The Black House

by Patricia Highsmith

  Only occasionally, in moments when he was tired, or disappointed about something that had gone wrong, did Lee think of the false friend Win, and wish him ill. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, the Bible said, the Old Testament part, anyway. But he really didn’t want that, Lee told himself, otherwise he would be doing something now to bring Win Greeves to justice, to hit back at him. Lee could even sue him and win handily, recover expenses and then some by forcing the Greeveses to sell their handsome house in Rosedale. With that money, he could buy his own house back, his birthplace. But Lee realized that he didn’t want the two-story white house where he had been born. His mother’s spirit had spoiled that house, made it evil.

  From Win Greeves there was silence, not a letter or a line from him of further explanation, or of an offer to repay part of what he had wrongly taken. Now and then, Lee did imagine Win worried, probably very anxious as he tried to guess what Lee might be doing about the situation. Nearly a month had passed since Lee’s visit to Arlington Hills. Wouldn’t Win and Kate and Mort be assuming that Lee Mandeville had taken a lawyer and that he was preparing his case against Winston Greeves and the man at the Hearthside?

  Then Lee received, to his surprise, a letter from Arlington Hills addressed by typewriter and with Win’s company’s name, Eagle Insurance, and the spread eagle trademark in the upper left corner of the envelope. Lee turned the envelope over—no name on the back—and for a few seconds wondered what might be in it. An abject apology, maybe even a check, however small? Absurd! Or was Eagle Insurance sending him a last bill for his mother’s house insurance? Lee laughed at this idea and opened the letter. It was a short typewritten note.

  Dear Lee,

  After all our troubles, there is one more. Mort died last Tuesday night, after running into a man and seriously injuring him (but not killing him, thank God) and then hitting a tree in his car himself. I can almost say it’s a blessing, considering the trouble Mort has caused himself and us. I thought you might like to hear. We are all sad here.

  Yours,

  Win

  Lee gave a sigh, a shrug. Well. What was he supposed to reply, or think, or care, about this? Was Win possibly expecting a letter of condolence from him? This piece of information, Lee thought, affected him not at all. Morton Greeves’s life or death was simply nothing to Lee.

  Later that day, when Lee was tugging off rubber boots and feeling a bit tired—he had been paint-stripping with a water hose in his back alley—he had a vision of Mort dead and bleeding, having hit a tree in his car, and thought, “Good!” An eye for an eye . . . For a few seconds he relished a vengeance achieved. Morton was Win’s only son, only child. Worthless all his life, and now dead! Good! Now Lee had his money for the Arlington Hills house he had sold, and he could, if he wished, buy a property he had looked at in a suburb of Chicago, a pleasant house near the lake. He could have a little boat.

  An image of his mother came to Lee as he undressed for bed that night, his mother in her big wicker rocking chair in the living room, reading her Bible, peering up at him grim-mouthed (though with her teeth), and asking him why he didn’t read the Bible more often. The Bible! Had it made his mother any better, kinder to her fellow men? A lot of the Bible seemed to be anti-sex, too. His mother was, certainly. If sex was so bad, Lee thought, how had his mother ever conceived him, ever got married in the first place?

  “No,” Lee said aloud, and shook himself as if he were shaking something off. No, he wasn’t going to entertain any thoughts of the Bible, or of vengeance, in regard to Win’s family, or in regard to the man at the Hearthside whose name by now Lee had forgotten, except for the first name Victor. What kind of Victor was he, for instance? Lee smiled at the absurdity of his name, the vainglorious ring of it.

  Lee had a few friends in the neighborhood, and one of them, Edward Newton, a man of Lee’s age and owner of a nearby bookshop, dropped in on Lee one afternoon as he often did, to have a coffee in the back of the shop. Lee had told Edward and others of his friends that his mother had been ill when he visited Arlington Hills, and that she had died a few days after his visit. Now Edward had found a small item in the newspaper.

  “Did you know him? I thought I’d show it to you, because I remember the name Hearthside, where your mother was.” Edward pointed to an item three inches long in the newspaper he had brought.

