The present of the refrigerator had no effect at all on Marge’s stunned face. Tom knew she was wondering whether he was going to live with Dickie or not, and that she was probably concluding, because of his cheerful manner, that he was going to live with him. Tom felt the question creeping up to her lips—she was as transparent as a child to him—then she asked: “Are you going to stay with him in Rome?”
“Maybe for a while. I’ll help him get settled. I want to go to Paris this month, then I suppose around the middle of December I’ll be going back to the States.”
Marge looked crestfallen. Tom knew she was imagining the lonely weeks ahead—even if Dickie did make periodic little visits to Mongibello to see her—the empty Sunday mornings, the lonely dinners. “What’s he going to do about Christmas? Do you think he wants to have it here or in Rome?”
Tom said with a trace of irritation, “Well, I don’t think here. I have the feeling he wants to be alone.”
Now she was shocked to silence, shocked and hurt. Wait till she got the letter he was going to write from Rome, Tom thought. He’d be gentle with her, of course, as gentle as Dickie, but there would be no mistaking that Dickie didn’t want to see her again.
A few minutes later, Marge stood up and said good-bye in an absentminded way. Tom suddenly felt that she might be going to telephone Dickie today. Or maybe even go up to Rome. But what if she did? Dickie could have changed his hotel. And there were enough hotels in Rome to keep her busy for days, even if she came to Rome to find him. When she didn’t find him, by telephone or by coming to Rome, she would suppose that he had gone to Paris or to some other city with Tom Ripley.
Tom glanced over the newspapers from Naples for an item about a scuttled boats having been found near San Remo. Barca affondata vicino San Remo, the caption would probably say. And they would make a great to-do over the bloodstains in the boat, if the bloodstains were still there. It was the kind of thing the Italian newspapers loved to write up in their melodramatic journalese: “Giorgio di Stefani, a young fisherman of San Remo, yesterday at three o’clock in the afternoon made a most terrible discovery in two meters of water. A little motorboat, its interior covered with horrible bloodstains . . .” But Tom did not see anything in the paper. Nor had there been anything yesterday. It might take months for the boat to be found, he thought. It might never be found. And if they did find it, how could they know that Dickie Greenleaf and Tom Ripley had taken the boat out together? They had not told their names to the Italian boatkeeper at San Remo. The boatkeeper had given them only a little orange ticket which Tom had had in his pocket, and had later found and destroyed.
Tom left Mongibello by taxi around six o’clock, after an espresso at Giorgio’s, where he said good-bye to Giorgio, Fausto, and several other village acquaintances of his and Dickie’s. To all of them he told the same story, that Signor Greenleaf was staying in Rome for the winter, and that he sent his greetings until he saw them again. Tom said that undoubtedly Dickie would be down for a visit before long.
He had had Dickie’s linens and paintings crated by the American Express that afternoon, and the boxes sent to Rome along with Dickie’s trunk and two heavier suitcases, to be claimed in Rome by Dickie Greenleaf. Tom took his own two suitcases and one other of Dickie’s in the taxi with him. He has spoken to Signor Pucci at the Miramare, and had said that there was a possibility that Signor Greenleaf would want to sell his house and furniture, and could Signor Pucci handle it? Signor Pucci had said he would be glad to. Tom had also spoken to Pietro, the dockkeeper, and asked him to be on the lookout for someone who might want to buy the Pipistrello, because there was a good chance that Signor Greenleaf would want to get rid of it this winter. Tom said that Signor Greenleaf would let it go for five hundred thousand lire, hardly eight hundred dollars, which was such a bargain for a boat that slept two people, Pietro thought he could sell it in a matter of weeks.
On the train to Rome Tom composed the letter to Marge so carefully that he memorized it in the process, and when he got to the Hotel Hassler he sat down at Dickie’s Hermes Baby, which he had brought in one of Dickie’s suitcases, and wrote the letter straight off.
Rome
28 November, 19——
Dear Marge,
I’ve decided to take an apartment in Rome for the winter, just to have a change of scene and get away from old Mongy for a while. I feel a terrific urge to be by myself. I’m sorry it was so sudden and that I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye, but actually I’m not far away, and I hope I’ll be seeing you now and then. I just didn’t feel like going to pack my stuff, so I threw the burden on Tom.
