The Black House

by Patricia Highsmith

  The girl turned and leaned back against the prow. She looked directly at Sam, and his heart jumped.

  Sam raised his right hand in something between a wave and a salute, and suddenly grinned back at her.

  Johnny came into the wheelhouse, and Sam left the helm before Johnny could say anything, so Johnny had to take it. Sam went down to the girl. The sun was setting.

  “You’re feeling better?” Sam asked.

  She nodded. “Oh, sure!”

  Sam kept a distance from her, partly out of courtesy, partly so he could better see her whole figure. “Did you—I’m the—”

  “What?”

  “I’m the one who wrote that lousy poem . . . You read it?”

  “I don’t think it’s lousy.”

  Sam sighed, aching.

  “Can you show me around the ship?”

  “Certainly can!”

  They began to walk aft on the starboard deck. Sam at once got a whiff of fish from the hold. He thought of the mackerel lying on salted ice below their feet now. That catch might have to be chucked. And why hadn’t somebody thought to put Louie in the hold?

  “That’s the galley,” Sam said, gesturing. “Cleaner than usual today, I have to admit. I think that’s in your honor.” He saw Filip still lying on the worn, shiny linoleum.

  “Somebody’s sleeping there?” she asked.

  “Y-yes, ma’am,” Sam said, aware of footsteps behind him.

  It was Chuck behind him, with a grin that was merely bared teeth. “Well, Sam?”

  “So—Chuck.” Sam kept his cool. “Would you like to join us on a tour of the ship?”

  Chuck followed them like a heavy, ugly shadow. Sam glanced at the girl for comfort, for alliance, but she was looking straight ahead, her gaze a bit lifted, as if unaware of Chuck’s attitude. Her feet in the big white socks made no sound on the deck, and Sam could almost believe she didn’t exist, except that when he glanced at her, the mere corner of her eye jolted him into reality. Sam heard Bif give an order for Johnny to put about. The port and starboard lights had come on. Filip’s blood was still on the deck, but the girl didn’t look down.

  Then on the port deck, she stopped suddenly. She had seen the tarpaulin-wrapped form of Louie. The rope circle was smaller at his ankles. It was unmistakably a human form. “This?” she said, looking with wide blue eyes at Sam, then at Chuck.

  Chuck cleared his throat and said, “Sacks.—Extra burlap sacks for fish. Have to keep ’em dry.”

  Sam walked on slowly with the girl, wishing he had thought to say that.

  Now they were at the cabin hatch, and Chuck stopped, but the girl did not want to go in. She said she felt quite well now, and wanted to stay out in the air. Captain Bif spoke to Sam and also to Filip, who was now sitting on a bench in the galley: they were to prepare supper, a good supper as they’d all more or less missed lunch. Then the captain produced some red wine. It was homemade by the local Portuguese, not notably good, but not mouth-puckering either.

  Sam slipped out the starboard galley door, and went forward to the cabin. From the drawer he shared with Johnny, Sam dragged out an orange waterproof jacket with a cozy lining, and dashed up the steps again and closed the hatches. He presented the jacket to the girl. “Getting cooler,” Sam said.

  She put it on. “Thank you, Sam. Just what I needed!”

  Sam smiled, and without a glance at the other men, returned to his cooking. It was getting dark now. The Emma C’s white steaming light atop the mast shed a lovely glow over the ship, nearly as pretty as moonlight. And a moon would be coming up, Sam knew, nearly full. Someone, probably Johnny, had switched on a transistor to guitar music. Ordinarily Captain Bif forbade transistors except for news, but Bif was in a good mood tonight. Sam heard laughter, and occasionally the girl’s soft voice, because the others fell silent when she spoke.

  “Hey, the catch is starting to stink!” Chuck yelled out, and the others laughed, even Natalie.

  Then Sam heard the planks over the hold being tossed aside on deck. Mackerel and the occasional pilchard arced over the bulwarks, over the stern.

  “Pity the gulls’re all asleep!” someone said.

