The Black House

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Rock,” said Ralph.

  “Rock, all right. The music phase might as well be part of a school curriculum. A year of guitar, clarinet or whatever. Third-rate music and then it’s all dropped.”

  His father was trying, a little bit, to be friendly, Ralph could see. “All right, maybe it’s a phase. But give me a hand with it for a while. Would that kill you?”

  “It might kill you. You’ve lost weight even. I can imagine the junk food you kids eat.”

  Ralph got to his feet, staggering very slightly, but that was because of his boot heels. He was ready to leave, more than ready. “I frankly think your whole life is junk.”

  “I don’t think you mean that . . . Take it easy, Ralph.”

  Ralph was on his way to the door. When he had opened it, he turned as if automatically, because he hadn’t thought to, and said, “Bye, Dad.”

  Twenty minutes later, he was home at the dump on the edge of SoHo. Ralph had walked a little, walking off his disappointment, trying to, then had caught a bus downtown. And here he was, breathing again. Home! The tall white walls and the white ceiling way up there were like the wide open spaces! Cassie had the stereo up high and was dancing to it by herself, snapping her fingers gently. She gave Ralph barely a nod when she saw him, but Ralph didn’t mind. He was smiling. Ben, raking his guitar along with the electronic music, yelled a “Hi!” In the bathroom, a fellow strange to Ralph stood in shorts washing his hair at the basin, and Georgie was sloshing around in the tub. Ralph wanted to use the toilet, and did. When Ralph went back into the living room, a fellow and a girl whom Ralph didn’t know came out of the small bedroom in the corner. Now these two sat down on one of the two pushed-together double beds that served as a big sofa in the daytime. The two lit cigarettes, Cassie was smiling and yelling something at them—Ralph couldn’t hear through the music—and Ralph saw that the two newcomers had dropped their coats in the corner by the trestle table, where all their guests dropped their coats. Was a party on for tonight? Hardly eight o’clock now. Early for arrivals.

  Suddenly Ralph had an idea: they’d give a rent-raising party. Ralph wasn’t the only one of the four who was short of rent money just now. They could charge five dollars for admission—or better make it three—and people could bring their own booze or wine or whatever.

  Ralph approached Cassie and shouted his idea.

  Cassie’s blue-gray eyes lit up, she nodded, and went over to scream it at Ben.

  All they had to do was notify the right people, maybe twenty or thirty, Ralph thought. These might bring along a few other people, but the fewer right people would furnish the money. It was Wednesday. They’d make the party for Saturday.

  “Come at nine!” Cassie was shrieking into the telephone. “Tell Teddie and Marcia, will you? That’ll save me a call.”

  The electronic tape had now come to the human voice bit, which always made Ralph think they were chanting:

  You’ve had it now . . .

  You’ve had it now . . .

  Now how was that meant? That you were finished, or that you’d just had something good? Like Cassie. Cassie belonged to all three of them just now, Georgie the pianist, Ben the guitar man, and himself. That was good. No arguments, no silly jealousy anywhere. None of the crap that bothered dead people like his father.

  “Dead people!” Ralph shouted, raising a booted foot, lifting a hand. His fingers struck the brim of his secondhand Stetson, and reminded him that he still had it on. “Saw my dad today!” Ralph yelled, taking his Stetson off with a flourish.

  But nobody heard him. The fellow who had been washing his hair came out of the bathroom with a towel over his head, bumped into Cassie and went on, bumped into the double beds and plunged down. The pair of strangers had left.

  Around midnight they ate frankfurters, boiled up by Cassie, in the kitchen. Mustard lay in a big plate on the kitchen table. The music continued. Cassie brought a stick of coke from the hiding place (which kept changing) in the little bedroom, and Georgie did the honors, scraping away with a razor blade at the white stick on a piece of flat but jagged-edged marble that he held on his leather-covered thighs. He lined up carefully and equitably fourteen rows of white powder, which they all sniffed in polite and leisurely turn. Five takers, twice taking, left four rows to spare. Ralph gallantly offered his second helping to Cassie, who rewarded him with a smile and a kiss on the lips. He was sitting next to her then, on an edge of the double bed. All five sat on the edges, lounging inward toward the marble slab in the center.