As to us, it can’t harm anything and possibly may improve everything if we don’t see each other for a while. I had a terrible feeling I was boring you, though you weren’t boring me, and please don’t think I am running away from anything. On the contrary, Rome should bring me closer to reality. Mongy certainly didn’t. Part of my discontent was you. My going away doesn’t solve anything, of course, but it will help me to discover how I really feel about you. For this reason, I prefer not to see you for a while, darling, and I hope you’ll understand. If you don’t—well, you don’t, and that’s the risk I run. I may go up to Paris for a couple of weeks with Tom, as he’s dying to go. That is, unless I start painting right away. Met a painter named Di Massimo whose work I like very much, an old fellow without much money who seems to be very glad to have me as a student if I pay him a little bit. I am going to paint with him in his studio.
The city looks marvelous with its fountains going all night and everybody up all night, contrary to old Mongy. You were on the wrong track about Tom. He’s going back to the States soon and I don’t care when, though he’s really not a bad guy and I don’t dislike him. He has nothing to do with us, anyway, and I hope you realize that.
Write me c/o American Express, Rome until I know where I am. Shall let you know when I find an apartment. Meanwhile keep the home fires burning, the refrigerators working and your typewriter also. I’m terribly sorry about Xmas, darling, but I don’t think I should see you that soon, and you can hate me or not for that.
All my love,
Dickie
Tom had kept his cap on since entering the hotel, and he had given Dickie’s passport in at the desk instead of his own, though hotels, he had noticed, never looked at the passport photo, only copied the passport number which was on the front cover. He had signed the register with Dickie’s hasty and rather flamboyant signature with the big looping capitals R and G. When he went out to mail the letter he walked to a drugstore several streets away and bought a few items of makeup that he thought he might need. He had fun with the Italian salesgirl, making her think that he was buying them for his wife who had lost her make-up kit, and who was indisposed in the hotel with the usual upset stomach.
He spent that evening practicing Dickie’s signature for the bank checks. Dickie’s monthly remittance was going to arrive from America in less than ten days.
14
He moved the next day to the Hotel Europa, a moderately priced hotel near the Via Veneto, because the Hassler was a trifle flashy, he thought, the kind of hotel that was patronized by visiting movie people, and where Freddie Miles, or people like him who knew Dickie, might choose to stay if they came to Rome.
Tom held imaginary conversations with Marge and Fausto and Freddie in his hotel room. Marge was the most likely to come to Rome, he thought. He spoke to her as Dickie, if he imagined it on the telephone, and as Tom, if he imagined her face to face with him. She might, for instance, pop up to Rome and find his hotel and insist on coming up to his room, in which case he would have to remove Dickie’s rings and change his clothing.
“I don’t know,” he would say to her in Tom’s voice. “You know how he is—likes to feel he’s getting away from everything. He said I could use his hotel room for a few days, because mine happens to be so badly heated. . . . Oh, he’ll be back in a couple of days, or there’ll be a postcard from him saying he?
??s all right. He went to some little town with Di Massimo to look at some paintings in a church.”
(“But you don’t know whether he went north or south?”)
“I really don’t. I guess south. But what good does that do us?”
(“It’s just my bad luck to miss him, isn’t it? Why couldn’t he at least have said where he was going?”)
“I know. I asked him, too. Looked the room over for a map or anything else that might have shown where he was going. He just called me up three days ago and said I could use his room if I cared to.”
It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley’s voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it.
But mostly he was Dickie, discoursing in a low tone with Freddie and Marge, and by long distance with Dickie’s mother, and with Fausto, and with a stranger at a dinner party, conversing in English and Italian, with Dickie’s portable radio turned on so that if a hotel employee passed by in the hall and happened to know that Signor Greenleaf was alone he would not think him an eccentric. Sometimes, if the song on the radio was one that Tom liked, he merely danced by himself, but he danced as Dickie would have with a girl—he had seen Dickie once on Giorgio’s terrace, dancing with Marge, and also in the Giardino degli Orangi in Naples—in long strides yet rather stiffly, not what could be called exactly good dancing. Every moment to Tom was a pleasure, alone in his room or walking the streets of Rome, when he combined sightseeing with looking around for an apartment. It was impossible ever to be lonely or bored, he thought, so long as he was Dickie Greenleaf.
