessional, meticulous and compulsive”—can't stop dieting. The article named the condition as “anorexia nervosa,” and Pat wrote across it: “I had all these symptoms aged 15–19.” “These symptoms” included “the presence of downy hair over normally hairless parts of the body,” “cold blue extremities,” and “low basal metabolic rate.”
³
Pat, who always also suffered from (female) hormone deficiencies, had another of anorexia nervosa's symptoms, too: dysmenorrhea—very infrequent menses until her periods ceased. There were whole years during which she didn't menstruate more than two or three times in twelve months.

Pat took with her on this boat trip the copy of Adolf Hitler's
Mein Kampf
that she'd bought in New York in early January, as well as
Sir Roger de Coverley,
a book of essays taken from the eighteenth-century journal
The Spectator,
edited by Addison and Steele. She was intent on justifying her high school English teacher's remark that she had “the best vocabulary in the class.”
⁴
Ambitious as always, she determined that her “studies must not go up in smoke” on board, and read throughout the voyage.
⁵
She watched the lights of Miami from the deck, viewed a bad movie in the theater, and met Ernst Hauser, a German traveller and journalist. Later, Hauser became a friend Pat would share with the writer Mary McCarthy; now, he was just a “nuisance.”

After the boat docked in Galveston, Pat made the journey to Fort Worth, where she remarked censoriously that her grandmother's house, with “brother Dan's” wife Florine and baby (Dan Walton) visiting, was “looking more neglected.” She began her furious habits of reading again—Proust, Hitler, Addison and Steele—and decided that she “must go deeper into Xian [Christian] Science.” And, on her third day in Fort Worth, she got in touch with her father, “J.B.” “My father will never simply sit & talk,” she noted disappointedly of their meeting. In March, she travelled the thirty miles to Dallas, where she was “drink[ing] secretly from excitement” and judging that her penmanship was developing “for the first time.” (It didn't develop much.)

Sometime later in March, after a “happy day, quite alone” in Fort Worth, Pat made a note: “B. shows me pornographic pictures (to my mingled disgust & fascination & shame for him).”
⁶
Pat set this incident down in a list of other occurrences—a long-awaited letter from a high school crush, a decision to go to Barnard “au lieu de N.Y.U.,” and the feeling that this was an “Ecstatic day!”—and gave it no more weight than she gave to anything else that was happening to her.
⁷
But she wrote a very ambivalent
B,
a
B
that might have something like a
J
attached to it. In which case, the person who showed her the pornographic pictures would have been her father, J. B. Plangman.

Or maybe not. Maybe her ambivalent
B
stood for the “completely dissolute” young man she'd also met during this time in Texas. It was a brief meeting when “I was 17” and he was “a very spoiled boy who was very much like Bruno [the psychopath in
Strangers on a Train
]…. He was an adopted boy in a wealthy family and completely worthless, and he was the sort of genesis of Bruno.”
⁸
One of the geneses of Bruno, anyway, and he made an indelible impression on Pat.

Burying crucial information such as who showed her the “pornographic pictures”—or conveying this information ambiguously—was a technique Pat was later to use in her novels. Her employment of long lists of lightly described objects, equalized or neutralized by
being
in lists and carried forward across the pages by connective participles, leads (as did this entry in her cahier) to the kind of accumulation of detail which suspends or obliterates the reader's ability to compare the importance of one detail with any other. In a list, even in a numbered list, there tends to be no foreground and no background. Everything is flat and judgment is suspended.

But in 1970, when she was barraging her bewildered stepfather, Stanley, with her raging, heartbroken, historical reasons for cutting off her relations with Mother Mary (and mounting a strong defense of her biological father as a secondary assault), Pat added to one letter a disturbing incident she'd left out of the sparse notes she made on her father at seventeen. It was, apparently, part of the “real” content of the relations between Pat and Jay B on that visit to Fort Worth in 1938, and it shows just how much Pat could exclude from her diaries when she wanted to:

“And now to my father. There were some lingering kisses when I was seventeen in Texas, not exactly paternal. This is all I meant. I do not want to make a big thing out of it. The word incestuous is a strong one.”
⁹

At thirty, staying in the German countryside and stimulated by reading “Theodor Reik's psychoanalytic biography,” Pat made a note to herself:

And that's as far as Patricia Highsmith—painfully alert observer of acutely abnormal psychological states—ever got in assessing what was “buried” under her “total neutrality of attitude” towards her biological father, Jay Bernard Plangman. With Stanley Highsmith, however, all too available and in the same living quarters, her critical analyses never stopped.

Dan Walton Coates thought that Stanley was “good to Pat” but that he “was a very easily dominated man and Mary was THE dominator.”
¹¹

Like Jay B and Mary, Stanley earned his living as a commercial artist. He was more advanced in his profession than Pat ever cared to admit. In a radio interview in 1987 in New York, Pat, dripping scorn, indicated that Stanley did drawings for the “yellow pages,” the telephone book. But Stanley worked longest for Bell Laboratories making “very complicated drawings, exploded views of helicopters, mechanical-type drawings.”
¹²
And because he didn't like bossing people around—Pat said dismissively that he lacked “push”—he refused an important managerial position at Bell Helicopter a few years before his retirement.
¹³
Mary married him on 14 June 1924, and Pat's new stepfather, brought up by his mother and five years younger than Mary, came into the Coates family with a crippling secret of his own: he was illegitimate and ashamed of it.

Pat's first memory of Stanley was that of being cheated. She allowed this memory to substitute for the real resentment (being cheated of her mother) underlying all her feelings for Stanley.

The precociously alert, preschool Patsy took immediate offense; the adult artist Pat never forgot the insult. She wrote her painful, feeling description of meeting Stanley Highsmith seventeen years after that meeting took place, when she was twenty-one years old and keenly sensing the confinements of her family. During the infrequent separations that characterized her mother's marriage to Stanley (Stanley moved out twice for brief periods, once when Pat was sixteen and once when she was nineteen),
¹⁵
Pat argued as hard as she could that Stanley was draining Mary's creativity and that Mary should leave him. Mary agreed with Pat, but kept the marriage together.

Later, after Stanley died, when Mary Highsmith was asked by her grandnephew Don what she'd done with Stanley's ashes, she replied puckishly: “I flushed them,” and refused to add another word. Mary also said she wanted her own ashes scattered from a plane while it played a recording of “Hey Look Me Over” from a loudspeaker.
¹⁶

Whether or not she deposited her second husband's remains in her toilet bowl and pulled the chain, Mary gave Stanley a rather expensive funeral when he died of an aneurysm brought on by treatment for Parkinson's disease in 1970. It was one more thing for Mary and Pat to quarrel about. That, and the fact that Pat wanted to “correct” Stanley's obituary, which listed her as his “daughter” even though he'd adopted her at her own suggestion. “I feel,” Mary wrote to Pat and not for the first time, “that anyone who reads your correction will think you are sick.”
¹⁷

But it was when Mary and Stanley, having put together “six hundred dollars,”
¹⁸
travelled back from New York (where they'd gone to earn the money) to pluck the six-year-old Pat from Fort Worth and her grandmother Willie Mae's watchful care that Pat began consciously to have “evil thoughts” about the “murder of my step-father.” Pat fixed her murderous fantasies as starting “when I was eight or less.”
¹⁹
Thirty years later, she ascribed her unusual self-possession—her classmates at Barnard College noticed it, labelling her “Pat the ultra” in their college yearbook—to her efforts at repressing a strong urge to murder her stepfather.