  Gotta wrangle oh-and-oh-and-oh . . .

  Did anyone hear those words but Ralph?

  The fellow who had washed his hair later got unceremoniously thrown down the stairs by Ben, who could sometimes lose his temper.

  “That’s not very nice!” Cassie yelled, as she danced around the living room, snapping her fingers in her easy way.

  Ralph didn’t ask what had happened. He thought Cassie had said earlier that the boy had brought the coke, and if so, he’d surely been paid for it. Hadn’t he? And did it matter? No. The rent mattered. And they’d get that. Ralph kept his eyes on Cassie, though she was dancing with Georgie. Ben was on his guitar again. Ralph didn’t want to dance, he wanted to sleep.

  And later it was Ralph who was in the same bed with Cassie, in the little bedroom. He couldn’t make it with her, and didn’t really try. It was great just to hold a girl in your arms, as they said in the old songs.

  The party idea had made progress by the next noon, when the four of them were having coffee and Danish in the kitchen.

  “It’ll be one giant disco,” said Ben, “and we’ll put the eats on the beds, so people can lounge on the floor there, pickin’.”

  “Surrealist fruit deco. I know what I’ll do.” Georgie, wide-eyed, his blond hair waxed into points, munched his pastry.

  “Paper cups. Safer if stuff gets broken. Have we got money for paper cups?” This from Cassie.

  “We got at least fifty jam jars,” Ralph put in. “Now listen, we want this to pay off. You think we should make a very selective guest list? Like twenty we’re sure can pay, so there won’t be a mob that can’t?”

  “Na-ah,” Ben said. “We stick up an invite in the Meetcha with price of admission loud and clear, see? No three buck-see, no entree . . . They’ll come!”

  Saturday was only two days off. They’d get hardly any sleep Saturday, Ralph realized, but the date in the Bronx wasn’t till noon, nothing ever got started there till 3 P.M. and on pills they’d make it, and maybe do the record even better. They’d be doing only five songs Sunday, half the record.

  That afternoon, Cassie made a poster on a big piece of cardboard to be tacked on a wall of the Meetcha Bar down the street.

  ROOF RAISIN’

  RENT RAISIN’

  PARTY!

  SAT. NITE 9 PM ONWARD

  103 FROTT ST. (3rd FLOOR)

  BRING YOUR RAISIN

  ALL WELCOME (this ain’t no church)

  DISCO ELECTRONIC

  ADMISSION $3.00

  AND BRING YOUR OWN POWDER, JUICE, Etc.

  The last line, Cassie conceded, was a halfway thing between saying no refreshments would be offered (untrue), and a suggestion that if people really had a preference as to drink and other things, they should bring their own so they’d be sure and get it. Cassie had been imbibing beer as she worked, and after an hour she was tired, but picked up at the boys’ praise of her artwork. She had drawn a couple of nudes dancing, with real raisins glued on where the sex organs would have been. The nude figures were lanky and blue-colored.

  “Really great!” Ben said. “Eye-catching!”

  Cassie flopped on a bed on her back, smiling, and closed her eyes, her arms curled above her head. She looked lovely to Ralph, with her thighs bulging her jeans, shirt buttons straining over her breasts that were partly visible through t
he gaps.

  Ralph was assigned to put the poster up, and went out with it, taking along also an old envelope in which Georgie had put six or more thumbtacks. For some reason (well, Ralph knew why), he was considered just a little more square than the others, more respectable even. Ralph didn’t care much for that, and maybe it wouldn’t last forever. So far he hadn’t run up a bill with Ed Meecham, who owned the Meetcha, whereas the others had. Small bills, of course, because Ed didn’t give credit higher than twenty dollars. Into this wooden-tabled, wooden-chaired establishment Ralph clumped in his cowboy boots with the poster in hand, and at once glanced around the walls, looking for a free and suitable place. The walls were already pretty much filled by art exhibition posters, announcements of sales of secondhand items, apartment-sharing opportunities, and cartoons of the patrons. Ralph greeted a couple of fellows hunched over beer or coffee at the tables, and made his way to Ed Meecham behind the bar at the back.

  “Okay if I put this up, Ed?”

