“Well, did—” Arthur began. “Did the Griffins say anything about Irene?”
“They didn’t say a word,” his mother replied over her shoulder. “Almost ominous. Ha!” She turned and looked at him.
“Maybe they don’t know. What’s so fascinating about Irene’s offspring? Don’t take it so seriously, Mom.”
His mother dried her hands on a paper towel.
Arthur pressed the cold beer can against his forehead and tried to continue. “Bob Cole went to the hospital?”
“Yes, because Irene wanted him to come. He said the baby had a little blond hair.”
So would a child of his father’s, Arthur realized with disgust and annoyance. He and his brother had had “a little blond hair” when they had been born, Arthur had heard. “And why did he take the trouble to mention that?”
“Oh—Bob talks on and on.—He said Irene wanted me to come and see the baby.”
“Oh, f’Chris’ sake!” Arthur felt like flinging his beer can at the sink, but he set it atop the fridge and took his mother’s hands in his, something he had never done before. “Mom, you’ve got to let it roll off you. Ignore it!—If you don’t talk to people you know—and if they don’t ask you questions—or if they do, just brush it off! Let Irene handle it. And give her the brush-off, too. If—” His mother was listening, looking straight at him with rather sad blue eyes, and Arthur suddenly and shyly released her hands. “Mom, if I could only give you some of what I feel tonight. Everything’s going so well! I’m going away in September, and Maggie—Everything’s all right there, I’m sure. I’d like you to be—” Happy or happier, he wanted to say, but things were not going well for Robbie, and Robbie was part of his mother’s life, too. His mother couldn’t turn loose of Robbie as easily as she might wash her hands of Irene. “I had an idea tonight.”
“What?”
“We should move to another town. Maybe some place in New Jersey. Pennsylvania, maybe. Change your life, Mom! Sell the house here—Mom, have you considered getting married again?”
“Married again? No, Arthur, why?”
“Well, why not? Companionship. And you’re still pretty!”
“Any prospects in mind for me?” His mother laughed as if the idea were an absurdity.
“No, because I haven’t given it much thought. In this boring town?—Anybody but the Reverend Cole, Mom! Holy cow!” Arthur rocked back, laughing. Bob Cole was a bachelor and without the least sign, which Arthur had looked for, of being gay. Arthur suspected him of playing the field carefully with girls some distance from Chalmerston.
“Arthur, I think you’re a little drunk.”
“I think you’re a little right. But—I’ll say the same thing tomorrow. It’s a good idea if we move. If we sold this house—”
“And Robbie?”
Arthur looked into his mother’s eyes again. “Robbie’s not coming back, Mom. Not here—to this house. I’d bet my life on that. He doesn’t want to.” And there was the study in this house, reminding his mother that his father had died there.
“This house is sad, Mom.”
His mother bent her head. “Ye-es, I know.”
Arthur kissed his mother’s cheek. “Go to bed, Mom. But think about what I said. Sleep on it.”
ARTHUR’S FIRST THOUGHT ON AWAKENING the next morning was moving. Settling his mother in another town, maybe in northern Pennsylvania, as he had said last night. The East Coast was more expensive than the area where they lived now, but the next house need not be as big as this, perhaps. He could look for a house in early September, in the weeks before Columbia classes began. He could drive his car east, as he had not thought of doing before, sell it finally for a couple of peanuts in New York or in some small town, since a car in New York was useless and a drain. Then his mother could keep her own car and find a secretarial job in the town where the new house would be, if she wanted or needed to take a job. Why was that such an impossible dream?
The sunlight came through the window on Arthur’s left, beautiful, cool and warm at the same time on the white sheet that covered him. It was almost 8. “Ah-h,” Arthur said, because the world seemed good at that moment.
His next thought was not so pleasant: Irene and her offspring. He sat up on the edge of his bed. A birth announcement might be in the Chalmerston Herald today, and if not, certainly tomorrow, because all births and deaths got at least a two-line mention. Miss Irene Langley standing by itself after “born to” would make the announcement look as if she’d had the child by some kind of parthenogenesis! She would probably have given the little thing a name already.
His mother tapped on the door. “Coffee is served!”
