Authors: Patricia Highsmith
Edith had left her diary among the last things to pack, mainly because she didn’t know where to put it. In a crate among the blankets and sheets? In one of her own suitcases? Now it lay naked, thick and dark brown, on an otherwise clear coffee table in the living room. The moving men weren’t coming till tomorrow morning. The walls were stripped of pictures, the book-cases of books, and the rugs had been rolled up. Edith had been sweeping sporadically, amazed at how much dust could stay under things, even with a good cleaning woman like Priscilla, who had been helping Edith this morning. Now it was nearly 5 p.m. Brett should be back soon. He’d telephoned an hour ago, saying he wouldn’t be back as soon as he’d thought, because he hadn’t been able to find the right drill for his Black and Decker and was going to try Bloomingdale’s.
And now, Edith thought, today, this evening, was the last evening and night the Howland family would spend on Grove Street. They were moving tomorrow morning to Brunswick Corner, Pennsylvania, into a two-story house surrounded by a lawn with two willows in front and a couple of elms and apple trees on the back lawn.
That
was worth an entry in her diary, Edith thought, and she realized she hadn’t even noted the day when she and Brett and Cliffie had found the Brunswick Corner house. They’d been looking for some time, maybe six months. Brett was in favor of the move, with Cliffie ten years old now. A country environment would be a blessed thing for a child, something he deserved, space to ride a bicycle, a chance to see what America really was, or at least where the same families had been for more generations than most families had been in New York. Or was that true? Edith thought for a few seconds and decided that it wasn’t necessarily true.
‘Cliffie?’ Edith called. ‘Have you got those drawers emptied yet?’ A long wait as usual before he answered.
‘Yes.’
His tone was feeble. Edith knew he hadn’t emptied the chest of drawers, though he had said he wanted to do it himself, so she went into his room – whose door was open – and with a cheerful air began to do it for him. Cliffie was upset about the move, Edith knew, though he’d seen the house and loved it and in a way was looking forward.
‘Can’t get much done if you sit reading comic books,’ Edith said.
She knew from his wide, dreamy eyes that he wasn’t even reading, simply trying to lose himself in the fantasy world of talking animals, spacemen, or whatever it was.
‘There’s no hurry, is there?’ Cliffie asked, hitching himself back on his bed. He wore Levis and a T-shirt which had University of California printed on it.
‘No, darling, but we may as well do as much as we can today, because there’ll be odds and ends tomorrow morning, and the moving men are coming at eight, you know.’
Cliffie didn’t answer, didn’t move, and Edith went on loading a crate with Cliffie’s sweaters, folding them carelessly, dropping them. Then his pajamas, then shirts.
‘You ought to be
happy
,
Cliffie. Aren’t you happy, going to live in a real house – with land – all your own?’
‘Sure.’
‘Didn’t any of your friends say —’ Edith tried to shake out a crumpled shirt from a bottom drawer and found that it was hopelessly stuck. With glue, apparently. Plainly it was tan-colored glue, couldn’t be anything else. ‘What happened to this?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Cliffie stuck his hands in the front pockets of his Levis and walked from the room, head hanging.
Edith straightened and smiled. ‘It’s not so serious, Cliffie. Let’s be cheerful! We’re going to the Chinese restaurant tonight!’
It was a good white shirt, however, and otherwise clean. Had Cliffie done it deliberately? What took out glue? Hot water? Edith dropped it into the crate-in-progress, and went on with her work.
‘Cliffie? Is Mildew all right?’ Her voice sounded sharp in the rugless apartment.
‘Yes,’ said Cliffie in the same toneless way.
Edith had last seen the cat sitting on the radiator cover in the living room, gazing out the window as if taking a last look at her three-story view of Grove Street. To make sure, Edith went into the living room, and saw Mildew on the floor by the sofa, her paws tucked in. Not a usual place for Mildew.
‘Mildew,’ Edith said softly, ‘you’re going to a much nicer house!’ She touched the top of Mildew’s head. The cat purred, half-asleep.
Mildew was a little over a year old. Edith and Brett had acquired her from the local grocery store, which hadn’t been able to find a home for her. They’d named her Mildred, but Cliffie had arrived at Mildew, which they called her more often than Mildred. She reminded Edith of the cats in Hogarth’s paintings with her white breast and feet, the rest of her brindle with a patch or two of black. A hearth-loving cat, Edith thought, and in Brunswick Corner she’d have a real hearth.