  Sam put frozen broccoli on to boil, and sipped his red wine. He could hear the captain laughing—a rare thing, Sam thought, with a half-a-hold catch going overboard. When Sam called everyone to table, the moon was up, and he had a glimpse of the girl leaning gracefully against the superstructure with her stemmed glass of wine—the only stemmed glass on board—and it seemed to Sam that she looked directly at him for a couple of seconds.

  Johnny had lashed the helm. There was no other vessel in sight, and the Cape lights lay far ahead, somewhere, as yet invisible. Four sat at the table, including Natalie, who had been provided with a pillow for the hard bench and another pillow to lean back against. Sam was happy to stand and serve, and Captain Bif, with new found sprightliness, remained on his feet also, and peered out from time to time to see if another boat might be in the neighborhood.

  “Natalie . . . Natalie . . .” But no one wanted to know her last name. No one asked where she lived. There were only questions like, “What is your favourite color? . . . What size shoe do you wear?” Were some of these idiots going to try to buy shoes for her, Sam wondered. But he also took note of her size: seven, sometimes seven and a half. No one asked her address. And there was much hearty laughter, at nothing. They were eating lamb chops, the best fare the freezer had afforded this evening. Natalie said the meal was delicious. Sam had discovered a jar of mint jelly to go with the lamb chops. And then ice cream. And more wine.

  Johnny was a bit drunk, and sang “Moon River,” addressing Natalie, but in a comical way addressing Chuck also, the man he had fought with that day.

  “. . . wherever you’re going

  I’m going—with you-u . . .”

  Chuck smiled contemptuously and told him to shut up.

  After supper, they went on deck in the moonlight, and the jettisoning of fish continued. The girl declined the offer of a cigarette from Johnny. She and two or three fellows were on the starboard deck where the moon shone brightest. Would he ever forget her face, Sam thought, as she stood leaning against the superstructure, hands behind her, in his orange jacket? The curve of her cheek, pale like the round moon? Sam wished another poem would spring full-blown to his mind, so he could write it out and give it to her, now.

  More guffaws as Johnny fell into the stinking hold! Johnny pronounced the hold empty, and Chuck and Bif pulled him out. Sam went into the galley to help Filip, who was clearing away. They began to wash dishes.

  On deck, the girl yawned like a child, and seeing this Captain Bif and Chuck both informed her that she was sleepy, that she’d had a long hard day.

  “You’ll sleep by yourself in the cabin,” Chuck said. “And I’ll be your guard.” Chuck was weaving on his feet, from drink and fatigue. He had bumped his swollen lip, the skin had split, and it was bleeding a little.

  “And I’ll kiss her good night,” said Johnny, approaching with a wobbling attempt at a bow.

  Natalie laughed, turned slightly from Johnny, and at that moment Chuck swung a fist that caught Johnny squarely in the chest. Johnny went straight backward over the bulwark into the sea, and Chuck’s feet slid forward, and he landed on his rump on the deck.

  “What the hell next on this boat!” Bif bawled. “Na-ow—where in God’s name’s a rope?”

  Natalie saw a rope first, the length that trailed from the tied feet of Louie, lifted it, and Bif hurled it over the side.

  “Man overboard!” Bif yelled. “Turn about!”

  Sam heard this and raced to the wheel. Johnny caught the rope after a minute or so, and was hauled gasping and spitting over a bulwark. He lay on the deck, mumbling still about kissing Natalie good night. Louie’s shoes had become exposed, and the gi
rl saw beyond a doubt what the tarpaulin contained. Chuck took her hand firmly, and led her to the cabin. The cabin light was on. Chuck took a blanket from another bunk and added this to the blanket she had, and tucked her feet.

  “You’ll be safe as a—as a bug in a rug,” he assured her. He pulled two other blankets from the other bunks, and went on deck with them. Here he announced that no one was sleeping in the cabin that night except Natalie.

  Bif laughed, as if Chuck’s giving such an order amused him.

  But no one protested. Filip wanted a sweater, and Chuck entered the cabin with a torch, as quietly as possible, got a sweater and jackets and oil slickers for warmth, and tossed them out on deck. Then he sat on deck with his back against the low cabin. Filip curled up on the galley floor, and Bif against the superstructure out of the wind. Sam was to steer for an hour or so, then awaken Bif. Sam lashed the wheel, leaned tiredly against the back wall of the wheelhouse, and smoked a rare cigarette, dreaming.

