People Who Knock on the Door

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Jeff goes. Sometimes. He’s the one you were talking to this morning.”

  “The one in the straw hat?—You mean they hear news at the church and then spread it around?”

  “No-o, silly!” Robbie squirmed, though squirming was habitual with him, and he looked not at all embarrassed. “Whole town knows about it, anyway.”

  “That is not true,” Arthur said, but suddenly he was unsure himself, and furious at the thought that a handful of gossips, maybe starting with Roxanne, might have created the impression that the whole town knew. Tom Robertson didn’t know, or he would have said something, Arthur was pretty sure. Norma Keer didn’t know, and she saw a lot of people at her teller’s window, and a lot of chatting went on there. “Come on, Robbie. What did you say to your friends?”

  “They knew it! What d’y’mean I had to say anything?”

  Arthur thought Robbie was lying, and that he wasn’t going to get anywhere. He had lost his appetite.

  However, when they were tidying up the kitchen, Arthur felt compelled to say, “You really shouldn’t, Robbie—at your age—talk with grown-ups about things like—what we were talking about. You shouldn’t spread the yacking. If you were a good brother, you wouldn’t do that.”

  Robbie was standing in the kitchen, spooning up the last of the walnut crunch ice cream from its plastic container. “You’re not a good brother,” Robbie said. “Dad says that. He says you’re not a good brother to me.”

  “Oh.” Arthur shook the suds off his hands and turned around. “It just could happen to you—someday.”

  “Oh, no!” Robbie shook his head slowly.

  “If you’d think for a minute, Robbie—nothing awful has happened, if just you and a lot of other people would shut up about it.”

  “Your girlfriend had an abortion,” Robbie said.

  “And some people have a tonsillectomy—like you.”

  “Oh-h—you’re tellin’ me it’s the same?”

  “Wait’ll it happens to you.” Arthur turned back to the sink.

  “It’ll never happen to me. I’ll get married first. That’s the right way to—to do, Dad says.”

  Arthur squeezed the sponge and tossed it by the water taps.

  Robbie went into the living room and turned the TV up more loudly.

  Then the telephone rang.

  Robbie got up from the floor and leapt for it. “That’s Mom. She said she’d phone at eight,” he said to Arthur, who was standing in the living room doorway. “. . . Oh, okay, Mom . . . Yep . . . Nope . . . Nope.” Robbie laughed. “No, he’s here . . . Okay.” He handed the telephone to Arthur.

  “Hello, Arthur. Just wanted to know if everything is all right there.”

  “Yes, fine. Had a good trip?”

  “Ah-h—a little exhausting in the heat. But the apartment here is air-conditioned, and we’ve all just had showers.” She laughed. “More heat waves due, we heard. We’re going on to San Francisco Wednesday morning. I gave you the name of our hotel, didn’t I?”

  “It’s right here by the phone.”

  “How’s that cut on Robbie’s thigh?”

  “He didn’t say anything about it. Hey, Robbie, how’s that cut on your thigh?”

  Engrossed in TV, Robbie had to have the question repeated; then over his shoulder he said, “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Arthur reported.

  “Mama’s out with her partner Blanche now, or I’d have her talk with you. . . . Well, take care, Arthur, and call us if anything goes wrong, will you?”

  When they had hung up, Arthur glanced at his watch. In half an hour he’d set off for Maggie’s on his bike. And in a little more than two months he would be eighteen and could drive the car—his mother’s—now sitting in the garage, thereby complying with his father’s law. He was going into his room when he heard a knock at the door.

  “Expecting somebody?” he asked Robbie.

  Robbie turned over. “Nope.”

  Arthur half opened the door.

  A blond woman stood on the doorstep in a pale summer dress and with a big white pocketbook in her hand. “Good evening. You’re—Is Richard—Mr. Alderman—” She looked worried.

  “If you mean my father, he’s not here.” She was one of the young churchgoers his father talked to, Arthur supposed, though this one looked about thirty. “My parents took off this morning.”