They greeted him as Signor Greenleaf at the American Express, where he called for his mail. Marge’s first letter said:
Dickie,
Well, it was a bit of a surprise. I wonder what came over you so suddenly in Rome or San Remo or wherever it was? Tom was most mysterious except to say that he would be staying with you. I’ll believe he’s leaving for America when I see it. At the risk of sticking my neck out, old boy, may I say that I don’t like that guy? From my point of view or anybody else’s he is using you for what you are worth. If you want to make some changes for your own good, for gosh sakes get him away from you. All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean. However, I’m not interested in Tom but in you. Yes, I can bear the few weeks without you, darling, and even Christmas, though I prefer not to think of Christmas. I prefer not to think about you and—as you said—let the feelings come or not. But it’s impossible not to think of you here because every inch of the village is haunted with you as far as I’m concerned, and in this house, everywhere I look there is some sign of you, the hedge we planted, the fence we started repairing and never finished, the books I borrowed from you and never returned. And your chair at the table, that’s the worst.
To continue with the neck-sticking, I don’t say that Tom is going to do anything actively bad to you, but I know that he has a subtly bad influence on you. You act vaguely ashamed of being around him when you are around him, do you know that? Did you ever try to analyze it? I thought you were beginning to realize all this in the last few weeks, but now you’re with him again and frankly, dear boy, I don’t know what to make of it. If you really “don’t care when” he takes off, for God’s sake send him packing! He’ll never help you or anybody else to get straightened out about anything. In fact it’s greatly to his interest to keep you muddled and string you along and your father too.
Thanks loads for the cologne, darling. I’ll save it—or most of it—for when I see you next. I haven’t got the refrigerator over to my house yet. You can have it, of course, any time you want it back.
Maybe Tom told you that Skippy skipped out. Should I capture a gecko and tie a string around its neck? I have to get to work on the house wall right away before it mildews completely and collapses on me. Wish you were here, darling—of course.
Lots of love and write,
XX
Marge
c/o American Express
Rome
12 Dec., 19——
Dear Mother and Dad,
I’m in Rome looking for an apartment, though I haven’t found exactly what I want yet. Apartments here are either too big or too small, and if too big you have to shut off every room but one in winter in order to heat it properly anyway. I’m trying to get a medium-sized, medium-priced place that I can heat completely without spending a fortune for it.
Sorry I’ve been so bad about letters lately. I hope to do better with the quieter life I’m leading here. I felt I needed a change from Mongibello—as you’ve both been saying for a long time—so I’ve moved bag and baggage and may even sell the house and the boat. I’ve met a wonderful painter called Di Massimo who is willing to give me instruction in his studio. I’m going to work like blazes for a few months and see what happens. A kind of trial period. I realize this doesn’t interest you, Dad, but since you’re always asking how I spend my time, this is how. I’ll be leading a very quiet, studious life until next summer.
Apropos of that, could you send me the latest folders from Burke-Greenleaf? I like to keep up with what you’re doing, too, and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything.
Mother, I hope you haven’t gone to great trouble for my Christmas. I don’t really need anything I can think of. How are you feeling? Are you able to get out very much? To the theater, etc.? How is Uncle Edward now? Send him my regards and keep me posted.
With love,
Dickie
Tom read it over, decided there were probably too many commas, and retyped it patiently and signed it. He had once seen a half-finished letter of Dickie’s to his parents in Dickie’s typewriter, and he knew Dickie’s general style. He knew that Dickie had never taken more than ten minutes writing any letter. If this letter was different, Tom thought, it could be different only in being a little more personal and enthusiastic than usual. He felt rather pleased with the letter when he read it over for the second time. Uncle Edward was a brother of Mrs. Greenleaf, who was ill in an Illinois hospital with some kind of cancer, Tom had learned from the latest letter to Dickie from his mother.
