This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  “You wouldn’t like to come by after work?” Wes asked David for at least the third time. “There’ll be other people there, not just Laura. She’s making eggnog, but you can have coffee.” Wes’s eyes pleaded with him.

  “Thanks, not now,” David said, unable to manufacture an excuse.

  “Off to your mother, eh?”

  Wes’s inflection on “mother” made David look at him. “Oh, I may not go till tomorrow. They have some party planned for tonight,” David replied, carrying it off with the boldness of despair.

  “She lives in a nursing home?”

  “Yes,” David said. There were two nursing homes within an hour’s drive of Froudsburg. He had ascertained that before he gave out his story.

  “Not in a house?” Wes asked.

  “No,” David said firmly. And why do you ask, he started to say, but couldn’t.

  Finally Wes nodded, and David wondered if Effie had dropped any hints to him, or told him that his mother was dead. “Effie asked about you,” Wes said. “I hope you sent her a Christmas card, anyway.”

  “Do you see her?” David asked, more hotly than he intended.

  “Now and then. Whenever I please.”

  On this rough-edged exchange they parted, David turning away as Wes did.

  Even Mrs. McCartney was dispensing hospitality in her “parlor” whose threadbareness somehow relieved its gloom and its air of never being used: someone had worn out the carpet, had let his cigarettes burn out on the top of the mahogany music cabinet, and had gathered the half dozen cattails that appeared to have been chewed by mice.

  “David, would you take this up to Mrs. Beecham?” Mrs. McCartney said in a tone of seasonal sweetness, extending a sloppy cup on a small plate on which sat a half slice of store-bought fruitcake. “Sarah’s busy making more nog.”

  David did not answer at once, and Mrs. McCartney with a puzzled expression started to speak to him again. Then he said, “Maybe I can help her get down,” and went out and climbed the stairs three at a time.

  Mrs. Beecham protested and laughed, and said she couldn’t get down in the chair, even if two men carried her.

  David picked her up chair and all, kicked the door open with his foot, and with Mrs. Beecham laughing and holding firmly to the banister with her right hand, they very slowly got down. A cheer went up as he carried her into the room and set her gently down on the sofa. He had left the chair in the hall.

  When David extricated himself from the parlor group and went up to his room, he found a small package wrapped in tissue paper on his bed. A card in the shape of a Santa Claus dangled from it and written in the white of the beard was “To dear David from Mollie Beecham.” The straggly writing, the clumsily tucked corners of the tissue wrapping, the thin, yellow, foil-threaded ribbon sent a torrent of pity through him, and as he stood there with the little package that he knew contained socks knitted by her hands, he thought that this might be as near as he would get to the spirit of Christmas this year. He pulled out a drawer in the bottom of his bureau and opened a round stud box of worn dark brown leather. Among buttons and a couple of odd cuff links—all his good cuff links were at his house—he found a ruby pin set with seed pearls. Having nothing to wrap it in, he took one of his white handkerchiefs, folded it as neatly as he could around the pin, cut a square from a sheet of typewriter paper, and wrote: “To Mrs. Beecham with a Merry Christmas from David.” He took it to her room, tiptoeing as if she were lying in the room asleep, and put it on the table where she kept her sewing articles. The pin had belonged to his mother, and though David had never been close to his mother, he ground his teeth and jerked his head away as he turned to go to the door.

  That evening at his house, during his ritual two martinis, he laid fir branches along his mantel, brightened them with holly, and on the cocktail table where the two glasses stood, he set up a little angels’ merry-go-round, lit its three candles, and turned off the Mozart Divertimento to listen to its simple, ever-changing tune of some nine notes. He had banked his few presents, most of them from a box from California that had come several days ago, at one side of his fireplace. In the total absence of Annabelle, not a present or even a card from her this year though last year there had been a present of an alligator key case, it was easier to feel that she was with him, that some of the presents were for her from other people, but that their presents to each other had been kept separate, to be opened together in some other room.

  After a simple but properly served dinner, he lay on the cowhide rug in front of the dying fire, his arms crossed on his chest. Their weight was Annabelle’s head resting there, and through the aroma of mingled firewood and fir, he could still detect the perfume that he knew. The concrete reality of the diamond clip he had sent her, that she had held in her hands at least and perhaps was holding at that moment, was a foundation on which to build the tallest of fantasies throughout the four days to come. With Annabelle he would plan voyages around the world, debate in advance about schools for their children (he liked to imagine they had a little girl already four and a boy two), consider a job offer in Brazil or Mexico, talk over the placement of a barbecue pit in the back patio, and whether they could afford to buy a small sailboat for next summer. He always saw Annabelle as more practical but also more impulsive than he, and almost never saying no to anything. He dressed her in silks, in fine wools, in mink and ermine. They sat in a box at the Met and heard Die Zauberflöte, Elektra, and Wozzeck, and when they went to a party together, they were always liked though a little envied by the married and the unmarried. When he bought a suit on his own, which he insisted upon doing, Annabelle sometimes made him take it back. There were certain ties of his that she liked, others that she didn’t like that he seldom or never wore. He made up her favorite foods, and pretended that she did not like shrimps or eggplant.