  SUICIDE OF NURSING HOME

  SUPERINTENDENT, 61

  The report said that Victor C. Malloway, superintendent of the Hearthside retirement and nursing home in Arlington Hills, Indiana, had killed himself by closing his car and piping in the exhaust from a running engine in his own garage at home. He left no note of explanation. He was survived by a wife, Mary, a son Philip and daughter Marion, and three grandchildren.

  “No,” Lee said. “No, I never met him, but I’ve heard his name, yes.”

  “I suppose it’s a depressing atmosphere—old people, you know. And they’re dying pretty frequently there, I’d suppose.”

  Lee agreed, and changed the subject.

  Win was next, Lee supposed. What would happen to him, or what would he do to himself? Maybe nothing, after all. His own son was dead, and how much of that death might be called suicide, Lee wondered. Surely Mort had known from Win that the game was up, that no more money would be coming from Lee Mandeville. Surely too Win and Victor Malloway would have had a couple of desperate conversations. Lee still remembered Win’s defeated and terrified face in that upstairs bedroom in Arlington Hills. Enough was enough, Lee thought. Win was a half-destroyed man now.

  With some of his money, Lee invested in ten Turkish carpets whose quality and colors especially pleased him. He was sure he could sell five or six at a profit, and he put a sign in his window to the effect that an exceptional opportunity to buy quality Turkish carpets was now offered, inquire within. The ones he did not sell would go well in the house in the suburbs on which Lee had put a down payment. Lee felt increasingly happy. He gave a birthday party on his own birthday, invited ten friends out to a restaurant, then took them back to his apartment and turned on the lights in his shop. One of his friends played on a piano that Lee had in his shop section, and there was a lot of laughter, because the piano was slightly out of tune. Everyone sang and drank champagne and toasted Lee’s health.

  Lee began to furnish his new house, which was smaller than the Arlington Hills house of his family, but still had two stories and a lovely fruit garden around it. It was almost thirty miles from Lee’s shop, so he did not drive there every day, but used the place mainly for weekends, though the distance was not so great that he couldn’t drive in the evening to stay the night there, if he chose. Now and again he thought, with a shock, of his mother, and the fact that she had been dead nearly six years, not the eight or ten months that he had told all his friends. And he thought without a tweak of resentment of the hundred thousand dollars or so down the drain, money which Win had pocketed and shared with Mort and the suicide Victor. The score had been evened. A score, yes, like the score in a game that Lee was not interested in—a domino score, an anagram-game score. Best to forget it. All deaths were sad. Lee had not lifted a finger, yet Mort and Victor were dead. It had not been necessary to gouge out an eye.

  Autumn came, and Lee was busy with weatherstripping in his house, when he heard a news item that caught his attention. He had heard the name Arlington Hills, but he had missed the first part. It was something about the death of a man in his own house due to a bullet wound possibly self-inflicted. Lee worked on, feeling vaguely troubled. Could Winston Greeves have been the name the announcer had said? The news would be repeated in an hour, unless something more important crowded out the Arlington Hills bit. Lee continued measuring his insulating tape, cutting, sticking down. He worked on his knees in blue jeans.

  If this were Win Greeves, it was really too much, Lee thought. Enough vengeance. More than enough. Well, there were lots of people i
n Arlington Hills, and maybe it hadn’t been Win. But Lee felt troubled, angry in a strange way, and nervous. The minutes crept as Lee worked, and when 5 p.m. came, Lee listened carefully to the news report. It was the last item before the weather: Winston Greeves, aged sixty-four, of Arlington Hills, Indiana, had died from a bullet wound that might or might not have been self-inflicted. His wife said that he had recently acquired a pistol for target practice.

  Lee had listened to the news standing, and suddenly his shoulders bent and he lowered his head. He felt weak for a few seconds, then gradually his strength returned, and with it the strange anger that he had known an hour ago. It was too much. My cup runneth over . . . No, that wasn’t it. Christ had said that. Christ wouldn’t have approved of this. Lee was about to cover his face with his hands, when he remembered Win making the same gesture. Lee took his hands down and straightened. He went down the stairs to his living room.