A few days later he was off to Paris by plane. He had called the Inghilterra before he left Rome: no letters or phone calls for Richard Greenleaf. He landed at Orly at five in the afternoon. The passport inspector stamped his passport after only a quick glance at him, though Tom had lightened his hair slightly with a peroxide wash and had forced some waves into it, aided by hair oil, and for the inspector’s benefit he had put on the rather tense, rather frowning expression of Dickie’s passport photograph. Tom checked in at the Hôtel du Quai-Voltaire, which had been recommended to him by some Americans with whom he had struck up an acquaintance at a Rome café, as being conveniently located and not too full of Americans. Then he went out for a stroll in the raw, foggy December evening. He walked with his head up and a smile on his face. It was the atmosphere of the city that he loved, the atmosphere that he had always heard about, crooked streets, gray-fronted houses with skylights, noisy car horns, and everywhere public urinals and columns with brightly colored theater notices on them. He wanted to let the atmosphere seep in slowly, perhaps for several days, before he visited the Louvre or went up in the Eiffel Tower or anything like that. He bought a Figaro, sat down at a table in the Dôme, and ordered a fine à l’eau, because Dickie had once said that fine à l’eau was his usual drink in France. Tom’s French was limited, but so was Dickie’s, Tom knew. Some interesting people stared at him through the glass-enclosed front of the café, but no one came in to speak to him. Tom was prepared for someone to get up from one of the tables at any moment, and come over and say, “Dickie Greenleaf! Is it really you?”
He had done so little artificially to chan
ge his appearance, but his very expression, Tom thought, was like Dickie’s now. He wore a smile that was dangerously welcoming to a stranger, a smile more fit to greet an old friend or a lover. It was Dickie’s best and most typical smile when he was in a good humor. Tom was in a good humor. It was Paris. Wonderful to sit in a famous café, and to think of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf! The cuff links, the white silk shirts, even the old clothes—the worn brown belt with the brass buckle, the old brown grain-leather shoes, the kind advertised in Punch as lasting a lifetime, the old mustard-colored coat sweater with the sagging pockets, they were all his and he loved them all. And the black fountain pen with little gold initials. And the wallet, a well-worn alligator wallet from Gucci’s. And there was plenty of money to go in it.
By the next afternoon he had been invited to a party in the Avenue Kléber by some people—a French girl and an American young man—with whom he had started a conversation in a large café-restaurant on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The party consisted of thirty or forty people, most of them middle-aged, standing around rather frigidly in a huge, chilly, formal apartment. In Europe, Tom gathered, inadequate heating was a hallmark of chic in winter, like the iceless martini in summer. He had moved to a more expensive hotel in Rome, finally, in order to be warmer, and had found that the more expensive hotel was even colder. In a gloomy, old-fashioned way the house was chic, Tom supposed. There were a butler and a maid, a vast table of pâtés en croûte, sliced turkey, and petits fours, and quantities of champagne, although the upholstery of the sofa and the long drapes at the windows were threadbare and rotting with age, and he had seen mouseholes in the hall by the elevator. At least half a dozen of the guests he had been presented to were counts and countesses. An American informed Tom that the young man and the girl who had invited him were going to be married, and that her parents were not enthusiastic. There was an atmosphere of strain in the big room, and Tom made an effort to be as pleasant as possible to everyone, even the severer-looking French people to whom he could say little more than “C’est très agréable, n’est-ce pas?” He did his very best, and won at least a smile from the French girl who had invited him. He considered himself lucky to be there. How many Americans alone in Paris could get themselves invited to a French home after only a week or so in the city? The French were especially slow in inviting strangers to their homes, Tom had always heard. Not a single one of the Americans seemed to know his name. Tom felt completely comfortable, as he had never felt before at any party that he could remember. He behaved as he had always wanted to behave at a party. This was the clean slate he had thought about on the boat coming over from America. This was the real annihilation of his past and of himself, Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and his rebirth as a completely new person. One Frenchwoman and two of the Americans invited him to parties, but Tom declined with the same reply to all of them: “Thank you very much, but I’m leaving Paris tomorrow.”