  The house was for dreaming, not plotting or fretting, and not a single worry about anything, any suspicion, any failure, any delay—because not even time existed here—clouded his visions as he lay before the fireplace, while his music, like incense, influenced his moods, the noble mathematics of Bach, the heroic tenderness of Brahms.

  10

  Mrs. Beecham was extremely touched by David’s gift. (“Why, it’s too beautiful for an ugly old woman like me.”) She went on so about it, words of praise that David could not reply anything to, and when for the third time she asked at what shop he had found such a pretty thing (she was aware that Froudsburg offered little), he blurted out that it had been his mother’s.

  “But she didn’t like it very much,” he hastened to add, when Mrs. Beecham’s mouth fell open. “I don’t even know how I came to have it.”

  “Why, shouldn’t you give it back to her?” Mrs. Beecham asked, and David suddenly realized the error in tenses he had made.

  “That’s why I have it, I suppose. She doesn’t like it.”

  Then Mrs. Beecham looked at him tenderly, and grotesque as her enlarged eyes were behind the thick round lenses, something within David’s heart stirred, awkwardly, unused to such a look. It’s just that the lenses magnify the look, David thought suddenly, and smiled.

  “Well, it’ll still be yours, David,” she said, holding the little pin in her boney sapless fingers. “You know it’ll never go out of this house, and when I die, I’ll see that you get it back.”

  David so recoiled, for safety’s sake, from the blunt truth of this statement, that it missed him, emotionally speaking. He left her room as soon as he could.

  At his writing table in his room, David wrote Annabelle two letters in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the second more violent, more derogatory of Gerald than the first. He demanded, in all fairness, that Annabelle write him a real letter, one that she really meant, one over which Gerald didn’t seem to be hanging, reading, and passing on every word as she wrote it. David loathed the holiday coming up, New Year’
s, even though he would be at his house and perhaps not hear a single car horn or drunken hoot. He received a letter from Annabelle, very short and not at all in answer to his, the same day that the little package containing the diamond clip arrived at Mrs. McCartney’s by special delivery. The note was intended to be very kind, very grateful, but she was sending it back. Gerald himself might have written it. David missed in it that one word, or two, that he had always found in Annabelle’s letters, words in which her own feelings showed through. My God, he thought, it’s as if she’s become a puppet of that freak!

  Surely she’d write him another letter. He had asked her some specific questions in his last letter, how many hours a day was she able to practice her piano, did she have many friends in Hartford, did she ever go to the theater, did she like espresso coffee, and again what did she intend to do about her Mozart-Schubert idea whose outline David had once seen? He felt reasonably sure she would answer those questions, perhaps after New Year’s when she would have more time, and he thought also that she would apologize for the coolness of her note concerning the return of his Christmas present, and explain that Gerald had wanted to see the note to make sure she was really returning it. She would tell him how much she wanted to keep it, because it was from him.

  On New Year’s Day, David awakened in his house from an unrefreshing sleep with a dream of Annabelle’s letter still damnably in his head. He had seen every word in his dream, and she had said that she loved him, she had put herself in his hands, asked him to make plans for her freedom from Gerald and promised to do anything that he proposed. And David awakened to this gigantic trickery of his own dreaming processes, to the empty house, to the first hours of a new year, stunned and shaken. It seemed a bad omen. Never before had he had a “bad dream” in his house. But later that morning as he was polishing brass and silver, it occurred to him that he could as well take the dream as a good omen as a bad. Perhaps such a letter was on its way to him. It had been stupid to feel downcast, simply because he hadn’t the letter in his hands. This more cheerful attitude stayed with him, even for several days after he went back to Mrs. McCartney’s and the factory.

  Twice David saw Effie Brennan at the boardinghouse, both times as he was returning from work around five-thirty. She came to visit Mrs. Beecham. The first time, Effie had a blossoming geranium in a pot, sheltered from the cold by a green paper wrapping that was open at the top. She had asked David to come upstairs to say hello to Mrs. Beecham with her, and David had politely declined, politely asked Effie how she had been, and she asked him the same thing, and that had been that. The second time Effie had been standing in the front hall, looking down at the mail on the wicker table as if she expected to find a letter there for herself, and as he closed the front door, she whirled around and smiled at him.

  “Why, hello, David. We meet again. There’s a package for you.”

  He picked up the little package, a book he had ordered from New York. They chatted, saying nothing. The weather was cold, and it would get worse. David felt as guilty in her presence as if he had committed a grave and shameful offense against her. It was that she knew—at any rate, she believed—that his mother was dead, though this fact and the fact that she had told him so to his face did not plainly come to David’s mind as he confronted her. He looked at her hair, short but fixed in wide curls that rose crisply around her dark blue beret, hair that was almost the same color as Annabelle’s with its touch of red, and he remembered that Annabelle’s hair, too, was short now, though he always thought of it as long, the way it had been in La Jolla. David could not face Effie’s clear, direct eyes.

  “By the way, your portrait’s got the fixative on it now,” she said. “If you’d like to have it, it’s yours. If you don’t want it, no offense taken.”