  Ed, bald, with a mustache like a black and gray shaving brush, eyed the poster sharply as if examining it for porn—and maybe he was—then nodded consent. “If you find a spot, Ralph.”

  “Thanks, Ed.” Ralph felt flattered because Ed had called him by name. Ed knew him, of course, but up to now hadn’t called him anything. Funny how little things like that built up the ego, Ralph thought. That was what the group at the dump spent a lot of time talking about—ego—what you thought of yourself. It was important. Ralph’s newfound confidence inspired him to tack, smoothly and with suitable speed, Cassie’s poster over a small poster of graffiti which Ralph considered the clientele had laughed at long enough. Ralph waved good-bye and departed.

  Back at the loft building, Ralph glanced at the mailbox before climbing the stairs. Two items. The box had a lock, but it had been broken. To Ralph’s surprise, one envelope was addressed to him in his father’s large yet angular hand with his genuine pen. His father didn’t like ballpoints. Ralph climbed the stairs, reported his success with the poster-fixing, and went into the kitchen to look at his letter. Ben and Georgie were working with guitar and piano, talking also. They’d already had a practice session that day, and Ben wanted another, but there were still five minutes to read a letter, and maybe his father had even enclosed a check, Ralph thought as he picked open the envelope of sturdy white paper. No stamp on it. His father had delivered the letter. Ralph had noticed that at once downstairs, but now that fact—or something—made his fingers shake.

  There was no check in the letter. It went, after the date which was Wednesday, yesterday:

  Dear Ralph,

  It is late in the evening but I feel inspired or compelled to write a few words to you by way of explaining my attitude, which I know you consider wrong, inhuman perhaps, or plain blind. So it may come as a relief to you to know that I’ve decided not to interfere or try to influence you from now on. Every human being has the right to make his own life. Birds must fly the nest. So did I when I left my parents exactly at your age, 20, and went to try my luck in Chicago and then in New York. You have the same right. And I realize that what seems to me wrong or unwise may be for you—right. At any rate, you are a man and you should be able to and be allowed to stand on your own feet.

  I think this may help clear the atmosphere and enable us to have a better relationship, because God knows it cannot be pleasant for a son to sense “parental disapproval” all the time, even if for the most part you shrug it off.

  However if you’re sick, you know very well I’m here to look after you. You are not alone in the world, Ralph, just free. And my good wishes and love are with you.

  Your dad, ever,

  Steve

  P.S. I know that the absence of your mother from the household has not helped, hasn’t made you any happier or stronger. I am bitterly and personally sorry about that, and I am no happier for it either. We should both (you and I) realize that we are not the only father and son in the world who have had to experience the same thing.

  Ralph felt shocked, in a strange and profound way. His father had cut him off. That P.S.—Well, they’d been over that, lots of times, in few words every time, but lots of times. That divorce had been his mother’s fault, that “other man” and all that. His father had never wanted a divorce, in spite of Bert who had disappeared as his father had thought he would. Ralph knew his mother had also been disappointed in him, Ralph. But the divorce remarks in the letter weren’t what upset Ralph. It was his father’s washing his hands of him. And such a polite way of saying it: You have the same right. Ralph was still under twenty-one. Wasn’t he still a minor? Well, no, if you could vote at eighteen, Ralph recalled.

  “Love letters—in—the—sand—” Georgie came into the kitchen singing. “Somebody let you down?”

  Ralph tried to get the frown off his face. “Na-ah. Letter from my dad. No dough.—Mister No-Dough.”

  “Well, you knew that.” Georgie poured himself some cold coffee from the pot on the stove, and upended a cellophane bag of potato chips into his mouth, a bag nearly empty. “Let’s go again, Ralphie? Another half hour or so. ‘Airport Bird’ now.” Georgie gestured towards the living room.