  “No, I—” Her brown eyes glanced nervously sideways and back to Arthur; then she advanced. “I wanted to see him. Richard. I don’t mean to be intruding.”

  Arthur stepped back. He left the door open. “My parents went to Kansas. Won’t be back for another two or three weeks.”

  She was looking over the partition at the kitchen walls, the ceiling. “Well, I know,” she said in a gentle voice. “I just wanted to set foot here again—somehow. Your father has helped me so much. Me and my sister Louise.—Hello, Robbie.” Her very red lips spread in a smile, showing small teeth.

  Robbie stood in the living room doorway, his mouth a little open in surprise. “My father told you not to come here while he’s gone.”

  “Yes, but—I’ve just explained—to your brother. He seems nice,” she added, turning her smile on Arthur.

  Was she drugged on something, Arthur wondered. She didn’t seem drunk, just odd.

  “My name is Irene Langley,” she told Arthur in a straight-forward way. “I live with my sister and my mother—who’s dying at home. So when I talk to your father—he’s very comforting to me.”

  “My father said he’d see you when he got back and not to come here,” Robbie said like a soldier passing on orders from a superior. “I heard him.”

  “Been here a few times before?” Arthur asked her.

  “Oh, yes. Four or five times—in the afternoons.” She swayed or bent a little, gazing past Robbie into the living room.

  Robbie frowned. “Well, it’s no use right now; you can see that.”

  “Can I write to your father? Or phone him? I don’t think he’d mind that.” She leaned toward Robbie now, and a brown color was visible to Arthur along the left-side part of her hair.

  “I think he’d mind it,” Robbie said. “If he didn’t give you his address, that means he doesn’t want you to have it.”

  The woman seemed not at all offended by Robbie’s tone. “Dear Robbie, what’s happened to your leg?” She bent closer with concern.

  “Oh—fishhook. ’S nothing.”

  “Can I give any message from you to my father?” Arthur said, wanting to get rid of her, edging toward the door.

  “Just tell him I—” She smiled gently and gazed at the living room ceiling. “It’s such a comfort for me to be here for a few minutes, because Richard gives me such courage. Faith, really. And patience, he calls it. He shows me what to read—which helps such a lot.”

  Arthur nodded. “You have a job?”

  “I’m a waitress. Not regular hours. Sometimes at night. It’s a diner. Well, a couple of diners, run by the same man.”

  The powder on her face looked like paste or dried flour. Robbie scowled in the doorway as if on the brink of pushing her out.

  “Well, thank you,” she said to Arthur. “It’s done me such good—being here. It’s almost as good as being in a church, because your father has said so many comforting things to me here.”

  Arthur moved willingly toward the front door. “What’s your mother dying of?” he asked, curious despite himself.

  “Kidney.”

  Arthur stood outside on the short porch with the door open. Irene Langley stared into the gathering darkness as if it were some task that she had to face. Behind her, Robbie advanced like a checkerboard piece, ready to oust her.

  “G’night, Robbie,” she said, turning as if she had known he was there. Her white high-heeled shoes
were worn out, and it crossed Arthur’s mind that she might be giving all her extra money to the church, because people at the church had told her to.

  “Night,” said Robbie ungraciously. “I think you better not come here again till my father gets back. What good is it?”

  “The aura,” she replied sweetly, smiling at Robbie. “And we all forgive you,” she added gently to Arthur, “and bless you just the same. Don’t be afraid, because the Lord is with you. That’s what your father says.”

  Does he, Arthur thought, feeling that he was in the presence of a nut. He walked down the front steps to encourage her departure. She did follow him, slowly.

  “Your father thinks he’s failed with you, that you’ve failed with yourself. He told me all about it,” she said with a weak smile that was perhaps meant to be friendly. “But it’s never too late to change. Of course the baby’s gone now, but it’s not too late for you.”

  The baby. A seven-week-old fetus. Hardly distinguishable from a pig’s fetus, Arthur reminded himself.