  And was it a dream, Sam thought. His head was still buzzing from wine. If so, they were all dreaming it. Or was it only he, dreaming about all of them?

  The captain offered to take over around 4 A.M. and Sam wrapped himself in a blanket and collapsed, face to the superstructure. Chuck was sleeping with his head between his knees, determined to sit up beside the cabin.

  Around 6:30, Sam made coffee. The Cape showed fuzzily on the port side, but Wellfleet was a couple of hours away. The Emma C was still not doing her full speed. No one mentioned lowering the nets, trying for another catch. They were going to give up the girl, deliver her, in a little while. Johnny sipped black coffee and didn’t want anything to eat. He cast dreary glances at the shore. It seemed to Sam that everyone’s eyes were sad that morning. Chuck had finally stretched out with his back against the cabin below the hatch doors, and as others awakened, so did Chuck.

  Sam wanted to go to Bif and say, “Let’s put in for food and fuel and take off again!” But he couldn’t give such an order. Instead, he poured two mugs of coffee and brought them on a tray to Chuck. “One for Natalie,” Sam said.

  Chuck stood up, folded his blanket, and fortified himself with a swallow of coffee. Then he rapped on the cabin hatch.

  Sam lingered, not trying to look into the cabin, but listening for the girl’s voice. She said, “Good morning, Chuck. Where are we now?” Sam walked on toward the galley.

  A few minutes later, a Coast Guard launch slid near enough to hail them. “Emma C!—What’s the matter with your radio?”

  “Conked out!” Johnny replied before anyone else could.

  “You got the Anderson girl?”

  This time Bif replied. “Yep . . . Didn’t know her name when we radioed you.”

  The man with the bullhorn said: “Heading for Wellfleet?”

  “Yep!” Bif replied. “All’s well.”

  The Emma C plowed on. Towards ten o’clock they were rounding the sandy spit that protected Wellfleet Harbor, and the wharves came into view. The girl was on deck in Chuck’s dungarees, socks and shirt, and some five men on the dock stared and smiled and commented.

  “. . . swimming and we picked her up!” Bif replied curtly to a question.

  “That the Anderson girl? . . . Why didn’t you radio?”

  Bif didn’t reply. He was going to ignore or stave off the queries. The girl was safe, wasn’t she? Unhurt.

  Sam had a secondhand car on shore. So had Chuck, who did not live in Wellfleet. Sam was about to ask Natalie if he could drive her anywhere, even to Cambridge, when he heard the wharf fellows saying, “. . . police . . . Coast Guard . . .” and someone ran off to the wharf telephone booth, no doubt to notify these groups.

  “Didn’t you have your radio on, Bif, you—”

  Bif didn’t answer. But on the wharf he spoke with a police officer who had driven up in a patrol car. Bif was talking about their casualty, Louie Galganes, whose body they had on board. He had died as a result of a fall on deck, a head concussion. The officer said he would have to see Louie’s work papers.

  “From the looks of your crew, you had a rough trip, Bif,” a wharf man said.

  Another twenty-four hours on the Emma C, Bif was thinking, and he might not have had any crew at all.

  Chuck held Natalie’s hand as she stepped from the rocking boat onto the wharf. Two other men on the wharf were ready to assist. Natalie staggered a little and recovered, smiling. Three fellows stared at her, then a policeman spoke to her and began writing in a notebook. Chuck stood near, attentive.

  “Your family’s been really worried, miss. We’ll phone them again to say that you’re really here.” Seeing that his fellow officer was busy with the tarpaulin bundle on the Emma C’s port deck, the officer went to the patrol car and spoke over the radio telephone.

  “Chuck, you’ve been very nice to me. Thank you.” The girl looked shy, a little awkward. She pulled a sock up higher. “Captain Bif—” She waited until he had removed his unlighted cigar and thrown it down. “I want to say thanks to all of you for saving me . . . And you for finding me, Sam, and for the poem.”

  Sam was biting the tip of his tongue, staring at her as if sheer concentration could create a miracle, that she’d stay, that he’d have the courage to—to do what? If he asked her for a date next Saturday night, would she say yes? “A p-pleasure,” he said finally.