Cliffie at that moment was gazing out the window of his parents’ bedroom. He realized that his heart was beating faster. The move was real, not something he had imagined, otherwise the carpets wouldn’t be up, the refrigerator wouldn’t be nearly empty. Cliffie often imagined much more violent things, like a bomb going off under their apartment building, even under all of New York, the whole city going up sky-high with no survivors. But suddenly this, their moving to another state, was somehow like a real bomb going off under his own feet. He looked around the neatly stripped bedroom, noticed the small leatherbound travel clock on his parents’ night-table, and at once thought of hurling it out the window. Cliffie imagined it hitting the pavement, maybe not breaking because of its leather cover, and imagined a stranger – delighted at having found something valuable – picking it up and pocketing it quickly, before anyone could notice him. Cliffie felt like breaking something, felt like hitting back at his parents.
Edith’s big diary finally went between the second and third folded sheets in one of the crates. She must record this day, and tomorrow, right away in Pennsylvania, she thought, no matter how busy she was in the new house. She was rather glad she hadn’t filled the diary with trivia all these years, because it meant that more than half the diary was still empty. The diary had been a present when she was twenty, still at Bryn Mawr, given her by a man called Rudolf Mallikin, who’d been about thirty (to her an older man), and she remembered with a slight embarrassment that she’d asked him for a Bible – when he’d said, around Christmas time, that he wanted to give her something nice, something she really wanted. That had been Edith’s metaphysical period, Jakob Boehme, Swedenborg, Mary Baker Eddy and all that. Not that she hadn’t a Bible, in a way, in her family’s bookshelf, but she had wanted a nice leatherbound one all her own. But since Rudolf’s objective had been to get her to go to bed with him, he had declared with a laugh that he simply couldn’t give her a Bible, anything else but that, a fact which Edith later understood. So he had found a beautiful blank book, not even lines in it, so that she could make little sketches or draw maps, if she wished. Its brown leather was grainy and tooled with a gold Florentine design. The gold had flaked off to a great extent, but Edith had kept the leather oiled, and considering it was fifteen years old, the book showed only moderate signs of wear. To Edith it looked more handsome now than when it was new. She kept the diary always among her own things, her typewriter paper, dictionary, World Almanac, if she had a spare room to work in, as she had had here in Grove Street, or at least among her own things if she had to work in a corner of the living room. But Brett wasn’t the type to pry, that was one of the nice things about him, and as for Cliff, Edith simply couldn’t imagine him being interested in her diary.
And – Edith smiled to herself as she tackled more of Cliffie’s possessions – she seldom looked back at what she’d written in her diary. It was simply
there
,
and an entry helped her sometimes to organize and analyse her life-in-progress. She remembered she had opened the diary at random about a year ago, and had winced at something written when she was twenty-two. The more recent entries were apt to be about moods and thoughts. Such as one she remembered quite well written at least eight years ago:
‘Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?’
She’d felt better after getting that down on paper. Such an attitude wasn’t phony armor, she thought, it was a fact that life had no meaning. One simply went on and on, worked on, and did one’s best. The joy of life was in movement, in action itself.
If she had any problem, it was Cliffie, she admitted. He wasn’t doing well in school. He didn’t try, he had no initiative. He liked best to sit in front of the television set, not even paying much attention to it, just daydreaming and nibbling at his fingernails. Worse and maybe more significant than the school failure was that he didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t make any friends among kids his own age. He didn’t passionately like anything or any person.
Edith’s futile and familiar thought path was interrupted by a muscular effort – heaving up a stack of magazines, some of them curling at the corners with age.
New Republics
,
Commentarys
.
She realized with a pang of guilt that her last article had been printed three years ago in 1952, a lance hurled against McCarthy.
The doorbell rang.
Edith pushed the door-buzzer blithely, not knowing or caring who it was. She went out on the landing and looked down the stairwell. ‘Marion?’ Edith called, thinking she recognized a coat sleeve.
‘Me no less!’ said Marion. ‘How y’doin’, kid?’
‘Coming along, thanks!’
Marion emerged, onto the landing. ‘Brought you a pie,’ she said, smiling, a little out of breath.