  “Do you know,” she began, reaching forth with one hand as she leaned toward Arthur, but he stepped back, “what strength it takes to watch a mother dying day by day? The hospital just won’t keep my mother anymore.” She shook her head for emphasis. “She can get painkillers galore now, but the doctors say she’s happier at home and there’s nothing more they can do for her in the hospital. Do you know what it takes to find the strength to face that—calmly?”

  The strength that comes from having gone nuts, Arthur thought, at least in this case. “I can imagine.” He glanced over his shoulder toward Norma’s house, just as her living room light came on palely beyond her curtains. If Norma could hear this, how she’d chuckle!

  “You’re nervous, you feel guilty,” she informed Arthur. “But all that can go away, if you give yourself into the care of Jesus. You and your girlfriend. But you must repent, and that means, Richard says, just to say you’re sorry.”

  Arthur nodded and led the way down the walk. “Did you come in a car?”

  “No, I walked.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Haskill and Main.”

  A mile away at least. “Your sister has a job, too?”

  “No, she stays home and looks after our mother. My sister Louise is fat. Very fat,” said Irene Langley with a laugh that showed more of her small teeth. “Your father says that’s a sin, too—gluttony. But your father smiled when I told him my sister can’t resist a candy box. Your father has a sense of humor, you know? And tolerance—such tolerance! I can talk to him better than I can to Bob Cole, though he’s pretty good and never closed his ear to me, I’ll say that. But your father is warmer—because he’s just discovered God himself. His words are new, as he says.”

  “You’re married?” Arthur asked.

  “Now why do you ask me that?—No, but I was married unhappily for about two years. I’ve been divorced four years now. And I’m much happier.”

  Arthur saw Robbie on the front steps, watching, and he walked on toward the sidewalkless street.

  Now she seemed to realize that he wanted to get rid of her, and she walked suddenly ahead of him, waving, saying over her shoulder, “Good-bye, Arthur, and bless you!”

  Arthur watched her light-colored figure disappear quickly along the edge of the street, under the shadows of the tulip and sycamore trees. He felt a horrible sense of unhappiness suddenly— of her unhappiness. Arthur saw his brother’s figure turn and go into the house. He shoved his hands into his back pockets and leapt the front steps.

  “You could’ve been more polite,” Arthur said to Robbie when he had closed the front door. “What’s the idea of talking to a young lady like that? ‘My father told you not to come here.’”

  “A young lady?” Robbie replied, gathering himself for combat.

  “Yes. Is that the way you treat a friend of Dad’s, not even asking her to sit down?”

  “He—Dad has his reasons—why he does things, says things.” Robbie clamped his lips together.

  “She comes here in the afternoons?”

  “Yeah. Coupla times.” Robbie kept his stern face and looked straight at Arthur.

  Arthur had the same sense of being excluded that he had felt at Robbie’s fishing party that morning. “When you were here—she came?”

  “Yeah. Once anyway. Sure.”

  And when his mother wasn’t here, Arthur thought. Did his mother know about these religious nuts emoting all over the living room, maybe kneeling on the carpet? “What does Dad do? Read the Bible to her?”

  Robbie shrugged and started to run away as if he had had enough questions. “No, he asks her—Well, she talks on her own. Then maybe he reads her something or just talks. She says it helps her.”

  “She’s weird, little brother. And you’re getting—”

  “Don’t call me ‘little brother.’”

  “You talked to her as if you were her boss. Does Dad talk to her the same way?”

  Robbie hesitated. “You have to. She’s dependent, Dad says. At least just now.—She’s not weird now. You should’ve seen her before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before a coupla months ago. She was practically a prostitute, Dad told me. She said it, too—to me. Well, she’s not now.”

  “She still looks like one, to tell you the truth.”

  “She sure isn’t now. She doesn’t drink anymore and she doesn’t even drink coffee, just tea. She has less money now.”

  “Oh, I can imagine.”

  “But she’s happier, she says.” Robbie looked at Arthur as if victory was plainly on his side and plainly won. “Irene’s like a saint now—Dad says. But she still needs help or she’ll do something crazy. That’s why Dad has to speak to her—sort of firmly, the way I did tonight.”