  To the left and right of his fireplace there were bookshelves set into the wall. He reached firmly for a black leatherbound book. This was the Bible, the same one his mother had used to read, with the top and bottom of its spine all worn and showing brown where the black had worn off the leather. Lee quickly found where the Old Testament left off and the New Testament began, and he seized the thicker Old in his left hand and tore it from the binding. He thrust it like something unclean away from him and into the fireplace where there was no fire now, and he wiped his left hand on the side of his blue jeans. The pages had all spilled apart, thin and dry. Lee struck a match.

  He watched the pages burn, and become even more gossamery and quite black, and he knew he had accomplished nothing. This was not the only Old Testament in the world. He had made an angry gesture to satisfy only himself. And he felt not at all satisfied, or cleansed, or rid of anything.

  A letter of condolence to Kate Greeves, Lee thought, was due. Yes, he would write it this evening. Why not now? Words came to his mind as he moved toward the table where he kept his paper and pens. A longhand letter, of course. Kate had lost her son and her husband in a span of only a few months.

  Dear Kate,

  By accident this afternoon I heard on my radio the sad news about Win. I can realize that it is an awful blow to receive so shortly after the death of Morton. I would like you to know that I send you my sincerest sympathies now and that I can appreciate your grief . . .

  Lee wrote on smoothly and slowly. The curious thing was that he did feel sympathy for Kate. He bore her no grievance at all, though she was a partner to her husband in his deception. She was, somehow, a separate entity. This fact transcended guilt or the necessity to forgive. Lee signed his name. He meant every word of the letter.

  I Despise Your Life

  A hole is a hole is a hole, Ralph was thinking as he stared at the keyhole. The key was in his hand, ready to stick in, but still he hesitated. He could just as well ring the doorbell! He was expected.

  Ralph turned and clumped in a circle in his cowboy boots, and faced the door again. It was his father’s apartment after all, and he had the key. Ralph set his teeth, his lower lip curled forward, and he stuck the key in the lock and turned it.

  There was a light in the living room, ahead and to the right.

  “Hello, Dad?” Ralph called, and walked toward the living room. A battered leather handbag swung from a strap over his shoulder.

  “Hi there, Ralph!” His father was on his feet, in gray flannels and sweater, house shoes, and with a pipe in his hand. He looked his son up and down.

  Ralph, taller than his father, walked past him. Everything neat and orderly as usual, Ralph saw, two sofas, armchairs, one with a book on its arm where his father must just have been reading.

  “And how’s life?” asked his father. “You’re looking . . . pretty well.”

  Was he? Ralph realized that his jeans were dirty, and recalled that he hadn’t bothered shaving even yesterday. The left side of his short-cut, blondish hair was a dark pink, because someone had smeared a handful of dye into it suddenly, sometime last night or rather early this morning. Ralph knew his father wasn’t going to mention the dye, but his father’s face bore a faintly amused smile. Not nice, Ralph thought. Such people were the enemy. Mustn’t forget that.

  “Sit down, boy. What brings you here? . . . Like a beer?”

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks.” Ralph was at that moment feeling a little fuzzy in the head. He had been a lot sharper less than an hour ago, higher and sharper, when he had been smoking with Cassie, Ben and Georgie back at the dump. The dump. That was what had brought him here, and he’d better get down to it. Meanwhile a beer was what they called socially acceptable. Ralph took the cold can that his father extended.

  “You probably don’t want a glass.”

  Ralph didn’t, and so what? He threw his head back a little, smiling, and sipped from the triangle in the can. Another hole, this triangle. “Life’s full of holes, isn’t it?”

  Now his father grinned. “What do you mean by that? . . . Sit down somewhere, Ralph. You look tired. Had a late night?” His father took the armchair, put a bookmark in the book and laid the book on a side table.