‘A pie! Aren’t you a darling! Come in and see our progress!’
Marion Zylstra lived on Perry Street. Her husband Ed was a radio engineer. She was just a bit older than Edith, thirty-six. Marion refused to let Edith cut the lemon meringue or make any tea or coffee for her, because she was sure Edith couldn’t afford the time, but Marion did sit down on the edge of the sofa.
‘We’re going to miss you,’ Marion said. ‘Where’s Brett?’
‘Oh, Brett’s looking for a gadget for his Black and Decker. He’ll be here any minute.’ Edith had lit a cigarette, but she didn’t sit, only leaned against the heavy oval table in the living room, the table on which they dined when they had guests. ‘Don’t forget we’re just two hours by bus from Manhattan. We want you to see the place as soon as you can. A real guestroom. Imagine!’
Marion laughed. ‘Plutocrats. I envy you. Ed’s so stuck with his job in New York. Every family ought to have a certain amount of time in a country atmosphere,
I
think.’
Marion had no children. She was a registered nurse, worked irregular hours, and earned good money. Edith and Brett had taken a mortgage on their Pennsylvania house, they were anything but rich, but Marion knew that.
‘I’m free for a little while now, Edie, if there’s anything I can do. Ed’s working midnight to eight, so he’s sleeping now.’
‘You’re an angel but – Brett and I can manage the rest. Brett says most people wouldn’t do nearly as much as we’ve done already, they’d leave it to the moving men, you know? Even the fragile things. But I like to do as much as I can. – Want to come to dinner with us tonight, Marion? We’re going to the Chinese joint on Fourth.’
‘Oh —’ Marion begged out. She had to write to her mother, and there was a possibility that a patient might telephone if another nurse couldn’t go on tonight.
Just then a key was fitted into the lock, and Brett came in, slender, alert, smiling. He wore an old tweed jacket, a turtle-neck sweater, baggy gray flannels. He had short-cut, straight black hair, and gave a boyish impression until one noticed crow’s feet in the dryish skin under his eyes. His glasses had round black rims.
‘Well, Marion! Greetings!’
‘Hello, Brett! Just stuck my nose in to bring you a pie and wish you well.’
‘A pie,’ said Brett, advancing toward Edith, kissing her cheek as he usually did on coming home. He turned back to Marion. ‘That’s very Samaritan of you. Why aren’t you both diving in? Into the pie, I mean.’
‘Marion hasn’t the time,’ Edith said.
Marion stood up.
‘You and Ed better find the time to visit us,’ Brett said.
Marion promised that they would, and Edith assured her that she’d make them come, even if the house wasn’t completely fixed up. The Zylstras hadn’t even seen the house, just a couple of photographs Brett had taken of it.
‘And I hope your new job works out, Brett.’
‘Oh.
Trenton Standard
,’
Brett said, a bit uneasily. ‘Less money, I’ll tell you that right now.’
‘Yes,
I
know.’ Marion laughed, then she was gone.
‘What’s
that
?’
Edith said in a whisper, having heard an ominous growl from the cat, from somewhere.
Brett followed her across the hall into the bedroom.
‘Cliffie?’ Edith said. ‘What’s happening?’
Cliffie wriggled off the double bed and stood up. From a heap of blue-and-white eiderdown the cat emerged, staggering, coughing, and jumped limply to the floor.
‘Were you trying to smother her?’ Edith said quickly, and anger suddenly burned her cheeks. ‘You were!’
‘All right, Edith, I’ll —’ Brett, just as grim as Edith, checked himself, however. He had long ago decided to let Edith handle Cliff, in case of crises. Brett didn’t want Cliffie scarred by paternal sternness, and Brett realized he did lose his patience, had since quite a while lost it in regard to Cliff, beyond the degree to which a parent should lose it.
Speechless, Edith stared at the cat long enough to see that she wasn’t seriously hurt, then looked at her son.
Cliffie’s face was expressionless, as usual in such circumstances, neutral, rather calm, as if he were saying inwardly, ‘What’ve I done, after all?’
Edith knew quite well that if not for the brief silence after Marion closed the door, she and Brett might not have heard the cat’s growl under the comforter. Mildew might’ve been dead, if Marion had stayed two minutes longer.