  “I see.” And she’s goddamn stupid, Arthur wanted to say, not only stupid now but stupid before she found God or the church or Richard. Arthur went into the bathroom and washed his face. He scraped his jaw with his safety razor, though as yet he hadn’t much of a beard.

  It was at least a quarter past 9, when he got to the Brewsters’ house. Maggie answered his ring. She wore a sleeveless dress of light green and darker green sandals.

  “We’re just having coffee. Want some?”

  Arthur walked with her into the air-conditioned living room, where her parents sat, and also a middle-aged woman who he supposed was their houseguest, and a young man who looked twenty or a little more.

  “Diane—Arthur Alderman,” Maggie said. “Diane Vickers and Charles Lafferty.”

  “How d’y’do?” said Charles to Arthur from his chair.

  Arthur declined coffee, thinking he and Maggie might escape sooner. He assumed she wanted to go out. But who was this Charles? Not Mrs. Vickers’s son, surely, or they’d have the same name. Charles was the second jolt of the evening. Was he a boyfriend of Maggie’s, maybe one she still liked, and approved by her parents? Arthur assessed Charles’s medium-good looks, his tan cotton slacks, new tennis shoes, and decided that he had a little money. Always an asset.

  “. . . working today, Arthur?” asked Maggie’s mother.

  “Yes—as usual,” Arthur replied.

  A moment later, Charles stood up. “Thank you, Mrs. Brewster—sir.”

  “Good night, Charles,” said Diane Vickers warmly, as if she knew him well.

  Maggie went with him to the door. Mrs. Vickers was looking him over critically with her large made-up eyes, or so Arthur felt. Maggie came back.

  “Want to take a walk, Arthur? Or go somewhere?” Maggie asked, as she might have if they had been alone.

  “Whichever you want.”

  “See you in a minute.” Maggie went upstairs.

  Arthur heard a car starting outside.

  “
Maggie tells me you’re going to Columbia,” said Diane Vickers.

  All the heat of the day seemed to gather and explode in Arthur’s face. “No-no. Things’ve changed. Just in the last days. I can’t go to Columbia. Some other college—but not Columbia.” To attribute this to bad grades or lack of money seemed equally damning. Maggie plainly hadn’t mentioned it to her parents, because both of them were politely listening. And of course it was nothing to Betty and Warren Brewster whether he entered Columbia or not, but Arthur felt that he sank further in their esteem. They would assume he was going to a college of lower caliber or maybe no college at all.

  Maggie came downstairs with a handbag. Arthur said good night to the Brewsters and to Diane Vickers whose eyes seemed to be looking right through him.

  Then he was alone with Maggie, outside in the darkness.

  “Go to the quarry?” Maggie said.

  “Why not?”

  They got into her car.

  Arthur rolled his window down. After a while, he said, “Hey, who’s this Charles?”

  “Oh—Charles. He goes to C.U. I had a couple of dates with him—a while back. He just wanted to see me again.”

  “So—What did you tell him?”

  “About what?—Well!” Maggie laughed. “I told him I had a rather steady relationship now. Words to that effect.”

  Arthur smiled in the dark, and rested his head against the seat back, watching Maggie, happy for several seconds until he recalled the conversation with Mrs. Vickers. “Seems you didn’t say anything to your folks about Columbia—being out. Anyway I did, because Mrs. Vickers asked me. I had to say it wasn’t Columbia. Do you think that’s a strike against me—with your folks?”

  “No, Arthur. Why should they think all that much about it?”

  True, Arthur thought. Was he developing an inferiority complex? Paranoia?

  Maggie was concentrating on getting the car up the gritty slope beside the limestone slabs, beside the void that was now on their right. She stopped the car and cut the engine. Then she turned to him.

  Arthur seized her and kissed her neck, and in that long instant when his eyes were shut, thoughts ran fast through his head. Maggie’s unsweet and interesting perfume made him think of the sick, off-putting sweetness of Irene Langley’s, which had lingered in the house. Fight the bastards, he thought, people like his father, Robbie now, creeps like Irene Langley.