  “Well, yeah—practicing as usual. Always gets later than we think.” Ralph lowered his lean figure to the sofa. “We’re going—” Now where was he? He had meant to tell his father about the record they were going to cut next Sunday at a place in the Bronx. The Plastics, Ralph’s group called itself. Cassie was great on the bass fiddle, unusual for a girl. Cassie was great all round. She was their mascot, their pet, and she even cooked. “There’s a kitchen where we’re living,” Ralph said finally.

  “Oh, I assumed that. It’s a big apartment, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, but it’s a loft. One very big room, then a smaller room, kitchen and bath. And that’s—I need a hundred dollars now to hold up my end of it. The rent. That is, till we cut this record Sunday in the Bronx. That’s what we’re rehearsing now.”

  His father nodded calmly. “Then the record will be marketed?”

  “Naturally,” said Ralph, aware that he lied, or that the “marketing” was at best dubious. “Ten songs. That’s a big deal. We’re calling it ‘Night on the Tiles’ by the Plastics.”

  His father fiddled with his pipe, poked at the tobacco with a nail-like gadget.

  Well, Ralph thought with impatience as the silence went on. “It’s not that I like to ask you—” But that wasn’t true, he didn’t mind a damn asking for a hundred. What was a hundred to his father? The price of a business lunch!

  “This time it’s no, Ralph. Sorry.”

  “What do you mean?” Ralph felt a small, polite smile grow on his face, a smile of feigned incredulity. “What’s a hundred to you? We owe the rent there, we have to chip in, and we want this record cut. That’s business and it’s pretty important!”

  “And the record before that and before that? Do these records exist?” Stephen Duncan went on over his son’s protest, “You’re twenty, Ralph, you’re behaving like somebody ten, and you’re asking me to keep on subsidizing it.”

  His father smiled, but he was hotting up. That seldom happened. Ralph said, “You’re giving my mother a thousand a month and you don’t even feel it.”

  “Would you like to ask your mother for a hundred?” Steve gave a laugh.

  No, that was a stone wall. Ralph’s mother had gone back to California, to her parents’ hometown. His mother and dad had been divorced about a year now. His mother had wanted the divorce, and there’d been a pretty nasty story about “the other man,” his mother’s lover Bert, but their affair had broken up after the divorce, and that wasn’t the point, as far as Ralph and his mother were concerned. His mother didn’t like his lifestyle, had been surprisingly unsympathetic when Cornell had kicked him out for bad grades in the middle of his sophomore year, and when Ralph had taken up with some musicians in New York his mother had fairly
stopped talking to him. Even his father had been more understanding then. And here was his father making tons of money with his tools plant in New Jersey, with his house and a boat in Long Island, and balking at a hundred dollars! Ralph felt like yelling to his father that he was a tightwad, forty-six years old and living in the past, but caution warned him to take it easy, that all might not be lost today. “It’s an emergency, dad. Just these next two weeks—are really important and if we—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ralph, how many times have you said that? Pull yourself together and get a job! Any kind of job. Work behind a counter! Better men than you have started that way.”

  This was the enemy coming out. Ralph’s lower lip curled from his teeth, as it had when he had stuck the key in the keyhole, but he kept his tone low and polite. “That’s pretty negative, what you’re saying. That’s really death and the destruction of life.”

  His father laughed and shook his head. “What’ve you had today? Acid? . . . You’ve had something. You talk about death and you can’t even keep yourself in a healthy state. Who’re you fooling, Ralph?”

  “I haven’t had anything today, but we were working late last night. Rehearsing. We do work. And we write our own music. Ben writes our music.”

  Again the superior-looking nod from his father. “You never showed any particular interest in music till a few months ago. Clarinet now. A fine instrument, Mozart wrote for it, and you use it for rubbish. Face it, Ralph. The Plastics! You’re well named!” His father stood up, his lips a straight line of tension. “Sorry, Ralph, but I’ve got to leave the house in about ten minutes. Got to go to the Algonquin to meet a man who’s just arrived from Chicago. Work, you know? . . . This music thing, Ralph—I see it all over, mediocre pop bands—”