  The police officers were ready to take her in their car. “Nothing else with you, miss?”

  Natalie lifted her hand, in which she carried her rolled up blue swimsuit. “No.” She turned to Chuck. “I can return your clothes, if I know where to reach you—if I see you again. You can find my address in the phone book under Anderson—Herbert.”

  Chuck squirmed as if in pain. “Oh, I don’t mind. I mean, you can keep the clothes. I just want to keep you—for my dream.”

  “For your what?”

  “For my dream. Like a dream. My dream.”

  Sam heard this, with the taste of blood in his mouth, and realized that the girl must have left his orange jacket in the cabin. He could have given her that. Now he’d never wear that jacket again, just keep it. And damn fool Chuck, not to see her again! And yet, maybe that was what they all wanted, just this fantastic experience, this dream. Sam looked intently at Natalie as she waved to the crew, then got into the police car. All the crew, Filip, Johnny, and Chuck and Bif were staring at the girl in the same way. Then Sam blinked, and took his eyes away from the departing black car.

  A police car was an ugly object.

  Old Folks

  at Home

  “Well,” Lois said finally, “let’s do it.” Her expression as she looked at her husband was serious, a little worried, but she spoke with conviction.

  “Okay,” said Herbert, tensely.

  They were going to adopt an elderly couple to live with them. More than elderly, old probably. It was not a hasty decision on the part of the McIntyres. They had been thinking about it for several weeks. They had no children themselves, and didn’t want any. Herbert was a strategy analyst at a government-sponsored institution called Bayswater, some four miles from where they lived, and Lois was an historian, specializing in European history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thirty-three years old now, she had three books and a score of articles to her credit. She and Herbert could afford a pleasant two-story house in Connecticut with a glass-enclosed sunroom that was Herbert’s workroom and also their main library, handsome grounds and a part-time gardener all year round to look after their lawn and trees, bushes and flowers. They knew people in the neighborhood, friends and acquaintances, who had children—young children and teenagers—and the McIntyres felt a little guilty about not fulfilling their duty in this department; and besides that, they had seen an old people’s nursing home at first hand a few months ago, when Eustace Vickers, a retired inventor attached to Bayswater, had passed away.
The McIntyres, along with a few of Herbert’s colleagues, had paid a visit every few days to Eustace, who had been popular and active until his stroke.

  One of the nurses at the home had told Lois and Herbert that lots of families in the region took in old people for a week at a time, especially in winter or at the Christmas season, to give them a change, “a taste of family life for a few days,” and they came back much cheered and improved. “Some people are kind enough to adopt an old person—even a couple—to live with them in their homes,” the nurse had said.

  Lois remembered her shudder at the thought, then, with a twinge of guilt. Old people didn’t live forever. She and Herbert might be in the same boat one day, objects of semi-charity, really, dependent on the whim of nurses for basic physical needs. And old people loved to be helpful around the house, if they possibly could be, the nurse had said.

  “We’ll have to go—and look,” Herbert said to Lois, then broke out in a grin suddenly. “Something like shopping for an orphan child, eh?”

  Lois laughed too. To laugh was a relief after the earnest conversation of the past minutes. “Are you joking? Orphanages give people the children the orphanages choose to give. What kind of a child do you think we’d rate, Herb? White? High I.Q.? Good health? I doubt it.”

  “I doubt it too. We don’t go to church.”

  “And we don’t vote, because we don’t know which party to vote for.”

  “That’s because you’re an historian. And I’m a policy analyzer. Oh yes, and I don’t sleep at regular hours and sometimes switch on foreign news at four in the morning. But—you really mean this, Lois?”

  “I said I did.”

  So Lois rang up the Hilltop Home and asked to speak to the superintendent. She was not sure of his or her title. A man’s voice came on, and Lois explained her and her husband’s intentions in prepared words. “I was told such arrangements were made sometimes—for six months, for instance.” These last words had come out of nowhere, as if by themselves.

  The man on the telephone gave the shortest of laughs. “Well—yes, it would be possible—and a great help usually for all concerned. Would you and your husband like to come and see us, Mrs. McIntyre?”