  Ralph got his clarinet from its place under the foot of one of the double beds, where he had put it while he tacked the poster. He had to lift the bed to get it, rake the case out with his foot, but at least the instrument was always safe there, unstolen, unstepped on. The record-cutting would cost seventy-five dollars. They had a deal with Mike, the man in the Bronx. He distributed their records to cut-rate pop record shops which tried to push new groups, according to Mike. So far the Plastics hadn’t had any revenue from that, but what they had created was on record, and there were two earlier records here at the dump. They practiced, Cassie included. It was after six, and the ceiling spotlights were on, three pink ones, a couple of blues, but mainly white ones. Someone had said such lights ran into big electricity bills, but the lights gave atmosphere, and after the music got going, who thought about an electricity bill? Ralph tried to play with especial care and exactitude, letting himself go only in the finale of “Fried Chicks,” the song that would be number five, the last, on the record Sunday.

  But Ralph’s thoughts, most of his thoughts, were on his father and he couldn’t shake them off. Amazing. He was upset. And ordinarily he would have said to his chums, “I’m uptight today, sort of thrown.” But that evening he didn’t say it, even in the break they took around nine in the kitchen, where Cassie was stirring up a tomato sauce for their spaghetti dinner. Ben lit a joint which they passed around. Georgie went out for lettuce and a bottle of Italian table wine, the kind that came in a big glass jug. No meat for the spaghetti sauce, Cassie announced, but it was going to taste good anyway. And his father thought they didn’t eat properly, Ralph remembered.

  Why not invite Steve to the party? If his father condescended to come, he could see that they ran a going household with clean walls, that they weren’t a bunch of apes. Ralph knew his father thought they never knew what day of the week it was, that they lived off their parents—absolutely not true in the case of Georgie and Ben, who gave piano and guitar lessons—and that they never washed their clothes, whereas the tub had clothes soaking in it half the time, and Cassie was a great ironer.

  “Hey, does anybody mind,” Ralph began loudly, but the hi-fi was on, Ben had just said something funny, so everyone was laughing. Everyone now included two new people, a boy and girl who must have arrived with Georgie when he came back with lettuce and wine. Ralph tried again. “Hey, Cass! I feel like inviting my father Saturday night. Okay?”

  Cassie, smiling, shrugged a little as usual. It looked like the movement she made when she was dancing. “Why not?”

  Ralph smiled in a glow of contentment, even pride. Would his own parents, for instance, have opened their doors as freely to his chums of the dump? Good God, no! Who, between the two of them, was
more charitable, Christian, tolerant, all that crap?

  “That crap!” Ralph yelled. “Let’s get rid of it! Let’s conquer it with love!” No one was listening, no one heard, but that didn’t matter. He had got his message out. “Across and out!” Ralph shouted, and plunged toward the telephone. Twenty to ten, if his watch was correct. Ralph dialed his father’s number.

  No one answered the telephone. This disappointed Ralph.

  Throughout the evening, Ralph tried his father’s number at half-hour intervals. By midnight, everyone at the dump, including three more arrivals, knew whom he was trying to reach and why, and Ben had said he would invite his uncle for Saturday. Ben’s parents lived somewhere upstate, but he had an uncle in Brooklyn. At a little past 1 A.M. Ralph’s father answered the telephone, and Ralph proceeded to invite him for Saturday night, any time after 9 P.M.

  “Oh? A party. Well—y-yes, Ralph, thanks,” his father said. “I’m glad you did call, because I was a little worried after I dropped that letter.”

  His father sounded unusually serious, even sad. “Oh, that’s—Thanks, Dad, I was glad to get it really.” The words came out of nowhere, and didn’t mean anything, Ralph realized, but his tone was polite.

  After they had hung up, Ralph had a strange feeling that the conversation hadn’t really taken place, that he had imagined it. But his father’s voice had said that he would come. Yes. Definitely.

  The next two days till Saturday were enhanced by the coming party, in the way Ralph recalled that the approach of Christmas had made the days preceding magical, different, prettier, when he had been little. Ben had the brilliant idea of making potato soup their main dish, cheap and easy, and they would have thin slices of frankfurter floating in it, and a big bunch of parsley in the kitchen to garnish each bowl or paper cup or even plate of this thick soup, which Cassie promised to create. Plenty of garlic was to go into the soup, which would have a ham hock base. And Cassie and Georgie had also been busy with the decor. From a friend down the street she had acquired yards of old film reels, and these looked festive, twisted and strung from corner to corner of the room, and tied together in the center with somebody’s long red scarf.