“Ah, most welcome! And good morning, madame,” said Arthur holding the door. “Did you think about what I was saying last night?”
“Yes. And I think it’s a good idea. I’ll ask Mama what she thinks.” His mother looked at him, and her eyes seemed already happier, younger, merely with the thought.
“Leave it to me. I’ll scout around. East Coast. Can’t think now till I’ve had my coffee, you know.” Arthur picked up the mug and sipped.
Arthur called Maggie from Shoe Repair just after noon, as he had promised to do, and told her about his idea of his mother moving to another town in the East. Maggie said she thought it was a very good idea, because the present house “must be so sad for her.” In Maggie’s voice he heard a sympathy that struck deep. Maggie said there were some brochures on real estate in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in her house, six months old but maybe still useful, because her parents had been thinking last winter of moving to the East Coast. Arthur made a date with her to come to her house that evening after dinner.
Maggie gave him the pamphlets and brochures, which had a lot of photographs of houses that were not out of his and his mother’s price range. Arthur told Tom Robertson of his intention. This meant he would work only the first week in September in the shop, not the first two weeks. Tom said he was sorry—mainly at the idea of Arthur’s moving out of Chalmerston—but he gave Arthur his blessing. He used the word blessing, and Arthur recollected that Tom was one of the few who knew him and who did not seem to have heard of Irene Langley’s connection with his father.
One day in early September, just before Arthur was to head east in his car, his mother said:
“I saw Irene pushing a baby carriage this morning on Main Street. I must say, it was that fat sister who caught my eye. I thought it was a tent swaying from side to side in the breeze!” His mother paused to laugh. “Then I blinked and I recognized Louise in a wide blue dress, ambling along eating an ice-cream cone. And beside her, Irene—pushing a baby carriage.”
Arthur gave a one-sided smile. “Did you have a look at the infant?”
“Well, I confess I did. At the risk of being noticed by Irene and talked to, but she was walking along as if in a trance—and her sister was concentrating on her ice cream. I was behind them, so I walked ahead and turned back. The baby looked asleep. I didn’t see any blond hair, now that I think of it. I’ll just have to take Bob Cole’s word for that.”
The damned thing existed! His mother had seen it. His half-sister. Arthur realized he had forgotten to look for any birth announcement in the Herald. “Well, if Madame Irene is walking around already, I suppose she can go back to work soon. Maybe she’s already back at the Silver Arrow.”
“Yes, why not? The sister could look after the baby.”
Arthur noticed that his mother looked a bit nervous. That would pass in a few minutes. He was glad his mother had actually seen the thing, because it made the infant less of a ghost, made it flesh and blood, fated to die one day, just like the rest of humanity. “Speaking of Irene going back to work—wouldn’t it be funny if she went back to her old profession—you know—streetwalking.”
His mother’s shoulders bent with a laugh. “Oh,
Arthur!”
“Without the church to guide her,” Arthur went on, and at once thought, without his father to guide her. The Reverend Cole was supposed to be doing the job now. Would he? Could he? Arthur tried to be serious. “There really is more money in streetwalking than in the Silver Arrow,” he said in a solemn voice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.
Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States.
The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
PRAISE FOR PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”
—The New Yorker
“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”—Newsday
“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”
—Robert Towers, New York Review of Books
“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”
—Time
“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”
—Julian Symons, New York Times Book Review
“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”
—Graham Greene
“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”
—Boston Globe
“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”
—Newsday
“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”
—Boston Phoenix
To the courage of the Palestinian people and their leaders in
the struggle to regain a part of their homeland.
This book has nothing to do with their problem.
Copyright © 1983 by Patricia Highsmith
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
Originally published in 1983 by William Heinemann, Ltd., London, England
First published in the United States in 1985 by Penzler Books
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
The text of this book is composed in Bembo
Composition and design by Amanda Morrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–
People who knock on the door / by Patricia Highsmith
p. cm.
ISBN 0-393-32243-2 (pbk.)
I. Title
PS3558.I366 P4 2001
813’.54—dc21 2001052212
eISBN: 978-0-393-34470-7
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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Patricia Highsmith, People Who Knock on the Door
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