  “I’d like very much to have it.” He ground his palm on the newel post.

  “Why don’t you stop by some evening?”

  “Thanks very much, I will.” He smiled, then began to climb the stairs.

  She followed him. He opened his door, went in, and was about to close it when she said his name.

  “There’s something else I wanted to say to you,” she said quietly. “Can I come in a minute?”

  With a small, nervous sigh of exasperation, he stepped aside for her, closed the door which put them in darkness until he crossed the room with two long steps and pushed the button of the lamp on his writing table.

  “Oh!” she said, looking about. “I didn’t realize you had such a big room. And don’t they keep it nicely for you!”

  He nodded, slowly unbuttoning his overcoat. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “No, I won’t stay.” Her eyes had fixed on his face again. “David, it’s about that night at my apartment. I’m sorry I was so probing about your mother.”

  “You weren’t probing,” he said quickly.

  “I meant about whether she’s dead or not. I’m sure you have your reasons—I mean you said it was a mistake on the record. Anyway, since it isn’t my business, I’m sorry I said anything. The other thing I wanted to say is that I haven’t said anything to Wes about it.”

  “What does it matter? It’s perfectly all right,” David replied, his back to her as he hung up his overcoat.

  “I saw you were upset by it that night, that’s all.”

  Silence.

  “If you think Wes is acting a little different lately, it’s not because of that,” the girl added. “He’s annoyed because you never come by his house.” She smiled her wide smile.

  David shrugged. “All he tells me about is quarrels. I don’t like to go into a house where a man and wife are quarreling all the time. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know how to help him.”

  “You could help him just by going to see him. Honestly, David. They don’t quarrel when people are there, at least not when I was there. Wes thinks his wife’s temper has driven a lot of their friends away. Well, maybe it has, but if you like Wes—”

  David shifted on his feet.

  “Wes is so fond of you, really,” the hortatory voice went on. “It seems to me that you could do him a small favor. Even if you hate women, a visit of half an hour isn’t like living with one.”

  “I just can’t face it,” David said with the bluntness of impatience.

  Effie looked at him, disappointed. “I know. I understand. You can hardly bear for me to be in your room, I can see that,” she said, walking toward the door.

  Words of apology, of insane protest, stuck in his throat.

  She turned at the door. “What girl hurt you so much?”

  “No one.”

  “I’m sure there was someone. I’m not asking her name, just—how long ago was it?”

  “There’s no one,” he said quickly. Still frowning at the floor as he had been for the past minutes, he moved toward the door to open it for her. She spoke as his hand touched the knob.

  “You’re so young, there’s so much ahead of you, I hate to see you unhappy.”

  “But I’m not unhappy.” He had an impulse to open the door and push her out. Women! Their prattling little minds and tongues, their so-far-and-no-furtherness, but please come so-far, and their tedious obsession with the idea that human bliss is based on getting a man and woman in the same house together!

  “Good-bye, David.”

  “Good-bye.” He was trembling as he closed the door, his anger almost at the exploding point.

  He yanked off his tie and whipped it in the air, making a loud crack, and hung it up on the rack in the wardrobe. Tonight, he thought, he would read about ocean bottom cores and get the mess of his own life out of his head. He unwrapped the package, looked with the pleasure of anticipation at the brand new jacket of the book, and tossed it on his bed. Maybe tomorrow, David thought, he would ask Wes to come by and talk. There was still half a bottle of scotch in his wardrobe. He kep
t scotch always, as a courtesy to Wes, though Wes usually brought his own.

  His new book restored him. He read until after 2 A.M. and finished it. The book had just been published, and it mentioned a second voyage that the same group of scientists of the Dickson-Rand Laboratories were going to make four months from now for the purpose of taking sample cores from the bottom of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. The place names called to him romantically, pregnant with adventure. Dickson-Rand was where he had wanted to work when he met Annabelle. It was a wild thing, but perhaps he could—. His thoughts were checked as he struggled vainly to fit them to the circumstances with Annabelle. He had thought, after everything is settled. But after all, why should it take longer than four months to settle everything? Then, suppose it did take longer? He returned to his first idea, that he might at least write to Dickson-Rand, which was in Troy, give them his résumé, and ask if there was a place for him. It cheered him a little to think of his résumé with its impressive number of scholarships and prizes, plus the statement of highest commendation from Professor Henkert of Oakley, California.

  David woke up early, and wrote the letter to Dickson-Rand before he went down to breakfast. He felt unusually well all that day, despite having had only three hours’ sleep. He talked with Wes at lunch about the book on ocean cores, especially the climatological aspects of the core findings, which he knew would interest Wes. A light of interest came in Wes’s face, but it faded when Wes said that he envied anyone who could go on such a trip, but that he certainly couldn’t, because Laura wouldn’t hear of it. He made David see Laura as a female spider, every leg gripping a few web strands, keeping an eternal vigil for untoward vibrations and the threatening quiver of a breath of air. When Wes went to work, he went off with one of those strands attached to him, and he followed it back at night to the web and the spider.

  “Maybe you’d like to come by tonight,” David said. “I’ve still got some scotch in my wardrobe.”